The Hidden Land (12 page)

Laura was further irked. “Did you plan this for a long time?”

“Ever since the swords were stolen,” said Patrick. “I wanted Ted to help me, but he’s busy now and we’re out of time.”

Laura’s feelings finally found vent. “Why didn’t you tell us? We’ve been worried to death and you had a plan all along!”

“I didn’t even tell Ted until today,” said Patrick. “It was my idea, wasn’t it?”

Laura gave up being angry. Made brave by one of the few feelings of pure admiration she had ever had for Patrick, she said, “I’ll go with you since Ted can’t.” Ted had been meant to go on this adventure. This was what he got for leaving her out of his coronation.

Patrick hesitated, and then he grinned. “Sure,” he said. “You can be my lookout, and distract the intruders with your childish blandishments.”

Laura looked at him. No, he was not making fun of her. His tone of voice was maddeningly familiar but so out-of-place that it took her a moment to recognize it.

“You’re playing,” she said, half accusingly.

“D’you want to come, or not?”

“Yes,” said Laura, wondering what blandishments were. She followed him up the steps.

In the hall before the stairs to Fence’s tower, the purple torches burned. The yellow torches of High Castle smelled like turpentine; these gave off a damp scent of moss, and well water, and cold rock. How could anything burn that smelled like that? Sorcery, thought Laura grimly, that’s how.

The lower door with its enigmatic carvings was shut. Laura kept an eye out for beasts, but saw none. Patrick put his shoulder to the door, and it swung inward without a sound. Another purple torch glared across the darkness at their feet, where the steps went down, not up. They looked at one another. A cold air came up the stairway and stirred their hair.

“What the hell?” said Patrick, leaning forward.

“Wait a minute,” said Laura, trying to remember. The day Fence had come back seemed as long ago as the summers in Pennsylvania, when Patrick played Fence and torches, sorcerous or otherwise, burned only in their imaginations. Fence, covered with dust and looking just as he ought, had come along this hall with her and Ellen, and found that, contrary to his dispositions, the door was unlocked. Laura said, “Close the door and lock it. It makes the stairs go the right way.”

Patrick frowned. “Well, it can’t hurt.” He pulled the door to and locked it, after a little trouble with the silver key.

“Now you unlock it again and everything’s all right.”

Patrick did this, and opened the door. The purple torch hung over a pit of blackness.

“It worked when Fence did it,” said Laura.

“Could I have gotten the wrong key?”

“That one looks right. Anyway, it fit in the door, didn’t it?”

“Well, Fence is a wizard, and we aren’t. Huh,” said Patrick thoughtfully, and went back into the hall, where he stood on a stone bench and took a purple torch from its holder.

“What’re you doing?” said Laura, who knew quite well.

“Maybe this is just to scare us. If we could prop the door open it wouldn’t hurt to go down a little ways.”

He tilted the torch. It did not give much light, but it showed the first two or three steps. Laura thought with despair that this would keep them from breaking a leg, which would be enough for Patrick. She was very sorry she had been so angry with Ted.

Patrick was trying to drag a stone bench over to prop open the door. He made so much noise and roused so many echoes from the dark stairwell that she went to help him just to get it over with. They could not lift the bench, but with considerable scraping of hands and floor they inched it along until it would block the door if the door should blow shut.

“Come on,” said Patrick.

Laura wondered why he had forgotten about the blandishments, but she was past speech. She stood next to his free hand, and they started down.

It was cold and very quiet.

“Pat,” said Laura, remembering how far it was to Fence’s chambers when the stairs went the right way, “do we have to go
down
two hundred and eight steps to get anywhere?”

“I hope not,” said Patrick, “though it would make sense. Ted is supposed to keep Fence busy after the feast, but we can’t take too much time. And if too many people have left I can’t sneak the keys back.”

“Feasts are always long,” said Laura.

They went down and around and down and around. On the ninth or tenth landing, Patrick’s torch struck dim watery gleams from something spread on the stones. Laura stopped dead. The gleams grew to a great burst of light, then steadied to a long, winged shape of bright red, beating its way over a plain. It stooped upon a house. Laura had one moment to recognize the Secret House, and then it was fire. From its sparks another vision swelled. She saw a black-haired man who looked like Fence and was not, for he also looked like Randolph. He sat robed in red, with a book open on his lap, and the book showed the long scarlet shape of the dragon, smiting the Secret House with flame. From the lettering below the picture one word leapt out at her.

“Belaparthalion,” said Laura, trying it out letter by letter. The light died, and she stood with Patrick on a cold stair. At their feet was another purple beast.

“What?” said Patrick.

The beast made noises like a kettle about to boil. Patrick poked the torch at it, cautiously. It hissed and steamed up around them in a purple mist, and sifted away, smelling like damp stone and, a little, like the Well of the White Witch.

“Well,” said Patrick, “now we know they don’t like fire.”

“If that’s fire,” said Laura, looking dubiously at the torch.

They went on.

“Two hundred and eight,” said Patrick at last. They looked along the ghostly sphere of the torch and past it into darkness.

“Pat,” said Laura, without any great hope.

“Well,” said Patrick, “it would make sense to have it be the same number of steps down, but when did anything about this place make sense?”

“Can we go back now?” Laura felt oppressed by the layers of darkness above them. She did not like looking into the dark, and she was afraid to look at the torch lest she see more visions. She hated them more every time she had one. They must mean something, but she could not tell what. She was beginning to feel that they, too, were laughing at her.

She looked at Patrick instead. He was not a comforting sight. The torchlight dyed his unremarkable brown hair a vivid purple, and his rosy face a pale yellowish violet. He wore what Ruth called his mad-scientist expression.

“Well,” he said again, “it could be a multiple of the number going up.”

“It could go down forever,” said Laura.

“Sounds just like something Fence would do,” said Patrick sourly. He started down the steps again. “Look,” he said, when Laura stayed where she was. “Just two hundred and eight more, okay? Except, hell, in magic things go in threes.”

“I am
not,
” said Laura, “going down two times two hundred and eight more steps.” Her legs ached as if she had been bicycling up hills all day.

“Well, come down one times two hundred and eight, okay? We don’t really have time for any more anyway.”

Laura strongly suspected that once he had gotten her down the second two hundred and eight he would try to talk her into the third. But he had not suggested leaving her there in the dark, and she was grateful for this. “All right,” she said.

“Remind me,” she added, as she followed the purple blotch of Patrick’s light, “to tell Ted I saw something else, okay?”

“You did? When?”

“When the torchlight shone on that watery beast.”

“You didn’t see anything else about Ted getting killed, did you?”

“No. I didn’t see anybody we know.”

“Did you ever see me?”

Laura thought. “No. Nobody but Ted, that I knew.”

They went on.

“Couldn’t you count out loud?” said Laura after a while.

“I have to breathe, you know. I’ll tell you every tenth one . . . sixty.”

“Is that
all?
”

“And one hundred,” said Patrick eventually, as they crossed another landing. “Hey,” he said. “Jackpot. One and a half times as many steps.”

Laura’s hair prickled even before she crowded up beside him and saw what he saw. Down four steps on the last landing, a muted crowd of colored streaks lay across the stones, cast through the open doorway by things she could not see. The purple in this faded rainbow was the same color as the torch. Laura knew the green and blue at once as the colors of light given off by Shan’s and Melanie’s swords.

Patrick pounded down the last steps, passed stripedly across the landing, and said, “Laura!”

Laura followed and stood in the doorway with him. The room was full of weapons: swords, knives, spears, bows and arrows, a myriad of odd and ugly objects that Laura did not recognize. Some were hung neatly on the walls, some scattered across the floor. They all glowed, palely in purple, blue and green; in sickly orange; in pallid gold; in moony white; and with a vigorous red that reminded Laura unhappily of Claudia.

As her eyes adjusted to the light, like a jigsaw puzzle done in watercolors, she saw that the far wall of the room was lined with trunks. Their lids were open, and out of them spilled dim jewels. They drew her eyes into them; misty shapes began to form within them. Laura took a step forward, and another. Foggy, starlit spaces opened around her. She saw five figures standing by the bank of a stream. She strained to see them more clearly. One of them waved to her. They seemed familiar, but, like almost everything else here, not quite right.

Her breath was jarred out of her suddenly and pain shot up her right leg from her knee. Patrick called her name from a far distance. She blinked. She had tripped on a bow: her foot was still tangled in it. She had fallen and cut her knee on something. Laura moved the knee, and blood ran down her leg. She picked the sword up. It was small. The hilt was black, and set with blue stones, not like sapphires. A prickling went down her arm, as if a cold breeze had blown on her. The blade glowed blue.

“Here it is,” she said to Patrick.

“You think so?” he said.

Laura looked at him. He held a sword like hers. They laid the hilts together and examined them. They were not alike. The patterns of the stones and the shapes of the hilts were different.

“Well,” said Patrick, nastily, “which one is it?”

“How should I know?” said Laura. “Can you find yours?”

“There’s at least three that color of green,” said Patrick.

“Maybe they all do the same thing,” said Laura. Her knee twinged, and she decided not to look at it. “Have you got a handkerchief?”

“Didn’t you cut your knee on Shan’s sword, too?” Patrick put the sword down and rummaged in his cloak.

“I can’t help it.”

“No, I just meant, since we don’t have any other clues, why don’t you take the one you fell on?”

“Which one will you take?”

Patrick tied a handkerchief around her knee. Ted would have wiped the blood off first, but this was not the time to say so.

“Well,” said Patrick, “I know Melanie’s had three stones in it, so I’ll take a green one with three stones.”

“You think they’ll work the same?”

“A magic sword is a magic sword.”

A battery is a battery, thought Laura, looking at him with exasperation. A transistor is a transistor. Was that even true? Impossible to argue with Patrick on his own terms if you didn’t even know what they meant. She stood up and tried her knee. “We should go before I get all stiff,” she said from experience.

Patrick looked rebellious for an instant. “Oh, well,” he said, “I should get these keys back to Fence before he misses them.”

They took up their swords and stood looking at the dim colors of the room.

“I bet they’re
all
enchanted,” said Laura. Enchanted weapons might be useful in a battle against monsters; she wondered if anybody knew this room was here. Fence had seemed amused, more than anything else, when he had seen the stairs going down instead of up. He had seemed to think this was a joke that Randolph might play. No doubt they knew all about it.

“Too bad we don’t know what it all does,” said Patrick. He took the torch from where he had stuck it in a tangle of swordbelts, and then looked thoughtfully at the tangle. “Wait a minute. If we get belts for these things we won’t have to carry them.”

This accomplished, they began their climb.

T
ED got through his coronation dinner by repeatedly reminding himself how much worse the Banquet of Midsummer’s Eve had been. In the intervals of this, he wondered whether he ought to have stood up to Benjamin more. Even allowing for his grief and perplexity at the King’s death, Benjamin had been overbearing and rude. Edward would certainly have put up with this: his sudden acquisition of a real personality, in the game, did not happen until just before he killed Randolph. But Ted had already shown a real personality. Perhaps he should have gone on showing it.

Smitten by a sudden thought, Ted found that he was staring at Celia, and quickly smiled instead. He could not remember ever having shown a real personality to Benjamin. Something in Benjamin’s manner made it evident that he expected to be tolerated and to be obeyed. Ted remembered how, at the first Council meeting, Benjamin had with a touch kept an enraged Randolph from speaking, and how he had sat at the King’s left hand. Benjamin had not been at the Banquet when Ted attacked Andrew. All Ted’s other defiances had been flung at Fence or Randolph. But Fence and Randolph put up with Benjamin, too.

Ted looked down the table at him. He was haranguing Matthew’s wife and family. Celia grinned at him and occasionally said something. The three yellow-haired children sat stiffly, their noses almost in their plates and their faces solemn. Only when Celia said something would they slide their eyes sideways at one another; and then they looked as if they were battling what Ted’s mother called interior mirth. Benjamin must have invited them on Ted’s behalf, to make up for having forbidden Ruth and scared off Patrick and Laura. They did not look either pleased or honored.