Lady Of The Helm (Book 1) (47 page)

In the corridor, hidden from view, there was a shimmer of
dis-spelled energy as the interlopers abandoned their magical disguises and took on once more the form of elf captain, red headed priestess and scarred servant girl.  Only the borrowed rags and faded robes remained of their masquerade.

“You’d bette
r be right about this hidden gateway, girl,” Niarmit said.  “Right and quick.  Which way is it?”

Hepdida
led them swiftly through a warren of corridors. The Archbishop’s palace adjoined the temple and had been home not just to the leading prelate but sundry other notables in the church of the Goddess.  The quarters of sexton and canon and under-bishop together with their myriad assistants and servants ensured that the archbishop’s residence was nearly as capacious a complex as the citadel itself.  All around were the signs of the sacking.  Corridors strewn with torn papers and ripped cloth, doors caved in and blood scrawls on the walls.  Hepdida led the way up a back stairway to an upper landing.  She stopped outside a double doorway imprinted with the sigil of the Archbishop.  “It’s here,” she announced, pointing at the wall opposite the doorway.

Tordil set to work, fingers tracing the smooth surface in search of some hidden seam where the stone might slide open.  “I can find nothing,” he announced in exasperation.  Echoing down the corridors came the shouts and grunts of pursuit.
  “You must be mistaken girl. Truly there is nothing here.”

“Are you quite sure, Hep
dida?”  Niarmit probed with one eye in the stairway they had emerged from, whence the shouts of orc and outlander were drawing rapidly closer.  “Could you have mis-remembered it?”

The girl sniffed at this fresh doubt and pushed the elf to one side.  “Of course I am sure.” Her hands stroked the stone and at their touch a fine line of light lit up which stretched and spread into the outline of
a portal.  As elf and priestess watched in stunned silence, the light faded leaving only the dark bevelled edges to the dressed stone door.  Hepdida gave the centre of the doorway a firm push and it pivoted noiselessly upwards to reveal steps spiralling down within the thick palace wall.

The clatter of mailed feet on the stairs they had ascen
ded gave the trio all the encouragement they needed to duck through the opening.  The stone door swung shut behind them and, with the briefest flare of magic, sealed itself once more invisible.  The darkness was absolute for a few seconds but then Niarmit found herself able to discern the shadowy forms of her companions.  At first she had thought it was simply her eyes growing accustomed to the darkness, but then she saw the light emanating from small gemstones set in niches on the wall, glowing with faint magical illumination. 

“I
would swear there was nothing there,” Tordil was muttering, still rueing his failure to discover the opening

“
I told you it was,” Hepdida riposted.

“How did you know?
” Niarmit asked looking around at the walls of well formed masonry.  “How could a servant girl know and uncover a secret that could remain hidden from an elven sorcerer?”

Hepdida shrugged at Niarmit’s enquiry.  “When I was a gir
l, my mother served in the Archbishop’s palace l lived in the servant’s quarters.  An observant child could learn a lot.”

“We should move,” Tordil hissed as a commotion of shouts dimly penetrated the sealed stone door.  “The alert will sprea
d to the citadel soon enough. Let us get there before their vigilance is fully roused.”

Niarmit nodded her consent and
Hepdida led the way down the winding spiral.  The priestess estimated they had descended full four flights.  That took them well below not just the basement kitchens but the under-cellars of the prelate’s palace, before the staircase ended in a low ceilinged simple passageway.  More of the enchanted gems warmed to cast their magical light along its length revealing an even corridor lined with dressed stone.  It led away in an arrow straight line inclined gently downwards.

“Is this heading We
st?” Niarmit queried, her mental compass disorientated by the spiralling descent.

Hepdida nod
ded with a gulp.  “Come on.”

“Methinks you’re an unusually observant servant girl to know of this passageway.”  Tordil observed sourly
as he followed.

They passed an opening to the left and then another to the right, but Hepdida walked past both of them, albeit with a slight shudder.  “Are you all right
?” Niarmit asked.

“Old memories. I g
ot lost here once as a child. My mother found me crying.”

The floor had flattened out between the two openings and now it began to rise again. Niarmit reckoned they had gone about four hundred yards when the corridor ended at the foot of another spiral staircase.  

“You know where this comes out?”  Niarmit asked.

Hepdida shrugged.  “Inside the citadel, that’s all my mother told me.”

“If you and your mother knew of this, mere servants, what chance is there that others have not discovered it also?” Tordil bristled.  “What’s to say there isn’t a troop of orcs and outlanders waiting for us at the top of this stairway?”

“You couldn’t discover it,” Hepdida simply reminded the elf.

“Enough bickering,” Niarmit snapped at them both.  “Tordil’s spell of disguise and Hepdida’s local knowledge have already got us far deeper into an enemy occupied fortress than we had any right to expect.  If the Goddess has smiled thus far on our venture, then I think we may trust to her favour a little while longer.”  So saying she began to climb, followed by the chastened elf and servant girl.

The stairway ended in
another blank stone wall which proved inpenetrable to Tordil’s craft.   They looked at Hepdida but the girl replied “I never came this far before. I don’t know how this one works.”

With a sigh, Niarmit leant against the wall and immediately
the thin glowing tracery outlining a door began to appear.  “Hah,” the priestess announced.  “It seems these doorways need a woman’s touch?”

“Or maybe it was enchanted by some elf hater of Thren the eighth’s time,” Tordil suggested, resigned to his failure.

They held their collective breath as the door swung open around its ceiling pivot, but there was no clash of steel or shouts of alarm from any sentry.  Carefully they stepped from their hiding place into the heart of the captured fortress.   “Do you recognise it?” Tordil asked as they surveyed the broad corridor they had just entered.  It stretched to left and right and opposite them was a pair of ancient double doors decorated with ornate carvings of the crest of Eadran the Vanquisher. 

Niarmit shook her head.  “I never saw much of the citadel and then only the public receiving rooms.  I would say we are in the king’s private chambers.”

“Where now then?”

“And wh
ere are the orcs and outlanders?”  Hepdida asked the obvious question.

Straining to hear, Niarmit caught the sound of distant shouts, muffled by walls and doors.  “I think Tordil’s diversion in the temple may be working to our advantage.  It seems to have drawn some attention across the plaz
a.  As to direction, well?”  She clasped her hand around the Ankh still hanging on its chain from her neck.  There was an unaccustomed warmth to it and, on an impulse she declared, “We go this way.”

As they rounded the corner at the end, they ran straight into two burly outlanders engaged in an agitated conversation about false alarms and idiot orcs and wizards.  S
urprise was on the intruders’ side as Tordil skewered one and Niarmit spun a spell of holding that immobilised the other.  Another swing of Tordil’s sword and the guards had been finished off without a sound.  Still there was no place to conceal the bodies nor time to wait for others to happen upon them.  Niarmit seized a mace and shield from one corpse, while Hepdida grabbed a dagger from the other. Reassured at having a weapon in her hands, Niarmit leapt on, guided by the growing heat within the ankh.  It was not that sharp burst of fire when her unknown heir had died, but a more comforting glow of reassurance.

The passageways were becoming more familia
r as they reached the public areas.  They jinked through an empty antechamber where once petitioners had waited for an audience with the King. A solitary orc was ambling along the corridor between throne room and antechamber when the trio fell upon him.  Tordil’s sword missed its first thrust and Niarmit’s spell gripped too late to silence the cry of alarm from the creature’s throat.  It was but seconds to rectify the fault and send the orc spinning in its own ichor to the floor, but the damage was done.  Two grey green faces poked out of a side passage and quickly took in the scene.  They took the precaution of raising the alarm before charging down on the hostile trio.

“In here, now.”  Niarmit commanded, pushing Hep
dida ahead of her into the throne room.  Tordil followed, spinning round to bar the door behind them, just as the orcs hammered into it.   The bar bowed before the impact but still held.  Niarmit glanced around the great throne room.  It was a place she had not seen since her ill-fated petition to King Bulveld seeking assistance for her hard pressed father.  It was empty now, inhabited by shades and shadows.  Tordil and Hepdida sprinted along the side walls barring the other entrances as Niarmit paced down the centre aisle towards the pillar on which sat the object of their quest.  There was an ugly sprawling stain of red and brown on the floor before the pillar and the defilement of this place was tangible in the foul ordure that orcs had thrown or smeared across floor and walls and the stench of their waste.  But the Helm gleamed inviolate atop its pedestal.  There was renewed shouting at the door and now the other entrances were subjected to some external assault.

“We’re trapped,” Hepdida cried.

“If that is indeed a weapon, my lady,” Tordil called as Niarmit drew level with the gleaming artefact.  “Then now would be a good time to try it out.”

Niarmit picked up the H
elm two handed and felt a longing throb from the ankh about her neck.  It was a simple smooth basinet of untarnished steel.  Its surface was unmarked, unpitted by blow or corrosion.   A solid piece of beaten metal with a face plate that covered eyes and nose but not the mouth.   She turned it over in her hands, looked inside for any clue as to its power. 

There was a crack from the bar at the double doored
main entrance. It would not hold for long.  “Now my lady?”  Tordil called.

Niarmit spun round to
face the danger and lifted the Helm above her head.  She shut her eyes, muttered her father’s name in prayer, and brought the ancient helmet firmly down upon her head. 

There was an explosion of light in her eyes, a burning sensation at her temple and then everything went black.

Niarmit could not at first understand why she was blind, then she remembered how the helm covered the eyes with solid metal plate, and then she realised her eyes were still shut and she opened
them and she could see and what she saw made no sense at all.

She was still clad in the stinking stolen rags of the zombie
that she had been impersonating, but the Helm was not on her head and she was not in the throne room of the citadel.

She was in a garden looking up at a palace, a great sprawling palace that stretched in diverse wings to left and right, each element of it reminiscent of a different architectural era and all clashing in an unholy melange of styles.  Though it had been near evening on a grey cloudy autu
mn day when she had put on the Helm, the noon sun shone brightly summer high in a clear blue sky.  Somewhere a bell was ringing, like a call to prayer, and then there was a figure, a man running from the palace down angled steps to the garden in which she waited, bemused and worried for her absent friends.

The man was thin with sandled feet and a toga of white cloth edged in purple wrapped around his body and over his shoulder.  The tight garb seemed to restrict his movements for he took short fast steps as he descended to Niarmit’s level.  “So sorry,” he was saying.  “So very sorry.”

Niarmit frowned as he stopped and bowed low.  “Where is this? Why are you sorry? Am I dead? Is this some kind of heaven?” 

“Oh no, M
ajesty,” he said while maintaining his supplicant’s pose.  “I’m sorry I was not here to welcome you.  We have been waiting so long and we were not sure when to expect you.”

“Expect me
?”

“Come please,” he held out his hand.  “Come with me, there is much to explain an
d we don’t have much time.”

She pulled away from him.  “We have no time at all.  My friends are in danger.  I was in the throne room when I w
as magicked away to this place. I must get back to them.”

The man looked her steadily in the eye and said with utmost
seriousness, “you are still in the throne room Majesty.”  When she returned his stare with unbridled scepticism he went on, “you are still there at your coronation, though times have changed somewhat if these are now the robes in which the ruler of the salved is crowned.”

Niarmit looked down at the stained zombie rags whic
h had drawn the man’s curious stare. “It was a rather unconventional coronation and there is unfinished business I have there. How do I get back?”