could find little evidence for it. I now know that they did not.’
‘Where did they go?’ said Flydd.
‘Underground,’ said Klarm. ‘They made their winding way by night, in small groups so as not to attract attention, to the sea caves of Rencid. They went into the caves but they didn’t come out again.’
‘Sounds a bit far-fetched to me,’ said Flydd. ‘They’d have to cross running water just to enter the sea caves, and a lot more inside.’
‘That’s why we didn’t look more closely,’ said Klarm. ‘We knew it was against their nature, but there’s no doubt about it. The leaders must have fed their people an elixir to overcome their terror of water.’
‘I’d be more convinced if you could tell me where they went,’ Yggur said dubiously.
‘I know exactly where they went. At some stage, perhaps decades ago, they found or made an underground connection between the sea caves and the deep caverns that honeycomb central Rencid, a good hundred leagues away.’
‘They couldn’t have made a connection all that way,’ said Flydd. ‘It would be the work of a thousand years.’
Klarm shrugged. ‘It’s mostly limestone country and no one knows how far the caverns run. They’ve never been explored. But that doesn’t matter – the lyrinx now lie hidden in their tens of thousands, deep underground, within a stone’s throw of Worm Wood.’
‘How can you know?’ said Yggur. ‘How do you know they went through the sea caves, for that matter?’
‘My spies have been scouring the area between Nilkerrand and Snizort ever since we came back from Nennifer,’ said Klarm. ‘Talking to the hunters and scavengers, and the nomads who used to wander those plains. It’s surprising how many people still live in those lands. Most useful were the scavengers who roam the west coast of Lauralin. A rat doesn’t scurry from one side of a ribcage to the other without them knowing about it.
‘My spies have talked to thousands of people over the past months, and very expensive it was. I felt positively profligate.’ Klarm’s eyes flashed at Yggur. ‘And when I wasn’t wenching and boozing like the dissipated sot you think me to be, I put together a picture from all those tiny fragments of information, and it told me where to search.
‘We identified the right sea cave a month and a half ago, and I checked out the signs for myself. There was nothing at the entrance; the enemy had wiped it clean of tracks, but there were plenty inside. They’d gone in and there were no tracks coming out again. Where had they gone and how would I find them? Even ten thousand lyrinx, hibernating deep underground, would produce no sign that could be detected from above.’
‘So how did you find them?’ said Flydd, signing to an orderly. The fellow went out silently.
‘The only way I could. I followed their tracks.’
‘What, underground?’ cried Flydd. ‘You bloody fool, what if you’d been caught?’
The little man bowed in his direction. ‘It had to be done, Xervish, and I couldn’t send anyone else to do such a dangerous job. Besides, no one was more suited to it than myself, my father being a caver. I was born underground.’
‘And had they caught you, you would have died underground,’ said Yggur, ‘though not before telling them every secret we have.’
‘I carried a poison pill set in wax inside a hollow tooth,’ said Klarm. ‘If taken, I would have bitten it in half.’
The orderly reappeared with a flagon of black beer and a large tankard, which he placed in front of Klarm before withdrawing. Klarm nodded his thanks and filled the tankard. ‘It’s surprisingly thirsty work, following a lyrinx army underground.’ He downed half the tankard in one swallow.
‘And frightening too, I dare say.’
‘Aye.’ Klarm took another pull at the tankard. ‘It was that. In truth, I had little expectation that I’d come out alive. There’s bad air in places, and fast streams, and it wasn’t unguarded either. That was the hardest part of all. I couldn’t kill the guards, nor harm them in any way, or they would have known someone was spying on them. All I could use was my natural cunning and the odd small illusion.
‘But illusions work better underground, and the enemy were more frightened than I was, despite their elixir. They had to cross many subterranean streams and their terror gave me heart. But, terrified or not, they’d gone on, and so must I. That’s why I was so late back. I followed them the whole winding