Siren stared at the sealed doorway, wondering if the
Barrowhounds beyond would be able to break through it somehow, but the doors
seemed completely solid - indeed, it was as if there had been no door there at
all - and she couldn't hear any sounds coming from the other side. She could imagine the hounds sniffing and
slavering and barking beyond.
After a moment she turned and tried to take in the
hall in which they now stood. In terms
of scale it was enormous. Nothing along
the lines of Enoch, of course, this was a much more human kind of enormity, but
it certainly made the open spaces of the Silverspire seem small in comparison.
Everything was dark, in monochrome shades edged with
tarnished silver and faded gold.
Ornamentation and detail was everywhere she looked, but it was all
layered in dust and draped in cobwebs.
The floor beneath their feet was marble, but this only became clear when
they moved and saw the veined stonework in their dust-rimmed footprints. Several corridors led off the main hall and
all were as dark and foreboding as Siren had expected. The only light came from a few candelabras on
the walls, the candles lit with unnatural, pale flames.
"Where do we go from here?" she asked
after catching her breath.
"I'm quite 'appy standin' 'ere," Gulliver
said, leaning against a cobwebby wall and then jumping as something large and
spidrous scuttled into a crevice beside him.
"Mostly 'appy," he amended.
"For a change I think my brother's right,"
said Harker, "we'll stay here until the coast is clear and then we can
find somewhere else to shelter. There's
no sense stirring up a Vampire's nest if we don't have to."
Several of the crew were nodding in fervent
agreement, but Franck was shaking his head.
"No, no, no, no, no!" he was almost
shouting, the sound echoed shockingly off the marble floor, "We cannot sit
around in the hallway of a Vampire Lord and expect to go unnoticed!"
"Well of course we can't if you're going to
shout like that," Harker replied, his tone desperately measured.
"Oh, nonsense.
Do you think a Vampire's hearing so bad that I needed to shout to get
its attention. This Blood Dragon has
known we're here since we arrived on his doorstep. I'd rather find him and face him than wait
for him to pounce out of the shadows and take us out one by one!"
"I think you're ascribing far too much power to
this Vampire. We don't even know for
certain that he's here!"
"He's here, alright," came the small voice
of Annabella, standing a few metres away in the gloom, "I can hear him,
he's whispering to me."
All eyes turned to the little girl and, standing
there in the darkness, eyes wide with preternatural knowledge, listening to the
whispered ministrations of a Vampire Lord, she looked terrifying. Even after months in her company, Siren felt
a chill run down her spine. Knowing what
the girl was didn't seem to help even a little bit.
"Then we must find him, and quickly!"
Franck decided and before anyone could stop him he was marching along the
largest of all the corridors into the darkness.
"I suppose we follow him, then?" Siren
said, instantly regretting the question.
"Well, some of us should," Harker agreed
and then there followed a few moments of whispered mutterings as the crew split
themselves into ‘would-go’s and ‘would-not’s.
Most of the crew wanted to stay and so Gulliver, Rockspark, Miss
Barkcastle and Ember agreed to stay with them.
"I'll make sure they come to no harm," the
golden-haired Fallen had said and Rockspark nodded, mountain-like behind him.
Siren took Ellis' hand and Harker had Annabella's
before they said goodbye to their friends and disappeared after the Former
Baron.
The corridor they followed was much like the
vestibule in decor and dishevelment, though it was hard to see where they going
since the lit candelabras were so infrequent as to be almost useless. There were doors to rotting dining halls,
drawing rooms and state rooms to either side, but much of the furniture seemed
to have been removed or destroyed sometime in the past. Siren peered into them
briefly as they passed, but with Franck nowhere in sight, they couldn't afford
to linger.
They found him, eventually, scratching his head
beneath his hat and staring quite fixedly at a great barricade of baroque
furnishings which blocked the corridor.
He turned as he heard their footsteps behind him and gave them a thin
smile.
"Well this is quite the puzzle," he said
by way of greeting, "why would anyone build a barricade here?"
"Perhaps to keep the Vampire in?" Harker
suggested.
"Oh, this little pile of furniture wouldn't
hold a Vampire at bay. It makes no sense
at all!"
"Is there another way around?" Siren asked.
"Not that I can see," Franck replied,
shaking his head, "besides, this barrier is too much of a temptation. I'm sure that the Vampire must be on the
other side of and now I need to know why!"
And before anyone could stop him Franck was pulling
away rotted cushions and end tables and pieces of chaise longues and just
scattering them on the floor. The others
stood in stunned silence for a moment until he added, "Well, don't just
stand there!" Annabella shrugged
and started to do what she could and then Siren and Harker had little else to
do but follow suit. Soon antique
furnishings were flying everywhere and the barricade was steadily diminishing
in size, and as the blockade decreased it became clear that the other side of
it was a different world entirely.
The dark, dank, dingy corridor was, at the exact
point of the barricade, completely replaced by a version of itself as it must
have looked hundreds, if not thousands of years previously. The candelabra's were full of brightly
burning candles, the marble shone, the walls glistened and the pattern of
alternating red and white polished panelling could clearly be seen with its
pristine gilt edging.
"I was sure it was black," Siren said,
examining a patch of wall on their side of the barricade and finding that it was,
indeed, sable in colour. The change occurred
like a fade-in across the line of the barricade, just where the light of the
candles shone.
"It must be some kind of Hypostatick
field," Franck said, pulling objects out of the pile at an even greater
rate than before, "it transmutes the materials wherever it touches, but
the true state of things remains where it does not. Judging by the effect of the light, it is
something to do with those candles."
Siren gazed at the fully lit candelabra’s on the
other side and saw one of the flames gutter for a moment in a familiar green
light. It was hard to tell, but she
though the walls nearest the barricade dimmed a little at the same moment.
“Whatever it is, it looks like it’s getting weaker,”
she observed.
“Yes,” Franck agreed, scratching his head again, “it
really is most puzzling.”
It only took them a few more moments to clear the
barricade enough that they could cross it, making a mockery of whatever kind of
defence it was supposed to have offered to whoever built it. Then they were faced with another stretch of
corridor. The Former Baron led the way.
Eventually the corridor deposited them before a
grand set of double doors.
“This must be it,” Harker said, his voice less
steady than usual.
“I can hear him beyond,” Annabella added.
“Yes, well, I think the best way to do this is just
to confront it all head on!” said Franck as he immediately began pushing one of
the doors. It didn’t budge.
“Uh, Franck?”
The old man continued to push a moment longer,
giving it all his strength until he was groaning with the effort.
“Franck?”
“Don’t… just… stand… there… … help… me… !” he
huffed.
“Franck!”
He stopped pushing, turned to face his companions and
gave them a look of such practised disappointment that it still took him a
moment to realise that Siren was frowning at him.
“What?” he asked.
“The door has handles, Franck.”
The old man turned and scratched his head.
“Oh, so it has,” he said in a small voice, and then he
took one of them in his thin grip, turned it sharply, flung the door open
towards himself and strode through as if the embarrassing incident had never
happened. Siren, Harker and Annabella
glanced at each other before following.
Ellis continued to stare at the floor, but Siren still had his hand, so
he followed too.
They were in a great throne room. Ostentatious wasn’t nearly a big enough word
to describe it. It was richly decorated
in reds and blacks and golds and silvers.
Three great crystal chandeliers hung from the artfully plastered
ceiling, the hundreds of candles within shimmering on the marble floor
beneath. A throne with a back the height
of three men sat at the end of the room upon a raised dais another man high,
from which a richly tapestried carpet spilled down the steps towards them.
It’s spectacular state was matched only by its
spectacular emptiness.
“Hello?” Franck called, his voice echoing awkwardly
around the chamber.
“I thought you said he was here?” Harker asked, turning
to the little girl whose hand he held once more.
“I was sure he was… I could hear him!”
“Do you hear him still, child?” Franck asked.
“I… I think so.
The whispering has grown faint.”
“How odd,” the Former Baron added.
They stood in silence for a moment and then Harker turned
to head back.
“Wait!” Siren said suddenly, just as her fellow pirate
was about to cross the threshold into the corridor. “Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?” he asked.
“It sounds like… like very faint breathing.” She paused and listened again. “I think it’s coming from beyond the throne.”
Even as she said that the breathing grew fainter still,
but Siren thought that, just before it did, she had heard a sound a little like
someone gulping.
“There’s someone there!”
Harker turned on the spot, puffed out his chest and
bellowed, “Whoever you are, come out now and we won’t hurt you.”
Siren gave him an appraising glance. There really was no one who could bluff quite
like Harker, this being why she had lost the Ebon Crest to him in the first place.
“Yes,” Franck added, “and if you don’t come out now we’ll
dice you into a million pieces and feed you too the Barrowhounds sniffing at
your gates!”
There was a moments silence, filled only with the
panicked breathing of whoever was behind the throne, then a shadow moved and a
tall, dark figure in a long black cape emerged from behind the grand chair’s
back. He had dark eyes, thick black
eyebrows beneath a widow’s peak the same colour and lips an unnaturally rich
red. He stared at them a moment, arms
hidden beneath his cape, then he opened his mouth and said, in a voice almost
too small to be heard,
“Please don’t feed me to the Bawwowhoundsh, I weally
don’t get on well with dogsh!”
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