The Inquisitor

By GJ Kelly

Two years have passed since the horrors of Holbonne saw Yarmian Eventyde take ship to Narrespoint.
Two years, since the young Wizzen took himself into the wilds, found an abandoned shack, and made it his own.
For two years, Yarmian has struggled with his conscience, practiced his skills, and as best he could, kept himself apart from the world of Men; and especially from those in the nearby fishing village, an odd little place called Bayham.
Still, as Arric of Turretmor famously declared, troubles come to Yarmian like flies to shite, and so it's no surprise when old enemies, and new ones, come a-calling.
Nor is it any surprise when Yarmian Eventyde elects to do the right thing, much to the astonishment of those who dare to impose upon his peace...

• Language: English
• Publisher: GJ Kelly
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005655709

GJ Kelly

GJ Kelly was born near the white cliffs of Dover, England, in 1960. He spent a significant part of his early life in various parts of the world, including the Far East, Middle East, the South Atlantic, and West Africa. Later life has seen him venture to the USA, New Zealand, Europe, and Ireland. He began writing while still at school, where he was president of the Debating Society and won the Robb Trophy for public speaking. He combined his writing with his technical skills as a professional Technical Author and later as an internal communications specialist. His first novel was "A Country Fly" and he is currently writing a new Fantasy title.He engages with readers and answers questions at:http://www.goodreads.com/GJKelly and also at https://www.patreon.com/GJ_Kelly

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Prologue

Yarmian Eventyde! he called, and spat a little blood. Stepson of Albionus, Butcher of Boroka! Raised to be a WarWizzen! No wonder you managed to kill so many Lesser mystics! No wonder you were able to stand against me for so long!

It’s hardly a feat though, is it, given you’re just an Inquisitor, not a Retributioner.

He laughed a little, and shook his head. True, Yarmian Eventyde, true. No Retributioner me. Did he tell you what he expected of you? Before Evrard killed him?

Not in so many words. I think he rather hoped I’d follow in his illustrious footsteps, which I know so little about.

He named you Yarmian for a reason, you fool. But the time has come. You shall not fulfil whatever plans the Butcher had for you. It ends, here and now.

oOo

1. Home on the Hill

Trudging to the spring with an empty bucket two or three times a day had become something of an ingrained habit; and so it should after more than two years living in what I laughingly refer to as my little cottage on the hill. It is in fact an old, long-abandoned shack, in a copse on a high and imposing cliff overlooking the Carpidian Sea ten miles or so to the north of Narrespoint’s deepwater harbour.

It took a while to fill the bucket, the spring small and the flow sluggish, giving me plenty of time to pause and reflect before traipsing back up the slope to my home.

Two years after the fact, and I could still see the pleading, and then the shock, in those sparkling emerald green eyes of the young woman created by Parmella’s broken mind. Even now, two years after that lovely young woman had been shot in the back as a witch, I knew she’d been real… a real woman, with her own mind, her own life ahead of her… a real woman who’d never seen the world beyond the confines of the blockhouse prison in which she’d been born.

I know. I know she was born of Parmella’s madness, a form of escape for the ancient mystic healer imprisoned for five centuries by the Portlords of Holbonne, but the green-eyed young woman had been real, and worst of all, for me at least, totally innocent of Parmella’s wrongdoings.

She had not deserved to die.

The Lillabeth, a brigantine in service to Ranquin Dutt’s secretive trading organisation, had sailed from Holbonne to Narrespoint, laden with cargo and with me aboard as a passenger. I suppose it had been something of a fraught crossing from the west over to this ‘rougher’ east coast, but I hadn’t really noticed; or if I had, after two years living alone and in peace here in my home on the hill, I didn’t remember it as particularly parlous.

Indeed, about the only thing I remembered of that crossing now was the hammock in the forward sail locker, occasional meals with Captain Sarbyne in his cabin, and the fact that I apparently no longer needed dear old Harper’s ‘Remedy’ for seasickness. Not once had I suffered the kind of misery I’d endured aboard my old friend Tiresian’s ship, the Idalina, and for that, I suppose, I should’ve been more grateful than I was. However, I’d felt at the time that I deserved to be punished for all the deaths and injuries in Holbonne, wrought by Parmella’s centuries-old wrath, and for one green-eyed innocent’s death in particular.

For why? For because I’d been my usual idiot self and liberated the mystic healer from her confinement, and at once she had become the Hag of Holbonne, immediately abandoning her oath to do no harm, and had instead become a spiteful, vengeful witch, hurling fire hither and yon… until a sailor’s crossbow ended Parmella’s life, and that of her innocent green-eyed alter-ego.

The Lillabeth had finally docked in Narrespoint’s deepwater harbour after that barely-remembered storm-tossed voyage, and I’d disembarked even before its cargo had begun to be unloaded. Narrespoint Harbour is something of a semi-circular affair arcing around the rim of a submarine basin or crater; thus the fact that it’s a deepwater harbour accessible no matter the tide, though boats and ships do rise and fall with the tides and captains must be aware of that fact when they tie up alongside the wharfs. The northern half of the harbour is given over almost entirely to small fishing boats, and there’s a permanent whiff of fish about the place to testify to the port’s principle occupation. The southern half is apparently reserved for itinerant vessels, such as the Lillabeth, and of course the Idalina back in the days when I’d sailed there with Tiresian and his crew.

Rising up behind the town are the Narrespoint Cliffs, which loom over the port to a height of some three hundred feet. When Tiresian’s ship had docked there, my friend Harper had told me there’s not much to be found up there atop those cliffs; homesteads, farmland, grazing animals and so on, and the path leading down to the town is long, coming in from north of the place and following something of a winding route around the gentler slopes.

Harper hadn’t spoken a bad word about the town or its inhabitants, describing it as large, fairly prosperous, and deriving its income almost entirely from the sea and those who sail upon it. Such port towns made for excellent trading hubs, goods coming in and stored in large warehouses, only to be shipped out again and carried elsewhere, for a profit of course.

I’d stayed for a couple of nights in a fairly respectable inn at that fishy-whiffy northern end of the harbour, remaining long enough only to replenish my supplies and stock up on equipment I thought I might need; a cooking pot, dried provisions, a hammock… the kind of bits and bobs a fellow might need for setting up in a shanty somewhere up there on the high limestone cliffs overlooking the town. Then I’d taken that winding route out to the north and up to the top of those cliffs.

It had taken a few days of walking, striding and not ambling mark you, stopping off at homesteads and farms to sleep in barns and haylofts, before I learned of an abandoned shack even further to the north of the harbour town where the sheer cliffs began sloping down northwards and also inland towards more level ground. At the bottom of that northern slope I later discovered a small fishing village, situated at the apex of a pretty bay with a pebble beach, a place rather unimaginatively called Bayham… being a hamlet in a bay, I presumed.

Still, the shack I found was conveniently positioned in a copse standing some hundred feet or so above sea level, up on the cliffs above the heaving waters of the Carpidian, and two miles or so south of Bayham. Narrespoint itself was a good ten miles further in that direction, on the other side of the deep and broad Narr River which flowed gently into the sea. Of course I’d had to cross that river where it’d carved its way down over the ages to form something of a rather frighteningly deep crevasse through the limestone bedrock; bedrock which gave the land hereabouts its undulating topography. The rope bridge had been rather alarming, now that I recall crossing over it, my packs laden and carrying all my gear. But, since I had little to no intention of heading back that way into the port town, I’d rather shoved the memory of that fearful crossing to the back of my mind.

The shack, I’d learned, used to serve as a home to a light keeper, many years ago. The remains of the light itself, nothing more than a rocky platform atop which a beacon would be lit, were still to be found on the edge of the cliff, but it too had long fallen into disuse, having been replaced by a more modern affair above Narrespoint town itself. I often take myself out to practice or to sit on that rocky platform, gazing out to sea, watching fishing boats bobbing on the waters below, and larger ships plying their trade, as well as sailing barges travelling close to shore along the Narrespoint to Muthia route.

Muthia itself is only thirty-five miles north of Narrespoint, as the crow flies, but I hadn’t been there. I’ve been avoiding people, save for occasionally visiting a family homestead some miles southeast of the copse where I live, and of course rather more regular hikes into Bayham for supplies.

All those years, fifteen or sixteen of them, living with Albionus in his little cottage on his hill away across the sea in Dulluston, had served me very well indeed. I’d often regarded my early life with my stepfather as one almost of penal servitude, given all the chores and labour I’d been obliged to perform. Fixing a leaky roof, caulking walls and windows, tending the hearth, cooking, cleaning, fixing rotten boards, lifting boards to incinerate wretched cheese-thieving mice that raided the pantry for Albionus’ precious blue cheese… but suddenly all that work, all that labour, all that learning, made perfect sense to me now.

It’d been early March when I’d decided to make this clifftop shack my home, far from Gorms and their appalling mistreatment of innocent mystic healers, and all those skills I’d unwittingly acquired while living in my late stepfather’s cottage had proved incredibly useful, nay, essential, to my comfort and wellbeing in this peaceful little hermitage of mine.

Hermitage? Yes, why not tell it like it is. When I’d arrived here, I’d been disgusted with myself, but more than that, disgusted with Gorms for what had since become known all around Carpidia as The Horror of Holbonne. I’d taken myself far from them all, just as Albionus had. He’d fled the world of Gorms after three hundred years or so of living with them; at first wielding the Izen for a living, then after advancing through the ranks, ultimately becoming a Master of the Beldane Robe, an MBR, and then becoming the Isle of Sinnock’s official Retributioner…

He’d spent years travelling the region, visiting both coasts, ridding the lands of those Lesser Mystics rising up to enslave Gormish towns and cities during a Wizzens Purge, a purge of the kind which was in effect again today. Such a purge occurs infrequently, when more than two MBRs struggle for ascendency for the ultimate post, that of Philostrate on the Isle of Sinnock.

Today, there were three such candidates, named Kurster, Arrapthane, and Norridus, and one or more had sent out a Retributioner, an MBR named Evrard, to kill Wizzens who might have the power to thwart a candidate’s ambitions, or might possess historical knowledge of misdeeds which would likewise prevent a candidate’s rising to the highest seat of all in the Beldane Council.

Evrard had murdered my stepfather, three years ago now, and destroyed that little cottage on the hill to which Albionus had retired. I’d had to leave those ruins too, taking ship with Tiresian, and finally tracking Evrard down to a small town in the hills of Roundvale, near Kallasta. I’d killed Evrard, with more than a little help from one of my stepfather’s former apprentices, Dantine, and taken up those duties I felt Albionus had prepared me for: doing the right thing.

Well, doing the right thing in Holbonne had cost innocent lives, and one of those lives had possessed the beautiful, bewitching green eyes which haunted me still. I’d often wondered why Albionus had finally given up on doing the right thing, and taken himself off to a hill way down south, back when Dulluston was nothing more than a couple of shacks and criminals on the run hiding in them. After three hundred or more years (and I never did discover exactly how old Albionus had been), he’d simply had enough of Gorms and their ways, or so I’d suspected back then.

Well, here I am now, swinging in my hammock in a snug but rather ancient and long-abandoned light keeper’s shack, in the middle of a copse on the northern cliffs of Narrespoint, and I think I know now why my stepfather had retired from the world. The Butcher of Boroka, they’d called him, though never to his face of course. I was beginning to wonder what moniker might be attached to me in years to come.

Still, life as a hermit-Wizzen isn’t all doom and gloom and feeling sorry for myself, y’know. I haven’t been idle. After making the shack weatherproof and relatively comfortable, I’d slowly acquired a table and two chairs (empty barrels, actually), fixed up some shelves with some simple permie melding wields, and after that, being left in peace and there being no bloody cats around, had spent my days working on the Permanentus and on the Third Book, the Theoratus.

My Dome of Bombast was, for all intents and purposes, now capable of being deployed as quickly as my normal Shield of Bombast, though I confess it took time for me to squat low enough that the Dome encompassed all of me. If I didn’t squat, then the bottom of the Dome really only extended down to around my knees, depending on how high above my head I raised my beloved blackthorn half-staff. Beloved? Well yes, and not simply because Albionus had made it for me; I’d have been dead without it a long time ago.

I’d even mastered the ridiculously-named (by me) Tube of Bombast, too. Though in fact it was really only half a tube which curved neatly around the front of me, protecting my head down to my shins and wrapping around to my sides. I hadn’t developed the strength and force of will yet to be able to wrap it entirely around me, but calling it the Half-Tube of Bombast seemed even more ridiculous to my ears than the just plain Tube I’d come up with.

There were a few more tricks up my sleeve as might be expected after taking two years alone to practice with no-one else for miles around me, but I hadn’t deemed them worthy of a name yet. Besides, my ultimate goal was that spherical Bombast Evrard had deployed when I’d sent trees crashing down upon him. Even now I was still seriously impressed by his doing that, the bastard. I felt sure Albionus must’ve possessed that kind of power and skill when he’d blown open the massive doors of Boroka’s southern fort, and strode into the place with two hundred guardsmen twanging arrows at him…

I didn’t possess such power or skill. Yet. Oh I had power aplenty at my disposal; the kind of power which, if summoned, might render my home on the hill nothing but ashes. Fat lot of good that would do. I’d used that power to incinerate a large swath of witchbane in Holbonne, hosing Izenfire so powerful I’d felt almost like one of those fabled deities of old. Actually it’d been quite frightening, having so much power available to me if I opened up that strange internal ‘portal’ of mine, my ‘Izengate’.

I’d done that, too, here on the cliffs, and on more than one occasion. It was essential, I felt, that I learned to control it, for that fateful day when I’d go up against the MBRs on the Isle of Sinnock. And also for when I’d face The Black Rose up there in Boroka. No, I hadn’t forgotten them, nor anyone else on my list. They could wait, though, until I was ready to deal with them.

No, opening that inner door to the world of Izen around me certainly gave me access to terrifying power, but power is nothing unless you know how to wield it. I could make immense gouts of Izenfire, but I couldn’t see any necessity for practicing with that; there was nothing hereabouts that needed razing. I could launch spectacular Izenballs too, but with no real targets in need of destruction nearby, there was little point practicing that, either. The ‘ordinary’ weapons, offensive and defensive, which Albionus had taught me since I was four years old (or thereabouts), would be more than sufficient for now.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Albionus had been able to open that ‘third book portal’ too, which would explain how it’d been possible for him to devastate Boroka’s fort. How had Master Dantine put it?

Boroka… that was right… such doors! Oaken beams… iron braced… thirty feet high and forty feet broad… such doors as were barred against his coming! I wish… I wish I could’ve seen their faces in Boroka… when Albionus blew those mighty doors…

Well, me too, Master Dantine. Me too.

There was so much that Albionus hadn’t been able to teach me, but it was no use mourning the loss of such knowledge as my stepfather had possessed. I had the books, I had time to practice, and I was improving every day. I was convinced that Albionus had possessed some kind of Izen armour, which had protected him against two hundred soldiers of tyranny all shooting at him while he strode into their lair and annihilated them all. But how he’d developed such armour, how he’d shaped it and how he’d been able to manipulate the Izen in such a detailed and form-fitting fashion, I had no idea.

Well, he’d had a lot more practice than I’d had by the time he’d brought the Isle’s retribution down upon the Warlord of Boroka’s head that fateful day. Given enough confidence and enough time to practice, diligently and quietly out here in the middle of nowhere, eventually I’d figure it out too.

Still swinging in my hammock, I pointed my finger at the candle on the barrel nearby, and summoned a slight puff of Izenwind. The candle’s flame recoiled as if in horror, and promptly went out. Well, it was one of those little tricks I’d been teaching myself, nothing particularly spectacular.

But every new thing I learned to do with Izen had its source in my increasing understanding of the complex concepts contained in the Theoratus, and using myself and my own arms and finger bones as conduits for Izen was something that, to my knowledge anyway, no other Wizzen in Carpidia had developed over the course of their long lives. It was forbidden even to try it, as Albionus had told me often enough when I was a boy…

"Never, ever try to wield the Izen without your stick, Yarmian." So had Albionus adjured me. Never, ever. Understand?

"Why?"

"Your bones are not hardwood, that’s why, and you’ll burn your bloody arms off. If you want to ignore me and try it, go right ahead, you probably will anyway. Just don’t come crying to me waggling the two charred and blackened sticks poking out yer shoulders and begging me to fix it, ‘cos I can’t."

That warning had made no sense to my young mind, particularly since such trivial things as making coins from slices of broomstick, changing the colour of a flower, adding flavours to a pot or indeed healing a cut until proper medical assistance could be found were all done with the hands and fingers. The half-staff had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The stick is used for the big stuff.

Which was why, on regular visits to the old abandoned quarry to practice the big stuff, the sternly uttered adjuration never, ever came back to haunt me time and time again. Eventually, worn down by the incessant nagging of that one and only never, ever, this child did what all children do, and succumbed to curiosity.

In time, starting small and being extremely careful to pay attention to any tingling or pain in my arms, I had learned how to use a finger to nudge a tiny pebble. And I’d advanced, very cautiously and very slowly, from there. I’d always intended to impress my stepfather with this ability, but he’d been taken from me by Evrard before I’d had the chance. Instead, I’d impressed Evrard with the ability, using my fingers to rake his face with tiny streamers of Izenfire, before summoning my stick to my hand and bursting his filthy head apart.

In the darkness of the shack, my home for the past two years, I swung in the hammock and frowned. What day was it? Dunno. What date was it? Hmm. The second day of May. Which made it a Sunday. I think.

Ninite Baggy, I said quietly to the darkness, and heard a couple of gentle thumps on the floorboards by way of an answer.

Baggy? The short form of ‘Fleabag’, my two year-old dog; had him since he was a puppy born into the Drayfuz family homestead several miles to the southeast. One of their dogs had a litter of three pups, and well, they gifted one to me. I felt obliged to accept the gift, in payment, they said, for my fixing the wheel of their rickety but essential handcart, and sharpening up a ploughshare for them.

They’re a nice family, and to be honest, although I might live like a hermit, I’m really not one. I enjoy my occasional visits to their home and their little self-sufficient farm. And while I’m being honest, I’ve grown rather fond of Fleabag, and he’s very fond of me. Dogs have always liked me, and dogs have always liked Wizzens. Let’s face it, it’s nice to have someone to talk to, especially a marvellous beast that loves you unconditionally in return for some kind words, a pat on the head, and a meal. I was trying hard not to become too attached to Fleabag, though; the loss of Pandan the mule was still poignant, though the pain of the loss had been dulled by time.

Still, Pandan’s death at the hands of the Black Rose assassin had opened that Izengate within me, unleashing a terrifying fury, a white-hot rage which no amount of my ‘little teapot’ calming mantras could quench. It’d taken me totally by surprise back then; I hadn’t even had the time to think about my little teapot song… and I’d tortured that assassin to learn the location of the hidden lair of The Black Rose assassins. At the time, it’d been the right thing to do. Unpleasant, but necessary. It’d taught me a valuable lesson about myself, too.

But while I tried to keep a safe, emotional distance from the Fleabag, even giving him that name, I suppose I knew that the dopy mutt had wheedled his way into my heart. He might never fill the hole left by Pandan the marvellous mule, but dogs are really quite marvellous too in their own way. Unswervingly loyal, protective, always there for you, never judging you, and full of endearing traits.

There’ve been times in these past couple of years, I wished I’d been born a dog.

oOo

2. Look What I Found

Striding along, stick in hand, enjoying the spring sunshine and gentle seaside breezes, heading down the slope along a path I assume had been made by the old light keeper in days of yore, and watching Baggy lolloping away from bush to shrub sniffing for rabbits… what a lovely day! I was pretty sure it was Monday, May 3rd, but I’d find out for certain in the village down in the bay.

My small knapsack was empty (and not so small either, I only called it that because it was smaller than my trusty old backpack), and ready to be filled with dried fish, bread, and other provisions I intended to purchase in Bayham. It was a fishing village, so of course fish was cheap as chips… although actually, come to think of it, chips were more expensive than fish in Bayham, potatoes either imported from Narrespoint by boat, or grown by farming homesteaders a little further inland from the bay.

Did they know I was a Wizzen in the little village? Yes. At first they’d taken me for some kind of loony hermit living up there in the shack in the trees where once the older loony of a light keeper had dwelled (and yes, by all accounts, the old duffer really had been something of a nutcase, and much given to wandering around up there in the nude). But, after suffering an extremely rare pang of guilt for my paying these poor fishermen for essential supplies with bits of transmuted broomstick, I’d given the game away by carrying out a permie wielding to repair some cracked beams in the pride of their small fleet of boats, and that was that.

Did they care that I was a Wizzen? No. Were they surprised? No, not really. Why not? Because other Wizzens had passed through Bayham a while back, doubtless while fleeing the purge and heading out into the wilds for safety. Narrespoint, like almost all other large towns in Carpidia, had had its fair share of Wizzens, until of course the purge threatened those Beldanian mystics who were old enough to be considered a threat to the ambitions of the three would-be Philostrates up there on the Isle.

I suppose, when you entrust your life to the planks of a small boat and go out on the sea in hopes of a rich harvest, such things as mystics passing through or dwelling nearby aren’t worthy of much comment or consideration. Out there on the waters, life really does rather boil down to the elementary, and anything else is just a kind of frippery. In Bayham, they’re a fairly self-sufficient lot; there’s not really much point in their trying to sell their catch in Narrespoint, which is itself a major fishing port, so they rely for their food on themselves and their near neighbours out in the homesteads.

During my first visits to Bayham, I’d been in the grip of self-disgust for my crass stupidity in failing to see or even to consider Parmella’s insanity. After foolishly equating her centuries-long captivity to my own brief incarceration in Silman Barr’s tower, bound by his chains of Torbol Zensteel, it hadn’t occurred to me that she’d been driven quite mad. It had been me who’d loosed the hag upon Holbonne, and yes, I was right to assume the guilt of what followed.

However, as time passed and I became less self-absorbed, I began to notice the apparent curiosity that was the village of Bayham itself. Now, the bay was small, the beach all pebbles, and the land rising up either side of it forming cliffs which offered no safe anchorage. And since it was only a dozen miles or so from Bayham to Narrespoint by boat, why bother with a fishing village out here in the first place? Even the name was something of a curiosity… Bayham. Really, the size of the bay itself ought to qualify for the slightly less grandiose title of ‘cove’.

It’d been Fleabag who’d given me the answer to the conundrum posed by Bayham’s existing so close to a major fishing port, and that had been when he was still a pup a little over a year ago...

We’d been following this same path down to Bayham, just as we were now, when his natural instincts and curiosity had flushed a startled rabbit out from under a windblown gorse bush, and barking with furious delight, Baggy had shot off after the poor creature.

Now, the mutt’s not a bloody great wolfhound or anything, and nor is he a yappy little terrier. He is, in fact, something of a medium-sized mongrel, with a black muzzle, a white-ish patch over his right eye, and the rest of him a dirty greyish black colour. He has big feet, webbed for swimming like a water dog’s, and a slender tail which he seems to enjoy wagging whenever he looks at me. His ears tend to fold back along his head until something attracts his keen attention, when they shoot up and become highly mobile, putting me in mind of dear old Pandan and how his long ears seemed always to be listening out for something new and interesting.

So then, off shot the mongrel, his world suddenly reduced to nothing more than the pursuit of a canny rabbit which darted, zigged, zagged, sprinted, and variously evaded the deliriously happy Fleabag. So fixed was Baggy’s intent on his prey (though I doubt even he knew what he was going to do with the rabbit if he ever caught up with it), that none of my attempts at calling him back succeeded in breaking his concentration.

It didn’t take long before Baggy and his prey were out of sight, and I’d simply shrugged and carried on walking, leaving the dog to his fun and frolics. Dogs will usually come running when a Wizzen starts a wielding in range of their senses, so I wasn’t particularly worried about the daft mutt getting lost or anything. However, after about ten more minutes of trudging along the path to the village, I heard a distant, insistent barking. It sounded to me as though the rabbit had gone to ground, probably into its warren, and the idiot Fleabag was barking to draw my attention to whatever distant hole the bunny had dived into.

No amount of my whistling or calling would see Baggy abandon his hunt, and not even snapping up a Dome and then a Tube of Bombast could bring the dog back to heel. With a sigh, I’d followed the sound of that incessant barking inland, ending up a couple of hundred yards away from the path and on the other side of a small stand of silvertrees.

There stood Fleabag, performing some kind of excited doggy-dance, tail wagging so hard it almost lifted his hind paws off the ground, looking into a rocky hole and barking, and then looking at me before turning his attention back to the hole as if to say Quick! Come and look what I’ve found!

Bloody idiot. And I suppose Baggy was thinking the same of me until I finally strode forward and looked into the hole. It was in the middle of a rocky outcrop, and seemed deep. The dog stepped back, still wagging its tail, tongue hanging out, eyes flicking from me to the hole and back again…

I poked my stick into it. Nothing. The hole was deeper than my stick. I picked up a small stone and dropped it in, listening intently, and heard nothing. The hole was either very deep, or simply had nothing at the bottom but soft earth. I then saw, but Baggy did not, a grey shape some thirty yards away dashing out from another, much larger outcrop of rocks and boulders, and then sprint away into dense shrubbery. The rabbit had escaped. Hurrah for the bunny, boohoo poor Baggy.

He’s gone, Bags, I sighed. Bunny’s buggered off. Sorry boy. Come on.

I’d almost simply walked away, but the look of abject confusion and disappointment on the dog’s face when it finally became clear that I couldn’t perform the simple conjurer’s trick of pulling a rabbit out of the hole made me feel a little inadequate.

Come on, boy, he went that way, and I pointed at the boulders and rocks some distance away. G’won! There he is!

Ears erect, eyes suddenly alert again, the dog’s head turned sharply this way and that, and in the end I relented and set off towards the distant bushes where the poor bunny had disappeared. It’d been a lovely day, just like today, and I suppose I thought the Fleabag deserved a bit of holiday fun after putting up with me all winter. He eventually got the message, trotting off ahead of me, nose to the ground and sniffing hopefully.

Nearer to the rocks he must’ve caught something of a scent, and trotted forward, head dropping to sniff from time to time, and then he ran a little quicker, his tail started wagging again, he barked happily, and shot off in entirely the wrong direction to where the rabbit had emerged from below ground, instead of away and to the bushes.

And then he’d disappeared in amongst the boulders. Stupid dog...

But then, not so stupid, because his barking became faint, which was strange, and a tad alarming, and I hurried after him. There, surrounded by large boulders and thus almost completely hidden from sight, was a large hole in the ground, and down there somewhere in it, was Fleabag, uttering that unmistakeable Quick! Come and look what I’ve found! bark of his.

Nadir and zenith, I muttered to myself, and lit an Izenlight with my stick.

For why? For because there were rough-hewn steps cut into the rock leading down into the darkness where my doggy friend was barking, the sounds starting to echo and fade at the same time. Rough-hewn those steps may well have been, but worn smooth, testifying to the passage of many feet upon them.

Down I went, reminded of the time Arric of Turretmor and I had descended into a similar hole in the Sorcerer’s Vale in the mountains forty miles west of Brenneth. That descent had led us into peril, and almost cost us our lives. This new descent, however, seemed considerably less parlous, at least as far as Baggy was concerned.

Down into the tunnel, and then along a downward-sloping passage, and on the ground near the exit a few discarded, blackened torches had been unceremoniously dumped where light from the surface still penetrated. The dog’s barking was becoming fainter, the echoes confusing and making it difficult to determine where he was. It didn’t help that there were offshoots from the main passage as I progressed deeper, including a short branch which terminated in an upward-sloping dead end illuminated by a narrow shaft of light coming from a small hole. It was, I guessed, the very hole the rabbit had escaped into before fleeing out from the main passage, and a small stone sitting on a pile of leafy debris on the ground below it seemed to confirm it.

Always descending, the main passage wound this way and that, and my Izenlight revealed some of the offshoots were quite lengthy. Some of those side-tunnels contained debris; broken bottles, broken kegs and crates, even rags of some kind. Some were even faintly lit, thanks to crevices and smaller passages leading back up to the surface, though they were far too small for people to employ as means of ingress or exit. It was as though I’d shrunk in size and stepped into a rabbit warren, only of hard limestone rock rather than soft earth. Or perhaps a gigantic ant’s nest, of the kind I’d once seen drawn in one of Porky Norm’s books.

Baggy’s barking was becoming louder, the way ahead brighter, and I was able to extinguish my light after a descent of what I gauged from the sound of waves and the pressure of wind must’ve been some seventy or eighty yards. Finally, the main passageway opened out into a cave, and there was Baggy, standing on a rocky shore ahead of me, in a large cavern which was mostly submerged. The Carpidian Sea was lapping gently on that shore, swells entering the cave mouth and occasionally splashing onto the rocks where the dog, soaking wet, was wagging its dripping tail.

Dotted about that dry, horseshoe-shaped ledge, more barrels, kegs, and crates, and a couple of barrels containing ready-made torches, rag-wrapped heads waiting to be dunked in a barrel of pitch and lit to illuminate the way up to the surface.

With more excited barking, Fleabag suddenly launched himself off the ledge and splashed into the water, swimming around in a large circle. This