The gate seemed higher, and as she came near to it, Claudia saw that the chains were back across, each metal link thicker than her arm. But it was the snails that made her shiver: fat, large creatures, their silvery trails crisscrossing the condensation on the metal as if they had bred down here for centuries.
"Yuck." She pulled one off; it came away with a soft plop and she threw it down. "This is it.
He put a combination into the lock."
The Havaarna eagle spread wide wings. In the globe it held were seven small circular hollows; she was about to touch them when Jared caught her fingers.
"No! If the wrong combination goes in, alarms will go off. Or worse, we may be trapped.
This must be done carefully, Claudia"
He pulled out the small scanner and began, very gently, to take readings and adjust them, crouching among the rusted chains.
Impatient, she went back, checked the cellars, returned.
"Hurry, Master."
'T can't hurry this." He was absorbed, his fingers moving gently.
After long minutes she was almost sick with impatience. She took the Key out, looked at it behind his back. "Do you think ...?"
"Wait, Claudia, lm almost certain of the first number."
It could take hours. There was a disc on the door; it gleamed greenish bronze, slightly brighter than the surrounding metal. Over his head, she reached out and slid it aside.
A keyhole.
Shaped like the crystal, hexagonal.
She reached out and fitted the Key into it.
Instantly it leaped out of her fingers.
With a great crack that made her screech and made Jared jump back in terror, the Key turned by itself. Chains crashed. Rust fell. The gate shuddered ajar.
Scrambling up, Jared was frantically checking all the alarms; he gasped, "Claudia, that was so stupid!" but she didn't care, she was laughing because it was open, the gate, the Prison. She had unlocked
Incarceron.
The last chain slid.
The cellars rang with echoes.
Jared waited until every last whisper of noise was stilled.
"Well?" she said.
"No one coming. Everything up there is normal." He wiped sweat from his forehead with one hand. "We must be too far down for them to hear. More than we deserve, Claudia."
She shrugged. "I deserve to find Finn. And he deserves to be free."
They stared at the dark slit, waiting. She half expected a crowd of Prisoners to burst through.
But nothing happened, so she stepped forward and opened the gate.
And looked Inside.
25
I remember a story of a girl in Paradise who ate an apple once Some wise Sapient gave it to her. Because of it she saw things differently. What had seemed gold coins were dead leaves. Rich clothes were rags of cobweb. And she saw there was a wall around the world, with a locked gate. I am growing weak. The others are all dead. I have finished the key but no longer dare to use it.
-Lord Calliston's Diary
It was impossible. She stood frozen, felt hope shatter inside her. She had expected dark corridors, a maze of cells, stone passageways running with rats and damp. Not this.
Behind its oddly tilted entrance the white room was a perfect copy of her father's study. Its machines hummed efficiently, its single desk and chair stood uncluttered in the strip of light from the ceiling.
She let out a breath of despair. "It's exactly the same!"
Jared was scanning carefully. "The Warden is a man of meticulous tastes." He lowered the device and she saw from his face he was as stunned as she was. "Claudia, now the gate is open, I can tell you that there is no Prison below us, no underground labyrinth. This room is all there is."
Appalled, she shook her head. Then she stepped in.
Immediately she felt the same effect as before; that peculiar blurring and clicking, the floor seeming to even out under her feet, the walls to grow straighten Even the air seemed different in the room, cooler and drier, not the damp exhalations of the cellars.
Turning back she watched Jared.
"Now that was very strange," he said. "That was a spatial shift. As I said before, as if the room and the cellar are not quite ... adjacent."
He stepped in after her, and she saw how his dark eyes widened. But she was almost too sick with disappointment to care.
"Why make a copy of his study here?" She stalked over and kicked the desk angrily. "It looks no more used than the other one!
Jared stared around, fascinated. "Is it exactly the same?"
"In every single detail." She leaned on the desk and said the password Incarceron and the drawer rolled open. Inside, as she'd expected, was a crystal Key the image of their own. "He keeps a Key at home and one here. But the Prison is somewhere else."
The bitterness in her voice made Jared give her a worried glance and then come to her side. Quietly he said, "Don't torment yourself..."
"I told Finn I'd found the way in!" Disgusted, she turned and hugged her arms around herself. "And what do we do now? Tomorrow I'll be married to Caspar or executed for treason."
"Or you'll be Queen," he said.
She stared at him. "Or Queen. After a bloodbath that will haunt me forever."
She walked away and glared at the humming silver machines. Behind her, she heard