Wild vines and rubble hid the entrance. The Prince was the first to force his way down into the bowels of the earth. Farid hesitated when he saw how steep the climb down into the darkness looked. “Come on!” whispered Dustfinger impatiently. “The sun will soon rise, and the Adder’s soldiers aren’t going to mistake you for a squirrel.”
“But it smells like a burial vault,” said Farid, and he looked longingly up at the sky.
“The boy has a good nose!” said Snapper, before pushing his way past him, grim-faced. “Yes, there are many dead men down there. The mountain devoured them because they dug too deep.
You don’t see them, but you smell them. People say they stop up the galleries like a cargo of dead fish.”
Horrified, Farid looked at him, but Dustfinger just pushed him in the back. “Look, how often do I have to tell you it’s not the dead but the living you should fear? Come on, make a few sparks dance on your fingertips to give us a light.”
The robbers had settled in those galleries that were not buried in rubble. They had given the roofs and walls additional props, but Farid didn’t trust the beams now braced against the stone and the ground. How could they support the weight of a whole mountain? He thought he heard it sighing and groaning, and while he made himself as comfortable as he could on the dirty blankets that the robbers had spread on the hard ground, he suddenly remembered Sootbird again. But the Prince only laughed when he anxiously asked about him. “No, Sootbird doesn’t know about this place or any of our hideouts. He’s often tried to get us to take him along, but who’s going to trust such a wretched fire-eater? The only reason he knew about the Secret Camp was because he’s one of the strolling players.”
All the same, Farid did not feel safe. Almost a week yet to go before the Adderhead freed his prisoners! It would be a long wait. He was already wishing himself back among the mouse droppings in the Badger’s Earth. During the night he kept staring at the rubble closing off the galleries where they were sleeping. He thought he heard pale fingers scraping at the stones. “Put your hands over your ears, then!” was all Dustfinger said when Farid shook him awake to say so, and he put his arms around Roxane again. Dustfinger was having bad dreams, the kind he had often had in the other world, but now it was Roxane who calmed him and whispered him back to sleep. Her quiet voice, soft with love, reminded Farid of Meggie’s, and he missed Meggie so much that he felt ashamed of his weakness. In this darkness, surrounded by the dead, it was difficult to believe that she was missing him, too. Suppose she had forgotten him, the way Dustfinger often forgot him now that Roxane was here? Only Meggie had made him forget his jealousy, but Meggie wasn’t with him now.
On the second night a boy came to the mine. He worked in the stables of the Castle of Night and had been spying for the Black Prince ever since the Piper had his brother hanged. He said that the Adderhead would let the prisoners go along the road leading down to the harbor, on condition that they boarded a ship there and never returned.
“The road to the harbor. Ah,” was all the Prince said when the informer had gone again – and he set out with Dustfinger that same night. Farid didn’t ask if he could go, too. Fie simply followed them.
The road was little more than a footpath leading through the trees. It ran straight down Mount Adder, as if in a hurry to slip under the canopy of leaves. “The Adderhead pardoned a troop of prisoners once before and let them go along this road,” said the Prince, when they were under the trees at the roadside. “And they did reach the sea without mishap, just as he had promised, but the ship waiting for them was a slave ship, and they say the Adderhead got a particularly fine silver bridle for those prisoners, a scant dozen of them.”
Slaves? Farid remembered markets where people were sold, and buyers gaped at them and felt them as if they were cattle. Girls with blonde hair had been in great demand.
“Don’t look as if Meggie had been sold already!” said Dustfinger.
“The Prince will think of something – won’t you?” The Black Prince tried to smile, but he couldn’t conceal the fact that he was eyeing the road with great concern. “They must never reach that ship,” he said. “And we can only hope that the Adderhead doesn’t send too many soldiers to escort them. We must hide them quickly – in the mine at first, that will be best, until everything’s quieted down again. And very likely,” he added almost as an afterthought, “we shall need fire.”