Poppy gulped and Nathan nearly cried, knowing that tears were silently collecting and his eyes were moist. He turned and clasped John’s hand. “I won’t lose you for anyone,” he muttered. “But that’s the greatest offer – kindness – bravery – incredible. I’ll never forget it.” And he turned back to the tiger. “See how brave my friends are. You’re cruel and stupid and you want to hurt people so much better than yourself.”
Yaark roared, and even the Hazlett twins shrank back. The roar reverberated as Poppy’s shout had in the outer chamber. The sound swept around the walls like an engine, the stone floor shook beneath their feet and the ice trembled. Each tone of the roar increased, encircling and repeating. No one moved. Even the tiger himself stood tall, majestic and furious, unmoving, until the endless echoes had faded. Then the golden eyes narrowed, heavy-lidded with menace, and Nathan knew the beast intended action.
With a disguised shiver, Nathan stepped forwards. He held up the knife and pointed it directly into the tiger’s face. ‘I command,” he began, “that you take the place,” and then, shocked, he stumbled forwards and the knife dropped with a metallic clatter. Wagster had pushed him from behind, the clawed hand vicious into the small of his back. Both Alfie and John jumped on Wagster to stop him grabbing the fallen knife, and Poppy knelt as Nathan staggered, clasping the knife in her fist, and passing it immediately to Nathan. He thanked her turning, as she held out her hand.
“It burned me,” she whispered. “So what you said is true. Nobody but the Lord of Clarr can hold the Knife of Clarr.”
The tiger, pushing between Nathan and Poppy raised one paw, it claws outstretched, but as Poppy screamed, the tiger stopped, looking up quickly.
Wagster and Brewster no longer zoomed around their heads, but a great white bird was circling, the draught of its wings like a curtain of chilled wind.
“Tis Alice,” yelled Alfie. “And Hermes.”
With a swoop of triumphant feathers, a call of greeting, and a squawk of exuberance, they encircled the chamber, and the shadows fled. Instead of the darkness of threat, gloom, misery and fear, now the ceiling was a fluff of white and a whoop of joy.
“Look,” called Alice, her arms around Hermes’ neck, “this beautiful goose tried and tried, and eventually we managed to fly high enough to enter the tower. None of the others could make it, but here we are. And dear Hermes felt sure there was danger, so we wanted to help.” Looking down she saw the huge shape of the tiger standing motionless, and called, “is that Yaark? “
The tiger reared up, his claws almost catching Hermes’ breast feathers and Alice’s toes. “Yes, I am Yaark, fools,” he roared, and once again the echoes began to reverberate. “Beware the Warden of the Key.” Its roar turned to snarl. “But I am more than you can know. Do not challenge the lord of hellfire, or hellfire will swallow you all.”
Hermes continued to circle the room, the great outspread wings battering against Wagster and Brewster, who kept their distance. Alice had a handful of sharp stones collected from the ledge outside where the geese had landed, and she threw one fast and hard at the zooming and the cackling twins. One hit Brewster on the nose, and he snarled like the tiger, rearing and turning. Alice looked down, calling urgently to Alfie and John, Nathan and Poppy. “Jump on that thing’s back. Throw something. Pull its tail. Kick. Get together and attack while Hermes distracts its attention.”
Forewarned, the tiger snarled again, bent forwards, back legs high, as though to pounce. Nathan, deep breaths and unquenchable determination concentrated, attempted to jump on Yaark’s back, and his leg touched the rough vibrant fur. He fell backwards. The fur was fire as the tiger began its own transformation.
Alfie kicked out and jumped, but the tiger leapt around. Alice threw another stone but it missed. Poppy picked it up from the ground where it had fallen, and threw it straight into Yaarks eyes. But before the stone touched, it rebounded, lifted high into the icy air, and clattered to the ground.
“Ignorant creatures of the grasses,” spat the tiger. “You think you can touch the Warden of the Key, and the Lord of Hellfire?
The striped fur began to spike, and with a shiver, the tiger’s eyes went dark. Its face began to change. But while they yelled, fought and dodged, Nathan remembered something which had intrigued him at the time. Although Yaark claimed that the knife had no power over him, and for most of the time this had proved true, when Nathan had held it out and said certain words, Wagster had stopped him immediately, as though those words were dangerous. So now, moving back away from the scrabbling ferocious fury of the tiger, Nathan held up the knife, pointed the blade directly and spoke as loudly as he could.
The echoes began to spiral and rebound. “As Lord of Clarr and master of the Knife of Clarr, I command you to take the place of Queen Octobr. The queen shall be free of the ice, and the warden Yaark will take her place within the ice prison.”
And he stopped, took a deep breath, trembled, and watched, waiting, with the knife held firm with its point to Yaark’s face. The fading sounds of his voice flooded out and then fell back into whispers. A sudden spring of shadows, like the engulfing leather wings of a giant bat, turned the room black. A last whispering scratch of wingtips, and then silence fell like a shroud, no one moving. Hermes had landed and Alice had clambered off, groping in the dark for Alfie’s hand. Brewster and Wagster could be heard wheezing in the background. Nathan stood in the centre of the room, blinking.
Yaark’s transfiguration was halted. The shadow blooming from its yaws became a halo of ice crystals. Where giant black wings had started to form, now they shrank back. The thin crimson lines of skeleton bone turned again to the stripes of tiger fur, and a freezing and stagnant force pushed everyone, even the Hazletts, back against the walls.
Then once again he held up the knife.
Its light blazed out. The gold and silver gleam strengthened and spun its webs up to the ceiling and around the ice walls. And there, suspended within the wall where Granny Octobr had been, was the rearing form of a great angry tiger, on its hind legs as it leapt, its front paws extended, and its lips curled back in a snarl. Encased in the freeze, it remained utterly motionless. Yaark had indeed been taken by the ice grave.
Everyone stared. And then a very small voice said, “Is that you, Nathan?”
Whirling around, Nathan saw, and rushed into his grandmother’s arms. Poppy raced close behind him. But as they both clung to her, and her to them, shaking as though still frozen, another sound reverberated.
Both Wagster and Brewster were standing, mouths open, gaping and shouting, their knees trembling and their long fingers pointing at the vast slithering sheen of barely rippled ice which encircled the entire room beyond the arched doorway. They were horrified and desperately unbelieving. Their long skinny legs were bent and unsteady, their tight black jackets heaving as they tried to catch their breath, their top hats half slipping over their noses, and their little green button eyes wide as glass.
Hermes, standing proudly next to Alice, was bobbing his head in approval and respect, as Nathan stared back at Yaark, hardly able to understand what he had achieved. The others, crowding around, began to clap. The sound echoed. Granny, speechless, stood with her arms around Poppy, and she joined in the clapping.
And then, quite suddenly with a startling yell of fury, Wagster attacked. Nails curling into claws, he leapt. As his long legs sprang like sprinted stilts from the ground, he began to change and once again his body narrowed, twisted, and became dark coils of scaled power. His head expanded, the forked tongue flicked out and his jaws slit.
Dodging and running, Nathan raced around the room as the huge serpent swayed, ready to hurtle down, entrap, and contract its body to squeeze, strangle and kill. Hermes flew up at once, flapping violently around the snake’s head, its feathers in Wagster’s eyes and its webbed feet slapping against the back of his head. Brewster jumped to save his brother.
But he jumped too high and without stopping to look or think, Brewster Hazle
tt leapt straight into the long open pit.
As he fell, Brewster wailed, and then was gone.
With a screech, only half human, as he saw his twin disappear, Wagster fell back into his old form and scrabbled to the side of the pit to save his brother, He reached down his long arms into the shadows, but found he was slipping, his scales still clinging to his body and sliding on the icy stone.
Nathan knelt, and looked. Brewster, frantic and voiceless, was hanging onto the cord of destiny, his fingers entwined with rope and oozing blood, his face in open-mouthed panic, his hat disappearing down into the bottomless fall below his scrabbling golden feet.
But the cord was as fine as any invisible destiny, and Brewster, his attempts to climb up quite useless, was slipping and his fingers were unable to grip securely.
Beside Nathan, Alfie, John and Peter looked down.
“Leave him,” said Alfie. “Vile creature.”
“He wanted to kill you,” whispered Alice from behind them.
John looked dubious. “Those shrieks is mighty hard to hear,” he admitted, and it was Sam who began to sniff, as though about to cry. Hermes had trapped Wagster against the far wall, half man and half serpent, frantic and confused in scales and jacket, top hat and coiled tail. It was Poppy who came beside Nathan, peering down, and hurried away back to Granny’s sheltering arms.
Nathan shook his head. “I can’t leave him there.”
“Save the wretches’ life, and reckon he’ll try to kill you instead,” said Alfie gruffly.
But Nathan knelt again, and stretched down his arm, saying softly, “Brewster was the one who brought me to you. I wouldn’t have met any of you without him. And now you’re my best friends. The only really wonderful friends I’ve ever had. And all these most incredible adventures. All thanks to him.”
With another stretch, he grabbed Brewster’s failing fingers and pulled them up into the tightest grasp he could manage. Brewster finally released the cord of destiny with his right hand and clung to Nathan. Then Nathan grabbed Brewster’s left hand. It was coated in dried blood, put gradually Nathan managed to hold tight and slowly pulled. Brewster’s grip was now so desperately tight it was painful, but Nathan clung on and hoisted the skinny wizard, bit by bit, back onto the wet floor.
They sat together, collapsed and gasping for breath, staring at each other. Behind them Wagster had stopped struggling and watched quietly. Without his top hat, Brewster’s head was half bald with straggles of black tufts here and there, dropping over his ears but quite bare on top. He had never looked so vulnerable, and he was not laughing at all.
Everyone was watching and it was sometime before Brewster could speak. When he did, it was quiet, and only to Nathan. He murmured, “I owe you, boy. And a Hazlett always pays when called.”
Then, with a sudden turn, Wagster, more serpent now than man, snatched his twin brother up in his coils, hugged him safe and tight, swung across the pit, and within a blink was gone into the shadows. The faint sound of a slither on wet stone echoed back, and then quickly disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The small plump woman pushed back the thin grey wispy straggles of hair behind her ears where they got entangled with the purple frame of her glasses, leaned back with a breathless gasp against the ice wall, then realised what she was leaning against, glimpsed the motionless leap of the springing tiger directly behind her, and hurried away into the middle of the room.
There was no one left except Nathan, Poppy, Alice, Alfie, John and Sam, except for the goose. But Granny did not seem in the least perturbed by a talking goose, and smiled at everyone, pushed her glasses back up to her eyes, and sighed.
“I am most exceptionally grateful,” she said. “And so is he.”
“He?” asked Poppy. “You mean Brewster?”
“No, no,” said Granny, and drew out a tiny green frog with a yellow belly and huge black eyes from the dusty pocket of her apron. “Ferdinand,” she introduced him, brushing some self-raising flour off his head with her fingertip. “I’m not sure how long we were imprisoned, but it was most unpleasant.”
Nathan said hello again to Ferdinand, who bowed and muttered never ending thanks and loyalty, and then he regarded the other frozen figures encased in ice. “How do I get the others out?” Nathan asked.
“Sadly,” replied Granny, “there is no one to replace them. Without the key, you cannot unlock the prisons. And you well know who holds the key.”
“So how do I release Yaark and get it?”
“Without the key,” she repeated, “you can only swap one with another, and cannot simply release them all, nor even any one of them. Which is,” and she took both Nathan’s and Poppy’s hands in hers and walked very slowly over to another part of the wall near the doorway, “a great sadness for us all. For these, my dears, are your parents.”
“I should have kept Brewster, and swapped him,” whispered Nathan, staring, awed, at the motionless figures before him. He could not look away, and beside him Poppy was staring mesmerised as he was.
With a twitch of his fat stumpy tail feathers, Hermes waddled to Granny Octobr and bowed with reverence. “My lady,” he said, “I would be honoured to offer myself in exchange for one of our great imprisoned monarchs.”
John looked up. “And me. I reckon I wouldn’t mind. Go to sleep, maybe. Wouldn’t know the difference.”
“It’s not right.” Sam was crying again. “Take me. Just as long as you promise to look after Mouse.”
“Certainly not. None of you.” Granny clapped her hands and smiled. “You are heroes, each and every one. But the people trapped here must be freed by the great Key of Clarr. Every one of these are important men and women, and outside there are a thousand innocent souls turned to tiny creatures at the mercy of bad weather and the predators of the forests. Poor souls transformed into beetles, shrews, moles and turtles, the farmers have been unable to look after their crops. The craftsmen have had to abandon their businesses. The builders and carpenters have had to abandon their work. Lashtang has simply become the ruined plaything Clebbster, the tyrant, the wizard father of the Hazlett twins. Not only these people must be saved, and those outside, but Lashtang itself must be rescued. It has been too long.”
Nathan heard little of this speech. He and Poppy were staring at their parents.
The woman was tall, and her eyes were hazel with golden streaks, as was her hair. It was long and thick, and sun streaked just like Nathan’s and Poppy’s. Bumble-Bee Heads, all of them. She wore a long white dress to the ground, and there were pearls in her hair and around her waist. “Mother,” whispered Nathan to himself.
“How beautiful,” whispered Poppy. “Will we ever meet her properly, do you think?”
“I swear it. I promise it,” Nathan mumbled back to his sister. “I will come back here over and over until I find out how to help them both, and everyone else too.”
The man was unusually tall, and his hair was light brown, as were his heavy-lidded eyes. He wore a dark cloak which surrounded him, and there was a large square emerald ring on one thumb.
“I love them both,” said Poppy. “You have to let me come back with you, Nat. I want to fight the wizards too.”
Alfie had been listening. “Don’t leave us behind. Reckon this is a fantastic country. You better bring us all back.”
“Tis more than adventure,” John said suddenly, staring at Nathan. “Tis a duty, I reckon. And them puzzles to sort. Fire and ice, you says in that poesy. Well, this tower is ice. That be clear enough. And Yaark, tis the fire. The ruddy Hellfire tiger is trapped in the ice, but I don’t reckon the ice can keep him forever.”
“And we need the key back,” Poppy sniffed.
“But now,” said Granny, “it’s time to go home.” She nodded vigorously. “You have already achieved something wonderful on this visit. Oh yes – rescuing me of course – and thank you very much indeed. But more important, you have Yaark trapped in the ice. That is a great blessing.”
“But we have to rescue all those people trapped there,” said Poppy, shaking her head. “And that means Yaark too, doesn’t it?”
“May I,” Hermes bowed once again, “offer my services, my lady? If you wish to return to the human worlds, I can transport at least two of your illustrious selves.”
“There’s the puzzle,” said Nathan suddenly, remembering. “One of the arrows leads directly to the veil. We can leave altogether.”
Holding up her hand, Granny stood in the doorway, smiling. “You have all been heroes,” she said, “and people I should like to know better. I offer an open invitation for all of you to return to my land. But Lashtang is under great threat and needs warriors. One day, we will be at peace and will welcome everyone to our shores.”
It was Alice who stepped forwards, and bowed, as if to a queen. “My lady,” she answered, “I come from a time when war and great battles are fought all over the world, threat, invasion and danger are what we expect to face every day. We have been fighting a powerful and cruel man, and Nathan and Poppy have helped us beyond all expectation. We would like to help them in turn.”
Granny Octobr took Alice’s hand. “My dear,” she said, “I thank you and all of you brave people. Now I must return to England in my own modern times, and the life I adopted many years ago. I will take Poppy with me, if she will come, and hope to see Nathan soon. For we need to plan and get ready for the great fight.”
Nathan was still staring at his mother. He could hardly remember her from his childhood, but he recognised the kindness and love in her face and wished he could kiss her cheek. Now he turned back to his grandmother. “I want to go back with Alfie and John first,” he said. “I’ll come home soon.”
“Then we take the arrow towards the veil,” said Granny, “and I shall explain the different tunnels after that.”
In virtual silence, they returned to the entrance of the Tower, where the door still stood wide open, and beyond it the mountains soared, snow-topped, with their deep ravines, cliff sides, frozen waterfalls and precipices of ice and ruin. The wind howled, scattering icicles and whining through the slits in the rock. Everyone shivered, crowding together, and Hermes ruffled his feathers. The sky was grey, but there was daylight behind the clouds, and a glimmer of sunbeams on the higher slopes where the snow glittered bright.
Snap Page 27