Shadow Spell (7 page)

Cool, silvergrey light came in through the ragged-shaped windows, which had grown with the tower and were now as big as doors. Bigger. There was no glass in them and the cold air blew through, moist with unshed rain. Thin grey clouds drifted in too, coiling their way though the tower, in one huge window and out the other.

As they travelled downwards, drawing closer to the clouds, Nin began to make out their shape. They were imitating mermaids, with long locks of misty hair floating around them. A few more twists of the stair and their feet were disappearing into the clouds that rose about them like thick fog, swallowing them up. She hung on extra tight and moved closer to Jonas.

At last they stepped off the bottom stair on to a stone floor, polished until it looked like deep, dark water. Looking up, Nin could see the stairway twisting away above her up the hollow funnel of the trunk tower, until it disappeared into the drifting cloud. Silver light fell through the mermaids' wispy hair, rippling over the floor like water.

‘It's beautiful!' sighed Nin. ‘Kind of spooky, but beautiful.'

Here, the walls around them were made from the twisted roots of the giant tree, and there was one large window level with the floor. Nin went to look out.

Far below, the Drift was veiled from sight by another, lower layer of wispy mermaid cloud from which Dark's Mansion rose in a tower of greens and greys, its rugged mud-and-stone outer walls wreathed in ivy and moss.
Directly beneath her, Nin could see a sweep of green lawn jutting out, just above the clouds.

‘There's, like, a garden down there. A garden in the sky!' she called over her shoulder to Jonas. ‘It must be a sort of huge balcony!'

A stream ran across the lawn. The silver strip of water trickled to the edge of the garden, then out through a hole in the surrounding wall to tumble into nothingness and vanish into the clouds.

Behind her, Jonas sighed. He was studying something in the corner of the room. ‘So,' he said, ‘where do we start? What do you think this clue looks like?'

Nin shrugged. ‘It'll be magic and I'm betting we'll know it when …' She turned and saw Jonas staring. Her gaze followed his. ‘What's that?'

‘Skeleton. Thought you'd've worked that out!'

‘Yes,' said Nin with exaggerated patience, ‘but what's it doing here?
Other than being dead
,' she added sharply.

Jonas gave her a steady look. ‘This is a sorcerer's home, Nin. It may not be the Terrible House, but that doesn't mean it's
safe
.'

Nin glared at his back as he started walking towards an arch on the other side of the room. A horrible thought crossed her mind. What if Simeon Dark was
… not friendly
? Worse, what if he was
evil
? She had been seeing him as a hero, a champion who would use his powers to save them. But just because he was the only sorcerer left alive, and their one hope to stop Strood, didn't mean he had to be on their side. With a sigh, she
put it out of her head and followed Jonas. The Mansion looked big. Best not to get lost!

On the other side of the arch was a staircase down to a smaller room, which in turn led to a maze of other rooms, all connected by arches and stairways. They walked on through Dark's mountain home, with Jonas in the lead and Nin staring around her as they went. Here the walls and floors were mainly rock, sometimes polished until it shone like glass and sometimes rough and sporting patches of moss or tiny flowers that shone like stars. In places, the rock was seamed with agate or crystal and there were pillars like stalactites. It wasn't like being in a cave though, for every room was full of light that poured in through windows of every shape possible. Many of them were filled with stained glass that spilled their colour across the floor in swirls of blue and green, touched with vivid scarlet.

It would have been nice, but for two bad things. The first Nin noticed straight away. There were voices.

They began as a background murmur, but quickly grew to a constant chattering and laughing – almost as if they were getting used to the intruders' presence and growing bolder. After a while, Nin began to feel like they were the only living people at a very large party of unseen ghosts.

‘It's spooking me,' she grumbled. ‘I wish we could find the clue and get out of here.'

‘There's just so much of it,' sighed Jonas, meaning the Mansion.

He looked worried and Nin knew why. It brought her straight to bad thing number two. The bone count was growing, from leftover bits of skull and oddly scattered bones, to whole and fairly new-looking skeletons. She frowned at the one they were just passing. It was still sporting tufts of hair and looked unnervingly familiar. As if she had seen it before.

Bad thing number three was just about to arrive.

Jonas stopped dead in his tracks. ‘We've seen that before,' he said sharply. He threw up his arms. ‘Oh hell! I've been getting the feeling we're going round in circles and that just proves it!'

There was a moment of silence as the voices around them fell suddenly quiet. It gave Nin the creepy feeling that they were listening.

‘We can't have done,' she said firmly, ‘we've been going
down
every stairway we've found. To cover the same ground, we'd have to go
up
at least sometimes, right?'

‘This is a sorcerer's house, Nin. What's the betting normal rules don't apply?'

‘So … like … doors might not lead where you think they lead?' Nin's heart sank as she caught on. ‘There might be some that take you all the way from the top to the bottom in a step. And some that take you from the bottom to the top again.'

‘The whole place is a 3D maze,' groaned Jonas. ‘At this rate, we'll never find our way out, let alone track down the wretched clue. We could starve to death in here!'

They stared at the skeleton in desperate silence. The voices got going again and Nin was sure there was more than the usual amount of sniggering.

‘It's the story about him leaving treasure behind, I suppose,' she said thoughtfully. ‘That's why so many people have come here.'

‘And died, you mean? Yep, sounds about right. What worries me is the skeletons that aren't whole, the ones that look like something tore them up.'

‘Oh thanks for that thought!'

Instant images crowded into Nin's head, things with big teeth, things with claws, powerful things that could be waiting round the very next corner. Fear settled in, making a cold nest somewhere around her middle. She had a nasty feeling it was going to stay for a while. Suddenly, the bad things were stacking up.

Jonas laughed grimly and shifted his pack to settle it more comfortably.

‘Come on, kid. Better give it another go. Maybe now we know what we're up against we'll stand a better chance.'

They set off again, with Jonas marking the rooms and archways carefully as they went, using a piece of chalk dug out from the bottom of his pack. It soon became clear that things were pretty hopeless. There were so many rooms that Nin thought it would take months to look in them all.

On top of that, not only did the arches not lead where they ought to, but sometimes they were one-way only,
making it impossible for them to retrace their steps. They would go through an arch and find themselves in a familiar room, then turn back to find the single entrance they had come in by replaced by three different arches, all of which led to unknown rooms.

Jonas was concentrating hard, trying to work out if there was a system. In each room, he would go over to the windows to look out and get his bearings as to where they were in the Mansion. Nin could see that it didn't help much. There didn't seem to be any logic in the way it was laid out at all.

And now, as well as worrying about being lost, Nin kept expecting some horrible thing to leap out at them and rip them limb from limb. It would be just like a sorcerer, she thought, to set a horrible guardian to watch over his home.

Gloomily, she followed Jonas through yet another arch.

To distract herself from her fears, Nin began to listen more carefully to the voices. She wondered if they were echoes of all the things that had been said and done here, the parties that Simeon Dark had held, the gatherings of his friends and fellow sorcerers. Perhaps she was listening to their dinner-party conversations? When one discussion ended, another always began straight away, usually with different voices and about an entirely different subject. If she listened carefully, she could pick out individual people.

‘
Really, Simeon
,' said a voice that she thought belonged to Nemus Sturdy, the oldest and most powerful of the Seven Sorcerers, ‘
I don't think it's quite appropriate for you to pretend to be one of the Dread. Werewolves are so
…
unpleasant.
'

Nin smiled to herself, remembering what Enid had told her about Dark. It sounded like the sorcerer was getting a ticking off for his habit of turning up to his own dinner parties in disguise. It would be fun though,
she thought, if you could be anybody, an actual person or a made-up one. With magic, the disguise would be as real as the real thing.

There was no response from Dark, but Nin was sure she heard a stifled yawn.

‘
Simeon!
' snapped Nemus. ‘
This is serious, you know.
'

Nin laughed. Without realising it, the more interested she became, the more she fell behind Jonas. There was silence for a moment and then a different conversation started up, so she tuned in to listen. Soon she began to see the owner of each voice in her mind's eye.

‘
So what does it mean, exactly?
' asked a new voice that just had to belong to Senta Melana. It was a soft, slightly husky voice, not as beautiful as Enid's but lovely enough to make the listener shiver. Senta had been the most beautiful of all the Seven Sorcerers and to escape the plague she had poured all of her magic back into the Land and gone to spend the last years of her life in the Widdern. Even though Nin didn't know it, right now, Jik was standing guard over Senta's last remaining descendant.

She's over there, thought Nin as she slowed right down, standing by that window, bathed in blue and golden light. And then it was more than just seeing Senta in her head. The sorceress was there in front of her, clear and sharp, though faintly transparent. Her beauty took Nin's breath away and she stopped to stare. There was something familiar about her, but although Nin had met Hilary Jones once before, she didn't quite make the connection.

‘
How should I know, my dear,
' said another voice, this one with a masculine beauty that easily matched Senta's. It was a lazy voice too, one that didn't care. Or at least, one that pretended not to. Nin turned her head and saw Azork. For a moment she felt a chill run through her, but this was not the tombfolk King he would become, this was the old Azork, the way he had been before he had cast a spell to make himself into a Dread Fabulous.

‘
It's just one of Morgan's foolish sayings.
' Azork moved over to stand opposite Senta, his silver eyes bright in his dark face as he watched her. His look made Nin feel strange, as though she was spying on something private.

Senta laughed and the sound of it made Nin smile. It made Azork smile too, a gentle smile.

He's in love! Nin thought, amazed.

‘
Don't confuse foolishness with stupidity, Azork. Morgan isn't an idiot, whatever you may think of him. He just gets carried away sometimes.
' Senta moved, her long hair falling about her like golden silk, her dress a shimmer of pearly white.

Azork scowled. He obviously didn't like Morgan Crow much.

‘
Even so,
' put in another voice, ‘
I don't think the prediction has to mean anything specific. It's just an image, an impression snatched from a future time.
'

Nin spun around, excitement gripping her. She saw a man she didn't know. His hair was pale gold, his eyes a curious mix of gold and silver, and his slim shape clad in a white shirt with black trousers and a scarlet waistcoat,
hanging open. He looked like a man who was at home.

‘
Surely, visions of the future can't be exact,
' Simeon Dark went on, taking a bite out of an apple, ‘
not when they are about EVERYONE'S future. It's all very well telling some little girl to beware the tall, dark stranger, but when Morgan makes a prophecy it's about the Land and that means something that will affect everyone alive, something that may be decades away. So all he can give is an outline, a snatched view, see?
'

‘
Hmmn
,' Azork sneered.

Senta gave a dreamy sigh that made Azork's scowl even darker.

‘
He makes such lovely prophecies though, doesn't he,
' she said. ‘“
A tide of golden darkness will rise in the east and sweep the Land, carrying death to the heart of one and dread to the souls of many.”
'

‘
We could all make pretty sayings,
' muttered Azork irritably. ‘
And we'd have just as much chance of them coming true at some time in the future as Crow
.' He struck a pose, one arm outstretched and his head thrown back. The light from the window turned his eyes to a glowing yellow-white, but didn't seem to touch the purple velvet of his robe. He hesitated.

‘
Go on
,' said Senta, looking amused.

‘
When there is life again in the Heart, so shall the lost be found and the ruined made whole
.'

‘Is that the clue?' asked Nin eagerly. ‘Y'know, the lost being' … She stopped, her head spinning slightly. She was standing in an empty room talking to a window.

A very empty room.

‘Jonas!' she called, hurrying through the nearest archway. On the other side was another empty room, so she turned around to go back. In front of her were two arches and through neither of them was a room lit with blue and yellow light.