No … I have made no mistake. Oh, what wicked trickery is this? … If only I had remembered! Fool! Fool!
Then Lief blinked, and the vision was gone. The desk was empty, and Josef’s body was lying on the bed. Tomorrow Josef would be laid to rest with all the ceremony befitting a Deltoran hero, but he would spend this night in his own, humble room.
‘You will be avenged, Josef,’ Lief said softly. ‘Rest well.’
He glanced at the desk a second time as he turned to go. He had a niggling feeling that something about his fleeting vision had been wrong, but could not think what it could be.
He moved on to Paff’s room. Here the curtains were open, and the room’s air was golden with late afternoon light.
Paff lay propped up on pillows, exactly as Lief had seen her when he had first entered this room before sunrise. But she was no longer stiff and sweating. Her eyes were peacefully closed.
Beside her, in a chair dragged from behind the desk, sat Doom. A gleaming hunting knife lay across his knees. He raised his head as Lief entered the room. His shadowed face showed no surprise.
‘Stay back, Lief,’ he said softly.
‘You know I cannot,’ Lief said, moving forward.
Doom stared at him for a moment, then turned back to the sleeping girl. Her eyelids had begun to flutter.
‘Soon she will wake,’ he said. ‘I should have cut her throat before this. I do not know why I hesitated.’
‘Perhaps because you knew I would come,’ Lief said. ‘In your heart you know I must hear what she has to say.’
Doom shook his head restlessly. His long, brown fingers caressed the gleaming blade of the knife.
‘You do not know what it is to be utterly alone, Lief,’ he said. ‘You do not know the agony of having all you love torn from you. You have never felt the rage, the pain, the white-hot desire for revenge that burns from within until all that remains is dark despair, a yawning emptiness craving to be filled.’
‘I have not felt it as you have,’ Lief answered. ‘But I have felt the evil force that promises to fill the emptiness with riches and power in return for service to its will. And I know that other choices can be made. You know it too, Doom.’
Doom shrugged, and half-smiled. The knife fell clattering to the floor.
Paff’s eyes opened. She stared dreamily at the ceiling, then turned her head to look at Lief and Doom.
‘Josef?’ she murmured.
‘Josef is dead,’ Doom said in a level voice.
‘So … he is silenced,’ said the girl, her voice soft as a sigh. ‘How he hated and feared you by the end, Doom. He feared you almost as much as I did. But—but it does not matter now, does it? Nothing matters now.’
Tears welled in her eyes. Slowly she relaxed her fingers, and the emeralds spilled onto the white bed cover.
‘I tried so hard,’ she whispered, her voice so faint that Lief had to bend to hear her. ‘When I began, I had—such hopes! I thought of nothing but pleasing him. I did more—even more than he asked. And yet …’
‘And yet at the last he turned his back on you,’ Lief said. ‘He abandoned you. Why, Paff? Why?’
The girl stared at him through her tears. ‘Perhaps I tried too hard,’ she whispered. ‘Perhaps I did too much. My Master has many plans.’
And with the desperation of a trapped creature snatching at its only chance of escape, she threw herself forward and clutched the Belt of Deltora.
Lief tried to jump back, but Paff’s grip was as strong as iron. He watched in horror as her face twisted, her back arched. There was a ghastly smell of burning. And with a cry that was more relief than pain, the failed, abandoned guardian of the south fell back on her pillows, released from her torment at last.
16 - Shocks
When Lief and Doom returned to the kitchen, they found it in uproar. Manus had joined the party at the table, but he was not the cause of the excitement and distress. The cause was Kree.
After hearing the news that four Kin were on their way bearing the gems Lief had asked for, Jasmine had discovered that the old injury on Kree’s neck had reopened. Trying to clean the freshly-flowing blood away, she had found something lodged inside the wound.
‘It must have been buried deep, and gradually worked its way upward,’ she said. ‘No wonder the wound would not heal properly.’
She held the object out in the palm of her hand. It was a small grey glass bead. Red lines swirled within it.
Shuddering, Lief picked up the bead and threw it into the stove. It hissed, glowed briefly, then cracked and melted away.
‘So now it is clear how our enemies always knew where we were,’ Barda said heavily. ‘We were only safe when Kree was not with us. He was carrying the Shadow Lord’s eye, all along.’
Kree squawked loudly and indignantly.
‘Of course you did not know, Kree,’ Jasmine soothed. ‘The device must have been put into your neck when you were drugged that first time you came back to Del. Someone in the palace did it—someone …’
‘It was Paff,’ Lief said quietly.
‘Paff?’ exploded Barda.
‘Paff was the guardian of the south,’ Lief said. ‘But she will trouble us no more. The beast she sent to destroy us could withstand the power of the Belt, but she could not.’
The startled faces around the kitchen table grew sombre as the story of Paff’s death was told. Lief and Doom did not relish the telling. Both felt they had failed.
‘I wanted to spare her the horror of awakening,’ Doom said. ‘She had become a monster of wickedness, yet still I—I felt I understood how she had come to take the wrong path. She had lost everything. She was loved by no-one. Her misery had made her easy prey for the Shadow Lord.’
The corner of his mouth twisted in the familiar, mocking smile. ‘But Lief wanted her alive, to tell what she knew,’ he added. ‘For once, Lief was the ruthless one. But Paff outwitted him.’
‘Not for the first time,’ Lief said grimly. ‘She deceived me completely. The black slime attacked us in the chapel just after Gla-Thon came running to tell us that Paff had taken a turn for the worse. But still I did not understand. It was only when Jasmine spoke of trances, and I remembered how Paff had looked in her room just before the dawn attack, that I realised what she was.’
‘It was when I carried her out of the palace that I guessed it,’ said Doom. ‘She was as rigid as a stone statue. None of the other plague victims had been so.’
‘I confess, I tried desperately to believe it was not true,’ Lief muttered. ‘I could not bear the thought that I had left Josef helpless in Paff’s hands, to be kept drugged and confused, pumped for information and finally poisoned when she had no further use for him.’
‘You are not the only one who will carry that burden till death,’ muttered Ranesh.
‘I am most at fault,’ Doom said. ‘Plainly Paff was poisoning Josef’s mind against me for months. My impatience only made him fear and distrust me the more.’
‘And you were reading his letters before they were sent,’ Barda put in. ‘No doubt he suspected you were changing them, or not sending them at all.’
‘I think they were changed—at least one of them,’ Lief said quietly.
He pulled out the letter he had received from Josef on their way to the Isle of the Dead.
‘See here?’ he said, tapping the two small pages. Josef says he knows where we are going, but he fails to warn us of the danger lurking on Blood Lily Island. I could not understand that, but now I think I do.’
He held the pages out to Doom. ‘Am I right in thinking that Paff delivered this to you for sending?’ he asked.
‘Indeed she did,’ Doom frowned. ‘Josef took an age to write his note, and I was impatient. I shouted from the entrance hall, and a few moments later Paff came running like a scared rabbit. I scanned the note on my way to the bird room. It was confused and scrappy enough, but I certainly did not change it.’