The Shadow of Malabron (22 page)

The golem came to a stop and stood frozen, with the stone in its hands.

Pendrake opened his palm to show the others what he had found. It was a small, thick, yellow disc, like a piece of wax about the size of a shirt button. There was a letter or figure carved into its surface that vaguely resembled a bird with a long tail. They all turned to the motionless golem and saw the shallow hole in his forehead where the disc had been.

“Ord,” Pendrake said, his eyebrows furrowing. “The letter is Ord.”

“That’s his name?” Will asked.

“You could say that. The disc is the seal that gave him life, and his purpose. Without it he does nothing. He is nothing.”

“Then his story’s over now,” Finn said. “So we can leave the shard, right?”

Pendrake looked past Finn and pointed. Everyone turned. The tower was still there.

“No, no, I was wrong,” Pendrake growled, shaking his head. “Old fool. Shard dulled my wits. His story isn’t over, just stopped. We’ll stop too, probably in a few moments.”

He raised the disc to the golem’s forehead but his motions were slow and clumsy and the disc slipped from his fingers.

“Where is it?” Rowen cried.

“I can’t see it,” Will said.

With weary urgency they searched the mud at their feet.

“Never mind,” Pendrake said. He fished in one of his many pockets and brought out a handful of small objects: beads, buttons, marbles and other tiny trinkets.

“There must be something…” the toymaker muttered to himself as he sifted through the items in his hand. “Yes. This might do it.”

He held up an object that looked to Will like a small draughts piece made of pale wood, and pressed it into the hole in the golem’s forehead. Everyone else stepped back.

Nothing happened.

Pendrake tried another object, a blue-green marble. Again nothing happened to the golem. Then he popped one of the buttons off his coat and raised it to the golem’s forehead. By now his movements had become so agonizingly slow that Will had to suppress an angry shout. The button, like the draughts piece and the marble, had no apparent effect on the golem. And as the toymaker took the button away, his arm slowed until it stopped moving and stayed held out.

“Grandfather?” Rowen said.

“It’s already happening…” the toymaker said in a faltering voice, and to his horror Will could feel it in himself, too. As in those bad dreams he sometimes had where he could not move, his limbs were stiffening, refusing to obey his will. It was like being plunged into swiftly hardening concrete.

“Hurry…” Pendrake gasped. “Try another…”

Rowen plucked urgently at the objects in Pendrake’s palm, but her sluggish, clumsy attempt sent most of them falling to the ground. They seemed to take a long time getting there.

Rowen gave a choked cry.

“I can’t move my legs,” she gasped.

Finn struggled forward, holding out the green ring he wore on his right hand. He reached up and pressed it to the hole in the golem’s forehead. An instant later came a flash of emerald light from the ring, and the clay giant shuddered from head to foot. There was a cracking sound and Finn stumbled away from the golem. The ring’s band was still round his finger, but the stone was lodged in the golem’s forehead and glowed with a dull green fire.

In the next moment everything seemed to speed up. The toymaker suddenly lurched forward. Finn caught him before he fell.

“What did you…” he said to Finn, who was watching the golem with wide eyes.

“My brother’s emerald. He gave it to me before he left home. His memory was all I had left in my mind just now. I was trying to hold on to it, and then I thought of the ring.”

The huge lump of stone fell from the golem’s hands and hit the ground with a wet thud. The clay giant began walking again, but this time much faster than before.

Will and the others watched him, stunned, and then began to follow. Will breathed deeply, aware that the weariness in his body and fog in his mind were already beginning to vanish. He felt as though he had just woken up from a deep, dreamless slumber that had gone on for years. And even the bog itself seemed to come to a kind of life. The mist thinned, swept by a warmer breeze, and patches of blue appeared in the sky.

“Where’s he going?” Rowen asked, watching the golem trudge on.

“Ord seems to know, which will have to be enough for us,” Pendrake said.

As they drew closer to the tower they wondered if the golem would stop, but he passed by the lonely pile of stones without so much as a glance. And as Will and the others followed, they saw to their relief that the tower was sinking visibly. They heard the creaking and groaning of the stones as they shifted and slid.

“There must have been a kingdom here long ago,” Pendrake said, “before this land became a bog. For all we know, the tower is only the tallest turret of an entire castle sunk in the earth for hundreds of years.”

The golem’s pace began to quicken, and although Shade seemed able to keep pace with him, the others were still weary from their time in the storyshard and lagged behind. Finally Pendrake called a halt. They gathered together and watched as the golem trudged on without them. Only Finn kept on after the creature, until he sank to his knees in the mire and came plodding slowly back.

“I do not think you will get your green stone back,” Shade said to him. The young man shook his head wearily, but there was a light in his eyes Will had not seen before.

“It was not mine,” he said. “And I wasn’t trying to get it back. Where else would the golem go but to find the one who used to wear the ring? A foolish hope, I suppose.”

Already the golem had dwindled to a grey blur. Pendrake put a hand on Finn’s shoulder.

“You may meet Ord again some day.”

When they looked again the golem had vanished.

T
HEY TRUDGED ON,
and when the tower did not reappear, they felt certain they had escaped, especially when they found themselves in a region of the bog with more trees. Spindly spruce and pines stood in greater numbers here, and even some tall birch grew between the pools. Patches of warm sunlight dappled the earth, and the air smelled fresh and raw.

In the evening they took shelter from the biting wind in a clump of straggly pines. Tattered clouds sped across the sky, hiding and revealing the stars. Shade nosed some fleshy roots from the soil and Finn lit a fire long enough to cook a thin but warming broth.

The moon rose out of a mass of cloud on the horizon. Pale silver light flooded the bog. Pendrake gazed up at the bright silver orb and made a sound of surprise.

“What is it?” Rowen asked.

“The moon is at its full,” Pendrake said. “We were trapped in the storyshard for at least two days.”

“That’s not possible,” said Finn. “It was only a few hours, at most.”

“Not even that long,” Rowen added.

“If we hadn’t escaped,” Pendrake said, “for us it would have become eternity, and no time at all. But perhaps we can be thankful. By disappearing for so long we may have thrown off our pursuer.”

After a while Will sat down beside Rowen.

“I guess I shouldn’t ask you again if you’re all right.”

Rowen smirked.

“Funny,” she said. “I’m fine now, I think. What happened in the shard, I thought I’d never felt anything like that before. Then I remembered how I’d listen to the stories at the Golden Goose, and sometimes I would know what was going to be told, before the storyteller said a word. I could tell what storyfolk should do, even if they didn’t know themselves. In the shard I knew we had stumbled into some kind of story, a story that was
wrong
somehow, even before Grandfather knew. I don’t understand how I knew that. He’s the loremaster, not me.”

Will remembered the troubling feeling he’d had, when the loremaster first told him about Malabron and the Stewards, that the old man was keeping something back. But he felt now that he shouldn’t admit this to Rowen, and suddenly he knew why. Pendrake was keeping something not from him but from Rowen.

“Your grandfather’s told you a lot of stories,” he suggested half-heartedly. “Maybe you’re just learning to see things the way he does.”

“I suppose so,” Rowen said doubtfully. “I wondered if some day I would. But I don’t feel as if I learned this. It just … took hold of me.”

“That’s like what happens to me, with the knot-paths. I’m from the Untold, and so was your father. Maybe that’s why things are different for us. You should ask your grandfather about it.”

They both looked across the fire at Pendrake, who was sewing a button back onto his coat.

“I know I should,” Rowen said. “But I’m afraid to.”

The next morning the companions carried on and soon came to an area of the bog that was less flat and featureless. The land rose to bald hummocks and dropped into gullies, down which water ran in swift streams. The mist thinned long enough to give them a glimpse of blue hills to the west, and beyond them the peaks of high mountains tipped with snow. The air smelled fresher, too, less heavy with the rankness of the bog. Pendrake announced that they must be near the edge of the bog at last.

He was as dismayed as the others when they crested a hill late that afternoon and saw a vast lake lying before them, gleaming a dull red in the setting sun. The air was colder here, too, as the west wind drove a chill off the water.

“This lake was not here when I came this way last,” the toymaker said. “We will have to go round. How far, I cannot say. Let’s go down to the shore. I want to see how deep the water is.”

This was not news that anyone wanted to hear, but there was no choice, so they hoisted their packs and headed downhill. At the bottom they plunged into a field of tall reeds that swayed and whispered in the wind. They pushed through the damp reeds which soon rose over Will’s head, scaring up a few shorebirds along the way. Suddenly they came out into a clearing. A wall of hissing reeds ringed them on all sides, except for a narrow gap that led down a kind of tunnel to the lake. They could hear the lap of waves on the shore. The wind stung Will’s eyes and brought tears.

The setting sun blazed a moment through the clouds in the west, then sank below the black wall of the mountains and suddenly winked out.

Will lowered his head and started forward, but was halted by an urgent whisper from Pendrake.

“Listen.”

There was a rustling from near by. A flock of birds rose into the air with shrill cries and a clamour of flapping wings.

“We didn’t cause that,” Finn said.

Will felt a chill slide down his neck like cold water, a chill that he knew had nothing to do with the wind off the lake. A low, whistling moan whispered through the rushes. Before anyone had a chance to speak or move, three figures rose before them as if out of the ground.

They were tall, and pale as moonlight. Their faces were cold as stone but beautiful, like faces on the ancient tombs of kings and queens. Two were men, and the third, the one closest to them, was a woman with long flowing hair.

“Fetches,” Rowen cried. “They found us.”

“Keep quiet,” Pendrake whispered. “They’ll be drawn to our voices.”

As he spoke they heard another eerie moan from behind them. They turned. At the top of the hill they had just come down, there hovered two more fetches, like smoke taking shape from black shadows. These had also assumed the form of tall, kingly figures, though like the others they carried no weapons other than the fear that went before them like a creeping fog.

The companions moved to face outwards in a tight ring. Shade began to snarl and pace round them in a circle.

“I’ve fought these shadowshapes before,” he said. “Teeth and claws are no use against them.”

“Neither are swords,” Pendrake said. “And do not look them in the eye, whatever you do.”

The fetches on the hill descended swiftly and vanished into the encircling reeds, while the other three stood motionless, blocking the path to the water. Despite the toymaker’s warning, Will could not tear his eyes away from the fetch that had taken a woman’s shape. She was gazing at him, he was startled to see, with what looked like recognition, and even sadness. And though she did not open her mouth to speak, Will heard a voice speaking softly inside his head.

Do not be afraid
, the voice said gently.
You had need of us, and we have come
.

“Who are you?” he answered, and his own voice seemed to come not from his mouth, but from his thoughts.

You know the answer already. Come with us and find what you seek
.

At once a new hope leapt into Will’s heart.
The Hidden Folk
. The toymaker had said they were masters of concealment and illusion. Maybe this was how they eluded their enemies, by taking these ghostly shapes.

“Everyone stay together,” Pendrake said, and at the sound of his voice Will felt his mind lurch free, as though he had been drifting towards sleep and had been jolted awake. He turned to the toymaker, who bowed his head briefly and then looked up with a grim face. Pendrake began to sweep the staff slowly through the air over his head, while chanting over and over in a soft voice that grew louder: