Free The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World by Brian Stableford Page A

would have been any number of ways of gaining ingress. But she hadn’t even sufficient power to motivate a broomstick—she had never wielded anything larger than an enchanted feather duster by the power of mind alone. She contemplated descending into the moat and attempting to climb the wall, but it was an awfully long way, and the slimed mud at the bottom of the moat smelled quite foul.
    She sighed. “It will have to be cotton climbing, I suppose,” she muttered.
    So saying, she took from her jacket pocket a reel of black cotton, a darning needle, a wooden peg and a large hairpin. She put the peg through the hole in the reel and stuck it firmly into the ground. She unwound a few inches of cotton and bit it off, then tied the new end of the cotton still on the reel to the eye of the darning needle. She opened up the hairpin and forced the halves back against the bend, then made a tiny bow out of it by tying on the detached piece of cotton very tightly. She tested the strength of the bow, then placed the darning needle on it, as if it were an arrow.
    She closed her eyes, and muttered: “Bow bend, arrow fly, up and over, nice and high.” It was a very feeble spell, but it was one of the easiest in the book, and she had used it before.
    The bow came alive in her hands, bent itself back, and then hurled the needle high into the air. The cotton
    reel spun on the slender peg as the cotton unravelled, and a black line whipped up into the sky. The needle disappeared over the battlements, and within a couple of seconds the reel was still. Helen drew the cotton taut and fastened it to the head of the peg, murmuring: “Needle stick and stay secure, make my passage safe and sure.”
    There was only one more conjuration needed, and she rattled it off: “Cotton black and strong as steel, bear me up on an even keel.” Then she began climbing.
    She was a good climber, but it was a long way, and a piece of cotton, strong as steel or not, is by no means as easy to grip as a thick rope. It didn’t cut into her flesh as ordinary cotton would have cut into the flesh of someone without a modicum of magical protection, but it was difficult to manage. Had the spell not included a balancing clause she might never have made it.
    Castle Mirasol looked forbidding from the outside, but when Helen peered down into the courtyard within, it seemed three or four times as bad. It was like looking down into a great black well. Although it was mid-afternoon the pale light of the glowering sky made little impression on the deep shadows which gathered inside the castle. They were shadows of incalculable age, which had enjoyed domination over the grey stone walls for a long, long time. It would take a strong light indeed to challenge them now. They were massive shadows, deep and solid, within which might lurk horrors unimaginable. Everything was quite still… but not quite silent. Far, far below—so far that it might emanate from the ultimate dungeons of the castle or the bowels of the Earth itself—there was a faint, uneasy sound of moaning.
    The great hall, Helen knew, would be on the opposite side of the courtyard, its doors facing the drawbridge and the portcullis. But the only staircase descending from the ledge inside the battlements was on this side, zigzagging down the corner of the north-west tower. She would have to go down, passing through the shadows which hung batlike from the walls, and then walk diagonally across the open space, immersed in the gloomy miasma, to the entrance of the hall. What she would find inside it she didn’t know.
    There was no point in hanging about. She walked to the head of the stair and began the descent.
    There was no guard-rail on the stairway, and the steps were only two-and-a-half-feet wide. If she stumbled and chanced to fall over the edge she would plunge into the depths. She didn’t intend to fall.
    But the steps were covered in dust—a dust that was not fine and grey and powdery but thick and clotted