But Lief hardly noticed his surroundings. His mind was still on the spectre of The Lady Luck. Nervously he glanced over his shoulder and as he turned back he saw that Jasmine was watching him in concern. He suspected that she thought he and Barda had been seeing visions.
‘We are not imagining this, Jasmine!’ he snapped. ‘The ship is real! You searched for us for over a week, and you could not find us—even in your dreams! Yet we were on the ship, within Deltoran waters, all the time.’
‘I know this!’ Jasmine shook her head. ‘But how could the—the crew—have known what happened to you after you jumped overboard? How did they know where to find you?’
‘Somehow they must sense us,’ Barda muttered. ‘Somehow…’ Suddenly he stopped, his face alert.
‘The gold piece!’ he hissed. ‘Lief! You won two gold coins when you played that game, but you only returned the one you had borrowed. Perhaps…’
Lief dug deep into his pocket and pulled out the gold coin he had won after playing the beetle game.
‘Throw it away!’ Barda urged. ‘Throw it into the sea! Perhaps, once we are rid of it, the ship will cease haunting us.’
‘If you throw it into the sea, it will be lost forever,’ Jasmine hissed. ‘Who knows what will happen then?’
She held out her hand impatiently. ‘Give the coin to me, Lief! I am unknown to the crew of The Lady Luck. I owe them nothing! I have never set foot on their accursed ship.’
Lief hesitated, then handed over the coin. Nodding with satisfaction, Jasmine put it away in the Dread Gnomes’ money bag.
‘There,’ she said, returning the bag to her jacket pocket. ‘Now, let us concentrate on what is to come. The guardian of the Sister of the West no doubt awaits us on the Isle of the Dead. We must—’
She broke off with a startled cry as Kree suddenly swooped at her head and wheeled away, screeching. Filli, clinging to her shoulder, gave a high, despairing squeal.
A curious expression crossed Jasmine’s face. She looked down and her eyes widened in horror.
Puzzled and alarmed, Lief and Barda looked down too. But there was nothing to be seen—nothing but nodding scarlet lilies, trembling golden stamens, a few green leaves and the deep, soft earth beneath.
‘Beware!’ Jasmine shrieked. She began to kick and stamp violently. Lilies toppled and fell around her, crushed beneath her feet. She bent amid the ruin of the flowers and began brushing wildly at her legs.
Lief and Barda gaped at her. What had come over her? They could see that the dull cloth of her leggings was bright with smears of golden pollen beneath a clinging mass of lily petals. But what did that matter? Where was the danger in…?
And then they saw the blood—the blood dripping from Jasmine’s hands, the blood soaking her leggings, running down into her boots. And they saw that the black fringes of the swollen ‘petals’ she was clawing from her legs were wriggling. They saw feelers like golden stamens twitching angrily and razor-sharp pincers snapping as they were dragged from raw wounds.
The things clinging to her are not lily petals, Lief thought, numb with shock. They look exactly like them, but…
‘Beware!’ Jasmine shrieked again, still tearing the creatures from her legs. ‘Lief, Barda! They are on you too! They are—eating us alive!’
16 – Blood and Bone
The next moment Lief and Barda too were stamping, kicking, shuddering as they plucked from their bodies the hundreds of scarlet petal-shaped horrors that had cut through their clothes, then begun gnawing at their flesh.
Lief’s hands were slippery with blood. His head was spinning. As fast as he tore the creatures away, others were attacking, crawling up from the trampled lilies beneath his feet, slipping silently from the stems that nodded all around him.
His blood ran in streams into the rich earth, and it seemed to Lief that the lilies around them trembled with pleasure as they drank.
He felt disgust, horror, fear. But he felt no pain. Dizzy and unbelieving, he watched as a red creature fastened itself to his wrist and bit deeply. Blood flowed over the smears of yellow pollen that marked his skin. He pulled the creature off. A scrap of his flesh tore away with it, but he felt nothing at all.
It is the pollen, he thought hazily. The pollen numbs the skin. That is why we did not realise what was happening. The lilies shelter the creatures and prepare their victims. The creatures’ leavings feed the lilies. It is a partnership. A horrible partnership…
He stared, revolted, at the flowers around him, seeing them properly for the first time. He saw the scarlet petals fringed with black, the cluster of trembling stamens in the centre, heavy with pollen.
Blood Lilies. Blood Lilies… and Fleshbanes.
The names floated into his mind quite suddenly. And with the names came a picture—a vivid painting of scarlet flowers. For some reason the memory made him think of the library in Del. The library…
And suddenly his face burned as he realised that he had seen the painting in Josef’s book—The Deltora Book of Monsters. But he had read none of the text except the title.
Leafing quickly through the book so as to be able to tell Josef that he had read it, he had not even noticed the creatures that Josef had no doubt shown camouflaged among the lily flowers.
Fool! he told himself savagely. If you had taken the time to read the words you would have known the blood lilies were on this island. You would have known of the fleshbanes. You would have been warned—
Why did Ava not warn us?
The question pierced his mind like an arrow, but before he could think too much about it he became aware that Jasmine was shrieking to Barda.
The next moment Barda charged forward and, ignoring the fleshbanes still clinging to his body, began felling lilies by the dozen with great sweeps of his sword.
That will do no good, Barda! Lief thought in desperation. The lilies may die, but the fleshbanes will live on. They will keep attacking us from below.
He pressed his bloodstained hands to the Belt of Deltora.
‘Help us!’ he whispered, concentrating with all his might. ‘Dragon of the diamond, hear me! Help—’
His heart leaped as suddenly Barda jumped back and with a crackling roar the heap of slashed lilies burst into flames. The next moment juicy stems were spitting and hissing as they burned. Leaves and flowers were shrivelling. Fleshbanes in their hundreds were curling and dying.
Joyfully Lief looked up, searching the sky for the dragon that must at last have answered his call.
But no vast, glittering shape hovered above them. No matter how keenly he looked, he could only see Kree, swooping and screeching amid the slowly rising smoke.
Dazed with disappointment and confusion, he looked down again. Where the fallen lilies had been there was now a smoking circle of blackened earth littered with the charred bones of birds which had fallen victim to the fleshbanes in times past. And stepping onto the blackened patch, grinning in triumph, was Jasmine, the jar of fire beads clutched in her hand.
In seconds she was wreathed in steam as her wet boots sank into the hot ground. As Lief watched, she took more beads from the jar and threw them violently into the lilies ahead of her.
Flames leaped upward. The lilies caught fire, burning like torches, then collapsing into piles of soggy ash. The blackened patch lengthened.
Lief stumbled into the centre of the burned ground with Barda close behind him. Safe from further attack at last, they tore the remaining fleshbanes from their skin and crushed them into the steaming earth.