The Crystal Key

Chapter 6-1

LAWRENCE KINLAND WAS afraid. Ridiculous, he told himself. He had no reason for fear. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

RidiculousEven if he had no idea where he was. Or how he came to be here. Or why he wanted to be here.

whyHe sat alone at a round white-clothed table in the largest banquet hall he’d ever seen. And the strangest.

The room was a huge cavern, carved from a shining black stone, running at least fifty paces by a hundred and rising to a high vaulted ceiling. At scores of tables throughout, men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns talked and laughed, ate and drank. All wore animal-headed masks.

Servers, male and female, dressed only in loin cloths and leopard masks, wove between the tables. Each balanced a tray laden with a steaming roast of an unknown meat on their heads and carried a wine flask in one hand. On the cavern walls, torches burned with scarlet flames, washing the room in a bloody light.

Why was this scene so familiar? Had he been here before? If so, he couldn’t remember. Just as he couldn’t remember how he’d arrived here tonight.

Tonight? Was it night?

An oval dance floor of polished hardwood filled the middle of the cavern, large enough for a hundred couples, but currently empty. Circling that space, every twenty paces or so, flames leaped from bronze pots squatting waist-high on clawed feet, their smoke mixing with the torches and the smell of cooked meat.

Kinland’s table sat at the end of the room on the edge of the dining area. Beside him, the dance floor ended at a semicircular dais a meter high and ten across, sculpted from the black stone. The dais jutted from the cavern wall, tall red curtains hiding whatever lay behind. Two men dressed as Victorian footmen flanked the curtains, each holding draw ropes. They wore bear-head masks and sword scabbards.

Concentric circles lay carved into the platform, with spokes radiating outwards from the innermost circle. On the floor below where each spoke ended, a golden goblet rested, as if waiting to be filled.

Masked guests occupied every seat at every table in the room. Except at his. He sat alone, unmasked. The other diners paid him no notice, yet his isolation and proximity to the dais felt both threatening and ominous. He felt exposed, naked, unwanted.

At the opposite end of the cavern, a broad red-carpeted staircase led up from the dance floor to a tapestry-draped landing. A movement on the staircase caught his eye. A man wearing the formal attire of a Victorian gentleman and a boar’s head mask descended the stairs. Walking the length of the room, the man seated himself across from Kinland and removed the mask. Long white hair. Blue eyes, bright and cold. A hooked nose under snowy eyebrows.

Another jolt of surprise shook Kinland. They’d met before. Here. In this place. His memories rushed back.

The man’s name was…Beroald. He was a powerful man. A man who had offered to share that power with him—if Kinland performed a certain task.

Cold sweat trickled down his back. He remembered more now. Remembered the agreement he had made, the task he had promised to do.

Remembered, too, that he had failed in that task.

“You disappointed us, Lawrence,” Beroald said, as if reading his mind. He spoke with an upper-class English accent, his voice deep and rich with a softness that didn’t hide the threat in his words.

Kinland swallowed, his mouth dry. “Beroald, please, sir, give me another chance. I will try again. I—”

Beroald cut him off with a raised hand. “How, Lawrence? How will you try again? You no longer have access to the White Tower. You, therefore, no longer have access to where the artifact lies hidden. In short, the reasons which prompted us to approach you no longer apply.”

Kinland could think of no reply.

“Worse,” Beroald continued, “you made an enemy of Adrienne Archambeault with your treatment of her ward, the Dreycott boy. And roused her suspicions with your actions. The woman is no fool. Far from it. My people tell me she is making inquiries. Into the front company you used to shield your search. Into the individuals you employed for that search.” Beroald paused, his blue eyes piercing Kinland, pinning him to his chair. “Into you.”

“I…I can make amends. Please…”

Beroald flicked his hand at him as if shooing away a fly. “No, Lawrence. After we tie up a few loose ends, we shall adopt a different approach for our quest. This will be our last conversation, you and I.”

Which meant, Kinland knew, his last time in this strange room. And his last opportunity to share in the power Beroald had offered.

A masked server set a plate heaped with steaming slices of beef before them, then filled both their glasses with a ruby wine.

Beroald lifted his glass. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Lawrence. For both our sakes. You would have fit in well here. But enjoy your dinner. A last meal, so to speak. Someone will guide you from here…” He nodded at the red curtains. “…after tonight’s ceremony.” He clapped his hands.

Four musicians in harlequin masks and dressed as Elizabethan minstrels emerged from a tunnel to the left of the dais. Two carried mandolins, one a saxophone, and the last a set of bongos. Each bore a wooden stool. Reaching the dais, they sat on their stools beside the platform and took up their instruments.

Beroald clapped again.

The curtains drew back, revealing a dark opening in the black stone wall, like the mouth of a cave. In that mouth, Kinland sensed more than saw something watching, waiting.

“And finally…” Beroald gestured towards the far end of the room.

Kinland turned to look. Two figures appeared at the top of the carpeted staircase. One was a broad-chested giant, dressed like the two men flanking the red curtains—Victorian footman garb, bear mask, and sword. In his hands, he held a heavy chain of gray metal. The chain ran to a collar around the neck of a woman who stood beside him, her eyes downcast.

The woman was young and, even from this distance, the most beautiful Kinland had ever seen, with hair so white and skin so pale she seemed to glow. She wore only a diaphanous gown that changed color and shape when he tried to focus on it, sometimes concealing, sometimes revealing, sometimes seeming to disappear. The body it revealed was slim and lithe, with long arms and legs.

Her masked guard unfastened the collar from her neck. Freed, she raised her head to gaze around the room, transforming that simple movement into an act of defiance. The guard gestured to the stairs with an arm. Turning from him with a sneer, her chin held high, she glided down the staircase.

As she reached the bottom, the torches on the walls died, and Kinland realized the woman was glowing with some inner light. As if to match her light, the flames in the burners surrounding the dance floor sprang higher. Shadows writhed over the masked diners who now watched only this woman as she stepped onto the floor. She rose on her toes, her arms above her in a delicate arc, fingertips touching. Then she sprang forward.

wasAnd began to dance.

She leaped, she spun, she whirled down the floor, ever moving, ever graceful, but as one apart, as if she were the only person in the vast room. The band did not play. She seemed to dance to music only she heard. Kinland couldn’t take his eyes from her.

She moved past where he sat with Beroald. At the end of the dance floor, she stopped. No longer moving, no longer dancing, her earlier glow faded.

With downcast gaze, the Dancer (for that is what he now called this woman) crossed the stone semicircle with a slow precise gait. She halted two paces in front of the dais that lay before the darkened opening in the wall. She raised her hands above her head. The minstrel band began to play.

Kinland sucked in his breath, shivering with a thrill of surprise. He knew this tune. It was a song he’d heard before.

No. Not a song.

aThe Song.

The As the Song played, the cave opening quivered like a black membrane, vomiting a thick fog onto the dais. Inside that murk, a misshapen, many-legged form loomed.

The Dancer began to dance again. And glow again. Her glow grew with each spin she made, each leap she took, until it lit the room and, finally, penetrated the thick mist.

And Kinland saw the thing that had emerged from the opening, drawn here, he knew, by the Song.

The creature resembled a monstrous elongated beetle crossed with a scorpion. It skittered forward on six multi-jointed legs set below a black and shiny carapace. Dark scales protected a short neck and a bulbous head. Long pincers extended from each side of a slit-like mouth writhing in a horrible parody of human lips. The beast measured at least three meters from its head to the end of a jointed, barbed tail.

Four red multifaceted eyes took in the diners. It scrambled forward on the dais.

Wanting to flee but fearing any movement would attract the creature’s attention, Kinland remained frozen in his seat. The Dancer spun closer to the dais. The creature scuttled towards her, its many feet clicking and clacking on the stone. It stopped. The music played, and the Dancer danced. As she moved, the thing stood transfixed, swaying, red eyes locked on her, as if hypnotized by the spell she wove with her body.

The two curtain attendants slid long blades from their scabbards. They crept toward the beast. The nearest drew his arm back and, with a sudden but sure motion, slipped his blade between the scales surrounding the beast’s neck. The creature spasmed once, then slumped to the floor.

Blood spewed from the wound, thick and black, flowing along the channels carved in the stone into the waiting goblets. As the goblets filled, table attendants collected them and set more in place. The attendants then circulated amongst the tables with the filled goblets.

Her head lowered, the Dancer now knelt before the dais. Her masked guard refastened the metal collar with its chain around her neck. He then led the Dancer, her head down and a prisoner once more, the length of the room to the staircase. Climbing the stairs, the man and the Dancer disappeared through a side archway.

Kinland sat trembling, again fighting an urge to run. A leopard-headed woman arrived to pour blood from the goblet she carried into Beroald’s glass. She inclined her masked head toward Kinland, but Beroald waved a hand. The woman bowed and left.

Beroald raised his glass. “Excuse me, Lawrence, but the efficacy of the blood lasts but a short while.” He took a deep drink.

The sweet smell of the black liquid reached Kinland. And he remembered being here before. Remembered drinking the black blood. Remembered, too, what happened to him after.

Sweetness. Heat. Then…

A dam bursting inside him…a hidden lake released…his being flooded with rivers of vitality…freed from every bodily pain.

Over the following days, he’d experienced astounding energy, a vigor he hadn’t known for decades. A host of minor ailments that had plagued him for years disappeared. He’d felt wonderful. He’d felt strong. He’d felt powerful. It had been as if…

As if he had become young again.

Staring at Beroald and the man’s now empty glass, he licked his lips. He would never feel that way again, he realized. He’d had his chance. And lost it. Forever.

Beroald smiled sadly at him. The man now shone with a youthful vitality that belied his white hair. “Ah, you remember, don’t you? What we offered you. The taste you had of it.”