by Frewin Jones
Eden’s eyes opened, their intense blue like sapphires between the snow-white curtains of her hair. “It is almost done,” she said.
“Do you want to let me in on exactly what’s going to happen?” Tania said. All she knew was that the Altier Glamour would make it possible for them to move among the Gray Knights without suspicion.
“We will be transformed into small animals,” Eden said, her eyes fixed on Tania. “It will feel…strange…”
Tania’s eyes widened. “Animals?” she echoed. “What kind of animals?”
“Rats.”
“Oh.”
“I can do this thing alone if needs be,” Eden said.
“No, no. I said I’d help and I will,” Tania said. “Will we be able to talk to each other…afterward?”
“Indeed we will.”
“Okay, then.” Tania swallowed hard. “Go for it.”
Eden lowered her head and the white hair swept across her face. Tania heard her speaking in a lilting fashion, as though reciting a lullaby to a child. She didn’t understand any of the words. Then Eden spoke one word three times:
“Vasistabel! Vasistabel! Vasistabel!”
Tania let out a gasp. Something was happening. A hollow cavern yawned in the middle of her body, a sensation that was like cresting the highest peak of a roller coaster and tipping downward into a stomach-churning plunge. She doubled over, a screaming wind rushing through her brain. She had the impression of falling and of her clothes exploding outward from her in all directions. It was as if her skin was becoming the wrong shape and size for her body. She could feel hair spinning out from her flesh, her eyes bulging from their sockets, the whole of the bottom half of her face pushing hard against her lips, stretching them, tearing the upper lip in two as her teeth grew long and sharp. Her fingers grew, her nails extending and curling into claws. Her legs bent up under her, the knees pressing to her flanks, her feet becoming narrow and spindle-boned. Her heart raced.
And then everything stopped. She was crouched in darkness with a heavy weight lying over her. She lifted her head and sniffed. Her whiskers twitched. She could smell human being all around her, powerful and instantly recognizable: the scent of herself.
She suddenly realized what was covering her. Her own clothes. She began to burrow through the creases and folds of her jeans, scuttling down tunnels and conduits of cloth, seeking a way out. It wasn’t just her own scent that filled her head as she ran through the maze of her clothing; there were many, many other smells, and somehow she knew and recognized each of them: detergent, car exhaust fumes, a scent of Edric, the dankness of the corridors far below the palace….
At last, a white glow appeared ahead of her and she came out into bright light. She ran along an uneven surface and sprang onto a joist.
A brown rat stood on its haunches on the next joist along, whiskers quivering, black eyes bright as berries.
“Eden?”
“Indeed,” said the rat. “How do you fare?”
Tania blinked. “I feel very peculiar. It’s so bright in here.”
“You have a rat’s eyes now, Tania.”
“I didn’t expect to lose all my clothes.”
The Eden rat gave a gentle laugh. “You thought we would roam the palace clad in tiny garments?” she asked. “That were the way to go unnoticed, indeed!”
Tania looked down at herself. Her light brown fur was sleek and smooth, and long claws grew out of her paws. When she flexed muscles she had not possessed before, her naked tail whipped from side to side.
“Are you recovered from the transformation?” Eden asked.
Tania nodded. “Kind of.”
“Follow me, then, little sister, and be wary—we are going into great peril.”
Eden led her in a scuttling run along a joist. They squeezed through a crack that Tania would not have believed would take them; she was finding her rat body amazingly flexible. They climbed headfirst down the inside of a wall, claws gripping on every ledge and ridge to stop them from falling. On the other side of the wall, Tania could clearly hear the noise of the Gray Knights at their revels.
Other sounds came to her sensitive ears: she could hear the scampering of spiders and roaches in the wall cavity, the creak and groan of the timbers. She could hear every sound that Eden made. And yet the quality of the sounds was quite different—there were no deep noises, and the air seemed to be filled with high-pitched squeakings and shrillings.
They reached the level of the floor of the Great Hall and pushed their way along a narrow channel that led between cold stone and rough woodwork. They were in utter darkness, and yet Tania was vividly aware of her surroundings, her whiskers and ears and nose and paws feeding her more information than her human eyes ever could have done. Ahead of them, she saw that a ragged hole had been gnawed at the foot of the woodwork. Bluish light flickered beyond.
Eden turned her long head and the blue light burned in her round black eyes. “Stay close to me,” she warned. “We enter now into the very heart of evil.”
With a flick of her long tail, she slipped through the hole. Tania sat on her haunches for a moment, her forepaws rubbing fretfully together, her heart running fast in her narrow chest. Sudden images of her mortal home filled her mind, pictures of her old life in London; thoughts of her Mum and Dad, whom she loved so much. What if something went wrong? What if she and Eden were discovered and killed? Her parents would never know the truth of what had happened to her. They would come home from their holiday to a wrecked house and a daughter who wouldn’t ever return to them. It would totally destroy them.
She wished fleetingly that she had told them everything about herself and that their last few weeks together hadn’t been clouded by secrets and lies. At least then if they never saw her again, they might be able to believe she was safe and happy in another world.
If they could ever have believed such a crazy story.
Don’t think things like that! Just don’t!
Tania got a grip on herself, pushing her bad thoughts away. Taking a deep breath, she followed Eden through the hole.
An endless expanse of wooden flooring stretched out in front of her. She sat back on her haunches, overwhelmed. The legs of chairs and tables soared higher than the tallest tree. The people in the hall were colossal, their voices like thunder, their movements huge as an arm swept the air far above her head or a massive leg went surging by, the booted foot as huge as a moving hill, shaking the boards.
She realized that she couldn’t see red at all. The flames of the torches that lined the walls had a fierce, hard white heart, sheathed in a flare of luminous violet. The shapes that filled the world in front of her eyes were in shades of blue and gray and dull yellows and greens.
And the smells! A thousand different scents assaulted her nose. Wood. Brick. Plaster. Stone. Cooked meat. Bones. Sweat. Blood. Rotting fruit and vegetables. A horrible, pervasive stench of something worse than dead. And a powerful stink that threatened terrible danger, a stink Tania instinctively knew to be that of dogs.
She stared nervously around the Hall. Yes! It was dogs! Fortunately, there were none close by, but she could see them roaming on the far side of the dizzying stretch of floor: great black dogs with lean flanks bunched with muscle, short-haired with blunt muzzles and small evil eyes. Some of them sprawled at ease beneath the long benches, waiting for scraps to be thrown from the tables. Others roamed the floor, snuffling through the filth, fighting over discarded food or gnawing bones.
“Morrigan hounds!” Eden hissed. “Be vigilant, Tania. I know of these beasts. They are fearsome creatures.”
“Will they be able to smell us?”
“The glamour should mask our scent,” Eden said. “But I know why these half-demon hounds are here. They were bred with but a single purpose: to scent out black amber. The Sorcerer King means to use them to hunt down the mine of Tasha Dhul.”
Tania knew about Tasha Dhul; it was the hidden black amber mine, the only source of that precious miner
al in the whole of Faerie. Black amber was the only protection against Isenmort—against metal—and it was the Sorcerer King’s intention to equip an army with black amber jewels and send them into the Mortal World to conquer and destroy.
“Come,” Eden said. “We must keep to cover or we will be seen and crushed underfoot.”
“I’m right behind you,” Tania said.
Eden scuttled off, keeping tight to the wall until they came under a table. There they paused, hidden in shadowy shelter. Gradually, Tania found herself growing accustomed to her surroundings. The noise and the smells and the sheer size of everything was no less alarming, but as she peered out from under the table, she began to be able to make sense of it all. And the things she saw were worse than her darkest nightmares.
The glorious Faerie tapestries had been torn from the walls, and ugly emblems had been daubed on the white plaster: swaths of red and crude representations of coiled or striking serpents. A smell of blood hung in the air like a foul gas. The Gray Knights of Lyonesse sat at tables laden with food and drink; debris from the meal was scattered on the floor—bones and hunks of gnawed meat, spatters of food lying in the accumulated filth, trodden underfoot, snatched up by the roving dogs—all foul and stinking.
Tania’s stomach twisted in disgust when she saw the food that filled the tables. Impaled on a wooden spike on one long platter of roast meat was the head of a unicorn. She pictured the delicate little unicorn that she had met in Cordelia’s menagerie. The beautiful violet eyes were dead now, the soft pale blue mane clogged and tangled with blood. And there were other things on the tables—the butchered remains of more of Cordelia’s animals.
But worse was to come. On the far wall, briefly revealed when the crowds shifted, Tania saw rows of Faerie folk chained in bonds of Isenmort. Their moans were drowned in the noise, their strength all but gone so that they could do little more than hang from their fetters while the poisonous bite of Isenmort burned into their flesh. Some were ominously still, their legs bent under them, heads drooping.
And there were more Faerie folk in the hall, unchained but prisoners nonetheless. Dull-eyed and bruised and dressed in the ragged remains of their once-fine clothes, they moved among the tables, waiting on the reveling knights of Lyonesse—spat at and reviled and struck for no reason as, with dragging feet, they carried jugs and trays and bowls of food to their tormenters.
At the far end of the hall, on the raised dais where the thrones of Oberon and Titania still stood, a figure watched over the feast with hooded eyes.
Tania didn’t need to be told that this was the Sorcerer King. He sat leaning to one side, his long, narrow chin propped on one hand, his elbow on the arm of the throne. A dark red cloak with a dull leathery sheen swathed his lean body. His limbs were long and spidery, his face skull-gaunt with cavernous eyes and hollow cheekbones framed by thin gray hair that hung past his shoulders.
Another figure sat at his side, wearing a gown of what looked to Tania’s rat eyes like dark blue velvet—although Tania recognized the gown and knew that it was actually a vivid scarlet. An agony of grief filled her mind and her small body trembled with shock as she found herself staring into the pale, expressionless face of her sister Rathina. The princess sat stiffly in the Queen’s throne, her hands gripping the arms and her back straight, her long black hair disheveled around her blankly staring face.
“Such treachery!” Eden hissed, crouched at Tania’s side. “Such wickedness. How could she do us such harm, how could she?”
Tania’s throat was too tight for speech. What had happened to Rathina to bring her to this point? She had known that Rathina hated her, that she blamed her for Gabriel Drake’s banishment. But to think that Rathina’s hatred had grown until it had led her to help in the destruction of her entire family and of the whole Realm of Faerie—that was beyond Tania’s understanding.
“I have to get out of here,” she said, feeling sick. She turned to Eden. “Are you close enough to read his thoughts or whatever you were going to do?”
Eden sat huddled in a shivering ball, her long nose toward the Sorcerer King, her eyes intense, her whiskers swiveling. A long time seemed to pass, then the rat’s head dropped and the eyes turned to Tania.
“Alas!” said Eden. “I cannot penetrate his mind.”
“What about one of the others?” Tania asked. “Can you try it on them?”
“They have no thoughts. Their minds are dead. They have only the need to obey their master.”
“So what do we do now?”
Eden’s black rat eyes gleamed at her. “I do not know.”
Tania stared across to where Rathina and the evil King sat. Eden had failed. This had all been a waste of time.
As she watched a Faerie woman in a ragged gown stepped onto the dais, carrying a tray of food bowls and goblets. She offered the tray to Rathina, but the princess waved a dismissive white hand. The woman held up the tray to the King. His eyes turned to her and the woman became stiff, the tray clattering to the floor. The King lifted his hand and the woman rose into the air. Despite the clamor of the hall, Tania was able to hear the King’s voice with perfect clarity.
“Would you dance for us?” he asked, his voice as cold as ice under a waning moon. “Would you show us some pretty steps, my lady?”
The woman turned slowly in the air and, with a shock of horror, Tania realized who she was. It was the beautiful and gentle Lady Gaidheal.
The lady’s face was ashen and drawn with despair, her eyes lifeless as she hung there at the Sorcerer King’s will. The faces of many of the Gray Knights were turning toward the dais, their eyes burning with sinister joy.
“Mayhap wings will aid you with your dance,” the Sorcerer King said. He made a curling gesture with his left hand. Lady Gaidheal screamed in pain, her back arching, her limbs flailing. Tania could hardly bear to watch as something dark red and sharp-edged came bursting from the woman’s back, stabbing out like spindly fingers of bone, webbed with veined leather the color of dried blood.
They were wings: hideous, dark red bat wings, torn out of her body in some monstrous parody of the iridescent gossamer wings that grew from the shoulders of Faerie children.
The lady writhed in agony for a few moments as the horrible wings expanded and flapped, then she fell heavily to the floor with a single stifled groan. There was a howl of dark joy from the Gray Knights. The red wings shrouded the unmoving form. Blood spread slowly over the floorboards.
“She likes not her wings,” the Sorcerer King said impassively. “This is poor sport indeed. If the birds cannot fly, then we shall build pretty cages for them and they will sing their hearts out for us.”
He stood up, the cloak spreading open to reveal dully gleaming crimson mail. It was only now that Tania realized how very tall he was, far taller than any of the other knights. He stepped to the edge of the dais and opened his arms. He began to chant words in a language that fell like splinters of ice into Tania’s ears. She shivered, feeling a strange stirring in the air.
Flecks of darkness floated from the corners of the hall, coming together and spinning slowly in a heavy column of dancing black light. Tania heard a sound that was like claws scraping at the inside of her skull. She brought her rat paws to her ears, trying to block out the noise. A disturbing new smell filled her head—dangerous and sharp and as toxic as poison. As she watched the jerking dance of the black light began to change, to shift into patterns like a dark grid work that was forming from the shivering air. A kind of moan came from the watching knights, a low guttural sound of pleasure and approval.
The black lines wove together and became firmer and harder until Tania realized that she was staring up at a large iron cage that hung unsupported in the air. Blue-gray threads spun upward from the cage, forming a linked metal chain that wound over the roof beams. The Sorcerer King lowered his arms. The cage dropped slightly, the chains rattling and vibrating as they took the weight.
A howl of appreciation came from the throats of
the Gray Knights—some clashed sword hilts on the tables and stamped their feet, others pounded the tables with their fists until the platters and cups jumped while the baying of the Morrigan hounds added to the cacophony.
“It’s metal.” Tania gasped, staring at the cage. “How did he do that?”
“Only he has the power to draw Isenmort from the Mortal World and bend it to his will,” Eden said, and her voice was shaking. “What devilry does he intend?”
“Fetch the pretty birds!” the Sorcerer King called. “I would hear their sweet music.”
A small group of Gray Knights left the Hall. The others began to shout and chant, their fists beating rhythmically on the tables.
They did not have to wait long for their entertainment. A group of Faerie folk were herded in through the door. Tania could see the pain and despair etched in their faces. More knights rose from the tables and the Faeries were hurled bodily into the cage. As the Isenmort burned them their screams rose above the raucous laughter of the knights.
“Oh! Horrible! Horrible!” Eden whispered, turning away. But Tania forced herself to watch; hard as it was for her not to cover her eyes, someone had to bear witness to this cruelty.
After all the prisoners had been crammed into the cage, the iron door swung closed with a brutal clang. The Sorcerer King raised an arm and the cage went winding into the air on its long chains. The agonized cries of the trapped Faeries filled Tania’s head. Adults tried to lift their children, to protect them from the burn of the Isenmort bars, but it was impossible for them to stay upright as the cage swayed. Numb with horror, Tania recognized the oarsman who had rowed her and Zara to the Royal Galleon on the night of the Traveler’s Moon festival. She saw a gardener she had spoken with once, a woman who had been attending red flowers while white butterflies danced around her head.
Tania turned to look at Rathina. The princess had lowered her head, averting her eyes from the horrors. But the Sorcerer King came to her throne in two long strides. He caught her chin in his hand, forcing her head up so that her dark eyes were fixed on the swaying cage. There was no change of expression on Rathina’s pale face as she was forced to look at the torture of her people. How could she bear to see such suffering? It was as if their agony meant nothing to her.