Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 (29 page)

But now she seemed confused. Probing myself, I found no hint of any humans in the vicinity. “But I know I sensed her,” Theodora said doggedly. “Unless it’s some kind of trick—”

“Wait a minute,” said the king, peering over the edge of the carpet at the nearly invisible naked rock below us. “There’s supposed to be a castle here.”

“What castle?” I cried.

“There’s always been a ruined castle right below us, on top of these cliffs,” said Paul patiently, trying unsuccessfuly to wipe rainwater from his face. “Or at least I assume it hasn’t always been ruined—but it must have been since the Black Wars. We’re close to the border of the kingdom of Yurt here. This is the castle I told you about that I was exploring earlier in the summer.” I did remember now that he mentioned it. “Wel, you must be mistaken,” I said wearily, not even trying to wipe the streams of water from my face. “I know it’s hard to tel distances from the air.” Suddenly I stopped and grinned. Maybe we had them after al.

“You’re absolutely right, sire. A ruined castie would be exactly the place to hide a large group of children. And al the easier if you’re a wizard with the powerful spels to make a whole castle invisible.” Vlad’s obsidian castle in the eastern kingdoms had been invisible unless he wanted someone to see it. If it weren’t for Theodora’s witch-magic breaking through his defenses for a brief moment, and for Paul’s knowledge of local geography, we would have gone right by these cliffs without a second look. “Now I just have to find the way in,” I said fiercely.

Antonia was stil alive. “The castle’s stones are here though hidden, and we could rip the carpet landing on a jagged wal even if we can’t see it.” With the heavy darkness and the rain, we wouldn’t have been able to see much of the castle even without a spel of invisibility. “Down at the bottom of the cliffs,” said Paul, “there’s a back entrance that was probably where they once brought up goods from the river.” I immediately directed the carpet slowly downward. Rain was now faling so hard it bounced from the carpet’s surface. “Do you think, Wizard,” the king added as we descended, “that they’l know we’ve arrived?”

“They’l have a pretty good idea,” I said shordy. Would it just be Cyrus we had to face, I wondered as I gently landed the carpet amid jagged rocks that must have falen from a ruined wal above, or did he have Vlad with him now? And had these two dark wizards brought a demon along?

“The rest of you had better stay outside,” I said quiedy setting my jaw determinedly. “I don’t know how long this may take. But if I’m not back by dawn, Justinia, take the carpet and—” But none of them wanted to be left behind. Theodora cared as little about her personal safety as I cared about mine when it came to Antonia, and Paul flatly refused to wait patiently for the adventurers’

return. Justinia insisted she would freeze to death if forced to stay out in the driving rain for five more minutes, and Gwennie had no intention of being left alone on a night of magical darkness and hidden evil.

It was going to be hard enough to get myself out of this alive without worrying about al of them. I should have dumped them al off miles ago. But then I would never have located the castle. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s try to find the way in.”

PART SEVEN. The Ruined Castle I

“Here’s the door, Wizard,” caled Paul, feeling his way along a cliff face streaming with water. “I can’t see it but I can touch it.” Standing next to him I could feel it as wel, a half-open old door, faling from its hinges, with a musty passage beyond.

I had groped for and found pieces of driftwood that had come ashore here where cascades from the hils above flowed together to form the river: torches if we could discover a way inside out of the storm.

“Hold hands,” I told the others over the rumbling of thunder, and led them straight into and straight through what looked, in what litde light we had from lightning flashes, like unbroken rock. Theodora was right behind me, and I could feel the bite of her fingernails as we passed dirough the ilusion of solid cliff face, but no one spoke until we were al inside and wringing out our hair.

At least this castle was perfecdy visible once we were within the wals. “God be praised, it is dry in here,” said the Lady Justinia.

Paul blew out the air between his lips and commented,

“Glad you never decided to make my royal castle invisible, Wizard.”

Theodora and I lit the torches with fire magic; they never would have burned properly without a spel. With me in front and she in back, we started cautiously up the tunnel before us. The torchlight showed a shadowed and dismal passage, hung with dusty festoons of cobweb, its floor strewn with rubbish where animals had denned.

“It’s not very far,” Paul said in a low voice, “a straight way leading slightly upward, and then the big storage celars. It’s possible the children are there.” Sitting in the dark, I thought, in utter terror. Would we see them even if they were there, or would they be as invisible as the castle itself was from the outside?

The light flickered on the uneven wals, and our footsteps echoed holowly. It realy would be night soon, I thought, and the night would be Vlad’s, with nothing to stop him before the dawn. The weight of the cliffs above seemed to press down on us, and a fetid odor rose in the stale air from beneath our feet.

I kept straining, both with my ears and my magic, for indications of life, and at first found nothing, either good or evil. The sound of the thunder was very distant here, and I could hear nothing beyond our footsteps and our rapid breathing. Were the children even in this castle, or was it al an elaborate feint? But after only a few dozen yards I picked up the sound of distant moaning.

We came to an abrupt halt. “Antonia!” Theodora whispered.

But I shook my head. “Wait,” I whispered back. The floor before us came alive in the torchlight: glossy black cockroaches, spiders, and a six-foot viper that looked at us with glittering eyes, then slithered away. Gwennie was at my shoulder, and I could feel her trembling. In any of the others’ position, I would have run screaming back down the passageway, with a new appreciation for spending the night in the pouring rain, but no one moved.

Then, faint in the distance, I picked up a sound like the rattling of dry bones.

“What was that?” hissed Paul.

“Oh, Christ,” I said, mostly under my breath. It sounded to me exactly like a skeletal apparition, the residue of death and evil left over in this old castle from the time of the Black Wars, now given life by a demon. It seemed to be getting closer.

The slightest whiff of brimstone, I said to myself, and I’m gone.

As if in response, the roughly quarried stones on either hand rapidly began to grow warmer. Justinia, in relief, started to lean against the wal, but she puled away with a sharp intake of breath as it grew hotter and hotter. Raw horror, even beyond what was rational given what I had just seen and heard, seemed to rol down the tunnel toward us. And wafting through the air came a smal cloud of stinking smoke, poisonous yelow in the torchlight.

“Right,” said a rational voice in the back of my brain. “Zahlfast can’t argue with you anymore. Time for the demonology experts. Fly the carpet back to Yurt and telephone the school.”

“And when wil they arrive?” I asked myself testily.

“Tomorrow,” said the rational voice, sounding less certain. “And in the meantime, while we’re waiting, you can try to locate Elerius and Evrard—they must be around somewhere, looking for you.” But I couldn’t wait for tomorrow. Antonia was in this castle now.

And could she and al the other children be sitting, not just in the dark, but in a dark they shared with vipers, with brimstone, with skeletal apparitions, and with a demon that was even now kiling them one by one with terror?

“No, of course not,” babbled the rational voice. “Cyrus loves children. He may use a demon to help his magic, but he doesn’t want to hurt them. He’s always wanted the children to love him back.” The voice had a point. If Antonia was indeed stil alive, then Cyrus must have brought the children here for a reason, rather than dumping them into the first convenient widening in the river. He therefore wanted them for some specific purpose—ransoming perhaps, or a refined revenge—even if he did not love them for them selves.

And I therefore had to find them before his purpose took effect.

This mental argument with myself had taken only a few seconds. ‘The children are not in the big storage celars,” I said in a low voice, not mentioning what I was fairly sure was there. “Sire, is there any other way up to the rest of the castle without going through the celars?”

“There’s a narrow staircase on the left,” said Paul, “just a little farther on.” I noticed he’d drawn his sword— not that it would do any good. “It’s partialy blocked by falen stone, but it’s passable.”

“Theodora,” I said, “light the others back to the doorway and stay there until I get back. And if—”

But it was no use. In spite of what we had seen so far, and in spite of having to assert dirough chattering teeth that they were not at al frightened, Paul and Theodora had not given up their intention of accompanying me. Gwennie and Jusfinia claimed they preferred staying with the rest of us, even if it meant advancing through giant cockroaches, to waiting alone with hot wals and the moaning and clattering and no magic to keep a damp torch lit. Three of them, not knowing magic, might not be as susceptible as I was to the disembodied and demonic terror pouring out of the storage celars—but Theodora was.

No time to argue. “Then let’s hurry,” I said and strode forward. Pushing against waves of horror was like pushing against the tide. I kept my feet moving with sheer wil. The rattling of bones kept coming closer, as insects scurried out from underfoot. Paul’s narrow stairway was an empty black opening in the tunnel wal.

Good thing it wasn’t any farther or I might not have made it. I felt inside the opening with my hand—not as warm as the tunnel where we stood. When I thrust in the torch it was to see worn and cracked stone stairs spiraling upwards. There would be hals, chambers, and passages higher up, some certainly roofless, but some doubtless stil whole, and Antonia had to be up there.

I led the way again, climbing as quickly as I could on the uneven steps, my heart pounding wildly. The staircase was so narrow that there was scarcely room for my shoulders between the stone central post and the outer curved wal. A little rivulet of water found its way down the spiral, making surfaces slick and forcing me to be careful when I wanted to do nothing but run and run. The moaning and the rattling faded behind us. Someone slipped but caught themselves after a hard thump.

“Do you think the children had to climb al these stairs?” Gwennie whispered.

“I’m sure they were brought in the front way,” I whispered back. Wild terror receded as we climbed— unfortunately rational terror did not. “But we couldn’t even find the front way, and I’m stil hoping we can get to wherever they’re being held without being discovered.”

I spoke confidently, but whatever hope I had was a desperate one. Someone who went to the trouble to make his castle invisible and to surround it with dark clouds would certainly have set up spels to detect a wizard sneaking in.

How far had we come? It was impossible to tel distances, except to know that we had climbed high enough that my legs were aching. My wet clothes had begun drying on my back into clammy stiffness.

This had once been an expensive black wool suit, I recaled, bought just for Celia's vocation at the nunnery.

Ahead I thought I could pick up the smel of rain-washed air over the general mustiness, and then I began to hear a louder dripping. We came around a twist of the stair and saw Paul’s “partial blockage” before us.

Part of the wal had colapsed inward, leaving a gaping opening looking out into night. Rain stil lashed down. I redoubled the fire spel on my torch and put it and my head outside—stil sheer cliff above and below, but we must be getting close to the top.

The colapsed wal covered the staircase with chunks of stone, but beyond it continued to spiral upwards. The stones cast heavy shadows in the torchlight—had that been another viper? No, I tried to reassure myself, just another shadow.

“You have to climb carefuly over the loose stones,” said Paul. “It was daylight when I did this before, but—”

I stopped him and lifted myself with magic to fly up and over. One at a time I then lifted Gwennie, Paul, and Justinia to bring them past the obstacle and up beside me. Theodora flew unaided, holding the flaring torch wel away from herself. Gwennie, impressed, started to say something but didn’t.

Flying spels, I thought as Theodora found her footing, would announce to any wizard paying attention that another wizard had arrived. I would feel more comfortable about this if I could pick up the slightest trace of him—or if I didn’t keep imagining what might already be working its way up the stairs behind us, heating the stones as it came until the rivulets of dark water vanished into steam.

“We’re almost there,” said Paul quietly. “We’l come out in what was once the kitchen. The roof is long gone, but there’s another passage—stil covered:—that should take us to the great hal in the central keep. That’s the most intact part of the castle: the children may be there.” A final turn of the stair, and we staggered out onto a level if gritty surface, next to an enormous fireplace. Ducking under the stone mantel to shelter from the rain, now faling harder than ever, we al paused to catch our breaths.

I kept straining to pick up any sound over the rain’s steady drumming or any magical indication of who else was in this ruined castle, but stil found nothing. I lifted an eyebrow at Theodora, but she shook her head. “I haven’t sensed ber again since that one time.”

“This way,” said Paul. Back under an arched roof, we tried to walk quietly, but five sets offset on flagstones sent echoes running up and down the passage around us. The light from our torches was too dim to see any distance ahead or behind, though it made our shadows on the stone wals grotesque and gigantic. little puffs of wind tugged at our damp hair. Suddenly the torches went out. We al crashed together in the dark, then Theodora and I desperately tried to relight them. It was no use. Plenty of unburned wood remained, but our fire spels no longer seemed effective. And then, down the passageway ahead of us, I saw a smal yelow light, like a candle flame. As we al held our breaths we could hear the steady tap of approaching feet. The dead torch fel from stiff fingers. “No use running,” I said quietly. “They’ve found us.”