The Gift of Dark Hollow

by Kieran Larwood

  ‘Can we lower the bridge?’ Podkin suggested. ‘Then at least those Gorm over there won’t be able to get us.’

  They all had a quick look around for another rock cairn or secret handle, but there was nothing of the sort. The small island was mostly barren and empty: thin soil and patchy grass over lumps of rock, with the standing stone at one end and a mound of brambles at the other.

  ‘We’ll have to leave the bridge as it is,’ said Zarza. ‘It’s more important to find the tomb and get inside.’

  Podkin nodded. There were several torches on the far shore now, bobbing as they moved ever closer to them. They had only moments to spare.

  Running again, they made their way over to the mound of brambles, figuring that nothing else on the island was large enough to be a tomb. They were right – as they got closer, they could see it was actually a circular structure of stacked stones, covered all over with stringy brambles like a mop of unkempt hair. Steps downwards had been dug at one end, leading to a granite door below ground level. They scrambled down them, coming to a halt at the entrance.

  Crom ran his hands over it, then put his shoulder down and gave it a shove. It didn’t budge.

  ‘Comfrey told us a Gift would open it,’ said Podkin. He fumbled at his belt for Starclaw, but Paz was there first, pressing Ailfew to the stone. Podkin felt annoyed for a moment – was he ever going to get to use one of his Gifts on this stupid mission? – and then the door clunked open with a boom that shook the whole island.

  ‘Everybody in!’ Crom shouted. Podkin felt someone shove him forward into pitch blackness and then there was another boom as the door was shut. They had sealed themselves into a lightless ancient tomb.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Tomb

  Podkin blinked and waved a paw in front of his eyes.

  Nothing.

  He could hear the other rabbits around him, breathing, moving, but could see nothing at all, not even a shadow. The air was cold, damp and smelt of wet stone. He had a horrible feeling that the walls were gradually inching in to crush him, that all the air was being slowly sucked out. They were going to die down here in the blackness, leaving nothing but a pile of yellow bones for the next person who opened the tomb to discover …

  And then someone lit a candle, and the real world sprung back all around him.

  Mash was holding a cluster of little beeswax candles in one paw and a flint in the other. He lit the wick of another candle with the flame from the first, then passed it to Zarza.

  With the two flickering yellow lights, the rabbits could now get a look at their surroundings.

  They were in a narrow stone passage, sloping downwards beneath the island. The walls were smooth blocks of carefully cut stone, interlocking like some kind of giant puzzle, without any need for clay or mortar to hold them together. There were markings on some of the stones: spirals and zigzag patterns, and here and there figures standing. They were tall, willowy-looking creatures, with round heads and no ears. There was nothing rabbit-like about them. Podkin began to feel as if he was intruding somewhere alien; as though he was disturbing something he shouldn’t.

  ‘Where’s the hammer?’ Crom whispered.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ Paz whispered back. Podkin had no idea why they were speaking in hushed voices, but it seemed the right thing to do.

  ‘We must have to go down into the tomb,’ he said, as quietly as he could.

  ‘So much for getting in and out before the Gorm get here,’ said Mash. ‘How are we going to escape with the hammer?’

  ‘Can anyone swim?’ Crom asked. They all shook their heads.

  ‘Not a stroke,’ said Yarrow.

  ‘Then we’ll have to fight our way out,’ said Crom. ‘The quicker we get Surestrike, the less Gorm there’ll be.’

  Podkin gulped. They had managed two Gorm before, with the help of Ailfew. Would they be able to defeat more than that? He didn’t think so. Their only hope would be that Surestrike was easy to find.

  *

  It wasn’t.

  They followed the passage downwards, Mash and Zarza holding the candles high, casting long, flickering shadows across the walls.

  There were more carvings as they walked, feet scraping on the dusty, gritty floor. Podkin could see scuffmarks and paw prints there – quite fresh ones. From when Comfrey hid the hammer, he thought. At one point they disturbed a family of fat black beetles, who ran across their path, shells glittering in the lamplight. Zarza crouched to scoop them up in her leather pouch.

  ‘Is that in case you need something to kill?’ Podkin asked.

  She nodded. ‘Bad things happen when I run out of beetles.’

  The light danced over her mask, her eyes hidden in the shadows beneath. All this death, an ancient tomb, the strange carvings: Podkin felt a cold shiver run through his fur, wishing again for the warm hearthside at Dark Hollow and the chance to cuddle up to his mother once more.

  They turned a corner, then another, and another, and it became clear that they were spiralling down into the earth. Being underground was natural for a rabbit, but only in nice earthen tunnels you could dig your way out of, if you needed to. So much stone wasn’t normal, and all of them – except Crom – were gazing around with wide, nervous eyes, their ears (or ear, in Podkin’s case) pricked and twitching.

  Podkin thought they must have descended twenty metres or so before they came across the first trap.

  Mash, out in front, stepped on something that clicked. He froze instantly. ‘Oh whiskers,’ he muttered.

  The darts came a fraction of a second later, their mechanism perhaps damaged by thousands of years laying dormant.

  Zip! Zip! They shot from hairline cracks in the wall, some too high to threaten the little dwarf rabbit, some heading straight for his head and ears.

  There was a blur of movement, followed by three metallic pings. Podkin blinked and saw Zarza standing in front of Mash, blade drawn, candle still in one hand. At her feet were three silvery darts, bent in the middle where she had sliced them out of the air. Four more had embedded themselves in the wall where a taller rabbit’s head would have been.

  ‘Thank the Goddess,’ said Mash, breathing a sigh and sagging against the chamber wall.

  ‘Not your goddess,’ said Zarza. ‘Nixha did not want you to die today.’ She picked up one of the darts and examined the end.

  ‘Is it poisoned?’ Paz asked. She held up her sickle to check but the blade didn’t change.

  ‘Once, maybe,’ said Zarza. ‘But faded now. Still. We should be very careful how we proceed.’

  ‘Comfrey didn’t say anything about traps,’ Podkin said, feeling his stomach clench.

  ‘She didn’t have time, did she?’ said Yarrow. His eyes were twinkling, as though he was enjoying this adventure. Podkin had a nasty feeling he was going to end up being remembered in a song about a brave little rabbit who got skewered in an underground tomb.

  ‘We go carefully from now on,’ said Crom. ‘Everyone stay focused.’

  None of them had senses like Crom, and he detected the next trap. They had just turned yet another corner when he reached out to grab Mash and Zarza, halting everyone in the tunnel.

  ‘What is it?’ Mash asked, eyes zipping all around, looking for flying darts.

  Crom sniffed, slowly turning his head from side to side. ‘The air is different here,’ he said. ‘Colder. Damper.’

  Podkin sniffed too, but couldn’t smell anything. He looked down at the tunnel floor and saw that Comfrey’s footprints had suddenly jinked to one side, hugging the tunnel edge.

  ‘There’s something wrong with the floor there,’ he said. Zarza followed his gaze and tested the ground with her paw. There was a shriek of grinding stone and a trapdoor gave way, revealing a deep hole lined with spikes underneath.

  ‘Roasted radishes!’ Mash shouted. ‘This tomb is a deathtrap!’

  ‘A good place to hide a Gift, though,’ said Zarza. ‘Maybe we should leave it here.’

  ‘It’
s too important,’ said Crom. ‘We have to press on.’

  The big rabbit pressed himself against the wall and they all started edging past the pit.

  Podkin took Paz by the hand and followed the others, looking around at every stone slab as if any one could suddenly come to life and crush or spear him. What if Zarza was right? Should they just leave the hammer here? Why were they risking all these lethal traps if the Gorm were simply going to take it from them when they finally came out of the tomb?

  Not for the first time, Podkin wished Brigid were with them. She would have some mystical comment about how everything was part of the Goddess’s plan, how they shouldn’t worry. He tried to tell himself the same thing, but it just wouldn’t work. All he could think of was how important Surestrike was, and what was at stake if they lost it.

  *

  Two more twists downwards and they came to a dead end. A wall of stone blocked the tunnel, but they could clearly see Comfrey’s paw prints leading underneath.

  ‘Some kind of door,’ said Crom, running his hands over the surface. ‘But what triggers it?’

  ‘Could that be a clue?’ Yarrow said. He was pointing to faint markings on the door itself. Carvings in the granite like a pattern of dots and lines.

  Crom traced them with his fingers. ‘I think it’s some kind of writing,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not Ogham,’ said Paz.

  ‘Not Orestan runes, either,’ said Zarza.

  ‘Our troupe travelled all over the Five Realms,’ said Mash, ‘and I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  Podkin didn’t know how to read anything, especially not the funny dots on the door, so he kept his mouth firmly shut.

  They stood scratching their ears for a few minutes, trying to puzzle it out, until Yarrow snapped his fingers. ‘I think I might know! There’s this chap from Hulstland, a minstrel – plays the flute so divinely – who I meet every year at the Festival of Clarion. Travels all the way by foot, would you believe. Anyway, he has this system for writing down music, like it was a recipe for blackberry jam or something. The most bizarre idea, I always thought. What’s the point in training your bardic memory if you’re going to use scribbles to remember things for you?’

  ‘Will you be getting to the point any time before Bramblemas?’ Crom asked, glaring.

  ‘What? Oh yes … the music. Well, he writes down the notes on parchment and they look just like that. All dots and little lines and things.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude, Yarrow,’ said Paz. ‘But how will that help us?’

  ‘He means that the writing could be music!’ Podkin said, seeing the bard’s point. ‘If he makes the right notes, the door could open!’

  ‘Exactly, my dear child,’ said Yarrow, slapping him on the back. ‘See, if the first one was do, then that would be la, then ray, ray, fa …’

  Ignoring the strange stares from the others, Yarrow began singing a tune, reading from the door carvings as he went. It was an odd little melody, unlike any way of putting notes together Podkin had ever heard, but at the same time pleasant to listen to.

  Standing in that ancient place, listening to the music of its creators, gave Podkin a strange sensation. Like a waking dream, in which he’d stepped through a doorway into another time. For a moment he forgot about the hammer and the Gorm outside and instead gazed at the carved walls around him, half expecting one of the tall, earless creatures to appear and carry on chipping spirals into the stonework.

  The spell was broken by a grinding noise, as the door began to slide open. Paz threw her arms round Yarrow and squeezed him tight. ‘You’re a genius!’ she shouted.

  ‘Well, it has been said before, my dear,’ the bard winked at her. ‘Although not by me, of course.’

  They all craned their necks to peer around the slowly opening doorway. Their candles were held high, so that light crept inside to reveal more of the passage – another ten metres or so – and there at the end was a small chamber with a stone table in the centre. It was the heart of the tomb, the resting place of whatever artefact or hero the Ancients thought so precious that they built all this around it. Whatever it had been, it was long gone now. Stolen, or crumbled into dust.

  But in its place was something more important to Podkin and the others: it was Surestrike, the hammer of Applecross, laying on the table, softly glowing, as if it had been the cause of all the traps and tomb-building. The head was a beautiful bronze colour, smaller than Podkin had expected, and it was mounted on a shaft of white gleaming wood.

  ‘We found it!’ Paz shouted. ‘We actually found it!’

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Podkin. ‘Look at the floor.’

  The dusty stone slabs carried on from where they were standing – except for the last five metres before Surestrike’s chamber. In their place was a giant, hopeless, empty gap. Podkin walked to the edge and peered down. He couldn’t even see the bottom. Picking up a pebble from the floor, he dropped it in, listening for an impact. There was none.

  ‘How are we supposed to get to the hammer now?’ he said. It was so cruel to be able to see the thing, but not reach out and grab it.

  ‘There must be a floor that slides across,’ said Paz, pointing to the passage walls. ‘Look. You can see the outline there.’

  The edge of a long, thin slab nestled amongst the bricks of the wall. It looked the right size to cover the bottomless pit. Fresh trickles of dust around the bottom showed where Comfrey had triggered it before, when she placed Surestrike down here.

  ‘There must be a catch or a lever somewhere,’ said Zarza. ‘Everyone look for it.’

  The whole group searched, pressing every brick or slab they could, but with no results. They even took Pook down from Yarrow’s shoulders and made him look, hoping his uncanny luck would kick in. Even he couldn’t find anything.

  In the end, it was Podkin who spotted it: a tiny hole in the stone wall, with a faded spiral carved around it.

  ‘This must be it!’ he called, excited at first. The others all gathered round.

  ‘Put your finger in,’ said Mash.

  ‘Blow into it,’ suggested Paz.

  ‘Can you see anything inside?’ asked Crom.

  Podkin tried everything, but nothing would make the stone floor slide across. He held a candle close and peered in – nothing. How were they going to make the thing work?

  ‘It looks like a keyhole,’ said Yarrow. ‘Comfrey must have had a key when she came down here. It’s the only explanation.’

  ‘But she didn’t say anything about a key!’ Paz kicked the wall. ‘Why didn’t she give it to us? At least she could have told us where it was!’

  ‘She was being taken over by the Gorm,’ said Podkin, his voice small and sad. He sat on the passage floor and wrapped his arms round his legs. ‘She probably forgot about that part. She was trying her best to help us.’ He thought again about how they had left her there, chained up on the wall. How he wished they could have done more to free her.

  ‘That’s it then,’ said Paz. She sat down next to him and stared across at Surestrike, so close but so far out of reach. ‘We came all this way for nothing.’

  Zarza was still examining the walls, refusing to give up. Pook whimpered a little and climbed back up on to Yarrow’s back. Crom scratched his ears, trying to think of a plan.

  ‘Have we got rope?’ he said. ‘We could lasso it and pull it over.’

  ‘No rope,’ said Paz, sighing. Crom sighed as well.

  ‘I might make it,’ Mash said, under his breath. The other rabbits all looked at him. He had been standing at the edge of the pit, looking at the walls and measuring the distance in his head.

  ‘Make what?’ Podkin asked, suddenly hopeful.

  ‘Make it across the hole,’ said Mash. ‘If I jump from wall to wall, I think I could do it.’

  ‘What are you, small rabbit? Some kind of acrobat?’ Zarza had stopped examining the walls and was staring at him as well.

  ‘Actually, yes,’ said Mash. ‘My sister and I
used to tour with a troupe. Firebreathers, jugglers, things like that. We were the acrobats.’

  ‘You’d never make it back with the hammer,’ said Crom. ‘It would be too heavy.’

  ‘You could throw the hammer back,’ suggested Paz.

  ‘But what if you fall?’ Podkin had a sudden, horrid vision of the little acrobat spinning tail-over-ear, down into the darkness. ‘There could be anything down there. Spikes, snakes, bottomless pools of water with flesh-eating leeches …’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Podkin.’ Mash said. ‘I’m quite aware of the danger. But I’m going for it. Right now.’

  Before anyone could stop him, the little rabbit launched himself diagonally across the pit, aiming for the left-hand wall. He hit it with both feet, then sprang off, just like a rubber bouncing ball. Everyone held their breath as he sailed across the empty darkness below to hit the wall on the other side and bounce back again.

  Boing, boing, boing. With three leaps he had cleared the pit and was rolling across the floor on the other side.

  Podkin found himself leaping to his feet and cheering, along with everyone else. The shouts echoed up through the tomb and got even louder as Mash lifted Surestrike from the table and held it up to glimmer in the candlelight.

  ‘Now,’ said Crom as the cheers died down, ‘we just have to get it off this island and back home before the Gorm catch us.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Iron and Thorns

  ‘Can you hear anything?’

  They were back at the tomb’s entrance, and Crom had his ears pressed to the stone, trying to pick up any sounds from outside. The others were all gathered behind him, holding their breath.

  The blind warrior shook his head. ‘The stone’s too thick. There might be no one there, or the whole Gorm army could be waiting for us. I can’t tell.’

  Each rabbit looked at the other with quick, nervous glances. Zarza had her weapon drawn, and Mash was clutching Surestrike. After his heroic leap across the pit, nobody objected to him carrying it. The question was whether he would be holding it for long, or if the Gorm on the other side of the door would be snatching it off him.