The Realms Thereunder aet-1

by Stephen Lawhead

  Freya looked over at Nemain, who was still being guarded by Swi?gar. Nemain gazed steadily at Daniel and Freya. When he saw Freya looking at him, he gave a casual smile. She turned back to the door.

  “We’re missing something,” she said. “What about these little bolts, these tumblers? They fall from one wheel to the other, right?

  What if we’re supposed to get them all to the bottom? They can’t fall upwards, can they?”

  “Maybe. But look.” Daniel stuck his finger into one of the grooves and pushed upwards. “See, they have these little handles that let you move them back. If you turn them, it locks them into place just a little, then you can move the wheels back to how they were. If you do it right, you can move them between the wheels and probably right to the other side of the door.”

  “Oh, great. Perfect. When did you find that out?”

  “Just now.”

  Freya sighed and sank into a crouch. “No,” she said quietly.

  “Come on, I’ll bet we’re on the right track. Maybe we have to get all the bolts up to the top.”

  “Or all the way to one side, or both sides, or all the edges, or only just the middle!” Freya snapped.

  “We just have to keep trying. I refuse to let this puzzle beat me. We’ll get the solution, even if I have to guess a million times.”

  “Yeah, okay. Whatever. I’m going to look around. Clear my head. Hunt for clues or something.” She left Daniel standing at the door and turned around, rubbing her eyes.

  “What about you?” Freya turned suddenly to one of the silent, motionless women. “Do you know anything about that door?” The figure did not look at her but drew away slightly.

  “No, I thought not.” Freya walked around the room, searching up and down for any markings or diagrams-anything that might give a hint on how to work the door, but she found nothing. This search took her near Nemain, who watched her so creepily she made a show of ignoring him.

  Then she started to examine the stone dais that the Faerie had been sitting on when they first entered the room. She walked around the edges, then climbed up onto the dais itself. It was a plain, smooth surface with no designs or markings. She felt frustration rising in her chest again. She heard Daniel give instructions to Ecgbryt to turn certain wheels. She thought about the carvings that they had passed to get here. Perhaps one of those had some sort of directions or code for the door. Whoever designed a door lock so complex may well have wanted to keep the solution nearby. Or maybe the room itself was some sort of clue. She gazed around again, but she couldn’t see how that could be. She looked up at the rays of sunlight that were being bounced into the room from some distant hole at the surface. Perhaps the door was there only to distract them and they had to climb now. Did the light seem to be getting dimmer? Why wasn’t the air fresh?

  What if it wasn’t a riddle at all?

  Weary and frustrated, she rubbed her eyes again and turned around. Her eyes fell on the wooden rack that held the large book the Faerie had been reading. The cover was plain leather with brass corner strengtheners attached to it. She stepped closer and leaned over the book.

  “If you’re going to touch that,” Nemain said, “please clean your greasy hands.”

  Freya rubbed her fingers on the bottom of her skirt to remove the oil smudges from the door gears. Then she very carefully opened the enormous book to the first page. It was the size of a small poster and completely blank except for a short line of cramped writing in the centre. If it was English, she couldn’t make out the letters; it looked like a lot of loops and long lines.

  Freya started leafing through some of the pages. The first thing she noticed were the colours-bright, lively colours that tore across the yellowing pages like thunderbolts. There was also a mass of detail on each page-details of made-up figures, people, buildings, and landscapes. Each page was filled with pictures and scenes, usually showing people in some action. Words were written in the margins and in the pictures as well. Many of the pages seemed to be telling a story. She paused at two pages that each had six bordered images on them depicting a green-robed figure sitting in a forest glen talking to different groups of people as they apparently passed by. There was a picture of a king and a queen, a group of old men in brown robes, a beggar, the king by himself, two young maids, the queen and another young man, and others, including a demon with sheep’s horns . . .

  She turned more pages. One of them showed a stocky character in red wrestling with a man twice his size. One page had nine identical faces on it, all of them surrounded with the odd writing.

  One page had no writing on it at all-only a picture of two people performing an intricate dance, and the steps they took made it seem as if they were dancing across the page.

  She turned the page again and heard a small “wow” from behind her. Daniel was standing there, looking at the book from over her shoulder, his eyes fixed on the two pages she had opened that showed a large, emerald, scaled serpent. It was lying on the ground, resting, its tail curled around its clawed feet. Freya felt her gaze travel along that tail to where it joined the ridged back atop large haunches where enormous emerald scales shimmered with tiny detail. Her eye continued along the back, over the crease in the book, and down the long, tapered neck of the beast to its long, horse-like face and vicious mouth. The beast was examining something that turned out to be a small person holding a torch in one hand and a sword in the other.

  The detail was astonishing; each scale was rendered in precise detail. The rocks that the creature gripped were starting to crumble in its mighty talons. The wings looked veiny and tough. The night sky was above and the shadows cast by the moon and torch described massively powerful muscles beneath the thick scales.

  Daniel took a step back and turned his face up to Nemain. “What is it?” he asked.

  “It is a chronicle of our people-our history, our heroes, our knowledge, our genius . . .”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  Nemain gave a stiff-necked bow.

  Freya turned back to the book and to Daniel, who was staring at the page showing the beast, his jaw slack and his face pale.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “How does it end?” Daniel asked.

  Nemain didn’t respond. Freya turned some more pages, eventually coming to the end and the final spread. On the left-hand page-the next to last page-there were four pictures of a large group of people walking down a long slope, like a mountainside. As they descended, flames appeared. Each picture underneath showed the flames growing taller. There was no writing. The last page was a single image of a massive sheet of fire. Freya looked up at Nemain, whose smile now looked sad to her.

  “How long have you been down here?” Daniel asked.

  Freya, leafing back through more of the pages, felt her heart ache. It seemed so forlorn. She wished she knew the language the text was written in so that she could read it. She wanted to sit down with it and devour it-to get lost in its glorious pages for days, swim around in it. To find a work of such unimaginable beauty in a place like this, in the possession of a person like that . . .

  “How should I be able to tell? Four years? Forty? Four hundred? Time isn’t important when you’re a prisoner.”

  Freya held her breath. She tingled with the sudden feeling that she was on the brink of understanding something important and that to move or even breathe might take it from her. She turned her gaze from the book to Nemain and then to the wretched figures standing against the wall.

  “And you haven’t had anything to read except this book?”

  Daniel asked Nemain.

  “Why would I want anything else?”

  “I-” she started, but choked. “I think I have it.” She looked at the door and smiled. “I think I figured it out!”

  3

  “Think about it,” Freya said to Daniel and the knights. “The door-Nemain-why would you need them?”

  “Need them?” asked Daniel. “What do you mean?”

  “I mea
n-” Freya forced herself to slow down. “I mean, why do you have them both? If you have the amazingly complex door that’s almost impossible to open, why do you also need Nemain?

  If you have a clever Faerie with razor-sharp nails that can move as fast as a cheetah, why do you need an enormous iron door?”

  “So?”

  “I don’t think it is a door at all. I think that it’s a fake. Everything here is for show. Nemain isn’t a prisoner-prisoners don’t keep prisoners. And anyway, he can leave through the ceiling, the tunnels we came through, or, even more conveniently . . .”

  Nemain’s expression did not change; he just stared calmly at Swi?gar’s spear point in front of him, raking long, bony nails against the ground. The large knight tightened his grip on the weapon.

  Freya moved to the door. “Ecgbryt, hold the door right here,” she said, tapping one of the larger wheels, “and give it a good pull- don’t turn it, just give it a firm pull.”

  Swi?gar grabbed the wheel and pulled against it with all of his weight. It was a long moment before anything happened, and then, slowly and soundlessly, the whole door started to move.

  “Yes!” Freya punched the air. “Ha!”

  Daniel’s jaw dropped and his eyes bulged as he saw the complex mechanism move away from the large bolts, which were revealed to be just metal stumps set into the stone. “It was never even locked.”

  “It didn’t need to be, as long as everyone assumed it was. All these poor people-we thought they were prisoners, but they were just part of the illusion.”

  The next thing that anyone knew, Nemain was flying through the air towards Daniel, launching himself like a cat. Daniel registered the movement out of the corner of his eye and by the time he started to turn his head, Nemain was already flying towards him, his clawlike hands slicing the air in front of him.

  Everything seemed to slow for Daniel. He tried to duck out of the way but could not move fast enough. He felt the burning pain of four razor-sharp fingertips rake across his upper arm. He screamed and fell.

  He landed on the wooden bookrack, knocking it over and sending the enormous painted book crashing to the floor next to Nemain.

  The Faerie shrieked in horror and rushed over to the book.

  “You! You creased it!” Nemain picked it up, smoothed one of the bent pages, and shut it just as Swi?gar’s massive hand clutched him around the neck and shoulders. With a fierce and brutal violence, he slammed Nemain’s chest into the ground several times, the book bouncing in his hands. He was stopped by Freya’s shouting.

  “No! Swi?gar, stop! Please, stop!”

  Swi?gar relaxed his hold on the Faerie, who gave a whimpering moan and crawled back to the book. He drew it close to himself and curled up into a ball, whimpering slightly.

  Daniel writhed in agony on the floor. He would have been crying out with pain, but he couldn’t catch his breath. His arm hurt terribly, and he was gripping it as hard as he could, not wanting to let go. He felt Ecgbryt’s hands pull his own away and tug at the cloth of his shirt, examining the wound.

  Freya stood above them as Ecgbryt untied the strings on Daniel’s shirt and opened it slightly. He very carefully pulled Daniel’s arm out of its sleeve. There was starting to be a lot of blood. Ecgbryt took the water pouch from his belt and washed the arm. Daniel found his breath finally and let out a howl of pain.

  Ecgbryt tried to sooth him with low words while giving his arm a few very careful prods.

  “How is he?” Swi?gar asked.

  “Not so bad for all of that. Do you hear, boy? You fought with one of the Tuatha De and will live to tell the tale. Not many can say as much.” He asked Freya to fetch a small tin from his pack that contained a poultice-a dry, mossy substance with healing properties. He laid that to one side and then pulled a small knife from his belt; he cut a long strip off the bottom of one of the oilcloth blankets, then he placed the mossy material over the gashes on Daniel’s arm and bandaged it up. “You know, ?lfred had his share of scars, and more besides. Did I ever tell you-?”

  Ecgbryt’s voice dulled to a pleasant murmur as Freya turned her attention to Nemain.

  “Don’t get too close to him,” Swi?gar said. His spear was in his hand, angled downwards once again at the creature. Freya stood just next to the knight and looked down at the Faerie who was sobbing quietly. She frowned at his pathetic shape, chewing her lower lip.

  “I don’t think that you’re a bad person,” Freya said to Nemain. “You love the book because it’s beautiful, and it’s good to love beautiful things.”

  She crouched down and spoke in a lower voice. “But Daniel is worth more to us than the most expensive book in the world, and you damaged him. I think you know where we’re going and what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make sure that many more people are going to be safe from harm-we’re going to try to stop someone from destroying a lot more than just one beautiful book-we’re trying to save people. I don’t know why you would want to stop us from doing that.”

  Nemain’s sobs stilled to a broken, jagged breathing, allowing them to hear Daniel’s gasps as Ecgbryt helped him sit up. Freya looked into the face of the Faerie for a little while longer and then stood. She walked over to the wall where the silent women were huddled. “You can leave now. The door’s open. Follow us, if you like.”

  There was no response so she repeated herself with large gestures, and still there was no reaction to this news.

  “Can they understand me?” Freya asked, turning to Swi?gar.

  “Yes, but they will not listen. Come, let us depart. Their tale is not ended, and we can help them best by doing what we were sent to do.”

  Freya joined the others at the door. Ecgbryt packed up his things, stowed his weapons, and then lifted Daniel to his feet.

  Swi?gar backed away from the now shuddering Nemain.

  As they stood in the doorway, about to pass into the large, dry tunnel behind it, they heard a hacking cough and the sound of a weak voice trying to be strong.

  “Everything will be destroyed in time. Nothing lasts forever.

  The only freedom is death-and the only escape is to hell!”

  4

  Freya’s head was still spinning with the excitement of discovering the door’s secret and Nemain’s final attack, so she didn’t notice the peculiar walls of the new tunnel until they had been walking for several minutes.

  “Bricks!” she exclaimed. “It’s a red-brick tunnel. Finally -civilisation!”

  “Yeah,” groaned Daniel. “And it smells terrible!”

  He was right. In fact, the farther on they went, the worse the smell became. It was a decaying, sewage-like smell that stuck at the back of the throat, plugging the nose and burning the eyes.

  And then something odd happened-the tunnel stopped. There was no wall in front of them, just a gap in the floor and beyond it a black emptiness that looked so thick you could almost reach out and touch it. They walked to the edge and held their lanterns out into the inky air and tried to make out any detail possible, but it was no good. The light was completely eaten up by the void.

  “Listen,” said Daniel, “do you hear that?” They all stilled their breathing and strained their ears. There was a distant shh-shh sound, like water falling a very short distance. It seemed to come from somewhere in the emptiness below.

  “Look!” exclaimed Freya, as she glanced downwards. “Steps!

  Iron steps! It’s a ladder!”

  Below them were long strips of metal with griddle designs that had been fixed into the side to the sheer cliff face. The step had been joined by two sturdy handrails that ran alongside them. Before anyone could do or say anything, Freya had grabbed the lantern that Ecgbryt was carrying and had started down them.

  “Does it go far?” Ecgbryt asked.

  “It’s hard to tell. I can’t see the bottom,” came the reply from the darkness. “I’ll keep going until I run out of rungs. Oop-okay, that’s it. I’m at the bottom. It’s a drain or a sewer or something!�
� she shouted. “It’s made of good old red bricks and mortar!” She held the torch above her head and found that she was standing on a ridge, below which ran a dark, murky water through a round channel. Torchlight glinted off of a part of the opposite wall, showing glazed tiles. “We’re almost home,” she said to herself. “We must be.”

  The man-made bank turned slightly, following the inside curve of the sewer. She followed it around a few steps to see if she could find anything else.

  “Don’t stray too far, lass,” she heard Swi?gar call from above her.

  Daniel’s feet slapped down behind her and he picked up a torch and went towards her. “Freya?”

  She turned to face him. “We made it, Daniel,” she said in a low voice. “Look at these bricks! We made it back to the real world.”

  Daniel looked at Freya looking at the walls around her, her face eager. “Maybe one of these tunnels leads out-they’d have to, right? No one builds this without a way out-that’s impossible.”

  “Freya,” said Daniel, sounding more appalled than she thought he should. “We can’t leave now. They need us. We’re the mortals, remember? They can’t destroy it without us. They-think of everyone in Ni?ergeard surrounded by the yfelgopes and think what will happen if we fail!”

  “I know that!” Freya declared defensively. “I didn’t say that I wanted to abandon them-I only meant that maybe we don’t have to backtrack all the way back to Ni?ergeard to get home.”

  “Fine. But you have to, you know, finish something before it’s over.”

  “I know that, Daniel.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lifiendes,” Swi?gar said behind them. “Come now, don’t wander off.”

  They regrouped. “Well,” said Daniel, “where to now?”

  The platform that created the ridge extended in two directions. There were no markings anywhere; neither way seemed any more promising than the other.

  “On the one hand,” Daniel began, “the river, or sewer or whatever, looks to be going that way. It leads somewhere, obviously.