Ilse Of Illusion

15 - The Isle of Illusion

The grass was velvety soft under Lief’s feet. Above his head arched a sky of perfect blue. Soft purple hills misted the horizon. The air was warm, and fragrant with the flowers that bloomed beside a rippling silver stream. The shadows under the trees were dappled with sunlight.

Pirra.

The birds seemed to sing the name. The stream babbled it. The leaves whispered it, rustling in a gentle breeze that seemed to breathe magic.

Lief felt hands tugging at his arm. Heard Jasmine’s voice calling him from far away.

‘Lief! Wake! We are inside the dome.’

The blue of the sky shimmered uncertainly, like water. The trees wavered.

‘Lief, behind you! Look!’ Jasmine’s voice was sharp, urgent. It could no longer be ignored. Unwillingly, Lief turned.

A large crowd of people stood silently watching them. One, wearing the tall, stiff head-covering of a Piper, was dressed in purest white. The rest wore fluttering robes in soft, light colours. Many had flowers in their hair. They looked like the Aurons of the rafts, but they were taller, their faces were less sharp and their skin was golden brown.

And behind them, rising high above the tops of the tallest trees, seeming almost to touch the sky, was a glittering spire of glass. It flashed so brilliantly in the sunlight that at first Lief saw it only as a vast, shimmering column.

Then, as his eyes cleared, he realised that it had a shape. It was a vast statue of a woman—a Pirran woman, wearing the head-dress of a Piper. And he knew without doubt that the woman was Auron the Fair, who had long ago made music so beautiful that her audience wept.

The statue’s long robe fell straight to the ground in a thousand glittering glass pleats as sharp as razors. Its fixed, unseeing eyes gazed serenely towards the purple hills. Its tall head-dress glared like a white flame against the blue sky. And embedded in the centre of the white flame, perfect and untouchable, was the stem of the Pirran Pipe.

Lief stared, aghast. No hands could have formed that vast image. It could only have been created by magic.

‘No wonder we are here, in the centre of the island instead of at the edge as we expected,’ Barda muttered.

‘The mouthpiece of the Pipe pulled us to where it wanted us to be.’

‘We will never climb that statue. We would be cut to ribbons in a moment if we tried,’ Jasmine said. ‘You will just have to persuade the dome-dwellers to give us the stem willingly, Lief. They look gentle enough. Surely they will listen to you.’

But Lief was silent, fighting despair. The statue had clearly been created to seal the stem of the Pipe away from every danger for eternity. Those who had made it would never willingly give up their prize. Never.

‘Greetings, strangers.’

Lief forced his dazzled eyes downward, tried to focus on the figure standing before him. It was the man dressed in white. His arms were outstretched in welcome. The people behind him were also smiling, their robes fluttering like the petals of flowers ruffled by a gentle breeze.

‘I am the Piper, Auris,’ the man said. ‘I cannot guess how you have come to our land, but know it must be for a good and beautiful purpose, since nothing evil can dwell here. On behalf of the people, I bid you welcome to Pirra.’

Welcome to Pirra?

Lief glanced at Barda and Jasmine. Both were struggling to keep their faces blank.

Auris was waiting courteously. Lief wet his dry lips. However hopeless this situation seemed, however sure he was that the dome-dwellers would be enraged by his request, and certainly would not grant it, he had to try.

‘Thank you for your gracious welcome, Piper,’ he said carefully. ‘I am Lief, King of Deltora. I have come with my companions, Barda and Jasmine, to beg a favour of you.’

Auris’s brow furrowed slightly, and it seemed to Lief that the sweet, sunny air flickered.

Then Auris’s face cleared. ‘Ah,’ he said, bowing and smiling. ‘Of course. Deltora. The realm beyond the mountains. You must forgive me, your majesty. For a moment the name escaped my memory. We of Pirra do not feel the need to travel. As I am sure you can well understand.’

He lifted an elegant hand, gesturing at the beauty around him.

‘Indeed,’ said Lief politely.

‘A favour, you say?’ Auris murmured.

Lief took a deep breath, glanced once again at Jasmine and Barda, willing them to be patient, and mentally crossed his fingers for luck.

‘Many of our people are prisoners of the Shadow Lord, who is your enemy as well as ours,’ he said, keeping his voice low and calm. ‘The only thing that will save them is the Pirran Pipe, the stem of which you possess. We already have the mouthpiece, given to us willingly by the Plume people. This was how we were able to enter your magic dome so—’

‘Stop!’ The Piper’s eyes had glazed. The people behind him had begun flitting around so frantically that they seemed blurred. And the light—the light was flickering, dimming …

‘There is no need to fear us!’ Lief exclaimed hastily. ‘We could not take the stem by force, even if we wished it. But I beg you will listen. We have journeyed far through the caverns, and faced many terrible dangers, to find your island.’

There was a low rumbling like distant thunder. The trees, grass and flowers quivered, then began to droop, as though their colours and shapes were melting into the trembling air.

Auris clapped his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes tightly shut. ‘You are speaking gibberish! Your words have no meaning!’ he shouted. He was breathing heavily. His face had turned as white as the belly of a fish. The crowd behind him was surging like a troubled sea.

‘Do not listen to them! They are deluded fools!’ he panted, plainly speaking as much to himself as to the people. ‘There are no caverns. No dangers. No island. No dome. There is only Pirra, where all is beauty, all is peace, all is truth—’

‘You are the one speaking gibberish, Piper!’ Jasmine burst out, unable to keep silent any longer. ‘There is nothing true in this place.’

‘No!’ Auris’s eyes flew open and seemed to bulge in his head. ‘Stop—’

The thundering sound grew louder. Lief looked around him. Everywhere trees, flowers, grass and sky were shuddering, dissolving. Everything was melting, changing …

But … but this was not just a result of the Piper’s anger, surely. This was something far more serious. It was as if … as if …

A terrible thought struck Lief, shaking him to his core. Suddenly he remembered the parchments Penn had shown him. He remembered the one thing that had puzzled him about them. He remembered Penn’s anguished eyes, Penn’s words:

I have done all you require of me, Piper, and it has cost me dearly

Yet what had Penn done but tell the history of her people’s exile? Why had it cost her so dearly? Just because she feared for three strangers’ lives?

Or because, in the telling, she had broken the law she held most sacred?

Truth is all-important.

What had Penn said when Barda asked her why her ancestors had been expelled from the dome?

They were dangerous … They were sick of pretence.

Dangerous? Why dangerous? Unless …

‘You can make all the thunder and lightening you wish, Auris, but you will hear me!’ Jasmine shouted. ‘This is not Pirra! It is just an island protected by magic and filled with pictures. And you know that! I can hear it in your voice!’

There was a splitting, cracking sound, as though the heavens themselves were breaking apart.

Auris shrieked.

And Lief’s skin crawled as he understood at last. Penn had not lied. But she had not told the whole truth, either. And whatever the Piper claimed, Penn knew that this was the same as lying.

Auris and his people were swaying, backing towards the statue as though for protection. ‘Foulness is in your mouth!’ Auris howled at Jasmine. ‘Your mind is crude, your heart is mean and shrivelled. You are a savage, whose eyes are not fit to see the beauty of Pirra!’

‘Jasmine, do not answer! Let him be!’ Lief cried urgently. ‘Jasmine, the raft-dwellers knew this would happen. They are using us—to break the illusion and destroy the dome! The dome depends on belief! Doubt cracks it. Doubt will destroy it!’

But Jasmine was not listening to him. She was moving after Auris, shouting at him, beside herself with anger. ‘I am not a savage, and this is not Pirra!’ she shrieked. ‘You pretend not to know that, but you do, you do! Outside this pretty dream of yours, there are monsters crawling and breeding in filth! There are caverns, and a great sea, and thousands of people who live in darkness because you—’

Thunder rolled and crashed above them.

‘You have been sent by the unbelievers!’ Auris screeched, his bulging eyes dark with terror. ‘You are spies for all that is wicked and faithless! You have come to destroy me!’

And with that final word, the surging, fading crowd around him simply vanished, the flickering colours and shapes draining away into the grass like the phantoms they were.

Auris screamed—a scream of pure anguish that chilled Lief’s blood.

‘What has happened?’ Barda roared over the cracking of the thunder. ‘The people! Where have they gone?’

‘They never were,’ Lief shouted back, his stomach churning with horror. ‘They … were part of the illusion. He is alone here. Who knows how long —’

‘One by one the last of them failed me and died,’ cried Auris. ‘But I kept the faith! Alone I kept Pirra alive, harnessing the magic of thousands to keep its beauty perfect. Then you came. Spies and traitors! Saying what must never be said, speaking of things that must never be admitted—’

There was a flash of dazzling light and an ear-splitting crash. A jagged black crack opened in the sky, zig-zagging down to the trembling horizon like a bolt of lightning.

Auris shrieked and fell to the ground at the base of the statue. Desperately he stretched out his arms to it, his bony fingers clawing the air.

The split groaned and widened as the magic trapped for so long within the dome began escaping with rushing fury. Brilliant rainbow light could be seen through the gap as the cavern walls outside exploded into life, and colours dimmed for centuries gleamed.

Lief, Barda and Jasmine threw themselves to the ground, gripping the earth desperately as the force howled around them, tearing at the rags of trees, the faded tatters of flowers, grass, distant purple hills …

Then, suddenly, there was utter silence. But it was not the peaceful or exhausted silence of an ending. It was heavy and tense, as though everything was holding its breath. Waiting …

Cautiously, his skin prickling, Lief raised his head. The vision of Pirra had been swept away. Only the huge glass statue remained, rising into thick, still air which seemed to have been drained of colour. Auris lay face down at the statue’s base, the tips of his fingers just touching the knife-like folds of the robe where they met the ground.

Everything was bathed in a weird half-light. The hills on the horizon had disappeared. Great branching clumps of fungus, tall and thick as ancient trees, hunched where trees once stood. Tiny ferns and mosses covered the clay and clustered along the banks of a deep and silent stream.

In the distance, the jagged tear in the fabric of the dome was now a gaping wound. At the top, it shone with rainbow light. But lower down it was deepest black.

That is strange, Lief thought slowly.

‘Lief!’

Startled, Lief turned to see Barda scrambling to his feet and backing away to stand with his back to the nearest clump of fungus. Barda’s eyes were fixed on the tear in the dome. Jasmine, too, was jumping up, reaching for her dagger.

‘What—?’ Lief began. Then he saw their faces change, and heard, behind him, a distant scratching, tearing sound.

He spun around. And realised why no light had been visible through the lower part of the hole in the dome. Something had been pressing against it. Something huge and black that was now ripping its way through the gap, leg by spiny leg.

Arach!