The Enchanted Quest (9 page)

* * *

“Sleepers, awaken!”

Tania opened her eyes. She was resting against the stone surround of the fireplace. Rose was leaning over her and smiling.

“It is time to go now,” she said.

Tania gasped, sitting up and rubbing her eyes, stiff from having slept so awkwardly. “Oh, I’m sorry!” She looked around. The pub was deserted now and the lights were low. On the other side of the hearth Michael was gently shaking Rathina into wakefulness.

“How long was I asleep?” Tania asked. She could remember little of the evening beyond that first haunting song. She had put down her lute and stepped from the stage. Then there had been another song, slow and soothing. And then it was as if a warm dark veil had come down over her mind, peaceful and soothing.

“A couple of hours, that’s all,” said Rose. “You’re dry now, and warm—and you must be on your way. Michael and I will guide you to the edge of town—but from there you’ll need to go on alone.”

Tania looked into her fathomless black eyes. “Who are you?” she asked. “You seem to know things about us but . . . how
can
you? Are you from Faerie? Were you sent here to help us?”

“Were we sent?” Rose murmured. “I can’t answer that—I have a mind filled with long winding corridors and many closed doors.” She frowned. “As have you, I think, Tania.”

“Are you all ready and set?” Michael asked, looking bright-eyed from Rathina to Tania.

“We are,” said Rathina.

They made their way between the empty tables and stools, Tania careful not to brush against the black cast iron. The landlord stood at the open door.

“Will you be back tomorrow evening?” he asked Michael as he stepped out into the night.

“That’s my plan, unless events overtake me,” Michael called.

The door closed behind them and the bolt was thrown with a sharp clack.

Only a few windows showed lights now, and the long peace of the night hung over the town. Rathina walked alongside Michael, her hands clasped behind her back, her head bowed. Tania and Rose came along behind.

“You sing a merry air, Master Michael,” Rathina said. “But the words of that song where you spoke of the Faerie Queen—there was little sense in them, you know. Our mother would never enslave men to do her bidding nor hold their land in thrall.” She turned to look at him. “And I have traveled Faerie all o’er, yet I have never seen an apple tree that bears fruit of yellow, green, and red.”

“Well, songs are not always what they seem, Rathina,” he said, smiling. “And maybe that one was about a different Faerie Queen?”

“There is no other,” Rathina said solemnly.

“Maybe so,” Michael replied. “If we had more time together, you could teach me the truth of things, and I could write some new verses. Maybe if we meet again I could learn at your knee?”

“A worthy aim, forsooth,” said Rathina. “But tell me, where do you take us and what do you know of our quest?”

“I don’t know anything at all,” said Michael. “But I’m taking you to Ballinclea Heights, if the name means something to you, which I doubt.” He gazed into the sky, his eyes narrowing. “Something urges me on to that place—I have the strong sense that you need to be there.”

“You speak in riddles, Master Michael,” said Rathina.

“I know.” Michael sighed. “I wish I understood more.”

“I have something for you,” Rose said to Tania. She pulled the something from a pocket or fold of her skirt. “Take it—you’ll find it useful.”

Rose dropped a leaf into her palm. A single diamond-shaped leaf, smooth and shiny.

“Thank you,” Tania said, puzzled.

“It’s called
doras oscail
,” said Rose. “It has a virtue so that no door can remain closed against it.” Her black eyes gleamed cannily. “I think it’ll be useful where you’re heading.”

“Yes, thank you.” Tania said. It was becoming clearer and clearer to her that these were not normal Mortals she and Rathina had met by chance. All Faerie drowsed under the Gildensleep, so surely they could not have come out of the east. But if not of Faerie— then where?

She looked keenly into Rose’s face and a thought struck her. “Are you the Dream Weaver?” she asked.

“No, I think not.” There was something in Rose’s voice that stopped Tania asking more. She closed her fingers carefully over the leaf.

They came to a road that flanked a great flattopped hill skirted with trees and shrubs and rising in folds of reddish earth and white rock high into the sky.

Michael pointed up the pathless hill. “That’s your way,” he said. “Good luck to the both of you—and I hope you find your friend.”

He turned, his arm around Rose’s shoulders, and the two of them moved quickly away and vanished into the trees.

“Thank you!” Tania called.

“Well, now,” mused Rathina, her fists on her hips. “What do you make of that coil, sweet sister?”

“I have no idea,” Tania said. “But I think we can trust them.” She held out her arm. “Take my hand,” she said. “I’ve got a feeling we’re near Dorcha Tur.”

Hand-in-hand they stepped forward. The world rippled and wavered.

The hill was much higher now, rearing to twice its previous height. A great black castle shimmered into being on the top.

They had come to the fortress of Dorcha Tur.

“I like not the smell of this place, sister; it reeks of malevolence.”

They were in a stone corridor somewhere within the thick walls of the fortress. Wall-hung torches flared with a ruddy light, staining the low roof black with soot. So far they had not encountered any of the inhabitants, but a sense of menace followed them like an invisible mist.

The leathery little leaf had done all that Rose had promised. Their way in through the rear walls had been via a narrow postern door to one side of the formidable main gates. The door had no handle or lock on the outside. But the moment that Tania had touched the leaf to the heavy wooden panels, it had swung silently outward.

“A curious thing indeed for a Mortal woman to give you,” Rathina had said, eyeing the leaf dubiously. “If the two minstrels are indeed of Mortal stock.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Tania had replied.

The open door had revealed a low, cramped black tunnel that burrowed in under the wall. Coming out of the tunnel, they had slipped past a gatehouse, lantern-lit and murmurous with low voices. Hugging a flanking wall, they found stone steps that led to a second door.

The
doras oscail
worked its magic again, and now they were within the castle keep and flitting soft-footed along a stonewalled corridor lined with heavy wooden doors. They came across black arches every now and then revealing winding stone stairways leading up and down. They encountered no one, although Tania had the strong sense that the castle housed many people.

“Sister, stop,” Rathina said, her hand on Tania’s arm. “The fortress is huge—we could waste a night and a day searching and not find our quarry.” She frowned. “Are we certain that this is the castle of which the man Welsh spoke? Is Master Connor even here?”

Tania looked at her. “Someone or something sent Michael and Rose to meet us,” she said. “There are only two reasons for that: either to help us or to cause us problems. Which do you think it is?”

“I could sense no falsehoods in them,” Rathina replied. “I think they wished us well.”

“Then we have to believe that this is Lord Balor’s castle and that Connor is being held here. The only question now is—
where.
”

“Had we weapons, we might snatch one of the denizens of this ugly furuncle and seek an answer from them at sword point.” Rathina sighed heavily. “Or if Eden were with us, she’d use her Arts to sniff the boy out—and we’d be away with him in a ball of fire ere Lord Balor climbed into his britches!”

“Maybe Eden
can
help us,” Tania said. “Come with me. I’ve got an idea.” She ran quickly to the nearest door and pressed her ear to the panels. Gesturing for her sister to be quiet, she listened intently.

There was no sound from within. She touched the leaf to the door and it swung into darkness. Rathina lifted a torch from its wall sconce and they entered the room. It was small and bleak, with a narrow, deep window and six bare bed frames. A dormitory of some kind, Tania thought—but disused, judging from the broken crockery on the floor and the musty smell and the thick dust that lay over all.

She closed the door behind them. “Help me,” she said to Rathina. “Hold my hand. I’m going to try to make contact with Eden.”

She closed her eyes and took Rathina’s hand and conjured Eden’s face in her mind. A long face, solemn-eyed, careworn, framed with flowing white hair.

Yellow lights flickered behind Tania’s closed eyelids.

“Eden?”
A name hardly breathed.

The image that Tania had of her sister went white. From far away it seemed, a shred of darkness rushed forward. Suddenly it filled the white frame and it was Eden’s face, haggard with effort and care, shadowed deep beneath the eyes. The blue eyes locked on to Tania.

“Sister.”
The voice was soft but clear.
“What is it? Quickly, now. I cannot hold this for long. My strength is stretched thin.”

“We need weapons,”
Tania said, her lips moving but her voice only sounding in her head.
“And we’ve lost Connor. Can you help us find him?”

“I will try.”
Eden’s hand rose and she moved an outstretched finger toward Tania. There was a sharp clattering at Tania’s feet, and she felt an icy pain in her head—and then she saw behind her eyes an image of Connor strapped by leather bonds to a tilted wooden board in a deep, dark chamber in the bowels of the castle.

“Thank you, thank you.”
Tania gasped, wincing from the pain in her head.
“How is the Gildensleep working? Are you . . . ?”

But the image of Eden fizzed out like a spent candle flame and there was only darkness behind Tania’s eyes.

“By the spirits of justice and fate,” said Rathina, pulling her hand from Tania’s and staring down at the boards between them. “This is all I would have wished and more.”

Two swords lay on the floor. One was a Faerie sword, its blade a keen-edged length of pure shining crystal; the other was of Isenmort—Rathina’s own sword, the sword that she had picked up on the battlefield of Salisoc Heath, and whose bitter blade she had plunged through the body of her true love, the treacherous Gabriel Drake.

“And I was shown where Connor is being held,” said Tania. “I can see the way there clear as anything.”

Rathina stooped and picked up the swords, handing the crystal blade to Tania and stepping back to practice thrusts and parries on shadows. “Then let’s to him, sweet sister,” said Rathina, her voice animated now for the first time since they’d come ashore. “And let’s teach manners to a lord whose minions waylay innocent folk upon the high seas.”

It was the strangest sensation. Eden seemed to have planted in Tania’s brain a route through the maze of the castle’s corridors and winding stair towers so that she instinctively knew which turn to take, which stairs to descend—and also where to find a shadowy corner to hide when people were near.

The mystic intuition led them to a curious room in the bowels of the castle. Its ceiling was low and domed, and a raised octagonal platform made of mortared stones occupied most of the space. Set at regular intervals into the chest-high platform were deep, slanting holes or slots. The room itself was unlit, but jutting spokes of torchlight fingered up from the holes, hazing the air and giving the room an eerie, otherworldly feel.

“What manner of place is this?” murmured Rathina. “My skin crawls to be here. There is some great evil close by.”

“Shh!” hissed Tania. She could hear a voice booming from beneath them. She leaned over one of the slots and found herself staring down into a great, wide, torchlit chamber. Rathina moved to the next spy-hole and leaned forward.

The lower end of the peephole flared out so that most of the chamber was visible. The stone floor was maybe twenty feet below, and it took Tania only a moment to realize into what kind of room she was staring.

It was a torture chamber.

Hideous instruments and devices and machines filled the cavernous room—contraptions whose use Tania didn’t even dare think about. But some items she recognized: a rack, a table loaded with sharp implements, a stone griddle held by blackened ropes above a brazier of burning coals.

And in the center of the room, bound onto a tilted table of scarred and punctured wood, was Connor, surrounded by smoking braziers, stripped to the waist, his face and body running with sweat. Tania’s heart pounded at the sight of him, the blood suddenly cold in her veins. She clutched at the stonework lip of the peephole.

Tania lifted her head and saw Rathina staring wide-eyed at her.

“Did I not say this place reeked of malevolence?” Rathina hissed.

Tania nodded silently and looked down again. Connor
seemed
unhurt, so far as she could tell, save for a stain of dried blood at the corner of his mouth. But he looked exhausted and terrified. His eyes, Tania realized, were fixed on something just out of her range of vision.

And the something had a voice: the same booming voice she’d heard earlier. “An immortal creature such as yourself can have no idea of the burden of death,” it said. “In youth the grave seems impossibly distant. But the years pass, ever more fleet, and always the specter of oblivion looms larger.”

The speaker came into view, and Tania caught her breath. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man clad in dark leathers, his hair grizzled, curling on his shoulders, his face smooth-shaven but fissured like a crag. A long brown leather cloak dragged across the floor behind him, and his boots rang on the stone.

It was not the man that held Tania’s gaze but the creature that walked with clicking claws at his side. It was a huge white lizard, its legs splayed, body low to the ground like a crocodile’s. But it did not have the gnarled hide of a crocodile; its shining skin was smooth, scaled and ribbed like a fish. Its long, broad tail whipped slowly back and forth as it paced, its head wedge-shaped with protruding yellow eyes and with a yellow forked tongue that flicked in and out between fanged jaws.

A studded collar was bound around the creature’s thick neck, and from the collar extended a chain that was caught and held in the man’s right fist. And now came the final shock: The man seemed to be wearing a
metal
gauntlet. Tania felt certain that the glove, chain, and collar were all made of Isenmort!

Metal? How? There
is
no metal in this world!

Connor’s despairing voice interrupted Tania’s thoughts. “For the last time, I’m not Immortal,” he groaned. “Yes, I sailed with Tania and Rathina from Faerie—but I’m not one of them. I’m an ordinary human being from a completely different world.”

“Enough of this,” said the man. “Do you think me a fool? Do you seek to gull me with talk of other worlds? There is no other world than this.”

“You’re wrong,” Connor said. The man glared and the lizard growled with a noise like fingernails scraping down slate. “Lord Balor, I’m not disrespecting you,” Connor pleaded. “I understand it’s hard to believe—I wouldn’t have believed it myself a few days ago—but I’m telling you the truth. I’m not Immortal and I don’t know the secret of Immortality.” He looked fearfully around the room. “You’ve shown me what these things can do to me—I get it! But I can’t tell you stuff I don’t know.”

“You would stand amazed at the things I can glean from an unwilling guest,” Lord Balor said, now slowly circling the wooden board, the creature pacing always at his side. He stopped in front of Connor, lifting the hand that held the chain—the hand in the iron gauntlet. “Do you know what this is, boy?” he croaked. “This is iron: the substance you Immortal folk know as Isenmort, I believe. I know of your fear of Isenmort. I know that the Immortal folk dread its touch as deeply as do the people of Alba.” He moved closer, the iron hand raised above Connor, the fingers spread. “Only I, of all men and women born in this world, can endure the touch of iron! Only I have that power!”

No. You’re wrong
, thought Tania, glancing at her sister.
Rathina has the same gift.
But how had Lord Balor obtained it?

She saw that the iron chain was attached to the wrist of the gauntlet by a metal loop. The lizard lifted its head and growled.

“Would you know how I came by this adornment, boy?” asked Lord Balor. “It was sixty years ago now that one of my captains found an open boat upon the sea—a boat that came from the dark islands of the south, from the sinister land of Lyonesse.” Tania felt herself start at the mention of the Sorcerer King’s homeland. “There was a magician aboard, a warlock sent to spy on Faerie and to learn the whereabouts of their captive King. But his ship was blown off course and he found himself instead a prisoner in this room, half starved and near to death. He was unwilling to reveal his secrets—at first.” He glanced around at the ugly devices that surrounded him.

“In the end he was eager to tell all to me,” he continued. “So eager that he wished he had more secrets to reveal. He told me of Isenmort—of an alchemical substance not native to this Realm and how it was a great bane to all the living things of this world, even to the Immortals of the east. I wanted this bane for myself, and he helped me with conjurations and incantations. I paid a heavy price. I paid with my own flesh, my hand torn by dark magic from my arm, my blood boiling in my veins! The warlock of Lyonesse conjured
Isenmort
from the air and with fell flames seared this iron hand onto my bleeding wrist. It is with this hand and this chain and with the collar of
Isenmort
that I am able to bind the Great Salamander to my will.” He lifted the iron hand high. “I, Balor of Dorcha Tur, am the only man in all the world who is able to bear iron and to wield iron, because this iron is welded forever to the stump of my right hand.” His eyes blazed. “And now—you will tell me the truth or I shall set the iron to your flesh and you shall be burned to the bone!”

Connor turned his head away and gasped, writhing as the iron hand came down spread-fingered onto his chest.

The Great Salamander’s tongue flicked. Lord Balor pressed down on Connor’s breastbone. Tania held her breath.

Then Lord Balor drew his hand back, his voice uncertain. “It does not burn you!” he said. “How can this be?”

“I told you,” Connor said, panting. “I don’t come from this world. Now do you believe me?” His voice rose to a shout. “I come from London, England! The
real
world. I shouldn’t even
be
on this planet!”

Balor stared at him for a long time. “Perhaps you are speaking the truth, boy,” he said at last. “But if I cannot glean from you the secret of Immortality, then you are useless to me.” The iron hand reached for Connor’s throat.

Tania was about to shout—to make herself known in the hope of preventing Balor from hurting Connor. But even as she drew in her breath, Connor cried out.

“The others are Immortal!” he shouted, straining his head away from Balor’s hand. “The two girls. They’re both Immortal. If you kill me, you’ll never find out anything else about them.” He was gasping now, his chest heaving. “Let me go and I’ll find them for you. I promise. I’ll bring them to you.” His eyes were circular with hope and fear. “Believe me, I want to know the secret of Immortality as much as you do.”