The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World (13 page)

“About time,” muttered Ewan.

Wynkyn pointedly ignored him. He chanted:

“Zemmoul comes to take a lure, which motionless must lie; strike but once and strike him sure, above the baleful eye.”

The sword solidified. Its hilt darkened through pale blue to indigo, and finally to ebony black. The blade remained silver but lost its glow.

“And I hope you like your part,” said Wynkyn to Ewan, with rather more than the usual gleam in his eye, before he began to slowly fade out.

Helen knelt to pick up the sword, while Ewan frowned.

“What did he mean?” he asked.

Helen was testing the weight of the sword, and finding—much to her surprise—that it was light and comfortable in her two-handed grip. She didn’t answer.

Ewan let the spell-rhythm run through his head again, and an awful suspicion dawned on him. “How big is this monster?” he asked. “Very,” she replied. “And what does it eat?”

“For preference,” she said, “people. But I suppose it doesn’t get many these days and has to live on mud.”

“So… er… what kind of bait are we supposed to use to tempt him out of his bottomless pool? What’s the lure mentioned in the spell?”

She thought about it for a moment or two, and then the same answer occurred to her.

It was too dark for them to exchange glances where they stood, but Ewan was looking hard at where Helen was standing, and he imagined that she was doing likewise.

“Oh, well,” said Ewan. “I suppose yours is the difficult bit. All I have to do is lie still.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

When there was no answer to his knock, Sirion Hilversun entered his daughter’s bedroom. It was as he thought. The bed had not been slept in.

“Oh, dear,” he said, aloud. “Oh, dear. Where….”

He crossed the room to the dressing table, looking around for some evidence of where Helen might have gone, or why. Everything was neat and orderly, and quite unhelpful. He was about to turn round and go out again when he saw that the top left-hand drawer was not quite closed. Although this did not seem particularly odd or significant he reached out and opened it a little further.

Inside, there was an envelope. It had been opened, but the letter had been shoved back inside. He recognized it as the letter which had come from the palace a few days before—the letter containing Prince Damian’s first question. The enchanter took the folded sheet of paper out of the envelope, and opened it.

My dearest Helen, he read.

The words written upon the stone beneath the signpost at the heart of Methwold forest were:

TURN THE SIGNPOST ROUND.

Then he skipped to: on Faulhom’s horn… in Mirasol’s haunted banquet hall?

He didn’t bother with the rest.

“Mirasol?” he said to himself, softly. “She went to Mirasol. But she came back. It was the next day….”

Then the thoughts began to strike him like the strokes of a tolling bell.

Methwold forest… turn the signpost round… disenchanted. Mirasol’s banquet hall… the giant’s horn….

“Oh, no,” murmured Sirion Hilversun, realizing what the juxtaposition of these things signified. “Oh, no! Not the will…. Jeahawn Kambalba….”

The enchanter’s face went as white as the paper he held in his trembling fingers. He looked up and saw his reflection in the magic mirror, staring at him with wide eyes.

“Where is she?” he whispered. “You have to say: ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’” said the mirror. “It’s in the rules.”

“Where is she!” yelled the enchanter, at the top of his voice.

“All right, all right,” said the mirror. “I didn’t realize you felt like that. I don’t know. I’m only her mirror.”

“Don’t take that tone with me, you lousebound looking-glass!” howled Sirion Hilversun. “When I ask you a question you give me an answer, you hear!”

The mirror quailed in its frame, distorting the image of the enraged enchanter horribly.

“I’m sorry!” it wailed. “I don’t know, I tell you. Ever since that interference a few days ago I haven’t been able to keep track of her.”

“What interference?” asked the enchanter, icily.

“Didn’t she tell you? I’m sure I don’t know. We were talking quite amicably about difficult questions and all of a sudden I came over all peculiar. Overridden by another channel, if you ask me. I don’t know what went on—I went out like a light. Had a headache ever since. Proper poorly, I’ve been.”

“You…” hissed the enchanter, pausing as words failed him and lifting his fist in a gesture of furious menace.

“It’s my duty to warn you,” babbled the mirror, “that breaking me carries an automatic fine of seven years bad luck. Calm down, please.”

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t smash you into little pieces,” commanded the enchanter.

“Hold on,” blustered the mirror. “Just hold on a minute. Wait… on reflection, it seems to me that perhaps I might be able to help you after all. On reflection…

The mirror paused to giggle at its unconscious pun. It was not a diplomatic moment. The enchanter raised his arm still higher.

“Waitwaitwait…” gurgled the mirror. “I saw her writing the reply. I couldn’t help reading it… well, it was reflected in me, wasn’t it? It wasn’t as if I peeked. … And she asked something about a lamia in Ora Lamae.”

“I know that,” said Sirion Hilversun. “That’s the second verse of the will. That doesn’t help at all.”

“But don’t you see?” said the mirror, urgently. “That must be where she went. To check up on the prince, in

case he was cheating. She went to Ora Lamae and heaven only knows what happened…. Maybe the lamia got them both–-Don’t hit me!”

But Sirion Hilversun lost control at the suggestion that Helen might have been taken by the lamia. One of his fingers spat lightning, and the mirror shattered in its frame. As the pieces tinkled on the tabletop they chattered: “Seven years…”

“Don’t you threaten me,” murmured the enchanter, as his wild anger ebbed quickly away, draining out of him like water from a leaky bucket. “You couldn’t force bad luck on me if you were the great mirror of the sea itself.”

His fingers crushed the letter that he held into a ball, and he dropped it on to the shards of the mirror. He turned, and strode from the room with a purpose that his ancient legs had not found in forty years.

“Amnesia or no amnesia,” he said, “I’m not dead yet. Not by a long way. Caramorn will regret this! If I don’t get my daughter back I’ll curse that land for a thousand years… and turn their precious prince into a slime-mould!”

It was late afternoon when Ewan and Helen reached Fiora. They had ridden the grey mare together—as neither of them was overweight the horse had not been seriously inconvenienced, and they had not asked more of her than a steady walk.

The waterfall tumbled from the heights of a great craggy cliff that lay between the precipitous mountains of southern Caramorn and the lands of World’s Edge. The water fell into a great pool nearly a quarter of a mile across. But while the water that cascaded down was white and clean, the pool itself was all but black. Save for the place where the fall hit the surface, the pool was unnaturally still, the ripples that spread from the cascade moving slowly and quickly being damped and extinguished as they escaped the turbulence. The pool seemed to contain a thin, foul mud rather than pure water.

At the pool’s further rim the outflow was a slow-running deep stream, which ran away across the magic lands to the edge of the world itself.

“The stream is gobbled up by the Great Grey Chaos that girdles the world,” said Helen. “The water is dissipated into the mists that always envelope the edge itself. It used to be said that all the fresh, clean rain that falls from the sky all over the world is gathered and delivered here into this black pit, where the body of Zemmoul turns it foul. But I don’t believe that. The world is so big, and so much rain falls. Once, so legend has it, there were many more things like Zemmoul—Chaos creatures that haunted every sea and lake, krakens and great seaworms, jelly things with a million tentacles. Sometimes, in the very old times, some of them—especially the seaworms and the hippocampi—could assume the forms of men or horses, and come ashore riding the breakers on stormy days.”

“You know some delightful stories,” said Ewan, dismounting from the mare. As he released the reins he winced slightly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Helen.

“Sore fingers,” he said, with a wry grin. “Too much guitar playing.” He reached for the knot by which Helen had tied the sword to the saddle, but she pushed his hand away and quickly worked it loose with her own fingers.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “I’m not much off an enchantress, but sore fingers shouldn’t be difficult.”

“It’s nothing,” said Ewan.

But she took his hand in hers, and said: “Hold still.” Then she chanted: “Bruises fade and cuts seal, strength return and flesh heal.”

But nothing happened. The weals on Ewan’s fingertips, and the swellings around the knuckle-joints, would not yield.

“Healing power and magic true,” Helen tried again, “make these hands as good as new.” But that didn’t work either.

“The cuts were made by magic strings,” said Ewan. ‘Perhaps they can’t be undone so easily. They’ll heal, in their own time. Not to worry.”

Helen did worry. She knew the wounds weren’t serious—but they were wounds nevertheless, a penalty exacted by the spell of which they were the instruments. There might yet be more. She looked, uncomfortably, at her own hands, which had gripped the hilt of the sword. They were unscathed—so far.

“Look!” said Ewan, pointing.

Helen’s heart skipped a beat. But it wasn’t Zemmoul, rising already. Ewan was pointing to a weathered wooden post to which were attached two rusty shackles. It was close to the edge of the pool, about equidistant from the falls and the outflow.

“No prizes for guessing what that’s for,” said Ewan, dryly.

“Before the war,” said Helen, “people lived in the woods close by. They didn’t want Zemmoul coming out on hunting expeditions, so…”

“They used to keep him fed,” Ewan finished. “I know the theory. Young girls, I suppose.”

“Actually, no,” said Helen. “It was a matriarchal society. And besides which, it’s said Zemmoul preferred. …”

“All right,” Ewan interrupted. “I get the idea. The whole picture. That’s why I’m the bait.”

Helen shrugged. “The luck of the draw,” she said. “There are monsters and monsters.”

“We’d better make a move,” said Ewan. “Wynkyn seemed to think that we oughtn’t to waste time now.” So saying, he went over to the weathered post and sat down. Helen followed him and tried to fit one of the shackles around his foot. The locking mechanism was rusted away entirely, though, and it wouldn’t close.

“I don’t think we need bother,” said Ewan. “I’ll just pretend I’m nicely secured—just to reassure the monster that all’s well. How big did you say he was?”

“Very,” said Helen. “Can’t say exactly. No one’s clapped eyes on him for more than a hundred years.”

“If it’s that long since he last had his favourite food,” muttered Ewan, “he’s going to be very, very hungry.”

“Think how delighted he’ll be to see you. Isn’t it nice to be popular?”

Ewan smiled weakly.

Helen moved back a step, looked at Ewan carefully, as if trying to decide whether the monster would think him a tasty enough morsel, and waved the sword experimentally.

“I’ll be behind this rock,” she said, pointing at a boulder some eight or ten feet away from the post.

“It’s rather a long way, isn’t it?” he answered, nervously.

“I’m very quick on my feet,” she assured him. “And Zemmoul’s reputed to be a trifle sluggish.”

Ewan watched her retreat to take up a position behind the boulder, out of sight. He worried about the distance for a minute or two, and then—for a change—wondered whether a sword so light could possibly stop a large and

determined monster. It was all very well to smite its skull in order to try and reveal a small gem embedded therein, but quite another to kill it instantaneously. He told himself that there was no point in worrying, but this didn’t stop him.

He turned his attention to the water, watching the treacly ripples wandering slowly away from the cascade and smoothing themselves out.

How on earth, he thought, did I ever get mixed up in all this? I’m a scholar, the son of an instrument-maker, not a wizard or a hero-prince. Why couldn’t some other poor fool have catalogued King Rufus’s mouldy old library?

Why me? he asked the empty air. Why me? The empty air didn’t answer. It came to Ewan in a flash of insight that even in everyday life not all questions have answers.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sirion Hilversun strode into the council chamber of the palace at Jessamy. He wore the full regalia of his profession—a black silk cloak embroidered with every magical sign ever thought of, and a great pointed hat that made him seven feet tall. He also wore an expression which would have made the brightest day seem decidedly stormy.

As it happened, the only person in the council chamber was Prince Damian, who was wrestling unsuccessfully with a crossword puzzle. (Bellegrande was still away “seeking foreign aid,” Alcover had gone to one of the smaller states in the Western Empire, famous for its casinos, “to study modem financial theory,” and Hallowbrand had gone to a food fair in Heliopolis. Coronado had a diplomatic headache.) Prince Damian could be forgiven for the terrible shock and sense of disaster that overwhelmed him when he glanced up from twenty-six down to be confronted by the wrathful wizard. He would have ran away had he been able, but his legs had somehow acquired the texture of jelly. He quivered instead.

“You pusillanimous pestilence!” roared Sirion Hilversun. “What have you done with my daughter?”

Damian, who thought that “pusillanimous pestilence” must be an incantation designed to turn him into something horrid, could find no answer.

The roar, however—penetrating to the deepest corridors of the palace—attracted others to the council chamber. The first to arrive was the queen, who somehow failed to recognize the enchanter—an amazing feat, considering that appearances were, for once, in no way deceptive.