Emily Rodda - The Third Door

Emily Rodda

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

1. The Saltings

2. Inside

3. The Lantern

4. Time to Choose

5. Voices

6. Fell End

7. The Stranger

8. Keelin

9. The Chest

10. Carryl

11. The Pit

12. The Maze

13. The Barge

14. Riverside

15. The Watchtower

16. The Enemy of Weld

17. Upstream

18. The Head of the Serpent

19. Magic

20. The Pool

21. The Three Brothers

22. Terror

23. Three Doors

24. Nine Powers

25. The Wall

26. Decisions

ALSO BY EMILY RODDA

Copyright

1 - The Saltings

It was past midnight, but no one slept inside the stronghold of the Master. The day just ended had been eagerly awaited, but instead of triumph it had brought disaster. The Master’s rage had been terrible. The grey-faced supervisor now in charge of the vast Harbour complex had decreed that there was to be no rest until every room had been restored to order.

The flooded basement had been partly drained, but the workers there still toiled knee deep in oily water thick with drowned slays. Surveying the bloated bodies of the ferocious beasts she had bred from far less dangerous stock, the supervisor felt no emotion. That was not surprising. She was no more human than the grey-clad guards labouring around her. Like them, she existed only to serve.

She was already calculating how long it would be until she could begin the breeding programme again with the handful of slays she had left. She was also deciding that very large quantities of the red substance known as jell would speed the process. The slaves in the Diggings would have to work harder.

It did not occur to her to wonder why the Shadow Lord, who had such powerful sorcery at his command, required an army of deadly flying beasts that could attack by day as well as by night. It was not in her nature to ask such questions. What the Master wanted he must have—that was all that mattered.

The thing he wanted most at present was the capture of the four enemy spies who had dared to interfere with his plans. It had been early morning when the spies fled the Harbour leaving havoc behind them, but the supervisor had no doubt they would be caught, even after so long a delay.

Soon the Master’s giant birds would recover from the feeding frenzy that had left them gorged and unable to fly. At daybreak they would be released to hunt the criminals down.

The prisoners the spies had saved would go free. By now they would have scattered, and with Slave-hunter Kyte dead there was no one to identify them. Mine rats all looked the same to the supervisor and to most of the other workers in the Harbour.

The four spies were different. They would be easy to recognise. They were well fed, and two of them were copperheads. They had the means to make themselves invisible, certainly. But the birds were the Master’s creatures, not natural beasts like slays, and the Master’s power would sharpen their eyes.

The spies could not remain hidden forever. There would be no escape for them.

Rye, Sonia, Dirk and Sholto were at that very moment trying to prove the supervisor wrong. Hand in hand, sped by Rye’s magic ring and invisible beneath Rye’s hood, they were gliding over the parched plain called the Scour. The clouded sky was dark, but not so dark that they could not see their way, and thanks to the charmed feather Rye held, their feet did not touch the pebbled track that guided them.

The four had not dared to move in daylight, though Rye and Sonia now had brown hair instead of red thanks to a dark powder given to them by Cap of the Den, who had taken them into hiding. They had slept through the day in the Den, and even when night fell they had lingered. They knew that their lanky friend Bones, who had given them such valuable help at the Harbour, would raise an outcry if he saw his ‘magic ones’ leaving him. So they had waited till Bones was as deeply asleep as everyone else in the Den before slipping away.

‘It cannot be helped,’ Sonia whispered, feeling Rye’s guilt as they reached the place where they had first seen Bones—the pyramid of stones at the edge of the Saltings wasteland.

Rye sighed. ‘If only we could have taken Bones and the others home with us! And Bird and all the people from Nanny’s Pride Farm, too!’

‘I agree,’ Dirk growled. ‘But if we are to stay in Weld only briefly, and then see what is beyond the wooden Door, we will have to stay hidden. Bones and the rest would make that impossible.’

‘Indeed.’ Sholto grimaced. ‘Imagine the Warden’s panic if he saw a horde from beyond the Wall pouring into the Keep! Faene—that girl you tell me you smuggled in through the golden Door—sounds as if she could pass for a Weld person if she had to. The same cannot be said for Cap’s tribe—or Bird’s.’

Rye knew his brothers were right. The ragged men and women of the Den, wretchedly thin, with wild hair and scarlet jell-stained hands, would seem terrifying to the orderly citizens of Weld. The small, fierce people from Nanny’s Pride farm would be almost as frightening.

‘And they could not have hidden in the tower with Annocki and Faene,’ Dirk added. ‘There would not have been room to move!’

‘Who is Annocki?’ Sholto asked.

‘The Warden’s daughter,’ Dirk said with a grin. ‘Sonia’s friend, and the lady you are to marry, brother, if there is any justice! You were the one who found the enemy of Weld and destroyed the skimmers—the slays, as they call them here. You should win the Warden’s prize!’

‘Do not be ridiculous!’ Sholto snapped. ‘I have no wish to marry anyone—let alone a woman who has been forced to accept me!’

Sonia shot him an approving glance, but made no comment. ‘The people here would not follow us through a sorcerer’s Door to Weld even if we asked them, Rye,’ she said instead. ‘They are terrified of magic—all of them except Bones. They were grateful to us, but still they left us to ourselves as soon as they could.’

There was a strange, sad note in her voice. Her face was a pale blur in the dimness as she turned her head to stare over the Saltings. The dark, lumpy ground stretched away as far as the eye could see, so seething with moving snails that it seemed to ripple like water.

Rye tried to send her a message of comfort, but her mind was closed to him. Perhaps, he thought, she was imagining what Cap, Bird and the others would have felt if they had known that Rye had opened the way for the Master’s invasion by causing the death of the tyrant Olt. Sonia had always refused to believe that Olt’s power protected Dorne from the Lord of Shadows, but surely she accepted it now.

‘We had better get on,’ Dirk said. ‘Sholto’s trail of pyramids will guide us. As I recall, there are ten in all. The first we found—the one that had the remains of your notebook inside it, brother—is very near the silver Door.’

‘Possibly,’ Sholto muttered, ‘but I could not find the Door when I looked. Of course, I was not in my right mind at the time.’ He had tried to speak lightly, but he looked sick as he stared out at the creeping sea of snails ahead.

Rye and Dirk glanced at each other. Sholto had said very little about what had happened to him before he reached the Harbour, and they had not pressed him. They knew there were huge gaps in his memory, and that this disturbed him greatly.