James hurtled down through pitch-blackness. His screams measured the depth of his fall, the unseen walls of the tube slithering across his flailing arms like polished glass. A deafening explosion erupted through the air as his body crashed through a barrier stretched across the darkness. His body tensed, his teeth drawing blood as they clamped uncontrollably on his tongue. In that instant, he thought he was already dead, but as his robes continued to flutter crazily around him, he plunged on into the black.

With his mind still reeling with the impact, another, and then another of the invisible barriers broke across his body. Accompanied by the shrill sound of tearing, a sudden cascade of paper-like barriers fell across his path. The impacts jarred painfully through his body, but gradually, imperceptibly, his fall began to arrest. The unseen membranes grew steadily thicker and soon his descent had slowed to a fumbling crawl, the frayed edges whispering across his face and arms like the tattered skins of broken drums. Finally, a more rigid material settled beneath his feet which distended downwards, robbing his body of its last momentum. There was a wet, tearing rip, and then bright light erupted all around him.

His hands instinctively reached up to protect his face, but when the ground rushed up to meet him, he sank without pain into its yielding embrace. With his lungs still labouring in his chest, he stared uncomprehendingly at what lay beneath him; a carpet of swirling brown fronds which supported his weight like the countless springs of a giant mattress. Smiling grimly, he at last understood the ordeal he had just been through: the Gelder equivalent of an express elevator straight to the bottom of the tree!

To left and right, stony-faced guards loomed over him, grasping his arms in a painful grip. Without uttering a word, they dragged him across the small chamber to where a wooden walkway surrounded the carpet of springs like a jetty skirting a pond. There they waited with James pinned between them, as the distant sound of tearing heralded another arrival from above. The sound grew louder until a cacophony of tearing filled the air, sending vibrations rippling through the walls and floor of the chamber. A circular dimple formed in the ceiling which slowly distended, eventually popping like an overripe fruit. Calapine dropped from the ruptured hole, gracefully landing moments later within the pool of fronds. The walls and floor continued to tremble as Leander and Tavin followed suit, but Calapine’s belligerent stride was already carrying her forward, her handsome face distorted by the ugliness of her rage. Raising a clenched fist at her side, the statue-like poise of the guards dissolved as they broke into step behind her. Before either Tavin or Leander could be birthed from the ceiling, James was dragged out of sight.

The corridor they followed was long and straight, and when they eventually emerged, it was into a wide, sunlit gallery. Huge arched windows revealed tantalising glimpses of the interior from what was now ground level. Spread before them, the sprawling acres of gardens and woodland receded into the distance, dominated by the towering wall of the Citadel trees. However, they hadn’t travelled far along the wide concourse before they veered sharply from it, plunging once more through a portal carved within the vast wall of the tower.

A dusky gloom quickly enveloped them as Calapine’s ringing footsteps filled the narrow space. The tunnel descended steadily downwards, a hollow, droning wind issued from far below, carrying with it the musty scent of decay. Before long, the scant sunlight that accompanied their passage was superseded by the baleful glow of bioluminescent plants, revealing walls no longer of wood but of roughly-hewn clay.

As they descended ever deeper beneath the ground, the walls of clay finally gave way to an altogether different material. At first, James thought it was yet another wooden corridor, imprinted with Gelder carvings. But when he studied their forms more closely, he recognised the undulating designs for what they were; the walls, the ceiling, even the very ground beneath their feet, was decorated in bones. Mottled green with moss and lichen, tessellations of rib and skull, clavicle and femur, imprinted their macabre sensibilities upon the eye. Every bone of the human body combined to tell him that he was approaching the place of his death.

The guards tightened their grip as James convulsed, suddenly desperate to escape this dreadful place to which he was bound.

‘Please, no more!’ he whimpered. ‘I never meant any of this!’

Calapine grunted derisively, as though appalled at his display of cowardice, but from afar he heard the voice of his only friend; a sound which echoed out of the gloom like the sad notes of a dying song.

‘We are with you, Jame,’ Tavin called. ‘Be strong, you will not be alone in this.’

There might have been a time when he first arrived in this strange world, when the idea of his death might have presented the hope of escape from his psychosis. But now he knew differently. A feeling lodged deep within his gut told him that to die in this world was to surrender his life in his own. Finally, the barrier of disbelief and denial he had erected around himself ever since leaving the House of Galendar, broke with the absolute certainty of his impending death.

Amidst the lonely drone of the wind and the echo of their footfalls, James began to cry.

***

After what felt like an endless descent underground, James was confused when they finally emerged back into sunlight. Blinking tears from his eyes, he gazed out at a huge cavern similarly bedecked in a skein of bones. It was, after all, a place buried beneath the ground, but one illuminated by a vast hole that gave entrance to the sky far above.

The air was chill with damp and suffused with the scent of ancient decay. The faraway roar of the Citadel trees echoed in the air as the small party made their way forward. The patterning of bones continued beneath their feet, a great swirl culminating in a platform of roughly hewn stone. A shaft of sunlight illuminated the white robes in attendance, a loose ring of white surrounding the raised stone.

When the guards drew to a halt, Lord Balen greeted them with a modest bow. James had expected to find the man as triumphant and gloating as his daughter, but at the last he seemed to approach the moment of his execution with something akin to respect. But, before the lord could offer words in confirmation of his bearing, Leander strode forward, roughly shouldering her cousin aside.

‘My father trusted you, uncle!’ Leander spat. ‘He bore Jame to you in order to secure his life, not to end it!’

‘Silence cousin!’ Calapine seethed, reaching forward to take her arm.

Leander shrugged her hand away and glared up at her uncle, none of her fire diminished by the oppressive atmosphere of the chamber. Balen raised his hand, a flicker of his former frustration marking his pale face with a frown.

‘You forget yourself, Leander,’ he said softly. ‘The time of reckoning is upon the stranger. Evidently, the monk did not intercede on his behalf. Thus, the former ruling of the Citadel Lords must stand.’

‘But my father…’

‘Your father was a fool!’ Lord Balen shouted.

The tall man flinched at the severity of his own words, but his anger seemed to grow as though only the loss of his brother could allow such spiteful words to issue from him.

‘In times of war there is no place for such men. I loved your father as any brother could, but he was a gardener who knew nothing of the perils of war. The fall of his house and the ending of his life is testament enough to that!’

The man’s eyes narrowed and he glared down at his brother’s daughter as though addressing her own complicity.

‘Your father may have been content to let such creatures sit at his table and bring ruin upon his house, but that will not be tolerated here!’

‘But…’ Leander replied, her voice now pleading.

‘But nothing!’ Balen cried.

A deathly silence followed Lord Balen’s outburst and when Calapine took Leander’s arm, she grudgingly relented, unwilling or unable to meet James’ eyes as she passed beside him.

All the while, James had regarded the exchange as though from afar. Leander’s repeated attempts to spare his life, despite the formidable men and women poised against her, stirred his emotions. But he knew, perhaps better than she did herself, that it had all been for nothing.

‘Calapine, bring the barbarian forward,’ Balen said, his voice once more calm and composed.

‘His name is Jame!’ Tavin shouted angrily.

Annoyed by Tavin’s outburst, Calapine grasped James by the shoulder and shoved him forward, until he stood beneath her father’s hard grey eyes.

‘In life you were our enemy. In death you shall be pardoned. May the forest cleanse the corruption from your bones,’ Balen intoned gravely.

With a curt nod of his head, Lord Balen again motioned his daughter forward, and together she and James mounted the stone platform and into the circle of light.

James drew back when the hooded figure emerged from the darkness, but Calapine held him in place. The man was taller than any he had encountered in this world and dressed from head to foot in robes of black. His face was obscured behind the drooping hood, but he felt his hidden eyes turned upon him.

Calapine faced James squarely as the executioner came to a halt before them.

‘You will face the blade alone. If you are the coward I take you for, you will try to flee whence my hand leaves your shoulder. This, I can assure you, will result in death far more painful.’

Calapine unsheathed her sword and bowed, offering the glistening white blade across her open palms. The executioner regarded the proffered weapon for a long time before finally claiming it, holding it delicately between his fingers as though testing its unfamiliar weight.

With one last lingering grin of triumph, Calapine left the platform and joined the other lords of the Citadel, their white robes smouldering above the sea of green bones at their feet. James stared bleakly past their solemn faces and focused on the only two people he knew. Tavin unflinchingly returned his gaze, managing yet to offer him a smile despite the gentle hitching of his shoulders. But Leander’s gaze was far away, her head slowly shaking from side to side as though unable to believe what was happening.

‘It is time.’

Lord Balen’s voice echoed into the chamber, causing the executioner to step forward. The man lifted his arm from his side, the white sword extending outwards, where it halted in the air without the slightest tremor. Clasping his sweating hands in front of him, James closed his eyes upon the cavern of bones. The last thing he saw was Leander, her pale, scarred face contorted by emotions he was no nearer to deciphering. He heard the movement of the hooded man’s robes, and taking a deep, shuddering breath, waited for it all to end.

In the darkness behind his eyelids, there was a sharp intake of breath, followed by raised voices. There was the sound of movement close at hand, and then a startled cry from the executioner.

When he opened his eyes, he found the white blade halted mere inches from his neck. Staggering backwards, he regarded the other man now standing between himself and his executioner, his bony thumb and finger clasped to the point of the white blade, where they had halted the sword in mid-flight. The face that greeted him was an almost featureless black within the gloom of the cavern, but it was a face he now recognised. Like a statue hewn from obsidian, the monk, Kloven-Perrin, grinned benignly back at him.

As though waking from a trance, the hooded executioner lurched backwards, leaving the sword quivering between the monk’s thumb and finger. The man fell, his hood swept from his head as he hit the ground. His incredulous eyes sought those of Lord Balen, but without waiting for reply, he scrambled from the platform and back into the shadows that had borne him.

At last, the monk turned to regard the awestruck faces of the crowd. But he was no longer smiling. The assembled lords shifted uneasily under his gaze, their disbelieving eyes trained upon the sword still quivering between the monk’s fingers like an arrow impaled in blackened wood.

When Kloven-Perrin spoke, gone was the feeble voice of the old man James had met upon the summit of the white tower. The voice that now carried to the furthest reaches of the cavern was deep and resonant with implied danger.

‘Killing this man would have been the gravest mistake of your lives.’