Mo, thought Meggie. They really are taking me to him. And that thought extinguished any others.
Even thoughts of Mortola.
Chapter 60 – Fire on the Wall
Lo, on the whiteness of the wall,
Behold, appeared a human hand,
Which wrote and wrote, in letters tall,
A fiery message for the land.
– Heinrich Heine, “Belshazzar”
All was quiet in the wide, dark corridors as Dustfinger and Farid stole into the Castle of Night.
Only wax dripped from a thousand candles on the stone flags that all bore the Adderhead’s coat of arms. Servants hurried past them in soft-soled shoes, and maids scuttled by with bent heads.
Guards stood in endless passages and outside doorways so high that they seemed to have been made for giants, not ordinary humans. Every one of them bore the emblematic creature of the Adderhead – the snake striking at its prey – in scales of silver, and huge mirrors hung beside the doors. Farid kept stopping in front of them to look into the polished metal and reassure himself that he really was invisible.
Dustfinger made an acorn-sized flame dance on his hand so that the boy could follow him.
Servants were carrying delicious things to eat out of one of the halls they passed. Their aroma reminded Dustfinger painfully of his invisible stomach, and when he pushed his way past the servants as soundlessly as the Adderhead’s snake, he heard them talking in muted tones about a young witch and a deal that was to save the Bluejay from the gallows. Dustfinger, as invisible as their voices, listened to them and did not know which of his emotions was the stronger: relief that Fenoglio’s words were obviously coming true again, or fear of those words and the invisible threads spun by the old man, threads to catch even the Adderhead and make him dream of immortality, although Fenoglio had recorded his death in writing long ago. But had Meggie really read those deadly words before they took her away? “Now what?” Farid whispered. “Did you hear that? They’ve shut up Meggie with Silvertongue in one of the towers! How do I get there?”
His voice was shaking – heavens, what a plague love was! Anyone who claimed otherwise had never yet felt that wretched trembling of the heart.
“Forget it!” Dustfinger whispered to the boy. “The dungeons in the tower have strong doors.
Even invisible you wouldn’t get through them. And the place will be swarming with guards. After all, they still think they’ve caught the Bluejay. You’d do better to steal into the kitchen and listen to the maids and the menservants – you always learn something interesting that way. But be careful! I repeat: Invisible doesn’t mean immortal.”
“How about you?”
“I’m going to venture down to the dungeons under the castle, where the less valuable prisoners are held, to find the Barn Owl and Meggie’s mother. See that fat marble statue there? Must be some ancestor of the Adderhead. We’ll meet there. And don’t even think of following me! Farid?”
But the boy had already gone. Dustfinger suppressed a soft curse. He just hoped no one heard the boy’s lovesick heart thudding!
It was a long, dark way to the dungeons. One of the women healers who worked for the Barn Owl had told him where the entrance lay. None of the guards he passed even turned their heads as Dustfinger slipped by them. Two were lounging around at the mouth of the damp corridor, lit only by a single torch, with the door to the dungeons at the end of it. Beyond that door the way went on down, down into the deadly entrails of the Castle of Night, which digested human beings like a stony stomach, now and then excreting a few dead bodies. There was another snake on the door that no one ever wished to enter, but here the silver adder was coiled around a skull.
The guards were quarreling – it was something to do with Firefox – but Dustfinger had no time to eavesdrop. He was only glad that all their attention was on each other as he slipped past. The door creaked slightly when he opened it, just wide enough to get through – his heart almost stopped as he did it – but the guards didn’t turn around. What wouldn’t he give for a fearless heart like Farid’s, even if it made you reckless! It was so dark beyond the door that, for a moment, he had to summon fire before his invisible feet made their way down the steps, and just in time. They were steep and well trodden, worn away by the people whom the dungeons had swallowed up. Fear and desperation rose to greet him like vapors from the depths. The steps were said to lead as far down under the hill as the castle towers rose to the sky above it, but Dustfinger had never met anyone who could confirm this tale. Of those he had known who were taken down here, he had never seen a single one alive again.
Dustfinger, Dustfinger, he thought before starting on the downward climb, this is a dangerous path to take just to pass the time of day with two old friends, and your visit won’t even do them much good. However, he had run after the Barn Owl for years just as Farid was now running after him, and as for Resa perhaps he recalled her name last to convince himself that he was certainly not climbing down this damned stairway on her account.
Unfortunately, even invisible feet make sounds, but luckily he only met guards once. Three warders passed him at such close quarters that he could smell the garlic on their breath, and he only just managed to press close to the wall in time to stop the fattest of them from bumping into him. During the rest of the dark downward climb, he met no one. There was a torch burning every few feet along the rough-hewn walls, so different from the finely chiseled masonry in the castle above. Dustfinger twice passed a room where more guards were sitting, but they never even raised their heads as he stole by, more quietly than a breath of air and equally invisible.
When the stairs finally came to an end, he almost collided with a warder pacing up and down a candlelit corridor with a bored expression on his face. Soundlessly, he slipped past the man. He peered into dungeons scarcely larger than holes, too low for anyone to stand up in. Others were large enough to take fifty men. It would certainly be easy simply to forget a prisoner down here, and Dustfinger’s heart contracted as he imagined how Resa must be feeling in this darkness. She had been a prisoner before, for so many years, and after that her freedom had lasted barely a year.
He heard voices, and followed them along another corridor until they grew louder. A small, bald-headed man came toward him. He passed so close that Dustfinger held his breath but the man didn’t notice him, just muttered something about stupid women and disappeared around the corner. Dustfinger pressed his back against the damp wall and listened. Someone was weeping –
a woman, and someone else was speaking soothingly to her. There was only one cell at the end of the corridor: a dark, barred cavern with a torch burning beside it. How was he to get past those damned bars? He went close to them. There sat Resa, stroking another woman’s hair to comfort her, while Twofingers sat beside them playing a sad tune on a little flute. No one could have done it half as well with all ten fingers as he did with seven. Dustfinger didn’t know the others: neither the women with Resa nor the other men. There was no sign of the Barn Owl.
Where had they taken him? Had he perhaps been imprisoned with Silvertongue?
He looked around, listened. Somewhere a man laughed, probably one of the warders.
Dustfinger held a finger in the burning torch, whispered fire-words until a flame leaped from his fingertip like a sparrow picking up crumbs. When he had first shown Farid how to write his name on a wall in fire, the boy’s black eyes had almost popped out of his head. Yet it was perfectly easy. Dustfinger put his hand between the bars and passed his finger over the rough stone. Resa, he wrote, and saw Twofingers lower his flute and stare at the burning letters. Resa turned. Heavens, how sad she looked! He should have come sooner. A good thing her daughter couldn’t see her like this.
