Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) (62 page)

It was not just power though. Something else
lurked in that expression, even though the features were lifeless and the eyes
had been replaced with translucent stones. It wasn’t the first time he had seen
it in this museum. Could it be … intelligence?

His light reflected off something behind the animal and its
mate. He walked around and held up the lamp. It revealed a fully assembled
skeleton of ancient bones still encrusted with clinging rock. He knew nothing against
which he could compare the creature, except perhaps a house. Whatever it had
been, it had been big. Those jaws could have accommodated both foxes. His
imagination took hold and he found his thoughts drifting, painting scenes from
an age when such beasts walked the land. An expression of growing wonder
crossed his face as he stared up at the skeleton before him and looked back
into a forgotten past.

A muffled shriek interrupted him. He spun around to
see Tyne with a hand to her mouth, staring up at the fox, and Osric grinning
beside her.

Aedan turned back to the skeleton and decided to
get closer. He had to step around a long line of crates loaded with empty sacks.
The sacks had crumbled over the centuries and produced a shower of fine dust
beneath and around them. That and the gloom almost caused Aedan to miss and
trip over the object at his feet, but the light caught it just in time.

“Here’s something the girls will like,” he laughed.
“Ever seen a giant frog?”

Tyne and Osric approached.

“It’s a bit dark and grimy down there,” said Tyne.
“Pick it up and put it on one of these crates so we can brush it off and get a
decent look.”

Aedan had not expected such an enthusiastic
response. He bent to the job with a will. Big frogs were irresistible, always
had been, and this one looked like it would have ignored flies and lived on
ducks. He worked his fingers under the body and lifted, tensing and shaking
with the strain. The smooth-skinned body escaped his grip and dropped the half
inch he had been able to raise it. Aedan fell over and sat hard on the dusty
floor. “It must be made of lead,” he said. “It’s as heavy –”

The frog’s eyes opened, and Aedan realised in one
horrible instant that this was no frog. Each lemon-sized eye covered a large
section of what he had assumed to be a body. But it was not a body, it was only
a head. And he suddenly guessed the meaning of the shed snakeskin.

He felt a strong hand grasp his shirt, pull him to
his feet and hurry him away.

“Everybody out, now,” Osric barked. “Back to the
stairs. Don’t run.”

Nobody disobeyed when the general gave a flat
order. Aedan glimpsed lights moving from various points in the chamber. Ahead
of him, Fergal dropped the beetle he had been inspecting and hurried towards
the door. On the way through the archive room, however, he did manage to pocket
a hasty handful of tablets before being ushered up the stairs.

“What is it?” he asked.

The word “snake” was enough to give wings to his
flight. Aedan chanced a backward look before leaving the room but saw nothing.
He knew, though, that they might need all the distance they could put between
themselves and that serpent. Osric led the way, lamp in one hand, sword in the
other. Aedan waited until second-last and Merter brought up the rear, climbing
the stairs with a sword pointing behind him.

Contrary to traditional design, these stairs rose
anti-clockwise, giving the right-handed swordsman the advantage on the way up,
presumably because the archive had been considered the more difficult chamber
to infiltrate, and attack from above more likely.

And so it turned out.

Aedan had climbed about half way when there was shouting,
the clash of metal, and screams of pain. A sword, still attached to a hand,
came sliding down the stairs. Aedan recognised the weapon; it was the standard
army issue – a three foot double-edged blade and a single-handed grip with a
short, straight guard. Clearly too short. After a brief halt they resumed the
upward rush.

The clash of steel rose again as Aedan burst from
the stairs into the council room where he saw Osric pushing back three of the
soldiers who had deserted during the previous night. They kept their distance
before Osric’s huge sword. Aedan noticed that one of them held the jewelled
crown. A fourth soldier stood behind them cursing and clutching his shortened
arm that now ended in a bloody stump.

“Surprised to see us?” said the young, confident
soldier who held the crown. “Place didn’t look so bad in daylight. And when we
saw how you got in, we decided to collect our share of the loot. You would be
fools to get in our way.”

Osric stepped aside and pointed. “Down the
stairs,” he said. “You are welcome to all that you find down there.”

The soldiers eyed him.

“So you think
me
a fool, old man?” said the
wild-eyed youngster. “I can smell the trap in your breath. One of you is coming
with us so we don’t get locked down there.”

“We are leaving
now
!” said Osric, moving
away from the stairway entrance and leading the group around the side of the large
central table, but the soldiers ran around the other side and placed themselves
in the doorway, blocking the escape.

“We saw the wolf get hold of you, General,” the
young soldier said. “We know you won’t last in a fight. The boy is a coward who
wets himself like a beaten dog and the girl’s a featherweight. Looks like the
odds are in our favour. Your ranger isn’t even interested. All we require is an
escort. Then we go our own way.”

Merter was indeed distracted. He was looking out
the window, holding the edges and creeping along as if following some movement
and staying just out of sight.

“We have made too much noise,” he said. He spoke
quietly but the chill in his voice hushed everyone.

That was when Aedan heard a sound he remembered
well, a deep scraping, like the pouring of sand.

“What is it?” Osric asked, keeping his eyes on the
soldiers.

“Only saw a shadow,” Merter replied, his voice
rasping with strange emotion, “but it was big. Close the door.”

It was not the ranger captain’s rank that caused
the soldiers to obey; it was the paleness of his face. They swung the big iron
doors of the main entrance closed, one of them scraping along the tiled floor
with a shrill whine, and dropped an iron cross-beam into the brackets. All the
surfaces were rusted, but the metal was thick enough to still possess
formidable strength.

Osric and Merter ran back to the stairwell they
had just climbed. They raised the door they had smashed down earlier, leaning
it back into its frame. It would not stop anything, but it would give warning
if moved.

“Spread out along the wall,” Osric said, striding
to a position in the middle of the wall between the doors. “Multiple angles.”

Aedan pulled two solid bronze spears from their
mountings and, despite what Osric had said about spreading out, crouched beside
Liru.

The young soldier did not like how he was losing
control of the situation. “Are you putting on a little show for us?” he asked.
“Trying to get us distracted?”

Thump.

He turned around and looked at the braced double
door of the main entrance.

Thump.

“Rork, is that you?” he called.

No reply.

He leaned against the door with a mocking smile. “This
thing is solid iron. You can knock all you want but unless you tell me –”

Crash!

The young soldier flew across the room and collided
with the table, breaking two of the decayed legs and collapsing in a heap of
dust and splinters. The crown he had been holding slipped from his grasp,
tumbled along the ground and disappeared through a gap in the smaller doorframe.
They could hear it bouncing down the stairwell to the archive room.

The soldier was too dizzy to notice the crown’s
disappearance. He raised himself on his elbows and looked back. The iron door
was dented in.

Aedan could not understand how any creature could
have done this, even to corroded iron.

There was another crash. The door dented further
and a hinge burst from the wall. The soldiers began to move away. Their young
leader scrambled from the pile of timber and staggered to his feet.

The next impact thrust one of the doors across the
room and swung the other inward to collide against the wall with a shattering
of rock and plaster.

The dust concealed whatever it was that now filled
the opening. Before the air cleared, there was a scream and an explosive hiss.
A jet of dark, sticky vapour swelled into a black cloud, foul as carrion,
flooding the room with night.

In the sudden darkness, only dim, misty shapes told
the whereabouts of people. Something impossibly large filled the doorway, and
it began to move forward. At first Aedan thought the snake had escaped through
the hole at the back of the museum in order to meet them head on, but size
ruled this out. The creature before them was something on a different scale
altogether.

A yellow eye as big as a shield appeared through a
narrow break in the fog. The ink-black pupil flicked around the room, showing a
precision that took in every occupant. That enormous eye, full of deep cunning,
reduced a warrior to a mouse, nothing more.

An outline revealed the young soldier standing in
the middle of the room. He produced a soft, shaking moan and turned to run. In
near silence, the colossal shadowy form moved with horrifying speed. There was
a crunch of jaws snapping shut and a swirling of clouds as the shape glided
back to the doorway. Through the rift, they saw an arm projecting from a
lipless jawline, twitching slightly as the creature sank into the mist again,
leaving no one any the wiser as to what it was. Aedan, beneath his horror, had
a vague impression that only part of its body was in the room. Yet what was in
the room was surely bigger than any animal he had ever seen.

One of the other troopers on the far side of the
room crawled up against the wall and the shadows near him thickened.

It was then that Culver saw his chance. Ignoring
Osric’s instruction to remain still, he jumped up into the window behind him.
The wall was deep and the window presented a temporary refuge.

Had the shutter frame held together, he might have
made it, but the wood cracked, his weight pulled him away, and he swung back
into the room. Before he could recover, something in the mist had changed. A
silent darkness rushed towards him and his final scream was cut short with a
sickening crunch.

Culver was no more.

Liru hid her face. She should not have done so. The
movement betrayed her presence, and the shadows darkened in front of her.

Aedan, crouching alongside, slowly raised the two spears
between them, grounding the shafts in the corner between floor and wall. The weapons
rattled in his hands, but he kept them pointing to where the mist looked most solid.

From hidden nostrils, the beast’s breath drew and
pushed over them, cold and vile as poison.

Air blowing in from the windows thinned the black
fog slightly, revealing those crouched on the near side of the room, and a
great glowing eye hanging in the air, the pupil studying Aedan and Liru.

Barely moving from his crouched position against
the wall, Osric threw a spear. But the beast turned its head at the motion, and
the spear that should have plunged into its eye must have struck hard skin.
They all heard it clatter to the ground.

The eye vanished, but like a trap released, the black
shadows bolted towards Osric, a movement that might have crushed every bone and
smeared him against the opposite wall, but he ducked just enough to escape the
full weight. Still, it knocked him to the ground, and he skidded over the floor
to the far wall where he lay in a heap of broken wood. Tyne cried out and moved
impulsively to help him. Again, it drew the beast.

She froze, but it was too late. This time Aedan
saw a corner of the jaws – they held teeth the size of tusks. The lower jaw dropped,
shivering, as if muscles were bunching.

“No,” he whispered, “Not Tyne. Please not Tyne.”

There was a roar of fury and Aedan glanced up just
in time to see Osric on his feet again, tearing a huge double-bladed axe from
the wall.

Osric was not one to repeat a mistake. This time
he waited for the head to turn. Then he hurled the axe with enough force to
smash through a wall, and this time it must have struck the large eye square on.
The reaction was volcanic.

There was another hissing scream that caused everyone
to slam their hands against their ears and cringe. The air was filled anew with
black mist as the entire room was shaken by a series of wild collisions. It was
as if a giant had taken hold of a tree trunk, thrust it into the room and begun
smashing blindly. Chips of wood and stone flew about, tinkling like hail.

The beast’s power was staggering. Had they not
been tucked into the corners, every person would have been crushed.

The hissing and thumping that shook the ground gradually
receded. When the air cleared, the smell remained. Everything was coated in
slime. The table had been reduced to chips and powder, statues and ornaments
were toppled and shattered, and huge stones had been wrenched from the mortar
around the doorway as if they were no more than pebbles in mud. The entrance had
been doubled in size.

They got to their feet, rubbing their eyes and
swaying. Osric remained on the ground. He looked only barely conscious. He had
not quite escaped the thrashings.

Merter called for silence.

Everyone listened.

The retreating sounds were still fading, then they
ended abruptly. It was just a hint, but it was unmistakable – a distant
clatter, much like what might be produced by an axe falling on tiles.

Merter ran to the window and thrust his head out.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s still in the building.”

 A deep scraping rush echoed up from the enlarged
entrance.

“Back to the archive room!” Merter shouted. “Down
the stairwell. Go, go, go!”

He and Tyne grabbed Osric by the arms and dragged
his heavy body across the floor to the narrow stairwell opening across the room
from the main entrance. This time the soldiers understood all too well and
dashed ahead. Aedan and Fergal brought up the rear, spears pointed backwards,
tips shuddering.

As they turned towards the arched stone doorway,
the light in the room behind them darkened. Aedan pushed Fergal through and
dived after him as something struck against the frame, releasing a cloud of
dust. Clearly, the beast’s head was too large to pass through, but the next
instant heavy stones were falling all around Aedan, one bruising his thigh and
another narrowly missing his head. With a shout of pain, he twisted around and
stared at the monstrous shape moving through the billows of dust, striking,
twisting, plunging, only inches from his boots. It was actually digging through
the stone wall, enlarging the entrance.

He scrambled to his feet and tried to leap down
the stairs, but something held him fast. Spinning around, he saw that part of
his cloak had been trapped under a large rock. He knew he should unhook the
cloak, but before he could do so, the frame shuddered and this time something
living brushed his shoulder. It drove him to a panic. He pulled and strained to
tear the cloak free, half shouting, half crying, as he imagined the beast
gathering for another lunge.

A hand grasped his arm and pulled. The cloak tore off
at the clasp, and he and Fergal lurched forward, tumbling down several stairs ahead
of a terrific explosion of stone and dust.

Fergal pulled him to his feet and they edged down into
the blackness of the stairwell – all torches having been lost above. They soon
caught up with the others.

“There’s another way out of the archive room,” Fergal
shouted over the hammering of falling rock. “Don’t wait here. When the boulders
start to roll down the stairs, they won’t stop until they reach the bottom.”

They continued on through the darkness, increasing
the pace when a load of apple-sized rocks came tumbling past, striking against
legs and ankles.

“Hurry,” said Fergal, as an ominous pounding began
to fill the space. “How far are we Merter?”

“About half way.”

The thumping behind them grew with every bound –
it could only be a falling boulder.

“We’re not going to make it,” Fergal shouted.
“Everyone press up against the inside wall.”

There was no time for explanations. Aedan did as
he was told.

It was no longer thumping but smashing its way
down the stairs towards them. A boulder large enough to do that could kill them
all. Aedan turned his face away and held his breath. There was a shuddering
impact just to the side and something rushed past his head, the wind pulling at
his hair; then a scrape and a grunt of pain below him, a few more collisions, a
scream, and the sound faded.

“Fergal?” he asked.

“Just a scratch,” Fergal said, then raised his
voice, “Who was hurt?”

“One of the soldiers,” Merter’s voice echoed up.
“Sounds like a broken arm.”

There was no need for further instructions. They
were moving again, as fast as the darkness would allow. After a few steps, Aedan
missed his footing and stumbled forward, striking the outer wall. He realised that
the falling boulder must have made some large cavities in the stairs.

The sounds of digging had grown muffled, but it
was obvious that the creature’s efforts had not diminished in the least. Soon,
the echoes of heavy tumbling objects reached them again. This time it sounded
like there were many boulders.

“How far, Merter?” Fergal called.

“We’re here.”

Fergal and Aedan took the last few stairs as the
light grew, then they stumbled into the archive room still bright with oil
lamps.

“Move!” Fergal shouted. “Away from the door.”

He pulled Aedan and Liru to the side and the others
darted out of the way as three rocks, one almost as high as a man’s waist,
rushed through the opening, smashing into the shelves on the far side of the
room.

The soldiers were too shaken to speak, and they stared,
trembling. Even the injuries were ignored. Nobody looked for the crown which
would be somewhere under the rubble.

Merter and Aedan had their eyes on the cavernous museum
door on the far side of the chamber, but the snake had not emerged.

“What
was
that thing up there?” Tyne asked,
her voice shrill.

Nobody knew.

Fergal hurried away. “There are five alcoves in
this wall,” he said. “In one of them a hidden exit was planned, but I don’t
know if it was completed. Perhaps it is concealed by a shelf, or worked into
the floor. I’ll take the one nearest the museum, the rest of you take the
others. Merter, please keep an eye on the museum. There’s no telling where the snake
could be now.”

Aedan entered an alcove and Liru took the one
alongside. He began by pulling a large rug off the floor and inspecting the paving
stones for any kind of groove that might indicate a trapdoor, but the grouting
between blocks was solid.

Boulders continued to tumble down the stairs. He
suspected that eventually that giant beast would be able to dig its way to them.
He also knew that if the snake had not been properly roused earlier, this din
was likely to finish the job.

He tried to concentrate. The walls were next, but
packed shelves covered them. He began clearing, placing the armloads of tablets
on the floor as gently as his haste would allow. From one of the other alcoves
there was a tinkling crash of shattering clay. Someone, clearly, had decided
that it was time for sacrifices to be made. Aedan stepped back and looked over.
It was Tyne.

“Nothing here,” she said, and marched into another
alcove.

Fergal’s indignant face showed itself briefly.

“Here,” called Liru. “I think I have it.”

Aedan dropped the tablets he was holding with a
clatter and darted across, the others close behind. Liru was pointing to a
brass lever.

“Wait! Don’t touch it yet,” Fergal cried, pounding
into the alcove. He looked at the lever and darted from wall to wall, examining
the joins. When he noticed the steel bars in the corners he nodded.

“Well?” said Tyne, her impatience in no way
concealed. “Are we going to open this door or not?”

“It’s not a door,” Fergal replied. “Everyone,
collect your lamps and get in here.”

Osric was conscious but stunned, and had to be
supported. It was only the soldiers who hung back with distrustful expressions.

“Suit yourselves,” Fergal said, and pulled the
lever.

Nothing happened.

“You’re right,” said Tyne. “Definitely not a door.
I’m going to try another alcove.”

“Patience, dear. Counterweights can have delays.”

“Well right now, a delay –”

The floor shuddered and dropped, causing everyone
to reach out for a support. The walls began to slide up behind the standing
shelves, as the ground beneath them sank. In front of them, the floor of the
archive room rose, slowly closing off the entrance.

The soldiers were still watching from the archive
room. Something caused all three to look towards the museum. As if stung, they spun
away and shot across the floor, screaming, fighting each other to get ahead.
They dived through the shrinking gap between the archive floor and the ceiling
of the cubicle, tumbling onto the heads and shoulders of the rest of the party.
One landed on Osric. Tyne gripped his collar and flung him off none too gently.
But neither he nor the other two had eyes for anything other than the
disappearing entrance.