The Skeleth (14 page)

He raced back up to the gatehouse. “My lord, will you please raise the inner gate?” He put the sword to the brigand's back. “You, go up to the arrow slit. Say exactly the words I give you, and nothing else.”

Lord Tristan's bushy brows rose with his smile. “Aha! I think I understand.” He pushed the crossbowman across the room. “The stories speak truth—I do indeed keep my word. Hear me now. You will have my mercy if you obey this boy in all he says, but that is your only hope for clemency. I trust you
understand me.” He turned without help and stepped over to the inner winch.

Hamon Ruddy shot Tristan and Tom a look of venomous hate. Tom felt some surprise that it did not make him flinch. Perhaps it was because he knew that too many people would die if he failed in his plan. Perhaps he was simply too angry to be afraid.

He tapped Hamon with the flat of the sword. “Move.” He nudged him over to the nearest arrow slit.

Tristan heaved at the winch, doing the work of two men with ease. The rope drew taut, the drum turned, and the inner portcullis rose up. He set the ratchet in the winch so that it would not fall, then felt his way back to rejoin Tom by the windows that overlooked the approach to the castle.

Tom peered out through the arrow slit and spied the party on the road coming to a halt in front of the lowered drawbridge. They were roughly twenty in number, the same size as the party that had left the castle not long before. From the sacks on their shoulders, most looked to have partaken in some hasty plundering, and at least three of them dragged stolen horses along on rope leads. Torchlight glinted on the points of their spears and on the blades of their naked swords.

Aldred Shakesby stepped out in front. “Those accursed harpies tricked us! They've emptied the food stores, set their grain shed afire and run off into the woods somewhere!”

Hamon Ruddy turned to stare at Tom—under his rage there was just a hint of admiration. Tom leaned in to Hamon's ear and whispered.

“About time you got here!” Hamon shouted it through the arrow slit. “That boy sprang the old man from his cell! They've killed Tanchus, and now they're running riot in the courtyard!”

“Well, we'll fix that right enough!” Aldred threw down his plunder. “Raise the gates!”

Tom turned to Tristan. “Outer gate, my lord. Raise it, but don't lock it.”

Tristan hauled on the winch connected to the outer portcullis. From outside came the sound of men forming up and getting a fighting hold on their weapons.

Aldred leaned back to shout. “Where are they now?”

“By the stables,” said Hamon at Tom's prompting. The outer portcullis cranked up, just over the height of a man.

The steward's voice rose to a shout. “Kill the boy. Leave the old man alive if you can, but don't try too hard.” He raised his sword. “Right, ready, boys? Charge!”

The men gave forth a vicious cheer and rushed the gatehouse. Tom pushed Hamon aside and looked down as the last man passed out of view below. “Now, my lord! Let go!”

Tristan took his hands from the winch, and the outer portcullis slammed to the ground. Tom leapt across the room to the inner winch and yanked the ratchet free. The wheel spun, the chain clanked faster and faster—and then it stopped with a crash that resounded from below.

“What in all thunder?” The gates rattled in their tracks. Tom grabbed the wedge of wood beside the winch and jammed it over the portcullis to prevent it from being raised. Tristan did the same on his side.

A chorus of shouts rose up from the tunnel—confused,
then enraged, then fearful. Tom peered down through one of the holes in the floor to find Aldred Shakesby staring up at him from twenty feet below, surrounded by his men, all of them trapped between the gates.

“We got them all.” Tom stood and bowed to Tristan. “Your castle, my lord.”

Tristan broke into a belly laugh, so loud and so cheery that it silenced the brigands below. “Oho! Oh, ho-ho-ho! My dear boy, my dear boy, this is a feat worthy of every bard and minstrel from here to the golden domes of Üvhakkat! Come, let us see what we have caught in our nets!”

E
dmund rolled over, seething in pain. He had landed hard, but on something soft. “Geoffrey?” Fear flared in him. “Geoffrey, where are you?” He heard no answer. The trapdoor through which he had fallen levered back into place above him, sealing him in darkness.

“Geoffrey!” Edmund heaved himself up, felt frantically beneath him, then breathed in relief. He had fallen on a pile of heavy earth from above, and not on his brother, as he had feared.

A groan rose from a few feet away. “You donkey-brains.” Geoffrey coughed. “You dunderhead! Why don't you ever
think
?”

“You're all right, then?” Edmund reached out blind. “Nothing broken?”

“Get off me.” Geoffrey stiff-armed him. “You could have gotten us both killed!”

Edmund sat back again; his brother sounded well enough to be his usual irritating self. “Find the torches, then, and strike a light.”

Geoffrey rummaged, then scraped, causing sparks to spit lurid trails through the darkness. Edmund retrieved the
Paelandabok
and found it not much more damaged than it had been already. He gathered up the arrows that had spilled from Geoffrey's quiver and found the bow lying beside him in the dirt.

Geoffrey lit a torch and held it out. “Now what?”

“Now we see what we can find.” Edmund offered the bow and arrows in exchange. “Follow me.”

The low, rough tunnel might have been an ancient ruin, like the ruins Edmund had seen up in the Girth, but there all similarity ended. The stones looked uneven, set with thick, crumbling mortar, quite unlike the grand blocky dwellings of the folk who had once lived around the mountain of the Nethergrim. The faded paintings that covered them spoke of warrior kings with swords and lances held aloft in defiance against ranks of twisted creatures, creatures that Edmund would not have believed existed, had he not already seen a few with his own eyes.

“Just think.” Edmund tapped the ceiling. “Folk have been climbing and playing about in the old broken keep for years and years, never knowing this was right below their feet.”

“I liked the world better when old castles were just old castles.” Geoffrey lit a second torch for himself and drew his shiny new fighting dagger in his other hand.

Edmund knelt beside a scene that showed two women
standing with joined hands above an ornately decorated box. “Look at this.” He burned away some cobwebs, then translated what he found written below: “
The Skeleth are seen and yet unseen. Trust your thoughts, not your eyes.
”

“That's like what we just did up in the courtyard,” said Geoffrey. “We put an arrow through that brick because of what we knew, not because of what we saw.”

The passage turned at the footings of the tower to meet a set of spiral stairs around a massive central pillar. Little remained within the circular chamber beyond to tell of its former use. An age-squashed litter of leaves, mud and twigs choked the landing. Edmund guessed that the rain must come pouring through from the broken roof of the tower far above and found himself amazed that the structure had remained standing for so long.

“Look—flowers.” Geoffrey stepped into the room and felt out the round wall in the torchlight, tracing the twining designs painted there. “Lilies, I think.”

Edmund opened the
Paelandabok
and checked to make sure. “The flower of death. One of their symbols for the Nethergrim. And there, a pair of raised hands, just like we saw beneath the mountain.”

“And look at this.” Geoffrey scratched away some ancient mud to show a pattern that ran at the height of his knee, an undulating band that might once have been painted green, from the few flecks remaining.

“Follow that all the way around the room.” Edmund pointed. “See? It's a snake, eating its own tail. The Nethergrim again.”

“Ugh.” Geoffrey stood up. “Did these people serve it, too?”

“I think they fought against her, as best they could.” Edmund paused before the painted design of an inward-turning spiral. “The Nethergrim has come back into the world many times, and in many different shapes. She has used both men and monsters to serve her ends, but in every age of the world there have been folk who have stood in her way.”

He followed the images in a slow circle around the chamber. “Every time we destroy one of the Nethergrim's forms, we send her out of the world, and she has to convince someone to let her back in again.”

Geoffrey peered over Edmund's shoulder. “Why would someone do that?”

Edmund glanced at him. “Ask Vithric.”

Geoffrey turned in disgust from the wall and nearly tripped over the remains of a table that had lost a leg and spilled its collection of jugs and vials to the floor in centuries long past. Edmund followed him up around the circular stairs, to find another round room on the floor above.

“This one looks just like the one below.” Geoffrey took a brief glance into the room, then continued upward. “I doubt we could learn much in there.”

Edmund held his torch out into the room that Geoffrey had just passed. Prickles ran up the back of his neck.

Geoffrey stopped on the stairs above him, peering into the room on the next floor farther up. “Edmund.” His voice came out breathless. “What is happening?”

Edmund turned to look up the spiraling stairs and saw Geoffrey before and above him. He whirled around, toward the warmth of flame and flood of light. He found Geoffrey on the
stairs below, holding his torch aloft, confusion turning rapidly to fright upon his face.

“This room isn't just similar to the one below.” Edmund stepped out into the circular chamber and found the ruined table just where he expected it to be. “It's the same room.”

“That can't be.” Geoffrey ran onward up the stairs—and emerged from below.

Edmund's prickles turned to chills. “You stay here. Let me try it.” He went downstairs this time. As soon as he emerged below the level of the next floor down, he found Geoffrey looking up at him.

Edmund joined his brother on the landing. “You go upstairs, and I go downstairs. Ready? Go!”

The brothers ran away from each other, Edmund down and Geoffrey up—and crashed into each other on the landing of the stairs.

“Ow!” Geoffrey staggered back from Edmund. “What are we going to do? We're stuck in here!”

Edmund stepped into the room. “Help me look around.” He scanned the whole surface of the wall. “Maybe there's something we can learn in here to help us.”

“Here.” Geoffrey knocked a rotting pile of tapestries aside. “Here, Edmund. There's writing.”

Edmund rushed over and waved away a whole colony of skittering bugs. “
The Skeleth are shapes without substance. Right is left, up is down.
”

“Sounds like what's happening to us,” said Geoffrey.

Edmund paced around the chamber again, passing by the
spiral, then the head of the snake, then the raised hands upon the wall. He stopped. “Geoffrey, look. The snake has two heads.”

Geoffrey looked at Edmund, then around the room. “No it doesn't.”

“Follow me.” Edmund walked around the room one more time, with Geoffrey following close at his heels. This time he felt it, the shift and subtle warp of a spell. He passed the spiral again, then the raised hands—and he was sure. “Stop. Stop here. Feel it?”

“Feel what?” said Geoffrey.

Edmund grabbed his brother by the arm. He followed the feeling outward, from the room to the edge of the stairs. “The missing brick outside, and this chamber—they aren't really tests or traps, they're lessons. They're teaching us what the Skeleth are, and teaching us how to defeat them.”

Geoffrey shuffled behind him. “Defeat them how?”

“By a spell, one with multiple parts.” Edmund kept the doubled sight of the heads of the snake fixed in his vision, one in the corner of each eye. “Follow right behind me. It's here.”

“What's here?” said Geoffrey. “What are you doing? You're just waving your hand in the—oh!”

Edmund found the rift, the very slight imperfection in the folded space of the chamber. “Here.” He got his hand into it and felt the change of air. “Here, come through.” He forced the gap wider, first with his hand, then his shoulder, then he jerked Geoffrey through behind him, and dropped to his knees on a set of stairs that he had never seen before.

“Ha!” Edmund descended through a half circle of stairs,
then waved his torch across a pair of stone doors that barred his path. “Give me a hand with this.” He set his shoulder to one of the doors, and with Geoffrey's help it gave way with a grinding squeal.

Geoffrey poked his torch through the gap, then let out a hiss of awe. Two corpses, one a man, the other a woman, lay rotted to bones in the chamber beyond, each upon a slab of stone.

Edmund pushed in first. “I knew it!”

Geoffrey ducked through behind him. The crypt barely gave the brothers the space to stand together, and the ceiling arched in just above their heads. He held out his torch over the corpses—the glow of his flame awakened glints of gold. “A king and a queen.”

“But which king and queen? That's the question.” Edmund set his torch in a hole in the wall that seemed made for the purpose. Skeletal though she was, the queen lay in a repose that suggested peace. The king, on the other hand, looked to have died by some great violence, for though his corpse had been arranged with care, most of his bones looked badly damaged, and one side of his skull had been shorn clear off.

Geoffrey burned away some cobwebs from the wall with his torch. “What are these?”

Edmund set down his sack and drew from it his wax-covered writing tablet and stylus. “Those are just what I was hoping to find.” He started sketching the outlines of the spell painted on the wall, the curled and spiky symbols that recorded the thoughts of a long-dead wizard.

“The Sign of Perception, and then the Sign of Closing.” He brushed away some cobwebs, then traced out a long passage
about the sealing of boundaries and something to do with a casket, or a prison. “The Pillar of Inversion, yes, good . . .”

“Ugh!” said Geoffrey. “And what are
those
?”

Edmund followed Geoffrey's light—depicted on the stone were long lines of funny squiggles that he took at first to be the letters of an unfamiliar language, until he looked more closely. The painted creatures were nothing but rows of jointless arms undulating around maws of jagged darkness. “There's something written under them. Aha! Yes, these are the Skeleth.”

Geoffrey drew back in disgust, taking his torch with him. “I think I found something I hate worse than bolgugs.”

“I need that light!” Edmund set the book on the slab of the queen. “Look, there's a row of warriors above the creatures, and—Geoffrey, get back here. You should see this.”

He drew his knife, a double-edged dagger that was a twin to Geoffrey's, and scraped away some of the filth from the wall. Shadowed by the ceiling, covered in the drippings of centuries, stood a third line of figures.

Geoffrey peered at them. “It's like the squiggly monsters from the bottom row are standing with the men from the middle.” He raised his torch to bring the flame nearer. “Or in front of them.”

Edmund stared. “Not in front, inside. They're together, each monster bound to a man.” He traced out a figure—the squiggled rows of arms seemed to wrap around the man's body. “And here, see? There are the two women standing beside each other, with the opened box just like we saw before, and—look, look there—the men and the monsters have been pulled apart again.”

He followed the wall to the next scene. The squiggly creatures were being drawn into the box, leaving the men untouched. Geoffrey wandered away again, forcing Edmund to retrieve his own torch from the wall.

“The Skeleth are man and monster both.” Edmund read aloud from the words painted under the scene. “The man can be freed if he awakens to what the monster cannot know.”

“Oho, look at this!” Geoffrey shifted aside some ragged cloth from the breast of the king to expose an axe clutched in bony hands. “Give this thing a polish and I'll bet it could chop a shield right in half.”

Edmund turned to look. The meaning of it struck him—an axe. He turned back through the pages of the book.
There came three kings, three brothers, three kinsmen of the Pael—Ricimer, Thodimund and Childeric the Fair; an axe-king, a sword-king and a king of tall spear.

“Of course.” He returned to the symbols painted on the wall. “This is not the tomb of Childeric, the king who summoned up the Skeleth. This is the tomb of his brother, Ricimer, one of the kings who fought against him.”

“Then I'll bet he's the one who killed all those Skeleth things.” Geoffrey wiggled the axe, then tried to ease it from the grip of the dead king. “Anyone who could swing this thing around must have been a real terror in a fight.” He heaved and grunted, levering the axe with a crash onto the floor.