The Lost Heiress #2 (16 page)

Abruptly a rock reared ahead; he cried out and jerked aside and he was out! He was in a wide blue sky and he yelled in relief and caught hold of his mind, slowing himself, slowing, fighting bitterly for control.

He dropped carefully. Now he had it; then it all slipped away and he was plunging wildly again through endless blue air. He couldn’t keep it up. Panicking, he held on, praying for help, gabbling the Litany in terror over and over.

He was above the Unfinished Lands. They were more terrible than he had dreamed. Below were vast plateaus where nothing grew, where great cracks had opened in the ground, and plumes of filthy smoke hissed up and choked him. Flames and sparks spat from ravines; ahead a cone of ash erupted scorching lava, its gray cinder-field spreading destruction for miles. Briefly he saw ruins, crushed houses. Beyond that the land heaved and buckled as he watched, as if the very atoms of rock and soil were coming undone; convulsions cracked mountains, new rivers gushed out, sinister lichens crawled over every rotting growth. He began to think he was soaring over some great disease, as if Anara were pocked and pustuled with abscesses, as if the planet burned and tossed in fever, and then below him, coming suddenly into view, was the worst of it, a great wound, a vast open sore in the planet’s side, and out of it crawled creatures so disfigured that even from this height they filled him with horror.

These were the Pits of Maar.

Seven great holes, like some obscene reversal of the moons.

They were in every story he’d ever heard, and the sight of them filled him with dread. The nearest was pulling at him. Desperately he struggled to tug away, but it had him, it dragged him and he tipped over and fell, headfirst, mile after mile, arms out, screaming. Below, the Pit gaped, spiraling down in immense terraces, thousands of them, one beneath the other, and as he fell into it the darkness closed around him, and swallowed him in one gulp.

 

 

 

HE WAS STANDING IN A ROOM.

It was very dark; there were no candles. A small fire burned in a brazier, and as Raffi looked he saw that in front of it was a desk, and at the desk, far back in the shadows, someone was writing.

Bewildered, he stared around. He felt sick and giddy, battered, sore, and for a moment the room seemed to sway around him, and then it was still.

There was no sound but the pen, scratching.

He was glad of the fire; awkwardly he stretched out his hands to it and saw with a shock that they were frail and ghostly, and he could see right through them.

The figure that was writing never turned its head, but quite suddenly the scratch of the pen was an ominous sound, as if the words it formed were evil, and Raffi knew that the writer had sensed him, or heard him. He kept still, his heart thumping.

It was too dark to see the figure properly, but there was a wrongness about it, a slither of soft mesh or scales, something abhorrent in the shape. Slowly it stopped writing and put down the pen.

Raffi stared, astonished, at the hand that lay in the firelight. It was long, ridged. Unhuman.

And then he knew, suddenly and surely, that he was in the very depths of hell, in the Pits of Maar, and that for mile upon mile above him the unimaginable horrors of Kest bred and spawned and crawled.

The figure spoke. Its voice was low, reptilian. “Who are you?” it hissed.

Rigid with terror, Raffi couldn’t answer.

He could see the edge of its face: long, too long. If it got up and walked into the firelight he knew he would collapse, crumple in on himself, that it would destroy his mind like a searing flame. But he couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Close your eyes, he screamed at himself. Close your eyes! But they were fixed. The eyelids were heavy sheets of steel; he couldn’t do it, couldn’t force them down.

The figure stirred.

“A keeper!” it said, wondering. It began to stand.

And then, abruptly, Galen was there, Galen was helping him. Together they forced down the iron blinds, blotting out the room, fire, the nightmare narrow turning face. But Raffi was screaming, or someone was, far off, over and over, and for a second he saw himself lying in a dark bed, and the tall shapes were holding him down and calling him, calling him.

There was a hundred years of silence.

Water dripped into a pool.

“Raffi?”

Ages later, Carys was standing with him. They were alone in a golden place. She looked around, bewildered. “Where are we?”

He was sitting on a stone, huddled up. When she spoke, he found he could move, stiffly, could rub his face with his hands. His skin felt strange, his hands like an old man’s.

“I don’t know.”

She knelt and caught hold of his arm. “Are you all right?”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

“But where’s here? And I wish that screaming would stop!”

Vaguely he thought he could do something about that. Far off, he let it ebb into silence. Then he said, “This is all a dream. A vision. I drank the water of the well, Carys. I shouldn’t have done that. It was so stupid! And now I’m lost. I don’t know where I am; I’ve been here too long. And I can’t get back!”

She looked at him closely. “You look older. You
are
older.”

He knew that, could feel himself aging, as if month by month all his years were speeding up inside him. His chin felt stubbly, his hands too big.

She caught hold of him, and her hands were warm. “Concentrate, Raffi! What did you come here for?”

“What?”

Impatient, she shook him. “What are you looking for? Is it the Interrex?”

“Yes!”

Suddenly the word shone in front of him; he reached out his hands and caught hold of it and it was solid, heavy. It was a box, and he opened it and climbed inside, and walked down the long stairway. Behind him, Carys stood on the top step.

“Hurry up!” she said. “Time’s running out!”

He could see it too, time trickling down the stairs past him like water, rippling and dripping, the sound loud and close, a spring that never ran dry.

By the bottom of the stairs he was old; his hair was white and he couldn’t straighten; a pain throbbed in his side. But as he limped on, a sense-line came out of the dark and wrapped itself around him, and instantly he was young, only about ten, and he opened a door and walked into the classroom.

 

 

 

IT WAS A HUGE ROOM. BITTERLY COLD.

About fifty children sat there in rows, writing in utter silence, and he realized with a shock they were all wearing around their necks the insignia of the Watch.

He slid into a desk at the back, picked up the pen, and read what was on the paper. It was Galen’s handwriting.

Glancing up, he saw a tall lean man patrolling the lanes between desks, a splintered stick under his arm. Every now and then he would stop and bark out a number. A child shot up, chanted a section of the Rule, and sat down.

Something cold touched Raffi’s chest. Feeling inside his shirt, he pulled out a small metal disc on a chain and read the number on it: 914.

Then he noticed, on the opposite side of the room, a small girl, her red hair hacked short. She was no more than six or seven, and was watching him slyly. He smiled at her.

Instantly her hand shot up.

“What?” the Watchmaster roared.

“He isn’t writing.”

“Who isn’t?”

“Him.”

She pointed. Every head turned to Raffi. He swallowed; the Watchmaster was already striding down the aisle like a great long-legged stork.

“Stand up,” he hissed.

It really was a stork now, a black one with a viciously sharp beak. “Speak the Rule,” it snapped, but Raffi didn’t know the words.

The bird’s beak jabbed his chest. “Speak!”

“I . . . I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“I don’t know it,” he shouted, desperate. Then he glared across at the girl. “Why did you tell him?”

She giggled. “The Watch must watch each other first, stupid.”

“He’s a spy!” the stork hissed.

They were all around him now, crowding, prodding. They held him tight, he couldn’t move, and though they were children, they were changing before his eyes, slithering, growing tails, mutating with nightmare speed.

“He must be punished!” The stork beak stabbed at his eyes; he jerked aside in terror. “Where is this?” he yelled. “What Watchhouse? Tell me!”

Raffi
.

The girl smirked, her ears pointed like a cat’s. “Keilder Wood seven seventy.”

Hands scratched at him; he fought and bit and struggled, but they had him, and the vicious beak stabbed at his forehead till the pain exploded in him and the blood ran down, and a voice was saying over and over, “Raffi. Don’t fight us, Raffi. Open your eyes. Open your eyes.”

And finally, hopelessly, though he knew they were open, he opened them.

The Sekoi sat back, weary and gaunt with relief. “It’s all right, Galen,” it said. “He’s back.”

Sorrows of Kest

“
I
CAN’T BELIEVE,” Galen growled, “that you were stupid enough to do it.”

Tallis and the Sekoi exchanged glances. “Never mind that now.” She pressed the warm cup into Raffi’s hands. “It’s all over, at last.”

The room was dark. They were sitting around the fire, Tallis in her young-woman shape, the door behind her open, so they could see the moths in the soft moonlight over the lawns.

Raffi sipped the warm ale. He still felt tired and guilty and dizzy. Yesterday they’d told him he’d been in the dream-coma for three days and nights. He knew now he’d never have gotten out of it on his own; Galen had come in for him, in deep, into the journey, because that’s what it had been, the Deep Journey that only Relic Masters should make. It would have killed him soon. Even now, a whole day later, he barely had the strength to make a sense-line, and fell over if he stood up.

The ale was honey-sweet. It made him feel better.

When he had woken, all he had wanted to do was be sick, and then sleep. But Galen had been relentless. He had forced him to tell the dream, all of it, every detail, before he had let him collapse into nausea. Now the keeper sat grim, his hooked face dark and shadowed.

“I’m sorry,” Raffi muttered. It sounded weak, and stupid. “I just . . . I didn’t think anything would happen to me.”

“You didn’t think at all.” Galen was haggard and weary; his fasting had made him thinner, and Raffi knew he had prayed over him and fought with him for control all the time of the dream-sleep. “It was a mess, boy,” he said fiercely. “You could have ruined everything.”

“But he hasn’t, it seems,” Tallis put in smoothly. She sat down on the floor, her back against the bench. “And now we must discuss these messages the Makers have sent. However they came.”

The Sekoi put a bony finger into its ale cup and stirred thoughtfully. “Odd messages too. And dispiriting.” It looked up. “The last part seems the most important for us. Do you agree that it seems to tell us that the Interrex is a small girl-cub, and that she is in the hands of the Watch? In a Watchhouse?”

Galen nodded gloomily.

“You mean that girl who put her hand up?” Raffi went cold. “She’s the Emperor’s granddaughter? But she’s one of the enemy!”

Tallis shook her head. “It may be her. It may be the number round your neck will be more important. Nine fourteen. Remember it. At least we have a clear idea where to look. Keilder Wood is not far from here.”

Galen was sunk in his bitter mood. “We know where to look. But it’s worse than we thought. They may know who they have. If they do, we’re finished.”

“They’d have already killed her,” the Sekoi put in.

“Maybe. But even if they had no idea who she is, the child’s mind will already be twisted against us. This won’t be a simple rescue. She won’t want to come. It will be a kidnap.”

Thinking of the girl’s spiteful grin, Raffi thought Galen was more right than he knew.

“And anyway,” he said aloud, “how do we get in?”

Galen smiled strangely. “You know how. Carys must get us in.”

Tallis looked up. “Who is Carys?”

The Sekoi pulled a face. “That would take some explaining, Guardian. She’s a Watchspy. She may, or she may not, be a friend of ours.”

“Of course she is,” Raffi said hotly. He banged the empty cup down, annoyed. “She helped me. I saw her.”

“The Makers helped you,” Galen snapped. “And they appeared in forms your mind would recognize. But certainly Carys is our only way into a Watchhouse, so she must be told.”