The Golden Key (Book 3)

by Robert P. Hansen

  He moved in close to her, and she pointed ahead of them. The wall had a dark recess in it that swallowed up the light and spat back a troubling gloom. They could only see the front edge of it—a passage? alcove? archway? entryway?—but two things were clear: there was a short step upward, and a streamlet of water was trickling down the step and into an expanding, quivering pool.

  Without comment, his mother took a step back, just far enough to hide the shadowy entrance from view. “We should have brought another torch,” she said. “I am loathe to toss this one into that passage. The water may drown it.”

  Giorge nodded in agreement, but there was no point in worrying over it. Instead, he took the torch from his mother and moved up close to the wall. When he was almost against it, he held the torch low behind him to shield most of its glare and edged forward. His mother crouched down low and moved further away until she was out of the range of the torch. For a few seconds more, he saw her silhouette creeping forward and heard the soft swishing of the water as she passed, and then nothing. She was hidden in the thin line of shadow between the light of the torch and the luminescent fungal glow.

  The water deepened until it almost swallowed his boots, and there was a noticeable, weak current. Unlike the slime near his sarcophagus, this water was clear of muck because the current had pushed away the dust and grit as it flowed out from the opening. He eased closer to the recess, trying to muffle the sloshing stirred up by his passage, and with each step it became more and more apparent that the recess was a stairwell leading up. The base was wide, too broad for the obscured torchlight to stretch across it to the other end, and it narrowed considerably as the steps led upward into darkness. He nestled up to the entryway and paused long enough to peek around the corner. The shadows were too thick to penetrate, so he slowly moved the torch around to the front to bathe it in light. He shielded his eyes, but it was difficult to see past the glare. All he saw were generalities: the stairwell narrowed as it rose, and the water was streaming down on his side of it. The other end was clear, except for an accumulation of dust on the steps, but as he watched, the water spread across the highest, narrowest stair and started to trickle down the other side. He scowled at it; the leak—if that was what it was—was fresh, and it was growing.

  Giorge moved the torch behind him again, and as he turned away from the stairwell, he paused. Were there eyes glimmering down at him from just beyond the top stair? Two blue sparkles glinting in the torchlight? He wasn’t entirely sure, and when he looked closer, it was all in shadow again. He backed away from the entryway and waited for his mother to rejoin him. When she slunk out of the shadows and quietly hurried up next to him, he whispered, “What did you see?”

  “It’s a short rise,” she answered. “At the top, it goes back a short distance—not more than a few yards—and ends. There is something up there.” She paused, frowned, and gestured vaguely back toward the others, who were setting fire to the sarcophagi infected by the fungus. “It was like those sarcophagi, but it wasn’t made of wood. Something metallic caught the torchlight. Copper, bronze, maybe gold. It could be a statue—or worse. I’ve heard of guardians like that put in tombs like this.”

  “Are you sure it was metallic?” Giorge asked. “Could it have been gems catching the torchlight and refracting it?”

  His mother considered his suggestion for a few seconds, and then shrugged. “It could have been,” she said. “I only glimpsed a small part of it, and what I saw was only dimly lit.”

  “Did you notice the water?” he asked.

  “What of it?” she countered.

  “The flow is increasing,” he said. “Even in the short time that I was there, I saw it cover a broader area. If there is an exit up there, it’s probably underwater.”

  His mother thought for a moment. “If this is Symptata’s tomb,” she said, “It would be.”

  Giorge frowned and muttered, “The poem didn’t say anything about water. All it said was—” He closed his eyes, sighed, and recited what he could remember:

  “He cursed her line

  of thieving whores

  and lies in death,

  awaiting yours.”

  When he paused, his mother said. “Now that we’re here, I think it was referring to this place. He expects us to die here.”

  Giorge shook his head. “That was the end of the first poem,” he said. “There were more poems that came later.”

  “Other poems?” she asked. “What did they say? I never got past the first ones.”

  “There were two more. One was with the Eyes, and I think it also referred to this place.” He took a moment to recall the verses he had memorized, and then recited it in an ominous tone that fit too well their predicament:

  “The pain and danger felt thus far

  are but a taste of what’s in store,

  for twice the burden are the Eyes,

  and twice as swift is your demise.

  Halfway home; halfway free;

  soon the tomb of misery,

  wherein lies the Viper’s Skull

  that waits for you to pay its toll.”

  “What about the last one?” his mother asked after he had finished. “Does it say anything about the tomb?”

  “No,” Giorge said, shaking his head. “I don’t think it has anything to do with this place. It was more a riddle about the fangs. They were in the same place, but I had to look twice to find the second one. Angus said Symptata was using portals of some sort to move us from place to place. I never would have gotten as far as I did without his help. He’s the reason the plague of woe didn’t kill me.”

  She cringed and quickly said, “Tell me about it later. The water is rising; we don’t have time for it now.”

  Giorge shook his head. “I need to know something first.” He took a deep breath and then said, “I think I died before the end. Did you?” He knew what her answer would be, but he still had to ask it.

  Her lips pressed tightly together and she nodded. “Yes,” she said. “The plague of woe did me in. All those critters attacking me left me ragged, and I couldn’t outrun the last one.”

  He looked back at the others—their torches were slowly advancing on the fungal growth, burning it and the sarcophagi as they went. A phalanx of glowing forms had gathered in the far, bright corner; they were moving in unison, as if they were being directed by a silent general. Archibald had moved toward them and taken up a defensive position between the two groups.

  “I suspect the others would say the same thing,” Giorge muttered. “If what I was told is true, they couldn’t have completed the skull or the curse would have ended long ago. But why did you say Symptata’s tomb would be underwater?”

  His mother’s lips curled into a grim smile as she answered, “His tomb was in Bryn.”

  “So?” he frowned.

  She looked at him and raised her eyebrows. “Bryn fell into the sea a thousand years ago. Surely you remember that?”

  He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Of course,” he said. “I had forgotten about that. An earthquake, wasn’t it? The whole town slipped off the coast. But his tomb would have flooded long ago, unless—” he frowned and shook his head “The curse.”

  She nodded. “It must have kept the water at bay, and now that it’s been lifted,” she looked at the stairwell and her tone was determined as she finished, “we need to get out of here. Quickly.”

  Giorge looked back at the others again. The apparitions had advanced, and Archibald was hacking at them, lopping off arms, legs, heads—and still the pieces kept advancing. The fires were like a signal line, small and spaced evenly apart, but much too close together. The fungus smoldered, too damp to burn effectively, and sent out billows of smoke that seemed to both smother the light and spreading a peculiar gray-black-orange fog that consumed everything it touched.

  Giorge sniffed. The stench of the smoke was palpable, and it wouldn’t be long before it filled the room completely. He sucked in an acrid breath and nodded. The
fires would consume the air they needed and leave behind poison. “Yes,” he said, turning toward the stairway. “Let’s see where it leads, and then we’ll tell them what we’ve found.”

  His mother nodded. “They won’t be able to fend off those things for long,” she said. “There isn’t enough stuff to burn.”

  They moved quickly up to the stairwell, ignoring the sloshing water swarming around Giorge’s ankles as they approached it. If there was anything there, it already knew about them, and time was of the essence. When Giorge reached the opening, he almost gasped: The top three steps had become a cascading waterfall, and it wouldn’t be long before the whole stairwell was flooded. He glanced at his mother and, for the first time that he could recall, there was a worried furrow across her brow.

  He looked at the room one last time before stepping around the corner and onto the first stair. As he thrust the torch out in front of him, he wondered if the room would fill up with water before all the air was sucked up by the fire. But by the time his foot fell on the second step, he had already thrust the thought aside. There wasn’t time for it.

  11

  By the third day, the novelty of the horse experience had worn off, and Embril had grown tired of it. She couldn’t get comfortable with the noises, and the other horses couldn’t get comfortable with her. The daytime wasn’t bad, but that was because they were running most of the time. The night was more difficult. She kept forgetting to lower her head, and the monarch of the little herd didn’t like it. It almost came to a confrontation on the second evening, but Tobar had wedged in between them, calming the mare with a soft, coaxing voice as he led her firmly away.

  At the same time, Darby had taken hold of Embril’s lead rope and said, his tone reproachful, “Elmer, you fool, can’t you see she’s the dominant mare? What are you doing challenging her like that? Do you really want to fight with her?”

  She had stared at him with one eye and frowned—or tried to; her lips felt weird as they sagged away from her teeth. Was that what she had been doing? Challenging the horse for dominance? The books had a lot of information about the horse hierarchy, about how horses showed dominance and submissiveness, and about how the trainers used those behaviors to tame them. Her lower lip had fluttered as she remembered how she had been behaving and tried to think about what another horse would think about that behavior. Darby had been right: her attitude was one of superiority, and she hadn’t even realized that her posture and behavior reflected that superiority. In the end, she had sighed (a snorting wheeze) and shook her head; there had been no point in establishing dominance when she would only be a horse for a short time—unless Barnham had lied about the spell. The thought was not comforting.

  Early on the third day they reached the ledge leading to the plateau. They went at an easy walk, and she was placed in the middle of a single-file line of horses and riders. It was still false morning—the time when the sun was about to come out from behind the mountains to the east—when a strange aura surrounded her. It was like a shimmering rainbow fog. It puzzled her; she hadn’t been able to see yellow clearly since becoming a horse, but there were brilliant streams of it merging with the orange and red and fading into a greenish blur. The green was just as strange; most of the plants she’d seen over the past few days had been gray. What was it?

  Then she knew what it was. Barnham’s had said the spell would last three or four days. She brought the magic that was always near the periphery of her visual field rapidly into focus. The spell was unraveling like a knitted scarf with a loose string, and the spell’s outer shield was already gone. The inner weaving was beginning to come undone near her left front hoof, and she stumbled to an abrupt stop. Her hand was emerging! The hoof transformed back into fingernails that dug into the hard rock and splintered as the weight of her horse’s body fell upon them. She screeched—a high-pitched whinny that was quickly echoed by the other horses—and redistributed the weight to the other three horse’s legs.

  Her wrist and forearm returned as the magic holding together the horse’s shape dissipated, and soon her arm dangled down from the gigantic shoulder. When that shoulder shifted, she felt the dissolving spell radiate outward across her back muscles like waves rippling on the surface of a pond. It sped across her back to the other shoulder, which weakened rapidly as it changed to her normal form, and she fell forward onto her chest—which was also shifting shape. Her horse-shaped head flopped heavily down onto the road, her thinning neck unable to support its weight any longer, and then her torso shriveled from the bulky mare’s chest to her own.

  She screamed—a mixture of urgent whinny and high-pitched shriek that almost sent the other horses scattering—as the full weight of the pack frame, filled with her chest of books and other gear, suddenly fell upon her narrowing back.

  Her back legs and rump were still those of a horse, and they towered above her. The pack frame slid forward, threatening to crush her head. “Help me!” she cried as her muzzle retracted into thin, quivering lips.

  The transformation reached her rump, and the sudden, massive weight on the small of her back was intolerable—and then got worse as her thighs shifted shape. She thought her knees were going to snap before the pack frame suddenly stopped sliding, and by the time her shins were hers again, the weight of it had been lifted from her. She gasped, dangling in the contraption’s harness—which was much too big for her slender form—and tried to wriggle free of it. But she couldn’t get any leverage, and the straps were catching on her robe. “Lower me!” she snapped, making no attempt to conceal her pain.

  The men lowered the contraption and when the straps hit the road, she crawled out from under the pack frame’s harness. A second after she was free, there was a mild crash behind her as the soldiers dropped it. She rolled onto her sore back and sat up, cradling her bleeding hand in her lap. Four men were standing around the pack frame, and as soon as they saw that she was free, they hurried to their jittery horses and tried to calm them down. “Thank you,” she called after them as she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, it disoriented her to view the world from her limited perspective, but she was already beginning to readjust to it.

  A few minutes later, Darby dismounted and quickly knelt down beside her. “Where are your injuries?” he asked, his eyes dilating as he set his bag down next to her.

  She frowned. The pain in her back was easing and already manageable, and it would likely be gone completely once she settled fully into her normal form. An effect of the spell, perhaps? “I broke my nails,” she said, holding up her bloodied left hand.

  “Anything else?” Darby asked as he took her hand in his.

  She shook her head and felt the clumps of mud still clinging to her hair scraping across the back of her robe. “My back would have been crushed if they hadn’t reacted so quickly. Thank them for me; I didn’t notice who they were.”

  Darby nodded absently as he looked over her hand. To take her mind off what he was doing to it, she picked at the dried mud caked in her hair. I need a bath, she thought, cringing as she felt the mud crunching under her bottom as she flinched from Darby’s examination. There was a lot of mud down there, too.

  “No broken bones,” Darby said as he set her hand gently on her thigh and reached into his bag. “You were lucky.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Lieutenant Jarhad was stupid. He never should have put that thing on me.” She paused and shook her head again. “I was stupid for letting him.” But I couldn’t let him throw away my books.

  “Your nails will grow back out in time,” Darby said, taking out a few thumb-sized bottles. “Three peeled away completely or snapped off. One is split down the middle to the roots. The thumb is fine.” He reached for a flask of water and rinsed off her fingertips. “I can stop the bleeding, but they will be tender until the nails grow back on their own.” He opened one of the little bottles and sprinkled a dusting of fine brown powder over each nail. The powder melted into the bloo
d and it clotted into a smooth scab. The underlying wounds even felt like they were closing.

  He reached for a bandage and frowned. “I would normally wrap the fingers together,” he said. “The bandages are too wide to wrap around them individually.”

  She shook her head and said, “I’ll manage without the bandage,” she said. “But I could use some water to wash my hair.”

  “That will have to wait until we reach the river on the plateau,” Darby said. “We’re running a bit low.”

  Embril frowned and looked at the plateau. It was a long way off. “How long before we get there?”

  Darby looked at her and shrugged. “We’ll reach it tomorrow evening,” he said. “This ledge is narrow enough that we don’t want to stress the horses with a faster pace than that. We’ll also have to reconnoiter the area before he’ll let anyone go near it.”

  Two days with this hair? she thought, aghast. The mud ground on her bottom as she shifted position to stand. “Help me up,” she said.

  Darby half-lifted her, his clinical gaze studying her movements. Once he was satisfied that she could stand and walk on her own, he let her arm go and then turned to one of the men who were watching them. “We’ll need a pack horse for her things,” he said. “Be careful with them. I’ll tell the Lieutenant what happened.”

  “Should we saddle one of the spare horses?” another one of the men asked.

  Darby watched her walking around for several seconds, and she wondered how strange it looked. The mud chafed, and there was no way that she would ride a horse like that. Two days? She shook her head firmly. She couldn’t even walk comfortably; the mud kept finding ways to infiltrate her body as if she were sitting naked on a sandy beach of loose, shifting sand.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, concern in his voice. “If you’d like me to look—” She glared at him, and he fell silent. He nodded sharply and turned to the man who had asked about saddling the horse. “She’ll ride with me,” he said. “I want to keep an eye on her.” Then he mounted his horse and rode toward the head of the line of horses. He looked back only once—she was picking at her robe, trying to dislodge some of the mud when she saw him—before hurrying up to where the Lieutenant was no-doubt impatiently waiting for him.