Читать книгу Witch’s Honour - Jan Siegel - Страница 6

I

It was New Year’s Eve 2000. The ancient house of Wrokeby normally brooded in silence under the eaves of the Wrokewood, a haphazard sprawl of huddled rooms, writhen staircases, arthritic beams and creaking floors, its thick walls attacked from without by monstrous creepers and gnawed from within by mice, beetles, and dry rot. English Heritage had no mandate here; only shadows prowled the empty corridors, draughts fingered the drapes, water demons gurgled in the plumbing. The Fitzherberts who built it originally had, through the vicissitudes of history, subsequently knocked it down, razed it, and built it up again, constructing the priest’s hole, burrowing the secret passages, and locking unwanted wives and lunatic relatives in the more inaccessible attics, until the family expired of inbreeding and ownership passed to a private trust. Now, it was leased to members of the nouveau riche, who enjoyed decrying its many inconveniences and complained formally only when the domestic staff fell through the mouldering floorboards and threatened to sue. The latest tenant was one Kaspar Walgrim, an investment banker with a self-made reputation for cast-iron judgement and stainless steel integrity. He liked to mention the house in passing to colleagues and clients, but he rarely got around to visiting it. Until tonight. Tonight, Wrokeby was having a ball.

Lights had invaded the unoccupied rooms and furtive corridors: clusters of candles, fairy stars set in flower-trumpets, globes that spun and flashed. The shadows were confused, shredded into tissue-thin layers and dancing a tarantella across floor and walls; the glancing illumination showed costumes historical and fantastical, fantastical-historical and merely erotic wandering the unhallowed halls. Music blared and thumped from various sources: Abba in the ballroom, Queen in the gallery, garage in the stables. The Norman church-tower which was the oldest part of the building had been hung with red lanterns, and stray guests sat on the twisting stair smoking, snorting and pill-popping, until some of them could actually see the headless ghost of William Fitzherbert watching them in horror from under his own arm. Spiders which had bred undisturbed for generations scuttled into hiding. In the kitchen, a poltergeist was at work among the drinks, adding unexpected ingredients, but no one noticed.

Suddenly, all over the house—all over the country—the music stopped. Midnight struck. Those who were still conscious laughed and wept and kissed and hugged with more than their customary exuberance: it was, after all, the Second Millennium, and mere survival was something worth celebrating. The unsteady throng carolled Auld Lang Syne, a ballad written expressly to be sung by inebriates. Some revellers removed masks, others removed clothing (not necessarily their own). One hapless youth threw up over the balustrade of the gallery, in the misguided belief that he was vomiting into the moat. There was no moat. In the dining hall, a beauty with long black hair in a trailing gown of tattered chiffon refused to unmask, telling her light-hearted molester: ‘I am Morgause, queen of air and darkness. Who are you to look upon the unknown enchantment of my face?’

‘More—gauze?’ hazarded her admirer, touching the chiffon.

‘Sister of Morgan Le Fay,’ said a celebrated literary critic, thinly disguised under the scaly features and curling horns of a low-grade demon. ‘Mother—according to some—of the traitor Mordred. I think the lady has been reading T.H. White.’

‘Who was he?’ asked a tall blonde in a leather corselette with short spiked hair and long spiked heels. Behind a mask of scarlet feathers her eyes gleamed black. She did not listen to the answer; instead, her lips moved on words that the demon critic could not quite hear.

After a brief tussle, Morgause had lost her visor and a couple of hair-pieces, revealing a flushed Dana Walgrim, daughter of their host. She lunged at her molester, stumbled over her dress, and crashed to the floor: they heard the thud of her head hitting the parquet. There was a minute when the conversation stopped and all that could be heard was the invasive pounding of the music. Then people rushed forward and did the things people usually do under the circumstances: ‘Lift her head—No, don’t move her—She’s not badly hurt—There’s no blood—Give her air—Get some water—Give her brandy—She’ll come round.’ She did not come round. Someone went to look for her brother, someone else called an ambulance. ‘No point,’ said Lucas Walgrim, arriving on the scene with the slightly blank expression of a person who has gone from very drunk to very sober in a matter of seconds. ‘We’ll take her ourselves. My car’s on the drive.’

‘You’ll lose your licence,’ said a nervous pirate.

‘I’ll be careful.’

He scooped Dana into his arms; helpful hands supported her head and hitched up the long folds of her dress. As they went out the literary critic turned back to the spike-haired blonde. ‘Drugs,’ he opined. ‘And they only let her out of the Priory three months ago.’

But the blonde had vanished.

In a small room some distance from the action, Kaspar Walgrim was oblivious to his daughter’s misfortune. One or two people had gone to search for him, thinking that news of the accident might be of interest although father and child were barely on speaking terms, but without success. The room was reached through the back of a wardrobe in the main bedchamber, the yielding panels revealing, not a secret country of snow and magic, but an office equipped by a previous owner, with an obsolete computer on the desk and books jacketed thickly in dust. Beside the computer lay a pristine sheet of paper headed Tenancy Agreement. Words wrote themselves in strangely spiky italics across the page. Kaspar Walgrim was not watching. His flannel-grey eyes had misted over like a windscreen in cold weather. He was handsome in a chilly, bankeresque fashion with an adamantine jaw and a mouth like the slit in a money-box, but his present rigidity of expression was unnatural, the stony blankness of a zombie. The angled desk-lamp illumined his face from below, underwriting browbone and cheekbone and cupping his eyes in pouches of light. A glass stood at his hand filled with a red liquid that was not wine. Behind him, a solitary voice dripped words into his ears as smoothly as honey from a spoon. A hand crept along his shoulder, with supple fingers and nails like silver claws. ‘I like this place,’ said the voice. ‘It will suit me. You will be happy to rent it to me…for nothing. For gratitude. For succour. Per siéquor. Escri né luthor. You will be happy…’

‘I will be happy.’

‘It is well. You will remember how I healed your spirit, in gratitude, as in a dream, a vision. You will remember sensation, pleasure, peace.’ The hand slid down across his chest; the man gave a deep groan which might have been ecstasy. ‘Do you remember?’

‘I remember.’

‘Finish your drink.’

Kaspar Walgrim drank. The liquid in his glass held the light as if it were trapped there.

The spiked blonde hair was screwed into a ball on the desk. The knife-blade heels prowled to and fro, stabbing the floorboards. The bird-mask seemed to blend with the face of its wearer, transforming her into some exotic raptor, inhuman and predatory.

When he was told, Kaspar Walgrim signed the paper.

The year was barely an hour old when a minicab pulled up outside a house in Pimlico. This was smart Pimlico, the part that likes to pretend it is Belgravia: the house was cream-coloured Georgian in a square of the same, surrounding a garden which fenced off would-be trespassers with genteel railings. Two young women got out of the taxi, fumbling for their respective wallets. One found hers and paid the fare; the other scattered the contents of her handbag on the pavement and bent down to retrieve them, snatching at a stray tampon. The girl who paid was slender and not very tall, perhaps five foot five: the streetlamp glowed on the auburn lowlights in her short designer haircut. Her coat hung open to reveal a minimalist figure, grey-chiffoned and silver-frosted for the occasion. Her features might have been described as elfin if it had not been for a glossy coating of makeup and an immaculate veneer of self-assurance. She looked exquisitely groomed, successful, competent—she had booked the taxi, one of the few available, three months in advance and had negotiated both fare and tip at the time. Her name was Fern Capel.

She was a witch.

Her companion gave up on the tampon, which had rolled into the gutter, collected her other belongings, and straightened up. She had a lot of heavy dark hair which had started the evening piled on her head but was now beginning to escape from bondage, a wayward wrap and a dress patterned in sequinned flowers which was slightly the wrong shape for the body inside. Her face was in a state of nature save for a little blusher and some lipstick, most of which had been smudged off. For all that she had an elusive attraction which her friend lacked, an air of warmth and vulnerability. The deepset eyes were soft behind concealing lashes and the faintly tragic mouth suggested a temperament too often prone to both sympathy and empathy. In fact, Gaynor Mobberley was not long out of her latest disastrous relationship, this time with a neurotic flautist who had trashed her flat when she attempted to end the affair. She had been staying with Fern ever since.

They went indoors and up the stairs to the first floor apartment. ‘It was a good party,’ Gaynor hazarded, extricating the few remaining pins and an overburdened butterfly-clip from her hair.

‘No it wasn’t,’ said Fern. ‘It was dire. The food was quiche and the champagne was Blank de Blank. We only went for the view of the fireworks. Like all the other guests. What were you discussing so intimately with our host?’

‘He and Vanessa are having problems,’ said Gaynor unhappily. ‘He wants to buy me lunch and tell me all about it.’

‘You attract men with hang-ups like a blocked drain attracts flies,’ Fern said brutally. ‘So what did you say?’

Gaynor fluffed. ‘I couldn’t think of an excuse to get out of it.’

‘You don’t need an excuse. Just say no. Like the anti-drugs campaign.’ Fern pressed the button on her ansaphone, which was flashing to indicate a message.

A male voice invaded the room on a wave of background noise. ‘Hi sis. Just ringing to wish you a Happy New Year. I think we’re in Ulan Bator but I’m not quite sure: the fermented mare’s milk tends to cloud my geography. Anyway, we’re in a yurt somewhere and a wizened rustic is strumming his souzouki…’

‘Bouzouki,’ murmured Fern. ‘Which is Greek, not Mongolian. Idiot.’ What music they could hear was pure disco, Eastern-Eurostyle.

‘Shine jiliin bayar hurgeye, as they say over here,’ her brother concluded. ‘Be seeing you.’ Bleep.

‘Shin jillian what?’ echoed Gaynor.

‘God knows,’ said Fern. ‘He’s probably showing off. Still,’ she added rather too pointedly, ‘he hasn’t any hang-ups.’

‘I know,’ said Gaynor, reminded uncomfortably of her abortive non-affair with Fern’s younger brother. ‘That’s what scared me. It gave me nothing to hold on to. Anyhow, he’s obviously airbrushed me from his memory. You said you told him I was staying here, but…well, he didn’t even mention my name.’

‘He doesn’t have to,’ Fern responded. ‘He wouldn’t normally bother to phone just to wish me Happy New Year. I suspect he called for your benefit, not mine.’

‘We never even slept together,’ Gaynor said. ‘Just one kiss…’

‘Exactly,’ said Fern. ‘You’re the one that got away. A career angler like Will could never get over that. You couldn’t have done better if you’d tried.’ Gaynor flushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ Fern resumed. ‘I know you weren’t trying. Look…there’s a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the fridge. Let’s have our own celebration.’

They discarded coat and wrap, kicked off their shoes. Fern deposited her jewellery on a low table, took a couple of glasses from a cabinet, and fetched the champagne. After a cautious interval, the cork gave a satisfactory pop. ‘Happy New Year!’ Fern curled up in a big armchair, tucking her legs under her.

Gaynor, on the sofa, sat knees together, feet apart. ‘Happy New Century. It’s got to be better than the old one.’

‘It doesn’t start quite yet,’ her friend pointed out. ‘2001 is the first year of the century. This is the in-between year, millennium year. The year everything can change.’

‘Will it?’ asked Gaynor. ‘Can you see?’

‘I’m a witch, not a seeress. Everything can change any year. Any day. Dates aren’t magical—I think. All the same…’ Her expression suddenly altered, hardening to alertness. She set down her glass. ‘There’s something here. Now. Something…that doesn’t belong.’ Her skin prickled with an unearthly static. The striation of green in her eyes seemed to intensify, until they shone with a feline brilliance between the shadow-painted lids. Her gaze was fixed on the shelving at the far end of the room, where a vase rocked slightly on its base for no visible reason. Without looking, she reached for the switch on the table-lamp. There was a click, and the room was in semi-darkness. In the corner beside the vase there seemed to be a nucleus of shadow deeper than those around it. The light had extinguished it, but in the gloom it had substance and the suggestion of a shape. A very small shape, hunch-shouldered and shrinking from the witch’s stare. The glow of the street-lamps filtering through the curtains tinted the dark with a faint orange glimmer, and as Gaynor’s vision adjusted it appeared to her that the shape was trembling, though that might have been the uncertainty of its materialisation. It began to fade, but Fern moved her hand with a Command hardly louder than a whisper, soft strange words which seemed to travel through the air like a zephyr of power. ‘Vissari! Inbar fiassé…’ The shadow condensed, petrifying into solidity. Fern pressed the light switch.

And there it was, a being perhaps three feet high assembled at random from a collection of mismatched body parts. Overlong arms enwrapped it, the stumpy legs were crooked, mottled fragments of clothing hung like rags of skin from its sides. Slanting eyes, indigo-black from edge to edge, peered between sheltering fingers. A narrow crest of hair bristled on the top of its head and its ears were tufted like those of a lynx. It was a monster in miniature, an aberration, ludicrously out of place in the civilised interior.

Neither girl looked particularly shocked to see it.

‘A goblin,’ said Fern, ‘but not resident. And I didn’t ask anyone to advertise.’

‘How could it come in uninvited?’ asked Gaynor. ‘I thought that was against the Ultimate Law.’

‘Some creatures are too simple or too small for such laws. Like cockroaches, they go everywhere. Still…this is a witch’s flat. Even a cockroach should be more careful.’ She addressed the intruder directly. ‘Who are you, and what are you doing here?’

The goblin mumbled inaudibly.

‘Louder,’ said Fern. ‘Intona!’

‘Not a house-goblin,’ the creature said with evident contempt. ‘I’m a burglar.’

‘What have you stolen?’ asked Fern.

‘Nothing,’ the goblin admitted. ‘Yet.’

‘You know who I am?’

Mumble.

‘Good,’ said Fern. ‘So you came here to steal something specific, from me. I expect you thought I would be out much later on Millennium New Year’s Eve. Who sent you?’

Warty lids flickered briefly over the watchful eyes. ‘No one.’

‘Was it Az—. Was it the Old Spirit?’ said Gaynor.

‘He wouldn’t use an ordinary goblin,’ said Fern. ‘He thinks they’re beneath him.’ She lifted her hand, pointing at the intruder with forked fingers, murmuring words too soft to be heard. A tiny gleam of light played about her fingertips, like the sparkle in a champagne glass. ‘Who sent you?’

The goblin held its breath, flinched, squeezed its eyes tight shut and then opened them very wide. ‘The Queen!’ it squeaked. ‘I steal for the Queen! Not for gods or demons! I’m a royal burglar, I am! I—’

‘Mabb,’ said Fern, relaxing slowly. ‘I see. I suppose she…Of course, I know what she wants. Tell her it isn’t here, and it’s not mine anyway. It’s held in trust, tell her, a sacred trust. It’s not a thing to be stolen or bartered. Say I know she will understand this, because she is a true queen who appreciates the value of honour.’

‘Who’s Mabb?’ asked Gaynor, sotto voce.

‘The queen of the goblins,’ whispered Fern. ‘Not much fairy in her, so I hear.’

‘Does she appreciate the value of honour?’

‘I doubt it, but I’m told she responds to flattery. We’ll see.’ She raised her voice again. ‘What’s your name?’

The goblin pondered the question, evidently considering whether it was safe to answer. ‘Humans call me Skuldunder,’ he conceded eventually.

‘Well, Skuldunder,’ said Fern, ‘since you’re here, and it’s a special occasion, will you have some champagne?’

‘Is it good?’ The goblin scrambled down from the shelf and approached warily, radiating suspicion.

‘Have you never stolen any?’

There was a shrug, as if Skuldunder was reluctant to admit to any shortfall in his criminal activities.

Fern took another glass from the cupboard and half filled it. ‘Try it,’ she said.

The goblin sniffed, sipped, grimaced.

‘We will drink to your queen,’ Fern announced. ‘Queen Mabb!’

They drank, solemnly. When Fern judged their visitor was sufficiently at ease she left him with Gaynor and went to her room, returning presently with a small quilted bag, unzipped to show the contents. ‘These are gifts for your queen,’ she told Skuldunder, ‘as a gesture of friendship and respect. I have heard she is a great beauty.’ Fern uttered the unaccustomed lie without a wince, ‘so I have chosen presents to adorn her loveliness. These coloured powders can be daubed onto her eyelids; the gold liquid in this bottle, when applied to her fingernails, will set hard; in this tube is a special stick for tinting her lips. There is also a hand mirror and a brooch.’ She indicated a piece of costume jewellery in the shape of a butterfly, set with blue and green brilliants. ‘Tell her I honour her, but the Sleer Bronaw, the Spear of Grief, is something I and my people hold in trust. It is not mine to give up.’

Skuldunder nodded with an air of doubtful comprehension, accepting the quilted bag gingerly, as if it was a thing of great price. Then he drained his glass, choked, bowed clumsily to the two women, and made an awkward exit through a window which Fern had hastily opened. ‘I don’t think it will dematerialise,’ she said, referring to his burden. ‘I hope you can manage…’ But the goblin had already disappeared into the shadows of the street.

‘What was that all about?’ Gaynor demanded as Fern closed the window.

‘The Sleer Bronaw is the spear Bradachin brought with him from Scotland when he first came to Dale House,’ Fern explained. ‘It’s still there, as far as I know. I believe it has some mythic significance; Ragginbone thinks so, at any rate.’ Bradachin, the house-goblin who inhabited her family’s Yorkshire home, had migrated from a Scottish castle after the new owners converted it into a hotel. Ragginbone was an old friend, a tramp who might once have been a wizard and now led a footloose existence in search of troubles he could not prevent, accompanied by a faithful dog with the mien of a she-wolf. ‘It’s unusual for something like that to be left in the care of a goblin, but Bradachin knows what he’s doing. I think. You saw him use it once, remember?’

‘I remember.’ There was a short silence. Then Gaynor said: ‘Why would Mabb want it?’

‘I’m not sure. Ragginbone said someone had offered her a trade, but that was a long time ago. I suppose she must have latched onto the idea again; he says her mind leaps to and fro like a grasshopper on speed—or words to that effect. Anyhow, none of the werefolk are focused in Time the way humans are.’

‘It was an interesting start to the New Year,’ Gaynor volunteered. ‘A goblin-burglar.’ She gave a sudden little shiver of reaction, still unused to encounters with such beings.

‘Maybe,’ said Fern. ‘Maybe—it was a portent.’

When the bottle was empty, they went to bed, each to her own thoughts.

Gaynor lay awake a long time as two-year-old memories surfaced, memories of magic and danger—and of Will. Somehow, even in her darkest recollections, it was the image of Will which predominated. There were bats—she hated bats—flying out of a TV set, swarming around her, tangling in her hair, hooking onto her pyjamas. And Will, rushing to her rescue, holding her in his arms…She was waiting behind a locked door for the entrance of her gaoler, clutching a heavy china bowl with which she hoped to stun him, only it was Will—Will!—who had come in. Will who had escaped and come back to find her, Will beside her in the car when the engine wouldn’t start, and she switched on the light to see the morlochs crawling over the chassis, pressing their hungry mouths against the windscreen. Will whom she had kissed only once, and left, because he had too much charm and no hang-ups, and he could never want someone like her for more than a brief encounter, a short fling ending in long regret. ‘He’s your brother,’ she had said to Fern, as if that settled the matter, the implications unspoken. He’s your brother; if he breaks my heart it will damage our friendship, perhaps for good. But her heart, if not broken, was already bruised and tender, throbbing painfully at the mention of Will’s name, at the sound of his voice on a machine. Ulan Bator…what was he doing in Ulan Bator? She had been so busy trying to suppress her reaction, she had not even thought to ask. She knew he had turned from painting to photography and abandoned his thesis in mid-stream, ultimately taking up the video camera and joining with a kindred spirit to form their own production company. Whether they had any actual commissions or not was a moot point, but Fern had told her they were working on a series of films exploring little-known cultures, presumably in little-known parts of the world. Such as Ulan Bator, wherever that might be. (Mongolia?) And what the hell was a yurt? It sounded like a particularly vicious form of yoghurt, probably made from the fermented mare’s milk to which Will had alluded.

Gaynor drifted eventually into a dream of bats and goblins, where she and Will were trapped in a car sinking slowly into a bog of blackberry-flavoured yurt, but a morloch pulled Will out through the window, and she was left to drown on her own. Fortunately, by the next morning, she had forgotten all about it.

Fern stayed awake even longer, speculating about Mabb, and the goblin-burglar, and the spear whose story she had never heard, the ill-omened Spear of Grief. She remembered it as something very old, rust-spotted, the blade-edge pitted as if Time had bitten into it with visible teeth. It had no aura of potency or enchantment, no spell-runes engraved on shaft or head. It was just a hunk of metal, long neglected, with no more power than a garden rake. (Yet she had seen it kill, and swiftly.) She wondered whose tears had rusted the ancient blade, earning it its name. And inevitably, like Gaynor, she slipped from speculation into recollection, losing control of her thought and letting it stray where it would. She roamed through the rootscape of the Eternal Tree, in a world of interlacing tubers, secret mosses, skulking fungi, until she found a single black fruit on a low bough, ripening into a head which opened ice-blue eyes at her and said: ‘You.’ She remembered the smell of fire, and the dragon rising, and the one voice to which both she and the dragon had listened. The voice of the dragon-charmer. But the head was burned and the voice stilled, for ever and ever. And her thought shrank, reaching further back and further, seeking the pain that was older and deeper, spear-deep in her spirit, though the wound, if not healed, was all but forgotten. Now she probed even there, needing the pain, the loss, the guilt, fearing to find herself heart-whole again for all time. And so at last she came to a beach at sunset, and saw Rafarl Dévornine rising like a god from the golden waves.

But she had been so young then, only sixteen, in an age ten thousand years gone. And now I am different, she thought. In Atlantis, they thought I was a star fallen from the heavens. But now I am a witch—not some pagan crone from a dream of the past but a witch of today, a twenty-first century witch. My skills may be ancient but my spirit is as modern as a microchip. As modern as a hamburger. Would I love him, if I met him now? When Someday comes, if it comes, will I even know him, or he me? And the tears started, not from the return of pain but from its loss, so she thought the lack of pain hurt the more, and there was an ache inside her that was not her heart. Gaynor suffers, she sensed, for her Gift or their friendship showed her what the other sought to hide, but at least she suffers because she loves. I have lost all the love I ever had, and it will not come again, because you love like that just once, and then it’s gone for good. I must be a fickle creature, to love so deeply and forget so fast. And her tears dried, because she saw them as an indulgence, playing at grief, and she lay in the dark empty of all feeling, hollow and cold, until at last she slept.

And dreamed. She moved through the dream as if she were an onlooker behind her own eyes, with no control over her actions, traversing the city with the desperate certainty of someone who was utterly resolved on a dreadful errand. It was a winter evening, and the glare of the metropolis faded the stars. Many-windowed cliffs rose above her, glittering with lights; modern sculptures settled their steel coils on marble plinths; three-cornered courtyards flaunted fountains, polished plaques, automatic doors. Recent rain had left sprawling puddles at the roadside which gave back headlamp and streetlamp in glancing flashes. In places the city looked familiar, but at other times it seemed to change its nature, showing glimpses of an underlying world, alien and sinister. Sudden alleyways opened between buildings, thick with shadows that were darker and older than the nightfall. Flights of steps zig-zagged down into regions far below the Underground, where crowds of what might be people heaved like boiling soup. Faces passed by, picked out briefly in the lamplight, with inhuman features. It came to Fern that she was looking for something, something she did not want to find, driven by a compulsion that she could not control. She had always believed in the freedom to choose—between right and wrong, good and evil, the choices that shape the soul. But she knew now that she had already chosen, a choice that could not be unmade, and her feet were set on a deadly path.

Presently she came to the turning that she sought, a pedestrian walk that passed under an arch in a façade of opaque windows. When she emerged at the other end of the tunnel she was in an open square. It was large—far too large for the buildings that enclosed it on the outside, as if she had passed through a dimensional kink into some alternative space. Stone pavings stretched away on either hand; distant groups moved to and fro, busy as ants on their unknown affairs. In front of her, broad steps spread out like low waves on an endless beach, and above them rose the tower. She had been expecting it, she knew—she had been seeking it—but nonetheless the sight gave her a sick jolt in her stomach, a horror of what she was about to do, her fearful necessary errand. It was taller than the surrounding buildings, taller than the whole city, an angular edifice of blind glass and black steel climbing to an impossible height, terminating in a single spire which seemed to pierce the pallor of the clouds. Reflected lights gleamed like drowning stars in its crystal walls, but she could see nothing of what lay within. It was of the city and yet not of it, an architectural fungus: the urban maze nourished it even as a hapless tree nourishes a parasitic growth, which has outgrown and will ultimately devour its host. For this was the tower at the heart of all evil, the Dark Tower of legend, rebuilt in the modern world on foundations as old as pain. Fern looked up, and up, until her neck cricked, and dragged her gaze away, and slowly mounted the steps to the main entrance.

Guards stood on either side, scarlet-coated and braided across the shoulders. They might have been ordinary commissionaires were it not for the masks of dark metal covering their faces. Iron lids blinked once in the eye-slits as Fern passed between them. The double doors opened by invisible means and she entered a vast lobby a-gleam with black marble where a dim figure slid from behind the reception desk. A voice without tone or gender said: ‘He is waiting for you. Follow me.’ She followed.

Behind the reception area there was a cylindrical shaft, rising out of a deep well surrounded by subterranean levels, and ascending beyond the eye’s reach. Each storey was connected to the shaft by a narrow bridge, unprotected by rail or balustrade, open to the drop beneath. Transparent lifts travelled up and down, ovoid bubbles suspended around a central stem. Fern flinched inwardly from the bridge, but her legs carried her across uncaring. The lift door closed behind them and they began to rise, gently for the first few seconds and then with accelerating speed, until the passing storeys blurred and her stomach plunged and her brain felt squashed against her skull. When they stopped her guide stepped out, unaffected, unassisting. An automaton. For a moment she clutched the door-frame, pinching her nose and exhaling forcefully to pop her ears. She didn’t look down. She didn’t speculate how far it was to the bottom. Her legs were unsteady now and the bridge appeared much narrower, a slender gangplank over an abyss. Her guide had halted on the other side. She thought: It looks like a test, but it isn’t. It’s a lure, a taunt. A challenge.

But she could not turn back.

She crossed over, keeping her gaze ahead. They moved on. Now, they were on an escalator which crawled around the tower against the outer wall. At the top, another door slid back, admitting them to an office.

The office. The seat of darkness. Neither a sorcerer’s cell nor an unholy fane but an office suited to the most senior of executives. Spacious. Luxurious. Floor-to-ceiling windows, liquid sweeps of curtain, a carpet soft and deep as fur. In the middle of the room a desk of polished ebony, and on it a file covered in red, an old-fashioned quill pen and a dagger that might have been meant for a letter-opener but wasn’t. There was a name stamped on the file but she did not read it: she knew it was hers. Her guide had retreated; if there were other people in the room she did not see them. Only him. Beyond the huge windows there were no city lights: just the slow-moving stars and the double-pronged horn of the moon, very big and close now, floating between two tiers of cloud. A scarlet-shaded lamp cast a rusty glow across the desk-top.

He sat outside the fall of the lamplight. Neither moonbeam nor starfire reached his unseen features. She thought he wore a suit, but it did not matter. All she could see was the hint of a glimmer in narrowed eyes.

Perhaps he smiled.

‘I knew you would come to me,’ he said, ‘in the end.’

If she spoke—if she acknowledged him—she could not hear. The only voice she heard was his: a voice that was old, and cold, and infinitely familiar.

‘You resisted longer than I expected,’ he went on. ‘That is good. The strength of your resistance is the measure of my victory. But now the fight is over. Your Gift will be mine, uniting us, power with power, binding you to me. Serve me well, and I will set you among the highest in this world. Betray me, and retribution will come swiftly, but its duration will be eternal. Do you understand?’

But Fern was in the grip of other fears. She felt the anxiety within her, sharp as a blade.

‘The one you care for will be restored,’ he said. ‘But it must be through me. Only through me. No other has the power.’

She heard no sound yet she seemed to be pleading with him, torn between a loathing of such a bargain and the urgency of her need.

‘Can you doubt me?’ he demanded, and the savagery of aeons was in his voice. ‘Do you know who I am? Have you forgotten?’ He got to his feet, circling the desk in one smooth motion, seizing her arm. Struggle was futile: she was propelled towards the glass wall. His grasp was like a vice; her muscles turned to water at his touch. She sensed him behind her as a crowding darkness, too solid for shadow, a faceless potency. ‘Look down,’ he ordered. She saw a thin carpet of cloud, moon-silvered, and then it parted, and far below there were lights—the lights not of one city but of many, distant and dim as the Milky Way, a glistening scatterdust spreading away without boundary or horizon, until it was lost in infinity. ‘Behold! Here are all the nations of the world, all the men of wealth and influence, all the greed, ambition, desperation, all the evil deeds and good intentions—and in the end, it all comes to me. Everything comes to me. This tower is built on their dreams and paid for in their blood. Where they sow, I reap, and so it will always be, until the Pit that can never be filled overflows at the last.’ His tone softened, becoming a whisper that insinuated itself into the very root of her thought. ‘Without me, you will be nothing, mere flotsam swept away on the current of Time. With me—ah, with me, all this will be at your feet.’

Fern felt the sense of defeat lying heavy on her spirit. The vision was taken away; the clouds closed. She was led back to the desk. The red file was open now to reveal some sort of legal document with curling black calligraphy on cream-coloured paper. She did not read it. She knew what it said.

‘Hold out your arm.’

The knife nicked her vein, a tiny V-shaped cut from which the blood ran in a long scarlet trickle.

‘You will keep the scar forever,’ he said. ‘It is my mark. Sign.’

She dipped the quill in her own blood. The nib made a thin scratching noise as she began to write.

Behind her eyes, behind her mind, the other Fern—the Fern who was dreaming—screamed her horror and defiance in the prison of her own head. No! No…

She woke up.

The sweat was pouring off her, as if a moment earlier she had been raging with fever, but now she was cold. Unlike with Gaynor, there was no merciful oblivion. The dream was real and terrible—a witch’s dream, a seeing-beyond-the-world, a chink into the future. Azmordis. Her mouth shaped the name, though no sound came out, and the darkness swallowed it. Azmordis, the Oldest Spirit, her ancient enemy who lusted for her power, the Gift of her kind, and schemed for her destruction. Azmordis who was both god and demon, feeding off men’s worship—and their fears. But she had stood against him, and defeated him, and held to the truth she knew.

Until now.

She got up, shivering, and went into the kitchen, and made herself cocoa with a generous measure of whisky, and a hot water bottle. It seemed a long time till daylight.