The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) (34 page)

“But the Hiernarbos side of it,” Jackalope added. “The barrier stopped us being pulled all the way. We found ourselves in the valley of the Undine.”

“It’s real then?” Robin asked. “The Undine are really still there? Did you see the Shard?”

“We saw no treasure,” Jackalope sounded irritated. He folded his arms. “That was our deal, remember? I get you off the mountain, down from the Gravis Glaciem, and you bring me to this magical place full of treasure.”

“I never said it was full of treasure,” Robin said, irritated by the surly boy, and finding himself wondering at what point he had stopped being Jackalope and started being ‘Jack and I’.

“Silver-top here’s a treasure hunter,” Henry said to Woad in the background, bringing the faun up to date.

“I spend years being careful,” Jackalope said. “Evading Eris’ people, staying quiet, hidden, out of sight. I didn’t want any trouble, and here now this friend of yours…” He jabbed a finger in Karya’s direction, “...drags me out of the hidden valley as soon as we’d reached it to come and grab you three from the middle of what looked like a who’s who of dangerous people at a monster army rally.”

Woad cackled. “If you didn’t want trouble, you should really probably stay away from us.”

“Believe me,” the Fae replied darkly. “I fully intend to. Once we get back to the valley, our ways part, I assure you.”

Robin still couldn’t believe they were all back together. Things had looked so hopeless. He found he couldn’t stop himself from grinning. “The Shard is as good as ours,” he said to the others. “Strigoi and the Grimms, they’re trapped on the other side of the water, right? They can’t get through.”

Karya looked serious. “The Undine may have lent us the use of this rather alarming and unique craft to come and fetch you, Scion, but I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that.”

He looked at her questioningly. “What do you mean?”

There was a huge splash of white foam outside of their hard, prismatic craft, as the monumental dragon’s head finally surfaced from the water on the other side of the great barrier. Sunlight flooded into what Robin had begun to think of as the cockpit, where they stood and sat, filling the space with dazzling, dizzying light.

“You’ll see,” Karya said. “Welcome to Hiernarbos everyone.” The great jaws opened like glass portcullis, and the company emerged into a surprisingly sultry heat.

THE LAST UNDINE OF
HIERNARBOS

The waterwrym had deposited them on a grassy bank. Bright sunshine hit Robin’s eyes, making him squint. The sky on the other side of the barrier, out there in the camp, had been white and full of snow, a pale ghostly blanket scraping high gunmetal mountains.

This was a different place altogether.

“Wow,” Henry breathed, as they stepped from the obliging icy mouth, walking down an unfurled and glassy tongue like a runway.

They were in a large circular valley. High sheer cliffs rose up, enclosing on every side, encircling them with rock that was blueish grey and which glittered with mica-like flickering constellations. The great, soaring walls reared up and up all around them, so that the grassy valley floor stood in a deep and protected bowl. The sky overhead was blue, pale as mint and completely cloudless.

From every quarter along the circle of shimmering cliffs, thin waterfalls fell in their hundreds, endless ribbons of motion and light all around them. Robin tried to count them, his astonished gaze roaming over the beautiful sight. Here and there around the cliffs, fed by the countless waterfalls, there were clumps of beautiful twisted trees, boles as dark as spun liquorice and capped with great shaggybeards of blossom in pink and white. The mist raised from the multitude of cascades hung in the air, a refreshing and glittering spray, and where the sunlight hit, prismatic colours threaded through the haze. A borealis in every rainbow colour.

The hundreds of blossom-covered trees shed their petals in constant clouds, drifting across the hazy landscape, dancing in the updrafts from the falls.

“Welcome to the last sanctuary of the Undine,” Karya said, stepping onto the grass.

Robin was only dimly aware of the great construct of the wyrm sliding back beneath the wall of water behind them, disappearing into the barrier, presumably to return to its guardian watch at the other side. All of his attention was focussed on the sight in the centre of the beautiful hidden vale.

The encircling waterfalls, tall and thin, fed into the centre of the grassy bowl, where a great lake stood, as shining and still as a mirror, its surface reflecting the blue of the sky overhead. In the centre of this lake was an island, dominated by one feature, a great white tree, pale as ash.

It was the largest tree Robin had ever seen, vast in its girth, wider that a cathedral and as tall as a skyscraper. Its colossal grey-white trunk was dotted with hundreds of holes, slim windows, spiralling up and up, and its vast branches spread out, an enormous mushroom cloud of silver leaves, to cover almost the entire lake from above.

“That,” Henry said quietly, with an odd reverence, “is one hell of a big tree.”

“Hiernarbos,” Woad said with a smile, his eyes glinting as they craned their necks to watch the huge silver canopy whisper and shimmer in ripples of soft motion above them. It was as though a cloud had dropped from the skies, filled with shattered shards of lightening.

Karya walked through the long grass at their feet to the shore of the lake, where she crouched, bunched in her coat, and gently dipped a hand in the water. It was clearer than the highest mountain stream.

It was warm here, and Robin shrugged off his wolfskin cloak, draping it over his arm. The air itself seemed drowsy, a late day in some eternal springtime.

“I’ve returned,” Karya said. “And I found my friends. Thank you.”

There was a shimmer in the air, and from the island, across the expanse of water, a walkway formed, rolling out towards them. It was made of frost, swirling fernlike patterns which solidified as they reached the shore, until they formed a long and narrow bridge of ice.

“Come on,” she said, and stepped out onto the bridge. It held her weight quite firmly, and the others followed. Jackalope first, peering around the enchanted and peaceful vale with open suspicion. He tapped his boot heel several times on the bridge, before grunting, apparently satisfied, and stalked after the girl. Robin and the others followed.

It took several minutes of walking before they reached the island and the great tree. Robin saw that the walkway was melting silently away behind them. Silvery fish darted in the deep clear water at their sides in inquisitive shoals.

The tree, which had seemed immense from the far shore, loomed bigger and bigger the closer they got. And it was not until they stepped foot on the shore, that Robin saw how the massive trunk, whorled and gnarled, glittered and shone.

“It’s ice,” he realised. “It’s packed white ice.”

High, high above them, the great silver canopy, which from here filled the entirety of the sky, glimmered and shook, a maelstrom of softly undulating mirror shards. The leaves were ice also. Every one of them. And even over the constant, soothing and sonorous roar of the countless waterfalls, Robin could hear their musical tinkle, a distant chorus, like multitudes of tiny bells, up there above them.

“Rob, the tree has doors in it,” Henry jiggled Robin’s elbow in wonder.

The great frozen bole of Hiernarbos did indeed have doors, four stories high and arched in gothic ice. Wide icy steps led up to them. They stood open and inside, awaiting them, looking dwarfed by the immensity of its surroundings, was an Undine.

Following Karya, they walked to the steps, and the Undine waited to greet them. Robin hadn’t really given any thought to what an Undine would look like. He had only ever seen one dead, under the folly at Erlking, and that hadn’t been really something to go off.

He supposed he had kind of expected them to look like nymphs. Beautiful women, long flowing hair, rippling dresses, the kind of thing you tended to see in mythology books. But the being who met them at the foot of the stairs was far stranger than he had imagined.

She, for a she it was, was tall. Taller than anyone he had ever met, in either world. She would have dwarfed even Ker.

She wore a simple white pleated gown, bare at the shoulders, which made Robin think of old Greek statues, thought it was threaded through with filaments of silver. But her most striking feature was not her attire but her skin. Or rather, he corrected himself, her lack of it.

In place of flesh, the odd and slender being seemed to be fashioned from green-blue blown glass, somehow animated with life. Her face and bare arms were translucent, and deep in the depths of her glassy insides there rolled a blueish rippling light. Sunlight on water. It shimmered through her, from the tips of her clear blue fingers to the line of her shining lips. She was a walking sculpture, painted in depths of light and shade. Her eyes, long and almond shaped, were a soft, mother of pearl white from lid to lid, devoid of pupil, and the glassy dome of her tall head was entirely without hair.

From her shoulders, there sprouted what Robin at first had taken to be wings, but as she drew nearer, he saw they were rather the great nebulous skirts of a jellyfish, flowing out behind her weightlessly as she moved. When they reached the doors and she stood before them, towering silently over them all, the wings fell softly around her shoulders and draped down her back, a gossamer curtain.

“You are not the tools of Eris,” she said simply, appraising them one by one, her long head turning smoothly on its alien neck as her white eyes rolled over them. Her voice had a strange undertone. The sound one gets when a wet finger is run around the lip of a glass. “But you bring them with you.” She looked back across the lake, her features calm and composed, toward the canyon entrance and the great churning barrier of water which led back to the outside world.

“The way will hold shut,” she said. “But not for much longer.” She glanced down at them. “My mana is all but spent, young travellers. They work dark magic outside, chipping away at my will. When the waters fall, and they will, so too will Hiernarbos.” She did not seem overly concerned about this. Her smooth face was placid. “We have, I think, until nightfall. You must come, and tell me who you are. And why you are here.”

She turned away and passed regally and silently within the doors, into the depths of the great ice tree.

“If we only have until nightfall before that barrier falls and all of Ker’s army spills into this place,” Henry said to the others. “Shouldn’t we be thinking about evacuating? Getting all the Undine somewhere else? Somewhere safe?”

The woman paused, and without looking back, raised a hand and beckoned them to follow her within.

“There are no other Undine,” she said softly. “None waking. I am the last. My name is Fluensaltuma. Come with me.”

They passed within the great tree, exchanging bewildered glances. Robin had been expecting something out of the snow queen within, that old fairy tale with the cold-hearted queen who lived in a palace of ice. Arching staircases perhaps, clear as crystal, great carved and decorative columns of ice, glittering and resplendent. Maybe icicle chandeliers.

The interior space of Hiernarbos, however, was as strange and alien as their unusual, unearthly host.

The trunk was entirely hollow, a vast shaft reaching up dizzyingly above them. Great sheets of meltwater ran continually down the insides, a shifting skin of water, flowing endlessly along the walls. The wide floor was a shallow pool, in the centre of which was a wide, circular dais onto which the translucent being led the assembled children. Her bare feet, shimmering and dark as green ice, clicked on the floor as she walked. Her shifting billowing wings floated out behind her in the warm breeze which blew through the huge space, causing a low and continuous howl, haunting to hear.

It must be like an igloo, Robin thought. In principal of course, not design. Made of ice but warm inside. The continually falling sheets of water pushed air upward along the wide empty tube of the tree trunk, carrying with it a thin fog. Suspended water mist hung in the air all around them, giving everything a diffused misty quality.

The walls, which he had at first thought to have been intricately carved, he now saw were lined not with sculptures, but with row upon row of Undine. They stood, affixed to the walls like statues. Calm, composed, their skins various depths of blue and green ice, eyes closed, hands clasped in laps, every head bald and identical. They covered every inch of the walls, encircling them and standing on one another’s heads, stacked like glacial sardines and spiralling up onwards in endless columns beyond the reach of his sight into the rainbow-laced mists above.

There were thousands of Undine here. Silent and still, as cryogenically frozen as space travellers from a deeply surreal b-movie.

The meltwater flowed over them all constantly like a rippling blanket and the mist curled around their limbs. None of them shone from within as their guide did.

“There are so many of them,” Henry said, staring around. “Are they, are they all dead?”

The Undine, Fluensaltuma, looked at him curiously. “When lakes freeze, are they dead? Is not life continuing, deep beneath the surface? Waiting, hoping for the thaw, for the spring to come and for life to return?” She swept a hand graciously around the encircling sentinels, the multitude of icy figures. “My brothers and sisters wait, still as the glacier. They wait for the thaw. For Eris’ dark war to die. For her cruel reign to come to an end, and for the majesty of the Fae to return once more to the Netherworlde.

“Well, one of them has returned already,” Woad said encouragingly, presenting Robin with a majestic wave of his arms. “This here is the Scion. The actual really real Scion. He’s not even a myth or anything, Fluid-satsuma!”

“Fluensaltuma,” Karya corrected him quietly and tactfully.

“I’m just going to call you Flue,” the faun said decisively. He seemed to remember something. “Oh, yes, and look, this is another one! We’ve only just found this one.” He pointed to Jackalope. The older boy shuffled uncomfortably under the inscrutable, milky gaze of the Undine. “I don’t know his name, I only just met him, but from what I gather, he’s okay. Boss seems to like him anyway, the tips of her ears are all pink, and that only happens when—”

“Oh, be quiet Woad!” Karya hissed, her hands involuntarily disappearing into her hair around her ears. She folded her arms, and looked to the Undine.

“You are the only Undine who doesn’t sleep?” she asked, changing the subject quickly. Jackalope was paying no attention. He was eying the rows and rows of still and silent Undine with interest and narrowed eyes, as though wondering if their crystal skin was worth anything.

“One must watch,” the being replied softly. “One must tend Hiernarbos. Once, long ago, the nymphs lived with us. We were attended, we were worshipped. But the nymphs fell into darkness. Their hearts can be cold and thoughtless. They are flighty creatures, and are drawn to strength. We lost them all long ago to the Empress’ vicious cause.”

“Not all of them,” Robin told her. “There is a resistance against Eris, people who are brave enough to stand against her. One of them is a nymph. She’s taught me a lot. I don’t believe they are heartless.”

The Undine looked at the assembled company one by one. Her face was unreadable.

“I know why you have come here,” she said eventually. “When the wars began, we hid this place. We lived in peace, but our lady, our greatest, Tritea. She held a treasure. A gift that we all knew would eventually be the doom of our home. We have hidden here, secret and safe, for so long. But I knew one day someone would find us, someone would come looking for the Arcania.” She gestured for them all to join her on the strange circular pedestal. “I thought it would be Grimms, those puppets of cruelty and darkness, or some other unnatural beast from the stable of Lady Eris. I admit, I did not expect it to be children.”