The Kingdom - Clare B Dunkle - Hollow Kingdom 01 - The Hollow Kingdom

“I need to see him right away.”

The cat looked at her through the glass of the double doors. His round golden eyes grew rounder.

“You do?”

“Yes, but don’t call him, Seylin. I need you to take me to see him.”

The cat’s eyes were huge now.

“You do?” he squeaked. “All right. I’ll take you.” He paused for a second. “The King will surely be surprised.”

“Good,” said Kate grimly.

The cat laid his paws on the doors, and they swung open. How easy, thought Kate disgustedly. How childishly simple. She stepped quickly across the terrace and into the darkening forest, the black cat in the lead.

Half an hour later, they were standing in front of a cliff face. Seylin reared up on his hind legs, balancing quite easily. “Here, take my paw,” he said. She did so. “It might help if you close your eyes.” Kate closed her eyes. “Now, five steps forward.” This is it, she thought. Drippy caverns. Darkness. She felt dizzy. She counted off five steps, then opened her eyes and blinked in astonishment.

She was not in a drippy cavern, at least not yet. Instead, she felt as if she had walked into the middle of a kaleidoscope. Mirrored surfaces faced her on all sides. Even the floor was a fractured mirror. She and the black cat were reflected hundreds of times, each time at a more drastic angle. She began to feel rather seasick. Black-cloaked guards approached them from many directions. It was a few seconds before she realized that this was only one guard reflected many times.

“Oh, do you have your eyes open?” asked Seylin. “I’d close them again. This can be confusing if you’ve never seen it before. It’s supposed to make it hard for enemies to find the next doorway.” She gratefully shut her eyes as Seylin talked to the guard. They walked forward. Now the drippy caverns, she thought.

But no, they were in a long, straight corridor of polished black stone, lit by globe-shaped lamps hanging from brackets on the walls. Goblin guards of various sizes and shapes walked about the corridor. Some of them took Kate’s breath away. They all appeared to be wearing a variation of Marak’s normal black attire, and this combined with the black stone of the corridor made them difficult to see. Kate realized how appropriate such a uniform was for creatures who would only be out during the night. No wonder humans seldom saw a goblin!

At the end of this corridor was a huge door several times higher than Kate. It appeared to be solid iron. She looked around, waiting for another guard to emerge and let them through. Instead, a deep, hollow voice rang out. It seemed to come from the door itself.

“Hello, little Seylin,” said the voice.

“Hello, door,” piped the cat.

“Didn’t I just let you out?” asked the door, sounding puzzled.

“I need to see the King,” Seylin said earnestly.

“Who is the pretty woman?” asked the deep voice.

“She needs to see the King, too,” said Seylin.

“Are you sure I should let her in?” The door seemed rather doubtful.

“The King wants to see her, too,” Seylin assured it.

There was a pause. “He could see her out here,” the door suggested.

“He’s in court. Come on, door, I’m in a hurry,” complained the cat. The door slowly swung open, and they walked through. Kate stopped on the other side, feeling rather overcome.

Ahead of her lay what she knew must be a vast cave, but it didn’t resemble one at all. She seemed to be looking across a narrow valley under an intensely black night sky. She stood on a wide street that dipped down to the shallow valley floor and then rose up again beyond it. Beside her, rows of trees filled with colored lights marched down the slight incline. Along the very bottom of the valley ran a small river, and the street crossed it on a low, arched bridge before climbing upward again through elegant formal gardens.

On the far side of the valley, the street became the entrance steps to a palace so wide and so massive that it completely blocked their view of whatever lay beyond. Story upon story of colossal square windows shone out onto the park. The architecture reminded Kate of ancient Greece or Egypt—that is, if a titanic ancient temple could rise so high into the sky. No, not the sky. No friendly stars winked down at her. Kate squeezed Seylin’s paw in a flurry of panic and pictured the stars that were just coming out in the sky beyond this cave. They settled into their proper places in her mind, their silvery light mingling with the rising full moon, giving her the courage to face whatever lay ahead.

“Do you want to go back out?”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry, door,” answered Seylin. “We were just looking around.”

“Because I don’t know if I’m allowed to let you back out,” said the door gravely.

“No, no, thanks,” replied the cat, and started down the street toward the palace.

“I’ll have to wait for orders,” the door said stubbornly as they walked away.

“It’s really so stupid!” fumed the cat in a shrill hiss. “They’re all like that. The King says they’re just supposed to delay an enemy long enough for the rest of us to find it and kill it.”

They were passing the rows of glimmering trees. These looked like graceful saplings perhaps three times Kate’s height, but she could see that they were entirely artificial. The slim trunks and branches gleamed like solid gold, and throughout their crowns, huge, jeweled flowers bloomed. From the boughs hung colored lanterns, casting a faint light that illuminated dark green stone, not grass. The garden paths between the rows were mosaics of pale, polished rock.

As they walked, the delicate flowering trees gave way to thick summer growth, the rich green stone leaves almost paper-thin. Soon they passed dark bronze trees loaded with stone foliage in polished reds, oranges, and yellows and came to Kate’s very favorites, the trees by the river. These had trunks and branches of silver, the slender boughs loaded with delicate, tinkling clear crystals. Beneath them shone snow white paving stones. The crystals caught the pale light of the lanterns and refracted it in delicate rainbows onto the stone below.

“We need to hurry,” Seylin urged as Kate lingered to look at the beautiful trees. Tugging her along, he crossed the river. The shallow water foamed over rapids carefully composed of small cubes of rock sticking up from the shallow riverbed. Water in Kate’s world would catch the moonlight, but this river needed none. The many bubbles of foam appeared to shine with their own soft light.

Now the pair was climbing toward the steps of the palace. Beds of fanciful jeweled flowers alternated with musical fountains, and lamps of all colors lined the paths. Kate felt again that the light was rather faint. How beautiful these gardens would be in the daylight, she thought. Then, with bitter disappointment, she realized that it would never be day here. She was seeing the gardens not at night, but as they would always be.

The palace had no doors. Kate and Seylin stepped into an entrance hall several stories high, its outer wall pierced by huge windows. The enormous chandelier needed no candles because the crystals themselves shone. In their dim light, a huge double staircase curved up before the pair. On the wall between the wide flights of stairs, a mosaic of glass tiles sparkled with all the colors of a sunset.

Seylin pulled her down a corridor to the right. Kate felt rather giddy. She could absorb her surroundings only in snatches—here a hall with walls and floor of polished jade, there a hall of burnished lapis lazuli. While there was artwork everywhere, none of it represented anything she could understand. The smooth floor sparkled with scatterings of brilliant mosaic tiles in complicated, almost random patterns, and the walls were inlaid with horizontal bands of contrasting stones. They turned a corner and whisked by a tiny feathered creature rather like a yellow mop head.