The Third Door

‘Pieter,’ Carryl called feebly. ‘Zak …’

Keelin staggered to his feet and in a blink had reached the workroom.

The two boys were crouched together halfway to the door, plaster swirling like fine rain around them. Pieter had fallen. Zak was struggling to pull him up. Keelin seized them both, one in each arm, and sped them out of the workroom, through the lobby, and out into the air. How he moved with such speed he had no idea. He never gave the ring on his finger a single thought.

‘Zak, get Pieter away!’ he ordered, and plunged back for Carryl.

She was lying where he had left her, a vast beam across her chest, pinning her down.

‘Pieter …’ she murmured, as Keelin struggled to free her.

‘Outside. Safe. With Zak.’

Her eyes closed in relief. ‘Pocket,’ she croaked. ‘Book. For Farr. Then go. Go!’

There was a low rumbling sound. Straining timbers squeaked and cracked.

Get out! Get out! Get out!

‘I cannot—leave—you,’ Keelin gasped, struggling with the beam, refusing to listen to the voice screaming in his mind though his head felt as if it was bursting.

Carryl’s eyes fluttered open. They fixed him with a stern gaze. It seemed to him that the blue was already fading.

Sweat broke out on her forehead as with her one free hand she fumbled in the pocket of her overalls and pulled out a small book with a faded leather cover. Her cracked lips opened. The voice came, harsh with pain but full of authority.

‘I am finished. Save the book! Get it to Farr! Tell him to …’

And that was all. The words died on her lips as her brave heart gave up its struggle and her pain ended.

Shaking, Keelin pulled the book from the dead fingers. Turning to run, he looked down at the title, printed in gold on the front.

He stared at the title, transfixed.

It is going! GET OUT!

There was a groaning crash. The rumbling mounted to a roar. Clutching the book, Keelin took a single step towards the doorway. And then the floor gave way beneath his feet, and the world collapsed in on him.

11 - The Pit

He woke in the dark. He woke to raging thirst, to the smell of dust and decay, to a sense of ancient evil so strong that for a time he could only lie shivering without thought, listening to the sound of his own ragged breaths. Then slowly, slowly, his mind began to work. Little by little he remembered what had happened to him, where he was …

And who he was.

‘Rye,’ he whispered aloud. Suddenly his time as Keelin, the stranger, seemed like a dream. The shadows that had darkened his memory were still there, but they were clearing in patches that broadened every moment.

Sonia, Rye thought. Dirk. Sholto. Where are they? Why did they not come for me? Are they safe? The wings of terror fluttered briefly at the edges of his mind, but he brushed them away. He could not afford weakness now. And surely he would know if Sonia, Dirk and Sholto were in danger or dead.

Cautiously he moved one hand, then the other. He tested his feet, his legs. He sat up, wincing at the pain in his head, and the light debris that had covered him fell away in a chinking, rattling shower.

He felt for the bell tree stick. By a miracle, it was still in his belt, and unbroken. In another moment he had found that the bag of powers, too, was safe.

The wave of warmth these discoveries gave him did not last long. Soon the evil-smelling darkness was pressing in on him again, and his skin was crawling at the thought of what might be lurking within it. He pulled the light crystal from the bag. Its brilliance was a blessing, but so dazzling that at first he had to shield his eyes. Squinting through slitted fingers he peered around him.

He had fallen onto a heap of dust and ash thick with small, blackened twists of metal and crumbling objects that looked horribly like human bones. Grimy stone walls rose all around him. It was like being at the bottom of a huge well.

His stomach churning, he looked up and saw a jumble of wood and stone wedged into place high above his head.

Then he understood. He had fallen into a great pit in the ancient foundations of the museum—a burial pit, by the looks of things. Now that his eyes had become accustomed to the light he could see that some of the metal pieces looked like belt buckles, buttons and a brooch that might once have fastened a cloak. Beside him was a round object that he feared was the top of a skull. Gingerly he touched it and it crumbled into dust very similar to the dust on which he sat.

Shuddering, Rye looked up again. Part of a wall had fallen over the top of the pit, sealing it and so protecting him when the rest of the building collapsed.

There were small gaps in the seal—places where wood crisscrossed, and massive stones lay at an angle. He could squeeze through one of those gaps, he was sure of it. But who knew what was above? There might be nothing but more stones, more huge beams, and no way of escape. But he had to find out, for what other hope did he have?

Rye took the feather from the bag. As he shakily crawled to his feet, something that had been lying beneath him caught his eye. It was the little book that Carryl had pulled from her pocket—the book she had begged him with her dying breath to save. He had forgotten it. But there it lay, pressed wide open, its fragile pages creased by the weight of his body.

He picked it up. An old, frayed ribbon bookmark trailed in the fold between the pages. Perhaps that was why the book had fallen open at that place. As the light of the crystal passed over it, a section seemed to leap out at him from the end of the right-hand page. Some of the words were underlined, as if Carryl had thought them particularly worthy of note.

And so the great charm was forged and the chieftain, well satisfied, put it close to his heart and rode away from the forests with his bride. Once home, he ordered a gold casket to be made, and when the casket was ready he put the charm inside it and hid it away where no enemy could find it. For all the years that followed he guarded the secret of the hiding place jealously, telling it only to his eldest son, who was his favourite. At the end of his life he died peacefully, believing that what he had done would keep his people safe forever. But the future was not to be as he would have wished. And so it happened that in time the secret of the hiding place was lost, and the gold casket has never been seen by human eyes from that day to this.

Rye stared, his heart beating fast. So this was what Carryl had wanted Farr to see! The tale of a lost treasure—Fellan, by the sound of it. Carryl had come to believe that the casket was hidden somewhere beneath the museum, and she had been working night and day to find it. Perhaps she hoped that Farr could use the charm inside to combat the enemy by magic, and so avoid bloodshed.

Rye could just imagine how Councillors Manx, Barron and Sigrid would have greeted such an idea. And even Farr, fond of the old chieftain as he might have been, would surely not have been able to accept her story. Farr was a supremely practical man.

But Rye, shivering amid the bones of the long dead, haunted by the creeping sense of evil that seemed to seep from the very stones that surrounded him, knew that Carryl’s claim could not be dismissed out of hand.

And he knew something else that Farr did not know. The Enemy was the Lord of Shadows.

Rye groaned aloud as all the urgency he had felt in the time before he had lost his memory came back to him in a great rush.

Why was he standing here when time was racing by—when so much time had been lost already? Farr might be even now raising his army, driven to furious action at last by the attack on the museum, Zak’s narrow escape, and Carryl’s death. Almost certainly, he believed that ‘Keelin’ was dead too.