She reached out and fitted the Key into it.
Instantly it leaped out of her fingers.
With a great crack that made her screech and made Jared jump back in terror, the Key turned by itself. Chains crashed. Rust fell. The gate shuddered ajar.
Scrambling up, Jared was frantically checking all the alarms; he gasped, 'Claudia, that was so stupid!' but she didn't care, she was laughing because it was open, the gate, the Prison. She had unlocked
Incarceron.
The last chain slid.
The cellars rang with echoes.
Jared waited until every last whisper of noise was stilled.
'Well?' she said.
'No one coming. Everything up there is normal.' He wiped sweat from his forehead with one hand. 'We must be too far down for them to hear. More than we deserve, Claudia.'
She shrugged. 'I deserve to find Finn. And he deserves to be free.'
They stared at the dark slit, waiting. She half expected a crowd of Prisoners to burst through.
But nothing happened, so she stepped forward and opened the gate.
And looked Inside.
25
I remember a story of a girl in Paradise who ate an apple once Some wise Sapient gave it to her. Because of it she saw things differently. What had seemed gold coins were dead leaves. Rich clothes were rags of cobweb. And she saw there was a wall around the world, with a locked gate. I am growing weak. The others are all dead. I have finished the key but no longer dare to use it.
It was impossible. She stood frozen, felt hope shatter inside her. She had expected dark corridors, a maze of cells, stone passageways running with rats and damp. Not this.
Behind its oddly tilted entrance the white room was a perfect copy of her father's study. Its machines hummed efficiently, its single desk and chair stood uncluttered in the strip of light from the ceiling.
She let out a breath of despair. 'It's exactly the same!'
Jared was scanning carefully. 'The Warden is a man of meticulous tastes.' He lowered the device and she saw from his face he was as stunned as she was. 'Claudia, now the gate is open, I can tell you that there is no Prison below us, no underground labyrinth. This room is all there is.'
Appalled, she shook her head. Then she stepped in.
Immediately she felt the same effect as before; that peculiar blurring and clicking, the floor seeming to even out under her feet, the walls to grow straighten Even the air seemed different in the room, cooler and drier, not the damp exhalations of the cellars.
Turning back she watched Jared.
'Now that was very strange,' he said. 'That was a spatial shift. As I said before, as if the room and the cellar are not quite ... adjacent.'
He stepped in after her, and she saw how his dark eyes widened. But she was almost too sick with disappointment to care.
'Why make a copy of his study here?' She stalked over and kicked the desk angrily. 'It looks no more used than the other one!
Jared stared around, fascinated. 'Is it exactly the same?'
'In every single detail.' She leaned on the desk and said the password Incarceron and the drawer rolled open. Inside, as she'd expected, was a crystal Key the image of their own. 'He keeps a Key at home and one here. But the Prison is somewhere else.'
The bitterness in her voice made Jared give her a worried glance and then come to her side. Quietly he said, 'Don't torment yourself...'
'I told Finn I'd found the way in!' Disgusted, she turned and hugged her arms around herself. 'And what do we do now? Tomorrow I'll be married to Caspar or executed for treason.'
'Or you'll be Queen,' he said.
She stared at him. 'Or Queen. After a bloodbath that will haunt me forever.'
She walked away and glared at the humming silver machines. Behind her, she heard
Jared say, 'Well, at least...'
He stopped.
When he didn't finish the sentence she turned, saw him bent over the open drawer with the Key inside. Slowly he straightened and glanced at her sideways. When he spoke his voice was hoarse with excitement.
'It isn't a copy. It's the same room.'
She stared.
'Look, Claudia. Come and look.'
The Key. It lay in the black velvet and he reached out and touched it, and to her utter shock she saw how his fingers passed through the image onto the soft nap below. It was a holoimage.
The holo-image she had put there.
She stepped back, looked around. Then quickly she dived and scrabbled around the legs of the chair. 'If it's the same, there was a ...' She gasped, then jumped up with a mutter of bafflement. She held a very tiny scrap of metal. 'This was lying just there before! But how? How can it be the same room? That was at home. Miles away.' She stared at the open door, the dim cellars of the
Palace beyond.
Jared seemed to have forgotten his fear. His narrow face was lit; he took the metal scrap and looked at it closely, then slipped a small bag from his pocket and sealed the object inside. He aimed the scanner at the chair. 'There's something strange just here. The spatial rift seems stronger.' He frowned in frustration. 'Ah, if only we had better instruments, Claudia! If only the Sapienti had not been so hampered by Protocol all these years!
'Have you noticed,' she said, 'how the chair is fixed to the floor?'
She hadn't seen it before, but there were metal clasps to keep it in position. She walked around it. 'And why here? It's too far from the desk. There's just that light above.'
They stared up at it. A narrow, faintly blue light, falling on the chair and nothing else. Barely bright enough to read by.
A cold thought chilled her. 'Master ... this is not a place of torture, is it?'
He didn't answer at first, then she was grateful for his measured tone. 'I doubt it. There are no restraints, no signs of violence. Do you think your father would need to use such devices?'
She didn't want to answer that. Instead she said, 'We've seen all we can. Let's get out.' It was past midnight. Her whole body was listening for footsteps.
He nodded, reluctant. 'And yet this room holds secrets, Claudia, that I would give worlds to discover. Maybe it is a gateway. Maybe we are not seeing what is here.'
'Jared. That's enough.'
She crossed to the gate and stepped through. The cellars were still and gloomy. All the alarms were safely in place. And yet she was suddenly shaken by terrors; that dark figures were watching, that Fax was there, that her father stood in the shadows where she had stood, that the bronze gate would slam suddenly and trap Jared inside. She dragged him out so quickly, he almost fell.
Taking the Key, she tugged it out of the keyhole, watched how instantly the gate folded back with barely a clang, the chains linking themselves into place, the snails continuing their relentless slimy progress over the worn wings of the eagle.
