The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2)

by James Fahy

  DEAD TONGUES

  It was June the sixteenth, and a blazingly sunny day. High on its hill above the village of Barrowood, the sprawling stone and timber mass of Erlking Hall baked in the heat. Open windows of shimmering glass flashed in the sunlight and the ivy hung breathlessly still. The few wispy clouds in the vast blue bowl of the sky rolled over the sun and away again.

  In the large rose garden, enclosed on all sides by a tall stone wall and accessed by a warped wooden door, the heat flowed like molten lead, pooling in the bowl of this closed space. Here, in this breezeless oasis, the world’s last changeling, the Scion of the Arcania, the last of the House of Fellowes, lay on his stomach in the dry grass. A small, pale, and altogether unassuming figure amongst the vivid roses. He was sheltering under the thin and wavering shade of a small tree. Robin Fellows was reading a book, while the soil in the flowerbeds beside him baked as steadily as clay in a kiln.

  “If it gets any hotter…” a voice came wearily from above him, “ … I honestly believe I might actually combust.”

  Robin propped himself up on his elbows, looking upwards and shielding his eyes from the sun. He squinted into the dappled branches overhead. Another boy was lying in the tree above him, like a skinny leopard slung amongst the boughs, sprawled face down. He was ensconced among the branches with limbs dangling, looking for all the world like someone who had fallen from the sky and whose parachute hadn’t opened. This second boy was older and taller than Robin, though not by much, and his hair and skin were darker. Despite this, it seemed he was flagging in the heat much more than his pale friend below.

  “It’s not that hot, Henry,” Robin said, squinting up at him. “We’re in the shade anyway. You were complaining two weeks ago because it rained all spring without letting up.”

  Henry sighed breathlessly. “It is that hot,” he muttered miserably, looking down, his face squished against the tree bark. “It’s exactly that hot. In fact, Rob, it’s hotter. I reckon my brains are melting. There’s a funny smell up here as well.” He sniffed and made a face. “I think a squirrel died inside this tree and is slowly cooking.”

  Down below, Robin closed his book. It was a large tattered-looking hardback, bound in crimson leather and emblazoned with the gold-leaf title: ‘My Year amongst the Chalpies: an expedition into madness’. He had been using the sunny afternoon to catch up on his Netherworlde reading. Robin was never happier than with a book.

  “Do you want to go inside?” he asked the eternally dramatic boy above him. Henry was currently feigning death in the tree, but Robin had to admit, it was roasting hot outside today. The sun was burning through the back of his t-shirt. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was a cooling breeze or something, anything, just to break the oppressive heat – but no air moved. It hovered breathlessly still and stifling. A thick, smothering blanket.

  “Hestia will probably make us some cold drinks if we threaten to hang around and get under her feet for a while,” Robin grinned. “You know she’ll give us anything to get us out of her kitchen.”

  It was a favourite pastime of both boys to annoy Erlking’s perennially bad-tempered housekeeper.

  “Nah,” came the listless reply. “I haven’t got the energy to breathe, let alone move. I’ll just stay here ‘til they find my corpse. It will be shrivelled and cooked, like crispy bacon.” He waved a hand down at Robin on the grass. “You just stay down there until all of your adorable summertime freckles finally join up, and your face is completely orange.”

  Robin ignored Henry’s teasing. He shielded his eyes and looked out across the bright walled garden. The countless roses, red and white, some almost as large as his head, shimmered drowsily everywhere in the pollen-filled haze. They may as well have been in the Red Queen’s garden in Wonderland. Away on the far side of the garden, amongst the leafy bushes, Mr Drover, Henry’s father and Erlking’s all-round handyman, was busy weeding a border, and looking very red-faced and flustered. Mr Drover was a large heavy-set man, and not suited to heat-waves. It was like watching a polar bear trying to cope in a sauna. Robin could almost see steam rising from his balding head, which was rather burned-looking and shiny.

  “I think your dad’s going to explode soon,” he said conversationally to Henry. “Perhaps it is a bit warm to be outside after all.”

  “It would be better if we could go down to the lake,” Henry moaned, dropping a twig on Robin’s head deliberately. “Have a swim, cool off,” he sighed. “Bliss!”

  “You know I can’t swim,” Robin said, a little embarrassed by this fact. “I don’t think I’d relax much drowning and flailing about in the lake.” Ever since the weather had cleared up, Robin had endured countless subtle and not so subtle hints about the lake which lay not far beyond the trees behind Erlking.

  “Meh. What’s a little drowning? At least you’d be cooler,” Henry reasoned. “Or we could get you some arm bands. Maybe one of those inflatable rings with a duck on the front.” He cackled to himself evilly, before suddenly falling quiet. “Actually, dad made me wear one of those for swimming lessons once. Bloody nutter, never lived it down…”

  “I wish we could go to the local pool,” Robin sighed. “Maybe Aunt Irene would let us go.”

  “Nah mate, we’d have to be chaperoned and I don’t fancy seeing Hestia in a bikini. Anyway, it’s a death trap, the local pool. Full of wee and weird chemicals.”

  “There’s a pool somewhere inside Erlking Hall itself though, isn’t there? I’m sure I heard Hestia mention it one time. Never actually found it, though, which is a bit ridiculous when you consider I’ve been living here for nine months now.”

  Robin had lived at Erlking since the previous September and was still discovering new rooms every week. The place seemed to rearrange itself from time to time, like some kind of inter-dimensional rubix cube. Only the previous week, Robin had been ambling along the usual route from his bedroom to the large third floor bathroom, a walk he took at least once every day, when he had somehow taken a wrong turn and had found himself in a small passage with just two doors facing one another. They led into two identical rooms, parlours of sorts, he had supposed, although in truth he had no clear idea of what a parlour actually was.

  Both chambers, down to the very last detail, had been entirely monochromatic in design. One room had white walls, black curtains, a white chandelier sparkling down onto white polished floorboards, and it housed a black marble fireplace and a large black grand piano, atop which rested two snow white candlesticks. The room on the opposite side of the passage, when Robin inspected it, was laid out identically, in reverse. With black walls, white curtains, a jet black chandelier gleaming down on black painted floorboards, a pale fireplace and a large white piano atop which perched two black candlesticks. Even the piano keys, black and white, were reversed. Robin had padded around the silent rooms for a while, one by one, wandering what on earth their purpose might be. He had accidentally knocked one of the black candlesticks from its perch. As it had fallen to the floor, a similar clunk across the hall had made him jump. Crossing from the one parlour to the other, he had been surprised to see that a white candlestick was on the floor in there, rocking back and forth, although the room, he was certain, was completely empty.

  Robin had crossed the room and replaced it, and with an experimental hand reached out and played a couple of notes on the black piano. Instantly, strange, reedy echoes of piano music followed from across the hall. They sounded wrong somehow. If he was in this room, who … or what … was in the other? He’d run about halfway down the corridor when he’d heard both doors close themselves softly behind him in tandem. He hadn’t explored since then. It was just one of the many mysteries of Erlking.

  The house was like that. Things seemed to come and go. Sometimes it felt as though the building itself were asleep and you were living inside its dreams – fun and whimsical on occasion, but other times, quite grimly worrying. Not all dreams were pleasant, after all.

  Robin shook himself out of the memory. Get
ting back to the subject of un-findable rooms and swimming, he was sure he had heard Hestia mention something about an indoor pool somewhere.

  “We could always go inside and try to find it if you want,” he said to Henry. “The pool room of Erlking? The pool that time forgot? You can have your swim in there, rather than down at the lake, I’ll finish my book or something.” He waved the book hopefully.

  Henry half climbed, half fell out of the tree, shedding many leaves noisily on his way down. “Not anymore, mate. Technically anyway. They had to close the pool room off, I heard,” he said as his feet hit the dry grass. “A couple of years ago, I think I must have been ten or eleven at the time, when a kraken turned up. Stupid animal is still in there I think.” He rubbed tree bark off his hands. “You can hear it slithering along the walls now and then if you pass down the right corridors. Slopping about like … well, like a kraken.” He shrugged. “It must be massive by now. It’s not that the pool is hard to find really, it’s more that it’s completely off limits.”

  Robin raised his eyebrows. “A kraken?” He mopped his hot face with the front of his t-shirt. “As in a giant squid? With tentacles and things? In the pool inside? Are you serious?”

  Henry nodded. “Yes, kind of squid-like, bit of a sea-horsey face thrown in there too, just for good measure. They start off fairly small, kraken, or so your aunt told my dad anyways. People in the Netherworlde used to keep them as exotic pets apparently, but they get too big to look after and get flushed away. They end up in the sewers, going wild.” He scratched lazily at his tangled brown hair. “Bit cruel really. I never actually saw the one in the pool room here. My old man boarded up the doors before I could have a look, which I was gutted about, I can tell you. But I reckon it used to be someone’s pet or something because dad told me it had a little pink collar on it with ‘Inky’ spelled out in fake diamonds.”

  Robin frowned. “Inky? I feel a bit sorry for it,” he said, slipping his trainers on. “Locking it up in that pool room forever.”

  Henry shook his head. “I don’t. It would rip us all to shreds and eat us given half the chance. Vicious killers, they are. Kraken make bloodstained, dead-eyed killer man-eating sharks look downright cuddly.” He nodded knowledgeably.

  “Oh. I feel a bit less sorry for it then,” Robin amended, raising an eyebrow. There was still so much he didn’t know about so many creatures of the Netherworlde.

  “Kraken grow as big as the space they’re in,” Henry said, strolling away across the grass towards the far end of the garden, where his father was still toiling in the sultry heat. Robin followed him, gathering up his books.

  “Or so I heard anyway,” Henry continued, brushing tree bark fragments from his sleeves. “That’s why you seal the room up, you see, if you get an infestation? You can’t drive ‘em out. All you can do is try and contain ‘em. Dad says if one ever escaped and got out into the open ocean, it’d mean the end of the world, because it’d grow so big it filled the entire thing. A bit gloomy, eh?”

  They had crossed the baking lawn, the dry grass practically crunching under their feet, and drawn level with Mr Drover, who was fighting a losing battle, but was struggling on valiantly, trowel in hand.

  “Hullo boys,” he gruffed absently without looking up, his face the colour of beetroot.

  “Isn’t that right, dad?” Henry said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and rocking on his heels.

  “Hmm? What’s that?”

  “Kraken in the ocean. Armageddon,” Henry summarised lightly.

  “Hmm? Oh yes, terrible business,” Mr Drover muttered into his moustache. “Shouldn’t be allowed. Here, I don’t suppose you boys fancy making yourselves useful and finishing up here while I get on with something else do you? There are only fifteen flowerbeds left to do. It’s just strangleweed. Giving me a bugger of a time though. I need to get round to the herb garden and start in on the screaming beets. Have to put my slippers on first, you know how easily startled that beetroot is. Gives me a migraine with its howling.”

  “Sorry,” Henry said, thinking fast. “Robin here has tons of homework to do, and I said I’d help.”

  Mr Drover looked up at them suspiciously. “Homework? In June? School is out for summer. I should know, my lad, I’ve had you under my feet at home for weeks.”

  “No rest for the wicked eh, Mr D?” Robin said, smiling innocently. He waved his book in the air as supporting evidence.

  “Hmph,” Mr Drover frowned. “Well, I suppose you’re hardly following the national curriculum here at Erlking are you?” he conceded. “More the Sorcerer’s syllabus, eh?” He chuckled at his own joke. “If that’s the case then, you’d better get along. Your aunt might still be trying to find you a replacement tutor, they’re not easy to come by, but that’s no excuse to go slacking, is it?”

  Robin’s previous tutor, Phorbas, had been a satyr. Half man, half goat. A Panthea and an expert in the Tower of Air. It was a dangerous job, teaching the world’s last changeling. One risked the displeasure of the Netherworlde ruler, Lady Eris. Phorbas had paid the price for rebellion. He had been separated body and soul, and his essence was currently trapped, rather permanently, in an ornate knife.

  There wasn’t much effective learning to be had from cutlery.

  Robin had been enjoying the lazy lesson-free days of summer as best he could, and had been studiously ignoring the lengthy list of reading material his aunt had thoughtfully provided. Feeling slightly guilty for lying to Mr Drover, he made a mental note to at least make a start on the reading material Aunt Irene had given him tonight. Later would be better, when it was cool enough to think.

  The two boys left the gardens for into the blessed cool shade of the house proper. It took a few moments for their eyes to adjust to the gloom within, so it was that they didn’t immediately see the small figure of Karya before them.

  The young girl was sitting at a writing desk along one wall of the hallway, scribbling furiously on a telephone pad. Her wild mass of brown hair was pinned up haphazardly above her head with about a hundred clips, but this was the only concession she made to the sweltering heat. She still wore her large shaggy coat of animal skins. Robin had rarely seen her without it since their first meeting last year.

  “Hello you two,” she said without looking up. “Finished baking your brains, have you?”

  “Good morning to you too,” Robin said, wandering across the marble floor and over to her nook, trailing Henry behind him. “It is summer you know, Karya. Most normal people spend it outside mucking about. We haven’t seen you since breakfast.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said scowling. Henry didn’t consider Karya to be normal in even the slightest way. “You’ve not been outdoors all week. You’re always lurking in the shadows, reading and writing. It’s unnatural.”

  They hadn’t discussed it much, but Robin privately suspected that Henry was having trouble adjusting to this newest member of the Erlking family. Karya was a girl for a start, which made her in Henry’s mind instantly distrustful, and she was bookish and sharp tongued. She had helped to save Henry’s life from an inconvenient kidnapping, however, so he had decided gracefully not to kick up a fuss when Robin invited her to stay with them.

  Robin was bookish too, but that didn’t seem to bother Henry.

  Karya had seemingly taken to living at Erlking well. As far as Robin was concerned, she seemed to fit in well in a house full of misfits.

  “Unnatural? Reading and writing is unnatural now?” the young girl said testily, flicking her eyes up at the boys. Henry’s misgivings were mutual as far as she was concerned. As far as the Scion’s strange human friend was concerned, Karya clearly found him a constant, low-level irritation. “I’m sure you think it’s far more productive to go kicking a rubber ball around on the grass pointlessly for hours on end. Or prattling on endlessly. But some of us have actual work to do.”

  “What are you doing, seeing as you brought it up?” Robin asked curiously, looking over her shoulder. The pad on the de
sk before her was covered in indecipherable glyphs, symbols and calculations. “Henry has got a point you know; you’ve been hanging around the library for days. We’ve barely seen you.”

  “I happen to find the library restful and a good place to work. It’s the one place I can almost guarantee not to run into certain loud and annoying distractions.” She peered at Henry pointedly. “As for what I’m doing, Scion, it’s the same thing I’ve been doing for two weeks now, while some people have been wasting time sunbathing and whatever else you two do. I’m trying to translate something for your aunt.”

  “For Aunt Irene? Robin frowned, looking down at the girl’s scribbling covering the tabletop. “How come she’s got you working as her assistant then?”

  “Because the thing that I’m translating, or trying to translate at least, is not one of the nine languages she can read write and speak herself,” Karya said. She frowned down at her own notes. “It’s much too old.”

  “So why would you know it then?” Henry folded his arms. “You must be what, eleven years old?” Henry was a year older than Robin and didn’t like having his seniority challenged by someone younger and shorter than him.

  Karya gave him a withering look. “I don’t know the language, but I do know a more modern version of it. I’m backtracking, piecing together this protean tongue from fragments of later-developed languages.” She huffed. “But it’s not easy. It’s as difficult as it would be for a human like you trying to understand monkey screeches.”

  Robin found himself unsurprised that Karya might have a talent for ancient languages. She was a bundle of closely-guarded secrets.

  To be perfectly honest, he knew precious little about the strange girl who had erupted into his life the previous year. Karya was neither one of the Fae, like Robin, nor Panthea, like most of the Netherworlde’s free inhabitants. It wasn’t entirely clear what she was, but as she had never broached the subject, Robin had thought it would be terribly rude to ask outright.