The Familiars: Secrets of the Crown (13 page)

“Aldwyn, the stone!” cried Skylar.

Aldwyn concentrated on lifting it to the webbed wall telekinetically, but before he was able to guide it to the hole, a boulder six times his size – thrown by two of the trees together – hurtled down at him and Gilbert. There was no time to react. And even if there was, with his talents not yet strong enough to stop the flurry of smaller rocks, there was certainly no hope of holding back this one. He braced himself. This was it. This was the end. Gilbert threw his hands above his head.

And then the boulder stopped, frozen in midair.

Gilbert peeked out from between his webbed fingers.

“Aldwyn, you did it!” he croaked happily.

“It wasn’t me,” replied Aldwyn.

This was hardly the time to ponder what had just happened. Aldwyn refocused on the gemstone and sent it soaring straight into the hole in the wall. At once, the cracks lit up round it, and within the barrier’s base a door revealed itself, opening into the darkness of a cave beyond.

The woodpeckers were still commanding the trees to attack, but now every rock they threw was mysteriously stopped in midair. Skylar swooped down to rejoin her companions, and the familiars hurried through the opening into the mountain.

Before they were swallowed up by the darkness, Aldwyn glanced back one last time. Standing at the top of the cliffs, he could make out a figure in the shadows. It was a cat.

Unlike Skylar and Gilbert, Aldwyn had been convinced that their escape from the echo beast had been a lucky break, another creature from the Borderlands arriving at just the right moment to settle some unrelated territorial dispute. But now, after getting saved a second time, Aldwyn was certain he and his companions were being watched over, protected by someone from afar. Someone who could lift objects telekinetically with his mind. A cat from Maidenmere.

“Aldwyn, come on,” Skylar interrupted his musings.

It was difficult for Aldwyn to pull himself away. What if the cat stepped out into the moonlight and revealed his identity? But there simply wasn’t time to wait, and so Aldwyn raced into the darkness, following the glowing paw prints of his father.

Quickly, whatever light had been coming in from the outside disappeared. Now the familiars had to find their way through the black using only the pale green luminescence emanating from a mould that hung to the cave walls; Aldwyn could use Baxley’s paw prints for further illumination, but they weren’t any help to his companions. Droplets of water dripped from the ceiling, and every time one hit the floor, a tiny sound bounced through the hollow subterranean halls. Every hundred steps there was a new branching passageway, and after having passed half a dozen of them, Aldwyn was confident that even if the woodpeckers followed them into the cave, they would almost certainly get lost in this maze of stalactites and stalagmites.

“Did you see who helped us back there?” asked Gilbert.

“No,” replied Aldwyn – but at the same time his heart was full of hope that their protector was the same person whose path they were following – Baxley, his father. He was just glad that it was too dark in this place for his friends to see the wistful yearning on his face, his want for something so improbable.

“
Now comes a black crescent sword, Cutting through the emerald night. At last the waking moth, Flies to the rising light
,” said Skylar. “Let’s be sure not to overlook any more clues. We’re getting closer to the end of the song. Which means the Crown of the Snow Leopard shouldn’t be far.”

“I think my eyes have finally adjusted,” said Gilbert. “If there’s a curved sword to be seen, I will find it.” A moment later, he hopped straight into a small column of limestone.

“I found two stones in Baxley’s pouch,” said Aldwyn. “We can light a torch to guide us through.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” said Gilbert. “I’ll conjure a flame fairy.”

“Maybe you should let Skylar do that, Gil,” said Aldwyn. “She’s got a bit more experience in that area.”

“Save your components,” said Gilbert to Skylar. “I’ve got this one.”

The look on Skylar’s face was more than sceptical, but Gilbert had already pulled Marianne’s pocket scroll from his backpack and stretched his wiry green arms in preparation. The tree frog removed the necessary nightshade, juniper berries and sage leaves from the pack as well. He tossed them into the air and chanted, “Send a flame from whence you came!”

In a blink, a flame fairy formed, her tiny frame aburst in orange. A smile crept across Gilbert’s face; this was a confidence-booster that he sorely needed.

“I did it!” exclaimed Gilbert. “The spell actually work—”

The flame fairy began to shake, and then turned into an out-of-control fireball. It rocketed off, leaving a puff of smoke in Gilbert’s face. The spell bounced around the walls of the cave, nearly taking off Skylar’s head as it flew by before shooting straight through Aldwyn’s legs. They both dived for cover as the errant bolt finally crash-landed in a puddle on the ground and extinguished with an almighty hiss.

Gilbert wiped soot from his eyes.

“Here,” said Gilbert, handing Aldwyn Marianne’s spell scrolls. “Take these. We’ll all be safer that way.” Then the tree frog pulled his spear from his back. “You better take this too.” He set the bamboo stick on the ground. “Even my flower-bud backpack could be dangerous.”

“How could your backpack be dangerous?” asked Aldwyn.

“I don’t know, but I’m not taking any chances,” replied Gilbert, pulling his grass-strapped knapsack off his back. “Of course, there’s no reason to waste perfectly good larvae. Or grubs.” He reached into the pack and removed two bundles of squirming bugs, along with the silver chain of beads from the mawpi’s lair.

“I’ve got no place here,” said Gilbert. “I just wish I could go back to the palace and see Marianne.”

Suddenly, one of the two remaining shimmering blue beads on the chain began to swirl with light. Gilbert squinted from the bright glare and then a large wooden door with a brass knocker at its centre appeared before them.

“Gilbert, what did you do?” asked Skylar.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he replied.

Skylar hurried over to look at what he held in his hand.

“Did you take those from the mawpi’s lair?” she asked.

“Yes. Was that wrong?”

“Those are journey beads,” explained the blue jay. “They’ll take you to any destination, so long as you’ve set foot there before.”

Just then, the knocker banged three times on the door and it swung open to reveal Marianne and Dalton sparring with swords in the fencing hall of the New Palace of Bronzhaven. Sorceress Edna and Jack stood on the sidelines watching.

“If you can’t fight with your wand, you’ll need to be quick with a sabre,” the familiars heard Edna call out.

“Marianne, over here!” shouted Gilbert. But his loyal didn’t hear him.

“It’s like one of your puddle viewings,” said Skylar. “We can see them, but they can’t see us. Unless you walk through that door.”

Gilbert was about to do just that when Skylar stopped him.

“But once you do, the door will close behind you,” continued Skylar. “And each bead can only be used once.”

Gilbert seemed quite conflicted. Aldwyn, too, could see how inviting the palace looked – far more so than the dark cave they were standing in now.

“We’re the Prophesised Three, Gilbert,” said Aldwyn. “Not the Prophesised
Two.”

“You might be excellent at telekinesis,” said the tree frog as the wood door began to close, “but you’re even better with guilt trips.”

Aldwyn peered through the shrinking gap at Jack and could see that he was OK. Of course, he didn’t know for how much longer.

Then the magic portal slammed shut, and once it did, it dematerialised in an instant. Aldwyn watched as the bead that had formed the door faded from blue to a dull, colourless grey. Now there was only one shimmering journey bead left on the chain.

Aldwyn gave his web-footed friend a pat on the back. He knew how he was feeling.

Clank-clank-clank
.

“Did you hear that?” asked Aldwyn.

Clank-clank-clank.

“Sounds like human tools,” said Skylar.

Aldwyn led his companions further along the spirit trail, which, they quickly realised, took them straight towards the hammering. Soon they arrived at a hole in the tunnel wall, which looked out into a large cavern. It appeared to be some kind of mine, and Aldwyn could make out dozens of pale white albino dwarves with pickaxes who were chipping away at the stone walls of the cave. Others were sorting the ore, removing jet-black fragments from the limestone and placing them in wheelbarrows. When they were filled, the wheelbarrows were brought by a third group of dwarves to an enormous cart and dumped inside. Instead of being pulled by horses, this wagon had a gundabeast harnessed to the front with leather straps and metal chains. Aldwyn remembered his hair-raising encounter with a baby gundabeast near Stone Runlet only too well – the ten-foot-tall, three-eyed, horned creature from the Beyond had been a fearsome sight and almost turned him into a cat pancake. But nothing could have prepared him for the sheer magnitude of a fully grown specimen, more than double the size of the baby and the armour plating on its back appearing tough enough to deflect even the sharpest sword. Then Aldwyn noticed that the entire mining operation seemed to be supervised by a number of mysterious robed figures. Some stirred vats of boiling liquid, while others walked the floor with shadow hounds at their side. Every so often, they would shout orders at the dwarves. Disconcertingly, the robed figures seemed to use not their mouths, but gaping holes in their necks to do their commanding.

Aldwyn pinched himself to make sure he was awake because what he was seeing felt very much like a bizarre nightmare.

“Where are we?” asked Gilbert, who looked absolutely terrified.

“I don’t know,” answered Skylar, which made Gilbert look even more terrified. If not even Skylar knew where they were, then what was this place?

“Stalagmos,” said Aldwyn.

The two other familiars turned to him, clearly surprised that he knew something that Skylar didn’t.

“I recognise those robed figures from the sewer markets of Bridgetower,” he explained. “They’re the tongueless cave shamans. They sell deadly concoctions and nefarious tools of the trade for assassins and bounty hunters like Grimslade. Olfax tracking snouts, spring-loaded soul suckers, arsenic arrows. I even had a run-in with a shadow hound once.”

The three turned their attention to the vats of steaming magma below. Floating inside them were evil-looking contraptions with sharp edges and animal parts.

“This must be where they brew their dark magic,” said Aldwyn. “Rumour around the back alleys was that they were drained of their humanity a long time ago.”

“Mine faster,” commanded one of the tongueless shamans, striking an albino dwarf with a whip that crackled with black energy. “And take only the obsidian!”

The voice gave Aldwyn the creeps – it hissed and snarled like a snake with its tail cut off. Although it also sounded a bit like Gilbert croaking in his sleep.

“Obsidian,” whispered Skylar. “That’s the component used to raise the dead.” She looked to the cart and spotted the symbol of a double hex burnt into the wooden frame. “They must be working for Paksahara. This is what she needs to bring forth the Dead Army.”

“She must be smuggling shipments of obsidian across the border into Vastia,” said Aldwyn. “That’s what Urbaugh and his men stumbled upon.”

“There’s enough in that cart alone to raise a thousand zombie soldiers,” said Skylar. “Who knows how many tons she’s collected already?”

“Let’s just follow the paw prints and get out of here,” suggested Gilbert.

Aldwyn, too, wanted to leave this terrible place behind, but when he looked down again into the cavern, he saw his father’s purple paw prints go straight through the mine, past the gundabeast and beneath a pair of pointy stalactites that hung above the sole exit on the other side.

“Don’t even say it,” said Gilbert. “I can tell by the look on your face that we have to go through that exit.”

“Afraid so,” said Aldwyn.

“And how do you propose we do that?” asked Skylar.

“We blend in,” replied Aldwyn, gesturing to several long black robes hanging on hooks near the cauldrons.

They sneaked down the tunnel, staying low to the ground, until they reached the spare robes.

“Fly into the hood,” instructed Aldwyn. “We’ll take the feet.”

But Skylar didn’t need instructions. She knew just what to do. The blue jay soared inside one of the cloaks and flapped her wings, letting the hood drape over her. The effect was successful; it appeared as if a man was inside. Aldwyn and Gilbert crawled under the bottom, and together they began to move.

Aldwyn couldn’t really see where they were going; he only hoped that Skylar could.

“I can’t see where I’m going,” whispered Skylar down to the others.

Aldwyn had no choice but to peek an eye out and guide her. “Straight, straight, a little to the left. Stop, stop, stop!”

Another cave shaman was approaching, and if Skylar flapped her wings one more time, they’d walk right into him. Luckily she halted just in time.

“We’re behind schedule,” groaned the shaman. “Tell the miners on the ridge there will be no rest until the full moon. Have I made myself clear?”

The familiars remained silent.

“Gilbert,” whispered Aldwyn, “let out a croak.”

“Why?” asked Gilbert.

“Because you sound like them when you’re snoring.”

“Is there a problem?” asked the shaman harshly.

“Ngrrugh,” snorted Gilbert, letting out a sound that was indeed not so different from how the tongueless dark magicians communicated.

“Very well, then,” said the shaman, continuing along.

The three animals let out a collective sigh, and Skylar resumed her flapping. They moved among the other cloaked figures without getting a second glance. The exit was approaching.

Aldwyn, back on the lookout, was momentarily distracted by an albino dwarf hurrying past, pushing a mine cart.

“Skylar, left,” Aldwyn directed her. “No, no, right!” he corrected as the dwarf rolled by.

Skylar managed to reverse course, but Gilbert had already committed to Aldwyn’s initial direction. He got tangled in the bottom of the robe, pulling them all to the ground. With a thud, they hit something. Aldwyn pushed the cloth fabric off his head to see that they had knocked a small cauldron to the ground. Black smoke was pouring out from it. Gilbert freed himself from the tangle and found himself face to face with a smoky creature forming just inches from his nose.