“Hit the button!
Snowclaw got the idea and slammed his fist into the control panel. There came an ear-splitting squeal of distressed metal, then a horrendous clanking and groaning, followed by a loud, heavy thud.
It was an abrupt stop. Everyone wound up in a heap on the floor. There were moans and muffled, urgent requests.
“What?” Snowclaw asked.
“Get … off … my leg,” Jacoby puffed.
“Oh, sorry.”
“Everybody okay?” Gene asked after he got his breath. “Linda?”
“I thought we were going to die.” Her face was fish-belly white. “I’m going to be sick.”
Kwip picked himself up and exhaled. “This is an elevator, then?”
“Not quite,” Gene said. “It seems to lack certain mechanical necessities.”
“We must have fallen a hundred stories,” Jacoby said, his face a cadaverous shade of gray.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Linda said.
“It was my idea,” Gene said. “I should have known that nothing mechanical would work inside the castle. Forget it. Let’s get this door open.” Gene bent to examine the juncture of the inside doors. He tried to pry them open with his fingers. “They probably lock automatically,” he said. He looked at Linda. “You okay?”
She burped. “Excuse me. My stomach is still ten floors up. Yeah, I’m fine. Well, not
Gene thought about it. “Why not? Just don’t touch that Down switch again.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Linda said. She held her breath, then gingerly pressed the Open Door button.
The doors rolled apart, revealing a solid stone wall.
“Of course,” Gene said.
“Allow me,” Kwip said, stepping forward.
A moment later Gene tapped him on the arm. Kwip’s shoulders drew back and his head came ghosting out of the wall.
Kwip’s eyes gleamed strangely.
“See anything on the other side?” Gene asked.
“Aye, but …” Kwip gave Gene an odd look. “I need to get a mite closer.” He stepped into the wall again, this time disappearing completely.
Gene chewed his lip, then said, “Linda, do you think you could materialize an opening of some sort?”
Linda thought about it. “That’s an interesting question.”
She could, and it turned out to be a door with a graceful Gothic arch. It led into a vast room of unusual geometry, though the room was the last thing they noticed, for in the middle of it, high atop a dark, irregularly shaped supporting stanchion, sat an amber-colored crystalline mass of enormous proportions and complexity. It glowed with its own lambent light, throwing strange shadows into the farthest corners of the immense chamber.
Gene whistled and said, “Good God, look at the size of that thing!”
“The Brain,” Jacoby breathed.
“What?” Linda asked him.
“The Brain of Ramthonodox. The legendary jewel.”
“Yeah?” Gene said. “Is it supposed to have magic powers or something?”
“Enormous powers,” Jacoby said soberly, then licked dry lips.
The doorway hung about four feet off the floor. Snowclaw jumped off first and helped Linda down, then Jacoby. Gene leaped, and landed with knees bent.
Kwip did not turn to look at them. He stood on the edge of the platform on which they had alighted, his gaze fixed on the enormous jewel.
Gene came up and stood beside him. “Really something,” he said.
“Aye,” Kwip said quietly.
“How in the hell did they get it in here? They must’ve built the castle around it.”
“Likely did.”
The stone was a single glittering mass, a giant star with thousands of short crystalline spikes radiating from a spherical central body. Fingers of amber fire moved and weaved throughout the stone’s interior.
Jacoby seemed transported. “Beautiful,” he murmured. “The color …”
“Gorgeous,” Linda said.
Looking down, Kwip spied a way across the jumbled, many-tiered floor, stepped down from the platform and began to make his way toward the center of the chamber. Gene followed.
“C’mon guys,” he said.
The room looked like a Gothic amphitheater without seats, or a cathedral built in the shape of a bowl. Its roof was a complex arrangement of stone-ribbed vaults supported by clusters of slender pillars. The supporting stanchion stood where the stage or altar would have been. To get there they had to make their way down a series of terraced platforms. At the bottom they crossed a smooth stone floor and stopped at the foot of the stanchion.
Each radiating facet was a hexahedron tapering to a point, and all were of different thicknesses and lengths. Some were the size of a finger. They all sparkled and shone with an amber phosphorescence.
Kwip eyed the stanchion. It was a fractured, irregularly shaped mass of dull black rock, its apex lost among the thicket of crystalline shafts at the mammoth jewel’s underside. At floor level the rock was at least fifty paces across.
The rock could be climbed.
“Is that thing just balanced up there?” Gene said. “What’s supporting it?”
“It’s difficult to see,” Kwip said, squinting.
“Weird.” Gene turned and glanced around the chamber. “Looks like no way out. Linda, you’ll have to cut another door for us.”
“Can do.”
Jacoby shot Gene a look of annoyed contempt. “Don’t you realize what we have here? This is the castle’s source of power.”
“Yeah? Where’s the plug? I’m gonna pull that sucker.”
“You’re a fool.”
“What do you propose we do? Take it with us?”
“Of course not.”
Gene threw his arms wide. “Then what’s your beef, Jacoby?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Jacoby sniffed.
“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m just ticked off because I got passed over when they handed out the magic tricks.”
“Gene, your powers will come,” Linda said. “It’s different for each person.”
“What about me?” Snowclaw complained. “I’m in the same boat.”
Gene said, “You’re so big you don’t need hocus-pocus.”
“I want to get closer to it,” Jacoby said, walking toward the base of the stanchion. When he realized how steep it was, he stopped, hesitating. Then he screwed his courage up a notch and began climbing.
“Oh, for —” Gene stamped his foot and followed. “C’mon, Snowy. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I don’t want him mucking with whatever that is up there.”
“Right.”
Kwip and Linda watched them climb after Jacoby.
“Mistress Linda —”
“Just call me Linda.”
“I would be pleased to. Linda, might I ask a small favor?”
Above, Jacoby huffed and puffed, then quit. Looking up the jagged slope, he saw it was no use, and the enthusiasm sputtered out of him like air out of a balloon. He sat on a narrow ledge and watched Gene and
