Jalia Prevails (Book 5) (15 page)

“But it’s only a gold coin with some glowing jewels in it,” Jalia protested half-heartedly.

“It must be easy to steal if the people can see it every day,” Daniel said at the same time.

“It’s the magic totem of this town. The populace believe they are doomed if it leaves Wegnar. They would accuse the rich people of stealing it and lynch them if it vanished,” Nin said, answering Jalia’s question.

He turned to Daniel. “The coin is protected behind a magic shield that can kill fairies and detect weapons. One of the crew once took a knife in his boot when he went to look at it and the alarms went off as soon as he entered the stone circle. They locked him up for over a week and he missed the Steam Dragon’s sailing. The Captain said the next person who did anything so stupid again would be put over the barrel.”

“Who needs a weapon in your hands when you’re facing a bunch of village guards,” Jalia said contemptuously.

“The guards are experienced mercenaries and they take the job seriously. No one could steal the Five Gem Coin from the vault, no one.”

“Of course not,” Jalia muttered, but from that moment her mind was made up. She would steal the coin and get revenge on the men in the club. Better yet, she might get that crooked Keeper strung up. The whole thing got better and better the more she thought about it.

“I believe that anyone can go and see it at noon each day?” Jalia asked.

“I have, it’s in the courtyard in the center of the palace, deep underground in the vaults.”

“Are you thinking of going to look?” Daniel asked. A shiver of apprehension ran down his spine.

“Of course not, Daniel,” Jalia said quickly and changed the subject. “What were you doing last night? You got back quite some time after me.”

“I was looking after the horses and donkeys at a field the Boat Company owns,” Daniel replied, feeling a little flustered by the question.

Jalia sensed it would be worth her while to enquire further.

“You were on your own, I take it?”

“Well yes, at first. Then Don and Cara turned up with their horses and so I sorted their horses out.”

“With Cara and Don?”

“Well, Don left and Cara stayed to help…”

“Really Daniel,” Jalia said in a pained voice. “You spent most of the night alone with Cara and yet you spend the morning questioning my behavior. That’s it, I am going out and I don’t want to see you again for the rest of the day.”

Jalia hurried from the room, pleased that she had found a reason to be mad with Daniel. It would leave her free to carry out her plan.

“Did you do naughty things with Cara?” Hala asked Daniel, her eyes wide.

“Of course not,” Daniel said, his face flushing a little.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“No I didn’t!” Daniel said equally firmly. “But I did teach her something, if you really must know.”

Jalia went straight to their cabin. She decided to leave her weapons aboard the Steam Dragon as she couldn’t get them passed the magic circle. She stripped off the sword harness from her back and then, more reluctantly, removed the knife from her belt and the other from its sheath in her boot.

She needed to hide her weapons in a place that Daniel would not think to look. That was not going to be straightforward as the boy possessed a devious mind when he was in the mood. Remembering Gally Sorn’s note under her mattress gave Jalia inspiration and she carefully lined her weapons up under the mattress of her bunk before pressing it firmly down on them.

“Daniel would never, ever, expect me to hide something under a mattress,” Jalia told the room. “He knows I would be mortified if he ever found out that I hid anything in such an obvious place.”

Jalia felt she needed to wear a disguise, given that Tib Prentice had looked more than a little annoyed with her the night before and she was heading for his palace. She chose a black cloak. It had a deep hood she could hide inside. Pulling up the hood and wrapping the cloak around her, she hurried out of the cabin. It was nearly eleven o’clock and she needed to reach the Keeper’s Palace before noon.

Rak Tellis was a thickset man who wore loud colored and over-embroidered clothes. He had the kind of booming voice that made him a natural for a life on the stage or as a Town Crier. As a matter of fact, he had performed in both roles in his time, but as he approached middle age he had looked around for something to do that was a little less stressful.

What he found was a job he considered perfect. He had been the tour guide for the Five Gen Coin for nearly six years now and he loved it. Tib Prentice would let anyone who wanted visit the Coin. He charged a bit for the tour, which was a sixteenth of a gold coin and enough people visited each day to keep Rak successfully employed and Tib Prentice happy.

Tib was the first Keeper to think of charging the people for the privilege of seeing their most valued possession. He gave discounts to the poor and elderly and even offered tickets that lasted a whole year. This quieted his critics though many in the town regarded him as a tight-fisted man.

“Gather closely,” Rak said to the sixteen or so visitors that had come to the gate. Most of them were regulars, but he noted a woman hidden in a black cloak among the new people. Rak liked to put on a good show, and those who had been to visit many times expected him to follow his script. It had become a ritual. If he didn’t get it word perfect they were likely to heckle him or even shout out the lines he had dared to get wrong.

“What you are about to see is one of the wonders of the ancient world created by men in the days when humans could use magic. Wegnar was chosen by the Magician Kings to be the repository for an awesome magical force. That was so long ago that no one knows what the true purpose of the Five Gem Coin might be.”

“Suffice it to say that the Magician Kings did not trust the safety of the Five Gem Coin to the frailty of a mere Keeper. They constructed the vault we are about to enter and then surrounded the vault with a ring of red stone.”

Rak paused for both breath and dramatic effect. His regulars were hanging on his every word, though he noted that the black cloaked woman was looking around impatiently.

“
The ring of red, kills the Fairie dead
. That is what our children learn at their mother’s knee and you can hear them singing it in the streets to this day. A magic circle of lustrous stone; it warns of smuggled weapons and will kill the dread Fairie of legend, stone cold dead.”

“History tells us that during the war with the Fairie. No less than four were found dead within the circle. Small they were, less than a foot tall and with transparent wings on their backs that shone with the colors of the rainbow. They say there was not a mark on them and they looked as though they were sleeping.”

“I will point out their graves as we pass them. The Keeper of the time wished to avoid bringing down the wrath of the Empress Clea upon us and gave them a decent burial.”

“They say the greatest prophet that ever lived came to this place eight hundred years ago.” The audience gasped at this point as they always did. Nobody much believed in fairies anymore, but all of his audience knew of the prophet, Jer a’Dall.

“They say he saw all the futures that might be and all that had happened back to the dawn of time. Some claimed that he saw them all at once and that his gift drove him mad. What we do know for certain is what he told Keeper Daken the Twelfth all those years ago.”

“When the coin is stolen,

The Keeper will be broken,

The chaos that will bring

Heralds the return of the High King.”

Rak intoned the words solemnly and many in the crowd spoke the words along with him as if in prayer.

“We believe this prophesy to mean that the loss of the coin will bring about the end of the world. To be a High King would need a human magician and they are all long dead. Only when the dead rise from their cold graves could the High King of old return. That is why each Keeper guards the coin so carefully and why we townsfolk watch over the Keeper to make sure he does his job.”

A few cries of “Hear, hear,” greeted this remark.

“Before I take you into the vault, I shall explain how it is constructed and what steps our Keeper takes to protect it. The vault is thirty feet below ground and was carved from solid rock. After we have crossed the Ring of Red, we enter the first level of the vault. This is twenty feet down into the rock. Light enters the room through crystal pipes which I will tell you about later.”

“The outer door to that room is two foot thick and it is always kept locked. It swings open and closed on great hinges made of a metal we have lost the making of. Many small holes cut through the rock provide air and allow the guards inside to hear what is happening beyond it. Two guards stand watch on the outside of the vault and will warn those inside if they are attacked.”

“From the first level there are steps leading down to the Coin Level. The vault is lit by crystal pipes that direct sunlight from outside. The pipes are made of a solid unbreakable crystal in the form of five sided tubes that bounce sunlight through them.”

“The maze can best be described as four concentric squares. Each set one inside the other. Going beyond the doors to each square reveals corridors going right and left forming a path completely around the inner square. When traversed, these corridors lead to an inner door, which is located on the farthest side. Inside the fourth square is the Coin Room. This room is not lit by crystal pipes, but by the Five Gem Coin itself, which glows red from the magical rubies set within it.”

“Now let us walk the path to the vault, but can I warn any strangers among us that should you be of Fairie kind you best turn back now before you walk to your doom.”

“Pompous old idiot,” Jalia muttered from deep within her cloak. She was beginning to wonder if she was going to die of boredom before he got around to showing them the coin.

Rak led the party from the gate to the courtyard, making a point of describing the Keeper’s Palace in great detail. They were led along a path that passed across a neatly mown lawn to a squat building positioned at the center. Behind this squat building, the royal gardens were resplendent with summer blooms.

About thirty feet from the building, a stone circle cut its way through the lawn. It was made from a single piece of polished red stone unlike anything Jalia had seen before. Within the stone, thin ribbons of gold weaved their way between what looked like mottled red canyons, though the stones surface was completely flat.

“Beware if you are Fairie,” Rak said as he walked over the circle. Jalia grimaced and followed behind, stumbling into the people in front as she became suddenly lightheaded. She recovered immediately and the people in front of her glared at her, convinced she was trying to be funny.

Rak led them into the first level room, passing two guards who saluted him. Jalia sized up the men and saw that what she had been told was no lie. These men were experienced and fully alert. They were well armed and wearing armor strong enough to block a crossbow bolt fired at point blank range. Whatever his other faults, the Keeper was doing a good job of protecting the coin.

Inside the first room, they passed a third and fourth guard. These two were not wearing armor, but they were equally well armed and looked every bit as dangerous as the men outside. Tib must be paying well to have obtained the services of such men.

They were led down a narrow spiral stone staircase to the lower level. Jalia marveled at the thickness of the white stone as they descended through it. It was remarkably bright below as the crystal pipes brought amazing amounts of sunlight into the labyrinth.

“The surfaces of the pipes on the outside of the vault are cleaned and polished each day by the Keeper’s men,” Rak told them. “I want to you split into two groups when we reach the bottom, alternate people going left and right down the corridors. Do not fear, my friends, both groups will meet again at the next doorway.”

There were two guards stationed at the outermost square. Each positioned at the first turn of the corridor where they could see both the doorway the group had come through and one of the remaining corridors. In such confined quarters, one man skilled with a sword could defend the passage with ease.

Apparently, there were only six guards on duty as they saw no more on their journey. Jalia believed that one man at the top or bottom of the spiral staircase could stop anybody entering or leaving all on his own. The protection provided for this vault was impressive.

When they reached the inner vault, they found a wooden door. Rak took a silver key from his pocket and unlocked it grandly.