by V M Jones
The king turned his head a fraction in the direction of the Keeper, standing motionless at his shoulder. ‘Can this be so?’
The Keeper’s reply was muffled behind his mask. He stepped forward and plucked Tiger Lily off me, though she dug her claws in and hung on as tight as she could.
His eyes glittering, King Karazeel gestured towards Kenta, Rich and Jamie, standing by with their mouths open. The Keeper held Tiger Lily out towards them one by one. She hung purring in his hands, placid and relaxed, blinking sleepily at them with blissful golden eyes.
‘You see, my lord king, it is as I supposed. I fear your Mauler has become tame. Observe …’ Evor sidled forward, one hand outstretched towards the little cat. Instantly her ears flattened against her head, her mouth widened into a snarl, and a paw lashed out, claws extended.
Evor leapt back with astonishing speed and agility — but not fast enough. Four deep scratches appeared on his shrivelled hand, oozing purplish blood.
‘Hmmm.’ King Karazeel didn’t seem too displeased by the turn of events. Slowly, very cautiously, he extended one hand in the direction of Tiger Lily himself. The Keeper, clearly alarmed for the king’s safety and his own skin, took a rapid step back — but a glance from the king stopped him. Instead, the leather gauntlets tightened on Tiger Lily’s sides. Her golden eyes, fixed on the king, narrowed dangerously, and she gave a low, warning growl. The king stepped back and smiled at Evor — but it was a smile without humour.
‘So. It seems you know less than you would have me believe, Evor. I will think on this, and draw my own conclusions. Guard — take the prisoners below. Their skins have been saved — for the moment. Saved —’ and again the cruel lips curved into a thin smile — ‘by the grace of the Mauler.’
The guard bundled us back down the spiral staircase and into our cell. He removed our shackles and slammed the heavy gate, locking it securely. Then he replaced the key on its empty hook on the rack above the guards’ table, made a mark on the slate, and disappeared the way we’d come, the portcullises rattling down behind him.
Absolute silence settled on the dungeon. I looked round at the faces of the others — only three of them now. They were grey in the gloom, and bleak with despair.
For what seemed a long time, no one spoke.
And then the silence was broken by a voice from the next cell, where a pale shadow like a ghost had crept up to the bars and was peeping through, unnoticed. ‘Adam,’ it said reproachfully, ‘why did you take so long to rescue me?’
We were all huddled up to the bars between the cells, holding a whispered council of war. ‘So you see, Hannah,’ I was explaining, ‘I haven’t rescued you — not yet, anyway. It isn’t that simple. I wish it was.’ I was trying to put a positive spin on things for her, but there didn’t seem to be one. ‘You see, even though we’ve got the microcomputer, we can’t leave without Gen.’
‘But where is Gen?’
‘That’s the problem: we don’t know. She could be anywhere. She’s been taken away by King Karazeel’s soldiers, to be made into a kind of servant.’
‘Gen won’t want to work for him,’ Hannah said matter-of-factly. ‘He pretends to be nice, but he’s not. He looks young and handsome, like a prince in a fairy tale, but he smells like an old person. A nasty old person.’ She was right. That was the smell I’d been battling to place — the musty, oniony odour of unhealthy old age. ‘You’ll have to rescue her as well, Adam.’
‘Yeah, but Hannah, it’s not that easy. Blue-bum, for goodness sake stop doing that! You’re making me feel dizzy!’ Weevil was the only one who seemed remotely cheerful. He’d been hunkered down on his haunches listening intently to the discussion … and then at the first mention of Gen he’d started twirling round on his blue bum like a spinning-top. ‘What the heck’s the matter with you?’
‘We had a dog that used to scoot along on the grass to scratch his bum,’ Jamie said. ‘It was so embarrassing. The vet said he had impacted anal glands, whatever they are. Maybe that’s the problem with him.’
Weevil did a little capering dance of frustration, and chittered up at Jamie crossly. Then he sat down again, spun round three times, and looked up at us expectantly.
‘I think he’s trying to tell us something,’ Hannah said thoughtfully.
‘Shhhh!’ hissed Rich. ‘Someone’s coming! Weevil — back in the bag! Quick, everybody — lie down and pretend to be asleep!’
There was the distant rattle of gates opening, and the sound of footsteps. A pause, then the squeal of a key in a lock, and the creak of hinges from the empty cell on the far side of ours. ‘In with you!’ It was the gruff growl of the Captain of the Guard. ‘Here’s food and water — and stay away from the vermin in the next cell if you know what’s good for you.’
The footsteps moved to the guard station. A chair grated back on the stone floor and a heavy body settled itself with a creak and a grunt. Then there was silence, apart from the rustle of parchment and the scratching sound of a quill, and an occasional grumbling mutter.
I opened my eyes a crack. The Captain was at the table, the lantern beside him, writing laboriously in a thick leather-bound book. Who was the new prisoner? Could it be Gen? My heart thumping with wild hope, I turned my head a fraction and peered into the gloom of the neighbouring cell.
Unlike ours, it was furnished — if you could call a rickety table and chair and a narrow bed with a threadbare blanket folded at its foot ‘furniture’. I squinted through my eyelashes — and then my eyes popped wide open with shock. The prisoner wasn’t Gen. It was the Mauler’s Keeper.
He was standing at the table with his back to us, still in his cream satin get-up, pulling off his gauntlets. And perched on the table beside him was Tiger Lily, daintily lapping something out of a richly engraved metal bowl. My head spinning, I battled to make sense of it.
Had he been thrown in prison because Tiger Lily had been so friendly to us? But then why all that stuff about ‘saved by the grace of the Mauler?’ Unless King Karazeel had thought on it like he’d said, and the conclusions were bad news for Tiger Lily and the Keeper. But then surely he’d be wailing and flinging himself against the bars? But he wasn’t. He was lifting off his heavy mask, cool as a cucumber, and putting it on the table … running both hands through his sweaty brown hair with the air of someone just home from a hard morning at the office … and settling calmly down to lunch.
Still with his back to us, he perched on the stool, gave Tiger Lily a scratch behind her ear, and tore a hunk off his loaf of bread. I watched, still totally bamboozled, my mouth watering. There was a wedge of cheese on the plate too; I could see it clearly. I could smell it. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
The Keeper fumbled at the gold-embroidered edge of his tunic pocket and dug inside. Pulled something out and fiddled with it for a moment. There was a bright flash of steel. He sliced neatly into the cheese, once … twice … three … four times. My stomach growled. Then he put the knife down on the edge of the table — and my heart turned a slow, sickening somersault.
It wasn’t the rough, bone-handled dagger I’d imagined. It was a smooth, gleaming, bright red pocketknife … with a white cross clearly visible on the casing.
It was the Swiss army knife I’d given Kai.
Dimly aware of the sounds of the guard leaving, I stared at the knife in numb disbelief, my mind racing. Kai would never have parted with it. I remembered the look on his face when I’d given it to him as if it was yesterday — I’d never forget it.
Friends forever, we’d said.
Now, the Keeper had it. And that confirmed what I already knew. Kai was dead.
As the last echoes of the guard’s departure died away, the Keeper skewered the tidy pile of cheese slices on the end of Kai’s knife, stood, and stretched. Then he turned and ambled towards the partition between our cells, his thatch of brown hair sticking up in an untidy cow’s lick.
‘Friends forever,’ he said with a grin. ‘Who’s for some cheese?’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Rich for what seemed like the zillionth time.
Kai grinned at him through the bars. ‘A master of the Force-back fob you may be, Rich, but you sure ain’t got a heavy head.’ We were all clustered on the other side of our cell — the side adjoining Kai’s. He’d shared his lunch between us, even giving a morsel of cheese and a crust of bread to Weevil, who was munching away at it so hungrily he’d completely forgotten about his spinning-top act.
Hannah was curled up on Kai’s blanket in her cell with Tiger Lily snuggled under her chin, watching and listening.
‘They came for me two sunsets after I met you,’ Kai was telling us in a low voice. The dimple had disappeared. ‘I woke to find them bending over me — the Faceless. I remember the stench of them … the chill of their shadows. Then nothing more, until the morn.
‘I came to my senses in the back of a wagon, under guard, bound, gagged and blindfolded — headed for Shakesh, torture and certain death. I could not see or speak — but I could hear. And hear I did.
‘I heard the guards tell of a mystical creature that had appeared by magic on the upper levels of the temple, and used its powers to uncover and overcome a traitor to the king. I —’
‘Do you mean Tiger Lily?’ blurted Rich. ‘It wasn’t a traitor to the king we — I mean she — duffed up, it was one of those curator guys — the white one.’ Then, remembering he wasn’t supposed to know all this, he flushed.
Kai shot me the ghost of a wink that told me he knew — or suspected — a lot more than he was letting on. ‘Aye, I do mean Fang — the Mauler — she you call Tiger Lily. It seems the Curator was selling the Potion of Invisibility in secret, for his own profit. It was to procure phials of potion to sell under cover of darkness that he crept to the upper level of the temple — forbidden even to the Curators at that hour — just before the noon closing.
‘The Curator was in the wagon with me, though I did not know it then. As was Fang — and she I could hear, hissing and growling at all who approached her makeshift cage. Then the jolting of the cart on the rutted road dislodged the fastening, the door sprang open, and Fang escaped. In seconds she was gone — into the upper branches of a tall tree, from whence even the bravest of the guards could not recover her. At last they hit upon a plan — to send the prisoner, who had no choice in the matter.’ He grinned. ‘I have always been good at climbing. All too soon I reached her and held out a trembling hand … and she gave a grumbling growl and rubbed her silken head against it. And I carried her down, tame as a glonk.
‘We reached Shakesh, and I was cast into the dungeons. As for Fang — she became an instant favourite of the king. He kept her in a gilded cage beside his throne and tempted her with sweetmeats, hoping to make a pet of her. But they say she was as one possessed — pacing the confines of her cage with burning eyes, refusing to sleep or eat. Within days she had faded to a shadow of skin and bone, death staring from her sunken eyes. King Karazeel ordered his sorcerer to find a way to save her, or his own head would roll. And it was only then that Evor hearkened to the whispers of the guards: tales of the one who had gentled the Mauler … and now festered in the depths of the dungeons.
‘And that is how I became the Keeper: part captive, part courtier … and one in whom the king’s trust grows with every sun that rises.’
‘But Kai — he’s evil! Surely you aren’t … on his side, now?’
‘On the side of King Karazeel, Kenta?’ Kai’s face was grim, and though we knew the dungeon was deserted, he lowered his voice. ‘Never. I am sworn to the Believers — the secret army that grows daily in the shadow of the evil reign of Karazeel, awaiting the return of the True King.’
‘Zephyr?’ breathed Jamie.
‘Aye, Zephyr — the Lost Prince of the Wind. The time of the prophecy draws nigh … and Karazeel knows it. Even now, he is building a new fortress in the west, in the shadows of Dark Face: The Stronghold of Arraz. They say it will be mightier even than Shakesh, and that none — not even the True King — will be able to storm it.
‘But if I can gain the trust of Karazeel, maybe I will be able to work towards his downfall from within those walls when the time comes.
‘My friends, I believe it was not by chance that I was captured by the Faceless and brought to Shakesh. There be patterns in the tapestries of destiny, yet those caught in the weave find the patterns hard to see.’
I felt a strange thrill at Kai’s words. I’d heard them somewhere before … but where?
‘So you’re planning to win the trust of King Karazeel, and kick him in the teeth if you get the chance? Wicked, Kai — way to go!’ Rich’s eyes gleamed.
‘Yeah, that’s great,’ said Jamie bleakly. ‘But, at the risk of sounding selfish, it doesn’t help us much. We’ve found Hannah, but she’s locked in a separate cell with bars as thick as my arm, too close together for anyone except Tiger Lily to squeeze through. We’ve found Tiger Lily, but if we took her home — not that there’s any chance of that — your head would be on the block. One of us has been changed into a chatterbot, and it doesn’t show any signs of wearing off. And Gen —’ he gulped — ‘Gen’s going to have her tongue cut out and be made into a slave. As for the rest of us: we’ve been saved for now … but who knows how long it’ll last?’
Right on cue came the echoing clang of the portcullis. We moved hurriedly away from the bars and huddled by the back wall, exchanging uneasy glances. But we needn’t have worried. At the sight of the small procession entering the dim dungeon, every face broke into a broad grin of sheer disbelief.
At the head of the column strode the Captain of the Guard, and behind him marched three page boys, each carrying a laden tray. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I was dreaming … but the rich aromas escaping from the silver covers and tickling our nostrils were unmistakably real.
The Captain unlocked our door; the pages filed in and set the trays down on the floor. The four of us sat there gawking. Were we hallucinating … or had the king really decided to hand-deliver us a four-course gourmet banquet — courtesy of the Mauler?
The Captain gave us a rather nasty grin, slammed the cell door behind the retreating backs of the serving boys, and locked it. ‘His Excellency High King Karazeel of Karazan has toyed with you enough,’ he snarled. ‘He bids you enjoy the Feast of Karazeel. I will return within the hour to collect —’ that strange smile again — ‘the remains.’
With that, he turned on his heel, hung the key on its hook and left.
Jamie and Rich were over at the trays in a flash. ‘Hey, Adam, check this out!’ squeaked Jamie, lifting one of the silver domes. ‘A whole roast chicken — and roast potatoes! Real crunchy ones, too!’
‘And this tray’s full of desserts — steamed syrup pudding, and chocolate eclair-type things — raspberry buns — and what looks like pecan pie!’
After a second’s hesitation Kenta had joined them, and was lifting the lids of the last two salvers. ‘Fruit — fresh fruit! And crusty rolls, still warm — with butter and honey!’
Before I could stop him, Jamie reached out and grabbed one of the roast potatoes. He was right, it did look crispy … and it sounded crispy too, as he bit into it with a crunch that echoed round the walls of the dungeon.
‘Hang on, Jamie!’ I squawked. ‘I don’t think we should …’
I looked over at Kai for support. Their hands full of food, Jamie’s cheeks bulging, the others followed my gaze.
We all froze.
Kai’s face was grey, and he was clutching the bars as if he was about to fall.
‘What is it?’ I was first to speak. ‘Kai — the food — is it …’
‘Poisoned?’ breathed Kenta.
Jamie spat out a huge glob of half-chewed potato.
But Kai shook his head wordlessly.
‘What then?’ Rich’s voice was rough in the silence. ‘What is it?’
At last Kai spoke, with a terrible gentleness. ‘The food is
safe to eat, my friends. Enjoy it … if you can. For you have been sent the Feast of Karazeel — the Feast of the Damned.’
A spinning top
‘How long do we have?’ My voice sounded oddly calm and matter-of-fact.
‘Not long. An hour at best.’
‘So we have an hour to get out of here. Or else … there is no or else.’
Suddenly, the platters of food might not have existed. Instead, we stared hopelessly at the thick iron bars, the stout locks, the rack of keys that might as well have been on the moon. The seamless stone walls; the roof above us, invisible in the shadows. Two portcullises lay between us and the stairways to the rest of the castle. There was no escape. Except …
‘The only missing piece is Gen. We’ve found Hannah and Tiger Lily. Even Kai. If Gen was here we’d be done and dusted and on our way home. Blue-bum, will you stop twirling and keep quiet!’
But Kai was staring at Weevil with a strange look on his face. ‘Adam,’ he said, ‘have you used it yet?’
‘Used what?’
Kenta’s face lit up, and she clutched my arm so tightly it hurt. ‘Of course — of course! How could I have been so stupid! It’s been right under our noses — I should have realised!’
‘Realised what?’ growled Rich impatiently.
‘Weevil’s a chatterbot! And I actually said it in Chattering Wood …’
Suddenly I understood what Kenta was on about — and like her, I could have kicked myself. I could hear her words clearly in my mind: ‘In the game, they were cute little furry things — if you caught one, it could give you a wish.’
We stood in a circle round Weevil, who was squatting on his bright blue haunches on the cold stone floor. ‘I still think we should wish for a million more wishes …’ said Jamie wistfully.