The Witch's Daughter (Lamb & Castle Book 1) (15 page)

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Meg leaned out over the railing again, peering down into the darkness below. If ruins had tumbled down into that abyss, no living man would ever find them. She sniffed, and looked around the bleak landscape as if the temple were something she had momentarily misplaced.

Amelia’s heart ached to imagine the temple ruined a thousand years before her quest had even begun, the army of gardeners died out, the scented garden forgotten and dwindled to weeds and scrubs. She studied the tower. Hard to tell scale for sure in the alien landscape of steps and spires, nothing really to compare to, but it looked a great deal bigger around than the tower where she’d grown up, and more than ten times as tall, not even taking into account how deep its roots might reach into the black depths of the ravine. If she squinted, she could see a stairway circling it. And, while those parts of it in shadow were black as midnight, she thought some of those deep shadows might be tunnels. “This temple we’re looking for,” she ventured, “could it be… inside? In a cave, or, or something?” Yes, that ruled out the notion of it being set in acres of stunning manicured gardens, but old stories grew with embellishments over the ages.

Meg looked dubious, but couldn’t easily ignore Amelia’s suggestion. She drew the line at admitting ignorance, though. “Not an
impossible
idea, I suppose. You think it’s inside the tower, then?”

Amelia dropped her gaze meekly. “There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

The first rays of the sun broke across the endless grey plain, lighting the leaves of the sparse trees with fleeting sparks of gold. The golden light picked out the steps of a precarious staircase winding its way up the outer edges of the tower, the platforms and terraces everywhere.

Meg ordered the Captain to set down the
Storm Chaser
on one of the broad ledges that spiralled the height of the tower, but the skyship proved just too big. As they circled, scouting out their options to land, Amelia searched the surface of the column for likely looking entrances. Then, as they ventured further around the curve of the tower’s circumference, something awful came suddenly into view. Amelia shrank back, crying out in spite of herself.

Clinging to the surface of the tower, grey scales flecked with sunfire against grey rock, the dragon reared a hundred feet high, its fierce horned head poised on a long and sinuous neck that curved out from the wall like a snake preparing to strike.

Percival muttered a prayer, and Amelia heard the rapid hiss of Harold drawing his sword, but Meg only laughed when she saw the beast.

Amelia flushed: angry, startled and embarrassed all at once. The grey dragon was only a statue.

“Oh my days…” Meg shook her head and laughed again. “If you could only see the looks on your faces! Perce, I had to imagine yours, of course.”

“This
is
the land of dragons,” Percival reminded her sternly. “Such beasts still roam these forsaken lands, though they may be rarer nowadays.”

“Oh, don’t talk like you’ve ever actually
seen
a dragon, brave Sir Percival.”

As the
Storm Chaser
continued to traverse the edges of the tower, Amelia saw more and more draconic forms in the rock. Down in the cool shadowy depths, their slim sinuous forms seemed to come alive in the edges of her vision, although when she looked at them directly in the sunlight, she could see plain enough they were only stone. She pressed her hand to her chest, eyes closed as she listened to the frantic racing of her heart.
Only carvings…
She opened her eyes, immediately regretting the chance that she’d missed fleeting glances of even more spectacular carvings. What craftsmen had sculpted such huge and magnificent creatures, hundreds of feet above the depths of the abyss? They’d journeyed so many miles from civilisation… or had they? Amelia turned her attention to the darkness deep below the
Storm Chaser
; to the steep walls of the ravines. The gloom blurred the marked striation of the rocks into grey vagueness – there might be tunnels and carvings for miles around, beneath the hard grey skin of the earth here. There might be whole cities underground: a quiet, private race content to keep apart from the busy, noisy world of men that Amelia and her companions had ventured through.

“There are no tetherings here, Ma’am,” said Captain Dunnager. He was right: for all the stairways and carvings, all the signs of now-deserted habitation, there was no sign of the huge iron rings to tether a skyship.

“Might this place pre-date the modern skyship design?” Percival wondered aloud.

“Don’t be daft,” said Meg. “How else would anybody get to this place but by air?”

“I can set you down here, Ma’am,” said the Captain, his voice strained with concentration as the sides of the
Storm Chaser
drifted slowly closer to the tower, above a ledge easily wide enough to walk about on. “I’ll have to come down to rest somewhere for a bit, though.”

Meg nodded. “Of course. We might be here a while, so go and get some kip when you’ve put us down. We’ll send you a signal when we’re ready, though, so be on the lookout for a green flame.” And without further ado, she unrolled the ladder over the edge and began to climb down, soon finding the ledge below, sure-footed as a fat little mountain goat prancing on the rocks. Amelia steeled her nerves to follow, unable to suppress a frightened yelp as the rope ladder swayed and jolted in the wind.

“You’re all right, dear,” Meg called up. “I shan’t let you fall. That’s it, just concentrate on one rung at a time.”

Amelia dared not look at anything beside the rungs. In her mind’s eye, the unplumbed depths below waited like the gaping mouth of the underworld. She flinched when she felt Meg’s steadying hands on her waist, guiding her gently down onto solid ground. “Thank you,” she mumbled.

“That’s quite all right,” said Meg. “Can’t have my White Queen falling into the bottomless pit now, can I? Oh dear, gone a bit wobbly in the legs, have you? Sit down out of the way a minute while you get some air in your lungs.” She turned to look up at the
Storm Chaser
, and scowled. “What are you doing, boy?” she shouted up at Harold, who was climbing down the ladder himself.

Percival leaned over the railings. “We won’t see you two ladies wandering off into mysterious dragon-infested caves by yourselves!”

“How do you know they’re dragon-infested? Unless you’re afraid those statues are going to come to life in the moonlight or something.”

Still feeling weak and wobbly, Amelia moaned, wishing Meg hadn’t come up with such an idea. Or at the very least, that she had kept it to herself.

“Keep moving, lad,” said Percival to Harold. “If we’ve come to the temple, Amelia will need her Commander and Paladin,” he insisted.

“All right,” Meg grumbled, “let’s get moving, then.” And she stomped off towards the rocky steps, the others following after her. “Well, Amelia, do you have any clever ideas as to where we should look?”

Amelia hesitated, unsure if she should venture an answer or not. From the deck of the
Storm Chaser,
she’d seen one particular carving that had looked promising: a grand ornate arch heavily shadowed by rocky outcroppings. “Up the tower,” she said. “I think I may have seen the entrance to a tunnel.” Travelling upwards in the sunshine was at least preferable to a descent into darkness.

Across the ravine, the
Storm Chaser
touched down gently, leaning onto one side, where it lay as if the sea had drained away to leave all the ships stranded on the sea bed.

~

The sun climbed, the day growing bright and warm, so that the travellers sweated and panted their way up the immense spiral stairway, wearying long before they reached Amelia’s arch. She had been right – other tunnels pitted the surface of the column, but when the archway she’d spied from the deck of the
Storm Chaser
finally came into view along the path ahead of them, Amelia’s heart sank. She’d feared from the beginning that her tunnel might be no more than a trick of light and shadow in the dim light of first dawn.

Meg swore. “So much for a way in!”

“It looked like a tunnel from a distance,” Amelia said, meekly. Up close, she could see that the grand archway, thirty feet high and carved with dragons and fruit trees, enclosed only a shallow alcove. The other tunnels they’d investigated along the way hadn’t led far, either, all turning out to be dead ends or looping back on themselves to come back out on the peripheral stairway. Amelia looked up the path ahead of them, not holding out much hope for any other tunnels they might find along the way.

Percival, meanwhile, was investigating a pillar of stone at the side of the arch. It looked something like a lectern, with an open book carved on the top of it, and a matching pillar stood opposite. While Percival was not a short man, he struggled to look over the open pages. “Meg, you must see this,” he said. He had to lift her up like a child for her to read the words inscribed there.

Amelia jumped up and down trying to see the pages of the opposite book, but to no avail.

Harold rushed to help her up. “What’s it say?”

Amelia sighed. “Oh dear. Let me down, I can’t read a word of it.” She’d never seen such a language before, not even in her spell book. It might be some magic she hadn’t encountered yet, or might merely be some ancient language, long forgotten by ordinary folk.

Meg had pulled a small, dog-eared book from her satchel, and muttered to herself as she compared the pages of the stone book against it. Percival made the task all the more awkward because he couldn’t control his own curiosity, trying to translate instead of letting Meg get on with it.

Suddenly, Meg smacked the book against the rock in consternation. “Oh, for pity’s sake!”

“Will this trail of breadcrumbs never end?” Percival grumbled.

Meg was still busy muttering to herself, fists clenched atop the stone pages. Amelia listened carefully, thinking for a moment that Meg was preparing a new spell; that perhaps the ancient glyphs had given her some clue as to how to magically unlock the stone gateway. She blushed when she caught a few words and recognised decidedly unmagical language.

“What’s the book say?” asked Harold, despairing of ever getting an answer out of anyone.

Percival sighed, gently setting Meg down again. “The way will be revealed at the turning of the Dragon’s Moon,” he said, utterly failing to enlighten his young squire. “That is to say –”

“I’ve heard of that before,” Amelia interrupted, excited to think that she knew something without having to be told, for a change. “It’s one of the old names for the phases of the moon, isn’t it?”

“Quite right,” said Percival, sounding pleasantly surprised. “You’ve become quite studious, of late.”

Amelia blushed. She didn’t mention she’d learnt the old names for the moon at her stepmother’s knee, before she’d even learnt to read. Back when her stepmother had gladly told her fairy tales, before Amelia should have grown out of such childish things, they’d read ‘
The Hunting of the Moon’
together
.
It might not have been her favourite tale, but Amelia thought she remembered it well enough… “The Dragon’s Moon is after the Lion’s Moon but before the Rabbit’s Moon. If you have a diary I can –”

“A diary?” Meg scoffed. “What kind of woman keeps a diary in this day and age?”

“My stepmother does,” said Amelia. Mrs. Lamb always bought a prettily-bound new diary at the turn of the year so that she could keep up with social engagements, and feel important, and the like.

Meg sniffed. “
She
would.”

“Most skyships carry an almanac of sorts,” said Percival, keen to get the subject back on track. “We can ask Captain Dunnager when we return to the
Storm Chaser
.”

“All right,” said Meg. “You stay here and see if you can glean anything more from these books, I want a better look round before we retreat.” She set off along the path, Amelia hurrying after and Harold in tow, gallantly accompanying the two ladies into the unknown.

~

“What is this place?” Amelia asked as they passed through a roomy colonnade, a cool respite from the sun. “Did people live here once upon a time?”

Meg chewed the question over a long while. There was undoubtedly something quite deliberate about the terraces and passageways, but it just didn’t look workable. Even coming from the isolated tower off the coast of Springhaven, Amelia couldn’t imagine actually living in this lonely place. Perhaps more tellingly, there were no things left behind – no knives or forks, no barrels, no bracelets or trinkets or coins. Daily life left behind a certain type of debris, even when the people had long gone. Yes, wood rotted and iron rusted and magpies would steal silver, but for people to leave
nothing
behind? Not even in the far corners and crevices of the place? Unlikely.

“They must’ve worn their legs down to nothing, going up and down those stairs all day,” said Harold, red-faced and puffing even though the incline of the walkway had become very shallow since they’d left Percival to his translations.

“It’s more like a folly,” said Meg, at last. “It’s to give travellers something fancy to look at.” She said it with conviction, but Amelia doubted the truth of it. If nothing else, the view from so high up was spectacular enough all by itself. She paused a moment to take it all in. Why, from their vantage point on the tower, she could see for miles around: infinite blue skies with clouds chasing one another across the firmament; a horizon like nothing she had ever seen in her life; land so big she felt like an ant crawling on the stem of a nettle. And…

“Oh no!”

“Are you all right, dear?” Meg stopped, followed Amelia’s line of sight, and found what she had seen. Across the great hungry expanse of grey rock, bright as a speck of gold in the dirt, the unmistakeable yellow sails of the Black Queen’s skyship shone in the sunlight. “Damn!” said Meg. “On the bright side, they’re a good long way off yet.” She turned and bustled off back the way they’d come. “Hurry up, slowcoaches! Let’s grab Perce and get back to the
Storm Chaser
!”

“But what about the gateway?” said Amelia, chasing after her. “And the Dragon’s Moon, and, and –”

“We’ll take the
Storm Chaser
down into the ravine,” said Meg. “It’s more than big enough to take a skyship, and we can play cat and mouse with the Black Queen for at least a few days I’m sure, until this Dragon’s Moon of yours.”

The thought of the
Storm Chaser
where they had left her, apparently beached on the endless rocky shore, did little to reassure Amelia. “I’m not sure Captain Dunnager will be able to manage that,” she said. He’d sounded so very tired when he’d left them. “This journey has been
very
hard on him.”