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A babel of urgent voices filled his ear, some conjecturing whether or not there would be a battle, some discussing how exciting it all was. Beyond them were the voices of soldiers bawling orders, and under it, surfacing and submerging, the sinister laugh they had heard in the midst of the thunderstorm.
"Away," Gwen snapped, and Magnus slowly took his hand from the wall, then turned to his mother with a troubled gaze. "Thou hast heard it?"
"Aye. 'Twas some peasant folk come into the castle for fear of a siege—and 'twas hundreds of years agone."
"He is a past-reader!" Gregory's eyes were huge.
"Magnus always gets to do things first!" Geoffrey grumped.
" 'Tis not fair!" Cordelia complained.
" 'Tis as like to be a burden as a joy," Gwen assured them, and turned to Magnus again. "Thou hast a form of clear sight, my son. I've heard it spoken of, yet never known a one who had it. Thou canst read the thoughts embedded in the stones, or wood or metal, by the anguish or joy of those who dwelt near them."
"A psychometricist!" Rod's eyes were wide.
Magnus turned to Gwen, trying to focus on her face. "Yet wherefore have I not noted this aforetime?"
"For that thou hast ever been in places thronged with living folk, whose thoughts did obscure any that came from stones."
"Sure it might not be part of the boy turning into a young man?" Rod asked.
"Mama did speak of strong feelings," Gregory pointed out. "Mayhap such thoughts stay not in stones, with lesser feelings."
Gwen nodded. "There is some truth to that—and I bethink me that this castle has seen many who were overwrought."
"And not pleasantly." Rod scowled. "Try not to touch anything, okay, son?"
"I will endeavor…"
"Then I'll give you some help." Rod turned to face the gatehouse. "We still have to get that drawbridge down, unless we're going to expect Fess to wait outside the whole time."
"Aye…" Magnus turned, his frown deepening, seeming to come into clearer focus.
"Gregory, help me. Just think of holding that chain up, when the time comes. Gwen, if you and the other kids would take the right-hand chain… ? Good. Now, everybody think hot at it." He glared at the bottom link, concentrating on it while the rest of his surroundings grew fuzzy. The link began to glow, first red, then orange, on through yellow into white, until finally the metal flowed. "Now," Rod grated, and the chain lifted a foot. Rod sighed and relaxed, watching the metal darken back down the spectrum as it cooled. He turned to look at the rest of his family, but their chain was just now yellowing. Rod glanced back at his own, saw it was ruby again, and told Gregory, "Okay, put it down now." The chain lowered to swing clinking against the wall, and Rod turned to add his bit to the right-hand chain. The metal flowed, the chain rose—and, with a low and rising growl of breaking rust, the huge old sprocket wheels began to turn. The growl rose to a grown, underscored by a furious clanking as the drawbridge fell away at the end of the tu
"Careful, there!" Rod called, alarmed. "Those boards might be rotten!"
"The unsound ones fell to powder when the drawbridge dropped, Rod, and I can pick my way well enough around the holes." Then the clattering changed to thunder as Fess's hooves echoed in the tu
The children cheered. Gwen glanced at Magnus, saw his face alight, and relaxed a little.
"Why is destruction the only thing I do better than the rest of you?" Rod grumbled.
" 'Tis for cause that thou hast come to it lately, husband, not grown to it," Gwen assured him breezily.
Gregory was staring at the huge bar buried in the stone. "We could have lifted it, Papa…"
"This was faster."
"Yet now we ca
"I know." Rod gri
They spent the morning exploring the rest of the castle, and found a lot of dead leaves and branches blown in through the windows over the years. They also found a fair quantity of antique furniture, some of it still intact.
But not a single bird. Not even a rat or a mouse, for that matter.
"And never a one, through all these years." Cordelia looked up at the rafters. "How could that be, Papa?"
Rod shrugged. "They felt unwanted, dear."
"What was it that wanted them not?"
Rod avoided the question. "But look at the bright side—at least we won't have to set out traps. Or endanger a cat, either."
"Nay, Papa." Geoffrey corrected. " ' Tis the cat would endanger the rats."
"Not some of the rats I've seen—but there aren't any here. One advantage to ghosts, anyway." Rod had a brief, dizzying vision of an advertising sign: "Rid your house of those troublesome pests! Hire a haunt!" With, of course, a picture of a comical ghost shouting "Boo!" at a rat and a cockroach who were neck-and-neck in a dead heat away from the spook. Rod found himself wondering what to name the ghost? Buster? He shook his head and came back to the here and now.
"And none have dwelt here for two hundred years." Gregory gazed about him, wide-eyed.
"Not a living soul," Rod agreed. Strangely, there were no signs of squatters having moved in, or even having spent the night. On the other hand, that would've been hard to do, with the drawbridge up—which raised the question of why it was still up. Rod had a mental picture of the last servants to leave, heaving hard on the lip of the bridge, and watching it rise slowly, riding up on its counterweight. Either that, or the last servant had decided not to leave. Rod shuddered at that thought, and hoped he never met the person.
It was a pretty basic castle—just a keep with a curtain wall, diamond-shaped in its ground plan, with watchtowers at north and south, the keep itself serving to guard the western point, and the gatehouse at the east. There were only three floors to the keep, the first being all one huge, open room fifty feet in diameter, and the second divided into several rooms, presumably family quarters. The third was piled with small catapults and moldering crossbows and rusty bolts—the upstairs armory, for aerial defenses.
"Enough!" Gwen clapped her hands. "If we are to dwell here, no matter how short a while, we must needs make the keep fit for dwelling. Magnus and Gregory, sweep and dust! Cordelia and Geoffrey, hurl trash out into the moat!"
Geoffrey whooped and set to it; heaps of leaves began to swirl out the windows. Cordelia glowered at a broken, old table, and it rose off the floor, cracked leg dangling, and drifted toward the window.
Magnus frowned. "Wherefore do they pitch while we sweep, Mama?"
"For that thy sister's the best at making things fly," Gwen answered, "and Gregory's well suited to kiting along the ceiling and beams."
"Yet Geoffrey and I…"
"Are chosen for these tasks, for reasons thou knowest well." Gwen said, with steel beneath her voice; then her ma
Magnus gri
And away he went, sweeping up a storm; Rod wondered about the whirlwinds in it. He sighed with relief, and blessed his eldest—trying to put a broom in Geoffrey's hands was asking for a major confrontation, unless you went after him with a quarterstaff. Even then, the broomstick would probably beat the quarterstaff, and there wouldn't be much work done.
All went well for a good fifteen minutes; then Geoffrey remembered to grumble. "Wherefore must we clean?"
"Wouldst thou truly wish to dwell in so stale a mess?" Cordelia asked, with scorn.