Deadly Magic

Part Nine

Deep under the desert, Harry was digging.

Digging. Removing rocks. Pushing slippery piles of scree and sand aside. Digging again.

He has been doing it for two days.

A lesser man might have given up.

He was so thirsty his tongue was swollen and he couldn't swallow. He was so hungry he could barely even sit up; most of his scrabbling was done while lying down. He was so tired that the difference between asleep and awake was becoming hard to distinguish.

The blackness around him was absolute except for the occasional red flicker of lava from far below. Time had ceased to have any meaning. Harry slept very little, afraid that if he did, he would never wake up.

But he didn't give up hope. The same endless expectation of good things that had kept his mother struggling until she died was in his blood, as well.

He wasn't so deep under the sands, right? And whether is was dormant or alive and moving, the giant stone tiger still kept its basic structure, right? So he was probably still in the "throat," which was close to the "mouth," which led to the surface. And the thing was so torn up and destroyed that there were probably holes all over its granite skin. . . 

Right?

Harry also had two more things besides endless optimism that most other people didn't have.

One was a tiny cat.

He wasn't really that much help. But Dusty kept Harry sane and gave him a reason to push on.

The other things he had was a magic carpet, who -which?- was useful.  It neatly carried piles of stones out of the way and occasionally even lent a tassel to working out a stuck rock. Harry curled up on the carpet when he rested, and he could have sworn the thing rocked him a little.

He also had his thoughts to keep his mind busy while he worked. Sometimes they turned to the crazy, evil old man and his attempt at murder. But Harry wasn't one driven by revenge; he had seen that emotion use up and destroy others in the Quarter of the Ragamuffins. He just couldn't figure out why, once the old man had the stupid trinket he wanted, he had felt it necessary to kill Harry. He had what he wanted and Harry couldn't care less what happened to him and his dumb lamp. It wasn't like he was going to try to take it from him. There was something else in the play there, a mystery he would solve as soon as he was out of the cave. 

But mostly Harry thought about Prince Louis. If he had never met him, he wouldn't have been thrown into prison by the royal guards, he wouldn't have fallen in with the crazy, evil old man, and he wouldn't be here now, trying to dig himself out of a black, suffocating pit in the middle of the desert.

And still he wouldn't have change a thing.

Harry thought about his eyes when prince Louis was looking into his. He thought about his eyes when prince Louis had seen the beggar children. He had witnessed the single moment prince Louis began to comprehend the world Harry lived in. He replayed the graceful skill with which prince Louis handled his tiny silver dagger. He thought about him descending from the sky at the end of his pole vault like a warrior angel.

Thinking about all that made him forget that his fingers were rubbed raw and the inside of his mouth felt like the sand he dug through. 

On the end of the second day - or maybe it was the middle of the third; it was hard to tell - Harry began to hallucinate. 

He imagined there was a tiny cat with him that wore a tiny shirt just like him. He imagined there was a magic carpet helping him and waving its tassel around like a worried mother hen. 

Harry decided to keep his eyes forward and continue digging. Things that weren't real would just distract him.