The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World (8 page)

“It’s a hard life,” commented Ewan, in a voice not overburdened with sympathy.

“It certainly is,” said the elder statesman, shuffling away towards the door. As he went into the corridor he was desperately trying to think of another way—preferably an easier one. It was nice, he thought, to be a man with power—a man steering his own course through life towards a self-selected destiny. But it took a great deal of effort to steer, and the sea of life seemed full of the most wicked rocks and reefs.

This kingdom, he thought, doesn’t deserve a man like me. And I certainly don’t deserve a kingdom like this. Why, oh why, couldn’t I have gone west years ago?

He realized that in his inmost thoughts he didn’t really believe that a marriage between Damian and Helen would ever take place, or that it could save the kingdom if it did.

“No good will come of it all,” he muttered beneath his breath. “No good at all. But when your back’s to the wall, you have to try, haven’t you?”

In the council chamber he found Alcover practising dealing cards from the bottom of a deck and Hallowbrand earnestly studying a cookery book in lieu of food.

“Where’s Bellegrande?” he asked.

“Set out for Heliopolis this morning,” grunted Alcover. “Said he was going to try to negotiate some foreign aid. If you ask me he’s trying to get a job as a translator or something.”

Coronado groaned as things began to seem even blacker.

It looked as though the rats were about to start leaving the sinking ship.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Unlike Moonmansion, which was only a fake, Castle Mirasol had a moat, and also a great wooden drawbridge to span it. The moat had long ago dried up, but it still represented a barrier. The drawbridge was up and could only be let down from the inside.

Helen sat down at the edge of the moat and looked up at the ivied grey walls, whose worn battlements loomed high above her. The day was sullen and overcast, with rainclouds gathering ominously overhead. It was not the kind of day one would normally choose for a pleasant walk—or, for that matter, a heroic adventure—but Helen had not had the opportunity to pick and choose.

She wore a heavy jacket, denim jeans and pair of sensible shoes, so she wasn’t unduly worried about the weather, but she was apprehensive lest her father should wonder why she had come out on such a day. He had ways of finding such things out. She was also worried about the problem of getting into Castle Mirasol. She wasn’t afraid. She knew the castle was haunted, but she was too familiar with ghosts to let that worry her. Her anxiety was simply caused by the practical difficulties of getting in.

Had she been possessed of a more powerful species of magic there would have been any number of ways of gaining ingress. But she hadn’t even sufficient power to motivate a broomstick—she had never wielded anything larger than an enchanted feather duster by the power of mind alone. She contemplated descending into the moat and attempting to climb the wall, but it was an awfully long way, and the slimed mud at the bottom of the moat smelled quite foul.

She sighed. “It will have to be cotton climbing, I suppose,” she muttered.

So saying, she took from her jacket pocket a reel of black cotton, a darning needle, a wooden peg and a large hairpin. She put the peg through the hole in the reel and stuck it firmly into the ground. She unwound a few inches of cotton and bit it off, then tied the new end of the cotton still on the reel to the eye of the darning needle. She opened up the hairpin and forced the halves back against the bend, then made a tiny bow out of it by tying on the detached piece of cotton very tightly. She tested the strength of the bow, then placed the darning needle on it, as if it were an arrow.

She closed her eyes, and muttered: “Bow bend, arrow fly, up and over, nice and high.” It was a very feeble spell, but it was one of the easiest in the book, and she had used it before.

The bow came alive in her hands, bent itself back, and then hurled the needle high into the air. The cotton

reel spun on the slender peg as the cotton unravelled, and a black line whipped up into the sky. The needle disappeared over the battlements, and within a couple of seconds the reel was still. Helen drew the cotton taut and fastened it to the head of the peg, murmuring: “Needle stick and stay secure, make my passage safe and sure.”

There was only one more conjuration needed, and she rattled it off: “Cotton black and strong as steel, bear me up on an even keel.” Then she began climbing.

She was a good climber, but it was a long way, and a piece of cotton, strong as steel or not, is by no means as easy to grip as a thick rope. It didn’t cut into her flesh as ordinary cotton would have cut into the flesh of someone without a modicum of magical protection, but it was difficult to manage. Had the spell not included a balancing clause she might never have made it.

Castle Mirasol looked forbidding from the outside, but when Helen peered down into the courtyard within, it seemed three or four times as bad. It was like looking down into a great black well. Although it was mid-afternoon the pale light of the glowering sky made little impression on the deep shadows which gathered inside the castle. They were shadows of incalculable age, which had enjoyed domination over the grey stone walls for a long, long time. It would take a strong light indeed to challenge them now. They were massive shadows, deep and solid, within which might lurk horrors unimaginable. Everything was quite still… but not quite silent. Far, far below—so far that it might emanate from the ultimate dungeons of the castle or the bowels of the Earth itself—there was a faint, uneasy sound of moaning.

The great hall, Helen knew, would be on the opposite side of the courtyard, its doors facing the drawbridge and the portcullis. But the only staircase descending from the ledge inside the battlements was on this side, zigzagging down the corner of the north-west tower. She would have to go down, passing through the shadows which hung batlike from the walls, and then walk diagonally across the open space, immersed in the gloomy miasma, to the entrance of the hall. What she would find inside it she didn’t know.

There was no point in hanging about. She walked to the head of the stair and began the descent.

There was no guard-rail on the stairway, and the steps were only two-and-a-half-feet wide. If she stumbled and chanced to fall over the edge she would plunge into the depths. She didn’t intend to fall.

But the steps were covered in dust—a dust that was not fine and grey and powdery but thick and clotted and rather slimy. It was not nice to walk on, and, what was worse, it wasn’t safe.

By the time she reached the tenth step, Helen was treading very carefully indeed, placing each leading foot so that the sole was using all the width of the step, in the middle of the span. As the murk gathered about her and the great dome of the sky became a crenellated square cut out by the battlements, she gradually became aware of things moving in the greasy grime—worms which wriggled beneath her heels, trying to get out of the way. The feeling was quite repulsive.

Every thirteen steps the stairway turned back on itself diagonally, so that she had to change direction. At every turn there was a flat ledge about six feet square. Where each of these ledges met the wall there were spider-webs three or four feet in diameter. Once or twice she saw the spiders lurking in crevices at the edges of the webs: vast black beings with bodies the size of fists and legs like great crippled fingers. The first time she caught sight of one she gasped—not so much in fear as in loathing— but not one of them moved. Even when, at the fifth turning, the edge of her foot brushed and stirred an unusually large web, the builder of the web remained quite still.

It occurred to her that the webs, like the stair itself, were of incalculable age. In centuries none had caught so much as a single fly. Even flies stayed clear of places such as this. The spiders were all dead. They had died at their stations.

Now, only their ghosts scuttled from shadow to shadow, dark and silent. But Helen saw no spider-ghosts. One never does see the ghosts of such creatures, which have a preference for living inside walls and stones and wooden things.

The square of grey sky slowly dwindled in size, and its light—never powerful—retreated further and further from the world which now surrounded Helen. When she reached the bottom of the staircase it was very dark indeed. She took from her pocket a box of matches and struck one on the sandpaper side of the box. She shut her eyes and muttered a swift spell: “Match burn bright and match burn long, guide me well and I won’t go wrong.” Then she set off across the open space.

There were no webs here, but the grease-laden dust was still everywhere. The courtyard was paved with blocks four feet by four, with the gaps filled in with cement, but with time the cement had worn away, and grooves in the slick black coat etched out the pattern perfectly.

She had gone no more than four or five paces when the gleam of the match picked out something lying in the dust. It was a lump, about the size of a human foot. It may once have had shape and colour, but no longer. It was amorphous, anonymous. Helen did not pause to investigate. Another pace, and the matchlight found another, and yet another step took her within sight of three more. She picked her way carefully between them, careful not to step on one. In the centre of the courtyard there were so many that it was not easy to select a course.

In the very middle of the courtyard stood the castle well—a cylinder of brown brick with four upright wooden beams supporting a conical roof. The spindle was still there, and so was the rope wound around it, dangling into the well. Whether the bucket remained on the end of the rope was anyone’s guess. On top of the well’s roof was a model of a weathervane, with little bronze arrows pointing out the four different directions and a model of a little man blowing a great horn which would have swivelled to find the direction of the wind if ever a wind could blow down here in the belly of the castle.

Helen guessed readily enough that the model represented the giant Faulhorn, who had been killed long ago by the one-time owner of Castle Mirasol, King Belek of Beauval, who had become involved in the initial dispute between Elfspin and Viranian owing to the indiscretions of his own enchanters. Castle Mirasol had been the scene of one of the first great battles of the war, and had not been the same since.

Helen looked closely at the weathervane, in case this small replica of the giant’s horn might also have words written upon it, but it didn’t. She went on across the open space, still avoiding the shapeless things embedded in the dirt. At the mighty oaken doors of the great hall she paused again.

The distant moaning of the ghosts was not so distant now, and though it could still be heard emanating from far beneath her feet, it was now supplemented by a faint hollow whisper that came from within the hall.

It was not a loud sound but it was a complex one. It was not the work of one voice or even a hundred, but of a great multitude, most of whom were no doubt situated much more deeply than this, though a substantial fraction must be gathered in the great hall.

Helen gripped the handle of one of the big doors firmly in her left hand (the right held aloft the still-glimmering match) and turned it. Then she put her shoulder to the oaken panel and heaved with all her might.

Slowly and ponderously the door yielded and swung inwards.

She found that there were, indeed, five hundred or a thousand ghosts waiting for her within.

Ghosts are sometimes called shades or shadows, but that is exactly what they are not. Ghosts live in shadows, and stand out in their environment precisely because they themselves are composed of unshadow. Shadows are black and ghost gleam. A well-established ghost (recent ghosts are tentative and irregular in their manifestations) may be the purest glittering silver, shining very softly with a weird radiance quite unlike any other light which exists.

The ghosts which haunted the hall of Castle Mirasol were well established indeed. They were brilliant. Had this been any other kind of light it would have filled the hall with brightness and clarity, but it is the fate of ghosts always to be imprisoned by shadow and helpless within it… and hence the hall was a chaotic confusion of black and silver—deepest black and brightest silver, ghosts and shadows bound inextricably together.

The ghosts were seated about seven great tables—six set parallel to one another and in line with the door, and one at the far end, elevated somewhat and set at right angles. The tables had once been set with a glorious banquet, but that had been a very long time ago. The food had all rotted, unconsumed, and even the silver dishes and the forks and spoons were black with tarnish, while the copper candlesticks were green with verdigris except where their ruddiness was protected by translucent-drips of wax from long-dead candles.

As Helen came into the hall every ghostly eye was turned upon her. Ghosts’ eyes gleam more brightly than the rest of them, and sometimes seem like fiery diamonds when they are directed at a mortal being.

Helen paused, feeling the worms beneath her feet struggling to escape from their entrapment.

“Hello,” she said. She was always polite to ghosts. It cost nothing.

There was no reply. The whispering had died away, though there was still the moaning from far below. Ghosts have the ability to stifle their otherwise perpetual voices when living creatures are about. It is probably a great relief to them.

“I won’t disturb you,” said Helen. “All I want to know is what’s written on the horn which Belek of Beauval took from the hoard of the giant Faulhorn. Then I’ll… leave you to get on with… whatever you were doing.”

The ghosts exchanged glances. Not one spoke. Then, as one, they looked towards the high table. At the centre of the high table was the great throne of Mirasol, and on that throne sat the ghost of the last of Mirasol’s kings— Belek. This ghost moved, now, within its heavy shadows and looked down at the girl who stood in the aisle between two of the long tables, holding up a lighted match.