The 7th Knight

13 THE CHAMBER AND THE BOX

When he jolted awake, the pain had gone down a bit, but he was still very, very tired. He had no idea how much time had passed, it could have been 5 minutes or 5 hours. He felt his side, afraid that he was bleeding again, but his shirt was dry.

The total dark made a part of him want to panic. Llewellyn was gone with his light and the light stones hadnt run into this chamber. In the pitch black, he didnt even know which way the stone door was. He stayed still, listening for any sound, but all he could hear was his own breathing. It felt like he was in a small space, but that thought made him want to panic again. He wasnt normally claustrophobic, but this was different. This was being totally and utterly cut off from everything: from light, from sound, from contact. He was deep underground with a raging troll between him and the only way out, even if he could work out how to get the door open again.

He forced himself to his knees, shifting his sword out of the way as he did so. On his hands and knees, he felt around the floor of the chamber. He tried moving in one direction and quickly met with carved rock. He moved along this to where the floor curved up and felt more like the natural rock. His sword bumped the back of his legs again as he tried to stand and he shifted it out of the way again.

Standing with his hands against a wall he felt better and began moving along the wall. His hands met some kind of thick, flat stone sticking out of the rock and he felt along it. This was a shelf. Kai realised this when he felt the blocks on the shelves. The first one felt about two hands wide and three long but only a few centimetres high. The block felt like solid, carved wood. He couldnt tell what the carving was in the dark; just that it was there.

As he felt along the shelf, he found several of the boxes. There were other shelves above and below the one he had found as well. After a few paces of feeling along the shelf, he came to the other end of the chamber and rough cut rock again. That made the chamber no more than a couple of metres long. As he felt along the wall and down it to where it touched the ground his sword got in the way again and he heaved out a sigh of frustration and shoved it back.

He stopped as realisation hit him. Hed touched the hilt of his sword three times now and not felt sick.

Slowly he drew the blade from the scabbard. As he did so the light from the glowing inscriptions filled the room. Kai had to remind himself that it was only as bright as before, but he had been in total darkness for some time and that small light felt as bright as the sun at first.

He looked around the chamber.

His first thoughts had been right, it wasnt a big chamber. It looked roughly cut into the rock, unlike the tunnels he had been walking through. The stone shelves from floor to ceiling on one side of the chamber were pretty much all that was there. Each shelf was filled with those wooden blocks.

When he looked closely at the blocks he could see the carvings on the front. Some of the carvings were numbers next to names like Whisper, Wary Wry and even Wraith. Underneath the names were carvings of the signs of various great houses in this world. He could see the double-headed eagle on one, the fleur of France on another, the leaping lion and even three lions, one on top of the other which made Kai laugh a moment as that was the insignia of the England football team to him.

Once he picked up a block he realised it wasnt a block at all, but a box. It was hollow and something was rattling around inside. However, when he looked for some kind of latch or hinge or way of opening the box, it appeared just as solid as the block of wood he had mistaken them for.

He was just about to give up looking at the boxes and return to working out how to get out of the chamber when he noticed the box with the stylised rose on it. He stared at it a moment, trying to work out why that was important until it suddenly dawned on him: Conway. He was wearing the same rose on his tunic right now. The kings had come from the line of Conway ever since and so wore the symbol of Gwrych, the red dragon of Wales, as their own, but the red rose was still, officially the family crest. Edward had replaced the symbol of Gwrych with his own eagle and the dragon had become the symbol of Conway instead, but it was really the crest of the Kings, whatever house they were from. Kai guessed that Edward wanted people to forget the dragon symbols connection to the kings of Briton, particularly as the Crown of Kings had not shone for him.