by Garth Nix
The urthkin shifted anxiously and whispered among themselves in their thin voices. Eleanor kept her hand on Runnel’s hilt in case things went badly, but she told herself that she had no reason to feel anxious. The urthkin had always treated them honourably in the past.
Something moved behind her and she felt a tiny pinprick at her neck.
‘Move, tall one, and I will spill your lifeblood to the dirt,’ said the urthkin holding the curved knife to her throat.
Eleanor froze, and her gaze flicked to her friends. Odo and Hundred too were each standing with an urthkin blade at their throat, visible in the glow of the hands that held them.
‘Biter, no!’ cried Odo, struggling to keep his sword from bursting free. ‘We are the intruders here. We stay or leave at their – what’s the word?’
‘Behest, I think,’ said Eleanor.
‘Mercy might be better,’ said Hundred through gritted teeth.
‘They dishonour you,’ said Biter. ‘You are knights of the realm!’
‘This is not our realm,’ Runnel reminded him.
Egda stood straighter, but not so straight that his head was higher than any of the urthkin.
‘We await the Monarch Below’s pleasure,’ he told them calmly.
‘You will come with us,’ said the leader of the urthkin guards. ‘Say nothing unless spoken to. Touch nothing.’
‘We understand,’ said Egda. ‘Lead on.’
Odo let himself be shoved forward. The urthkin at his back was so small she practically had to stand on tiptoes to reach his throat, but that didn’t lessen the danger. It would be all too easy to kill them and bury the bodies where they would never be found.
As they shuffled forward along the Shadow Way, he felt the walls close in around him …
‘w! i! t! h! y! o! u!’ chirped a familiar voice from above, and he felt the band about his chest loosen a little. Tip was watching, one of many bats flying back and forth, snapping up cave insects – probably his family, left behind to seek out the former king. He would know if something happened to them now. That was some comfort in the dark.
They walked for what felt like hours, always downwards, but sometimes turning left and right. Glowing patches in the walls enabled Eleanor to make out the rough edges of things around them, such as buildings fashioned from hollow stalagmites, doorways, even windows. Breezes touched her face from odd directions, sometimes tickling with the scent of far-off spices, sometimes slapping her with smells more foul than fair. She saw urthkin coming and going, and heard their soft voices along with rhythmic cries and banging that might have been music. Whereas the tunnels they had seen beneath Ablerhyll had seemed cramped and empty, Winterset’s undercity was a thriving subterranean metropolis.
They came at last to a vast space that could not be measured by the eye. When Eleanor strained to make out the walls, she sensed only that they curved to her left and right without end. The ceiling rose up in a dome that never seemed to come down. Soft, echoing sounds filled the air. Pale light glimmered. Somewhere nearby were many, many urthkin.
‘Approach,’ called a sharp-edged voice from somewhere in front of them.
Odo’s urthkin guard nudged him forward. He supposed that they had reached their destination, perhaps a throne room of some kind, and therefore expected to head up a flight of steps or another ramp to where the Monarch Below might be sitting. Instead he stumbled as the way ahead sloped sharply down.
A faintly shimmering crowd of urthkin hissed as the humans passed among them. Eleanor stubbornly hung her head, determined not to stand straight.
‘That is close enough,’ said their guide. ‘Wait here.’
Their guards melted away into the crowd, and Odo felt a thousand eyes staring at him, waiting for him to make a mistake. Remembering the stern instructions they had been given, he kept his mouth tightly closed, and hoped Eleanor would find the patience to do the same.
A single flame flickered into life several yards below them. It was tiny, dancing atop a narrow, white candle, but it seemed so bright it made them all blink.
By its light, they saw that they were standing in a barred cage on the edge of a wide, circular space at the very bottom of which sat a tiny urthkin on a low stool, a long crystal shard held upright in one hand, like a spear. She wore no crown, but Eleanor knew instantly that she was the Monarch. She sat at the lowest point of the throne room, perhaps the lowest in the city.
‘I offer you the gift of light, old friend.’
The Monarch’s voice was thin, but strong.
‘Would that I could accept it,’ said Egda, bowing his blindfolded head. ‘But my friends will be grateful.’
‘Your words are as fine as ever. Long has it been since you graced our halls.’
‘The loss is mine. In darkness I sought wisdom, but some would say I found only further foolishness.’
‘That remains to be seen. What brings you here? The pact offers no protection anymore; you have placed yourself in grave danger.’
‘I seek only safe passage through your realm.’
‘To what end?’
‘To halt the coronation of my sister, tomorrow morning.’
‘You believe you are up to the measure of this task? You and your three companions?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Then you are indeed a fool. Prince Kendryk could not stop her, and he was wiser than you, if too tall for any urthkin’s liking.’
‘He inherited his mother’s height, along with her birthright,’ said Egda with a fond smile that faded as fast as it came. ‘While Kendryk lives, I will hold out hope.’
‘And if he doesn’t? My spies report that he survives, but a sly hand with a knife could easily fix that overnight.’
‘Odelyn would never kill her grandson. The future of her line depends on him producing an heir that she can control.’
‘Lord Deor might not see things so reasonably, and orders can so easily and tragically be misunderstood.’
‘You comprehend my haste, then.’
The Monarch pondered Egda’s words with her chin on one wrinkled hand, examining each of her visitors in turn. Odo tried not to fidget when she looked at him. There was something incredibly penetrating about her dark eyes.
When she spoke again, it was clear that she had made a decision. Unfortunately, it appeared to be the wrong one.
‘I cannot interfere in surface affairs. The pact forbids it.’
‘But the pact is broken!’ Eleanor cried out.
‘Silence!’ One of the guards reached into their cage and gripped her wrist tightly, yanking her arm so her face was mashed against cold iron bars.
Runnel was instantly in her other hand, and Hundred and Odo were close behind her with weapons drawn. Tip swooped down and flapped at the guard’s face, but was batted away with one sharp-nailed hand.
‘Harm any of us, and you will pay dearly,’ Hundred hissed in a fair impersonation of an urthkin’s chilly tones.
‘Desist at once!’ The Monarch’s command rang out through the vast bowl, echoing off distant walls and seeming to come back at them from all sides. The order was not just directed to the humans in her presence. Eleanor’s arm was instantly released, and she fell back into the cage as suddenly as the guard who had held her retreated. Tip walked on his feet and wingtips to the base of the cage and climbed up to the top, where he hung, glaring angrily at any urthkin who approached.
‘We are urthkin,’ the Monarch Below rebuked her fellows. ‘We do not injure those who come to us in honest supplication. Even if they are disrespectful. Human girl, step forward.’
Eleanor obeyed, blushing furiously.
‘The pact is indeed broken,’ the Monarch Below said. ‘Humans no longer trade fairly with urthkin. They talk of flooding the undercities. They creep into our tunnels to steal treasure they think we hoard. What would you have me do?’
Eleanor glanced at Hundred, who gestured encouragingly.
‘I would listen to Egda,’ she said, ‘and give
Prince Kendryk another chance. I don’t know him … but he can’t be that bad, can he? From what we’ve heard, it is the regent who has done everything, even when it has been in his name. He has never done anything directly himself.’
‘His time runs short,’ said the Monarch. ‘And my spies tell me he spends all his time finger painting. How will that save his kingdom?’
Eleanor had no good answer to that. Finger painting didn’t sound very promising.
‘We destroyed the backwards weather vane in Ablerhyll,’ Odo said, braving the wrath of the urthkin to add the weight of his opinion to Eleanor’s. ‘You know we honour the act. Let us through and we’ll do everything we can to set things right.’
‘Harm above means harm below?’ said the Monarch. ‘Isn’t that what we used to say, old friend?’
Egda bowed. ‘It has ever been so. War between our peoples benefits no one – and there will be war if Odelyn becomes King Above. She cares only about herself.’
‘Then I am decided,’ she said. ‘Your kingdom is in danger, humans. We will come to your aid. Our tunnels lead all under the city. You have but to tell us where you wish to go, and you will be taken there.’
‘We must be atop Old Dragon Stone by dawn tomorrow,’ Egda told her.
‘That stone, of all stones?’ she said.
‘It is where our coronations take place. He or she who is to be crowned takes the royal sword and, crying out the ritual words, plunges the blade into the Stone. There is a niche for that purpose, carved long ago, some say by a dragon’s tooth.’
The Monarch Below nodded. ‘Our hammers cannot penetrate this rock. We can, however, take you to the base of Old Dragon Stone before night’s end. Will that suffice?’
‘It will do us very well, Majesty. Thank you.’
‘Thank me by putting a proper ruler on the throne you relinquished. If the young finger painter is not up to the task, find another.’
The Monarch Below gestured, and her guards opened the cage. Darkness descended once more with the snuffing of the candle. Odo felt strong hands urging him along, more respectfully than before, and he let himself be led, hoping that sooner rather than later he would be in the open air again.
They left the throne room and followed another complicated series of tunnels through the underground city, Tip flying patiently along with them. Occasionally, they stopped to rest, eating what little remained of the fruit, nuts and bread the smiths had given them. On the second rest stop, Tip flapped around Odo’s head, hinting that he was hungry. Odo put some pieces of fruit in one palm and held them out so the little bat could snatch them carefully with his claws.
There wasn’t enough light to be sure, but Odo sensed his urthkin guide watching him closely, and when she spoke, he was certain of it.
‘The winged mouse … we call them Friends in the Dark … he is your pet?’
‘Tip? Not really. I guess he belongs to Prince Kendryk, if he belongs to anyone. He’s helped us a lot, though.’
‘His kind help us too. They eat the eight-legs that plague us, and we use their droppings to grow crops.’
‘You have plants down here?’ Odo couldn’t believe his ears. How could anything grow without light?
‘Yes, we have many. You should see the forests of – I do not remember your word.’
‘Mushrooms,’ Egda supplied.
‘Yes, mushrooms. Some of them grow thirty arm-lengths high!’
‘That sounds amazing. I wish I could see them,’ Odo said, with some honesty. ‘But how could I? There’s no light.’
‘Ah, that is a sadness. Perhaps one day our monarch could make an exception for you, as she has made an exception today. You should bring your dark friend with you.’
Odo held out some more food for Tip, who pounced on it with gratitude.
They walked until they were footsore and weary, through caverns and halls immeasurable to the human eye. They had no way of telling the time, which only made the thought of what lay ahead more unsettling. Would they have time to rest before taking on the entirety of Tofte’s army, if it came to that?
‘I do not expect we will face anything more than several dozen or so, without bows,’ Hundred said. ‘Although this coronation is real, we saw no banners on our approach to the city and heard no call for the population to celebrate. The regent will risk no public fuss until Prince Kendryk is safely dealt with.’
‘That’s sneaky,’ said Eleanor.
‘Many monarchs have been,’ said Runnel. ‘Gisila the First crowned her son in secret the moment he was born because she knew her uncle was trying to depose her. By the time he succeeded, the boy was grown into a man who knew the secret, that he had been king all along, and ordered his uncle executed.’
‘King Addlebert was crowned seventeen times,’ said Biter, ‘in order to confuse his enemies.’
‘Some would say that he was more confused than they were,’ said Runnel. ‘Permanently.’
‘It is difficult to be wise,’ said Egda, ‘when the whole world is watching you.’
Eleanor could appreciate that. She didn’t like it when even her father verbally quizzed her on her schooling. Answers she knew perfectly if she was on her own fled her mind with the ease of eels the moment he demanded them. That was why she left the judgment part of being a knight to Odo, whenever she could. How could she possibly know on the spot what the right answer was?
He told her once that he didn’t really know for sure, but he did know what felt right, and he trusted his instinct.
That was the kind of instinct a king needed, she supposed.
And a willingness to trust one’s ally in the dark.
At last, they came to the end of their long, subsurface journey. The smell of fresh rain wafted from an opening up ahead, and their guides slowed to a halt, calling out in their strange voices to the guards there. The urthkin parted before them, bowing, and Odo and Eleanor and the others crawled cautiously out of a narrow split in the earth and found themselves once again on the surface world, where they belonged. Even by starlight, everything seemed brightly lit, making them blink.
Odo let out a huge sigh of relief, which startled a sleeping parrot in a palm tree nearby. It squawked and irritably raised its brightly covered crest. Odo shushed it with an upraised hand.
‘Where’s the palace?’ whispered Eleanor, taking in the forest of bizarre plants surrounding them. This didn’t look anything like the capital as she had imagined it. Some of the plants were long and skinny, with a tuft of radiating leaves at the top. Others were squat and many-trunked, like lots of trees merged into one. The air smelled of flowers, of which there were plenty, and damp, which the ground underfoot definitely was. Slippery mud squelched as they moved for denser cover.
‘Look up there,’ said Hundred, pointing. ‘That shadow? It’s Old Dragon Stone.’
Odo and Eleanor peered through the foliage. ‘That shadow’ seemed to take up half the sky, an imposing, angular shape with a flat top. It was much higher than they had pictured.
‘The palace is behind us. This is the Royal Physic Garden,’ said Egda, holding a star-shaped blossom to his sensitive nose. ‘If my mother had known that it contained a door to the undercity, she would never have let me play here as a child!’
‘Doors go both ways – and I imagine this one will be sealed ere long,’ said Hundred, cautiously guiding them from tree to tree, closer to the base of the Stone. Their progress was slow and stealthy; they froze at the merest sound that might herald a human guard coming near. They could not be caught now, not when they were so close.
Even as Eleanor followed Hundred’s gestured instructions, treading as lightly as a leaf in the older woman’s footsteps, she marvelled at the fact that they had arrived. They were in Winterset at last!
She couldn’t see anything, and was sure that not every new knight dreamed of overthrowing a plot to take over the kingdom on their first day in the capital, but few people were as fortunate as her. That was for certain.
When the
y were just a few paces from the base of the Stone, which now loomed like a wall of utter blackness blocking out nearly all the sky, they stopped for a council of war.
‘Our objective is simple,’ said Egda. ‘To stop Odelyn from being crowned, we must reach the top of Old Dragon Stone by dawn. Unfortunately, there is only one way up to the summit, and that is via the Long Stair. Given that large swithorm tree we just passed, I believe we are on the opposite side of the Stone.’
‘That is so, my liege,’ said Hundred.
‘The Stair will be heavily guarded, which works to our advantage. No one will think to watch this side.’
‘But how does that help us?’ asked Eleanor. ‘If the Stair is on the other side, that’s where we need to be.’
‘A tricky approach by stairs,’ mused Biter. ‘Uphill all the way, confined to a narrow space so only one can fight at a time—’
‘With enemy reinforcements constantly coming from above and below?’ said Runnel. ‘I believe it would be nothing less than suicide.’
‘Perhaps we could stagger our assaults,’ Biter went on. ‘Our fiercest fighter first, the remaining three at the base of the Stair to fend off reinforcements, retreating as needed.’
‘You are forgetting arrows, little brother.’
‘Then we remain in pairs, with the second knight on the stairs to deflect shafts fired at the first. Our knights’ new dragon-scale shields should be equal to the task. Why do you only see problems, sister, when I see opportunities for valour?’
‘There is no valour in dying needlessly,’ said Hundred. ‘I would rather we all survived and the right person was crowned. To that end, we need another plan.’
‘Tip can fly up to the top,’ said Eleanor. ‘Does that help?’
‘Sir Drust, it is said, once used a trained pigeon to break a castle siege,’ replied Egda. ‘The bird carried a thread to the top of the wall, passed it over a crenellation, and then carried the end back down to Sir Drust. Attached to the other end of the thread was a rope. As he drew the thread to him, the rope ascended, then descended, and once affixed to a tree stump gave him access to the battlements.’