Isle of the Dead

12 – Surprises

Lief and Barda crawled up the side of the dune and peered cautiously over the top. They were staring straight into the sun, but they could see, shimmering in the distance, a long, wavering shape.

The shape was approaching fast—very fast. Its centre was dark, but at each end, bright colours flapped like wings.

Then Lief’s dazzled eyes suddenly made sense of what they were seeing. The shape separated into five separate shapes—five figures, hand in hand.

The figures at each end wore long, flowing robes—one scarlet, one blue. Of the others, one was tall and dark, another a small blur of blue-grey, and the one in the middle…

Lief stared in disbelief. His heart gave a great thud. The next moment, he was scrambling to his feet, shouting, waving both arms wildly above his head.

Barda was roaring and waving beside him, but Lief was hardly aware of it. Dizzy with joy, he had eyes only for the black-haired girl in the centre of the shimmering line, and ears only for her thin, distant cries floating to him over the sand.

A black bird became visible, soaring above the girl’s head.

Kree, Lief thought dazedly. Kree, flying… but—but he is only just keeping up with them! How…?

And then he realised that the robed figures were Zeean and Marilen of Tora, and understood. He himself had sped on the wings of Toran magic.

He watched, fascinated, as the five swept towards them.

Long would Lief remember that reunion in the place he learned to call the Sleeping Dunes.

First there was Jasmine, scolding, laughing and crying by turns as she embraced him. Then there was Josef’s former assistant, Ranesh, beaming, with his arm around Marilen, pumping his hand. And Zeean, her wrinkled face made young by joy. And Manus of Raladin, small hands clasped and button eyes wide, as speechless as he had been when first they met him, but this time with relief.

After that came a series of shocks.

There was Lief’s and Barda’s shock on learning that The Lady Luck had been invisible to all who searched for them, and that they had been missing not for a single night, but for ten long days!

There was the shock of the newcomers when, filled with awe, they gazed upon the dragon of the amethyst imprisoned in the dune.

There was the dragon’s shock when Zeean briskly insisted that it was not going to die. And its even greater shock when, not long afterwards, a hundred Torans swept into the Dunes, raised their arms and sent the sand that imprisoned it flying, freeing it at last.

‘I did not expect this,’ the beast told Zeean, flexing its mighty limbs and gingerly unfolding its crumpled, sand-crusted wings. ‘I had accepted my fate. But I thank you, woman of Tora.’

Stiffly, it bowed.

Zeean bowed also. ‘To assist you was our privilege, dragon of the amethyst,’ she said. ‘Long may you fly Toran skies, and your descendants also.’

‘We will see,’ said the dragon. And raised its wings to the sun.

There was so much to talk about, so much to explain, so many questions to be answered.

‘Ten days!’ muttered Barda. ‘How can it be?’

‘Time stands still on The Lady Luck, it seems,’ Lief said.

He glanced out to sea and for a moment thought he caught a glimpse of a dark, ragged shape and the moving sticks of oars.

He stiffened, looked again, and saw only white-flecked water and the purple sheen of the dragon slowly wading in the shallows.

His heart thudding violently, he turned back to his companions. Clearly they had noticed nothing.

‘I arrived in Tora to inspect the Bone Point Light,’ Manus was exclaiming. ‘Little did I know that I would be searching for lost friends instead!’

The ship was my imagination, Lief told himself. It was a shadow—a vision born of fear. That is all.

‘It has been a dark time,’ Zeean sighed. ‘The morning after Jasmine and the Kin called for our aid, we in Tora felt a shadow pass, as though a cloud had swept over the sun. I thought this was a sign that you were no more.’

‘I did not believe it,’ Jasmine said stoutly.

‘You did not,’ agreed Zeean, smiling. She looked apologetically at Lief and Barda. ‘By the end, Jasmine was the only one of us who still had hope that you would be found alive. The rest of us were certain that we were searching only for your drowned bodies—and the Belt.’

Lief gripped Jasmine’s hand as Zeean told the story.

Every day Jasmine had joined the search. Every night she had drunk Dreaming Water, and fixed her mind on Lief. And after nine nights of emptiness, suddenly there Lief was—alive!—lying on a shore with Barda, in a place where dunes rose like waves running back from the sea.

‘When Jasmine woke me and told me of the place she had seen, I knew it was the Sleeping Dunes,’ Zeean said. ‘We came at once—but I confess I had little hope. How could you be so far south, almost at the border of our territory, and yet still live? I thought Jasmine’s dream was one of wishing, rather than of truth. How glad I am that I was wrong!’

At sunset, Toran tents fluttered like giant silken butterflies on the dunes. A great fire burned brightly, and the smell of cooking mingled with the tang of the sea. The amethyst dragon, refreshed and fed, had removed itself to a quiet place further down the shore.

Lief, Barda and Jasmine, sternly bidden by Zeean to rest, sat together under a purple silk canopy a little away from the others. It was growing colder, but none of them wanted to move.

They had resisted Zeean’s efforts to persuade them to return to Tora for rest. The evil chance which had delayed them had also brought them very close to their goal. They wanted to press ahead with all speed.

It had been more difficult to resist Ranesh’s urgent desire to go with them.

‘Whatever you are doing, wherever you are going, I can surely be of use to you!’ Ranesh had argued, as soon as he had been able to speak to them alone.

‘You are already being of use,’ Barda said. ‘Are you not helping to re-build Where Waters Meet, the town of your childhood?’

Ranesh’s eyes darkened and he turned his head away.

‘That work is complete,’ he muttered. ‘The people who have returned have safe homes—for all the good it does them, since food is scarce, the well is sour and the waters of the Tor and the Broad are not fit to drink. I am spending most of my time in Tora now. And Tora—though it is Marilen’s home—is not really to my taste.’

Lief could well imagine it. Ranesh’s love for Marilen had taken him to Tora, but clearly the quiet, elegant life of the magic city did not suit him.

Any more than it would suit me, Lief thought. Ranesh must loathe the fact that none of the luxuries Tora provides can be used for the people starving outside its walls. The food of his father-in-law’s table must be dust and ashes in his mouth.

Ranesh’s mouth twisted in a rueful smile.

‘Also, Josef can reach me all too easily in Tora,’ he said. ‘Almost every day a messenger bird arrives with a letter from him complaining about Paff’s mistakes and begging me to return to Del. But how can I return?’

He shook his head in despair. ‘I do not know that I even want to spend the rest of my life working in a library! And even if I did, I cannot leave Marilen! Yet how can I keep refusing Josef, when I owe him so much, and he is in such trouble? I feel I am in a trap!’

He frowned as if he felt he had revealed too much. Then, without saying anything more, he strode away across the dunes.

The companions watched him go.

‘I pity him greatly,’ Jasmine said. ‘I know what it is to feel useless—and trapped. I felt the same in Del, while I still lived in the palace, and before I began training the messenger birds. It was a kind of torture.’

‘Ranesh has spent too long living on his wits to settle into a life where everything is made easy by magic,’ Barda agreed. ‘But we cannot take him with us. He must solve his own problems, as best he can.’

Silence fell. Jasmine began feeding Filli some nuts she had found in her pocket. Barda drew out the puzzle box he had carried with him all the way from the Os-Mine Hills.

Lief watched him idly. Two smooth rods now protruded from the carved surface of the little cube, but the box remained stubbornly locked. He wondered if Barda would ever discover its secret.

He leaned back, and paper crackled under his cloak. With a start he remembered the little wax-sealed packet Zeean had discreetly passed to him.

‘Messages for you from Del, sent before knowledge of your disappearance reached anyone there,’ she had whispered, and Lief had thrust the little packet into his jacket pocket, to open later, in privacy.

Wearily, he took the packet out, and lifted the wax seal with his thumbnail.

Three small papers were inside, folded closely together. He unfolded them almost with dread. He knew that no news from Del could be good.

The first paper was covered in writing he knew well.

Lief shook his head ruefully. He realised that Barda and Jasmine were looking at him and passed them the note.

‘Not in code?’ Barda said in surprise, glancing at the letter.

‘There was no time to work in code, I imagine,’ said Lief. ‘Doom expected us to stay in Tora only for a few hours, and wanted to be sure his message reached us. But the note is in code of a sort.’

Jasmine had been reading her father’s note carefully.

‘So it is!’ she exclaimed. ‘His real meaning lies under the plain words. He rejoices that the Sister of the North has been destroyed. He recognises the piece of Boolong cone, so knows we sent our message from Dread Mountain. He warns us that the Shadow Lord will now be even more intent on stopping us—’

‘As if we are not all too aware of that!’ snorted Barda.

‘And he tells us not to write again too soon,’ said Lief. ‘Plainly his fear that any message will fall into the wrong hands is even greater than it was before. Only the sentences about poor Josef, added at the end, are what they seem.’

He turned to Josef’s letter—two pages hastily torn from a little notebook.

He smiled. How Josef must have hated being forced to send such a rough message! It would have offended all his ideas of what was proper.

Quickly he scanned the first page of the note.

Lief frowned. He turned to the second page, which proved to be even more confused than the first.

‘What does the old windbag say?’ Barda yawned.

‘He says that Doom is moody, and that we are in danger,’ Lief said dryly.

Jasmine laughed. ‘Well, that is news indeed!’ she said. ‘Does he say nothing else?’

Lief sighed again. ‘He thinks that by studying Doran’s maps and writings he has worked out where we are going. He wants me to tell him if he is right.’

Barda looked up. ‘You will not do so, I presume?’

‘Of course not.’ Lief lay back, frowning, and closed his eyes. He did not like to think of Josef waiting vainly for an answer to his urgent request.

And there was something else. Lief’s frown deepened. He had ignored the fussy old librarian before—and regretted it. Josef’s mind was sharp, and he knew the Deltora Annals like no-one else.

… something about my results worries me…

‘Lief!’

Lief’s eyes flew open. Manus was standing in front of him, his small face screwed into an apologetic smile.

‘I am sorry to disturb you, Lief,’ Manus said softly. ‘But I have a promise to keep.’

He held out a small package wrapped in white paper and tied with string.

‘On my way to Tora from Raladin, I stopped at Tom’s shop to buy a packet of No Bakes for the journey,’ he said. ‘Tom gave me this. He said it was for you.’