The Third Door

22 - Terror

The chieftain stood up. His eyes were hard, his mouth set in a tight half-smile, and suddenly, with sick dismay, Rye saw the truth. Farr had known all along that the attack would go on without him. Farr had planned for everything, including his own capture or death. ‘Nothing must stop us now,’ he must have said to Manx, Barron and Sigrid as they left Riverside. ‘You are to move at sunrise whether I am with you to give the order or not.’

Farr had never trusted Rye—had not believed a word Rye said. He had agreed to go deeper into the forest, to go almost certainly to his own death, only to make the Fellan feel safe and give his soldiers the advantage of surprise.

There was another roar from below, and another. The sky above the clearing was dark with smoke. Sonia covered her face and swayed where she stood.

Rye ran to her and caught her before she fell. She sagged against him, her mind clouded, her whole body trembling.

‘You fool!’ he shrieked at Farr. ‘Do you know what you have done?’

‘I’ve done what I had to do,’ Farr snapped back. ‘And if I’m a fool, Keelin, you’re a greater one. How could you expect me to believe that the Shadow Lord had invaded Dorne without my knowing it? Why, when I first saw you at Fell End I had just returned from touring the east coast guard posts and seen for myself that all was well!’

Rye gaped at him over Sonia’s head, his mind frozen, his teeth chattering.

Farr raised his eyebrows and his face softened slightly. ‘Can it be that you really believe the nonsense you told me?’ he murmured. ‘Yes, I see you do. So you’re a dupe, Keelin, not a villain! It’s said that the Fellan can create illusions, make people see—’

He broke off with a start. Hooded figures were peeling away from the swaying trunks of the giant ferns. Their garments flew in the wind of their fury, their hoods blew back, and their long braids twisted and hissed around their heads like spitting snakes. Their bodies seemed to flicker as their colour changed from brown to green.

‘You have broken the treaty of our ancestors, human,’ a female rasped at Farr. ‘You have invaded our land. Your people will pay the price.’

Farr raised his chin. ‘My troops know their danger, Fellan,’ he said evenly. ‘As one man falls, another will take his place. You won’t stop us. You won’t defeat us. You and your cursed magic are finished!’

The Fellan looked at him, their eyes burning. He groaned and fell to his knees.

‘Do not harm him!’ Rye burst out. ‘He is the only one who can stop the attack! Make him understand! Tell him that it is only because you allowed it that the Lord of Shadows was able to invade! Tell him—’

He quailed as the Fellan turned on him, contempt in their green eyes. Their voices hissed in his mind.

You insult us, Rye of Weld! Lies and empty threats are for humans, not for the Fellan. The sorcerer Malverlain will never return to claim Dorne. Never, while we live!

‘But—but he has invaded!’ Rye stammered. ‘Beyond the silver Door. I saw—we saw—’

The green eyes flashed. To his amazement, Rye saw in them what looked like shock and fear. The air of the clearing seemed to blur. Then the Fellan were gone.

Rye could not think. His mind felt numb. Sonia was struggling to stand upright and Farr was striding towards him, but he could not move. Screams of terror had begun rising from below. Farr’s face seemed to swirl before him in a mist. The chieftain’s lips were moving, but it seemed to take a long time before the words came to Rye’s ears.

‘Take me out of here, I tell you!’ Farr barked, seizing his arm and shaking it. ‘I must see—I must know …’

Rye looked down at his hand. He was still clutching the red feather. He remembered floating above the treetops as the sun rose, only minutes ago. He remembered what he had seen. Instantly his mind recoiled, taking refuge in numbness once more.

Rye! Do as he says!

Sonia’s silent cry filtered through the muffling wall that seemed to have enclosed Rye’s mind. He forced himself to respond.

‘Only if you agree to have your hands tied,’ he said to Farr, his voice sounding to his own ears like the voice of a stranger. ‘You are not to be trusted.’

Without a word, Farr held out his hands, wrists together.

Rye glanced at Sonia. She hesitated for an instant, then pulled the piece of cord from her waist and looped it around the man’s wrists. He stiffened and his eyes went blank.

‘Stop pretending, Farr!’ Rye snapped. ‘That trick will not work a second time.’

‘He is not pretending,’ Sonia said quietly. ‘Do you not see, Rye? It is the cord.’

As Rye swung round to her, she shrugged. ‘I found it long ago, hidden away in an old cupboard in the Keep tower,’ she murmured. ‘I—liked it, though I did not know why, and I have kept it by me ever since. I—I think now that it is made of Fellan hair. It does not affect me, but for people with no Fellan blood, like Farr, it must be different. It—it stills them.’

Rye shook his head in disbelief. If only they had known the cord’s power before!

‘Like the powers in the bag,’ Sonia said, touching her pocket where the damaged bag lay hidden. ‘We had to work them out one by one. And we still do not know what the ninth power is, or what the honey sweet can—’

She froze as the terrible sounds from below suddenly grew louder. Quickly Rye slipped his arm through Farr’s, pulled the hood over his head and raised the feather. He felt Sonia’s magic rush into his fingertips. And the next instant he was opening his eyes on a nightmare.

At first he almost believed he was back in the Diggings. The ground was flooded in weird yellow light. Grey cloud blanketed the sky. Whips cracked and flames leaped. Groans and screams filled the air. Great carts pulled by teams of grunting hogs laboured over seared earth. Everywhere there were helmeted figures dressed in grey.

But as the smoke swirled, clearing in patches only to close in again, Rye came to his senses. Of course this was not the Diggings. It was the Fell Zone, burning.

He, Sonia and Farr were standing behind a scorched tree, halfway up the burned black track that the troops with flamers had already created in their march uphill. It was smoke that was muffling the sky. The figures were not grey guards but Farr’s troops, their protective suits heavily filmed with ash. The carts were not laden with broken rocks, but piled high with barrels. And the screams were not the cries of tormented slaves but the terrible sounds of soldiers dying hideously beneath the teeth and claws of enraged Fell dragons that sprang hissing from the trees.

Rye turned his face away. He could not look. ‘Untie the cord, Sonia!’ he shouted, his voice breaking. ‘Free Farr, so he can call his troops back!’

‘He will not call them back,’ Sonia said, barely moving her lips. ‘He knows they can win.’

And when Rye made himself look again at the terrible scene, he saw that it was so. Farr’s troops were dying, but Fell dragons were dying too, as soldiers sprang to defend their fallen comrades. Savage as the giant lizards were, they could not stand forever against swords, arrows, spears and flame.

Tails lashing in fury, the beasts lunged at their attackers, killing and maiming wherever they could. But the soldiers were too many. Their weapons were too strong. Their rage made them fearless.

His throat aching, his eyes stinging, Rye saw lizard after lizard crash to the scorched ground, its jaws still dripping with the blood of its last victim. With every creature’s death a great wave of Fellan pain burst into his mind, crashing against the bitter tide of triumph streaming from the soldiers who had avenged their friends.

And as Farr had predicted the attack did not falter, for every soldier who fell was instantly replaced by another. Shoulder to shoulder, their helmeted heads bent against the wind, the troops with flame weapons were moving doggedly upward, setting fire to everything in their path. Behind them, on the broad black strip that now climbed from the broken barrier like a ragged, smoking road, the dead and injured were being lifted onto stretchers and carried away. The carts trundled on, veering left and right to avoid the scorched trees and the bodies of the slaughtered dragons, the hogs squealing and showing the whites of their eyes at the scent of blood.

Yet no figure with flashing green eyes and hair like flame flew to stop the army’s advance with a flick of a hand. No soldier fell by magic or froze as if bewitched. The ground fire burned unchecked, rising higher and higher up the hill. The carts rolled on without hindrance. And slowly Rye understood that this was because the Fellan were nowhere near. The Fellan had retreated, as if repelled by some force they could not fight.

The carts.

Rye turned to Sonia as her message came to him. She nodded slightly, her eyes dull.

A great gust of wind howled around them, almost lifting them off their feet. The Fellan could not approach the track, perhaps, but they had the wind at their command, and the wind was fearful. It was screaming like a live thing, raging through the treetops, filling the air with choking smoke and ash, sending flaming twigs and embers flying back towards Fell End. The Fellan were turning Farr’s own weapon against him.

And suddenly, despite what she had said, Sonia was fumbling with the cord looped around Farr’s wrists and pulling it away.

‘Stop the attack!’ she cried to Farr, who blinked at her, dazed, as if he had just woken from a deep sleep. ‘Do you not see what is happening? Fell End will burn! Everyone will die! Your wife! Your people! Rye’s—’ Her voice broke off in a choking sob.

Rye’s brothers …

Dirk. Sholto. Stiffly Rye turned his head, looked down at the town. People with scarves tied over their mouths and noses packed the riverbank. They were passing water-filled buckets from hand to hand, quenching flying sparks and embers as they fell, drenching the ground, the dock, the houses, in preparation for what might come.

‘Fell End will survive,’ Farr muttered, though Rye could feel his fear. ‘The first stage is almost complete. Any moment now …’

And as he spoke, a vast crashing and clattering began. The leading carts had stopped and begun shedding their loads. Soldiers were pushing the barrels over the sides. The barrels were thudding onto the blackened ground, bursting open so that their contents spilled and scattered.

Rye’s throat closed as he saw the objects rolling and coming to rest on the scorched ground. Bent metal rods. Scraps of roofing iron. Twisted metal shutters. Broken tools and weapons. Rusted anchors. Odd lengths of chain and wire. Even small household items like burned out kettles, dented buckets and cooking pots that had lost their handles.

Waste metal, collected from every warehouse, every shop, farm and home in New Nerra and beyond. Metal to quench the magic of the Fellan.

This was why the guardians of the forest had retreated. This was why the soldiers had only the Fell dragons and the wind to fight as they burned their way up to the Fell Zone’s summit.

And the more metal was brought in, the less the Fellan would be able to defend this part of their territory. Even now, the mighty wind was wavering, weakening, and cheers were rising from Fell End, from the soldiers leading the hogs that drew the carts, from the troops with the flamers.

Farr gave a great sigh. Rye turned to him. The chieftain’s face was slack with relief.

‘You could not quite believe it would work,’ Rye said evenly.

Farr wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘It seemed such a simple thing,’ he admitted. ‘But I was well advised. Now we’ve a safe place to begin.’

I was well advised.

The words floated into Rye’s mind and clung there like prickling burrs as troops pounced on the objects littering the track and hurled them far into the undergrowth. They clung there as the first carts emptied and other carts trundled past them to shed their loads further up the hill. They clung there as Rye felt the Fellan’s power shrink back, and as the wind beating on his face gradually stuttered and died.

And only then, in what seemed a sudden, deathly hush, did Rye focus on Farr’s last words.

Now we’ve a safe place to begin.