Castle Perilous Read online

  “Not necessarily.”

  Kwip was pacing slowly in a circle behind Jacoby’s chair. Until he saw the sweeping view from the terrace, he had thought the castle a human artifact, albeit an enchanted one. Now he was convinced otherwise. Its sheer bulk alone argued for a supernatural origin. And its lord could not possibly be anything less than the Prince of Demons.

  “Anything wrong, Kwip?” Linda asked.

  “Eh? No, nothing.”

  Gene stood. “One thing for sure — we’re not going to find anything hanging around here.”

  “You’re right about that, Gene, old buddy,” Snowclaw said. “I don’t know about you people, but it’s too damn warm in this place for me. I got to find me some snow and ice or I’ll go ‘bananas’ too … whatever they are.”

  “You want me to conjure a snowbank for you?” Linda said.

  “Thanks, Linda. No, not right now, but if I get desperate, I’ll let you know.”

  “Let’s look for a way down,” Gene said.

  Linda said, “I don’t want to leave the castle, Gene. Not for that wasteland outside.”

  “Neither do I, now that you mention it. I was just thinking that we should try to find a way downstairs. If the portal to our world is still open, it’d be down there somewhere. That’s where we came in, I think. Looked like the basement, anyway. Right, Snowy?”

  Snowclaw shrugged his massive, furry shoulders. “Hard to tell.”

  “Yeah, I know. But let’s give it a try anyway.”

  “Sure.”

  Jacoby was laughing silently.

  “You don’t have to come with us,” Gene said sardonically.

  “Sorry,” Jacoby said, “but your stubbornness is rather amusing. Quite admirable in a way, though.”

  “Thanks. Linda, are you coming?”

  She looked at Jacoby, then at Gene. “Sure,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m game for anything,” Jacoby said, rising. “Shall we look for a lift, then?”

  Linda said, “Don’t be silly, Mr. Jacoby.”

  “Hey,” Gene said, “maybe he has something.”

  “Only joking, my boy. As far as I know, there aren’t —”

  “No, what I mean is, Linda can conjure one up!”

  “Huh?” Linda said, wide-eyed. “Conjure an elevator?”

  “Why not?”

  Linda thought about it, then threw her arms wide. “Well, by golly, why not?” She stood and stared at the near wall, putting a finger to her chin. Her brow wrinkled. “Hmm,” she mused.

  Kwip looked confused. “Pardon —”

  “What is it, Kwip?” Gene said.

  “At times your speech is passing strange. Pray tell, what is an ‘elevator’?”

  “Just watch.”

  Before Gene had finished speaking the words, a soft chime sounded. Gene turned his head and saw elevator doors opening in the near wall. Above them an inset light shaped like an arrow glowed red; the arrow pointed downwards.

  “Going down?” Gene called.

  “Do you think it really works?” Linda said with some concern. “I don’t know anything about mechanical things.”

  Gene walked into the small metal cubical and looked it over. “It’s pretty convincing.”

  “It could all be an illusion.” Linda entered and stood beside him.

  “The food you whipped up certainly was no illusion. I even got heartburn from the béarnaise sauce.” Gene examined the controls. “This looks like your average automatic job, only no floor buttons. Just Up and Down, and, let’s see, what this … Open Door, Close Door, and Emergency Stop. Standard.”

  “But why doesn’t it have floor buttons?”

  “I don’t know. It’s your elevator. Why doesn’t it?”

  Linda brushed a wisp of blond hair from her forehead. “I wish I knew how I do what I do.”

  “Yeah, that voodoo that you do so well. Maybe you should give it some thought. C’mon, gang, all aboard.”

  They all piled in. With Snowclaw it was a little crowded. Gene checked for toes sticking out, then hit the Close Door switch. Outside and inside doors hissed shut.

  The car remained motionless.

  “Well,” Gene said. “Here goes.” He hit the Down button.

  The floor dropped out from under them. Jacoby shrieked, Linda screamed. Gene yelled, and the car was suddenly acrawl with floating bodies. The elevator plummeted. Gene frantically tried to swim back to the control panel, but Snowclaw’s hairy white bulk was in the way.

  They fell for a short eternity. Gene grabbed handfuls of white fur and shook.

  “Snowy! The red button!”

  “Huh?”

  “Hit the button! Hit the button!”

  Snowclaw got the idea and slammed his fist into the control panel. There came an ear-splitting squeal of distressed metal, then a horrendous clanking and groaning, followed by a loud, heavy thud.

  It was an abrupt stop. Everyone wound up in a heap on the floor. There were moans and muffled, urgent requests.

  “What?” Snowclaw asked.

  “Get … off … my leg,” Jacoby puffed.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Everybody okay?” Gene asked after he got his breath. “Linda?”

  “I thought we were going to die.” Her face was fish-belly white. “I’m going to be sick.”

  Kwip picked himself up and exhaled. “This is an elevator, then?”

  “Not quite,” Gene said. “It seems to lack certain mechanical necessities.”

  “We must have fallen a hundred stories,” Jacoby said, his face a cadaverous shade of gray.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Linda said.

  “It was my idea,” Gene said. “I should have known that nothing mechanical would work inside the castle. Forget it. Let’s get this door open.” Gene bent to examine the juncture of the inside doors. He tried to pry them open with his fingers. “They probably lock automatically,” he said. He looked at Linda. “You okay?”

  She burped. “Excuse me. My stomach is still ten floors up. Yeah, I’m fine. Well, not fine.” She rubbed her middle and scrutinized the control panel. “Why not just hit the door button?”

  Gene thought about it. “Why not? Just don’t touch that Down switch again.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” Linda said. She held her breath, then gingerly pressed the Open Door button.

  The doors rolled apart, revealing a solid stone wall.

  “Of course,” Gene said.

  “Allow me,” Kwip said, stepping forward.

  A moment later Gene tapped him on the arm. Kwip’s shoulders drew back and his head came ghosting out of the wall.

  Kwip’s eyes gleamed strangely.

  “See anything on the other side?” Gene asked.

  “Aye, but …” Kwip gave Gene an odd look. “I need to get a mite closer.” He stepped into the wall again, this time disappearing completely.

  Gene chewed his lip, then said, “Linda, do you think you could materialize an opening of some sort?”

  Linda thought about it. “That’s an interesting question.”

  She could, and it turned out to be a door with a graceful Gothic arch. It led into a vast room of unusual geometry, though the room was the last thing they noticed, for in the middle of it, high atop a dark, irregularly shaped supporting stanchion, sat an amber-colored crystalline mass of enormous proportions and complexity. It glowed with its own lambent light, throwing strange shadows into the farthest corners of the immense chamber.

  Gene whistled and said, “Good God, look at the size of that thing!”

  “The Brain,” Jacoby breathed.

  “What?” Linda asked him.

  “The Brain of Ramthonodox. The legendary jewel.”

  “Yeah?” Gene said. “Is it supposed to have magic powers or something?”

  “Enormous powers,” Jacoby said soberly, then licked dry lips.

  The doorway hung about four feet off the floor. Snowclaw jumped off first and helped Linda down, then Jac
oby. Gene leaped, and landed with knees bent.

  Kwip did not turn to look at them. He stood on the edge of the platform on which they had alighted, his gaze fixed on the enormous jewel.

  Gene came up and stood beside him. “Really something,” he said.

  “Aye,” Kwip said quietly.

  “How in the hell did they get it in here? They must’ve built the castle around it.”

  “Likely did.”

  The stone was a single glittering mass, a giant star with thousands of short crystalline spikes radiating from a spherical central body. Fingers of amber fire moved and weaved throughout the stone’s interior.

  Jacoby seemed transported. “Beautiful,” he murmured. “The color …”

  “Gorgeous,” Linda said.

  Looking down, Kwip spied a way across the jumbled, many-tiered floor, stepped down from the platform and began to make his way toward the center of the chamber. Gene followed.

  “C’mon guys,” he said.

  The room looked like a Gothic amphitheater without seats, or a cathedral built in the shape of a bowl. Its roof was a complex arrangement of stone-ribbed vaults supported by clusters of slender pillars. The supporting stanchion stood where the stage or altar would have been. To get there they had to make their way down a series of terraced platforms. At the bottom they crossed a smooth stone floor and stopped at the foot of the stanchion.

  Each radiating facet was a hexahedron tapering to a point, and all were of different thicknesses and lengths. Some were the size of a finger. They all sparkled and shone with an amber phosphorescence.

  Kwip eyed the stanchion. It was a fractured, irregularly shaped mass of dull black rock, its apex lost among the thicket of crystalline shafts at the mammoth jewel’s underside. At floor level the rock was at least fifty paces across.

  The rock could be climbed.

  “Is that thing just balanced up there?” Gene said. “What’s supporting it?”

  “It’s difficult to see,” Kwip said, squinting.

  “Weird.” Gene turned and glanced around the chamber. “Looks like no way out. Linda, you’ll have to cut another door for us.”

  “Can do.”

  Jacoby shot Gene a look of annoyed contempt. “Don’t you realize what we have here? This is the castle’s source of power.”

  “Yeah? Where’s the plug? I’m gonna pull that sucker.”

  “You’re a fool.”

  “What do you propose we do? Take it with us?”

  “Of course not.”

  Gene threw his arms wide. “Then what’s your beef, Jacoby?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Jacoby sniffed.

  “Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m just ticked off because I got passed over when they handed out the magic tricks.”

  “Gene, your powers will come,” Linda said. “It’s different for each person.”

  “What about me?” Snowclaw complained. “I’m in the same boat.”

  Gene said, “You’re so big you don’t need hocus-pocus.”

  “I want to get closer to it,” Jacoby said, walking toward the base of the stanchion. When he realized how steep it was, he stopped, hesitating. Then he screwed his courage up a notch and began climbing.

  “Oh, for —” Gene stamped his foot and followed. “C’mon, Snowy. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I don’t want him mucking with whatever that is up there.”

  “Right.”

  Kwip and Linda watched them climb after Jacoby.

  “Mistress Linda —”

  “Just call me Linda.”

  “I would be pleased to. Linda, might I ask a small favor?”

  Above, Jacoby huffed and puffed, then quit. Looking up the jagged slope, he saw it was no use, and the enthusiasm sputtered out of him like air out of a balloon. He sat on a narrow ledge and watched Gene and Snowclaw climb up after him.

  “What’s the matter, Jacoby? Waiting for your Sherpa guide?”

  Jacoby smiled thinly. “You’re young — you go up.”

  Gene bent to peer at the surface of the rock. It looked like anthracite but was as hard as granite. “Okay, I will.”

  It was tough going, and Gene made it almost to the top. What made him stop was the sight of the bottommost spike of the jewel floating inches off the sharp apex of the rock. There was something else going on up here. He heard a faint crackling and a barely audible hum like the singing of high-tension electrical lines. He looked more closely at the jewel. Faint blue lines of force stretched between the underside of the jewel and the peak of the black massif.

  The tip of one of the spikes hung directly above him. He reached, slowly, putting out his index finger. He hesitated, finger poised. He drew back. Then he touched it.

  It was cold, very cold. He took his finger away and rubbed its tip against his breeches.

  “Some kind of weird,” he muttered.

  When he got back down, they were all waiting for him.

  “What’s up there?” Linda wanted to know.

  “Some guy selling Amway. What do you people want to do?”

  “I’d like to get out of here,” Linda said. “It’s cold, and that thing up there is giving me the spooks.”

  When they had climbed back up out of the amphitheater, Linda materialized another doorway, this one leading into a curving passageway. They turned right and followed it until it met another tube leading away from the outer wall of the amphitheater.

  At length Kwip halted. “Gods of a pig’s arse.”

  “What?” Gene asked.

  “Left me rucksack back there. I shan’t be a minute.” He turned and headed back.

  “Wait, I’ll go with you.”

  “You needn’t bother, my friend.”

  Gene stopped running after Kwip, watched until the dark-bearded man rounded the corner, then walked back.

  Linda asked, “Anyone for lunch? Dinner? Whatever it is.”

  Jacoby patted his stomach. “Always feeding time at this zoo, I’m afraid. Another wedding feast, my dear?”

  “No, I’m going to try for my friend Shelly’s brother’s bar mitzvah.”

  Gene said, “I could go for a corned beef on rye piled with cole slaw with Russian dressing.”

  “I like a man who knows what he wants. It was a sit-down dinner, though. I don’t remember if they had cold cuts.”

  They didn’t, although there were a number of sizable rib roasts.

  “Oh, now I remember,” Linda said. “Prime rib au jus.”

  “Kosher, I guess,” Gene said.

  “You bet. Will you carve, Gene?”

  “Sure. What’ll it be, Jacoby? Well-done, medium, rare, still ruminating …?”

  Jacoby was staring back down the hall. “Hm? Oh, rare will be fine.”

  Gene handed him a plate with a slab of meat on it. Jacoby looked at it, then resumed gazing down the corridor.

  Gene served Linda, then Snowclaw, who’d commented that the stuff looked edible enough to sample. Gene cut a medium-rare slice for himself and sat down. He was about to dig in when he noticed Jacoby still looking off moodily.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t trust that chap.”

  “He seems like a nice man,” Linda said. “A little strange. I mean, he asked me for that tool, and I gave it to him, but I don’t have the slightest idea what he wanted it for.”

  Gene cocked an eyebrow. “What tool?”

  “Didn’t you — Oh, you guys were climbing the rock. He wanted a little … what would you call it? A hammer with a sort of chisel on one end of it. A pickax. Like a thing a mountain climber uses. He described it to me, and I whipped one up for him.”

  Gene looked at Jacoby.

  “You don’t think —” Gene began, but just then a ringing came from the hall of the jewel, as from a strange and ominous bell, growing louder and louder ….

  I’m thrice damned, Kwip thought as he climbed.

  He’d have to make this quick. He neared the top, stopped and searched for a suitable spike, o
ne small enough to hide in the backpack.

  One of the smaller shafts caught his eye. He reached, and could just barely grasp its tip. No good. He stepped up higher and reached again. The jewel was cold to the touch.

  Damn me, Kwip thought, I’d steal from the Dark One himself. But I must, I must have at least a part of it!

  He got out the pickax, reached up and grasped the shaft. It felt like ice, but its warm amber light filled his eyes, and the shifting fire drew him into its warmth. He struck with the pick end of the tool. With a sharp, high-pitched pinging sound the end of the shaft broke off easily in his hand. He inspected the fragment briefly, noting that it still glowed. He looked about, listening. Droning like a crystal bell, the entire jewel began to resonate with the sound of the breaking.

  He dropped the crystal into the backpack and hurried down. By the time he reached bottom, the ringing had grown into an ear-splitting alarm, its painfully high note reverberating in the stone bowl of the amphitheater, growing ever louder. As echoes multiplied, the noise swelled to an overwhelming crescendo, and soon the air was rent by an unbearably loud, horrendous keening that shook the ancient walls.

  The floor quaked. Kwip stumbled and fell. He got to his knees and covered his ears. His scream of pain went unheard as the air shattered around him.

  Library

  Osmirik laid the heavy folio aside and rubbed his eyes. He had read enough, and the truth lay on him like the rubble of a landslide. His worst fears had been justified. The ancient chroniclers were quite clear on the matter.

  Despite the sick, hollow feeling in his stomach, he was scholar enough to still be in awe of the books and scrolls that lay piled before him. Priceless specimens such as these were not to be found even in Hunra, nor anywhere else, he suspected. He felt a distant pang of regret that they would most likely be blown to dust and scattered to the winds when the castle vanished. Or perhaps they, too, were mere conjurings.

  It did not matter. All that mattered was thwarting Melydia. But how?

  Mad Melydia. She would stop at nothing in her quest for vengeance. For years she nursed the wound that Incarnadine had inflicted; for years she plotted and schemed. She learned her Arts well, then cast about for suitable puppets to employ in her little dumb show. To the east lived a prince with a domineering empress mother. He needed lands to conquer, and a bride on whom his mother would look with favor. A spell, a puff of smoke from a brazier, and he did Melydia’s bidding, while the empress looked on with an approving smile.