Almost at once she was swallowed up by the darkness and quiet of the cave. Charlie raised her feeble candle high and saw that she had entered a tunnel. She lowered it again to look more closely at the ground as she walked. She kept one eye on the flickering blue light at all times, following it deeper into the mountain. The storm and the soldiers and the outside world were now far away and almost forgotten.
Some distant part of her mind knew that what she was doing was stupid and dangerous, but her curiosity about what the light was and where it was going was overwhelming. Charlie had already faced so many dangerous and ludicrous situations over the last few months with a mulish stubbornness and blatant disregard for her own safety that she wondered if she was even capable of distinguishing a wise decision from an unwise one. Following a moving, glowing light deep into a dark mountain tunnel didn’t even quicken her pulse. If a dragon had suddenly emerged from the shadows and breathed fire at her, she doubted she could have mustered any surprise.
The bobbing light rounded a sudden corner, and Charlie hurried after it, worried it would disappear if she let it get too far away. She turned the corner and had taken only a few steps when the ground beneath her disappeared, and she was suddenly free-falling. The sudden drop left her breathless and unable to think. She had thrown her arms out instinctively when she fell, and the scrape of stone against her fingers made her think she had fallen into some sort of narrow, vertical tunnel like a well shaft. She flipped to her back and tried to slow her fall by pushing her arms and legs against the walls of the shaft. Her momentum slowed slightly as she scraped down the sides of the tunnel, but then there was suddenly nothing left to push against, and she dropped several feet onto hard stone.
The impact knocked the air out of her and jarred every bone in her body. She heard rather than felt her head smack the ground and her teeth clack together. She experienced the frightening sensation not of intense pain, but of being unable to move. Her last impression before she lost consciousness was of multicolored orbs of light, gently swirling around the room.
When she woke up, the intense pain had usurped the paralysis. Her entire body hurt so fiercely that it took her a few moments to identify her injuries. Several broken ribs, a badly bruised left shoulder and thigh, a giant goose egg on the back of her head, scrapes everywhere from having her body dragged across the stone. For a long moment she lay still and contemplated her suffering with no intention of ever moving. Somewhere in the midst of her misery, she realized it wasn’t dark. In fact, wherever she was was lit as if by many candles. Slowly she willed herself to turn her head and look around.
She was in a large underground room, the uneven stone walls and domed ceiling confirming that she was still inside the mountain. The source of the light came from the rows and rows of shelves that lined the walls. The shelves were stacked with glass jars, and in each jar was a glowing ball of light like the one she had followed. In the center of the room was a large stone sarcophagus with the figure of a sleeping woman carved in marble as its lid. On the far side of the room was a large wooden door.
Very slowly, Charlie sat up, and when the black spots in her vision cleared, dragged herself to her feet. She went first to the ornate wooden door and tried its handle. It was locked. The door was about ten feet high, broad, and rounded at the top. It was braced with heavy strips of iron and decorated with thin strips of gold fashioned into arcane shapes. It was set into the rock wall by some invisible means. She tried to peer through the keyhole but could see nothing.
Leaving the door for the moment, she moved to the shelves anchored along the walls to look at the glowing jars. They were all different sizes and shapes, and there were hundreds of them, each with a tiny ball of colored light inside gently flickering like a candle flame. She picked one up to look more closely at what was inside. The light was about the size of her fist and golden in color, and it floated gently around the jar, bumping into the walls of its glass prison. Charlie pried the wax lid of the jar off with her belt knife, and the little golden sphere shot out of the jar and zipped around the room a few times before settling down to hover several feet above her head.
She moved on to the sarcophagus. It was an elaborately and finely carved tomb. The marble carving depicted the occupant as a young woman in a long gown, her eyes closed in sleep and her delicate hands clasped at her waist. The workmanship was so excellent that Charlie almost expected the long eyelashes to flutter open or a breeze to stir her veil. The marble was pristine, with no rock dust or cobwebs to dirty its surface. She knelt by the end of the sarcophagus to read the inscription carved into the stone.
My darling Elisabet, I would destroy the world to keep you here,
Your death is not forever, and we shall be together always.
“Hmm,” Charlie said, nonplussed. She looked up at the statue again, and the statue was looking back at her. She shrieked and fell backward. For a moment she remained in her ungraceful position on the ground and stared at the figure, barely able to breathe. Surely it was a trick of the light or her overactive imagination. After all, she had hit her head. But no, the statue’s stone eyes were slightly open, and she was sure they hadn’t been before. Gathering her courage, Charlie slowly crept forward, watching the statue closely. It showed no further signs of moving, so she hesitantly laid her hand on its wrist. Nothing happened.
Charlie decided it was time to find a way out. She went back to the spot where she had fallen and looked up at the hole she had fallen through. The mouth of the tunnel was too high for her to reach, and even if she could climb to it, she didn’t think she could climb back up it. There was no going back that way; the door was her only option. She went back to it and rattled the handle a few more times in frustration. It still wouldn’t open. Charlie took a deep breath and told herself to think rationally. This locked door was just like any other locked door, regardless of its location. It either had a key, the lock could be picked, or the door could be knocked down. Perhaps the key was somewhere in the room. She began a careful search of the room, looking over all of the jars and running her hands underneath the shelves in case something was hidden beneath them. She kept a close eye on the sarcophagus as she looked in case something else decided to move.
As she was feeling around behind the jars on a shelf above her head, she accidentally knocked one over, and it fell to the floor and shattered. The glowing pink ball of light that had been contained inside drifted across the room to hover over the sarcophagus. The yellow sphere that had been bobbing around the room came to join it, and they floated together around the statue’s head. After watching them for a moment, Charlie took down another jar and removed the lid. The newly-freed purple orb joined the other two. With a mixture of curiosity and dread, she moved toward the little lights. They didn’t flee at her approach, but when she tried to touch them, they moved gently away. The statue’s eyes were open now, and she thought she detected a warm tint to her marble hair.
“Any chance you have the key?” Charlie asked, half afraid the statue would answer. She walked a circle around the tomb and sighed. “Sorry about this,” she told the woman, then gave the marble lid of the sarcophagus a great heave.
As the lid slid open a crack, Charlie felt a tremor run through the heart of the mountain. The glass jars tinkled as they jostled together, and a mist of stone dust floated down from the ceiling. Ignoring it, she gave the lid another push, and there was another shudder from the mountain. A few jars fell from their shelves and broke, the lights within bobbing over as if to see what she was doing. Charlie sat on the edge of the tomb and put her boot against the lid so she could push it with her leg. It skidded open several more inches, and the room shook more violently than before.
Charlie held her breath and waited until the crashing of glass had stopped and the clouds of dust had settled. The room was filled with dozens of glowing balls of light now, and they were zipping around her head like hummingbirds. When she could see again, she steeled herself and looked into the sarcophagus.
She had expected a rotten corpse or another skeleton, but the woman inside was perfectly preserved. She looked exactly like her stone replica, but her hair, skin, and clothing were colored instead of marble white. Her blonde eyelashes trembled for a moment, then her eyes opened, and she looked up at Charlie with pale blue eyes.
Charlie’s breath caught in her throat. She stared for a moment, then gave the lid a final shove to the side, eliciting another rumble. None of the falling dust landed on the tomb or its occupant.
The young woman sat up, then slowly turned her head to look at Charlie. She didn’t speak. Her face was as still and blank as the statue’s. The lights congregated around her, brushing against her hair and her gown.
“Elisabet?” Charlie said cautiously.
Elisabet blinked at her, then tried to get out of the coffin, her movements as stilted and awkward as a marionette’s.
Charlie cautiously grabbed her arm to steady her and almost jerked away again at how cold the woman’s flesh felt. She had a sick feeling that despite her perfect appearance and her ability to move that Elisabet was not alive. She didn’t appear to be breathing, and she seemed unaware of her surroundings. She successfully got out of the sarcophagus and stood next to it, staring at nothing.
With one eye on Elisabet, Charlie surveyed the damage to the room. Half of the shelves had collapsed, and the floor was littered with broken glass covered by a film of stone dust. The freed light orbs were chasing each other around the destroyed room, while those still contained in jars were slamming themselves into the glass as if desperate to be free too. Some flew up the tunnel Charlie had fallen down or hovered by the ceiling, but a large group stayed close to Elisabet like a glowing cloud of gnats.
Elisabet raised one slender arm and pointed at the wall of jars.
“What is it?” Charlie asked nervously. “What do you want?”
Elisabet looked blank and pointed more vigorous at the jars.
“I don’t know what you want,” Charlie said, wondering if the dead woman was even capable of comprehending her.
The woman turned to face Charlie and stared at her glassy-eyed for a long moment. Then she seemed to take a deep breath, holding her arms out slightly to the side and tipping her head back. As she inhaled, the throng of shimming lights floated into her mouth as if drawn in by a draft. As Charlie watched, more and more glowing orbs rushed into Elisabet’s mouth, presumably going down her throat. As she breathed in the lights, a change began to come over her. An intelligence came to her eyes, and her face lost the mask-like, expressionless appearance. Her movements were subtly more natural. She looked properly alive now.
“Elisabet?” Charlie said cautiously.
“Who are you?” Elisabet asked in a soft but intelligent voice. She was properly sentient now.
“My name is Charlie,” Charlie said. “Do you have a key to that door?”
Elisabet paused. “I don’t think so. Balfour will have a key. Where is Balfour?”
“I don’t know. Who is Balfour?”
“Balfour is my beloved. He has hidden me here, and he will come back to find me,” Elisabet said serenely.
“Um,” Charlie said awkwardly. The date on Elisabet’s tomb was over two hundred years ago. “When did he say he would come back?”
“When he has found a way for me to leave this place without dying. He had to hide me here in this mountain because the other mages who were trying to stop him would have destroyed me to undo the magic.”
“Why do they want to undo the magic?” Charlie asked
“Because they believe it is immoral,” Elisabet sighed. “Balfour used dark magic to trap the souls he used to preserve me. But it is only temporary. As soon as he finds a more permanent solution to save me, he will release all of the souls. He promised me that.”
Charlie’s blood ran cold at that. “These are people’s souls?” she asked, looking at the jars still on the shelves.
“Souls, some essence of their selves that he stole and trapped in a glass jar,” Elisabet said with no real feeling. “He thought he could use them to give me immortality.”
“It sort of seems to have worked,” Charlie said uneasily. “You’re walking around and talking. You’re aware.”
“It didn’t work entirely. He used his magic to preserve my body, but I can never leave this place. I have been asleep waiting for him to return until you woke me.”
Charlie looked at her boots for a long moment. “Elisabet,” she said finally. “I don’t think Balfour is coming back. If the date on your coffin is when he put your body in the tomb, Balfour would have died well over a century ago. You’ve been asleep a long time.”
A ghostly pallor overtook the young woman’s face. “Balfour is dead?” she whispered. “But he said he was coming back.”
“I’m sure he meant it,” Charlie tried to reassure her. “Perhaps the other mages caught him before he could return to you.”
Elisabet stood very still and silent for so long Charlie began to wonder if she had lost her sentience again. Then a tear ran down her check and fell to her dress. “He never came back. He left me frozen, and he never came back and freed me or freed the souls.” She wiped a few more tears away with the backs of her hands.
“What happens now, Elisabet?” Charlie asked quietly. “If you can’t leave, will you just stay here with the souls?”
“There’s no point,” Elisabet said bitterly. “It was supposed to be a temporary measure, and I was asleep, so I didn’t feel it. Now that I’m awake, I could do nothing but sit here alone, painfully aware of the passing days forever.”
“Well, you’ll have company for at least a little while,” Charlie said grimly, “because I can’t get out.”
“You’ll have to get that door open. If you open the door, we can free the souls.”
“I haven’t got a key, and if we free the souls, won’t you die?”
“I’m already dead,” Elisabet said quietly. “And by lingering here, I’m holding a thousand souls hostage. Break the jars and let them out. If you can open the door, I’ll step out and take them with me.” She sounded tired now and very sad.
“All right,” Charlie said at last. “I’ll break the jars. I don’t know how to open the door, but I’ll keep trying until I do.”
Grimly, Charlie took the remaining jars off the shelves and smashed them one at a time. When she couldn’t reach the jars on the higher shelves, she used a board that had fallen down during the quakes to push them off their shelves. The room was immediately a cacophony of shattering glass and low rumbling. She had to squint against the dust that was falling, and it was growing harder to keep her balance as the ground shook beneath her. The shaking of the mountain helped knock down more of the jars, but she had to cling to the wooden shelves to keep from falling into the piles of glass on the floor. Elisabet stood impassively by her coffin, not seeming to notice what was happening around her. When she had finished with the shelves, Charlie walked gingerly around the room, glad of her thick-soled boots, and poked through the glass with her sword to make sure no jar remained unbroken and no soul was left behind. She found her bag as she searched, but she was unwilling to dig around for her candle.
The souls were freed from the jars, but everyone was still trapped deep in the heart of the mountain. Charlie went to the door and considered the options she hadn’t tried yet. She had already failed to find a key, and she doubted she had the strength to kick in a metal-reinforced door, so that left picking the lock as her only option. She dug through her bag, looking for something that might work. Unfortunately, she had packed so lightly that she didn’t even have a hair pin or a sewing needle to try. The room gave a sudden shudder, and she was knocked off balance, falling onto the glass-covered floor. Wincing, she got to her feet again and tried to pick the glass slivers back out of her hand.
“I can’t see,” she told Elisabet. “All the lights are around you.”
Elisabet made a sweeping gesture with her arm in Charlie’s direc
tion, and a contingent of light orbs broke away from her and came to hover close to Charlie. “Can you open it?” she asked.
“No, have you got hairpins or something? Maybe holding your veil?”
Elisabet pulled the veil off and ran her hands through her curly blonde hair, feeling for pins. She held up two combs. “Will these work?”
“Maybe if we break them. Bring them here.”
Elisabet started to pick her way across the floor toward Charlie as the mountain gave another rumble and the room shook. A boulder the size of a sheep crashed into the floor, sending up a spray of glass fragments.
“I think the magic is breaking up,” Elisabet shouted over the din. “The room is going to collapse. Open the door!”
“I don’t have anything to open it with!” Charlie shouted back. She was feeling a bit peeved at being repeatedly ordered to open the door by someone who offered neither help nor advice in doing so.
“Hit it with your sword or something!”
Hitting the huge, metal-reinforced door with a sword was a ludicrous suggestion, but it gave Charlie an idea. Jordana’s sword sometimes worked as a key—she had opened the bridge across the water with it. Quickly, Charlie stood, drew the sword, and, struggling to keep her balance as the floor quaked, carefully inserted its tip into the lock. It took a few tries, but finally the lock turned. She sheathed the sword, grabbed her bag, and gestured to Elisabet to hurry.
The shaking was now constant, and more heavy rocks were crashing into the floor below. Elisabet dashed through the broken glass and falling rocks and joined Charlie at the door. They both seized the handle and pulled with all their strength, dragging it back against the rubble on the floor.
When they had it cracked open, Elisabet turned back to the room and repeated the inhalation gesture she had performed earlier, drawing all of the remaining light spheres inside herself. When she had finished, she grabbed Charlie’s wrist, and they both squeezed through the gap in the door.
* * *
They were standing on the side of the mountain, and it was dark, cool, and quiet outside. The mountain was still rumbling underneath them, but it seemed further away.
The Silver Key Page 21