The Witch's Daughter (Lamb & Castle Book 1) (17 page)

Prince Archalthus stood at the parapet, gazing far across the City, into the clouds. Even Commander Breaker, whose eyes were very keen, couldn’t see what his master saw out there in the wide and far distance. Presently, it came into sight: a tiny speck of gold in the blue. Archalthus raised his arm, and the clockwork dragonette landed on his outstretched wrist with a whir of metallic wings.

“You’ve been gone a terribly long time,” Archalthus reprimanded the dragonette gently. “What news do you have for me?”

The clockwork dragonette cheeped and trilled, beautiful music but entirely incomprehensible to all but a handful of individuals. Archalthus inclined his head, listening carefully.

“I see,” he said, when the little spy finally fell silent. The prince’s face, handsome as ever, had taken on a subtly fiercer look. Commander Breaker took a few steps back, out of easy reach. More than once he’d seen that same expression as a precursor to careless servants losing their lives or limbs. Archalthus turned to his Commander. “The griffins,” said the prince thoughtfully. “You have the most experience with them – what is your opinion of their quality?”

Commander Breaker didn’t dare hesitate too long, but only wished he knew what the chirping little spy had said. “All very fine beasts,” he said. “Very well built. Fast as horses, strong as bulls, fierce as lions.” He didn’t add
‘stubborn as mules’ to
the list. Nor
‘proud as eagles and capricious as cats’
, although he had thought as much from the beginning.

“Hmm. And as loyal as…?”

“As loyal as myself, Master,” said Breaker, too keen. By the look on his Master’s face, he would probably do better to distance himself from the griffins, whatever they were up to.

“I see. I sent two of the griffins to keep the White Queen out of my way. Two should have been quite adequate, should they not? But I hear that they failed to do very much at all to change the course of the White Queen’s skyship, such that she and her companions will reach the temple very soon.”

“Which two?”

“The black and the red. But you said they were
all
marvellous beasts.”

Breaker cursed the griffins. “I can take a couple of my men out there and stop the White Queen in her tracks before the sun sets, Master,” he volunteered.

“I think not,” said the prince, haughtier than ever. “Judging by recent reports, your gentleman have had even less success than the griffins. Fortunately, this marvellous creature here has brought me all the information I require.”

Commander Breaker glared at the gleaming clockwork dragonette, preening itself smugly on the prince’s elegant wrist. The wretched little spy might somehow find its way to an unfortunate end, next time Archalthus’ back was turned. The tunnels beneath the City were full of heavy machinery, where the delicate dragonette might easily lose its way in the dark… “What about the White Queen, then?” His men should have been allowed to get rid of her when they’d had the chance. Instead they’d ended up making a scene in Ilamira’s Main Street, embarrassing themselves and him in the process. Lucky that Prince Archalthus considered money no object in pursuit of the quest, at least.

“Now that I know the location of the temple,” said Archalthus, “we should be able to reach it within a matter of days. But the White Queen may have reached it by now,” he mused. “Perhaps we find ourselves at the stage where it would be best to eliminate her from the competition.”

“Give my men a second chance to prove their worth, and she’ll be dead before nightfall,” said Commander Breaker.

“No.” The prince gazed out into the sky, and Breaker wondered just how far his Master’s golden eyes pierced into the distance. “I have something else in mind.”

As the
Storm Chaser
slipped away from the tower and back into the fog from whence it had come, Amelia stood at the stern, anxiously watching for any sign of the Black Queen. The ship coasted almost silently through the air, steadily dropping deeper into the boundless grey inside the depths of the ravine.

“I’m still worried about Captain Dunnager,” she said, when Meg joined her.

“Well don’t be,” said Meg. “He’s a skysailor, tough as old boots. He got us away safely without any complaints, didn’t he?”

“No thanks to Sir Percival, clanking away like a cupboard full of pots and pans falling out!” A good thing Amelia had brought along her coat in case of rain, so they’d at least had something to try and muffle his armour with. “What’s it all in aid of anyway? What possible reason could he have to be in armour every minute of the day?” Amelia had to admit that with the adventures Meg got them into, there were times she dearly wished for a full-body suit of armour of her own. It didn’t quell her anger at the fact that the knight’s cumbersome, noisy armour had almost been the death of them all.

“He has his reasons,” said Meg. “Foolish as they may be. And besides, perhaps he thinks we’re no better, hiding away from the Black Queen.”

“I think we have very good reason to hide from the Black Queen! Dreadful girl… I saw that knife she had, you know. And that bodyguard of hers, didn’t you see him?” A ferocious looking man; scarred, steel-eyed and dressed all in black.

“Of course I saw him. But he’s only a man, and a pompous starch-shirted fool of a man at that. Her Paladin, I ‘spect, just like young Harold is Paladin to you. And don’t you forget, the Black Queen’s just a girl, younger’n you and probably every inch as scared. She may have found it easy enough to fire down on people from up high, but she’ll find it different to fight anyone face to face on level ground. If she had any real experience wielding that knife, I doubt we’d all have come out of that encounter in one piece.”

Amelia stared into the grey, sulking. It was no time at all for Meg to start sympathising with their enemy’s imagined troubles. “If you care so much for the poor little Black Queen, why didn’t you pull
her
out of her home and off on this wretched quest?” she muttered.

Meg threw up her hands in disgust. “Oh, suit yourself, if you’re going to be like that.” And she walked off, leaving Amelia to her little black raincloud of self-pity.

For the first time in some long while, Amelia honestly wished herself back in her safe, hidden tower just off the coast of Springhaven. The wider world hid too many secrets of its own; too many mysteries. More to the point, it had revealed too many of them to Amelia just lately, without any attempt at an explanation. She’d barely even begun to balance which creatures belonged in fairy tales and which belonged in encyclopaedias. For Amelia, who’d spent her life with her head in the clouds anyway, everything remained very confused. They hadn’t even had a chance to talk to anyone in Ilamira about where those blasted griffins might have come from. She’d considered the possibility that they might be elaborate constructions, not dissimilar to the clockwork dragonette in a way. The impossible hybrids were an offence to nature, but then she might have said the same about giant snails before, as well. Who would even think to build such awful, vicious creatures as those griffins? What purpose could they possibly have but murder? And who on earth would send them out to hunt down an innocent woman who only wanted to live in peace? Amelia felt the sting of tears as all the fear and anger and worry of the long journey overcame her at once. She hurried to the cabin, where she hid her face in her pillow to quiet her sobs. She couldn’t stand the thought of Meg berating her for emotional weakness in the face of the twelve-year-old enemy, and she cried all the harder in humiliation at the thought that Captain Dunnager probably couldn’t help but hear her.

~

A light tapping woke her some hours later. “Are you awake, dear?” Meg called gently through the door curtain. “I’ve brought a piece of that fruitcake for you, if you like.”

Amelia sat up. She had to agree, a life without desserts was a poor existence. “Thank you,” she said, her voice still rough and stuffy from crying.

Meg raised an eyebrow when she saw Amelia’s dishevelled appearance: her puffy eyes, red nose and flyaway hair escaping from its braids. “Do you feel any better for that?” she asked.

Amelia nodded. Although her eyes still stung, her head had cleared a little for it, and she remembered something Meg had said to the fierce Black Paladin. Under better circumstances, she would have liked to have hidden herself away in the cabin a while longer while she composed herself, cleaned up, brushed and braided her hair neatly again. But Meg didn’t care and why should she? The questions clustering in her head outweighed her vanity. “What did you mean about golems?” she asked, as Meg sat down and made herself comfortable amongst the rumpled cushions on the bunk.

“Oh,
them
. The Black Queen may feign ignorance, but I know a golem when I see one.”

“Yes, but what
is
a golem? Do you mean those strange gentlemen who followed us to Ilamira?”

“A golem… Let’s think, how to put it… A golem is a man-made living creature, built to follow its owner’s instructions. You know a little about written magic by now, so you’ll understand when I tell you that each golem has its instructions written inside it in a magical language – written on paper, generally, or maybe carved in stone or stamped in metal for a more lasting spell. The body is built out of stone or wood or clay, or whatever else the maker sees fit, and the script written. Then a soul’s put into it, and that makes it live.”

Amelia’s eyes narrowed. “More soul magic. More stolen, innocent souls.” She still didn’t entirely approve of the use of captive souls to power skyships. Captain Dunnager’s flagging spirit had only cemented her horror at the concept.

“Amelia, dear,” said Meg sternly, “I’m not fond of the idea of golems myself. It’s a fine line we walk when dealing with soul magic: what’s right and wrong; what can be justified and what’s an unkindness too far. That’s a subject for another day, when we’ve the luxury of being able to sit and discuss philosophy with nobody trying to kill us. Building golems is illegal these days, anyhow. You remember all those jars at the soul forge? Well, the soul forger will tell you they’re meant for skyships and such. Truth is, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some of them end up in golems.”

Amelia shivered at the unsavoury memory of the soul forger, but she still didn’t really understand what could be so much worse about golems than about the souls captured and enslaved for skyships. But the golems had Meg worried, and that terrified Amelia. “What is it exactly that’s so bad about golems?” she asked, not honestly wanting to hear the answer.

Meg took a deep breath, avoiding Amelia’s anxious gaze. “For one thing,” she said, reluctantly, “building golems takes cleverness and proper book learning and real power. Whoever sent those things after us is either a magic user more powerful than the likes of you and me will
ever
be, or can afford to hire one at least. I don’t like that idea at all. For another thing, a golem follows its instructions to the end, or to its own destruction.”

Amelia needed no further explanation. If those two men at Ilamira had been golems, their scripts wouldn’t have been written on anything as fragile as parchment, she was sure of that. She hadn’t seen them close when they’d repaired themselves, but Harold had, and he’d described the gleam of polished black stone to her. “So, we could only stop them by destroying them?” She didn’t see how that could possibly be done – fire and cold steel had barely touched the twin assassins. And what was worse, she remembered the peculiar intimacy between the two brothers in the meeting house at Lannersmeet, and recoiled at the thought of destroying such convincingly human constructions. “Do they have any weaknesses?” In fairy tales, all monsters had weaknesses: trolls turned to stone at sunrise; fierce rampaging unicorns knelt at the feet of virgins; dragons often fell victim to their own love of gold and treasure.

“Well…” Meg considered it carefully. “They can never use magic themselves. They can’t channel it like you or I can, so they only use magical artefacts that have their own power source. Like that pistol you saw them use in Ilamira. But other than that, no.” She sighed heavily, “Reach the temple, win your prize, and an honourable opponent would call off the hunt.” Amelia remembered the hidebound Black Paladin from the tower, but Meg’s despondency suggested that they couldn’t necessarily rely on the honourable conduct of their enemy. Meg saw the worried look on Amelia’s face, and forced a smile. “But, you’d be the White Queen, then,” she said. “Your rivals would be fools to continue after that. Let’s see if we can do this by stealth and cleverness and a tiny wee bit of magic, shall we? Leave the swords and violence to the boys. We’ll fight like women, and we’ll win.”

“And that’ll work, will it?” asked Amelia, doubtful. The history books in her father’s library were full of bloody histories – kings and knights and epic battles – and not a great many women.

“It’s worked more times throughout history than you can imagine,” Meg assured her. “Most of the time, the boys are too busy with their swords and ponies to even notice it happening. Now, how about we take a look at that almanac, and you can work out when this Dragon’s Moon comes around.”

~

With the Black Queen’s skyship still out there somewhere in the Stacks, Amelia and her companions took it in turns to keep watch from the crow’s nest of the
Storm Chaser
. In the earlier days of their voyage, before the unfortunate incident with the eagle soul, Amelia had seen Captain Dunnager climb up and down from that perch a dozen times or more. He’d made it look so effortless: after all, what was the modest height of the mast to someone who sailed thousands of feet above the ground? Amelia, on the other hand, still felt queasy crouching up there by herself. Harold had helped her up there each time, as she still wobbled and yelped from time to time, either going up or coming down. He’d even gallantly offered to take her shift for her, but Amelia wanted to do her bit. Luckily they’d seen neither hide nor hair of the Black Queen since the encounter on the tower, and there was very little to see as the
Storm Chaser
sailed the ravines around the tower, even from the height of the crow’s nest. Much of the fog had dispersed, although it still obscured the depths. Captain Dunnager kept the skyship moving, sluggishly, below the tops of the rocky walls, but the Black Queen seemed to have more pressing plans than the hunting of the White Queen. For the last three days, Amelia had taken her turn at twilight, volunteering to do so if only to watch the moon rise, bigger and rounder every night. Judging by Captain Dunnager’s almanac, she’d seen the Lion’s Moon come and go, although she found it hard to judge the exact proportion of the moon that was illuminated each night. The Dragon’s Moon would come soon: unmistakeable, perfect and whole.

On the deck, Harold practised his sword-fighting moves against his shadow, while Meg and Percival huddled over a stack of old books together in the fading light. In the distance, Amelia could see the wyverns hunting swifts, the two younger ones squabbling playfully as the baby tested the limits of its growing wings. They still hadn’t seen the mother, despite the wyverns following the journey of the
Storm Chaser
. Amelia had asked about it once or twice, and Meg had changed the subject, apparently deeming it inappropriate for sensitive types. Amelia hoped nobody had taken the wyvern mother for a skyship soul…

Something pale flashed in the blue. Amelia almost missed it, and when she turned her head to look more closely, couldn’t find anything. She didn’t wait to see it again, putting her faith in instinct. She didn’t shout, but clambered down from her perch, holding in any fearful noises.

“Meg, there’s something out there,” she whispered. As if on cue, a wyvern shrieked, terse and territorial. As they looked on, Amelia thought she could make out the form of a ghostly grey apparition winging its way towards the
Storm Chaser
in unearthly silence.

Meg saw it too. “More damned griffins,” she muttered. The dark scattered shapes of the wyverns regathered, wheeling and crying uncertainly in the wake of the speeding griffin. “Captain Dunnager…”

“I know, Ma’am.” The
Storm Chaser
would never outrun a griffin, not with the exhausted Captain in the soulchamber. Instead, it sank like a stone, into the remnants of the fog, so fast it made Amelia’s stomach lurch queasily.

Percival reached for the lamp to snuff out its light, but Meg grabbed it first. “I somehow ‘spect griffins can see in the dark,” she whispered, “and I know we
can’t
.”

“It could be dangerous,” Percival protested.

The griffin had followed the
Storm Chaser
into the murky confines of the ravine, and from time to time Amelia could make out the figure moving silent through the fog like a ghost, catching it in in half glimpses of wing shadow and sinuous lines that ended in the flick of long whip-like tail. With velvety soft white owl wings, the griffin had the wyverns at a clear disadvantage, evading the noisy dark shadows easily as they shrieked to each other in the suffocating grey of the fog. Intermittently, fire flared in the boundless grey, to no avail.

“I’ve no doubt it’s dangerous,” said Meg. “Let’s keep close together, now,” she warned Harold, who was at the bow, trying to get a closer look. He came back to them reluctantly.