The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2)

by James Fahy

  “I can hear an ice cream truck too,” Henry observed.

  Robin was trying to clear his head. Where on earth were they? He assumed they must be north of Manchester, because they had only travelled north since entering the Netherworlde, very far north. He looked around but nothing identified his location. He was a long way from home.

  He thought of Karya and Woad, and the Undine, Flue, trapped in the dubious bastion of the great ice tree back in the Netherworlde. Was Mr Ker’s army of Peacekeepers and centaurs assailing them right now? Was the dark and deadly Strigoi already tearing down the sealed doors? It all seemed too surreal, sitting here in the sunshine, watching two young girls playing Frisbee in the distance with a golden retriever, not a care in the world.

  He would have given anything at that moment to be able to contact his aunt or tutor. To get help. They would know what to do. But there was none to be had. They were on their own.

  “Where’s the tomb?” Robin stood, aching. He turned full circle in the sunshine, looking around desperately. “There’s no tomb here, Henry! Flue said that Tritea and Nightshade were here.” He pointed at the ground at their feet in agitation. “Here, the spot in our world where Hiernarbos stands over there. But how? Look around. This place is a tourist trap, not a secret! I can see a National Trust hut right there.” He pointed.

  Henry was equally confused. “Can’t you use your scion-powers or whatever?” he ventured. “You know, sniff out the Shard.” He waved his hands in a hopefully mystical manner. “Use the force, Robin.”

  “I’m not a bloodhound,” the blonde boy countered. He stalked off urgently through the sand away from the lake, headed towards the pathway. There was a sign there, one of those tourist information points. If nothing else, at least they could find out where they were. Henry followed in his wake. “Oi, hold up, will you?”

  “I thought I saw someone else in the mist, as we fell. Someone coming after us,” Robin remembered. “It doesn’t make sense though. Woad and Karya wouldn’t leave the Undine on her own. They’ll stay and fight, if they have to. Why would they jump in after us?”

  Henry shrugged as they reached the sign, Robin gripping it with both hands and looking down through the protective Perspex cover. His hair was still damp from free-falling through the mist and the hot sun was already burning it off, making his head steam slightly. There was a coloured map of the lake beneath, with bike trails, footpaths and dog walks picked out in different helpful colours. Picnic sites and nearby car parks were highlighted with useful symbols. But, as Robin had expected, nowhere on the map was there a symbols for a hidden tomb of an otherworldly creature and her Fae lover guarding a Shard of the Arcania.

  He supposed even the National Trust couldn’t account for everything. But there was at least text alongside the map, so at least they knew where they were.

  “Loch Morlich-Katrine,” Robin said. “We’re in Scotland, Henry. Says here that Loch Morlich-Katrine enjoys one of the finest settings of any lake in the country. It is surrounded by forests and fringed by beaches.” He read on, his lips moving silently in his urgency. “Those hills and mountains are the northern Cairngorms apparently,” he said.

  “Fascinating.” Henry stared over his shoulder. “Does it say where the magic alien glass woman and the horned and mystical Fae who loved her might be buried then? I’m guessing not under the cornetto shop over there.”

  “No,” Robin said. “This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t a place Tritea and Nightshade would have come and ‘settled down in’ after the war. The circuit of the loch is a very popular walk apparently. This isn’t a secluded hideaway, it’s a bank holiday weekend destination.”

  “Not the best place to hide out the rest of your days then,” Henry noted. “Hardly a hidden cottage in the woods, is it?”

  He suddenly leaned in. “Wait, hold up Rob, what’s this?”

  He jabbed his finger at a separate section of writing. There was an old grainy and sepia photograph of a village, dark shingle roofs and a church with a pointed steeple.

  “The history of Morlich-Katrine,” Robin read with interest.

  “Henry,” he said after a moment. “This Lake, or loch, or whatever it is. It’s not natural.”

  Henry glanced at his companion sidelong. “Nothing we ever have anything to do with is natural, Robin. Our best mate is blue and sings to a squid.”

  “No, I mean, it wasn’t always here. It’s only existed for the last ten years! Listen.”

  Robin ran his finger over the tourist information. “It says here that the lake is artificial. It was created by damming the valley, to provide a water source and hydroelectric for the nearby towns. There was a village here once. Just over a decade ago. It was bought out and abandoned. The whole area was sealed off and then deliberately flooded.”

  “I’ve heard of that elsewhere too,” Henry agreed.

  Robin pointed to a grainy photograph showing the lake surface, and something like a shark’s fin standing proud of the water. “It says here that during that big drought we had the other year, the water level in the lake was so low, that the top of the old church steeple could be seen poking out of the surface.”

  He looked up at Henry. “An abandoned village, flooded and forgotten. It’s still down there, Henry. The whole village. Under the water.”

  They stared back at the lake, innocent and shimmering in the rare Scottish sunshine. There were a few windsurfers out in the distance, their sails white and blue.

  “The Shard of the Arcania,” Henry said, wonderingly. “Not hidden in the Netherworlde, in the secret valley of Hiernarbos, but here, in the same spot on the human world side of things.” He grinned. “Who’d a thought, eh? All that guff about mystical doors and secret valleys, and it was lumped in a lake in Scotland all this time.”

  “This must be where they lived. And died,” Robin nodded. “They could be buried down in that village. And then the village was flooded. What better hiding place? Do you think they knew of the plans to flood the valley when they moved here?”

  “It says that the entire village was deserted at the time of the flooding … obviously. Bit cruel otherwise,” Henry said, his eyes scanning the text beneath the perspex. “Everyone was relocated. Oh, there’s a local legend. Listen. It says the last occupants were an old hermit and his wife, who nobody could find. The village was searched high and low, but of old Mr and Mrs Paxton, no sign could be found. Rumours had been told in the village for years that the old lady was a witch, and her strange husband her familiar, and when they failed to appear, the decision was eventually made to flood the valley. Everyone assumed they had left.”

  “Some say that they didn’t though,” he went on. “That their ghosts still haunt the waters at night, the couple who refused to abandon their homeland, and who still haunt the depths.” Henry glanced up. “Mr and Mrs Paxton?” he said with raised eyebrows. “It’s all a bit hokey, these touristy things always are. There’s even a ghost walk you can do at Halloween, in hope of seeing the old recluses who were never seen again.”

  “Flue told us that Tritea and her lover, Nightshade, wanted to escape the war, to live in peace, or in Pax, as she said.” He looked out over the water. “Tritea and Nightshade never left the village, Henry. I know it. They’re still down there. They died here, keeping the Shard, and whatever my father gave to them on Titania’s orders, safe.”

  “We have to go down there, don’t we?” Henry said glumly.

  Robin’s blue eyes narrowed. “Somewhere down there is a ghost who guards a Shard,” he said grimly. He absently reached up and closed his fingers around his mana stone. Seraphinite. Good for spirit magic, good for ghosts.

  “And we’re going to wake her up.”

  They were almost back at the shore, where the soft edges of the lake lapped at the pebble sand, when Henry caught Robin by the elbow.

  “Robin, look!”

  Robin followed Henry’s gaze. A little way along the beach, in the opposite direction of most of the day-tripp
ing families, there was a quieter spot by the water’s edge where the treeline came right down to the water. Half hidden by the tree trunks was a small stone hut by the shore. It was flat-roofed and utilitarian, windowless, not much larger than a port-a-cabin, and its only feature was a steel door, looking sturdy and firmly locked.

  Henry and Robin were staring in disbelief as two figures had just darted from the shadows and disappeared through the closed door, as though it had been nothing but smoke. For a second, Robin thought he had seen ghosts. The spirits of Tritea and Nightshade themselves. But the truth was even harder to believe.

  “That was Jackalope!” Henry said in disbelief.

  “And Miss Peryl,” Robing agreed, gobsmacked. “What are they…? How did they?”

  Henry had already set of at a run towards the hut. This made no sense. How were they here, either of them? And why on earth would they be together?

  They reached the hut, gasping for air. The Fae and the Grimm were gone. There was no sign of them.

  “They came through the tear,” Robin said, staring around. “I knew someone had.”

  “But how could that demented girl have been there?” Henry wanted to know. He had run right up to the steel door. It looked old and rusted. There was no handle, only a small maintenance keyhole and a bolt which was rusted shut. No one had been inside this place in a long time, despite the fact they had just seen Jackalope and Peryl melt into it.

  “She couldn’t have been there,” Henry insisted. “The only ones who got in when the barrier fell were us. I think we would have noticed a grey-faced ghoul girl as we made our way through the waters. I mean, it’s not like there’s a lot of places to hide inside a clear dragon’s head made of ice, is it?”

  Robin didn’t know either. He joined Henry at the door. There was no visible way to open it. He tried to work his fingers around the steel edges, but he achieved nothing more than skinning his knuckles.

  “Never mind how they’re here,” Robin said. “I don’t know why Jackalope is with Peryl, but Peryl is after the Shard. This place must be something. We have to get inside.”

  “Robin, it’s just a maintenance hut,” Henry said. He pointed to warning signs, rusted and faded with age which declared just this. The usual ‘keep outs’, ‘no unauthorised access’, and ‘danger of death’ signs which both boys had seen countless times on other such buildings and electricity substations. Henry was right. This kind of shed, old as it was, was nothing more than a toolbox for whatever government subsector was responsible for the dam nearby. Hydroelectric power, the tourist info had said. What possible interest could it be to the Grimm? And how had she, and the apparently traitorous Fae from the death-camps, have gotten inside it anyway. What could they be doing in there? It was a tiny hut, barely big enough for two people to stand up in.

  “There’s no handle, there’s no way in.” Henry said. “They just walked through the door like it wasn’t there!”

  Robin stopped, and stepped back, his eyes roaming all over the front of the hut.

  “You’re right, Henry,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It isn’t there. The door.”

  Henry stared at Robin as though he’d lost his mind. “Did you hit your head harder than I thought when we fell through from the Netherworlde, Rob?” He rapped his knuckles against the rusty steel door. It clanged solidly. “It’s very definitely there.”

  “No,” Robin was still searching, his eyes roving all over the hut, around the warning signs, with their dribbles of orange rust, in between the stones. “It’s not.” It had to be here somewhere.

  “Here!” he said, dropping to his knees, his hands reaching out to the stones. Henry, frowning, bent down beside him.

  “Here what?”

  “This,” Robin tapped with his finger. There was a small triangle, with an eye inside. It looked as though it had been drawn on the stonework in spray paint, if that had been possible, considering the whole thing was no bigger than his little fingernail. “It’s a glamour, Henry. Same as the one on the altar back in the church at St Anne’s. The whole thing is an illusion.”

  “It looks and feels pretty real,” Henry argued stubbornly.

  “Well, it’s meant to. That’s kind of the point of a glamour,” Robin said, frustrated. “You can’t just break them by knowing they’re not real. You need a bloody potion.”

  He stood up, looking more desperate than ever.

  “Peryl must have Glam-juice,” he said. “She would be able to pass through, and Jack too, if she’d shared.” He kicked out at the door suddenly in anger, making Henry jump back in surprise.

  “Steady on, Rob,” he said, worriedly.

  “But now she’s in there, and she’s after the Shard, and we have no way of following her!” He groaned in exasperation. “After everything we went through to find this place! Finding the Undine on the folly at Erlking! Figuring out the puzzle box, nearly being killed by sirens!” He kicked the door again angrily. “Working out the location of the Janus station! Escaping the Grimms, fighting off Strife and Ker, and bloody, bloody Strigoi! We were nearly killed by an army of centaurs! We were eaten by a dragon! We found the hidden valley of the Undine! We jumped into that bloody sodding chasm!”

  He ran his fingers through his hair in desperation. He had never felt so utterly helpless. “For nothing? To get this far and have the Grimms win, just because, on top of everything else, we didn’t have the presence of mind to bring some damned Glam-juice with us?”

  In anger, he cast a Needlepoint at the hut. The javelin of ice erupting from his fingers was larger and thicker than any he’d managed to produce before. It howled the short distance and clanged noisily against the steel door, shattering into countless shards and raining a flurry of snow onto them.

  Perhaps Calypso had been right, he thought furiously. Water was ruled by emotions after all.

  “Rob,” Henry, who had stepped back cautiously in the face of his friend’s rage, waved a little to get his attention.

  Robin glared at him, lips tight, looking rather desperate.

  “You mean this stuff?”

  Henry had produced a small dark bottle from the pocket of his school trousers. He waggled it in front of Robin hopefully, with a lopsided smile on his good-natured face.

  Robin stared. “Is … is that … where did you get that?”

  Henry shrugged, casually tossing the bottle to Robin, who caught it in both hands, eyes wide.

  “Back at the church in the city,” Henry said. “Karya had it, remember?” He imitated the girl’s voice. “Always be prepared, blah blah blah … She passed it round and I must have pocketed it.” He shrugged. “I’d kind of forgotten about it to be honest.”

  Robin couldn’t believe it. “Henry, I could kiss you!”

  “Ummm, please don’t. I know where you’ve been,” Henry said. Robin uncorked the bottle, examining the tiny pipette attached to the lid.

  “There’s still enough. Come here, quick.”

  The two boys applied the eyedrops, blinking and grimacing at the familiar sting.

  When his vision cleared, Robin looked back to the small service maintenance hut.

  “Well,” he heard Henry say behind him. “That worked.”

  The tiny hut was gone. What stood before them instead was a large stone mausoleum of dark marble. Carved figures flanked the open entrance on either side, their stone robes flowing, their heads bowed low in respect, eyes closed. The heads of the statues were hooded, but the boys both saw that the carved women had no hair beneath the stony shadows of their head-covering, and from their backs, marble wings, outstretched and diaphanous. Not feathered, but styled after the odd, jellyfish petticoats they had seen sported on the back of Flue. They soared up from their shoulders, meeting each other and forming the arch of the magnificent entrance. Beyond was empty darkness.

  “We’re definitely in the right place, then,” Robin said, staring in wonder. He took one last look around the sunny lakeside. Not too far off,
two men were rollerblading and an elderly lady was jogging alongside a spaniel by the shore. None of them looked in their direction. Even if they had, they would have seen nothing more than two young boys exploring a boring-looking old hut.

  “Let’s go,” Robin said, and stepped inside.

  The interior of the marble chapel was small and completely empty, save for a hole in the ground, down which disappeared wide spiral steps.

  “I guess we’re going down,” Henry said. “Under the lake.”

  “I hope there’s nothing down there less friendly than Peryl,” Robin murmured as they descended into the darkness, leaving the world of the light and living above them.

  “Me too, mate,” Henry agreed. “We come in Pax.”

  The staircase spiralled down and down into dizzying darkness, until the light above them was all but gone, and the heat of the sun nothing but a memory. They felt their way uneasily downward, hands stretched out and sliding over the curving circular wall. The light grew dimmer and dimmer until they were almost blind, corkscrewing down into the darkness below, the only sound their footfalls and the faint hushed whispers of their palms sliding along the circular wall for guidance.

  “Don’t you hate walking down a load of stairs, and you feel like your legs have forgotten how to walk?” Henry mumbled behind him.

  Robin agreed, and was relieved when faint light began to creep up from below and he could once more see his feet and the steps before him.

  They reached the foot of the staircase and looked down the long wide corridor stretching away before them. Tiny lights fluttered on the walls. Robin stared at one, and slowly reached out to nudge it with his finger. It lifted from the wall and fluttered hysterically for a moment before settling back where it had been. A tiny glowing moth.

  “Peryl has lit the way for herself,” Robin said. “How thoughtful of her.”

  “Robin, look up.” Henry directed his friend’s gaze away from the moths.

  The long sweeping corridor arched above them, and the roof, they saw, was not stone, but glass. Or, more likely, given the weight of water pressing down from above them, tempered crystal of some kind. They were beneath the lake. A vast expanse of dark water hung above them, the distant surface glimmering far away. Shoals of silvery fish darted around in the depths, skimming pockets of quicksilver in the oppressive silence.