The Silver Door

7 - The Pyramid

Rye felt something tickling his closed eyelid. Just for a moment he thought he was lying in the shade of the bell tree at home, and a falling leaf had drifted onto his face. Half smiling he put up his hand to brush the leaf off, and felt movement beneath his fingers.

He yelled and sat up, slapping at his eye. Wings whirred frantically, and he caught a brief glimpse of something streaking away into the air.

He felt for his hood and found that it was still in place. So the flying creature, whatever it was, could not have seen him. It must have sensed him—felt his warmth, perhaps.

Sonia was crawling to her knees beside him. She was staring around blankly. A tangle of sticks was caught in her scarf, just below her ear, but she seemed unaware of it.

Then the tangle moved. Rye’s stomach heaved as he realised that the sticks were legs, and at the same moment saw stiff, transparent wings, a head filled with glittering eyes, a needle-like stinger poised to strike …

Sonia screamed as he shouted and lunged at her. Again there was the whir of wings, but this time Rye saw the creature clearly as it sped away. It was shaped like the small, blood-sucking insects called whines that plagued the people of Weld in warm, damp weather. But it was huge—as big as his fist!

Pushing back his hood, he scrambled to his feet, pulling Sonia up with him. She was deathly pale. With one hand she clung to Rye, with the other she brushed feverishly at her neck as if to make absolutely sure that the monstrous insect was no longer there.

‘By the Wall, where are we?’ Dirk grunted, crawling to his feet behind them.

‘Wherever it is,’ Sonia said bleakly, ‘it is not Dorne.’

Very startled, Rye tore his eyes from her stricken face and for the first time registered his surroundings.

He saw a barren wasteland of rounded, weirdly patterned stones and gaping holes from which oozed a sickly yellow mist. Thick grey cloud hung low overhead like a brooding ceiling, and walls of fog rose on every side, obscuring whatever was beyond.

The place was utterly desolate. There was not a single green, growing thing. There was not a breath of wind. And there was no sound at all.

Instinctively Rye looked over his shoulder for the silver Door, but there was no sign of it—and no sign of the Wall of Weld either. He was not surprised, but still an iron hand seemed to clutch at his heart.

‘Of course this is Dorne!’ he retorted, more sharply than he had meant.

Sonia shook her head helplessly.

‘We must be on the eastern side of the island,’ said Dirk, bending to examine something at his feet. ‘We were told that the east was wild and barren. People fled here to escape from Olt, Faene says, but before that it was deserted. If this place is an example of one of its beauty spots, I can see why.’

His small joke fell flat. Sonia’s expression did not change.

‘This cannot be Dorne,’ she repeated dully. ‘Everything here is dead.’

Rye fought down a surge of irritation. ‘Well, there is no point in standing around arguing about it,’ he said. ‘The silver Door delivered us here and that is all that counts. Which way do you think we should go?’

Sonia merely shrugged. Dirk, who had prised a strangely shaped object from the ground and was scraping it clean with the side of his boot, did not appear to be listening. And as Rye surveyed the dreary wasteland around him, his own will to move began to falter.

The place reeked of sadness and loss.

Everything here is dead …

He glanced back at Sonia. She was gnawing her bottom lip. Her shoulders were drooping, her eyes dull as muddy water.

And suddenly he understood that he had begun to feel what she had been feeling all along. It was as if the weird rocks, the lowering sky, the despair that seemed to seep from the ravaged earth like the yellow mist, were somehow draining his strength. He could feel himself wilting where he stood, like a plant starved of water, like a flame starved of air.

What was happening? Could the mist be some kind of poison? Or could it be …?

Sorcery!

Rye recalled the evil shadow of his dream and instinctively crossed his fingers and his wrists. Then, determined to resist the spell, he lurched forward.

Almost at once he tripped and fell. His knees and the palms of his hands struck hard, lumpy ground. Scalding tears of pain sprang into his eyes.

What in Weld are you doing, Rye, barging about without a thought in your head?

Rye froze where he lay. The drawling voice in his mind was so clear that it was almost as if Sholto had actually spoken to him!

And in that moment he knew, without question, that Sholto had been in this very spot not so long ago. He jerked his head up, and through the tears that still blurred his eyes he saw his brother standing in the distance among the patterned rocks, writing in a notebook.

His heart leaped, but just as he drew breath to call out, the lean, dark figure flickered and disappeared.

An illusion! Rye’s throat tightened with bitter disappointment. But then he saw Sholto again. This time Sholto was a little closer, peering intently into a hole in the earth as if trying to work out the yellow mist’s cause. And no sooner had this second image vanished than another appeared, closer still and a little to Rye’s left.

In this vision Sholto had his sleeves rolled up, and his brow was gleaming with sweat. Two of the giant insects were circling him, but he was paying no attention to them. He was lifting stones, stolidly piling one upon the other like a child making a tower of toy bricks.

Rye blinked, and again Sholto’s figure vanished. But something remained where it had been—a small pyramid of stones, its peak rising just a little above the surrounding rocks.

Rye gaped at it, awe-struck. If he had not seen Sholto building this marker, he would probably not have noticed it among all the other piles of rocks that littered the ground. Even if he had come across it by chance, he might not have realised it was made by human hands.

But there it stood, clear evidence that he had seen the past—seen Sholto in the past! The visions had been as true as the glimpses of Sholto that had so often come to him in dreams.

Or … was the pyramid itself an illusion?

Rye had to know. Calling hoarsely to the others, he jumped up and began scrambling across the rocks.

He reached the pyramid in moments. It stood in a small circle of cleared earth, and was almost as tall as he was. He put out his hands and touched it. It was solid. It was real.

So Sholto had truly been here, and Sholto had survived—survived to make his way to the red place, to find the source of the skimmers.

And if he could do it, we can do it too, Rye thought. Deliberately he breathed out, letting the last of his fear and tension go.

‘What is it?’ Sonia asked fretfully, coming up behind him. Rye glanced at her over his shoulder. She still looked listless, but at least she had followed him.

‘Sholto built this,’ he said. ‘I saw him doing it.’

Her eyes widened, but before she could ask what he meant, he turned back to the pyramid. And it was only then that he realised why the rocks looked so oddly rounded, and were so strangely patterned.

Every stone was completely covered in snails! The creatures’ shells, striped and dotted with black, brown, orange, pink and blue, were pressed as closely together as tiles on a richly decorated wall.

Amazed that he had not realised this before, Rye prodded the nearest snails with the tip of one finger. He could not shift them. They were clearly very much alive, holding on for dear life.

They were similar to the sea snails Rye had seen clustered on the piers of the fishermen’s jetty in Oltan bay. These were land creatures, though, and the colours of their shells were not so bright.

But just because of that, they reminded him of something else.

Wondering, he slid his fingers into the little bag hanging around his neck. He found the smooth, round object he was seeking, and drew it out.

The snail shell looked faded in the dull light. Rye put it into the palm of his hand, and examined it.

There was no doubt. Except that it was empty and lifeless, it was exactly like the millions of shells that now surrounded him.

‘Sonia!’ Rye said slowly. ‘We are in Dorne—here is the proof of it!’

Sonia leaned forward and looked from the shell in his hand to the snails studding the pyramid.

‘What does this mean?’ she whispered, with more excitement in her voice than Rye had heard since they went through the silver Door.

Rye hesitated. ‘If it is like the feather, the ring and the serpent scale, the shell’s power has something to do with the creature it came from,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps it will help us to hide.’

‘The hood does that already,’ Sonia objected, turning back to the pyramid and scanning the living snails eagerly. ‘It must be … Oh! What is that?’

She crouched and pointed at something white that was poking through a small gap in the pyramid’s base. Gingerly she pulled at the thing and it came away in her hand. It was a scrap of paper, its edges nibbled to lace by snails.

Rye’s heart thudded as he recognised the writing on the fragment.

‘Sholto!’ he breathed. He swung round to call Dirk, saw that Dirk was still busy with whatever he had found on the ground, and quickly looked back to read the scrap in Sonia’s hand.

‘He found dead skimmers,’ Rye muttered. ‘Look on the other side.’ Sonia turned the paper over, and sure enough there were more words on the back.

Sonia shook her head in confusion.

‘It is from Sholto’s notebook,’ Rye said, battling the fear that had chilled him the moment he saw the paper. ‘But he would not have torn a page out. I do not know why it is here.’

Then, suddenly, he did know. Ignoring Sonia’s exclamations, he thrust the magic snail shell into his pocket and began pulling stones from the top of the pyramid. As he had expected, the structure was hollow.

He peered inside and found that the cavity contained some tatters of oiled cloth, the broken pieces of a clay pot, some lumps of candle wax, and the remains of a small book.

The book’s covers had been eaten away. Most of its pages had been reduced to flakes of paper clinging to a threadbare spine. The few scattered fragments that had survived had been chewed almost to pieces. Rye gathered them carefully and showed them to Sonia with a rueful shrug.

‘It looks as if Sholto filled an entire notebook in this place, and hid it when he moved on,’ he said, sliding the fragile scraps into his pocket to keep them safe. ‘He wrapped the book in oiled cloth and put it into a pot sealed with wax. No doubt he thought that was protection enough from the snails. But it was not. These snails are not like the snails that prey on the vegetable fields of Weld. They will eat anything, it seems, even wax and clay.’

‘Perhaps that is their power,’ Sonia joked feebly. ‘Perhaps whenever you hold the shell, Rye, you will be able to eat clay too.’

Rye smiled, though in truth he did not feel like it. He retrieved the little snail shell from among the paper fragments in his pocket, and weighed it thoughtfully in his palm.

‘Rye!’

Rye and Sonia jumped violently as the shout rang out. Dirk was hurrying awkwardly towards them, sliding and stumbling on the rocks. He was brandishing a dingy skimmer hook.

That must have been what he found on the ground, Rye thought in confusion. But why is he—?

‘Rye! Behind you!’ Dirk roared, his finger stabbing at the sky. ‘Put on the hood! The hood!’

Rye spun round. Sonia was looking up, her face rigid with fear.

A terrifying form was sweeping down through the cloud. It was a gigantic bird, a bird as big as a Weld house, with vast wings and a long, twisting neck that was spiked like the neck of a sea serpent.

It was the monstrous bird of which Rye had once dreamed—the bird pictured on the silver Door.