The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) (38 page)

“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.

“I don’t like being underwater,” Henry said. “I’m the same with lifts and aeroplanes. Feeling closed in and all. It’s horrible. There’s an awful lot of water up there.”

“Why on earth did you want to come, then? Didn’t you assume that water would be involved if we needed kraken bile?”

“Didn’t know what it was. Just drank it.” Robin stared at his friend, who shrugged. “All for one, et cetera.”

“Well, we can be ‘one with’ the water, remember?” Robin assured him, shaking his head. “I’m assuming she meant we’d be able to breathe underwater or something like that.”

“Something like that?” Henry gave him a look. “You mean she didn’t actually say so?”

Robin shrugged apologetically.

“It’s not the sort of thing to be vague about you know,” Henry complained as they made their way along the silent corridor beneath the lake. “You really want to pin down those details first.”

It was vast and seemingly endless. There was no sign of Peryl or Jackalope as they hurried along, their footsteps hushed on the stone floor. They passed moth after glowing moth. It reminded Robin of cat’s eyes on the strangest highway he had ever travelled. The smattering of lights stretched ahead to tiny pinpricks.

The tunnel around them was changing. It became less and less stoney the further they got from the shore and more clear crystal, until eventually they were walking through an almost entirely transparent tunnel. The dark, sandy bed of the lake was just visible beyond the walls, ghostly light penetrating the waters from the surface far overhead.

“There’s the village,” Robin said with wonder after a while. Out beyond the crystal walls, through the deep and silent murk, shadows loomed. The skeletal remains of houses swam out of the darkness, and they began to make out streets, peaked roofs and roads, long since covered with drifts of sand and undergrowth, reeds swaying endlessly in the current. It looked like a ghost of a town, wavering before them. Robin supposed it was.

Their endless tunnel led them right through the village, passing crumbled and barnacle-studded houses, their dark windows long since gone, filled now only with dark, cold water, moss and algae, and the occasional darting fish. The wavering light distorted the outlines of the cottages and old shops, making them waver and shift around them. Robin was reminded of old documentaries he had seen, where divers swam down to sunken ships, to find the sea slowly absorbing the husks, eating into the hulls and covering them with barnacles and sea-ferns. This was the same, only a whole village, softly, slowly and silently crumbling under the water.

“I guess normal people can’t see this tunnel,” Henry said, as they walked along, through the ruins of the place Tritea and Nightshade had once called their home. It was strange, Robin observed. To come from water, to live out the remains of your life in a different world in secret, only to have water cover you once more when you died. It was as though the element was claiming Tritea back to where she belonged, and taking the whole village with her.

“And they certainly wouldn’t see that, I’m guessing,” Henry said. They both stared outside.

Beyond, in the sunken village, shimmering in the dark water, something huge loomed behind what had once clearly been the village church. A much taller and wider structure. It looked for all the world like a cathedral. Deposited in this dark and secret place, amongst the shells of other, human remains. It was ornamental and grand. Wide columns, sweeping buttresses. They shone in the dark. It was the polished sheen of blue glass, glowing softly in the dark under-waters.

“It’s ice,” Robin said, wonderingly. “A great big ice-church.”

“Not a church, a tomb,” Henry said. “Bloody hell. They don’t do things by halves, do they?”

The tunnel curved right towards it.

“What are we going to do when we run into those two?” Henry wanted to know.

Robin wasn’t sure. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. He only knew they had to protect the Shard and find Nightshade’s locked box. The thing which Aunt Irene had been looking for since the start of this whole business.

“My father hid something here,” Robin said to Henry quietly, as they walked the silent corridor. “In this silent place beneath the waters. And I think it was something I was meant to find.”

He didn’t know how he knew this, but he felt it with every fibre of his being. Whatever Titania had instructed his father to deliver to Nightshade, it was important to Robin.

Ahead of them, the tunnel finally came to an end in a large circular door. It was a sea of stone and crystal rubble. They saw that it had been smashed apart. Evidently, Peryl had skills other than mere trickery up her sleeve. They passed through and found themselves face to face with the great tomb of ice. Between the tall shining door and the boys, there stood two things. The first was a churning wall of what appeared to be thousands of ice shards, filled the tomb’s doorway entirely in ever constant maelstrom of wickedly sharp flying knives. Most of them were as long as Robin’s arm, and they were packed into the entrance archway, rolling constantly over one another with a great scraping noise, the sound of a thousand blades grinding against one another.

Secondly, standing before this impassable barrier of churning death, and surrounded by a small halo of flittery glowing moths, stood Jackalope and Miss Peryl.

The unlikely pair turned as Robin and Henry entered. Jackalope frowned at them in an unfriendly way.

Peryl merely stood with her hands on her hips, looking rather put out.

“Oh, you came after all, did you?” she said conversationally, as though not remotely surprised to see them there. “Well, fat lot of good it’ll do any of us. Have you seen this nonsense?” She swept a hand beside her at the churning sea of ice-knives blocking the entrance. “Gor-ram Undines. They’re so dramatic. I mean, really. Icy blades of death? That’s just rude, don’t you think?” She looked back at the wall thoughtfully.