The Hunting of the Princes

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Taggie was starting to worry they’d missed Red Loch altogether. Then she saw a red glow up ahead, as if a ruby-coloured sun had just set behind the horizon.

  Red Loch was twenty miles at its longest stretch, and over eight miles wide in the middle. It had a rocky island a mile offshore, which was where King Yovonin had decided his impregnable fortress would be built. A thin bridge with innumerable supporting arches stretched out between the shore and the island.

  Taggie looked at the water in confusion. It glowed a dull red, as if the loch’s bedrock was a giant seam of dying lightstone.

  ‘Amazing,’ Lantic said. ‘A sea of light.’

  ‘Is it enchanted?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Not quite,’ Felix said. ‘It has been like this since an angel fell from the stars in the First Times and crashed to the ground forming the loch. Some say it is the angel’s blood that mingles with the water.’

  ‘That means nobody’s going to sneak up on the castle,’ Sophie said in dismay. ‘Not in this light.’

  ‘No, they’re not,’ Taggie agreed. ‘But the loch’s not too bright. We should manage to get over the bridge OK.’

  The bridge only began thirty metres out from the low cliff which ran along the side of the loch. Once, long ago, there had been huge guard-towers on either side. They must have contained a drawbridge that could be lowered to cover the gulf between them and the cliff. Now the towers were razed to mounds of stone smothered in rotting frost fungus. The drawbridge was gone, obliterated in King Ornalo’s doomed last stand.

  In its place was a rickety-looking ramp of wood. A long lodge had been built on top of the cliff where the ramp started. Its windows shone with the orange light of a fire burning in its hearth. The glow of the loch revealed several armed Rannalal knights patrolling outside.

  ‘Now what?’ Lantic asked as they reined in their horses and studied the lodge from the shadows.

  ‘I’ll take care of them,’ Taggie said. She dismounted and walked along the beaten-down strip of snow that was the road.

  When she was fifty metres away, one of the Rannalal lifted its snout and sniffed the air. It let out a growling cry, summoning more from the lodge. They lined up across the road, bristling with sharp enchanted weapons. Taggie kept walking; she didn’t even hesitate when she saw the tiny shape of gnomes scurrying about between the legs of the Rannalal.

  ‘Stop,’ the Rannalal commander shouted as she stepped forward into the meagre splash of light from the lodge’s open door.

  ‘Of course,’ Taggie said. She held her hands up, and the coat sleeve fell away from her wrist. The symbols on the charmsward bands were already lined up. ‘Wonfi al turon,’ she chanted softly, and her grandmother’s gentle enchantment sent the Rannalal and gnomes falling into a deep sleep.

  ‘That. Is. Amazing,’ Lantic said as he came up behind her, and stared at the shapes snoring on the ground.

  ‘They’ll stay like that for a few hours,’ Taggie said. ‘We’d better carry them back into the lodge. It’s too cold out here.’

  Once the unconscious knights and slumbering gnomes had been dragged back inside, Taggie stood at the edge of the ramp and looked along the narrow bridge to the island that rose from the expanse of rippling luminescent water.

  ‘Is it safe?’ Lantic asked in a quiet voice. The bridge was barely wide enough for a cart to travel along. There would be no hiding on it if someone came the other way.

  ‘Jem?’ Taggie asked.

  ‘I think so. I can’t see anyone on the bridge.’

  ‘Do we ride down it?’ Lantic asked.

  ‘No,’ Taggie said. ‘We don’t know what’s at the other end. The horses could be a problem. We’ll leave them here.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ he muttered.

  Taggie, Jemima, Felix and Lantic stepped on to the ramp. Sophie flew beside them, her crossbow held ready for any trouble.

  King Ornalo’s final battle must have been ferocious. It wasn’t just the ramp that had been built to make the bridge useable again. As they walked along they found big sections of the road missing, as if a monster had taken bites out. Beams and planks had been used to fill the gaps in the crumbling stone, and by the look of it they’d been repaired and replaced many times since. Long lengths of the low walls running along each side were also missing. Somehow the spindly rails patching them up didn’t seem much use.

  It was tough going. They didn’t trust the repairs, and had to test every wobbly plank before they trod on it. Someone had to watch out behind in case anyone appeared at the end of the bridge and gave chase. Sophie was constantly worried rathwai would fall upon them from the sky, and held her crossbow ready the whole time.

  When they were two-thirds of the way across, they could finally make out the ruins of the castle in the vermilion gloom cast by the loch light. Huge blocks of stone had been smashed down and strewn across the ground. A single tower remained, standing black against the rose-tinted sky. Its smooth surface tapered gradually, then flared out in an onion shape eighty metres above the ground.

  ‘No need to ask where Lord Colgath is kept, then,’ Sophie muttered.

  ‘A tower overlooking water,’ Taggie said. ‘Well seen, Jem.’

  ‘Where are all the jailers?’ Lantic asked.

  Taggie eyed the lone tower uneasily. It seemed to radiate dark wizardry into the cold air. ‘I don’t think he needs them,’ she said. ‘Those Rannalal were there to keep people out, not him in.’

  As they reached the end of the bridge, a couple of yellow lights became visible amid the colossal avalanche of rubble. A couple of shacks had been built from the smaller stones. The light they were seeing was creeping out of crude shutters. Beside them were pens of goats and pigs who snuffled softly.

  ‘Is anyone else around?’ Taggie asked Jemima.

  ‘No. I can sight three men and a troll in the shacks, but that’s it.’

  Taggie craned her neck back to look at the bulbous top of the tower. ‘What about up there?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jemima said. ‘It’s chock-full of wardveils and shadecasts.’

  ‘The tower has a lot of enchantments besides wardveils,’ Taggie said. ‘The Karraks have done something odd to the tower itself, I can feel it.’

  ‘They’d need to use some potent wizardries to hold one of their own,’ Lantic said. ‘The brother of the Grand Lord is going to be formidable.’

  Keeping a nervous watch on the shacks, they made their way across the broken stone and drifts of snow.

  THE THING IN THE TOWER

  Eventually the children and Felix came across a well-worn track that stretched between the shacks and the base of the tower. They followed it to the tower itself, which loomed ominously over them. Walking a complete circle round the base, the only opening they could find was a small metal cylinder set into the smooth stone at shoulder height, barely two feet high and one in diameter. There was a keyhole in the middle of it.

  Lantic peered at the inset cylinder. ‘Whatever this is, it can’t be the way in. Yet it’s the only gap in the stone. This is a sore puzzle.’ He waved his hands across the metal, chanting softly. ‘Hmm, that’s very odd. My lock-breaker enchantments don’t have any effect. It’s as if the magic stopped working.’

  ‘Let me try,’ Taggie said. The charmsward bands spun, axe symbol aligning with door and wind. They glowed a dark amber. ‘Zothron,’ she chanted, which was a much stronger opening spell than the one Lantic had used. She felt the magic flash out of her hand, only to be sucked away into nothingness by the stone.

  ‘Oh Heavens,’ she said with a shudder at the unsettling effect, and looked up at the tower with a newfound dismay and respect. ‘The Karraks have enchanted it to kill magic. That’s how they’re keeping Lord Colgath inside. He can’t escape because his wizardry doesn’t work in there.’

  ‘So how do we get in?’ Jemima asked.

  ‘Sophie,’ Taggie said, still looking at the bulging top of the tower. ‘Can you fly up there and see if there are any win
dows?’

  The skymaid took off and zoomed upward. Barely a minute later she was back down. ‘Five windows,’ she said breathlessly. ‘They’re narrow, like slits in the stone, but you could get in if they didn’t have iron grilles set across them. I didn’t see any light inside, but I did try calling his name. If Colgath is in there he’s not answering.’

  ‘Then I’ll ask him a little more firmly,’ Taggie said with determination. She formed the complicated Adrap spellform in her mind, visualizing the eagle she wished to become: a beautiful bird, sleek and powerful, with huge wings spread wide, just like Katrabeth achieved. She held her arms out. Clicked her fingers. Excited by the idea of racing Sophie through the air, which was . . .

  The spellform twisted, and magic flared out of her feet into the ice-covered rocks. ‘Oww.’

  ‘Taggie!’ Jemima groaned in exasperation.

  ‘I can do this,’ Taggie snapped back. Once again the Adrap spellform. Then the visualization. She thought she’d got both of them right as she clicked her fingers, but the two together were too much. Magic sizzled away. She stamped her foot as much in frustration as pain.

  Felix flicked the tip of his tail from side to side. ‘Lantic, if Sophie takes the spiders up there can they weave a ladder down to the ground for us?’

  Taggie was about to protest, to tell them to stop, that she could shapeshift. Except the doubts in her heart made it hard to form the words. She wasn’t going to sniffle at her repeated failure, though. Definitely not.

  Lantic gave the tower a thoughtful look. ‘I can do better than that,’ he said, and retrieved the three spiders from his satchel. He chanted several instructions to them before giving them to Sophie. ‘Take them to the very top and place them on the stone,’ he told her.

  Sophie took off again.

  She was back down quickly. ‘I called for Colgath a few times again. Nothing.’

  ‘Do you suppose he’s dead?’ Lantic asked.

  ‘He wasn’t when I sighted him,’ Jemima insisted. ‘It wasn’t that long ago.’

  ‘How long will the spiders take?’ Taggie asked.

  ‘Should be down in a minute or so,’ Lantic told her.

  ‘Really?’

  He gave her a mischievous grin. She couldn’t help but smile back. This Lantic was so different to the one who’d greeted her off the royal barge back in Shatha’hal. Easy to be around . . .

  Sure enough, each of the spiders descended on a single strand of gossamer a couple of minutes later.

  ‘It’s going to take forever to weave a ladder,’ Jemima complained.

  ‘Who said anything about a ladder?’ Lantic asked.

  He made Jemima stand still and ordered a spider to scurry round and round her, weaving a simple harness of gossamer.

  ‘Oh!’ Taggie said. A spider wound an identical harness round her, and Lantic kept hold of Felix as the third spider spun out his harness.

  ‘Ready?’ Lantic asked.

  Suddenly the door on one of the shacks slammed open. They could hear the voices of two men in the night air.

  ‘Go,’ Taggie urged.

  ‘Morool,’ Lantic whispered.

  The three spiders began to crawl back up the gossamer they’d spun down from the top of the tower, lifting Taggie, Lantic and Jemima up with them. Taggie felt a disquieting tingle down her legs again as she dangled on the end of gossamer thinner than a strand of cotton, sliding relentlessly up into the sky with nothing beneath her feet. She turned as she rose higher and higher, spinning ever so slowly, so that one minute she was staring at the featureless stone wall of the tower, then the next the loch slid round into view.

  When she glanced down she saw the men from the shacks holding lanterns as they walked along the path to the tower. Sophie fluttered past, quieter than a moth and holding her crossbow ready. All the men had to do was glance upward and the game would be up. The light of Red Loch might be faint, but it made them very visible.

  The men walked to the bottom of the tower. Their harsh voices laughed about something. By then, Taggie was a good thirty metres directly above them. She saw one slide a key into the metal cylinder. The cylinder must have opened, because the other one put his hand inside. He seemed to be pulling at something. There was an odd grinding sound, as if stone wheels were rolling around inside the tower. Then the cylinder was shut and locked, and they were walking away again.

  Taggie hadn’t even realized she was holding in her breath until she exhaled in relief. The tower wall slipped round in front of her once more. Taggie looked up. The bulging room at the top of the tower was a lot closer now.

  Five minutes after leaving the ground, Taggie and the others were clinging on to the metal grid that covered one of the window slits. Sophie hovered in the air a few metres away. Up here, there was a lot more wind blowing off the loch. It made Taggie’s grip seem very precarious.

  ‘Lord Colgath,’ Taggie called nervously. ‘I am the Queen of Dreams from the First Realm. Please, I must talk with you.’

  Peering in past the iron grid, there was only darkness to be seen. Nothing moved. There was no sound. ‘Please!’ Taggie growled as loud as she dared. ‘Colgath. I can get you out.’

  ‘Why won’t he answer?’ Jemima whined.

  Holding on to the harness, Taggie put her feet flat against the vertical wall of the tower room, and straightened her legs. She stood at right angles to the wall, which redoubled the tingling in her legs.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jemima squeaked.

  ‘Breaking in.’ Taggie prayed the enchantments within the tower’s stone didn’t also work in the iron grille. The bands on her charmsward slipped round. She pointed her finger, and summoned her full magical strength. ‘Droiak!’

  The purple-white magical light flashed out of her finger, smashing into the grille. The glare immediately flared wide, as the tower’s enchantments sucked the magic away. But the grid had buckled and twisted under the impact of the destruction spell.

  ‘Droiak!... Droiak!... Droiak!’

  Finally the tough iron gave way, leaving a hole just big enough for Taggie to wiggle through.

  ‘I think the men down below might have heard that,’ Sophie said drily. ‘The door on one of their shacks just opened.’

  Taggie growled in annoyance and carefully pulled herself through the wrecked grille. The window was a sloping hole cut through the tower’s thick stone walls. Taggie slithered helplessly down, then felt herself falling, and flung her hands out in front.

  It was only a few feet, but the impact made her squawk as pain flashed up through her wrists. She crumpled inelegantly on to the floor.

  ‘Taggie, are you OK?’ Lantic called.

  ‘Yes, fine.’ She could see the pale red rectangle of the window slit above her, and slowly stood up. ‘Lord Colgath?’

  It was a single room; in the distance she could just make out four other rectangles of scarlet luminescence that were the other windows. Somewhere close by she could hear running water – which was odd. She instinctively tried to search through the charmsward’s memories for an illumination spell. There were no charmsward memories. The wizardry in the tower’s stone really did kill any magic inside.

  Taggie did what she’d done a hundred times in the Outer Realm when she got caught outside at night, and pulled her mobile phone from her pocket and switched it on. As there was no magic inside the tower that could interfere with the device, the little screen lit up right away, casting a reasonable blue-green light across the circular room. She peered round. The room itself was normal. Definitely a jail cell for someone important. There were several bookcases full of big leather-bound tomes; a stone basin with water running into it from a spout just above; what she assumed was a toilet – a low stone cylinder with a hole in the top. And also the remains of a wooden bed and desk which someone had carefully dismantled.

  The furnishings didn’t interest her at all. Instead she stared in bewilderment at the mechanism that had been built across the floor. It was like a big chunk of
clockwork, but made out of wood and leather, with cogwheels, and rollers, and rope pulleys, and a slim conveyor belt running through the middle.

  ‘What in in the sweet Heavens . . . ?’ Taggie gawped.

  ‘Taggie?’ Lantic hissed. ‘The men are coming, and the troll as well. They’ll see us in a minute. What’s happening? Is he there or not?’

  ‘No, he’s not here. You’d better come in.’

  Lantic was first. Taggie helped catch him before he tumbled on to the ground. Jemima was next, looking round curiously. Then Sophie wiggled in. Felix appeared in the grille, and began to slide down the stone. He started to grow. Fast.

  Taggie was so surprised, she took a half-step back, letting out a yelp.

  Felix landed on the floor, and slowly clambered to his feet in the hazy light of the mobile’s screen. Taggie, Sophie, Jemima and Lantic simply stood there, staring at him.

  Felix gazed round them in concern. ‘What?’

  ‘Felix,’ Jemima said in wonder. ‘Felix . . . it’s you.’

  Felix brought his hands up, gazing at them. He wasn’t a squirrel any more, but a boy of about fifteen years, with long white hair that reached halfway down his back. ‘Oh my,’ he gulped.

  ‘There’s no magic in here,’ Taggie said quietly. ‘The curse can’t work when you’re inside the tower.’

  Jemima walked over to him as if in a trance. She reached up and touched his face, then broke into a glorious smile. ‘It is you. You were at the quayside. You saved me from the gols.’

  Felix gave a lopsided grin, and shrugged.

  ‘And you didn’t tell me who you were!’Jemima shouted crossly.

  ‘I was just doing my job watching out for you,’ Felix said sheepishly. ‘You’re always getting into trouble.’

  ‘Am not! And, anyway, how come you weren’t a squirrel that day?’

  ‘For each day outside my birthday and while snow falls on oak,’ Felix quoted softly. ‘That is the curse placed upon my family.’