Ewan wondered desperately what day it was. If it was the same day that he had set out, he could be in time with the answer when he returned to Jessamy. If it was the day after, then he had run over the time limit. He remembered the patch of night sky that he had seen before turning the signpost around. It had to be the next day. He must have been asleep for many, many hours.
But something inside him told him that it wasn’t the next day, that he still had time.
He stood up and stretched his limbs.
The grey mare was standing beside one of the four roads which led away into the forest—the one which led away toward the setting sun, and Caramorn. In the grass where he had lain were two things. One was a set of panpipes. The other was a candle in a glass casket. When he knelt to pick them up he saw, much to his surprise that the wick of the candle was still smouldering.
While he marvelled, he heard the sound of someone approaching. Coming from the east, walking beside the little stream, was a figure bent with age, cloaked and hooded, helping himself along with a long black staff which seemed to be carved out of ebony wood.
Ewan ran to the man’s side, and without bothering with any formula of greeting, said: “Tell me quickly please—what day is this?”
The bent figure unwound slightly, and the light penetrated the shadow within the hood just long enough for Ewan to catch the merest glimpse of two remarkable eyes.
“You are in time,” said the hooded man. Just that and no more.
Ewan did not pause but ran back to the mare and mounted her. He had turned her towards Jessamy an urged her into her shambling trot before it occurred to him that the answer he had received was really no answer at all. How could the old man possibly have known why he needed to know what day it was?
He looked back quickly, but the hooded figure was no longer to be seen. Ewan shook his head, wonderingly. He was angry at himself for having taken the answer at face value like that. He had simply accepted it, and trusted it, without a moment’s thought.
And yet, inside himself, he still felt that it was true. He would be in time.
“Even so,” he said, aloud, while he reached forward to pat the old grey mare on the neck, “remind me to ask my questions more carefully next time we meet a man with purple eyes.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
While Helen studied the letter her facial expression registered puzzlement and dismay. It said, simply:
My dearest Helen,
The words written upon the stone beneath the signpost at the heart of Methwold forest were: TURN THE SIGNPOST ROUND. My question, obviously, is: “And what are those engraved… on Faulhorn’s horn…in Mirasol’s haunted banquet hall?” I trust you will find this query simple enough, as I found mine. I look forward to hearing your answer in two days’ time.
Yours very sincerely, with all best wishes.
Damian, prince of Caramorn
“I just don’t believe it,” murmured Helen. “It’s a lie. He made it up.”
Tears came into her eyes, though she wasn’t quite sure why. Partly it was annoyance, but partly it was the knowledge that she had somehow missed the target badly, and that she was now enmeshed by the consequences of her actions.
She saw her father hurrying across the great hall, and she quickly folded up the letter and put it away.
“The most incredible thing…” he began, and then broke off. “Was that the letter from Prince Damian?”
“Yes,” she said, dully.
“May I see it?”
“Oh, no,” she said, hurriedly. “It contains his question. You’re bound to know the answer. I must find it myself.”
“I won’t tell you what it is.”
“You know perfectly well that you wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to drop hints,” she said, firmly. “I can’t let you see it.”
“Oh, well,” sighed the enchanter. “But this does mean, doesn’t it, that he answered your first question correctly?”
“Oh, yes,” said Helen, dryly. “He answered it.”
“I’m so glad. Everything is going very well, isn’t it? You know, I was almost afraid that you’d attempt to set a question that was virtually unanswerable. I’m glad you’re playing fair.”
Helen looked down at the floor, as if inspecting the carpet for stains.
“You will be able to answer the prince’s question, won’t you?” asked Sirion Hilversun. “It’s not too hard for you?”
She looked up at that, her eyes flaring as if she were about to lose her temper. But she only said, in a voice steeped in determination: “His question is no harder than mine. If Prince Damian can discover what I set him to find, then there’s no reason at all why I shouldn’t succeed just as well.”
“Oh, good!” said the enchanter. “Excellent!”
Helen managed a weak smile.
“What’s incredible?” she asked.
“Eh?”
“You came in just now and said that something was incredible.”
“Did I really?” The enchanter furrowed his brow, stroked his long beard, thinking hard. He took a pair of spectacles out of his sleeve, polished them, and put them on. Then he peered all around the room. No inspiration struck him.
“I wonder what it was?” he murmured. “Quite slipped my mind. I wonder if it’s something that’s already happened or something’s that’s just about to happen. What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” muttered Helen. “But don’t worry about it. It’ll be just as incredible when it occurs to you again, if not more so.”
She made as if to leave, but Sirion Hilversun said: “No, wait. It’ll come back. I was up on the battlements, pacing. I was looking out toward Methwold. Everything was just the same as usual…. I must have turned round half a dozen times. You know how it is when you’re preoccupied… you see what you expect to see, not what’s really there. But I finally noted that something wasn’t as it should be, that something unfamiliar had turned familiar….”
“The forest…” whispered Helen.
“That’s right,” said the enchanter, snapping his fingers. “The forest. It’s turned green. Incredible! The enchanted forest has simply been… disenchanted! I can’t remember anything like it ever happening again. Or before, for that matter. Where are you going?”
“Out for a walk,” said Helen, who was running towards the great staircase, intending to change her clothes immediately. “Maybe I’ll go over the hill and out towards Mirasol.”
“Oh, yes,” said the enchanter, absently. “Good idea.”
Meanwhile, in the library at the palace, while Ewan proceeded patiently with his task of cataloguing the books, Coronado was having his doubts.
“I admit that it was the obvious thing to do,” he said. “But where would politics be if we never looked beyond the obvious? I think that we should have found an easier question. Nothing too fancy, just something ingenious and clever. We do, when all’s said and done, want this marriage to take place.”
“I answered the first question,” pointed out Ewan. “It was pretty hairy there, for a while, but I did it. There’s nothing impossible about the rhyme. And, as you agreed yourself when you wrote the letter out, the girl has laid down a challenge and we should be prepared to meet it. If we break the pattern she may decide that Damian is a worthless specimen and set something really hard next time.”
“You have thought ahead, I suppose?” said Coronado sarcastically.
“About the lamia in the forbidden city? Certainly I have. And also about the gate at the edge of the world. I don’t say I’m not worried. But when things got to their worst in that forest last night… or tonight, perhaps, if I really did come back in time… someone or something helped me. There’s something very peculiar about that so-called will, and I can’t help being curious.”
“Curious enough to look up a lamia? Do you know what a lamia is?”
Ewan shrugged. “Supposedly a female vampire who may sometimes change into a snake.”
&nbs
p; “And that doesn’t worry you?” asked the prime minister.
“I always suspect that such legends and rumours are wildly exaggerated,” said Ewan. “As in the case of the forest, where men had disappeared and there were supposed to be trolls and evil spirits round every corner. It was just dark and rather nasty, that’s all. And even that turned out to be an illusion that collapsed when I did something very simple.”
“That may be very true,” said Coronado. “And it’s certainly brave. But if I were you, I wouldn’t bank on that theory. It’s never safe to mess about with the supernatural.”
Ewan shrugged again. “The supernatural is only the natural we don’t yet know much about,” he said. “It’s mostly to do with appearances, not with real things at all. Haven’t you ever seen a conjurer at work?”
This remark had a slight hint of insult about it, but Coronado diplomatically let it go.
“I told the king where you’d been and what you’d done,” mused Coronado. “He wasn’t very happy about it. I didn’t tell him about the rest of the verses. It didn’t seem to be the right time. Deep down, you know, I’m not at all sure that he wants this to go through. I almost think that he’d like to find a legitimate excuse to call it off. The battle of conscious desires and unconscious prejudices, you know.”
“I know,” said Ewan. “Only too well. My conscious desire tells me to get out of this now, and never mind the consequences. But there’s something inside me that won’t let it go. This is important. I think it’s one of those things that once you’re involved with it you can’t back out. Do you see what I mean?”
“Certainly. It’s like being prime minister of Caramorn. I have to save the kingdom, if only to protect my reputation. It’s difficult to get another job if the last one ended in total disaster. I don’t think I’m ready to retire yet, and the government couldn’t pay my pension anyway.”
“It’s a hard life,” commented Ewan, in a voice not overburdened with sympathy.
“It certainly is,” said the elder statesman, shuffling away towards the door. As he went into the corridor he was desperately trying to think of another way—preferably an easier one. It was nice, he thought, to be a man with power—a man steering his own course through life towards a self-selected destiny. But it took a great deal of effort to steer, and the sea of life seemed full of the most wicked rocks and reefs.
This kingdom, he thought, doesn’t deserve a man like me. And I certainly don’t deserve a kingdom like this. Why, oh why, couldn’t I have gone west years ago?
He realized that in his inmost thoughts he didn’t really believe that a marriage between Damian and Helen would ever take place, or that it could save the kingdom if it did.
“No good will come of it all,” he muttered beneath his breath. “No good at all. But when your back’s to the wall, you have to try, haven’t you?”
In the council chamber he found Alcover practising dealing cards from the bottom of a deck and Hallowbrand earnestly studying a cookery book in lieu of food.
“Where’s Bellegrande?” he asked.
“Set out for Heliopolis this morning,” grunted Alcover. “Said he was going to try to negotiate some foreign aid. If you ask me he’s trying to get a job as a translator or something.”
Coronado groaned as things began to seem even blacker.
It looked as though the rats were about to start leaving the sinking ship.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Unlike Moonmansion, which was only a fake, Castle Mirasol had a moat, and also a great wooden drawbridge to span it. The moat had long ago dried up, but it still represented a barrier. The drawbridge was up and could only be let down from the inside.
Helen sat down at the edge of the moat and looked up at the ivied grey walls, whose worn battlements loomed high above her. The day was sullen and overcast, with rainclouds gathering ominously overhead. It was not the kind of day one would normally choose for a pleasant walk—or, for that matter, a heroic adventure—but Helen had not had the opportunity to pick and choose.
She wore a heavy jacket, denim jeans and pair of sensible shoes, so she wasn’t unduly worried about the weather, but she was apprehensive lest her father should wonder why she had come out on such a day. He had ways of finding such things out. She was also worried about the problem of getting into Castle Mirasol. She wasn’t afraid. She knew the castle was haunted, but she was too familiar with ghosts to let that worry her. Her anxiety was simply caused by the practical difficulties of getting in.
Had she been possessed of a more powerful species of magic there would have been any number of ways of gaining ingress. But she hadn’t even sufficient power to motivate a broomstick—she had never wielded anything larger than an enchanted feather duster by the power of mind alone. She contemplated descending into the moat and attempting to climb the wall, but it was an awfully long way, and the slimed mud at the bottom of the moat smelled quite foul.
She sighed. “It will have to be cotton climbing, I suppose,” she muttered.
So saying, she took from her jacket pocket a reel of black cotton, a darning needle, a wooden peg and a large hairpin. She put the peg through the hole in the reel and stuck it firmly into the ground. She unwound a few inches of cotton and bit it off, then tied the new end of the cotton still on the reel to the eye of the darning needle. She opened up the hairpin and forced the halves back against the bend, then made a tiny bow out of it by tying on the detached piece of cotton very tightly. She tested the strength of the bow, then placed the darning needle on it, as if it were an arrow.
She closed her eyes, and muttered: “Bow bend, arrow fly, up and over, nice and high.” It was a very feeble spell, but it was one of the easiest in the book, and she had used it before.
The bow came alive in her hands, bent itself back, and then hurled the needle high into the air. The cotton
reel spun on the slender peg as the cotton unravelled, and a black line whipped up into the sky. The needle disappeared over the battlements, and within a couple of seconds the reel was still. Helen drew the cotton taut and fastened it to the head of the peg, murmuring: “Needle stick and stay secure, make my passage safe and sure.”
There was only one more conjuration needed, and she rattled it off: “Cotton black and strong as steel, bear me up on an even keel.” Then she began climbing.
She was a good climber, but it was a long way, and a piece of cotton, strong as steel or not, is by no means as easy to grip as a thick rope. It didn’t cut into her flesh as ordinary cotton would have cut into the flesh of someone without a modicum of magical protection, but it was difficult to manage. Had the spell not included a balancing clause she might never have made it.
Castle Mirasol looked forbidding from the outside, but when Helen peered down into the courtyard within, it seemed three or four times as bad. It was like looking down into a great black well. Although it was mid-afternoon the pale light of the glowering sky made little impression on the deep shadows which gathered inside the castle. They were shadows of incalculable age, which had enjoyed domination over the grey stone walls for a long, long time. It would take a strong light indeed to challenge them now. They were massive shadows, deep and solid, within which might lurk horrors unimaginable. Everything was quite still… but not quite silent. Far, far below—so far that it might emanate from the ultimate dungeons of the castle or the bowels of the Earth itself—there was a faint, uneasy sound of moaning.
The great hall, Helen knew, would be on the opposite side of the courtyard, its doors facing the drawbridge and the portcullis. But the only staircase descending from the ledge inside the battlements was on this side, zigzagging down the corner of the north-west tower. She would have to go down, passing through the shadows which hung batlike from the walls, and then walk diagonally across the open space, immersed in the gloomy miasma, to the entrance of the hall. What she would find inside it she didn’t know.
There was no point in hanging about. She walked to the head of the stair and began t
he descent.
There was no guard-rail on the stairway, and the steps were only two-and-a-half-feet wide. If she stumbled and chanced to fall over the edge she would plunge into the depths. She didn’t intend to fall.
But the steps were covered in dust—a dust that was not fine and grey and powdery but thick and clotted and rather slimy. It was not nice to walk on, and, what was worse, it wasn’t safe.
By the time she reached the tenth step, Helen was treading very carefully indeed, placing each leading foot so that the sole was using all the width of the step, in the middle of the span. As the murk gathered about her and the great dome of the sky became a crenellated square cut out by the battlements, she gradually became aware of things moving in the greasy grime—worms which wriggled beneath her heels, trying to get out of the way. The feeling was quite repulsive.
Every thirteen steps the stairway turned back on itself diagonally, so that she had to change direction. At every turn there was a flat ledge about six feet square. Where each of these ledges met the wall there were spider-webs three or four feet in diameter. Once or twice she saw the spiders lurking in crevices at the edges of the webs: vast black beings with bodies the size of fists and legs like great crippled fingers. The first time she caught sight of one she gasped—not so much in fear as in loathing— but not one of them moved. Even when, at the fifth turning, the edge of her foot brushed and stirred an unusually large web, the builder of the web remained quite still.
It occurred to her that the webs, like the stair itself, were of incalculable age. In centuries none had caught so much as a single fly. Even flies stayed clear of places such as this. The spiders were all dead. They had died at their stations.
Now, only their ghosts scuttled from shadow to shadow, dark and silent. But Helen saw no spider-ghosts. One never does see the ghosts of such creatures, which have a preference for living inside walls and stones and wooden things.
The square of grey sky slowly dwindled in size, and its light—never powerful—retreated further and further from the world which now surrounded Helen. When she reached the bottom of the staircase it was very dark indeed. She took from her pocket a box of matches and struck one on the sandpaper side of the box. She shut her eyes and muttered a swift spell: “Match burn bright and match burn long, guide me well and I won’t go wrong.” Then she set off across the open space.
The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World Page 6