The Golden Key (Book 3) (17 page)

10

Giorge and his mother had taken only a half dozen steps when
their torchlight filled the corner. The wall ranging out of the corner to their
left was still in shadow, a deep shadow that avoided the weak flame of their
makeshift torch and the pale, distant orange glow of the fungus. They turned
that way and plodded along, keeping the wall in sight as they went. Giorge
studied the wall carefully as they passed, but saw no sign of a secret
passage—or a blatantly obvious door. He continued to watch even after their
footfalls began to splash and the wall glistened with moisture. Then his mother
stopped and held up her hand.

He moved in close to her, and she pointed ahead of them. The
wall had a dark recess in it that swallowed up the light and spat back a
troubling gloom. They could only see the front edge of it—a passage? alcove?
archway? entryway?—but two things were clear: there was a short step upward,
and a streamlet of water was trickling down the step and into an expanding,
quivering pool.

Without comment, his mother took a step back, just far
enough to hide the shadowy entrance from view. “We should have brought another
torch,” she said. “I am loathe to toss this one into that passage. The water may
drown it.”

Giorge nodded in agreement, but there was no point in
worrying over it. Instead, he took the torch from his mother and moved up close
to the wall. When he was almost against it, he held the torch low behind him to
shield most of its glare and edged forward. His mother crouched down low and
moved further away until she was out of the range of the torch. For a few
seconds more, he saw her silhouette creeping forward and heard the soft
swishing of the water as she passed, and then nothing. She was hidden in the thin
line of shadow between the light of the torch and the luminescent fungal glow.

The water deepened until it almost swallowed his boots, and
there was a noticeable, weak current. Unlike the slime near his sarcophagus,
this water was clear of muck because the current had pushed away the dust and
grit as it flowed out from the opening. He eased closer to the recess, trying
to muffle the sloshing stirred up by his passage, and with each step it became
more and more apparent that the recess was a stairwell leading up. The base was
wide, too broad for the obscured torchlight to stretch across it to the other
end, and it narrowed considerably as the steps led upward into darkness. He
nestled up to the entryway and paused long enough to peek around the corner.
The shadows were too thick to penetrate, so he slowly moved the torch around to
the front to bathe it in light. He shielded his eyes, but it was difficult to
see past the glare. All he saw were generalities: the stairwell narrowed as it
rose, and the water was streaming down on his side of it. The other end was
clear, except for an accumulation of dust on the steps, but as he watched, the
water spread across the highest, narrowest stair and started to trickle down
the other side. He scowled at it; the leak—if that was what it was—was fresh,
and it was
growing
.

Giorge moved the torch behind him again, and as he turned
away from the stairwell, he paused. Were there eyes glimmering down at him from
just beyond the top stair? Two blue sparkles glinting in the torchlight? He
wasn’t entirely sure, and when he looked closer, it was all in shadow again. He
backed away from the entryway and waited for his mother to rejoin him. When she
slunk out of the shadows and quietly hurried up next to him, he whispered,
“What did you see?”

“It’s a short rise,” she answered. “At the top, it goes back
a short distance—not more than a few yards—and ends. There is something up
there.” She paused, frowned, and gestured vaguely back toward the others, who
were setting fire to the sarcophagi infected by the fungus. “It was like those
sarcophagi, but it wasn’t made of wood. Something metallic caught the
torchlight. Copper, bronze, maybe gold. It could be a statue—or worse. I’ve
heard of guardians like that put in tombs like this.”

“Are you sure it was metallic?” Giorge asked. “Could it have
been gems catching the torchlight and refracting it?”

His mother considered his suggestion for a few seconds, and
then shrugged. “It could have been,” she said. “I only glimpsed a small part of
it, and what I saw was only dimly lit.”

“Did you notice the water?” he asked.

“What of it?” she countered.

“The flow is increasing,” he said. “Even in the short time
that I was there, I saw it cover a broader area. If there is an exit up there,
it’s probably underwater.”

His mother thought for a moment. “If this is Symptata’s
tomb,” she said, “It would be.”

Giorge frowned and muttered, “The poem didn’t say anything
about water. All it said was—” He closed his eyes, sighed, and recited what he
could remember:

“He cursed her line

of thieving whores

and lies in death,

awaiting yours.”

When he paused, his mother said. “Now that we’re here, I
think it was referring to this place. He expects us to die here.”

Giorge shook his head. “That was the end of the first poem,”
he said. “There were more poems that came later.”

“Other poems?” she asked. “What did they say? I never got
past the first ones.”

“There were two more. One was with the Eyes, and I think it
also referred to this place.” He took a moment to recall the verses he had
memorized, and then recited it in an ominous tone that fit too well their
predicament:

“The pain and danger felt thus far

are but a taste of what’s in store,

for twice the burden are the Eyes,

and twice as swift is your demise.

Halfway home; halfway free;

soon the tomb of misery,

wherein lies the Viper’s Skull

that waits for you to pay its toll.”

“What about the last one?” his mother asked after he had finished.
“Does it say anything about the tomb?”

“No,” Giorge said, shaking his head. “I don’t think it has
anything to do with this place. It was more a riddle about the fangs. They were
in the same place, but I had to look twice to find the second one. Angus said
Symptata was using portals of some sort to move us from place to place. I never
would have gotten as far as I did without his help. He’s the reason the plague
of woe didn’t kill me.”

She cringed and quickly said, “Tell me about it later. The
water is rising; we don’t have time for it now.”

Giorge shook his head. “I need to know something first.” He
took a deep breath and then said, “I think I died before the end. Did you?” He
knew what her answer would be, but he still had to ask it.

Her lips pressed tightly together and she nodded. “Yes,” she
said. “The plague of woe did me in. All those critters attacking me left me
ragged, and I couldn’t outrun the last one.”

He looked back at the others—their torches were slowly
advancing on the fungal growth, burning it and the sarcophagi as they went. A
phalanx of glowing forms had gathered in the far, bright corner; they were
moving in unison, as if they were being directed by a silent general. Archibald
had moved toward them and taken up a defensive position between the two groups.

“I suspect the others would say the same thing,” Giorge muttered.
“If what I was told is true, they couldn’t have completed the skull or the
curse would have ended long ago. But why did you say Symptata’s tomb would be
underwater?”

His mother’s lips curled into a grim smile as she answered,
“His tomb was in Bryn.”

“So?” he frowned.

She looked at him and raised her eyebrows. “Bryn fell into
the sea a thousand years ago. Surely you remember that?”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Of course,” he said.
“I had forgotten about that. An earthquake, wasn’t it? The whole town slipped
off the coast. But his tomb would have flooded long ago, unless—” he frowned
and shook his head “The curse.”

She nodded. “It must have kept the water at bay, and now
that it’s been lifted,” she looked at the stairwell and her tone was determined
as she finished, “we need to get out of here. Quickly.”

Giorge looked back at the others again. The apparitions had
advanced, and Archibald was hacking at them, lopping off arms, legs, heads—and
still the pieces kept advancing. The fires were like a signal line, small and
spaced evenly apart, but much too close together. The fungus smoldered, too
damp to burn effectively, and sent out billows of smoke that seemed to both
smother the light and spreading a peculiar gray-black-orange fog that consumed
everything it touched.

Giorge sniffed. The stench of the smoke was palpable, and it
wouldn’t be long before it filled the room completely. He sucked in an acrid
breath and nodded. The fires would consume the air they needed and leave behind
poison. “Yes,” he said, turning toward the stairway. “Let’s see where it leads,
and then we’ll tell them what we’ve found.”

His mother nodded. “They won’t be able to fend off those
things for long,” she said. “There isn’t enough stuff to burn.”

They moved quickly up to the stairwell, ignoring the
sloshing water swarming around Giorge’s ankles as they approached it. If there
was anything there, it already knew about them, and time was of the essence.
When Giorge reached the opening, he almost gasped: The top three steps had
become a cascading waterfall, and it wouldn’t be long before the whole
stairwell was flooded. He glanced at his mother and, for the first time that he
could recall, there was a worried furrow across her brow.

He looked at the room one last time before stepping around
the corner and onto the first stair. As he thrust the torch out in front of
him, he wondered if the room would fill up with water before all the air was
sucked up by the fire. But by the time his foot fell on the second step, he had
already thrust the thought aside. There wasn’t time for it.

11

By the third day, the novelty of the horse experience had
worn off, and Embril had grown tired of it. She couldn’t get comfortable with
the noises, and the other horses couldn’t get comfortable with her. The daytime
wasn’t bad, but that was because they were running most of the time. The night
was more difficult. She kept forgetting to lower her head, and the monarch of
the little herd didn’t like it. It
almost
came to a confrontation on the
second evening, but Tobar had wedged in between them, calming the mare with a
soft, coaxing voice as he led her firmly away.

At the same time, Darby had taken hold of Embril’s lead rope
and said, his tone reproachful, “Elmer, you fool, can’t you see she’s the
dominant mare? What are you doing challenging her like that? Do you
really
want to fight with her?”

She had stared at him with one eye and frowned—or tried to;
her lips felt weird as they sagged away from her teeth. Was that what she had
been doing? Challenging the horse for dominance? The books had a lot of
information about the horse hierarchy, about how horses showed dominance and
submissiveness, and about how the trainers used those behaviors to tame them.
Her lower lip had fluttered as she remembered how she had been behaving and
tried to think about what another horse would think about that behavior. Darby
had been right: her attitude was one of superiority, and she hadn’t even
realized that her posture and behavior reflected that superiority. In the end,
she had sighed (a snorting wheeze) and shook her head; there had been no point
in establishing dominance when she would only be a horse for a short
time—unless Barnham had lied about the spell. The thought was not comforting.

Early on the third day they reached the ledge leading to the
plateau. They went at an easy walk, and she was placed in the middle of a
single-file line of horses and riders. It was still false morning—the time when
the sun was about to come out from behind the mountains to the east—when a
strange aura surrounded her. It was like a shimmering rainbow fog. It puzzled
her; she hadn’t been able to see yellow clearly since becoming a horse, but
there were brilliant streams of it merging with the orange and red and fading
into a greenish blur. The green was just as strange; most of the plants she’d
seen over the past few days had been gray. What was it?

Then she knew what it was. Barnham’s had said the spell
would last three or four days. She brought the magic that was always near the
periphery of her visual field rapidly into focus. The spell was unraveling like
a knitted scarf with a loose string, and the spell’s outer shield was already gone.
The inner weaving was beginning to come undone near her left front hoof, and she
stumbled to an abrupt stop. Her hand was emerging! The hoof transformed back
into fingernails that dug into the hard rock and splintered as the weight of
her horse’s body fell upon them. She screeched—a high-pitched whinny that was
quickly echoed by the other horses—and redistributed the weight to the other
three horse’s legs.

Her wrist and forearm returned as the magic holding together
the horse’s shape dissipated, and soon her arm dangled down from the gigantic
shoulder. When that shoulder shifted, she felt the dissolving spell radiate
outward across her back muscles like waves rippling on the surface of a pond.
It sped across her back to the other shoulder, which weakened rapidly as it
changed to her normal form, and she fell forward onto her chest—which was also
shifting shape. Her horse-shaped head flopped heavily down onto the road, her thinning
neck unable to support its weight any longer, and then her torso shriveled from
the bulky mare’s chest to her own.

She screamed—a mixture of urgent whinny and high-pitched
shriek that almost sent the other horses scattering—as the full weight of the
pack frame, filled with her chest of books and other gear, suddenly fell upon
her narrowing back.

Her back legs and rump were still those of a horse, and they
towered above her. The pack frame slid forward, threatening to crush her head.
“Help me!” she cried as her muzzle retracted into thin, quivering lips.

The transformation reached her rump, and the sudden, massive
weight on the small of her back was intolerable—and then got worse as her
thighs shifted shape. She thought her knees were going to snap before the pack
frame suddenly stopped sliding, and by the time her shins were hers again, the
weight of it had been lifted from her. She gasped, dangling in the
contraption’s harness—which was much too big for her slender form—and tried to
wriggle free of it. But she couldn’t get any leverage, and the straps were
catching on her robe. “Lower me!” she snapped, making no attempt to conceal her
pain.

The men lowered the contraption and when the straps hit the
road, she crawled out from under the pack frame’s harness. A second after she
was free, there was a mild crash behind her as the soldiers dropped it. She
rolled onto her sore back and sat up, cradling her bleeding hand in her lap.
Four men were standing around the pack frame, and as soon as they saw that she
was free, they hurried to their jittery horses and tried to calm them down.
“Thank you,” she called after them as she took a deep breath and closed her
eyes. When she opened them again, it disoriented her to view the world from her
limited perspective, but she was already beginning to readjust to it.

A few minutes later, Darby dismounted and quickly knelt down
beside her. “Where are your injuries?” he asked, his eyes dilating as he set
his bag down next to her.

She frowned. The pain in her back was easing and already
manageable, and it would likely be gone completely once she settled fully into
her normal form. An effect of the spell, perhaps? “I broke my nails,” she said,
holding up her bloodied left hand.

“Anything else?” Darby asked as he took her hand in his.

She shook her head and felt the clumps of mud still clinging
to her hair scraping across the back of her robe. “My back would have been
crushed if they hadn’t reacted so quickly. Thank them for me; I didn’t notice
who they were.”

Darby nodded absently as he looked over her hand. To take
her mind off what he was doing to it, she picked at the dried mud caked in her
hair.
I need a bath
, she thought, cringing as she felt the mud crunching
under her bottom as she flinched from Darby’s examination. There was a lot of
mud down there, too.

“No broken bones,” Darby said as he set her hand gently on
her thigh and reached into his bag. “You were lucky.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Lieutenant Jarhad was
stupid. He never should have put that thing on me.” She paused and shook her
head again. “I was stupid for letting him.”
But I couldn’t let him throw
away my books.

“Your nails will grow back out in time,” Darby said, taking
out a few thumb-sized bottles. “Three peeled away completely or snapped off.
One is split down the middle to the roots. The thumb is fine.” He reached for a
flask of water and rinsed off her fingertips. “I can stop the bleeding, but
they will be tender until the nails grow back on their own.” He opened one of
the little bottles and sprinkled a dusting of fine brown powder over each nail.
The powder melted into the blood and it clotted into a smooth scab. The
underlying wounds even felt like they were closing.

He reached for a bandage and frowned. “I would normally wrap
the fingers together,” he said. “The bandages are too wide to wrap around them
individually.”

She shook her head and said, “I’ll manage without the
bandage,” she said. “But I could use some water to wash my hair.”

“That will have to wait until we reach the river on the
plateau,” Darby said. “We’re running a bit low.”

Embril frowned and looked at the plateau. It was a long way
off. “How long before we get there?”

Darby looked at her and shrugged. “We’ll reach it tomorrow
evening,” he said. “This ledge is narrow enough that we don’t want to stress
the horses with a faster pace than that. We’ll also have to reconnoiter the
area before he’ll let anyone go near it.”

Two days with
this
hair?
she thought, aghast.
The mud ground on her bottom as she shifted position to stand. “Help me up,”
she said.

Darby half-lifted her, his clinical gaze studying her
movements. Once he was satisfied that she could stand and walk on her own, he
let her arm go and then turned to one of the men who were watching them. “We’ll
need a pack horse for her things,” he said. “Be careful with them. I’ll tell
the Lieutenant what happened.”

“Should we saddle one of the spare horses?” another one of
the men asked.

Darby watched her walking around for several seconds, and
she wondered how strange it looked. The mud
chafed
, and there was no way
that she would ride a horse like that.
Two days?
She shook her head
firmly. She couldn’t even walk comfortably; the mud kept finding ways to
infiltrate her body as if she were sitting naked on a sandy beach of loose,
shifting sand.

“Are you all right?” he asked, concern in his voice. “If
you’d like me to look—” She glared at him, and he fell silent. He nodded
sharply and turned to the man who had asked about saddling the horse. “She’ll
ride with me,” he said. “I want to keep an eye on her.” Then he mounted his
horse and rode toward the head of the line of horses. He looked back only
once—she was picking at her robe, trying to dislodge some of the mud when she
saw him—before hurrying up to where the Lieutenant was no-doubt impatiently
waiting for him.

I need a bath,
Embril thought, waddling uncomfortably
to the edge of the ledge and looking across the canyon. There was a waterfall
cascading down the cliff from the plateau to the west, and it fed a large lake
at the bottom. That lake was the source of the river that passed by
Hellsbreath, but no one had given it a name. Few people in recent times had
even seen it. She flinched as she pried another bit of mud free—along with a
few hairs.
I
need
a bath!

“Um,” one of the men said, his voice hesitant. “Elmer?”

She didn’t have to turn to know he was close enough to catch
her if she fell, but she had no intention of falling. “Yes?” she asked as she
brought the magic into focus.

“Are you sure you want to stand so close to the edge? It’s a
long way down.”

She nodded. “I’m fine,” she said as she reached out for the
strands she would need and brought them to her. Before weaving them together,
she turned to him—he
was
close—and smiled. “Please step back. I don’t
want you to interrupt me.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and then
reluctantly took a couple of steps back.

Without turning away from him, and without looking at her
hands, she quickly wove together the strands of the Flying spell. Her smile
broadened as she cast the spell. She hadn’t primed for it, and it had been a
long time since she had cast a spell from memory alone, but her fingers acted
as if she had just finished priming for it. It always seemed to be that way
with the spells she knew well.

The men gasped as they realized what she was doing, but they
had the sense not to disrupt the casting. When she finished, she jumped off the
ledge backward and hovered in place in front of them. The man nearest her
lunged forward too late, but she held up her hand to stop him. “Tell Lieutenant
Jarhad that I will be in the cave at the other end. Bring my things to me
there.” She paused, half-turned, and then looked back. “Oh, and tell Lieutenant
Jarhad that I will hold him
personally
responsible for any damage done
to them.” She floated out a few more feet before turning.
That will keep
them
in line,
she thought, smiling as she flew swiftly toward the waterfall. The
air was crisp as it buffeted her, but the chill only made her fly more quickly.