Emily Rodda - The Third Door

Rye’s throat closed as he saw the objects rolling and coming to rest on the scorched ground. Bent metal rods. Scraps of roofing iron. Twisted metal shutters. Broken tools and weapons. Rusted anchors. Odd lengths of chain and wire. Even small household items like burned out kettles, dented buckets and cooking pots that had lost their handles.

Waste metal, collected from every warehouse, every shop, farm and home in New Nerra and beyond. Metal to quench the magic of the Fellan.

This was why the guardians of the forest had retreated. This was why the soldiers had only the Fell dragons and the wind to fight as they burned their way up to the Fell Zone’s summit.

And the more metal was brought in, the less the Fellan would be able to defend this part of their territory. Even now, the mighty wind was wavering, weakening, and cheers were rising from Fell End, from the soldiers leading the hogs that drew the carts, from the troops with the flamers.

Farr gave a great sigh. Rye turned to him. The chieftain’s face was slack with relief.

‘You could not quite believe it would work,’ Rye said evenly.

Farr wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘It seemed such a simple thing,’ he admitted. ‘But I was well advised. Now we’ve a safe place to begin.’

I was well advised.

The words floated into Rye’s mind and clung there like prickling burrs as troops pounced on the objects littering the track and hurled them far into the undergrowth. They clung there as the first carts emptied and other carts trundled past them to shed their loads further up the hill. They clung there as Rye felt the Fellan’s power shrink back, and as the wind beating on his face gradually stuttered and died.

And only then, in what seemed a sudden, deathly hush, did Rye focus on Farr’s last words.

Now we’ve a safe place to begin.

23 - Three Doors

Fire and metal were only part of Farr’s plan. There was something worse to come. Rye could see that in the chieftain’s tired but exultant face, in the determined tilt of his chin. And in that moment Rye realised it was the charm, the token of the treaty, that had made Farr hesitate to attack the Fellan for so long. Farr had not known the disc existed, but it had still exerted power over him. Now it was gone, and all the man’s doubts had gone with it.

‘Farr,’ Rye cried desperately. ‘I beg you, stop the attack. The Fellan keep Dorne safe—safe from invasion! I saw it in the pool. They—’

Farr shook his head pityingly. ‘Get away from here, Keelin,’ he muttered. ‘Find somewhere safe to hide till your mind’s your own again.’

He pulled himself free and strode out of cover. Smoke and ash swirled around him. The men trudging by with the carts did not notice him and he made no effort to attract their attention. He merely stood and waited, looking down towards Fell End.

Stop him, Rye!

Sonia’s thought was as faint as a sigh. She was leaning heavily on Rye’s arm, perhaps hardly knowing what she did. The great weight of metal hidden in the passing carts was sapping more of her energy every moment. Her eyes were as dull as they had been in the wasteland of the Saltings.

Rye drew her closer, trying to strengthen her with his warmth. And with a mixture of admiration and pity he felt her rousing herself, fighting to respond.

The Enemy … he felt her call to him. The Enemy … the pipeline …

Rye’s head jerked up. He turned to stare at the pipeline, far below.

Something about it had changed. The clear tubing attached to its high, arching summit no longer lay in a towering heap. The coils were unwinding like the coils of a giant snake, and the tube was sliding through the gap in the barrier and up the black, burned track, supported by hundreds of Fell End workers in yellow overalls.

The Enemy …

A picture drifted into Rye’s mind—words appearing in the still, dark pool called Dann’s Mirror, beyond the golden Door. Rye had asked where Dirk was to be found, and the pool had answered.

Dirk had been in the city of Oltan, in Chieftain Olt’s fortress by the sea. But Olt had not been the Fellan’s enemy, Rye knew that now. Olt would never have harmed the beings whose magic protected him, and Dorne, from the Lord of Shadows.

So what had the message meant by ‘the place of the Enemy’? Who in Oltan did the Fellan fear?

What did the Fellan fear?

Then Rye remembered. He clutched at the book beneath his shirt, gripped by a certainty that turned his bones to water. Suddenly he knew the pipeline’s purpose.

The pipeline had been built to carry something far more deadly than troops, skimmers, fire or metal. It had been built to carry the Fellan’s ancient enemy into the island’s heart.

Through that vast tube would come the sea—the sea, frothing and hissing, tumbling with weed and snails … and thick with salt.

The sea is their enemy. The salt weakens their magic …

It would take months for Farr’s troops to traverse the whole Fell Zone—to burn the tracks, to spread the metal, to spray the water pumped from the coast—the salt-laden water that would kill the Fellan’s magic.

But at last the seawater would finish what fire and metal had begun. The forest would die. The Fellan would die. The magic would die, never to rise again.

The sorcerer Malverlain will never return to claim Dorne. Never, while we live!

The memory of those Fellan voices echoed in Rye’s mind like the dread tolling of a bell.

Never … Never, while we live!

Rye’s skin crawled. His whole body quaked. And in that instant his mind burst through the numbing, protective wall that had grown up around it, sealing it away from the confusion and shocks of the night. Pictures began flashing before his eyes, tumbling over one another like cards thrown into the air. It was as if all the memories of his three quests beyond the Wall of Weld were coming together here on this smoky, blackened hillside.

Faene kneeling by her parents’ grave in the courtyard garden in Fleet. The serene little park in Riverside. Grey guards sprawled at their ease in the Diggings … The pit in Olt’s dungeons where Dirk and the rebels had been ambushed. The pit beneath the museum, littered with bones and belt buckles … Dirk in the Saltings, brandishing a dingy skimmer hook. Two boys arguing in Carryl’s workroom. Pebbles cracking under the slides of Bones’ loaded sled. Snail-eaten pages from Sholto’s notebook …

A rhyme carved in stone above three Doors.

Time to choose …

And then Rye understood. He understood at last. There was no more struggling to force the impossible to make sense, no more need to doubt the evidence of his own eyes and ears.

He understood how it could be that Dann and his followers had fled from Olt just before the first Gifting, and he and Sonia had arrived in Oltan just before the second.

He understood why both Farr and the Fellan insisted that the Lord of Shadows had not invaded Dorne.

All he had to do was accept one astonishing fact, and everything else fell into place. And he did accept it. Why not? Eldannen, brother of Olt and Malverlain, friend of the Fellan, founder of Weld, had been a great sorcerer. Perhaps, indeed, he had been the greatest of the three.

Rye became aware that Sonia was shaking his arm. He turned to meet her frightened eyes.

‘Rye, what happened?’ she whispered. ‘You looked so strange! And your mind was moving so fast that I could not—’

‘I have realised something!’ Rye broke in huskily. He took a breath, deliberately calmed himself, and began to put his ideas into some sort of order, knowing that now, at least, Sonia would be able to follow him.