Aedan brought his eye as close as he could without spoiling the light. It was a large ring. He put his fingers through it and pulled, gradually applying more pressure until a long brass cylinder slid out with a quiet scrape.
He was turning it in his hands, wondering if it held some secret, when the ground shuddered. There was a deep grinding and a soft cracking of mortar. Aedan paled and tried to shove the brass cylinder back, but it wouldn’t go. And then he had to scramble away as the wall in front of him began to sweep outwards along the ground with the ponderousness of great mass. It was a barn-sized swivelling door, and he had released the draw-weight.
Everyone in the room looked up and dropped what they were doing as the wall pivoted. Once the door was fully open, the grinding and the movement stopped, leaving the dust to settle. All stared into the blackness beyond.
“Your doing, Aedan?” Fergal asked.
“Sorry. I didn’t know anything like this would happen.” He held up the brass cylinder with a sheepish look.
Fergal did not seem in the least upset. He grabbed a lamp and headed for the doorway, the others following.
This room was as dark as the first was bright, but the deep echoes told them that it was a lot bigger. Fergal walked down an aisle between large shelves and what appeared to be statues. His lamp revealed the strangest shapes. By the time the rest had collected lamps and followed, he was only a small glowing orb surrounded by colossal objects that loomed between the heavy pillars.
“Oh, it’s a museum,” said Tyne as she walked with Aedan into the dark cavern. The air was cold and heavy, carrying the smell of aged bones and hides. Stuffed animals lined the shelves and stood on the ground, coated in films of dust and sheets of cobwebs. A few were so decayed that patches of skin had been completely eaten away and shed hair lay beneath them in dusty heaps. There was something odd about them though. Aedan held his lamp in front of a creature he’d taken for a kind of bushpig. Apart from its size it did not resemble a pig at all. Every feature was a perfect copy of a shrew.
Then he found a pair of tatty moths. Though there was almost nothing left of their wings, it was clear that they had been as big as crows.
“I don’t think it’s a museum,” he whispered to Tyne, the strangeness of the place seeming to demand silence. “They can’t be stuffed animals – they’re too big. Must be models.”
“Really detailed models,” Tyne whispered back as she brushed over the feathers of a dove wing as long as her arm.
They began to recognise more creatures enlarged to startling, even grotesque proportions – ants, spiders, beetles, centipedes, bees, mice and hedgehogs. The bees were larger than a man’s head and the hedgehogs taller than sheep. Some were a little more than two or three times normal size; others were much more. Aedan would have expected a greater degree of consistency in the models. But as he studied the detail on the hedgehog and saw the decomposition of skin, and the bone and sinew showing through, an uncomfortable thought took hold.
Though he was not too sure about the beetles, it began to look as if the rest of the animals had been actual living creatures. He found two pygmy antelope the size of horses, and a pair of geese that might have snapped the ridge-beam of a roof on alighting, but it appeared that there was nothing bigger. Aedan felt a slight disappointment. These colossal bugs and rodents were all well and good for the girls and academics, but he wanted to see something that had the interest factor of death and terror. Like a giant wolf.
Fergal was examining one of the ants.
“Look at this,” Merter called from several aisles away.
It took some walking and weaving between shelves and displays to find him. He was shining his lamp on an impossibly large snake skin that reached away into the darkness.
“I don’t even want to imagine the size of the snake that wore this,” said Tyne. “It must have been two feet thick. Or more.”
Fergal looked puzzled. “All these animals are in pairs,” he said, “and their full bodies are here. Where are the dead snakes?”
“Perhaps this was all they could retrieve,” said Osric.
“Perhaps,” said Fergal, “but it’s unlike the Gellerac. They dearly loved symmetry.”
“There’s a draft,” said Merter. “There must be another opening on the far side.” He moved off to investigate.
Aedan took another direction. He was set on finding something more impressive. He walked as fast as he could, ignoring the bones that filled the ten-foot shelves around him. More boring little bones. What he needed …
As he turned the corner, a pair of immense eyes glared down at him. He fell to a crouch and almost dropped his lamp, barely managing to stifle a yell of fright.
The animal’s head was something that not even Osric’s arms could have encircled. It had a body the size of a prize bull’s and half that again. Lips were pulled back in a snarl, revealing canines longer than butchers’ knives. It waited, immobile.
Aedan rose slowly from his crouch. Part of him remained convinced that this beast was as alive as he was. He stalked around to the side and relaxed a little now that he was no longer under those jaws. This animal was well preserved. It had the features and lines of a fox, but the monster that stood in front of him could not have been called by that name. A more careful inspection showed him that the proportions were different – the chest deeper, shoulders wider, jaws heavier and eyes narrower. It was an enormously powerful-looking creature.
It was not just power though. Something else lurked in that expression, even though the features were lifeless and the eyes had been replaced with translucent stones. It wasn’t the first time he had seen it in this museum. Could it be … intelligence?
His light reflected off something behind the animal and its mate. He walked around and held up the lamp. It revealed a fully assembled skeleton of ancient bones still encrusted with clinging rock. He knew nothing against which he could compare the creature, except perhaps a house. Whatever it had been, it had been big. Those jaws could have accommodated both foxes. His imagination took hold and he found his thoughts drifting, painting scenes from an age when such beasts walked the land. An expression of growing wonder crossed his face as he stared up at the skeleton before him and looked back into a forgotten past.
A muffled shriek interrupted him. He spun around to see Tyne with a hand to her mouth, staring up at the fox, and Osric grinning beside her.
Aedan turned back to the skeleton and decided to get closer. He had to step around a long line of crates loaded with empty sacks. The sacks had crumbled over the centuries and produced a shower of fine dust beneath and around them. That and the gloom almost caused Aedan to miss and trip over the object at his feet, but the light caught it just in time.
“Here’s something the girls will like,” he laughed. “Ever seen a giant frog?”
Tyne and Osric approached.
“It’s a bit dark and grimy down there,” said Tyne. “Pick it up and put it on one of these crates so we can brush it off and get a decent look.”
Aedan had not expected such an enthusiastic response. He bent to the job with a will. Big frogs were irresistible, always had been, and this one looked like it would have ignored flies and lived on ducks. He worked his fingers under the body and lifted, tensing and shaking with the strain. The smooth-skinned body escaped his grip and dropped the half inch he had been able to raise it. Aedan fell over and sat hard on the dusty floor. “It must be made of lead,” he said. “It’s as heavy –”
The frog’s eyes opened, and Aedan realised in one horrible instant that this was no frog. Each lemon-sized eye covered a large section of what he had assumed to be a body. But it was not a body, it was only a head. And he suddenly guessed the meaning of the shed snakeskin.
He felt a strong hand grasp his shirt, pull him to his feet and hurry him away.
“Everybody out, now,” Osric barked. “Back to the stairs. Don’t run.”
Nobody disobeyed when the general gave a flat order. Aedan glim
psed lights moving from various points in the chamber. Ahead of him, Fergal dropped the beetle he had been inspecting and hurried towards the door. On the way through the archive room, however, he did manage to pocket a hasty handful of tablets before being ushered up the stairs.
“What is it?” he asked.
The word “snake” was enough to give wings to his flight. Aedan chanced a backward look before leaving the room but saw nothing. He knew, though, that they might need all the distance they could put between themselves and that serpent. Osric led the way, lamp in one hand, sword in the other. Aedan waited until second-last and Merter brought up the rear, climbing the stairs with a sword pointing behind him.
Contrary to traditional design, these stairs rose anti-clockwise, giving the right-handed swordsman the advantage on the way up, presumably because the archive had been considered the more difficult chamber to infiltrate, and attack from above more likely.
And so it turned out.
Aedan had climbed about half way when there was shouting, the clash of metal, and screams of pain. A sword, still attached to a hand, came sliding down the stairs. Aedan recognised the weapon; it was the standard army issue – a three foot double-edged blade and a single-handed grip with a short, straight guard. Clearly too short. After a brief halt they resumed the upward rush.
The clash of steel rose again as Aedan burst from the stairs into the council room where he saw Osric pushing back three of the soldiers who had deserted during the previous night. They kept their distance before Osric’s huge sword. Aedan noticed that one of them held the jewelled crown. A fourth soldier stood behind them cursing and clutching his shortened arm that now ended in a bloody stump.
“Surprised to see us?” said the young, confident soldier who held the crown. “Place didn’t look so bad in daylight. And when we saw how you got in, we decided to collect our share of the loot. You would be fools to get in our way.”
Osric stepped aside and pointed. “Down the stairs,” he said. “You are welcome to all that you find down there.”
The soldiers eyed him.
“So you think me a fool, old man?” said the wild-eyed youngster. “I can smell the trap in your breath. One of you is coming with us so we don’t get locked down there.”
“We are leaving now!” said Osric, moving away from the stairway entrance and leading the group around the side of the large central table, but the soldiers ran around the other side and placed themselves in the doorway, blocking the escape.
“We saw the wolf get hold of you, General,” the young soldier said. “We know you won’t last in a fight. The boy is a coward who wets himself like a beaten dog and the girl’s a featherweight. Looks like the odds are in our favour. Your ranger isn’t even interested. All we require is an escort. Then we go our own way.”
Merter was indeed distracted. He was looking out the window, holding the edges and creeping along as if following some movement and staying just out of sight.
“We have made too much noise,” he said. He spoke quietly but the chill in his voice hushed everyone.
That was when Aedan heard a sound he remembered well, a deep scraping, like the pouring of sand.
“What is it?” Osric asked, keeping his eyes on the soldiers.
“Only saw a shadow,” Merter replied, his voice rasping with strange emotion, “but it was big. Close the door.”
It was not the ranger captain’s rank that caused the soldiers to obey; it was the paleness of his face. They swung the big iron doors of the main entrance closed, one of them scraping along the tiled floor with a shrill whine, and dropped an iron cross-beam into the brackets. All the surfaces were rusted, but the metal was thick enough to still possess formidable strength.
Osric and Merter ran back to the stairwell they had just climbed. They raised the door they had smashed down earlier, leaning it back into its frame. It would not stop anything, but it would give warning if moved.
“Spread out along the wall,” Osric said, striding to a position in the middle of the wall between the doors. “Multiple angles.”
Aedan pulled two solid bronze spears from their mountings and, despite what Osric had said about spreading out, crouched beside Liru.
The young soldier did not like how he was losing control of the situation. “Are you putting on a little show for us?” he asked. “Trying to get us distracted?”
Thump.
He turned around and looked at the braced double door of the main entrance.
Thump.
“Rork, is that you?” he called.
No reply.
He leaned against the door with a mocking smile. “This thing is solid iron. You can knock all you want but unless you tell me –”
Crash!
The young soldier flew across the room and collided with the table, breaking two of the decayed legs and collapsing in a heap of dust and splinters. The crown he had been holding slipped from his grasp, tumbled along the ground and disappeared through a gap in the smaller doorframe. They could hear it bouncing down the stairwell to the archive room.
The soldier was too dizzy to notice the crown’s disappearance. He raised himself on his elbows and looked back. The iron door was dented in.
Aedan could not understand how any creature could have done this, even to corroded iron.
There was another crash. The door dented further and a hinge burst from the wall. The soldiers began to move away. Their young leader scrambled from the pile of timber and staggered to his feet.
The next impact thrust one of the doors across the room and swung the other inward to collide against the wall with a shattering of rock and plaster.
The dust concealed whatever it was that now filled the opening. Before the air cleared, there was a scream and an explosive hiss. A jet of dark, sticky vapour swelled into a black cloud, foul as carrion, flooding the room with night.
In the sudden darkness, only dim, misty shapes told the whereabouts of people. Something impossibly large filled the doorway, and it began to move forward. At first Aedan thought the snake had escaped through the hole at the back of the museum in order to meet them head on, but size ruled this out. The creature before them was something on a different scale altogether.
A yellow eye as big as a shield appeared through a narrow break in the fog. The ink-black pupil flicked around the room, showing a precision that took in every occupant. That enormous eye, full of deep cunning, reduced a warrior to a mouse, nothing more.
An outline revealed the young soldier standing in the middle of the room. He produced a soft, shaking moan and turned to run. In near silence, the colossal shadowy form moved with horrifying speed. There was a crunch of jaws snapping shut and a swirling of clouds as the shape glided back to the doorway. Through the rift, they saw an arm projecting from a lipless jawline, twitching slightly as the creature sank into the mist again, leaving no one any the wiser as to what it was. Aedan, beneath his horror, had a vague impression that only part of its body was in the room. Yet what was in the room was surely bigger than any animal he had ever seen.
One of the other troopers on the far side of the room crawled up against the wall and the shadows near him thickened.
It was then that Culver saw his chance. Ignoring Osric’s instruction to remain still, he jumped up into the window behind him. The wall was deep and the window presented a temporary refuge.
Had the shutter frame held together, he might have made it, but the wood cracked, his weight pulled him away, and he swung back into the room. Before he could recover, something in the mist had changed. A silent darkness rushed towards him and his final scream was cut short with a sickening crunch.
Culver was no more.
Liru hid her face. She should not have done so. The movement betrayed her presence, and the shadows darkened in front of her.
Aedan, crouching alongside, slowly raised the two spears between them, grounding the shafts in the corner between floor and wall. The weapons rattled in his hands, but he kept them pointi
ng to where the mist looked most solid.
From hidden nostrils, the beast’s breath drew and pushed over them, cold and vile as poison.
Air blowing in from the windows thinned the black fog slightly, revealing those crouched on the near side of the room, and a great glowing eye hanging in the air, the pupil studying Aedan and Liru.
Barely moving from his crouched position against the wall, Osric threw a spear. But the beast turned its head at the motion, and the spear that should have plunged into its eye must have struck hard skin. They all heard it clatter to the ground.
The eye vanished, but like a trap released, the black shadows bolted towards Osric, a movement that might have crushed every bone and smeared him against the opposite wall, but he ducked just enough to escape the full weight. Still, it knocked him to the ground, and he skidded over the floor to the far wall where he lay in a heap of broken wood. Tyne cried out and moved impulsively to help him. Again, it drew the beast.
She froze, but it was too late. This time Aedan saw a corner of the jaws – they held teeth the size of tusks. The lower jaw dropped, shivering, as if muscles were bunching.
“No,” he whispered, “Not Tyne. Please not Tyne.”
There was a roar of fury and Aedan glanced up just in time to see Osric on his feet again, tearing a huge double-bladed axe from the wall.
Osric was not one to repeat a mistake. This time he waited for the head to turn. Then he hurled the axe with enough force to smash through a wall, and this time it must have struck the large eye square on. The reaction was volcanic.
There was another hissing scream that caused everyone to slam their hands against their ears and cringe. The air was filled anew with black mist as the entire room was shaken by a series of wild collisions. It was as if a giant had taken hold of a tree trunk, thrust it into the room and begun smashing blindly. Chips of wood and stone flew about, tinkling like hail.
Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) Page 60
