Sagaria (72 page)

Yet again, the king raised his arm for silence. His guards subsided, one or two of them muttering resentfully.

Astonishingly, the blade of Xaraxeer began to lose its yellow gleam. Within a second it was as dull as a bar of iron. Sagandran could see the effort the Frogly Knight was making not to acknowledge this fact.

“Xaraxeer,” said the king.

It took a moment for Sagandran to understand Brygantra was addressing not Sir Tombin, but the weapon.

“Xaraxeer, you are here.”

“Eh?” said Sir Tombin stupidly. “You recognize this sword?”

“Yes. It’s mine. You must know that. When I discovered death was creeping up close upon me, I gave it to the royal house of Spectram to keep in trust until the hour of its greatest need arrived. Even then, my Xaraxeer was to be placed only into the hand of one who deserved it. Are you that one, sirrah, or are you merely a thief?”

Realising she had the advantage, Perima stepped up next to Sir Tombin.

“King Brygantra,” she said, “I will vouch with my life for Sir Tombin Quackford. This person you see before you is the bravest and best-hearted
knight there has ever been.”

Again, there was that dusty sound Sagandran identified as a chuckle.

“Myself excluded, I trust.”

“With all due respect, King Brygantra, I did not exclude you.”

Oh no
, thought Sagandran.
She’s got overconfident and blown it. We’re done for
.

“Well spoken, Princess,” said Brygantra gravely. “This Sir Tombin must be a mighty knight indeed to have earned your respect to this degree.”

“He is indeed.”

“Although, I have to say it … I mean, it’s been many centuries since last I looked upon human faces, but—”

“And he is more handsome than any other knight I have ever beheld,” said Perima firmly. “It’s true, Quackie,” she added conversationally, glancing up at Sir Tombin. “I’ll admit you’re not conventionally good looking, but anyone can see past your face to the handsomeness within. If I happened to have a predilection for older men, I’d be setting my sights on you. As it is I’m stuck with” – she gave a much-put-upon shrug of disdain toward Sagandran – “you know, boys.”

“That’s the trouble with women,” Flip whispered cryptically in Sagandran’s ear. At some point during the melee the little rodent must have clambered up Sagandran’s clothing to find this new perch.

Brygantra returned his attention to Sir Tombin.

“Tell me, worthy knight, how it is you came to be in the possession of my Lightbringer?”

As briefly as he could, Sir Tombin explained.

“Queen Mirabella!” exclaimed the king at one point. “Her name was foretold to me. It was said that a queen of that name would be ruling Spectram when Sagaria’s great time of crisis came, the age when the fate of the three worlds could go in either direction. This all makes perfect sense. Alas.”

Sir Tombin continued, describing tersely how Arkanamon had arisen to grasp the throat of the Shadow World, and how the self-appointed Shadow Master now intended to do the same to the other two worlds.

“Ah, if only it were trusted to the dead to change the worlds of the living,” sighed King Brygantra when the Frogly Knight was done, “then I and my men here would be glad to ride into battle at your side, brave Sir Tombin. But this is sadly not permitted to us. Otherwise, the worlds would never truly belong to those who must dwell in them, and that would be the greatest injustice of all. However, good sir, we can at least assist you in one small way.”

Perima was staring at King Brygantra with a sneer on her face. She clearly thought a hero, even a centuries-dead hero, should be offering something a bit
better than this. “And what could that be?”

“We can tell you which of the two ways over there,” the king gestured toward the far end of the chamber, “you should take to the Palace of Shadows.”

“Is that all? Huh!” She tossed her head.

“Enough to save your life, Princess, and the lives of all your friends,” reproved Brygantra mildly.

She gave a look of deep skepticism. “Yes?”

Brygantra stared at her for several slow heartbeats, then said, “Neither.”

Sir Tombin was dumbfounded. “Neither?”

“They’re both traps. They both lead to certain death.”

“Why would anyone wish to make them that way? Why two?”

With a casual gesture, King Brygantra managed to convey that to the dead, the concerns of the living could not be disregarded, but were nevertheless perceived as if at a great distance.

“The doings of those who have sold their souls to the darkness are cunning and devious. If the people who wished to set the snare had constructed only one tunnel leading out of here, then tomb-robbers would rightly have regarded it with suspicion. But two? They send one of their number along one tunnel and then, if he meets his doom, they proceed with confidence along the other.”

Sagandran could hardly believe the callousness only partly hidden by the king’s indifferent tone. Would tomb-robbers really value the lives of their friends so cheaply? He supposed they must.

“Then how are we to get to this Palace of Shadows you talk about?” demanded Perima.

“Through here,” replied the king with a courtly bow.

He backed a few paces away from Perima and Sir Tombin.
He was behaving
, Sagandran thought,
more like the commissionaire of a swanky apartment building than a king
. The guards likewise fell aside, forming a path that led to the solitary giant coffin, the one that had not opened when the others did.

“This is the great gate to the Palace of Shadows, and its portcullis and drawbridge also,” said King Brygantra.

“It just looks like a coffin to me,” said Samzing, breaking his long silence. Unnoticed by Sagandran, he’d pulled himself up off the floor and was now acting as if his previous abject terror had all been part of some grand master plan to which the others would never be privy.

“It does indeed take the form of a grand sarcophagus, but instead it is the gateway to what is all too often a graveyard of human aspirations,” said the
king ominously.

“The Palace of Shadows,” breathed Perima.

“Yes.”

The moment Sagandran climbed in the giant coffin, he was dazzled by a solid wall of brilliance that struck him in the face as forcefully as a fist.

He seemed to be floating downward – or possibly sideways or upward – through treacle-thick, warm air. Blindly, he flailed his arms until one of them made solid contact with someone else, provoking a cry of pain and outrage. The air was full of the noise of confusion. He realized that the rest of the companions were as disabled and disoriented as he was.

He closed his eyes as tightly as he could, but that didn’t diminish the glare at all. It was as if this were a light he could not only see; it imbued every part of him; it was felt by and overloaded his every sense. Should he not find some way of removing himself from the bath of incandescence soon, he felt it might dissolve him entirely: skin, flesh, organs, bones, mind, everything. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to be disturbed or concerned by the prospect. The light seemed to be cleansing his mind of troubled thoughts, soothing it, reassuring it.

Then he was suddenly standing on the solid floor of a brightly lit corridor. The featureless walls extended as far as he could see in both directions and seemed to be made of highly polished silver. A breath of warm air caressed his cheek. There was no obvious source of illumination, yet everything around him was uniformly radiant. His head was reeling.

His friends seemed to have arrived at the same moment he had. They were standing in strangely incongruous poses, their faces wrought into expressions of strong emotion, as if they’d been frozen in a moment of intense activity. There was something else odd about their appearance, and it took him a few seconds to realize what it was.

They cast no shadows.

His shoulders slumped. In the same instant, the others fell out of their fixed poses. Sir Tombin was holding Xaraxeer half-scabbarded and he staggered, clearly as dizzy as Sagandran.

“Oh my,” said Samzing softly. “How my head does spin.”

Sagandran’s head was spinning too. So was his stomach. The main trouble was that they seemed to be spinning in opposite directions. Perima appeared to be having the same problem. Woozily supporting herself with one arm on the wall and holding her hair back from her face, she was demurely throwing up.

“Watch what you’re doing!” shrilled Flip, lurching away from her hurriedly.

“You would have thought,” remarked Sir Tombin to no one in particular, “that King Brygantra – jolly nice fellow, let me say, won’t hear a word against him, and so on – that he might have, you know, thought to mention this would happen. Forewarned is forearmed, after all.”

“Maybe he and his men never came through here themselves,” ventured Sagandran. His mouth tasted as if he’d been eating cold barley broth. His voice sounded a bit that way as well.

“Very sensible of them,” said Samzing tartly.

Only Cheireanna seemed unaffected by the dislocation to which they’d been subjected. The girl was gazing around her with eyes that glinted with awe.

This may be
, thought Sagandran, steadying his rebellious digestive tract,
the first time she’s ever seen anything more luminous than flickering candlelight or the flames of a fire. It’s a wonder she’s not terrified out of her wits
.

He glanced at her again.
She must have more courage than seems  possible
.

“Which direction is that breeze coming from?” asked Sir Tombin suddenly.

Perima pointed weakly, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve.

“That’s what I thought too,” said the Frogly Knight, nodding. “So that must be where the nearer end of this passageway is. Well, probably, anyway.”

It was Sagandran’s turn to nod. Sir Tombin’s deduction made sense.

“Anyone got any more upchucking to do?” said Samzing gaily, drawing a glare from Perima. “No? Well, in that case, let’s be on our way.” He wrinkled his nose ostentatiously. “I don’t especially want to stay hanging around our dear friend’s little commentary on these adventures.”

This time Perima’s glare would have flash-fried a chicken whole, but miraculously, the wizard remained unscathed.

The gleaming white walls of the passage were totally uniform. As the companions trudged along, Sir Tombin in the lead, Sagandran found himself haunted by the strange feeling that they weren’t really moving anywhere at all, that they were just going through the motions, marking time. He tried to find any small blemish on the walls’ smooth surface, so he might reassure himself by watching it as he walked past it, but there wasn’t any mark to use as a measure. Lacking any sense of distance being covered, he soon began to lose all track of the passage of time.
It’s like this was a passage of no-time
, he thought, grimacing at his own pun. He wished he’d been wearing his wristwatch when he’d departed the Earthworld, so that he might trace the movement of its second hand, but the timepiece was still sitting by his bed in Grandpa Melwin’s cottage.

That led him to ask a further question. How much time had really elapsed
since he’d run out of that cottage into a rainy night? He knew how much time he’d
lived through
– a matter of a few days – but was that the same as the amount of time that had really passed back home? Sagandran had read tales about people who’d wandered into the Land of Faerie. They returned to the mundane world after only a few weeks had passed for them but a whole century for everybody else; he’d also come across science-fiction stories in which people had all sorts of adventures in some parallel world before returning to the exact same moment they’d started. Could either of these two things be happening to him?

What was time, anyway? Back on the Earthworld he’d have thought it was a silly question, and he’d have dismissed it with a laugh. Whatever writers might do with it in stories, time was just itself: time. It marched on, unless it flew. It was no man’s prisoner, and so on. It was the tick of the classroom clock on a summer day when the fields and trees were calling to him. It was so familiar, you didn’t have to think about it. It just
was
. Now he wasn’t so sure. He’d thought the world and universe around him just were, as well, and now he knew differently.

Ah, wait though. The soft, insistent push of the breeze against his face was definitely becoming a little stronger. And, unless his ears were playing tricks on him, there was a susurrus of sound coming from somewhere up ahead.

“I think,” said Sir Tombin, “we’re getting somewhere at last.”

“Any idea where, old thing?” asked Samzing languidly.

“Not the foggiest, dear chap. But we’ll soon find out, won’t we?”

“I was afraid you might say that.”

Within minutes they could see a black rectangle ahead. Involuntarily, their pace quickened and soon, they were standing with the brightly lit tunnel at their backs and a sheer cliff dropping away below them.

The passageway emerged into the open air and out onto a thin rock shelf halfway up the side of the great ravine they’d seen in the distance. Looking off to his right, Sagandran could once more see the mighty stronghold that was the Palace of Shadows squatting over the end of the gorge. It seemed to have been built out of the darkness itself. Afternoon had turned into night while the companions were journeying through the mountain, and the feeble moonlight glanced off aspects of the castle’s turrets, fortifications, parapets and grim, monstrous walls. The edifice exuded such a sense of its own massiveness that Sagandran could swear he felt it pulling him toward it, as if he were a whirling mote being drawn by the gravity of a world.