“That was … interesting,” she said.

“Was that … it?”

“Not all, I think.” She looked in. A sullen menace filled the well now; she could sense it sinking lower as she let her magery strengthen. She tried to move the rock fragment now on top; it rose so fast it almost hit her in the head, bursting out the roof over the well and then landing with a jarring THUNK just short of a cottage wall. Again she sent a scythe stroke of magery to sever the power that propelled it, and again dispatched the remnant that threw up a cloud of dust in its struggles.

“It’s too dangerous,” Black Sef said.

“Too dangerous to try that again,” Dorrin said. “Some of those rocks are much bigger. I will have to go down.”

“Today?”

“Today. It will be stronger tomorrow, now it knows someone’s trying to destroy it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Once she was down below the rim, the heat was even worse, stifling. The stench was both physical and magical: stagnant, polluted water, blood and death and decay, sour and sickly sweet all at once. The walls seemed to be closing in on her; the thick, stinking air clogged her nose, her lungs. Dorrin reached out with her free hand and stroked the old stone lining. “You want to be clean,” she said to the stone. She had only a few phrases of dwarf-tongue, and wished she’d learned more; a dwarf would know how to comfort this stone. “You are dross,” she said, one of the few words she remembered. Strong, it meant. Healthy. Brave. “Help me,” she said to the stone. She felt something change, just a little; the smell of clean stone touched her nose. “Help that broken stone, if you can; it was once whole, as you are, and clean.”

At the bottom, in the dimness, she made her light again. The stones there seemed locked in a hopeless jumble, each blocked by others, each blocking others. No way at all to put a rope sling around any of them and lift. Dorrin created with magery what she hoped was a secure lining for the entire shaft, in case the stone lining had been undermined. Then she put the tip of her sword on the stone below her foot and poured magery into it … lift slowly, she thought.

The stone rose, and with her standing on it, came slowly, steadily, up out of the well until she could see out, step out, off the stone and onto the ground. The stone followed her sword; when she pushed a little, it sank to the ground an armspan from the well. She withdrew her magery and then her sword, then nodded to her escort and they lowered her again.

One after another, the stones obeyed her magery, and one after another she stacked them ready for rebuilding the well’s coping. She found under one the body of a man, desiccated, shrunken to skin over bones. She touched it, brow, eyes, mouth, and spoke Falk’s prayer of dismissal and Alyanya’s blessing. Lifting it in her arms, she carried it up, standing on the stone on which he had lain, not noticing that this time the stone rose at her command without the sword’s touch. She laid the body on the ground, heart full of sorrow.