The Wizards of Once Read online

  The weight of Sychorax’s disappointment was so depressing that Wish could feel herself drooping like her fingers were made of lead.

  Be merciful… thought Sychorax as Wish wilted miserably in front of her. I suppose the child can’t HELP looking like a weird little twig that somebody accidentally trod on. I suppose she can’t HELP bobbing about the place like an unbalanced bunny rabbit. A queen should be GRACIOUS as well as severely and incorruptibly just… A queen must be FORGIVING as well as unbendingly and unswervingly firm…

  Sychorax controlled herself with a strong effort.

  “I suppose…” said Queen Sychorax, gritting her teeth, “you did your best, however inferior that best might be. How is your headache, thinking of physical and mental weakness?”

  “My headache?” said Wish blankly, before remembering hurriedly that she had told her mother she was going to bed early with a headache so she could sneak out after the spoon. “Oh, er, the headache’s much better, Mother, thank you,” said Wish.

  “And how are you finding learning how to be a Warrior?” asked her mother.

  “It’s quite difficult, Mother…”

  Queen Sychorax sighed with exasperation. “Madam Dreadlock says that your spelling is going particularly badly—reading and writing is a sign of how superior and civilized us Warriors are, you know, Wish.”

  “Yes, but the thing with the spelling is, the letters won’t stay still,” explained Wish. “They keep wandering about in my head, and I forget what order they were in, in the first place.

  “There are some people,” Wish suggested bravely, “who think that spelling might not be as important as the things you are trying to spell…”

  “Well, those people are CRAZY,” said Queen Sychorax. “You’ll just have to try a bit harder, won’t you? Starting with your appearance…”

  Wish was looking even more than usually bedraggled. Cloak on inside out and back to front. Ripped clothes, twigs all over the place, hair whipped up into frenzied knots from when Squeezjoos had made a nest out of it earlier.

  “Even a substandard Warrior like you should always be well put together, Wish,” said Queen Sychorax, sweeping away. “Every hair in place. Every weapon sharpened. Every fingernail shining. Remember that.”

  And just as Queen Sychorax was sailing off, in a rustle of long, gracious white skirts, a certain knot that attached a little iron key to the belt she wore around her waist undid itself, like a small snake uncoiling, and the key dropped to the floor.

  It was a very tiny key, so when it dropped onto the flagstones, it made a very tiny noise that the queen did not hear. She disappeared around the corner, not knowing she had lost it.

  Ting!

  Wish, looking after her mother dejectedly, heard the noise.

  She picked up the key.

  She opened her mouth to say, “Mother, you’ve dropped your key!”

  And then she shut it again.

  The key was small and black and cold.

  The hair stood up on the back of Wish’s neck as she realized it was the key, not only to every room in Warrior fort, but to her mother’s dungeons.

  How strange that Queen Sychorax should lose it at that precise, particular moment.

  Did it drop, or did it jump?

  If you were a fanciful person, you might have said that it was almost as if the key were looking for Wish and wanted her to use it.

  But we are not fanciful people, and that would be ridiculous.

  15. Breaking into Queen Sychorax’s Dungeon

  Wish and Bodkin and Bumbleboozle tried to sneak down into Sychorax’s dungeons in the daytime, but it was impossible. There were too many people around.

  “We’ll have to wait until everyone goes to bed,” said Wish. “But how are we going to get past the sentry guarding the entrance to my mother’s dungeons?”

  “I has a great sleeping spell—let me put him to sleep!” squeaked Bumbleboozle.

  “Your spells won’t work here, I’m afraid, Bumbleboozle,” said Wish.

  Bodkin looked guilty. “I still think this is a terrible idea,” he said. “But just in case you wanted to go through with it, I put a small sleeping draught in the sentry’s serving of wild boar stew when I was serving him dinner. Magic people aren’t the only ones who know something about herb-work…”

  “Oh, Bodkin, THANK YOU!” said Wish in delight.

  “Don’t thank me,” said Bodkin gloomily. “My father would be very disappointed in me. I just felt sorry for that poor little Squeezjoos, but I should be able to overcome mere personal weakness and do the right thing… I don’t know what’s come over me.”

  So, late that night, Wish and Bodkin crept down to the great door that was the entrance to Queen Sychorax’s dungeons.

  The sentry who was supposed to be guarding it had indeed fallen fast asleep, so they tiptoed past him, unlocked the door with Sychorax’s key, and slipped in, soft as shadows, closing the door behind them.

  As the door shut, Bodkin had a suffocating feeling of panic.

  Sychorax’s dungeons tended to have that effect on people.

  “You stay here, Bumbleboozle,” said Wish. “So you can come and warn us if my mother or anyone else comes down after us.”

  “Okay!” squeaked Bumbleboozle. The smaller hairy fairies were always extremely pleased to be given a role. And she was delighted not to have to go any farther.

  For in the center of the room they were standing in was the true entrance to the dungeons. A great pit, with a movable platform hanging above it.

  Bodkin stared into the pit. “We’re going to have to go down there, aren’t we?” he said, pathetically hoping somehow Wish might say no.

  “Yup,” said Wish, climbing onto the platform.

  “Good-bye…” whispered Bumbleboozle. “Good luck… It was nicccce knowing you… For Big People you were kind of lessss ssssmelly than mossst…”

  “Thank you,” said Bodkin. Shakily, he climbed onto the platform, and Wish untied the rope and gradually let it out and…

  DOWN…

  DOWN…

  DOWN…

  …they went, the temperature dropping like a stone, as did Bodkin’s heart, as the platform lowered deeper, ever deeper into the underground prison.

  Wish’s heart was sinking too, for coming down here felt like not only a betrayal, but also a trespass.

  Sychorax would have secrets here…

  Because…

  A queen must have her secrets…

  And Sychorax DID have secrets…

  All of Sychorax’s secrets were hidden underground.

  Wish knew that, and she also knew that she really, really did not want to find out what those secrets were.

  But she had no choice.

  DOWN…

  DOWN…

  DOWN…

  They went deeper, ever deeper.

  When the platform finally came to a soft landing, what seemed like a horribly long time later, they landed in the secret midnight world of the prisons of Queen Sychorax, buried in a hundred yards of stone and earth, deep below the Warrior hill-fort.

  Wish and Bodkin stepped off the platform into a grim little chamber, with a steady drip, drip of water coming from the ceiling, and lit by dim and guttering torchlight.

  There were no fewer than seven corridors leading off the chamber.

  Sychorax’s dungeons were on the site of what in ancient times had been a mine, so they were haunted not only by the prisoners of the present but also the giant and dwarf and human miners of the past. Mine had turned to prison, and the dungeons were now a great spreading maze like a gigantic long-legged spider’s web, with corridors meandering and crossing over one another in trickily confusing fashion, just like the torturous maze of tricky Queen Sychorax’s mind.

  Off these corridors were endless little chambers, some with prisoners in them, some with… other things… But how were Bodkin and Wish to know which way to go?

  “And what’s that NOISE?” whispered Bodkin.
>
  Sychorax’s dungeons, as I mentioned earlier, were always filled with noise.

  An iron music of despair and sweetness all mixed together, for longing does have its own sweetness, and beautiful things can come out of pain.

  The Once-Magic-People imprisoned in those underground regions could no longer perform Magic. They could not work their spells, the sprites could not fly, the giants were ve-ry slowly shrinking. For in one of the secret cells, in the lowest, deepest chamber of all, was Sychorax’s Stone-That-Takes-Away-Magic, and they had all been taken there, and they had touched the stone and lost the Magic that made them what they were.

  They were then led back to their cells and kept there, until they readjusted and got used to life without their Magic.

  No one had quite gotten used to it yet, and so the Once-Magic-People who were living there filled the dungeons with noise. Melancholy noise, angry noise, regretful noise. The sound of the stamping feet of ogres, treading in sad, slow circles. The howling of werewolves, the song of sprites, singing in high, eerie voices about the bright old days.

  It was the one thing they could do now. They had lost their wings, their spells, their hope. They had lost their sight, their light, for when the Magic went from sprites, their colors faded, the inner light that burned so bright flickered and died.

  But they still made noise.

  They were brought iron spoons and iron dinner plates to eat from, and they clasped the iron in their no-longer-Magic fists or paws, and they tapped out a melancholy beat that drummed through the prison like the ache of a long-lost love.

  When Wish and Bodkin entered the dungeons, they could hear the song of a sprite called the Once-sprite, who was standing on the shoulder of Crusher the giant, locked in one of Sychorax’s cells. For Wish had been right. Crusher had indeed been captured by Queen Sychorax’s Warriors when Xar had left him behind in the clearing of the forest.

  And here Crusher the giant was now, hidden somewhere in Queen Sychorax’s dungeons, his eyes closed, thinking great thoughts and hoping against hope that Xar would come and save him.

  Meanwhile, on his shoulder, the Once-sprite was singing of one particular bright blue of a summer’s day when he flew up, up and slept on the wing like a swift, allowing the air currents of the atmosphere to be his bed, so high that the last thing he saw as he fell asleep was the many islands of Albion spread out below him, the forests reaching from sea to sea.

  And he sang it so beautifully that all the inhabitants of that underground chamber thought that they could see it too, and joined in the “Song of Lost Magic,” stamping, beating an iron beat in time with the giant’s great beating heart as if they were up there in the skies, not down buried deep, lost, and forgotten, landlocked forever. Poor Squeezjoos. Was this to be his fate too?

  Once you have heard the “Song of Lost Magic,” you never forget it.

  The confusion of emotions in that song—the despair, the hope, the regret—coupled with the exquisite re-creation of the Magic world and the powers that the Once-Magic-People realized in the moment of losing they had lost, and the way they echoed down the corridors repeating and mirroring and bouncing off the warren of walls, created a maze of noise and emotions and moral choices at least as disorientating and overwhelming as the physical maze itself.

  “Have we done right? Have we done wrong?” sang the songs. “What have we lost? But had we no choice?” And this song ran into other songs, about the beauty of the wildwoods at midnight, where only the eyes of Magic could see in the dark, the formation of hair-ice on the elder-tree twigs as the first deep frost of winter came to the forest, and cyclamen buds, deep violet and leafless, pushing their way through the earth and the discarded autumn leaf clutter from the trees above, too quiet for dull human eyes to see their slow growing but clear as daylight for the eyes of Magic.

  And it wasn’t even certain which were the songs of living people and which were the songs of long-dead ghosts of the Once-Magic-People imprisoned in these warrens long ago, whose voices had sunk and frozen into the walls, only to be ricocheted back to life again by the slicing blow of a present sound-wave, as if the spirits of the long-dead goblin and hob-elf and she-dwarf miners were still there, picking the sounds out of the walls with their enchanted axes and sending the songs off on their way again so that they were alive once more in the ears of Bodkin and Wish.

  Ah yes, it was a strange haunted place, that underground prison, where Magic and iron and past and present and good and evil were being held together in a much more complicated and contradictory manner than you might expect from Sychorax’s confident iron hill-fort standing so proudly above them.

  “We have no map,” said Bodkin, covering his ears, for the noise was so muddling it made it difficult to think, let alone make any clear choices. He had already explored down one of the corridors and found it split in two other directions at the end of it. “How are we going to find where she’s imprisoned Xar? We’re never going to locate him in a maze as big as this one.”

  A maze can be as effective as locks and keys if you are trying to hide something.

  Wish and Bodkin walked around the chamber in despair for a while, before the Enchanted Spoon noticed something, down at the bottom of one of the unlit deep black corridors. A tiny sprinkle of light, blinking on and off like a remote star.

  The spoon rapped Wish gently on the head to get her attention and then tip-tapped his way along the corridor to draw her attention to the little pool of light.

  Wish felt her way after the spoon, with Bodkin saying, “Where are you going?” and following her reluctantly.

  And when she had reached the bright little particles, she could see another patch, way in the distance, beckoning her like werelight. “Sprite dust!

  Xar must have sprinkled sprite dust along the way so we could follow him! That’s clever!” said Wish admiringly.

  So on they went, feeling their way toward the distant sprinkles of light, deeper and deeper, losing themselves in the twisting corridors of Sychorax’s dungeons.

  “It must be somewhere around here,” said Bodkin as they came to a long corridor with at least twenty-five rooms coming off it. “We’ll just have to check every room.”

  “Do we have to?” said Wish. “It’s all very well for you—it’s not YOUR mother—but I feel really weird finding things out about my mother that I REALLY DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.”

  Reluctantly, Wish took out the key and unlocked the nearest door, which swung open with an ominous creak.

  “You look, Bodkin,” said Wish, putting her hand over her eye.

  Bodkin peered around the edge of the door…

  …and fainted.

  Wish very hurriedly shut the door.

  “What was in there????” said Wish when Bodkin came around again.

  “You REALLY, REALLY don’t want to know,” said Bodkin.

  After that, Wish decided that it was kind of worse, the not-knowing, because then it left it up to her imagination as to what it might be in there, so she made up her mind she was going to look this time.

  Bodkin opened the next door and immediately shut it again with an “EEEEEWWWW!!!” of disgust.

  “What was in there??” cried Wish.

  “Heads,” said Bodkin.

  “Oh, come on, I’ve had enough of this,” said Wish, pushing him out of the way. “It can’t possibly be heads. You’re just completely determined that my mother should be this bad person…”

  And she shoved Bodkin out of the way and went into the room.

  It was heads.

  “EEEEEWWW!!!” said Wish.

  Wish shut the door again, very, very quickly.

  “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for that,” she said. “My mother is very interested in anatomy.”

  “Really?” said Bodkin skeptically.

  Other rooms contained less gruesome things.

  A whole collection of Spelling Books, for example. A library, with everything carefully lined up in rows and labeled,
for Sychorax was a very neat person.

  A potion room.

  Many, many collections of banned Magic objects.

  But even after a long time searching, they still hadn’t found Xar.

  Meanwhile, down in cell number 445, as hour after hour passed with no sign of Wish and Bodkin and the sword coming to rescue him, Xar’s spirits were sinking, and he was very close to despair. Of course, Sychorax’s dungeons were designed with spirit-sinking in mind. That’s part of the POINT of a dungeon, after all. You don’t design them to be cheerful, airy spaces with a nice view and comfy seating.

  Every now and then during the day, Sychorax would visit, and ask whether he had changed his mind about telling her where the sword was, and the sprites and Xar got the opportunity to shout and hiss rude remarks about her nose, and that cheered them up a little. But then she went away again, and the dank and miserable dark prison air would sink into their bones and the “Song of Lost Magic” would depress them even further.

  “Sssshee’ssss not coming, that Wissssh…” hissed Tiffinstorm, whose light was fading fast. “Stupid Warrior of a girl—why would you trussst her?”

  “She took the sword… she warned me about the ‘Love-Never-Lies’ potion…” said Xar moodily, for he was worrying about the same thing himself.

  “They’re too stupid to follow the sprite dust… They’re too cowardly to come here anyway… They hate you… They won’t be able to unlock the doors…”

  The miserable sprites kept up a steady flow of discouraging comments, for they were desperately unhappy.

  “You’ve kidnapped them, you stole their sword, you tricked them,” said Ariel. “Why would they rissssk their lives for you, the enemy, the turnipsss in tin canssss?”

  “Ariel has got a point,” said Caliburn gloomily.

  Had Xar been stupid to put his life in the hands of two enemy Warriors?

  “They liked Squeezjoos,” said Xar. “I know they did.”

  He looked down at Squeezjoos. Squeezjoos was so dark now he was nearly black, and his little heart was barely beating.