The Third Door

23 - Three Doors

Fire and metal were only part of Farr’s plan. There was something worse to come. Rye could see that in the chieftain’s tired but exultant face, in the determined tilt of his chin. And in that moment Rye realised it was the charm, the token of the treaty, that had made Farr hesitate to attack the Fellan for so long. Farr had not known the disc existed, but it had still exerted power over him. Now it was gone, and all the man’s doubts had gone with it.

‘Farr,’ Rye cried desperately. ‘I beg you, stop the attack. The Fellan keep Dorne safe—safe from invasion! I saw it in the pool. They—’

Farr shook his head pityingly. ‘Get away from here, Keelin,’ he muttered. ‘Find somewhere safe to hide till your mind’s your own again.’

He pulled himself free and strode out of cover. Smoke and ash swirled around him. The men trudging by with the carts did not notice him and he made no effort to attract their attention. He merely stood and waited, looking down towards Fell End.

Stop him, Rye!

Sonia’s thought was as faint as a sigh. She was leaning heavily on Rye’s arm, perhaps hardly knowing what she did. The great weight of metal hidden in the passing carts was sapping more of her energy every moment. Her eyes were as dull as they had been in the wasteland of the Saltings.

Rye drew her closer, trying to strengthen her with his warmth. And with a mixture of admiration and pity he felt her rousing herself, fighting to respond.

The Enemy … he felt her call to him. The Enemy … the pipeline …

Rye’s head jerked up. He turned to stare at the pipeline, far below.

Something about it had changed. The clear tubing attached to its high, arching summit no longer lay in a towering heap. The coils were unwinding like the coils of a giant snake, and the tube was sliding through the gap in the barrier and up the black, burned track, supported by hundreds of Fell End workers in yellow overalls.

The Enemy …

A picture drifted into Rye’s mind—words appearing in the still, dark pool called Dann’s Mirror, beyond the golden Door. Rye had asked where Dirk was to be found, and the pool had answered.

Dirk had been in the city of Oltan, in Chieftain Olt’s fortress by the sea. But Olt had not been the Fellan’s enemy, Rye knew that now. Olt would never have harmed the beings whose magic protected him, and Dorne, from the Lord of Shadows.

So what had the message meant by ‘the place of the Enemy’? Who in Oltan did the Fellan fear?

What did the Fellan fear?

Then Rye remembered. He clutched at the book beneath his shirt, gripped by a certainty that turned his bones to water. Suddenly he knew the pipeline’s purpose.

The pipeline had been built to carry something far more deadly than troops, skimmers, fire or metal. It had been built to carry the Fellan’s ancient enemy into the island’s heart.

Through that vast tube would come the sea—the sea, frothing and hissing, tumbling with weed and snails … and thick with salt.

The sea is their enemy. The salt weakens their magic …

It would take months for Farr’s troops to traverse the whole Fell Zone—to burn the tracks, to spread the metal, to spray the water pumped from the coast—the salt-laden water that would kill the Fellan’s magic.

But at last the seawater would finish what fire and metal had begun. The forest would die. The Fellan would die. The magic would die, never to rise again.

The sorcerer Malverlain will never return to claim Dorne. Never, while we live!

The memory of those Fellan voices echoed in Rye’s mind like the dread tolling of a bell.

Never … Never, while we live!

Rye’s skin crawled. His whole body quaked. And in that instant his mind burst through the numbing, protective wall that had grown up around it, sealing it away from the confusion and shocks of the night. Pictures began flashing before his eyes, tumbling over one another like cards thrown into the air. It was as if all the memories of his three quests beyond the Wall of Weld were coming together here on this smoky, blackened hillside.

Faene kneeling by her parents’ grave in the courtyard garden in Fleet. The serene little park in Riverside. Grey guards sprawled at their ease in the Diggings … The pit in Olt’s dungeons where Dirk and the rebels had been ambushed. The pit beneath the museum, littered with bones and belt buckles … Dirk in the Saltings, brandishing a dingy skimmer hook. Two boys arguing in Carryl’s workroom. Pebbles cracking under the slides of Bones’ loaded sled. Snail-eaten pages from Sholto’s notebook …

A rhyme carved in stone above three Doors.

Time to choose …

And then Rye understood. He understood at last. There was no more struggling to force the impossible to make sense, no more need to doubt the evidence of his own eyes and ears.

He understood how it could be that Dann and his followers had fled from Olt just before the first Gifting, and he and Sonia had arrived in Oltan just before the second.

He understood why both Farr and the Fellan insisted that the Lord of Shadows had not invaded Dorne.

All he had to do was accept one astonishing fact, and everything else fell into place. And he did accept it. Why not? Eldannen, brother of Olt and Malverlain, friend of the Fellan, founder of Weld, had been a great sorcerer. Perhaps, indeed, he had been the greatest of the three.

Rye became aware that Sonia was shaking his arm. He turned to meet her frightened eyes.

‘Rye, what happened?’ she whispered. ‘You looked so strange! And your mind was moving so fast that I could not—’

‘I have realised something!’ Rye broke in huskily. He took a breath, deliberately calmed himself, and began to put his ideas into some sort of order, knowing that now, at least, Sonia would be able to follow him.

The Sorcerer Dann had made each of the three Doors for a different purpose.

The oldest, made of wood and brass, was an ordinary door, put in place to seal the hollow mountaintop that was to shelter Weld. The other two were powerful portals, created to serve two urgent needs.

Thinking back over what he now knew of the Sorcerer Dann, Rye felt he knew what these needs were.

Dann missed the world he had left behind. Especially he missed the forbidden forest, and the Fellan who were his mother’s kin and his friends. As the years went by, his longing became so great that at last the tiled pictures he had made to remind him of what he had lost were not enough to comfort him. Brief escapes through the wooden Door did not satisfy his need either. So much time had passed that even in the forest much had changed, and he felt like a stranger.

So he created the golden Door—a door to the past. Through it, secretly, he could leave Weld and spend time with Edelle and the other Fellan he knew well, in the forest that was still as he remembered it. He could forget, for a time, his duties as Weld’s leader, his fears that his people’s magic was fading inside the Wall, and his growing doubts that he had done the right thing in shutting himself away from the outside world.

‘So when we went through the golden Door,’ Sonia breathed, ‘we went into the past. We travelled from the Fell Zone to the coast and back again with no idea that we were seeing Dorne as it was centuries ago—only a few years after Dann founded Weld!’

‘Yes,’ Rye said quietly. ‘And we have just made the same journey, following much the same route, with no idea we had done it before.’

He shrugged as Sonia gasped in disbelief. ‘A thousand years have passed. All the landmarks have changed so much that we did not recognise them. Vine has taken over parts of the forest. The buildings of Fell End cover land where there were only fields and a goat shelter before. The stream has been widened and deepened to make a river. Riverside has grown up on the old site of Fleet. Oltan bay has been made safe for ships to anchor close to shore. Oltan itself has been rebuilt and renamed New Nerra—’

‘And the stone maze where I found you is all that remains of Olt’s fortress—the part that was below the ground. The museum was built on the ruins.’ Sonia shook her head. ‘Rye, I can hardly take this in! I cannot believe we moved through the same part of Dorne twice without knowing it.’

Rye wet his lips. ‘Not twice,’ he said. ‘Three times.’

Sonia stared at him, coughing a little in the smoke haze. And slowly her face paled.

Rye nodded. His mouth was very dry. ‘I think Dann created the silver Door because his doubts became too much for him. He had to know … to know the result of his decision to leave Olt to rule Dorne unchecked. So in the space between the golden Door and the wooden one he placed a silver Door, covered with images that change depending on what is happening beyond it. The silver Door leads to exactly the same place as the other two do. But it is a Door to the future.’

‘The—’ Sonia looked wildly around. At the rich, deep green behind her. At the blackened track stretching up towards Weld. At Fell End, the sparkling river, the rolling fields. She began shaking her head.

‘You must believe it, Sonia!’ The pain in Rye’s chest and throat was like a knife, but he knew he had to go on. ‘I imagine that what Dann saw beyond the silver Door was Olt living on and on, preying on his people, becoming more cruel and monstrous by the day. What we saw was our future—the time to come after the deaths of the Fellan, after the invasion of the Lord of Shadows. We saw something that has not yet happened, but is in the making now.’

‘No!’ Still Sonia was shaking her head, stubbornly, helplessly, as if somehow by doing that she could shake away the truth.

‘Yes!’ Rye said harshly. ‘Weld and the Fell Zone will become the Saltings, blasted to rubble, littered with metal, sour with salt, infested with sea snails that have adapted to life on land. Fell End and the surrounding farms will become the desert of the Scour. The river will dry to a pebbled track. Riverside will become the Diggings, where FitzFee’s descendants will be enslaved and grey guards will roast their meat over the slab that marked Faene’s parents’ graves. New Nerra will be covered by the Harbour …’

And, he thought but did not say, I think Pieter, Carryl’s youngest grandchild, the funny, eager boy who loves old tales, will become Bones, the hero of the failed Resistance, the half-mad wanderer in the Saltings, the clown of the Den.

‘Wait!’ Sonia exclaimed, her face brightening. ‘Rye, you are wrong! When Sholto first went through the silver Door he was in the Fell Zone! The Fell Zone, Rye, as alive and magic as it is now! He was there for a long time, and there were trees and vines and—’

‘Sholto was in the Fell Zone for a long time,’ Rye agreed, still in that same, harsh voice. ‘For over a year. Then one evening the forest vanished, and he found himself in the Saltings.’

‘That was how it seemed to him,’ Sonia protested, ‘but—’

‘That was how it was,’ Rye cut in flatly. ‘Sholto was living in the future, Sonia! What happens in the future depends on what has happened in the past. And that night the past was changed in a moment … by the death of Olt.’

All the light died from Sonia’s face. She pressed her hands to her mouth.

‘When Olt died, his secrets died with him,’ Rye went on relentlessly. ‘And the Lord of Shadows could start to plan … for this.’

He waved his hand at the troops with flamers, at the clear pipe snaking up from Fell End, at the carts still dumping their loads of metal on the scorched earth, at Farr waiting on the track only a few steps away. The chieftain’s words prickled in his mind.

I have been well advised …

Sonia took a deep, shuddering breath. Then she took her hands from her mouth, raised her chin and tossed back her hair.

‘So—we changed the distant past, and so changed the future,’ she said. ‘Well, now we are in the present, and as far as the future we saw is concerned, this is the past as well! So it is not too late, Rye! We still have a chance to stop that future from happening! It is not too late!’