Emily Rodda - The Third Door

‘Rye, wait!’ Sonia gasped. ‘You have not—’

‘Jett can stay where he is,’ Rye muttered, and flung them both into space. He felt the breeze from the river cool on his hot face, his neck, his ears. Only then did he realise what Sonia had been trying to tell him. He was not wearing the hood. He had forgotten to pull on the hood!

There was a crash behind them as Jett’s chair fell to the floor. Then Jett himself was at the window, bawling to the crowd below, stabbing his finger at Rye and Sonia.

‘Sorcerers!’ Jett roared, as shocked faces turned upwards and people began to scream, crossing their fingers and their wrists at the sight of two beings swooping like birds above them. ‘You see? I am innocent! There are your assassins! Do not let them get away!’

17 - Upstream

In seconds, arrows were flying into the air. The soldiers’ aim was deadly. If it had not been for the armour shell, Rye and Sonia would have perished at once. As it was, the arrows simply bounced away from them. The crowd cried out in terror and disbelief. The soldiers cursed, fitted fresh arrows to their bows and tried again, just as uselessly.

Rye struggled to pull on the hood, but it was flapping behind him in the wind and the silk kept slipping through his fingers. Desperately he scanned the ground, and at last caught sight of Dirk and Sholto edging back towards the little park, their shocked faces upturned.

What a fool they must think me, Rye told himself. How could I have forgotten the hood? He felt the power of the feather waver and heard Sonia catch her breath. Grimly he thrust his shame aside and focused his mind on his brothers, on reaching his brothers …

‘No!’ Sonia cried, hearing his thoughts. ‘Leave them, Rye! They are safe here. No one saw them with us. And neither of them is fit to fly!’

Rye shut his mind to her. His faith in Farr had been badly shaken but part of him still could not believe the man was his enemy. In Fell End he would find out for sure, and whatever happened after that, he wanted Dirk and Sholto with him.

He swooped downwards, shouting to Dirk and Sholto to be ready. His eyes stung and watered as the air beat into his face. The ground came rushing up to meet him—a blur of green, a blur of stone, his brothers’ faces, their mouths gaping. And then he was off the ground again, with Dirk and Sholto clinging to him, and was hurtling above the heads of the crowd through a hail of stones and arrows.

‘Rye, this is madness!’ Sholto roared. ‘Dirk cannot—’

‘Hold onto him,’ Rye roared back. ‘Just a few more seconds …’

They were soaring over the pipeline, skimming over the road. And there was the river, its rippling surface gleaming in the sun.

As they flew over the bank, Rye pushed the red feather deep into his pocket and pulled out the sea serpent scale he had put there in readiness. An instant later his companions were yelling in shock as they all ploughed into the river. Cool water opened to receive them, rose to cover them as they sank.

With elation Rye felt the pain in the palm of his hand that told him the serpent scale had sunk into his flesh. Strength flowed through him. Effortlessly he twisted in the water and slid beneath Sonia till in her panic she caught hold of his shoulders. He wrapped one arm around Dirk, the other around Sholto. Then he shot to the surface, dragging them all with him.

‘Swim!’ he ordered. ‘Feel what you can do!’

He barely heard the bellows of shock from the riverbank as he surged forward, carving through the water as if it were air, leaving a trail of foam behind him. His companions were no weight at all, and soon they were all helping him, feeling what he felt, revelling in their mastery of the current that pushed vainly against them.

It did not matter that Rye could not use his arms, or that Dirk and Sholto were injured. By the power of the enchanted scale they all streaked through the water like serpents, more often below the surface than above, leaving their pursuers far behind.

So they passed through low hills without seeing them, passed fields of green and gold without knowing it, passed Farr and his companions who turned in their saddles to stare. And in what seemed the blink of an eye, the Fell End jetty was beside them, and they were gliding to a stop behind a half unloaded barge.

No one in Fell End had seen them arrive. People were working far too feverishly on land to notice a disturbance in the river. Rye pulled the hood of concealment over his head and the companions peered over the flat deck of the barge.

The Fell End riverbank looked very different from the way it had when they had first seen it. Then the bank had been green and peaceful, a welcome banner had fluttered over the jetty and music had filled the air. Now the riverbank was churned mud, and crowded with barrels that were being rolled and hefted onto carts. Hundreds of loaded carts already stood in lines along the metal barrier that separated the town from the Fell Zone. Soldiers were labouring side by side with pipeline workers. People not strong enough to work with the barrels were scurrying around with drinking water for those who were. It seemed that every soul in the town was on the riverbank, engaged in this one, mighty task.

And above them the pipeline soared, complete. Clutching the side of the barge, looking up, Rye felt his mouth go dry. The vast silver pipe continued almost all the way to the metal barrier then tilted steeply upward, so it looked like the neck of a giant sea serpent rising high above the waves. It even straightened at the top, stretching over the fence like the serpent’s head.

But the ‘serpent’s’ gaping mouth was rimmed in black. And sealed to the black rim was a great length of broad, clear tube. The tube was not rigid like the pipeline. It dangled from the black circle like a snake the ‘serpent’ was swallowing, trailing down to coil on the Fell End side of the barrier. It was so enormously long that the coils formed a mound as large as the chieftain’s lodge in the city by the sea.

Sonia, Dirk and Sholto were staring, aghast. Like Rye, they had seen tubing like that before. They had seen it, in miniature, attached to skimmer cages in the testing hall of the Master. They had seen skimmers hurtle through it and burst out into the air in a frenzy to feed.

‘What does this mean?’ Dirk whispered.

Rye swallowed, struggling to find an answer that would allow him to keep his faith in Farr. ‘It may not mean anything. New Nerra is a trading port. Goods come to it from all over the Sea of Serpents.’

‘Oltan is a trading port too,’ Dirk muttered. ‘Yet there is nothing like that soft, clear pipe there. I have only ever seen it in one other place before.’

‘That piping, and the black seal, are the Master’s work,’ Sholto said evenly. ‘Farr could not have obtained them from anyone else.’

Rye could not speak. It was left to Sonia to tell what Jett had said in the watchtower. When she had finished, there was silence. Dirk and Sholto were both staring in horror at the rearing pipeline and at the great mound of tubing that, uncoiled and stretched to its full length, would surely reach all the way up through the Fell Zone, to Weld.

‘So now we know why the soldiers are armed with flamers,’ Dirk said heavily at last. ‘They are going to burn a track through the forest, to make way for the people dragging the tube.’

Sholto’s face was haggard. ‘And they will be beginning that task very soon, no doubt. They have left it till the last minute, but, after all, the skimmers cannot be released before sunset.’

In dread, Rye looked up at the dimming sky.

‘Rye,’ Sonia whispered, clutching his cold hand. ‘We must go to the Fellan—all of us! The disc is our only chance! You know now that there is no point in trying to talk to Farr.’