There were double gates in the outer wall.
It was tempting to approach those gates, but the time of darkness was nigh and it would be folly to endanger one’s existence in the gloaming. Besides, it was possible that the castle’s invisible barriers were incapable of keeping out eldritch wights. Dunters were wont to inhabit the deserted buildings of men, and other species might have been attracted by any remnants of enchantment lingering in the stones, such as the very sorcery that locked out mortalkind.
If wights bided here, they would be most active at night. Better to risk one’s safety in the morning, Jewel decided. She retreated down the ridge and found a scattering of elms, providing shelter from the wind. After a frugal supper subtracted from her waggoners’ rations, she folded herself in comforting wrappings and lay down to sleep.
In the brazen light of morning the fortress still existed, as did the entrance in the outer wall. The night had been still, without a puff or eddy, but the dawn brought with it a rising wind and a wall of cloud riding in from the west that boded rain.
Jewel paid scant attention to the weather. After scanning the landscape a second time to make certain that no guards were posted anywhere nigh, she approached the gates, moving slowly, as in a dream. No fear churned through her mind—only exhilaration and avid curiosity. The bleached bones of doomed men lay scattered along the base of the castle wall—their comrades must have been too terrified to retrieve their remains—but, intent on her quest, the damsel scarcely noticed. Fleetingly she recalled again the tale about Tierney A’Connacht and his brothers, of how they had spoken to the sorcerer’s servants and been told to circumnavigate the fortress three times, bidding the gate to open. They, however, had not been descendants of Jaravhor’s line.
The gates were securely fastened. Marvelously the key remained, massive and ornate, its bit resting in the core of the lock. The knopped shank and scalloped handle protruded, the iron dully refusing to reflect early glints of sunlight. Jewel extended her hand toward the thing. Yet, at the final instant she drew back. To summon courage, she clutched at the gem dangling at her throat. Inhaling deeply, closing her eyes, whispering an entreaty to natural providence, she grasped the key. The contours and ridges pressed cool and hard between her fingers. Without opening her eyes she twisted the instrument. Deep within the lock a tumbler rotated. Pins slid into motion. Emitting a click, the gate opened, and the intruder stepped within.
Euphoria fountained in her veins. Joyous incredulity buoyed her, and she was hard put not to crow with exuberance. She had survived, while breaching the fortress. Her heart pounded rapidly, keeping tempo with the silent ovation racketing through her mind.
The courtyard that opened in front of her was spacious, and utterly deserted.
Again, had she known, this was close to the way her forefather Tierney A’-Connacht had first beheld it. No grooms, stable-boys, or equerries busied themselves about the stables. No pages, drudges, or footmen crossed the area on their errands. No scullery-maids filled their pails at the well. Thistles and tough grasses infested the crevices between the flagstones, and the fibrous remains of some aged birds’ nests were scattered about. Atop a squat belltower, a petrified clock, its dial marked with eleven intervals, overlooked the scene. Here and there, chalky glimmers indicated fragments of disarticulated skeletons, the remains of some who had tried to enter without leave—and without leaving.
A sense of enchantment permeated the Dome’s close. Even the air seemed petrified, at first, until a cold gust swept down over the outer wall, and raised spirals of withered leaves in a lunatic dance. Undaunted, seething with excitement, awe, and expectation, Jewel crossed the leaf-strewn flagstones and ascended a broad, shallow stairway. Two wide and lofty doors of brass-studded oak stood at the top. An insignia of two crossed axes was nailed in the middle of each. At their feet, the stairs were stained with a great splash of old blood, now as black as char. The doors were shut, but once again a key remained in the lock, and the girl broached this portal without trouble. Still grasping the white gem, she passed between the doors and into a hall so vast it could have encompassed a thicket of trees. From here a grander staircase led to a second pair of majestic doors, also easily opened. Beyond them stretched a vast refectory, in whose center stood a long table surrounded by tall-backed, vacant chairs.
The table was bare.
More than merely void and vacant was this chamber; the few furnishings that remained appeared to have been plundered. Grooves and small craters in the wood of table and chairs indicated places where costly inlays and gems might once have nestled.
Every room through which the intruder passed seemed to extend the entire length and height of the interior of a hill, and each one, so far, had been empty of living creatures. There was, however, no evidence of the wealth Jewel had expected in a structure so magnificent in proportion and design. The inner doors, the locks all yielding to their keys as she turned them, were embellished with neither gold nor silver. The fluted pillars supporting the ceilings loomed as tall as forest giants, but their stonework was unadorned. From the center of every ceiling, where the principal arches met, there hung ragged skeins of iron links. Marvelous chandeliers might once have been suspended therefrom, before being ripped from their chains. The castle did not merely lack precious ornament—it had apparently been deprived of any. Pedestals stood, surmounted by an absence of statuary. The gilt had been painstakingly peeled from painted murals; curtain rods had been robbed of their draperies; the floors were bereft of coverings, the walls innocent of tapestries or weapons; mantels deserted. In one corner, as if forgotten, stood an old brass beam balance; in another, covered with dust, an ancient and worm-eaten rocking chair. Yet, as far as Jewel could see, not a diamond glittered; not a gem flashed. Where were the famed valuables concealed?
The old weathermaster tale of Fallowblade and the rescue of Álainna Machnamh kept haunting the intruder. She wondered which was the chamber in which A’Connacht had at last found his sweetheart, and she tried to picture the three of them together—sorcerer and young lovers, all of them her ancestors.
As she wandered along a wide corridor it came to Jewel that something was following her. Swiftly she swung around, but nothing could be seen. Only the deserted passageway stretched behind her; only her own footprints marked the fine particles of dust layered like sheerest gossamer across the floor, and translucent beams of sunlight leaned in from the windows, swimming with dust motes and desiccated moths’ wings, as if mists and the ghosts of insects were captured in cylinders of clearest glass. No figure tracked her with muted footsteps; no shadow slipped furtively into darker shadows.
She recalled then, belatedly, the sound of the front gate swinging at her back as she crossed the courtyard, and furtive sounds like the scratchings of mice, or the settling of sediments, occurring behind her as she moved from chamber to chamber. Suffused by her initial excitement she had ignored these signs, dismissing them as phenomena invoked by the freshening wind, or by rodents scuttling frantically in the walls. In hindsight, however, inspired by spontaneous fear, she recalled them clearly.
The certainty overwhelmed her that some unknown entity pursued her, and was about to appear from around some corner. Hastily she darted into the nearest hiding place, a wall recess half-concealed by a pilaster. She swallowed her fright, which turned into a stone, jumping and banging against her ribs. Holding her breath, she waited for the presence to rush by, searching, with a soft rustling of robes and the rhythmic susurrus of deliberately muffled footfalls.
But nothing went past.
’Tis a mere invention of my wayward imagination, she told herself. My shrieking mind is playing tricks on me.
After a while she gathered the courage to move again.
The chambers of Strang brooded, eerie but not entirely silent, for the wind caused unknown objects to rattle and knock in adjacent chambers and in distant places. The galleries were vacant, the stairwells and corridors and concave ceilings haunted by unquiet ec
hoes. Yet the sparse furniture—a chair here, a table there, a dilapidated cuckoo-clock on a wall—was as austerely pleasing to the eye as the architecture.
Nonetheless Jewel was unable to shake off the sense of clandestine pursuit, until, after heaving open a door wide and high enough to admit a house on wheels, she was confronted with a spectacle so stupefying it drove off her anxieties.
She had reached the cavity of the main dome.
This barrel-vaulted interior, as vast as the gnawed-out hub of a mountain, was crowded with mechanical contraptions so remarkable, so utterly astonishing, as to defy description. The most extraordinary aspect of these engines was their sheer scale, which was so grand they seemed no less than the toys of giants. Recalling her studies at the schoolhouse in High Darioneth, Jewel guessed the names of several. They included an aeoliphile of copper, an abacus, a trebuchet or siege engine—the firing arm mounted on trestles as lofty as ancient forests—a telescope so huge it might scratch the stars, a tellurion, for demonstrating how the rotation and revolution of the world precipitates day and night, and the changing of the seasons, and a lofty waterglass, or clepsydra, a device for measuring time by recording the controlled flow of water through a small aperture. No water flowed here, however. All this apparatus was constructed of base metals such as iron, copper, brass, and some greenish-bronze alloy, everything stained, corroded, and tarnished with age. There was no precious metal. Alchemists or astrologers might have considered this a slowly decaying storehouse of wealth, but Jewel held no such opinion.
If this mass of machinery were ever to be set in motion this hollow place would be filled with feverish activity; the revolution of massive arms, the rotation of wheels, the arcing of pendula, and the constant transference of energies from point to point, like nerve impulses flashing through a cerebral system. For any onlooker, it would be like standing within a living brain housed in the dome of an improbable skull.
Central to this mechanical conglomeration, serpent-thin cylinders of copper soared up from the floor to the apogee of the Dome. Jewel ventured in amongst the monumental machinery, daring to touch her fingertips to a surface, here and there. All were cold, unyielding, save for the copper pipes running up through the Dome’s axis. From them seemed to emanate a dim thrumming.
Quickly, Jewel snatched her hand back. The sensation had been not unlike that of a pulse, but without the rhythm of a beating heart. It was as if, deep amidst all these long-dead, silent behemoths, something was still functioning. The thought made her feel queasy.
Even as she hastened back to the door, the air of this vault thickened with darkness. Some potent shadow had passed across the face of the sun. Conceivably, the rainclouds blowing in from the west had arrived, and were racing across the skies above Castle Strang.
Many other contrivances met the eye of the intruder, and for these, despite mental gropings, she could find no name. Some were a snarl of springs and cogs, others a chaos of tubing, wires, and levers. Jewel could only surmise that they were not so much the tools of science as machines of torment.
Gravely disquieted, she hurried from that place. She ran down several flights of stairs and through a postern that gave onto a small, inner courtyard. Overhead the sky lowered, heavy with cloud-rack. The wind had risen to a stiff breeze that eddied in corners and dashed handfuls of withered leaves into the air. Dressed stones littered the ground, amongst thin copper pipes and rusted tools such as a stonemason might employ, all overgrown with weeds and interlaced by tangles of withered grass. A squat, square tower occupied the yard’s center. Oddly, it appeared to possess no door or access of any kind, except for some windows set high up in the masonry.
“This is some secure exchequer,” whispered Jewel in sudden delight. “The greatest treasure must be here!”
Without wasting another moment, she picked up a discarded length of piping and began thumping and prying at the stonework near the base. It seemed the only method by which she might penetrate the tower—the windows were too high to reach, and too narrow to allow ingress, and besides, the masonry was faulty and easy to disintegrate. The stones had been carelessly laid, and the illmixed mortar between them was crumbling.
It was as if the builder had been in a hurry, and had neglected to do his job properly.
Using the pipe as a crowbar, Jewel levered a loose stone and jumped backward as it spilled out. Eagerly she dug and jabbed. The wind lashed her hair across her face, and flogged her clothing. More powdery mortar showered down; another stone became dislodged. Her work became easier as blocks fell away, weakening the courses above.
Pausing for a brief rest, Jewel perceived a shallow inscription crudely carved on a slab set into the wall. It read:
THOSE WHO SEEK LOVE SHALL FIND ONLY CALAMITY,
FOR LOVE IS NO MORE THAN A VANITY.
A fleeting sense of wistfulness passed through her. Could such a declaration be true? Was love nothing but a sham?
More likely this epigraph was the work of some cynic, some social outcast who felt cheated, who believed he was owed loyalty and affection despite being incapable of giving it. Someone such as the Sorcerer of Strang.
To all purposes Jewel herself was an outcast now, having turned her back on those who cared for her in order to pursue this foolish quest. And what did she have to show for it so far? Dry bricks, worm-eaten rafters, and a bitter caption: little else. After all her labors she felt extremely frustrated at having found nothing of import so far.
“Hmph!” she snorted disparagingly, before resuming her work with vigor. The fourth stone fell, creating a window level with Jewel’s face.
The mask of Death stared back at her.
Aghast, Jewel dropped the pipe, recoiling from the thing she had uncovered. She stumbled over a broken hod and fell to the ground, her gaze never leaving the apparition.
The skull of a deceased human being was peering out through the window in the wall. The sockets from which it seemed to watch were hollows brimming with blindness. The teeth with which it grinned were pearls in rows. When this grotesque and pathetic visage failed to speak or move, Jewel picked herself up and cautiously moved forward to examine it.
All flesh had long ago withered away, but the hair remained, unrotted. It was beautiful hair—as flowing, glossy, and dark as a river reflecting moonlight. And that hair was encased in a headdress of filigree gold, encrusted with rubies and skilfully wrought. The garments clothing the bony shoulders were of similar costly magnificence, fashioned of sumptuous fabrics and stitched with flamboyant embroideries. She—for judging by the clothes these were the mortal remains of a woman—was standing in the wall. Her claw-like remnants of hands were upraised, as if she tore at the stones with her nails. Indeed, long scratches were scored in the mortar.
This woman had been walled in alive.
Sick with horror, Jewel fled.
Knowing no other means of egress from the rubbish-strewn close, she returned by the way she had come, in through the postern, and up the several flights of stairs within the main building. On reaching a landing, she collapsed to the floor to regain her breath, and remained there, resting her shoulders against a newel post and listening to the ambient noise of loose articles, near and far, being slammed about by air currents. It was akin to being deep inside a network of mines and hearing the tap-tap of pickaxes coming through the rock, from hidden depths and gangs.
She pondered on what she had witnessed. The hallmarks of death were clearly visible in places about the castle. Beside the outer pales and in the courtyard had lain the bones of those who had perished while trying to enter the fortress. By the smear of blood on the very threshold any visitor ought to have been prepared for such sights as the lady in the wall. Jewel shuddered. For certain, extreme cruelty had reigned here in days of yore. The notion filled her with such revulsion that she felt queasy, and for one mad moment she wished she could slit open her own flesh and flush the sorcerer’s blood out of her veins.
A soft sound near at hand made Jewel gasp. S
he held still and listened, with all her capacity. Had there been footsteps again? Inexorably, the concept of an invisible follower led her to recall her mother’s madness. Lilith had been audience to sounds nobody else had heard. She had vowed they were the footsteps of a pursuer. In the end, the delusion had been the agent of her destruction. No one in the marsh had ever spoken to Jewel about the cause of her grandfather’s death, but she had gathered, from talk overheard, that Old Man Connick, too, had been subject to that particular form of insanity, and Earnán had confirmed her conjecture at their meeting in the Fairfield. Those hallucinations were hereditary, engendered by the curse of Jaravhor. For an instant, Jewel’s eerie surroundings and the macabre atmosphere of the abandoned fortress confused her, and illogically, an alarming notion struck her: What if the curse had not been invalidated after all?
The Well of Tears: Book Two of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 25
