Inquest Read online

  “You see?” Myra said brightly to Twist. “I told you.” Twist felt his heart shudder at the sudden relief of the idea.

  “Considering your skills,” Zéphyrin went on, “I think it’s very likely that you two will be put to work for us, for a time, as payment for your crimes. After that, there would be no reason not to simply let you go.” Twist couldn’t imagine any skill he possessed that a dragon might find useful, but decided to ask about that later.

  “Should we suggest something like that to them?” Jonas asked, his tone conversational despite the tightness Twist felt in his attention.

  “No, no, no,” Vane said instantly, seemingly frightened. “Don’t say anything unless they speak to you first.”

  Jonas looked toward him with obvious disbelief.

  “He’s right,” Zéphyrin mentioned. “I don’t mind at all, and especially not in a situation like this one,” he said with a gesture to what was left of their meal, “but my brothers wouldn’t appreciate a human being speaking directly to them in an official setting. If they ask you a question, then by all means answer and do so with full honesty. But of course, even in that case, most of them don’t pay much attention to human words, anyway.”

  “Then how are we supposed to offer any defense?” Jonas asked.

  “If you will permit me,” Zéphyrin said thoughtfully, “I’d like to offer to speak for you. After spending some time with you, I feel that I’ve begun to understand the both of you fairly well. I think I can convince them not to kill you.” Vane dropped his fork, staring at Zéphyrin in shock.

  “You would help us that far?” Twist asked, his tone hesitant and soft.

  Zéphyrin glanced to the djinn. “Hala and I have been watching you carefully since you came on board,” he said before reaching out to take his wineglass. “So far, we have only found reasons to help you. You haven’t given us a single cause to think that you’re beyond reason. You’re both survivors. You’re resourceful and quick to act but also loyal and caring for each other and your friends,” he said with a gesture to Myra. Twist caught Hala peering quietly at the tiny Skye, who was sitting against Kali’s side on the bottom of the little glass bottle, looking bored beyond belief. “And even though you’re clearly not close,” Zéphyrin went on, “your fox friend has gone far out of his own way to try to defend you.”

  “Why have you been doing that?” Jonas asked, turning toward Vane.

  Vane gave a shrug. “You’re my friends.”

  “Are we? Really?” Twist asked, the disbelief on his face a mirror of Jonas’s.

  “Well…yeah,” Vane muttered with another shrug as he picked at the edge of his napkin. “I haven’t got many friends. I’m not very good at keeping them, for some reason. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” Myra gave Vane a momentary look of pity.

  “You are the most confusing person I’ve ever met,” Jonas said, shaking his head.

  “He’s not a man,” Hala cautioned Jonas. “Don’t expect him to act like one.” Vane smiled meekly at her.

  “Whether you realize it or not,” Zéphyrin said, “the loyalty of a fox is not easily won. Nor is an ancient princess easily fooled,” he added with a glance to Myra. “Your actions and the belief of your friends show what sort of men you truly are. And I would gladly speak for you to my brothers.” Twist looked to the dragon soberly as he began to understand the true value of the offer. The cool silence in the buzz at his neck promised that Jonas felt the same.

  “Thank you,” Twist said. “We would be grateful for your help.” Jonas nodded his agreement. Zéphyrin smiled back at him, clearly pleased.

  “You see?” Myra said brightly to Twist. “Nothing to worry about at all.”

  Twist smiled to her and tried to push his anxiety fully away. It wouldn’t help him anyway. What he needed now was a clear head and a great deal of luck.

  Not long after the meal had come to an end, Twist noticed a huge, thick sheet of ice slip into view above the ship. He and his companions left the dining room and headed into the salon to find that half of the sea seemed to have been filled with one enormous, ghostly blue, upside-down mountain of ice. Up near the surface, the ice reached out in a wide and jagged sheet that glistened in the soft light of sunset above the waves. Down below, in the shadowed depths, the tapering tip of the thick ice vanished into the deepest blue.

  The submersible moved slowly closer, heading for a deep cleft in the side of the mountain. The bright-white lights at the front of the ship made ghostly shapes in the ice, illuminating caverns and ravines in shimmering blue and glassy clear. Twist watched, mesmerized by the natural spectacle that engulfed the now seemingly rather tiny ship, as they moved deeper into the cleft.

  “Is this an iceberg?” Twist asked Jonas, who stood beside him at the wall of glass.

  “It’s not moving,” Jonas said, shaking his head. “Icebergs usually move at least a little. I think this is Antarctica.”

  “But where’s the land?” Twist asked. “Antarctica isn’t just a solid block of ice, is it?”

  “No, there is some land,” Jonas said, looking down into the water below. “But there’s certainly a lot more ice.”

  “It’s so beautiful…” Myra said in awe, watching the ice glisten around them.

  Twist smiled, mesmerized himself by the sight. As his mind struggled to find some familiar ground in this unearthly world, Twist suddenly recalled that he’d technically seen this place before. He turned to Jonas in his surprise. “Say, have you ever read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Jonas said, shaking his head. He glanced to Twist, clearly curious about this sudden mention of popular literature.

  “Well, you know what it’s about, don’t you?” Twist said offhandedly.

  “Something about giant squids?” Jonas returned with a shrug.

  “That’s only one part of it,” Twist said, skipping on to the part of the book he truly wanted to discuss. “You see, there’s this one bit where Captain Nemo takes his submersible ship, the Nautilus, to the South Pole, just as we are doing now. I remember trying to picture what this place might look like, but I must say, my imagination fell well short. But then, once the Nautilus arrived, they all went up to the surface and tried to find the exact location of the pole. And right there in the middle of the terrible frozen wasteland, precisely at noon on the Summer Solstice, Nemo planted his black flag right on the pole, claiming it before any other man in history. Ah, it was a wonderful scene! You really should read the book.”

  Jonas smiled at Twist as he recounted the tale. “And then they get attacked by a squid?”

  “No, no, the squid thing doesn’t come up until later,” Twist said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “But we are heading to the pole now, aren’t we? I wonder if we’ll find a black flag when we get there…” he said, giving his voice a mysterious air.

  “Oh, do you think we might?” Myra asked earnestly.

  Jonas chuckled and shook his head. “You two are adorable.”

  Twist shot him an unhappy glance, but Jonas had already turned to peer deeper into the ice before them. Twist saw the same luminous blue of the pure ice mirrored in the color of Jonas’s eyes and felt a soft murmur of delighted wonder in the buzzing at his neck. Twist smiled, marveling at the idea that even a man so well traveled as Jonas could still manage to find wonder in a new vista.

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” Jonas mentioned after a moment, peering into the valley before them. Twist offered him a questioning tone. “There’s a staircase made completely of ice over there,” Jonas said, pointing. “It’s full of water, but I think it leads to the surface. Very nice filigree on the banisters.”

  Twist strained his vision but couldn’t pick out anything like what Jonas had mentioned. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before the ship drew closer to a cliff-like platform that hung out into the darkness under the transparent shadows of the ice above. The ship’s lights flashed off of the nearby ice, illuminating exactly what Jonas had proph
esied. A long, wide, curving staircase of ice stood on one side, meeting the plain and leading up through a wide tunnel.

  While the staircase was made entirely of ice, obviously carved out of the mountainside itself, the artistry of the structure was charming: fine, curling, snakelike, glassy dragons wove in and out of the thin balustrades, among a forest of crusted filigree that hung from the banisters. But just as Jonas had said, the whole area was submerged completely in the frigid waters.

  “Come along,” Zéphyrin said from behind them.

  Twist and the others turned to find him holding a bundle of white and silver fur coats, while his own attire hadn’t changed at all beyond the addition of a long black scarf. Twist’s stomach tightened sharply at the thought of finally reaching their destination. No matter how pretty the site of his murder trial might be, it was still going to be a murder trial.

  “We’re going to walk from here,” Zéphyrin added lightly, as if it were perfectly natural.

  “You do know that we can’t breathe underwater, right?” Jonas asked him slowly.

  “Don’t worry, little one,” Zéphyrin said with a smile in his red eyes. “Just put on your coat. It’s very cold at the South Pole.”

  Twist and the others stepped forward as Vane and Hala both came to meet them as well. Zéphyrin handed a coat each to Twist and Jonas. Vane reached into his wide sleeve and pulled out a large, black fur coat, which he slipped on over his shoulders. When Zéphyrin offered a coat to Myra, she glanced over her frilly pink dress and jacket and gave the dragon a shrug.

  “I’m all right, thank you,” she said lightly. “I don’t get cold. Oh, but if we’re going out, I should like to take my parasol,” she added gravely. Jonas sniggered under his breath.

  Zéphyrin suggested politely that she hurry. Myra scurried off quickly while Zéphyrin led the others to a room in the belly of the ship that Twist never been to. The low, arching ceiling joined the floor where it curved up to meet it, giving the brushed brass space the feeling of a wide and flat capsule. There was a large pool of water in the center of the room, which opened the ship to the cold sea below and spilled a shifting and dim blue light up into the space.

  Twist peered over the edge of the pool to see the shelf of ice lying less than ten feet below. A goblin wandered into the room and spoke to Zéphyrin before leaning down to a collapsed ladder that was attached to one side of the pool. The goblin released the catch and let the ladder drop into the water, ending one step away from the ice shelf.

  “Here you are, darling,” Myra said, entering the room. Twist turned to see that while her parasol now hung from her arm on its little hook, she also held his walking stick and top hat. “I thought you might like these as well.”

  “You’re ever so thoughtful,” Twist said, smiling at such an unexpected gesture.

  He took his walking stick and then began to reach for his hat, but she moved first. Myra leaned close and popped the hat onto his head for him before moving back to admire the angle and arrange a stray curl or two. Twist held still, unsure of what to expect next.

  “There,” she said, stepping back. “Now you look like a proper gentleman. You can’t go meeting new people looking like just anyone.”

  Jonas’s soft laughter caught at Twist’s attention. Shooting him a glare, Twist found that Vane, standing beside Jonas, wore a similar sentiment on his face.

  “What’s so funny?” Myra asked them, suddenly cross.

  “Nothing at all,” Jonas said, clearly struggling to hold his voice steady. “Except that Twist is a very bad influence on you.” Vane nodded silently.

  “That’s impossible,” Myra said with a flippant wave of her hand. “Come along, my dear,” she said, taking Twist’s arm to turn him away from Jonas and Vane. “Don’t pay any attention to those scoundrels.”

  Twist smiled at her, nearly overcome with pride and admiration. He would have never asked her to change, but every time she chose to affect a new guise, she somehow became even more magnificent to him.

  He was unable to remark on this, however, as Zéphyrin announced that it was time to disembark. Hala moved for the ladder first, stepping down onto the top rung. The moment her purple toes dipped into the water, the surface rippled and pulled back away from her. She moved farther downward, taking rung after rung, but the water continued to evade her at every step. She stepped eventually onto the ice below as the water finally closed over her to create a large, round bubble of air that kept her completely dry.

  “Djinn are wonderfully entertaining,” Zéphyrin said happily as he moved to follow her. Once again, the water slipped away from his advance and formed a bubble around him as he stepped off the bottom of the ladder.

  “Oh! I want to try it!” Myra gasped brightly, clasping her hands.

  “Be my guest,” Twist said, offering a hand to help her onto the ladder.

  Once she too was standing in her own bubble on the ice shelf below, smiling brightly at the magic that kept her dry, Jonas and Vane followed her into the water. Having witnessed the feat so many times over, Twist found he had minimal hesitation. He stepped gingerly over the edge and down the ladder, watching as a bubble formed slowly around him as well.

  Twist looked up at the dome of freezing water over his head and listened to the strange, muffled, lapping sound of the bubble rippling gently at his every motion. Zéphyrin’s voice called from the foot of the staircase, muffled by the water between them. Twist stepped closer, following the others, and watched carefully as his bubble followed along with him. He pulled his fur coat tighter around him as the cold of the water and the ice under his feet began to chill the pocket of air around him.

  The water on the staircase moved out of the way of his steps as he began to climb after the others. Twist took extra care not to lose his footing on the ice and continued into the sloping tunnel that led up into gradually brighter light. After a fairly long climb, the bubble around him broke against the surface of the water and fell away around him as he stepped up into unbelievably cold, dry air.

  Only a few steps above the surface of the water, the tunnel fell away as well, and Twist climbed up the last few steps onto a vast plain. The frozen wind whipped at him savagely, carrying only the scent of snow and the roaring of open air. The ruddy sky above him was edged in sunset on all sides, as if the whole flat, characterless circle of the horizon were made of flaming gold, while the richest pinks and yellows reflected strangely off of the endless white expanse.

  “This way,” Zéphyrin called, waving an arm. “Stay together. There are all sorts of invisible things around here. I don’t want of you falling down any holes or running into anything.”

  Twist hurried his pace instantly, meeting the group as they all clustered tightly together, following their guide into the unknown distance.

  The procession fell into a line, following Zéphyrin over the windswept, icy plain. Myra twirled her parasol idly in the chilly wind, using it to shield her copper skin from nothing in particular in the empty sky. Twist held her hand in the crook of his arm, tapping his walking stick on the ice with each step. After a little while, and thanks in large part to the fur coat that Zéphyrin had given him, he grew accustomed to the freezing cold and the blustery, wild winds. It wasn’t really all that unlike the weather on an airship at the top of the sky.

  Looking out over the vast emptiness around them, the complete ring of sunset—or maybe sunrise—all around the horizon, and the cloudless, ruddy sky above, Twist began to feel he was in a whole new and alarmingly empty world. He saw no birds, no animals or men, no plants, trees, rivers, or mountains. It was as if the creator had completely neglected to fill in this corner of the world. He also noticed no black flags, though he told himself that he wasn’t really looking for one. Hala stood out among them in her brilliant purple skin and emerald sari, while Myra simply matched the sky perfectly in her frilly pink cotton dress and jacket.

  The line stopped moving abruptly as Twist mused on the empty plain. Zéphyrin, standing at the
front, passed his hand over the empty air before him, as if searching for a seam in an invisible wall. Apparently finding it, he curled the long fingers of both of his hands into the air and seemed to pull something back. Twist gasped as the air parted like a curtain to reveal a gigantic wall of ice standing just ten feet before Zéphyrin, behind the strange curtain of vista that he held in his hands. Zéphyrin turned to them with an inviting gesture on one hand, continuing to hold back the illusion with the other.

  They moved forward, stepping under the edge of one world and into the next. As he too stepped past the dragon, Twist was amazed to find that the wall of ice, which stood easily over a hundred feet high, seemed to stretch out to either side, into infinity. There was an enormous closed gate set into it, large enough to easily allow a three-story house to walk through it. The solid ice doors of the gate were adorned with ornate carvings of more snakelike dragons curling around clouds and stars.

  Standing at the sealed seam of the gate doors was what Twist first thought was an old man. On second look, however, he realized that the figure was a satyr, complete with long, curling horns in his graying mane of hair and gray-furred goat legs below his wooly blue jumper and scarf. He wore a beard that came down to a point near his hooves, and he leaned on a silver staff that stood at twice his height and seemed to have an ax-head attached to the top of it. His eyes appeared to be closed, though he stood still and straight. Having let the illusion fall closed behind him, Zéphyrin approached the satyr. Twist and the others moved to follow him, while Hala remained at his side.

  “Good day,” the dragon said pleasantly to the satyr.

  The satyr opened his icy, pale-pink eyes and looked over both Zéphyrin and Hala before he fell into a deep bow that caused his beard to pool at his hooves. “My honored lord and lady,” he said reverently. “Have you had a pleasant journey?” he asked, rising up with a smile.