by R. J. Grieve
Bethro the Hero being absent that night, the librarian prowled timidly around the edges of the firelight, cravenly avoiding the darker corners of the hall, listening to the immense silence which seemed to possess the fortress like an invisible occupant. It was a living thing, that silence, that pressed in upon him from all sides in a dark embrace. He looked around him fearfully, wondering if there was movement in the shadowy corners. Finally convincing himself it was just caused by the flickering light of the fire, combined with his ever-active imagination, he turned his attention to the mighty fireplace and realised that the shades were drawing in because he had neglected to put wood on the fire. He began rifling amongst the scattered heaps of debris, trotting back and forth with promising bits of wood, carefully stoking the blaze. Finally, in his search, his hand fell upon something that was not quite as broken and decayed as everything else. It was a wooden box, deeply carved with a sinuous device on its lid. Its polished surface was now dingy and scratched with age but it was otherwise intact. When he lifted it between his hands and tried to open the lid, he suffered a check, for he found that it wouldn’t budge. He struggled with it for some moments before he came to the conclusion that it was locked. His curiosity piqued, he poked around in the debris, looking for a key but found nothing. The box was not particularly heavy, so getting a good grip on it, he shook it vigorously. There was no rattle from within and no sense of contents shifting and Bethro decided that, locked or not, the box was empty. Losing interest in it, he placed it on top of the blaze and sat down for a few moments to enjoy the heat.
Gradually the warmth penetrated his cold bones, bringing with it a sense of comfort that had become sadly foreign to him recently. The icy wind could be heard moaning around the outer walls of the castle, but this only increased Bethro’s sense of shelter. He shifted closer to the fire and watched as the initial blaze subsided into soft flickers of flame that played along the edges of the wood. His chin sank in his hand. Still, those mesmerising little tongues of flame writhed and danced along the wood, and as he watched, very softly inside his head, he began to hear a low, hypnotic drumbeat. His eyes drooped a little and the soft rhythm was joined by the gentle strumming of a harp. Into this enchanting mixture dropped the haunting notes of a mountain flute. Still he watched the flames, but now it seemed to him that although the music was still inside his head, the tiny flames were beginning to dance in time to the rhythm. Up and down, twisting and swirling, round and round. Before his hypnotised gaze, the tongues of flame began to assume the shapes of tiny figures clothed in flickering light. A female form, not as big as his little finger, entirely formed of fire, danced and gyrated along the wood. Her long, flying hair scattered sparks like red stardust around her, and her swirling skirts glowed with gold. Bethro blinked, and rubbing his eyes, leaned closer, mistrusting what his senses were telling him. The music in his head did not cease but instead increased in tempo. The figure was now joined by many others and faster and faster they danced, weaving in and out of one another, almost reckless in their abandonment to the music. Then Bethro suddenly realised that not only were they dancing along the edge of the wooden box, now engulfed in flame, but that the lid had opened.
“That is where they came from,” he said aloud. “They were in the box all the time and by putting it on the fire, I have released them. But why was the box locked? Why were they imprisoned when they are so pretty?”
As if his word had disturbed them, the music suddenly stopped and a shocking silence fell. The fire sprites ceased their gyrations and all turned as of one accord to look at him, and although they were tiny, Bethro felt that they did not look upon him kindly.
Abruptly, with a crackle of sparks, one leaped into the air and flung itself at him. It shot forward like a fiery dart and struck him on the back of the hand, delivering a coin-sized burn.
“Aah!” cried Bethro in pain.
As if this was a signal, all the fire sprites began to dart at him, singeing his clothes and hair, inflicting burns where his skin was unprotected. They circled him like incandescent hornets waiting for the chance to strike, leaving trails of sparks behind them that glittered in the dark air.
“Help me!” bellowed Bethro, trying to pull a blanket over his head to protect himself.
But his companions did not respond. They slept on as if under a spell and could not be roused. He violently shook Eimer’s shoulder, even Gorm’s, but they slept on oblivious.
By now some of the fire sprites had found their way under the blanket and were inflicting burns that caused him to cast it aside with a roar of pain and take to his heels. Like a swarm of light, they followed him across the hall, just a pace or two behind him.
Howling with fright, he tugged open a side door at random and shot off down the dark corridor, pursued by his tormentors. He could scarcely see where he was going, but the occasional glassless window allowed enough moonlight to spill onto the dusty floor to allow him to keep up his headlong flight. The orange swarm brought their own light but this was behind him and he knew that he dare not falter or they would be upon him, stinging and scorching him until they burned him to death.
Coming to the head of a spiral staircase that descended into the bowels of the fortress, Bethro knew he had no choice. He plunged down it, almost tripping headlong in his haste.
Down and down went Bethro into the dark unknown depths of the castle, more terrified of what was behind him, than anything that lay ahead.
When he reached the bottom, the light that his pursuers created illuminated what had clearly once been a dungeon. It was divided into many individual cells with heavy barred doors, but Bethro had no time to take it all in. He pounded along the narrow stone passageway between the cells, gasping and sobbing for breath, until he was faced with a solid oak door looming up at the end. Fervently praying that it was not locked, he put both hands out in front of him and charged at it, running straight into it with a thump. To his relief, the door gave way easily and flew back against the wall. Coming to a skidding halt, Bethro swung round and slammed the door shut behind him, leaving the swarm of flames on the wrong side of it.
Chest heaving and sobbing with relief, he turned to inspect his surroundings. He expected to be able to see little in the darkness but for some unascertainable reason, he could see quite clearly. The windowless room was lit by a pale, grey light, a little like diluted moonlight, from some obscure source. It revealed that the small, stone chamber was empty and bare. It had none of the usual piles of debris – nor, to Bethro’s horror, did it possess any other door, other than the one he had just used.
It was, in fact, a trap.
The room contained only one thing, so unexpected, that it instantly claimed his attention. The stone wall opposite the door was deeply incised with an enormous motif, as tall as a man, of the coiled serpent of Parth. Its head was set at right angles to its body, projecting outwards into the room. Its stone eyes were eternally blind and its long fangs were bared in permanent menace. Frantically, he began to examine the snake, running his hands over it, wondering if it possessed any secrets. But if it did, it refused to divulge them and Bethro’s fruitless search was interrupted when his sense of smell suddenly detected something burning. He swung round to face the door in time to see black charred marks begin to bloom through the centre of the wood.
“They are burning their way through the door,” he whispered in terror. “If I cannot find some other way out of here, I’m finished.”
He returned to the snake again. “You must be here for a reason,” he addressed it desperately. “You must be. You are too big for a room this size.”
Once again, his hasty fingers probed and pushed every coil and scale. He even stuck his fingers in its empty eye sockets. Finally in despair, he shoved his hand roughly against its snout. With a low grinding noise, the enormous circular carving began to shift slightly, pivoting on a concealed axis. At the same moment, the charred portion in the centre of the wooden door, fell smouldering to the floor and the swarm s
hot in. The room was suddenly filled with a burst of golden light. One, a little in advance of the others, darted forward and burned him on the cheek. The others followed, surrounding him, attacking from all sides, burning and tormenting.
Chapter Twenty
The Vengeance of Parth
Bethro screamed and awoke with a start.
He was lying on his side in the Great Hall perilously close to the fire, his companions still fast asleep under their blankets. The fire had spat out a charred flake of wood and it had landed on his hand, slightly singeing him. He flicked it off and sat up, wiping his forehead, still trembling with fright and not quite able to grasp that the terrifying experience had all been unreal.
One aspect of his dream had at least been true. There, engulfed in flame, was the wooden box and just as in his dream, the lid had opened. Before it became totally blackened, Bethro saw that the underside of the lid was emblazoned with the coiled snake of Parth. As he watched, a tongue of flame flared up and engulfed it, and in an instant it was gone.
“If that much is true,” he asked himself, “what else might be true? Maybe this was more than a dream. Maybe it was a vision.”
Bethro the Hero, though still shaken, rather liked that idea.
Dawn was a grey, muted event that the company remained largely unaware of because the Great Hall did not boast any windows. Vesarion instinctively awoke at the usual hour, to find that he was lying with his back to the fire, facing towards the great doors. A chink of cold light was spilling through a narrow gap underneath the doors onto the stone flags.
Stiffly, he sat up, rubbing his neck, to find Gorm on watch, sitting alertly by the fire, indulging in his favourite pastime of sharpening his sword with a whetstone. The others were just beginning to stir and instantly his eyes sought Sareth, who was beside him. He found that she was awake, her head pillowed on the blanket, her unclouded eyes dreamily regarding him.
“The fever has gone,” she said.
“I know. It broke last night.”
“I’m absolutely starving.”
He rose to his feet, smiling in satisfaction. “An excellent sign. Let’s see what Bethro can produce.”
After breakfast, just as they were packing up, Vesarion knew that the issue that had been nagging at him for sometime now, could no longer be avoided.
“We have a problem,” he began, not mincing matters. “I cannot discover a pass through the mountains and from this point onwards there is no obvious trail to follow. I was on top of one of those tall towers last night when the whole countryside was lit by moonlight so bright it was as clear as day, and I could see no way forward. The valley we have been following appears to end at this fortress. Behind the castle, the mountains rise sheer again and I could see no path.”
“But the Keeper said there was a way,” objected Iska. “He would not mislead us.”
“Perhaps we should look again from the top of one of the towers,” Sareth suggested. “I mean, moonlight can sometimes be deceptive. It casts very dark shadows that just might be hiding something, so perhaps, if the mist has gone, we should have another look to see what daylight can reveal.”
“Very well,” Vesarion agreed. “You have sharp eyesight, Sareth. Come with me to the tower and see if you can spot something that I have missed.”
Leaving the others in the great hall, Vesarion guided Sareth along the labyrinthine corridors that he and Eimer had inspected the night before, until they reached the foot of the tower. She was unusually silent, her customary humorous comments entirely absent. He guessed that the brooding atmosphere of the place was finally affecting her, dragging down her spirits as it had done to them all. As they ascended the fan-shaped steps of the spiral staircase, she remarked in a flattened voice: “This place is like a tomb. I take it, on your search last night, you didn’t come across any corpses? It would somehow be appropriate.”
“No, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of this place. It is utterly immense. Ravenshold is like a child’s toy compared with it.”
They emerged onto the flat roof of the tower, ringed by crenellated defences. The place was littered with old sticks and crows’ droppings but the untidy residents had departed with the dawn and were now seen only as tiny back dots against the leaden sky.
“At least the wind has dropped,” Sareth observed, peering gingerly over the wall to look at the snowfield far below.
Vesarion, too, leaned on the wall. “It stopped snowing far too soon last night,” he informed her. “Look down there. I can even see our tracks from here! The snow has softened them a little but it would take no skill to follow them.” He shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it, except move on swiftly.”
They turned their backs to the snowfield and instead examined the mountains towering behind the fortress.
“Luckily, the clouds have lifted,” murmured Sareth in satisfaction, her eyes scanning the heights that were, for once, innocent of mist. Carefully and methodically, they both examined every ridge and fold of the mountains, searching for some sort of gap or indentation that might look even remotely traversable. But they were finally forced to admit that they could find nothing.
“Spoke too soon,” she said. “What do we do now?”
Vesarion turned from his survey of the mountain and was on the point of replying, when he suddenly stiffened. Following the direction of his gaze, Sareth saw a band of dark figures struggling across the snowfield in the wake of their trail.
“They’ve found us!” she exclaimed.
Her companion caught her arm and pulled her down. “Don’t stand against the skyline,” he hissed, but it was too late.
A collective, triumphant snarl from twenty Red Turog throats travelled across the snowfield. A quick peep between the crenellations revealed that their pace had quickened. They were now ploughing through the snow with the determination of hunters who know that their prey is near.
Sareth and Vesarion tumbled down the staircase, desperate in their haste to warn the others. As they ran, Sareth called: “We can’t go out the great doors or we’ll walk straight into them. Did you find any other way out of this rat’s nest?”
“No. Nothing.”
They flew along the passageways until they fairly burst through the side door into the Great Hall with such speed that the others, who had been peacefully sitting on their packs by the dying fire, leaped to their feet in alarm.
“Red Turog!” shouted Vesarion. “They’ll be in the courtyard by now! Quickly!”
The response was an eruption of activity, with everyone grabbing belongings and weapons, colliding with one another in their haste. But all the frenetic activity came to a sudden halt when there was a dull but powerful thud against the great doors. For the space of a heartbeat everyone froze.
Another, heavier thump fell against the doors, and they visibly quivered with the impact. Then something struck them with an almighty crash. The wooden bar that Vesarion had thrust between the handles, issued a sharp cracking noise, and began to splinter.
“They’re using some sort of battering ram,” Eimer shouted, pushing Iska before him towards a side door. “They’ll be through on the next blow!”
Vesarion was the last to leave the hall by the side door and just as he was passing through it, he heard a ferocious crash and the sound of shattering wood that could only mean that the great doors had given up the struggle.
He quietly closed the door behind him, hoping his exit had been unobserved. His eyes searched the back of the door for a bolt or some other means of securing it, but there was nothing. All he could do was snatch up a piece of broken beam lying nearby and wedge it against the handle.
The others were fleeing along the corridor by now and were out of sight. Drawing his sword, he sped after them.
“Where are we going?” panted Iska, as they stumbled pell-mell down the dim passage.
Bethro, who for once was in the lead, kept calling excitedly over his shoulder: “This way! Follow me!”
“How does he know where he’s going?” Eimer asked, keeping pace with Iska. “He never left the Great Hall the whole time we were there?”
“I don’t know, but as I don’t have a better idea, I’m sticking with him.”
Just as Vesarion caught up with them, another crash, echoing along the passageway, informed him that his temporary obstruction had given way.
“This way! This way!” shouted Bethro.
“Where’s he taking us?” Vesarion demanded of Eimer.
“I have no idea but wherever he’s going, we’d better get there quickly because I can hear them in the passageway now.”
An ominous snarling, hissing noise was reverberating off the stone walls, magnifying the sound until it sounded as if thousands of demons were pursuing them.
“Hurry!” cried Iska. “It sounds like there is an army of them.”
“How many did you see?” Eimer asked Vesarion.
“About twenty. Too many to fight.”
Bethro, with astonishing agility, had shot down the dark entrance to one of the descending spiral staircases with all the alacrity of a rather stout weasel after a rabbit.
“Sareth?” Vesarion called to the figure running a few paces ahead of him. “Find out where Bethro is taking us. And quickly. He could be leading us into a trap!”
She nodded and putting on extra speed, plunged down the staircase in pursuit of him.
Vesarion braked to a halt at the top of the steps almost causing Eimer to collide with him.
“We could use this staircase to slow them down,” he suggested.
“Agreed. Do we make a stand here or at the bottom?”
Vesarion glanced down the narrow, wedge-like steps. “At the bottom,” he decided. “They’ll have no choice but to descend in single-file.”
With another throaty roar, their pursuers came into view, streaming along the flags like hounds on a scent. They all wore armour and steel-spiked helmets and carried either curved swords or heavy, nail-studded maces in their hands. Their yellow eyes appeared almost to glow against their dull red skins and every one of them was tall and powerful.