“Here’s the door, Wizard,” called Paul, feeling his way along a cliff face streaming with water. “I can’t see it but I can touch it.” Standing next to him I could feel it as well, a half-open old door, falling from its hinges, with a musty passage beyond.
I had groped for and found pieces of driftwood that had come ashore here where cascades from the hills above flowed together to form the river: torches if we could discover a way inside out of the storm. “Hold hands,” I told the others over the rumbling of thunder, and led them straight into and straight through what looked, in what little light we had from lightning flashes, like unbroken rock. Theodora was right behind me, and I could feel the bite of her fingernails as we passed through the illusion of solid cliff face, but no one spoke until we were all inside and wringing out our hair.
At least this castle was perfectly visible once we were within the walls. “God be praised, it is dry in here,” said the Lady Justinia
Paul blew out the air between his lips and commented, “Glad you never decided to make my royal castle invisible, Wizard.”
Theodora and I lit the torches with fire magic; they never would have burned properly without a spell. With me in front and she in back, we started cautiously up the tunnel before us. The torchlight showed a shadowed and dismal passage, hung with dusty festoons of cobweb, its floor strew with rubbish where animals had denned.
“It’s not very far,” Paul said in a low voice, “a straight way leading slightly upward, and then the big storage cellars. It’s possible the children are there.”
Sitting in the dark, I thought, in utter terror. Would we see them even if they were there, or would they be as invisible as the castle itself was from the outside?
The light flickered on the uneven walls, and our footsteps echoed hollowly. It really would be night soon, I thought, and the night would be Vlad’s, with nothing to stop him before the dawn. The weight of the cliffs above seemed to press down on us, and a fetid odor rose in the stale air from beneath our feet.
I kept straining, both with my ears and my magic, for indications of life, and at first found nothing, either good or evil. The sound of the thunder was very distant here, and I could hear nothing beyond our footsteps and our rapid breathing. Were the children even in this castle, or was it all an elaborate feint? But after only a few dozen yards I picked up the sound of distant moaning.
We came to an abrupt halt. “Antonia!” Theodora whispered.
But I shook my head. “Wait,” I whispered back. The floor before us came alive in the torchlight: glossy black cockroaches, spiders, and a six-foot viper that looked at us with glittering eyes, then slithered away. Gwennie was at my shoulder, and I could feel her trembling. In any of the others’ position, I would have run screaming back down the passageway, with a new appreciation for spending the night in the pouring rain, but no one moved.
Then, faint in the distance, I picked up a sound like the rattling of dry bones.
“What was that?” hissed Paul.
“Oh, Christ,” I said, mostly under my breath. It sounded to me exactly like a skeletal apparition, the residue of death and evil left over in this old castle from the time of the Black Wars, now given life by a demon. It seemed to be getting closer.
The slightest whiff of brimstone, I said to myself, and I’m gone.
As if in response, the roughly-quarried stones on either hand rapidly began to grow warmer. Justinia, in relief, started to lean against the wall, but she pulled away with a sharp intake of breath as it grew hotter and hotter. Raw horror, even beyond what was rational given what I had just seen and heard, seemed to roll down the tunnel toward us. And wafting through the air came a small cloud of stinking smoke, poisonous yellow in the torchlight.
“Right,” said a rational voice in the back of my brain. “Zahlfast can’t argue with you any more. Time for the demonology experts. Fly the carpet back to Yurt and telephone the school.”
“And when will they arrive?” I asked myself testily.
“Tomorrow,” said the rational voice, sounding less certain. “And in the meantime, while we’re waiting, you can try to locate Elerius and Evrard-they must be around somewhere, looking for you.” But I couldn’t wait for tomorrow. Antonia was in this castle now.
And could she and all the other children be sitting, not just in the dark, but in a dark they shared with vipers, with brimstone, with skeletal apparitions, and with a demon that was even now killing them one by one with terror?
“No, of course not,” babbled the rational voice. “Cyrus loves children. He may use a demon to help his magic, but he doesn’t want to hurt them. He’s always wanted the children to love him back.”
The voice had a point. If Antonia was indeed still alive, then Cyrus must have brought the children here for a reason, rather than dumping them into the first convenient widening in the river. He therefore wanted them for some specific purpose-ransoming perhaps, or a refined revenge-even if he did not love them for themselves.
And I therefore had to find them before his purpose took effect.
This mental argument with myself had taken only a few seconds. “The children are not in the big storage cellars,” I said in a low voice, not mentioning what I was fairly sure was there. “Sire, is there any other way up to the rest of the castle without going through the cellars?”
“There’s a narrow staircase on the left,” said Paul, “just a little further on.” I noticed he’d drawn his sword-not that it would do any good. “It’s partially blocked by fallen stone, but it’s passable.”
“Theodora,” I said, “light the others back to the doorway and stay there until I get back. And if-”
But it was no use. In spite of what we had seen so far, and in spite of having to assert through chattering teeth that they were not at all frightened, Paul and Theodora had not given up their intention of accompanying me. Gwennie and Justinia claimed they preferred staying with the rest of us, even if it meant advancing through giant cockroaches, to waiting alone with hot walls and the moaning and clattering and no magic to keep a damp torch lit. Three of them, not knowing magic, might not be as susceptible as I was to the disembodied and demonic terror pouring out of the storage cellars-but Theodora was.
No time to argue. “Then let’s hurry,” I said and strode forward. Pushing against waves of horror was like pushing against the tide. I kept my feet moving with sheer will. The rattling of bones kept coming closer, as insects scurried out from underfoot. Paul’s narrow stairway was an empty black opening in the tunnel wall.
Good thing it wasn’t any further or I might not have made it. I felt inside the opening with my hand-not as warm as the tunnel where we stood. When I thrust in the torch it was to see worn and cracked stone stairs spiraling upwards. There would be halls, chambers, and passages higher up, some certainly roofless, but some doubtless still whole, and Antonia had to be up there.
I led the way again, climbing as quickly as I could on the uneven steps, my heart pounding wildly. The staircase was so narrow that there was scarcely room for my shoulders between the stone central post and the outer curved wall. A little rivulet of water found its way down the spiral, making surfaces slick and forcing me to be careful when I wanted to do nothing but run and run. The moaning and the rattling faded behind us. Someone slipped but caught themselves after a hard thump.
“Do you think the children had to climb all these stairs?” Gwennie whispered.
“I’m sure they were brought in the front way,” I whispered back. Wild terror receded as we climbed-unfortunately rational terror did not. “But we couldn’t even find the front way, and I’m still hoping we can get to wherever they’re being held without being discovered.”
I spoke confidently, but whatever hope I had was a desperate one. Someone who went to the trouble to make his castle invisible and to surround it with dark clouds would certainly have set up spells to detect a wizard sneaking in.
How far had we come? It was impossible to tell distances, except to know that we had climbed high enough that my legs were aching. My wet clothes had begun drying on my back into clammy stiffness. This had once been an expensive black wool suit, I recalled, bought just for Celia’s vocation at the nunnery.
Ahead I thought I could pick up the smell of rain-washed air over the general mustiness, and then I began to hear a louder dripping. We came around a twist of the stair and saw Paul’s “partial blockage” before us.
Part of the wall had collapsed inward, leaving a gaping opening looking out into night. Rain still lashed down. I redoubled the fire spell on my torch and put it and my head outside-still sheer cliff above and below, but we must be getting close to the top.
The collapsed wall covered the staircase with chunks of stone, but beyond it continued to spiral upwards. The stones cast heavy shadows in the torch light-had that been another viper? No, I tried to reassure myself, just another shadow.
“You have to climb carefully over the loose stones,” said Paul. “It was daylight when I did this before, but-”
I stopped him and lifted myself with magic to fly up and over. One at a time I then lifted Gwennie, Paul, and Justinia to bring them past the obstacle and up beside me. Theodora flew unaided, holding the flaring torch well away from herself. Gwennie, impressed, started to say something but didn’t.
Flying spells, I thought as Theodora found her footing, would announce to any wizard paying attention that another wizard had arrived. I would feel more comfortable about this if I could pick up the slightest trace of him-or if I didn’t keep imagining what might already be working its way up the stairs behind us, heating the stones as it came until the rivulets of dark water vanished into steam.
“We’re almost there,” said Paul quietly. “We’ll come out in what was once the kitchen. The roof is long gone, but there’s another passage-still covered-that should take us to the great hall in the central keep. That’s the most intact part of the castle: the children may be there.”
A final turn of the stair, and we staggered out onto a level if gritty surface, next to an enormous fireplace. Ducking under the stone mantle to shelter from the rain, now falling harder than ever, we all paused to catch our breaths.
I kept straining to pick up any sound over the rain’s steady drumming or any magical indication of who else was in this ruined castle, but still found nothing. I lifted an eyebrow at Theodora, but she shook her head. “I haven’t sensed her again since that one time.”
“This way,” said Paul. Back under an arched roof, we tried to walk quietly, but five sets of feet on flagstones sent echoes running up and down the passage around us. The light from our torches was too dim to see any distance ahead or behind, though it made our shadows on the stone walls grotesque and gigantic. Little puffs of wind tugged at our damp hair.
Suddenly the torches went out. We all crashed together in the dark, then Theodora and I desperately tried to relight them. It was no use. Plenty of unburned wood remained, but our fire spells no longer seemed effective.
And then, down the passageway ahead of us, I saw a small yellow light, like a candle flame. As we all held our breaths we could hear the steady tap of approaching feet.
The dead torch fell from stiff fingers. “No use running,” I said quietly. “They’ve found us.”
Paul and I stood with the women behind us, waiting for whomever was coming. The cold knot in my stomach already knew. Someone dressed in black satin emerged from the shadows. Just before he came close enough to pick out the features on the white face, Paul gave a sudden, startled grunt and dropped his sword.
I looked down. The blade had transformed itself into a black and white striped snake that now slithered away. Paul reached for the knife at his belt but I nudged him and shook my head.
The person kept on coming. I could see his face now clearly, dead white, split by a smile that showed an unusually large number of sharp teeth. One of the cheeks was just a little crooked; the eyes, behind half-lowered translucent lids, were expressionless stones.
“Daimbert, we meet again,” he said in a friendly tone.
One of the women behind me gave a brief moan of terror. I took a deep breath. “Greetings, Prince Vlad,” I said.