Shadowgate

6 – Mysteries

The wagon was richly furnished. The air was heavy with the scents of spices and perfumed candle wax.

Bess was sitting at the round table. A candle threw flickering light up onto her smooth owl face. Her hands were cupped around a glass ball in front of her.

‘Sit down, Lewin,’ she said, nodding at the chair on the other side of the table.

Unwillingly, Lief did as she asked.

‘Ah,’ Bess breathed. She stared, as if drinking in the sight of him.

But there is nothing to see, Lief thought. She cannot see my face. I am wearing a mask.

Then it struck him. The bird mask he was wearing must have once belonged to Bede. When Bess looked at him, she saw her son reborn.

He felt sick.

He looked down at the table. The glass ball was swirling with shadows. Was this what Quill had not wanted him to see? He thought of the Shadow Lord’s crystal, and shuddered.

Bess took her hands from the ball, and the shadows disappeared.

‘Do not fear the glass, Lewin,’ she murmured. ‘With its aid I read the signs, as my mother did before me.’

She pushed the ball away, revealing another object lying on the table in front of her. It was row of eight small metal rods fastened to a wooden base. She struck the first of the metal rods with her long fingernail and a low, clear note rang out.

‘Can you name that note, Lewin?’ she asked.

Lief had no idea what she meant. He shook his head.

Bess sighed. ‘I feared as much,’ she said. ‘You have a great deal to learn.’

She passed a sheet of paper to him. ‘Music is like another language,’ she said. ‘This is how we write it down.’

‘Now, I am going to play the notes on this paper,’ Bess said. ‘Listen carefully.’

She struck the rods one by one. Notes rang out, going up like stairs from low to high. She played them again, this time singing their names.

Lief’s fingers felt hot. He looked down and saw that the liquid that had oozed from the fragment of root was drying to grey jelly. His fingertips were stinging. Suddenly fearful, he rubbed them against his coat. The grey jelly peeled from his skin in tiny balls, which he brushed quickly onto the floor.

‘Stop fidgeting and pay attention, Lewin!’ snapped Bess. ‘You must learn to read and write music. How else will you be able to note down the beautiful songs you will compose for me, as Bede used to do?’

Lief’s face grew hot beneath his mask.

‘Bess—’ he mumbled. But Bess’s voice flowed on as if he had not spoken.

‘Ah, Bede’s songs could charm the birds from the trees,’ she sighed. ‘The words were full of feeling. The rhymes were perfect. The melodies were charming. And, of course, his voice was without compare. Wherever we went, silly village girls were drawn to him like bees to a honeypot.’

She laughed. ‘They paid well for the chance to swoon over Bede! When we moved on, we would leave a trail of broken hearts behind us, and our purses would be heavy with bareface gold.’

She reached across the table and took Lief’s hand. ‘And you will be the same, Lewin,’ she said. ‘You will restore the fortunes of the Masked Ones!’

Lief winced, glad that the mask was hiding his face.

‘Bess, I will never be like Bede,’ he said awkwardly. ‘And—I do not want to be.’

He tried to free his hand, but Bess held it fast.

‘Trust me, Lewin,’ she said. ‘This was fated to be.’

Lief shook his head.

‘Yes!’ Bess insisted. ‘I lost Bede seven years ago. I had grown used to my grief. But lately, thoughts of him have haunted me. The glass kept showing me his face. I did not know why. I feared I was losing my reason!’

She freed Lief’s hand and drew the glass ball towards her again. She bent over it, gazing hungrily.

‘But then—then you came, Lewin,’ she murmured. ‘You came into our secret place, through our barriers, guarded by a phantom. A boy so like Bede. A boy who could speak our language! I saw the signs, and realised what they meant. My thoughts of Bede had been preparation for the coming of his replacement. You!’

She tapped the huge gold ring on her little finger. It was the only ring that had no stone. Its broad surface was covered in carved signs.

‘This ring is worn by the leader of the Masked Ones,’ she said softly. ‘One day, it will be yours. You must work hard to be worthy, for in the hand of the leader lies the gift of life… and death.’

Lief did not trust himself to speak.

Bess was wrong, so wrong. Her ‘signs’ were only matters of chance. As she would realise, if only he could tell her the truth.

But he could not tell her. Not if he valued his life, and the lives of his companions.

Bess was waiting for him to speak. He blurted out the first thing that came into his head.

‘Bess, what happened to Bede?’

For a moment, he thought she was not going to answer. Then she spoke.

‘Seven years ago, when we were last in the northwest, Grey Guards attacked our wagons,’ she said. ‘Eight of the inner circle died defending us.’

Her enormous hands were clasped on the tabletop, the rings biting deep into the flesh of her straining fingers.

‘The Guards were killed, but we knew that soon more would come. We fled to a village deep in the mountains. It is a lonely place, but we had visited it only the year before, and knew the way. So we went—to Bede’s doom.’

‘What is its name, this village?’ Lief asked softly. His scalp was tingling.

‘You would not know it,’ said Bess. ‘It is not worth knowing. They call it Shadowgate.’

Lief sat frozen. Can this, too, be chance? he thought. Or can it be that Bess is right after all? Can it be that all this is somehow meant?

The memory of the dragon’s voice whispered in his mind. This is the place where I must leave you… I feel it.

‘There are beasts, deep in the mountains,’ Bess muttered. ‘Monsters beyond imagining. Things that crawl in the shadows. Things that growl deep below the rock. Shadowgate lies among them. A dread pass is the only way to reach it. We hid our tracks, disguised our scent, so the Guards could not smell us out.’

She drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘We hid in Shadowgate for a full month. I wanted to make sure we were safe. And safe we were—though the villagers did not welcome us. But there was another danger I had not expected.’

Lief wet his lips. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘Bede… lost his heart,’ said Bess. ‘To a silly bareface girl not worthy to tie the strings on his shoes.’

The bitterness in her voice was chilling.

‘I suspected nothing,’ she went on. ‘He and the scheming wench had been meeting in secret. He came to me the night before his eighteenth birthday. The mask of his adulthood was ready. The ceremony of his entry to the inner circle was planned for the morning. He said he wished to leave the Masked Ones—to become a travelling minstrel, and marry this—Mariette.’

She spoke the name like a curse.

‘I could not believe my ears,’ she hissed. ‘I said, “You will quickly tire of this ignorant little bareface! Why, only last year you were dallying with her sister—that proud beauty, Kirsten, who ran off into the mountains in shame when you left her, and caused these villagers to hate us.’”

She snorted, as though Kirsten’s fate was no concern of hers.

‘But Bede told me that he had always preferred Mariette to her sister. He said it had begun as a fancy, but that in this past month he had learned what true love was. He said he could not live without the girl. He talked wildly, like one in a fever.’

So, Lief thought grimly. Bede was caught in the net he had so often set for others. There is justice in that.

But Bess, lost in memories, did not seem to be aware of what he could see so clearly.

‘I told him to put the girl out of his mind,’ she said. ‘I told him, “You are a Masked One. We do not marry outsiders. Tomorrow, you will put on the mask of your adulthood, and that will be the end of it.’”

She sighed.

‘He seemed to accept it. He left me gently, with a kiss. But I never saw him again. That night, he and the girl ran away into the mountains. We searched, but we could not find them.’

The brown owl face showed no expression. Only the trembling voice gave a sign that Bess was re-living an old, terrible grief.

‘The mountains had swallowed them up, just as they had swallowed the girl’s sister the year before,’ she said. ‘And so Bede threw his life away, and we lost our greatest treasure.’

And what of the parents who lost two daughters because of your son, Bess? Lief thought, as her voice trailed away. Have you no word for them?

The silence lengthened. Then, at last, Bess seemed to rouse herself. She straightened her shoulders.

‘I have work to do,’ she said abruptly, pushing the little row of metal rods towards Lief. ‘I expect you to know all your notes by tomorrow morning.’

Lief stood up, pushed the chimes and the paper into his pocket, and left the wagon. He was determined that by morning he, Barda and Jasmine would be long gone.

Outside, the sun was setting and shadows were gathering behind the line of wagons. Lief breathed in the fresh, cool air with relief.

It was quiet where he was standing, but the centre of the field was full of movement. All around the unlit wood heap, Masked Ones were practising their skills.

The frog-woman was juggling flaming torches. Three clowns were tumbling about blowing coloured bubbles from enormous pipes. The eagle-man, Quill, was standing with Barda, who was lifting a set of enormous weights. A man with the head of a lizard was doing magic tricks, assisted by the polypan-boy, Zerry.

To one side, a group of blue-clad acrobats with dog faces were standing on one another’s shoulders to form a tall pyramid. Balanced at the top of the pyramid was a small, grey-masked figure, standing on its hands.

It was Jasmine. She had put aside her clumsy coat, and her feet were bare.

Lief caught his breath as she turned a backwards somersault and landed upright on the shoulders of the man at the pyramid’s tip.

‘Your brother is a talented acrobat, it seems,’ a low voice said in Lief’s ear.

Lief jumped, turned, and saw the fox-woman standing very close to him. He had not heard her approach. Perhaps she had been standing there in the shadows all along.

‘Oh—yes,’ Lief stammered.

‘It is hard to believe he has never been trained,’ the fox-woman went on smoothly. Her eyes were narrow with suspicion.

‘Jay is self-taught,’ Lief answered, with perfect truth. His eyes flicked around the field. And it was then that he noticed the fluttering white patches that dotted the fences on all sides.

He turned and looked behind him. Yes, the fence there was covered with white splashes too. Poison-spitting moths clung to the rough wood, silently opening and closing their wings.

Lief remembered the red boxes he had seen being unloaded by the fence. The moths had been in those boxes, no doubt. Now they were in place. There would be no escape from the camp tonight.

He clenched his fists. The disappointment was bitter. He heard a distant screech, as if Kree was echoing his feelings.

‘Is something wrong?’ Rust asked coldly.

‘No,’ Lief managed to say. ‘No, I—’

His voice was drowned out by a high, wavering shriek of pure terror.