Red Palace

by Sarah Dalton

  I wipe away the sweat on my forehead with the sleeve of my tunic. “But what if I’m wrong? I’m not sure now.”

  “Go through the options logically,” Sasha suggests.

  My eyes follow the two lines of sarcophagi. There are too many kings. What if I am missing something? I cannot think of any more quakes or landslides or anything relating to soil that would have impacted a king’s rule. All I can think about is that avalanche in the Benothian ranges, the one that killed hundreds of Aldrych’s men.

  “I wish Father was here,” I whisper, not realising I had said it out loud. My cheeks burn as I look sideways at Sasha.

  “You can do this alone, Mae. You have a gut instinct that you can trust. You are the craft-born. You’re magical. You should trust yourself,” she says.

  “I’m not alone,” I reply. “Not when you’re here. Although, it would have been nice if you could have fought those dogs.”

  She grins. “Sorry. But look how well you did. Mae, you know in your gut that the answer is Aldrych. Do it.”

  I shake my head and stride over to the last sarcophagus, the one nearest the far wall. “That’s easy for you to say, you can’t get your throat ripped out by a mechanical guard dog.”

  Before I press the hilt, I run my hand over the smooth marble. This is the newest addition to the crypt. Our current king’s father. A shudder passes through me as I think of his body just inches away from my hand. It has to be him. It has to be.

  I close my eyes as I press down on the sword, praying to anyone and anything, any God that might want to listen, that I am choosing the correct answer. The familiar scraping of stone against stone breaks the silence in the crypt. When the sound stops, Sasha gasps.

  “Mae, you have to see this.”

  I open my eyes and turn. The crypt wall has opened up to reveal the secret room. At last. I run my fingers through my hair and let out a relieved laugh.

  “We were right! We found it. We passed all the tests and we found it,” I say, breathless with excitement.

  But I need to curb my excitement, because we don’t yet know what we have found. Sasha motions for me to go first. I retrieve a torch from the wall and step through the doorway into the room.

  The first sight that hits you is the huge, cylindrical machine towering up several floors. It sits atop a great furnace in the middle of the room. All around the walls of the room runs a circular bench covered in test tubes and paraphernalia I’ve never seen before.

  “This is all very strange.” Sasha almost floats around the room, taking in the many bottles of potions, salts, rocks and stones laid out on the bench. “Mae, come take a look at this.” Her voice is quick and breathy enough to make me hurry to her side. Once there, she points out a number of tiny black stones.

  “What are these?” I lift one between finger and thumb to examine it. The dim light of the lantern, and the light from the one tiny window high up on the wall, bounces off the many facets of the stone. “I think this is a diamond.”

  “But it’s black,” she says. “Diamonds are transparent.”

  I’ve never seen a diamond in my life. I hide my embarrassment by snapping. “Well, it’s some sort of jewel.”

  Sasha ignores my tone and leans towards the gem, squinting. “No, I think you were right. I remember when there were rumours going through the realm. We were ransacking a village outside Fordrencan. In the tavern, before we ambushed a couple of noblemen, there was talk of the King’s debts. Someone said he’d been trying to make diamonds without the craft. Your magic doesn’t just filter down to the amulets used by the Borgans, it can be harnessed by the Red Palace—”

  “Yes,” I say. “Beardsley told me all about that. He said that he built the machines to run from the energy my magic creates. But how does it make diamonds?”

  “Well, they said it was to do with pressing something really hard until it makes it into a jewel. I don’t know what it was, some sort of stone or something. He said the king was trying to make a black diamond because they are worth more.”

  “Well,” I say, twirling the diamond between my fingers. “It looks like he succeeded.”

  Sasha purses her lips as though something is bothering her.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It just seems a bit odd to keep all this hidden away. I mean, the entire realm knows about the diamonds.”

  “Maybe it’s to stop people stealing them,” I suggest.

  “No,” she says. “I think there’s more to it. They have safes in the palace. It must be something to do with the contraptions they have down here.”

  “You mean, that,” I say, pointing to the monstrosity in the middle of the room.

  We both step closer, examining the strange machinery. Nothing seems particularly out of the ordinary, but then neither of us know the first thing in regards to technology. We’ve both lived in areas that are less advanced than Cyne.

  “Why don’t we try reading the King’s journal again,” I say. “I still think he’s crazy, but it might reveal something we’ve missed.”

  I find a chair to sit down. Fighting the dogs has weakened me, and I need a rest. But as I lower myself onto the seat, I find a sinking feeling pulling me deeper and deeper. As I go, I hear Sasha shout Mae, and:

  I am the final story.

  I am the fate of all.

  I come too early for some.

  Too late for others.

  Craft-born, you will help me change my fate, or I will speed up the ending to your final story. If you help me, in return, I will give you the one thing you want in this world.

  Then nothing.

  Chapter Fifteen – The Nothing

  The room is cold. There is a faint waft of mildew, indicating that I might be deep underground. Perhaps I am in the dungeon, the place criminals are left to rot, or the crypt again. My nerves tighten. The darkness is thick enough to consume everything in its path. I cannot see my hand, not even when I press my palm to my nose. Through that ever reaching darkness is one sound. Sobbing.

  “Hello?” I say.

  The sobbing continues, and a cold chill runs through my veins. It’s too personal listening to someone cry like that. I take a tentative step forward, splaying my hands out before me so that I can feel my way in the dark.

  “Is there someone here?”

  The sobbing never breaks. The further I walk forwards, the more difficult it is to ascertain which direction the sound is coming from. Whenever I change direction, the crying does as well.

  “Cas?”

  My heart beats harder against my chest. Cas is the person I least want to find making such a wretched noise. The sobbing intensifies into a high-pitched wail causing a shiver to run down my spine. My breath exhales faster, panicked. I have to calm myself. It’s just the dark and that crying making me frightened. There’s nothing here to suggest I am in danger. At least not yet.

  I stumble on, with my hands out ready to catch me if I fall. My feet shuffle against the cold stones below, only audible in the quieter moments of the crying. I have to force myself to focus on my steps. If I don’t, I could find myself falling into a deep panic, unable to move at all. Part of me wants to stop walking, sit on the ground and rock back and forth until it’s all over.

  My eyes still have not adjusted to the dark. There is not a glimmer of light to be seen. I have no matches, and no lantern.

  This time, I have the words of the Nix in my mind. I will speed up your final story. A threat—the first one. I take a deep breath and attempt to quell the tremor in my fingers. Now, I know it isn’t a trick. The Nix wants me for a purpose—to change my fate—and until I have fulfilled that purpose, I am safe, at least from death. Pain on the other hand…

  The sobbing turns to moaning. Then it quietens into a sniffling cry.

  I stop and stand still, with a heavy feeling in my stomach. “Father?” The word escapes my throat in a rasp.

  There is something about the place I am in, roughly the black
est black I have ever seen. Rather than dark it is devoid of all light. A nothingness. It panics me, seizing hold of my chest with an icy fist. What if the crying is my father? What if he is not at rest but trapped in some eternal state of… nothingness.

  “Can you hear me?” I say. There is a quaver in my voice that cannot be disguised. I can’t bear the thought of my father being left in a place like this. “Father?”

  The unease spreads through my veins. How could I possibly defend myself in this darkness? I suck in a deep breath and try to calm the panic. Allerton told me to call on my powers before fighting. He’s right. I should play to my strengths. I gather power at my sides and feel the wind collecting around me.

  If only I could create fire. I would be able to light the way, I think.

  Fire comes from anger.

  I stand still and cup both hands in front of me. I cannot see them, but I imagine them, and concentrate on that image. I clench my fists three times and try to muster the kind of anger I felt when I watched my father’s funeral pyre burn along the river. My skin prickles with the memory of the heat on my face, and the way the flames danced in the air.

  I don’t have to be that person again, I only have to learn to pretend to be her.

  The thought gives me comfort. I can tap into that rage, but control it. Only, as I begin to let the emotions flow into me, I let in the grief, too.

  But right now, the fear is worse than grief. Fear that my father is trapped in this place. Trapped in pain and suffering. That fear is more motivating than anything I have felt before.

  “I’m in grief all the time anyway,” I say aloud through gritted teeth. “I have to do this.”

  I don’t have a choice. And yet, the grief still blocks me. I do not want to feel the same anger I felt watching my father’s body float down the river in Halts-Walden. Yet I must.

  Without light I will never find out who it is trapped here. I will never know if it is Father. Tears spring at the back of my eyes.

  This is a vision, I say to myself. It isn’t real.

  But as Sasha said, they are based on some truth. Some fundamental truth.

  The sobbing breaks the silence once more. It seems to echo around me, like three or four voices at once. I spin around, breathing rapidly, dizzy from the fear and panic in my heart.

  I focus myself, concentrating on the things I know. I cannot beat the Nix without tapping into this one last power. And now I have a choice, I can continue to stumble on in the dark, or I can dig deep and force myself to use this one last power.

  Concentrate.

  Father.

  Fire.

  Endwyn.

  Anger.

  I close my eyes and let it burn me. It begins as uncomfortable and intensifies into painful. The rage floods me, seeps through me. It’s an emotion I have blocked because I saw how destructive it was, and it pains me to tap into that anger once more. I let out a cry of frustration and tears flow from my eyes.

  The fire builds up from my gut. The heat runs through my veins like a lit fuse. A light film of sweat builds on my forehead, and I know I have to fight to control it. I have to use all my strength to stop myself exploding like a bright comet in the sky. My cheeks burn with the effort, but I control my breathing.

  I open my eyes.

  The fire bursts from my fingers like a flash of lightning. It’s like a waterfall cascading out of me, lighting the entire room.

  Except it isn’t a room at all.

  With an enormous fireball between my hands, I survey the scene around me. I know I don’t have much time before I lose control of the fire and am forced to put it out. I examine all around me in a quick glimpse, my head moving in furtive, jerky movement. All I know, is that I am in an expanse; an expanse of nothingness—just as I had feared.

  Everything around me is either black or grey. The floor is stone, but there are no flags like in the Red Palace. Instead, it stretches out like a never-ending lawn of flat grey. Instead of walls there is simply darkness.

  But there is one outlying object in the complete stretch of nothingness. There is a man.

  “Father!”

  I rush towards him, but it takes me only a few moments to realise that he is not my father at all. He is someone else that I know, someone I did not expect to see.

  I hardly recognise him at first. He is in tattered clothing. His face is a pallid grey and he lies flat on his back. There is no life in his features, and his cold grey eyes stare up, glassy. His mouth hangs open. It takes me only a moment to know that he cannot be crying. The sobbing cannot be coming from him in the same way it comes from all of us, it cannot come from his dead throat. Instead, it comes from his mind. I hear the pain in his mind. Or his heart. His soul.

  The dead man in the expanse of nothingness is the King, and the sight of him makes my stomach roil with disgust. My fireball threatens to explode. I work fast to think of water—rain, rivers, the soothing of anger, calm. It is quicker to answer my call than the fire, perhaps because I want desperately for the darkness back so I no longer have to look at those eyes.

  *

  When Sasha watches me wake, the first thing I notice is the scrunched up expression on her face.

  “Where did you go?” she asks before I can even draw a breath.

  When I fell into the vision, I also fell off my chair, and the back of my head throbs. However, after examining it with my fingers, I’m relieved to find that there is no blood, just a small lump. I scramble up to my feet and sit back down on the chair with some caution.

  “It was another vision from the Nix. This time I was in a long, stretched room and it was dark. I couldn’t see an inch in front of me. But I summoned fire—”

  She gasps. “You did? That’s… that’s incredible!”

  “I almost blew myself up, but I summoned fire to see where I was going…” I trail off and pick at a thread in my tunic. “Sasha, I don’t ever want to feel like that again. Summoning fire released some sort of rage inside me. It was painful… it was… disturbing.”

  “What happened?” she insists.

  “I needed to light the way, because I thought… I thought my father might be there. But then, when the fire burst from me, I realised it was someone else,” I say. My voice sounds distant and quiet. “I saw him lying there. And he was sobbing. But there were no tears on his face. He wasn’t making the sound from his throat. It was as though the noise came from deep within himself.”

  Sasha makes a tutting sound with her mouth, clearly frustrated with my vague reply. “But who did you see?”

  “The king,” I reply. “I saw the king lying on the ground. He was dead, I’m sure of it. His eyes were unfocussed, unblinking. His chest did not rise and fall. I only saw him for the briefest of moments and yet what I saw chilled me… deep down.” I shudder as the ice cold passes through me once more.

  Sasha quietens. She crosses her arms around her chest and stares down at the ground as though deep in thought. “How do you know it wasn’t someone else crying in the room?”

  “It wasn’t a room,” I say. “It was like an expanse of nothingness. And I don’t know for certain, except that I felt as though I was in his mind. And I felt the same fear, the same dread of nothingness, like when you’re laid in bed at night and wonder if the afterlife exists at all. That kind of fear. I think the king is afraid of dying, and I think that is how his fear manifested. Or, at least, that’s how the Nix showed me the vision.”

  “All of this comes back to those two, doesn’t it?” Sasha says. “The Nix, and the king. From the king’s journal, to the secret laboratory, to the visions from the Nix… they must connect somehow.”

  “Yes,” I say. “The Nix threatened me before I fell into the vision. It said that I need to find something to change its fate or it would speed up my final story, whatever that means. And in the king’s journals he is frightened of something. Whatever he is frightened of, he wants Beardsley to fix it. Well, now we know it is death.”

  In that instant,
all the pieces fall into place. The dark despair written in the king’s journal, the pressure put on Beardsley to find an answer, the quest for magic to be brought back to the realm, and now his deepest fear is revealed…

  “Death,” I say again, thinking aloud. “Of course… it all makes sense now.”

  “Explain.”

  “Do you remember the old legend concerning the Ember Stone?”

  I sing:

  For many gaze up at the elder tree,

  And yearn for immortality.

  The old king searches far and wide,

  But the Ember Stone will ever hide.

  “When Mummers came to Halts-Walden they sang that song. Legend says that the key to immortality is in the finding of a mystical black diamond. There are people who search far and wide, in the mines of the Haedalands and the peaks of…” I stop when I see how Sasha’s expression has turned very white.

  “It isn’t a diamond,” she says. “It’s an amulet. The Borgans know about it.”

  “They do? The legend is real?”

  “The legend is very real. It is a black stone set into a necklace. Little is written on the subject. They say it was created by an ancient king but was lost. He used it to live forever. It’s written in the craft-born journals.”

  “Where was it lost?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Nobody knows. It’s all second hand knowledge and based on stories and songs.”

  “So how do you know it really exists?” I ask.

  “Because we worship it. In a sense, anyway. Our amulets are a tribute to the great Ember Stone. We fashion them from amber and it harnesses the power of the craft-born. Of course, they are nowhere near as powerful as the original.”

  “What would happen if the king found the Ember Stone?”

  Sasha raises her eyebrows. “He would be the most powerful king that ever existed. He would be able to use your craft. He would be invincible, too. No forged weapon could kill him. No disease or infection could harm him. He would live forever.”