Red Palace (14 page)

Aldrych
is close to the far wall where I suspect the entrance to the laboratory is, and Andrei is further back, near the poem. I turn to each, one after the other. There is a part of me that is drawn to Aldrych, even though the memory of the disaster during his reign is only partially related to soil, somehow I can imagine our king wanting to involve his father. A snow slide is more like a landslide than it is a tidal wave. I turn from Aldrych and head towards Andrei. No. The poem stated soil—I must go with the logical choice.

My palms are slick with sweat as I reach towards the hilt of the sword. I suck in the stale air of the underground crypt, and it is as though the walls are looming down around me, closing in tighter and tighter.
My stomach clenches. I’ve been right so far. I press down on the hilt and it depresses into the coffin just like the others, and behind me there is the scrape of stone, as though a heavy door has been dragged open.

I spin around to Sasha in excitement. “I did it.”

But Sasha’s mouth is hanging open and her eyes are fixed on the ground. The sound of the scraping stone was not from the secret door at all. The final flagstone by the far wall of the crypt is pulled away, leaving a gaping hole in the ground. From inside that hole comes the sound of something scuttling and scraping.

“What is it?” I whisper.

Sasha shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

I take a step forward, hesitant to see what lies beneath the ground. There’s a twist in my stomach that tells me this isn’t the door we’ve been looking for. And as my heart pounds against my chest, a brass coated creature bursts from the opened trap door.

It happens in a flurry of gold limbs. The creature leaps out towards me and I have barely enough time to summon wind to knock it back. As it staggers away I grasp hold of my sword and wield it in front of me, using both hands to steady the blade.

“What is it?” I
shout to Sasha. But she is as still as the sarcophagi, staring at the mechanical beast.

It climbs to its feet and faces me. Ruby red glass eyes stare at me through the darkness. It has a long snout, a broad chest, four legs and a jaw full of sharp teeth. This time Beardsley has excelled himself, he has managed to create the most frightening dog I’ve ever seen. It snaps
its jaw open and shut, imitating a dog gnashing its teeth, and even though it makes no such noise, I can imagine the growl at the back of its throat.

Sasha snaps out of her trance. “It has pieces of glass stuck on the end of its paws like claws, and there’s a tail like a metal whip. It’s very flexible and long
, so be careful.”

The dog scrapes its paws along the stone flags,
as though waiting for the perfect time to pounce. In turn, I keep wind close to me, and hold my sword aloft. I’m limited in the amount of the craft I can use without endangering our lives down in the crypt. Water could end up drowning us, plus it would do little against the brass of the dog, flames would barely hurt the thing—not that I can create them anyway—and soil could end up in us buried alive. My best bet is to remember what Beardsley said about the spider—the weakness is in the eyes.

“Beardsley, for the love of the Gods
, how did you make these things?” I mumble.

The dog sets off at a gallop and I push back with wind. I need to keep my power in check,
controlling my emotions. The dog fights through the wind, but I manage to at least slow it down to give me enough time to pull back my sword and prepare to attack. As I withdraw my sword, ready to thrust it at the creature, the dog leans back on its hind legs and pounces towards me, its jaw open, the jagged teeth bare. I duck, swinging blindly with my sword, somehow managing a hit on the underbelly of the beast as I drop down to the ground. It at least throws the dog off course and it falls onto Andrei’s coffin, knocking a chunk of marble from the corner.

I stagger back
, onto the first highlighted flagstone. The brass dog lies unmoving on top of King Andrei, and I hope to all the Gods that it will not get back up. Then its head twitches to the right. Its tail flicks up and slaps against the stone. It gets back on its feet and turns to face me, only now one of its eyes have been smashed.

“Bash its head in, Mae,” Sasha shouts. “I think it has some sort of… brain there.”

The dog rushes towards me and sure enough behind that broken eye it seems as though there is a glint of something, a flash of an amber jewel like the amulets worn by the Borgans. I use the same tactic, slowing it down with a short, sharp gust of wind and then thrusting the sword forwards, letting out a cry as I throw my shoulder into the task. The dog tries to jump at me with its metal teeth showing, but this time I am ready for it, and I bring the sword down in a crashing blow on its last good eye. The dog is stunned, staggering back as it composes itself. That’s when I ram the sword through its eye, managing to find a weak spot in the plates of metal at the back of its head. When I pull the sword back, it immediately goes limp. Sasha jumps up and down and cheers for me.

I reach down and collect the broken amulet. “Beardsley must have used amber because he knows it will
channel the craft. Half mechanics and half magic. No wonder they are so terrifying.”

“Mae!” Sasha calls.

I have barely enough time to face Sasha when three more brass dogs leap through the hole. I almost drop my sword at the sight of them. Sasha screams for me to go left, and at the last moment I’m able to move my limbs, missing the dogs by a hair.

The three dogs are identical, with the same powerful hind legs and sharp teeth. I try to ignore the nausea in my stomach and regain my balance, lifting the sword to protect me. The dog
closest to me is the quickest to change direction, and it chases me down with sweeping strides. Air pulses from me, knocking the dog back and taking the other two with it, but the effort of using my powers in such force brings beads of sweat out on my forehead. My legs begin to tremble. If I’m not careful, I will weaken.

There’s no way I can fight all three with a sword. Instead, I need to think fast
. I need to outwit them. What is their weakness? I can’t find any weakness at all. They are strong, fast, impenetrable. But then, I destroyed the first dog because it crashed into the sarcophagus. The dogs are not alive, that means they have no fear. They don’t see hazards in the way humans and animals do.

With renewed energy, I position myself next to Andrei’s tomb, silently apologising to the long dead king for desecrating his final resting place.

“I’m alive, Andrei,” I whisper, never taking my eyes from the red glassy eyes of the dogs, “and I plan to stay that way.”

As soon as I plant my feet, the dogs race towards me.

Sasha yells my name, but I do not look at her. Instead, I watch the path of the dogs, waiting. Waiting for the very last minute when all three have their legs lifted from the ground. And then I drop to my stomach. There’s the clash of metal on stone behind me as I slither across the ground away from them. Shards of metal fall on me, one cuts through the cloth of my tunic, grazing my arm.

“Hurry, Mae. One of them is still functioning,” Sasha warns.

I jump back to my feet just in time to raise my sword. The dog’s jaw clamps down over the blade, and its paws hit me on the shoulders, knocking me back. Somehow, I lift my feet and kick its belly, managing to make the dog lose its balance. The dog’s jaw loosens and I manage to retract the sword in time to make one last swing at its head. Something deep within me snaps and I hear a feral battle cry come from somewhere deep inside me. Primitive. Linked to fear and anger and the tenacity to survive. I haven’t come all this way to be defeated by a metal dog.

The sword shatters the glass of the eye and penetrates the mechanism behind it, destroying the skull of the dog.
Plates of metal fly through the air and the dog’s body falls limp, hitting me with a thud. I have to heave it off me before I can stand, my entire body shaking.

“Wow,” Sasha says. “You just killed
four
of those things. That was incredible.”

The crypt is littered with broken glass and metal plates. I bend down and retrieve one of the amber coloured gems from the flagstones and put it in my pocket.

“I hope that’s the last of them, because honestly, I don’t think I could do that again.” I stare down at my sword, mangled and bent from the metal on metal clash. My shoulder sings with pain from the effort of driving the weapon into the mechanical dog. I throw the contorted weapon onto the floor—now useless—and stretch out my sore back. “Right so, I’m guessing that was the wrong king.”

Sasha laughs. “I think you might be right. But, look, the stones are still highlighted by
light, that means you just have to press Aldrych I and we should be let in.”

I wipe away the sweat on my forehead with the sleeve of my tunic. “Bu
t 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 wi
sh 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 i
t. 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 ransac
king 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 purs
es 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.