I nodded; my head did not ache yet then. The prospect of making money, walking around the forbidden island, and learning a little more magic looked quite attractive. Who knew that I would be feeling so sick?
Besides us, three more workers were going to the island, and, judging by their clothing, they were not local. Nobody wore shirts with short sleeves in Krauhard, not even in summer—health is more important than comfort. The guys did not attempt to make introductions, but I realized that all of them were students, either from the capital or from its suburbs. They took swigs out of a large leather flask and laughed; they looked like they knew little about the King’s Island. I had already pictured in my mind a company of cabinet scientists committing a raid on historical places on their university’s budget, when the paramilitary truck approached the pier. A mountain of bales, boxes, and barrels grew rapidly on the berth; a couple of burly men in uniform overalls received the cargo at the pier and chased the curious away; one of the two had a nightstick hanging on his belt, and another one had a knife tucked in his boot. The ship that lazily dangled off the coast started steaming.
I tried to fight off nausea and think sensibly: the car, the boat, and the guards implied that the superiors of the expedition were not just after the money, they knew what kind of place the island was. I started wondering:
“What are we going to look for?”
Uncle just laughed in response: “I did not ask. Do not worry, nephew, we’ll be cautious.”
The students roared, welcoming the director of the expedition, a short, lean, and remarkably ugly woman. Hers was one of those cases when even a white magician would not be able to help: having proper facial features and smooth, ivory skin, she sported heavy eyelids of a habitual drunkard and a sardonic smile that would have scared a crocodile. The director was followed by a man a head taller than she, deliberately overdressed and bearing the obvious signs of a dark magician.
No surprise there; bringing a specialist in the supernatural to the island was a very wise decision, but we all knew how costly the services of a dark magician with military bearing were.
“Gentlemen,” the lady-crocodile began her greeting speech, referring mainly to the two of us, “I am your queen and god for the next four weeks. Please address me ‘Mrs. Clements’ and nothing short of it. Just so we are clear, I will not tolerate any drunken debauchery during our expedition,” she pierced me with a glare, though the flask was in the hands of the students, “and I am warning you: all that you will see or find on the island is the exclusive property of the expedition. Got it? Those who do not agree better stay on the mainland.”
“Everything is clear, Mrs. Clements!” Uncle sang in a tone that was typically used for courting an obstinate mare.
The lady-crocodile jerked her head in a rather horse-like manner, but the man who stood behind her coughed politely, and a scandal did not unfold.
“Next to me is Mr. Smith,” she said through her teeth, “he is our safety expert. Given the specificity of our place of work, I am asking you to report to him any oddities or unusual events immediately.”
All of us nodded, but I became a little disappointed. What, I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about the island?! The trip was turning out to be somewhat schizophrenic from the outset.
A lifeboat with a crackling ethanol engine cast off from the ship. Local fishermen that gathered on the shore watched the boat with interest: would it stall or wouldn’t? If the alcohol was local, then it surely would; I tested it on my moped many times. Either the climate here was very humid, or vendors were particularly shameless, but I failed to achieve any stable engine operation. It would be dubious fun to get stuck in the middle of nowhere.
But on a bright sunny day the boat looked good, and it flew—not sailed—across the waves.
“Roll call!” Mrs. Clements captured my attention again. “Pierre Acleran…”
Students readily raised their hands, Mr. Smith and the two guards were accounted for too, and someone called Mermer was marked as being on a ship. Uncle and I were the last on the list.
“Gordon Ferro…”
“Present!”
“…and Thomas Tangor.”
“Here,” I raised my hand for clarity. Mr. Smith gave me an interested look.
“All aboard!”
Mrs. Clements was hasty, of course, when she commanded everyone to board: only four people and a couple of boxes at a time could fit onto the boat. Mrs. Clements and the students went first, but I did not envy them: the three of them would have to receive and arrange all of the expedition’s belongings. On the shore, Uncle was able to maneuver so that he involved everyone in the loading, including the guards and the driver of the truck. Naturally, we finished the job faster. The last boat (already free of its boxes) took to the ship those who lingered over on the shore. Mr. Smith sat down across from me and stared at me during the ride.
“Why have you joined the expedition, Mr. Tangor?” he asked finally.
“Money, sir!” I smiled broadly. A universal reason.
“What about you, Mr. Ferro?”
“Someone has to watch my nephew.”
“Hmm.”
“Why are you going there, Mr. Smith?” I could not restrain my curiosity.
He jerked his eyebrow in surprise. I wondered what his expectation was when he started a conversation with a dark mage.
“My job is to ensure the safety of this stupid expedition!” he admitted with surprising sincerity.
“I feel sorry for you,” Uncle intoned.
But Mr. Smith stubbornly shook his head: “Everything is under control. There won’t be any problems.”
As they say, Let us pray, Brothers and Sisters.
But perhaps that was a perfect example of a rational approach based on knowledge rather than on local superstitions. I have been pestered with safety rules since I was five; I knew about the supernatural manifestations so much that I could lecture at Redstone University. Yet in my memory, nothing occurred in our valley like what was depicted in old men’s stories. Well, a couple of imbeciles had been injured, of course… Cattle raged at night as well… But against Krauhard’s sinister reputation it was hardly noteworthy. Perhaps, rumors exaggerated the King’s Island’s danger too. It happened now and then!
It took us almost twenty-four hours to reach the place. Of course, we could have sailed faster, but nobody wanted to land on the island in the dark. I slept soundly under the quiet whistle of a steam turbine, the nausea was gone, and my mood could not be better. Time to look around—assess where exactly I ended up.
The ship slowly and cautiously made its way through the fog that was much thinner over the water and smelled subtly of the sea. There were no birds; the only sources of sound were the boat and the surf slowly roaring somewhere nearby. We had passed the beacon line at night, and now there were jagged cliffs and boulders, stretching to the right of the ship, protruding from the sea as if guarding some ancient fortresses. I idly watched seaweed floundering about in the foam between the rock teeth. The members of the team who were not struck down by seasickness woke up and got out on the deck. It was at that exact moment that the island chose to surprise us.
The shore cliffs snuggled close to the ground, revealing a large cleft: water and wind corroded stone, and the rock broke like a bad tooth. A metal castle appeared in the inner cavity. It was perfectly exposed before our eyes. My jaw dropped. Almost untouched by rust, massive metallic plates enclosed the structure from the outside; where the rocks had overcome the metal, the eye caught layers of inner levels in a jumble of steel construction. Years had stripped away the extra stuff, and whatever resisted belonged to the centuries, millennia, eternity. The castle seemed to be tired of solitude, and it leaned out of the rocks to look at us with its dark maw. Below the castle, a ledge sprinkled with crushed stone was sticking out above the shore line, and powerful steel trusses could be seen under the ledge. From the ship, it seemed like the cliffs were but a false front, lined with stone and holl
ow inside.
“A gorgeous place!” the words escaped my mouth unbidden. Indeed, if the expedition let at least one picture leak to the world at large, no enchanted beacons would hold people back.
The armored plates over a foot thick suggested such reliability and power that you just wanted to sink your teeth into them. Was there anything left inside?
“Get out of here! The place is ugly as hell,” one of the students gasped.
I raised my eyebrow unwittingly. I thought he was pale because of seasickness. Was he scared by the island?
“Ah,” it dawned on me, “you are the white, aren’t you? I got it.”
“What did you get?” his companion protested.
“Nerves,” I shrugged.
Uncle struggled out from the hold and, having discerned the shore, began to rub his hands involuntarily: “Wow, how deliciously captivating! What’s inside?” he asked Mrs. Clements.
“It should not concern you!” she said coldly. “The ruins are under the state’s protection, and you will not approach them.”
What a witch… Uncle saddened noticeably.
We quickly left behind the mysterious construction, but I was still puzzled, trying to figure out in what era our ancestors could build something like that. As an alchemist, I knew how heavy one such plate could be, and it was incomprehensible how the plates were assembled in such a big stack. And how they worked from the inside, not the outside. History wasn’t my strongest subject, but I always thought that in previous centuries people lived somewhat simpler.
The situation intrigued me; surprises on the King’s Island were in store for all.
“As you know, I do not like to hire locals!” Mrs. Clements thoroughly stirred a spoonful of white powder in a quarter of glass of water and swallowed the resulting mess in one gulp. The taste of the medical medley made her shudder. Her conversation partner lazily mumbled something from his bunk.
“Especially those, who are also wild drunks,” she hid a box of medicine in a leather case. “You get little help but problems through the roof from them.”
“Do not rush to conclusions, they were not drunk,” Mr. Smith got up on his elbow. “As to their uproar… Both of them are dark—a huge fortune! Hiring those two in Ho-Carg would have eaten our entire budget, but here they will work for us almost for free. Let me deal with them, okay?”
“No problem!” Mrs. Clements easily agreed. “I do not think that we will need their skills. The last commission had worked on the island three years ago, and their review was favorable. The caretaker still lives in the castle, and NZAMIPS would not have allowed this if they had any doubts.”
“The last three years… These three years have been too strange,” Mr. Smith sighed, “but I hope you’re right. That will be better for all of us.”
Chapter 4
The island rejected us. It became clear from the very first minute of our stay there.
The fog cleared when we reached our destination. The sun did not show up; instead, the sky was filled with a translucent pearl-gray haze—a common phenomenon for Krauhard. When the monotony of the landscape became tiresome, the cliffs parted, revealing an entrance to a deep bay, the ancient name of which had been reliably forgotten long ago, and for the last three hundred years it was known simply as the Prison Bay. On the far side of the island one could see buildings of the type more common for Ingernika: rough masonry made from local stone, guarded windows, rusty stains on the walls. The buildings were subtly immersed in landscape, pretending to be a mirage; only their roofs of red tiles dotted the background of gray rocks. There were no external walls - the place had never been used as a fortress. And who would ever think of guarding the King’s Island? From the outset, the complex was built as a prison, Vale of the Doomed—a name that had become a household word. If memory served me correctly, it was the first specialized institution of that kind; before, criminals were either flogged publicly or had their heads lopped off, nothing in between. Indubitably, given their particular character, there were far more dark mages held there over the years than anyone else, and that brought about all sorts of silly superstitions. A black slab of some unknown material, obviously predating the construction of the prison, served as its foundation.
Crossing the natural breakwater, the ship gave a signal. Then another one. And another. Then the noise of the engine changed: the team started backing up; it seemed that the captain did not dare to approach the pier head-on. After a short meeting, they lowered the dinghy on the water and Mr. Smith went ashore with one of the guards. They returned two hours later and, after another meeting, the ship finally moved forward. Lady-crocodile, as if nothing had happened, began directing the unloading.
I drew two conclusions from what was going on: first, something went wrong, and second, mere mortals were not supposed to know what exactly went wrong.
“Keep your eyes open,” Uncle whispered to me.
The unloading made me set my concerns aside for a moment. Students, cursing, hauled a cart with the expeditionary belongings to a building (at least we had a cart. Without it, to carry that mountain of stuff over would have taken until the end of summer). Uncle Gordon and I, armed with poles, rolled barrels with fuel for the generator up the hill (not really a difficult task, but it looked technically daunting from outside). That white guy was busy with the dynamo-machine in the outbuilding. I couldn’t believe my eyes: didn’t they find a dark mage to send?! After the third barrel, I really wanted to ask what he was doing there for so long. After the fourth one I acted.
The outbuilding strongly smelled of oil; the white had managed to fuel the tank. Burnt fuses lay on the floor: an emergency breaker was triggered, but, at first glance, neither the generator nor its winding looked damaged. The student was yanking the start-up handle again and again to no visible results. The poor fellow was in a trance; the machine was not working. I needed to rescue the guy and myself. Literally. That was one of the most annoying traits in the white mages—if something really upsets them, they could cry for weeks. More than once had I witnessed a funeral of a broken cup, not to mention of dead mice and birds. The most unforgettable spectacle for me, though, was a man gently carrying a caught cockroach into the street. Imagine: the cockroach must have been captured first and then carried outside without being hurt. In short, I was not thrilled with the prospect of spending four weeks in the company of the emotionally shell-shocked white. Much less so, on King’s Island. Ha!
“Hey, make way for an alchemist!”
He sulked and started looking like Lyuchik.
“Don’t lose heart!” I patted him on the shoulder. “I will fix it right away.”
The problem was as simple as a stump and wasn’t related to alchemy at all, but rather to the “science of shitty contacts”—that sorry excuse for a mechanic had not pushed the fuses far enough into the slots, causing the generator not to start up. When the machine started, the student genuinely lit up.
“If something else happens,” I smiled amicably, “call me. I’ll try my best to help!”
He nodded and smiled.
“Mr. Tangor! What are you doing there?” Mr. Smith barked from somewhere.
“I’m taking out the garbage!” I yelled out the first thing that came into my mind, winked, and was gone.
As it turned out, Mr. Smith yelled for a good reason—the weather had changed dramatically. Although the day was at its height, a strip of thick fog crept out from the sea to the shore. It looked utterly suspicious. Our superiors began fretting; we were ordered to grab and drag everything that could be damaged by dampness into the house and leave the rest outside in its place. The boat started backing up to anchor somewhere in the middle of the bay, out of harm’s way. By the time the trembling white curtain of fog reached the shore, the doors of the prison’s only residential building had been closed tightly, and the members of the expedition had made their home as comfortable as they could.
We were given a corner room overlooking the prison yard, though we couldn
’t see anything because of the fog. In the light of the day, such as it was, the room looked cozy, just a little dusty. Uncle checked for ward-off spells on the windows, clicked his tongue, and did not change anything. The thick fog splashed outside, like milk, and poured into the water; the sun illuminated it from within, and the air seemed to glow faintly. An infernal spectacle that we, Krauhardians, did not like to admire.
“Uncle, don’t you feel that something is wrong here?”
“The supernatural,” he nodded with the look of a connoisseur. “It looms so close to the borders of reality that it presses on our nerves. Actually, our whole venture is starting to smell.”
“Well, they ought to have known where they were going to.”
“Are you sure?” Uncle chuckled. “The situation can change very quickly. They expected to be met. Have you noticed? Who was supposed to meet us, and where is he now?”
I shuddered involuntarily. So far, I hadn’t met anything deadly dangerous that could take away a man’s life. The only guests from the other world in our valley were ignes fatui—flashes of light that wandered in fog—quite a harmless phenomenon, as long as you didn’t touch them.
Somebody knocked on the door politely.
“Come in,” Uncle offered.
The white mage from the generator room timidly peeked through the door and said: “Mrs. Clements has asked for everyone to gather downstairs.”
“We are coming!” I tried to remember where I put my shoes.
“What’s the urgency, I wonder?” Uncle grunted and pulled out of his bag a pair of felt slippers. Alas, I lacked the foresight to bring the same.
“Maybe she wants to bid us farewell?” I giggled hysterically.
Perhaps, the prison’s administration used to live in this building at one time: rooms were spacious, narrow hallways with multiple doors were absent, and a spacious hall was right behind the front door. There, among a heap of unsorted equipment, Mrs. Clements decided to gather us. In the absence of chairs, we had to sit on the luggage. The atmosphere at the meeting was quite peculiar: there appeared to be no immediate danger, but something strange was certainly going on. The problem, in my opinion, was that the capital residents thought that otherworldly threats were severely exaggerated (you can afford an attitude of that sort only if you live on top of salt marshes—the supernatural doesn’t like salt). Nobody seemed to realize that there was nothing alive, not even rats, on the King’s Island. Intuition stubbornly kept telling me that Krauhard wouldn’t forgive such an attitude.
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