Читать книгу The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three - Jan Siegel - Страница 7

For a place where a murderer had lived, Riverside House seemed to Annie, as ever, curiously lacking in atmosphere. The round towers which had formerly been oast houses were joined by a two-storey building with all mod cons, currently littered with boxes – boxes sealed or opened, half unpacked or collapsed into folds for re-use – and assorted furniture, often in the wrong place. There was a sofa in the kitchen and a double bed in the living room. Daubs of paint on the walls indicated experimentation with future colour schemes. Much of the kitchen had turned lemon yellow, decorated with random stencils of art nouveau vegetables. The Rayburns were bringing their own atmosphere, Annie thought, but there was nothing underneath. Several murders and the residence of a dark enchantress had left little impression.

‘Have a seat,’ said Ursula Rayburn. ‘No – not there! Sorry. That’s Gawain’s school project.’ She picked up a fragile construction that seemed to consist mostly of paper, feathers and glue. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? I think it’s meant to be a phoenix.’

‘I’m sure it’s just like one,’ Annie said obligingly.

‘Those pink fluffy bits look awfully like Liberty’s feather boa. She was wondering where it had got to. Oh well, it’s such a tiny sacrifice for her to make for her brother’s artistic development. All my children are so creative.’ She sighed happily. ‘Except Michael, but he’s a sort of mathematical genius, so that’s all right … I hear Nathan’s frightfully brilliant too?’

‘He does okay,’ Annie said, feeling uncomfortable. She had no desire to boast of Nathan’s genius or creativity. All she wanted was for him to be as normal as possible – and under the circumstances, that was difficult enough.

‘Did you get hold of a plumber?’ she went on, changing the subject.

‘Oh yes,’ Ursula said. ‘Some firm in Crowford – but he said he couldn’t find anything wrong, and I said, there’s got to be. We keep finding water on the floor. So he said, maybe the roof leaks – it has rained a lot lately – but I said, then it would be on the top floor, and it isn’t, it’s downstairs. Anyway, he thinks it could be sort of funnelled down somehow, but I don’t believe it. I haven’t found any damp patches on the walls or ceiling.’

Annie asked, a little hesitantly: ‘Could I see where—?’ She expected Ursula to find her curiosity bizarre, but her hostess clearly thought she was just trying to be helpful.

‘Of course you can.’ She led Annie through into the ground floor room in one of the towers, which had once been a study. ‘This is going to be a sitting room,’ she explained. ‘I love the shape. At the moment, Romany’s sleeping here—’ a vague gesture encompassed a mattress on the floor ‘—and Michael and Gawain are upstairs. Jude and Lib are too old to share so they have their own rooms. The murder room’s going to be a guest bedroom – but only when I feel it’s been completely purged of bad vibes.’

Annie grinned. ‘So when people come to stay you can tell them: We’ve put you in the haunted room…?’

‘Actually,’ Ursula said, ‘I haven’t really sensed any ghosts. It’s a bit disappointing. At least, not exactly disappointing, but when a house has a history like this – well, you’d expect more than just vibes, wouldn’t you? It isn’t that I want to see an apparition or anything, but I did think … You know, a bloodstain that won’t scrub out, or – or perhaps moaning in the night. Something.’

‘And all you’ve got is a puddle on the floor,’ Annie said thoughtfully. In the middle of the room was a large damp patch where the carpet still hadn’t dried out.

‘There’s nothing ghostly about that,’ Ursula retorted. ‘It’s just a bloody nuisance. I suppose we’ll have to get someone to look at the roof next. I tell you, I’m going to sue that surveyor …’

They went back into the kitchen and she poured coffee.

‘We had an awful fright last weekend,’ she went on. ‘The kids wanted a boat so much, so Donny got them an inflatable – it’s on the bank now, down by the jetty – and they were messing around with it, and Romany fell in. I don’t know how it happened – that river is dodgy, isn’t it? She must’ve gone right under, and then she popped up again, and we got her out somehow, and she was fine, but it absolutely terrified me. I mean, she’s eight, she can swim a bit, but she kept saying how the weeds pulled her under. I told them all, they’re to stay away from the river, but of course they won’t.’

Absently, Annie found herself murmuring the familiar lines:

‘Cloud on the sunset

Wave on the tide …’

‘What’s that?’ Ursula asked.

‘It’s a sort of local folk-rhyme,’ Annie said. ‘About the river.

Cloud on the sunset

Wave on the tide

Fish from the deep sea

Swim up the Glyde.

The river’s tidal, you see.’ She didn’t go on with the poem.

‘Does that mean you can get dolphins and things? Like in the Thames?’ Ursula looked enthusiastic, then dubious. ‘Surely not – this river’s far too small. I expect that’s just fanciful.’

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Fanciful.’ She gazed pensively into her coffee, unsure of her own thoughts – or fears. Unsure what to say, and what to leave out.

Water on the floor – in the room where Romany slept. And it was Romany who fell in the river …

‘I think,’ she said, ‘you should keep an eye on her.’

‘On who?’

‘Romany.’

‘I always do. Though in the main, she’s such a good child. A bit solitary – always inventing her own games, making up imaginary friends, going off on adventures with them. Of course, she includes Gawain sometimes – he’s her baby brother, after all. I expect she’ll grow up to be a great novelist, or playwright, or something.’

As long as she does grow up, Annie thought.

Or was she being paranoid?

She would have to discuss it with Bartlemy when the opportunity offered.

Hazel thought too much of her time at Thornyhill Manor was spent on school work. She didn’t know quite how it had happened, but in the last few months she had begun re-doing her lessons with Bartlemy, and although a tiny part of her was secretly pleased that her grades had gone up, the stubborn, awkward, Hazelish part still told her lessons weren’t exactly her thing, and she would never do really well, so it was all a waste of effort. Besides, school work was boring, and she was supposed to be there to learn about magic. Despite her stated aversion to it, magic wasn’t boring.

‘Could we try the spellfire again?’ she said one day, off-handly. ‘I’m sick of maths. I never get it right.’

Bartlemy’s mild gaze narrowed with a hint of amusement. ‘You’re doing fine with that geometry,’ he pointed out. ‘Maths teaches you to think. If you do magic without thought you’ll end up like your great-grandmother. Do you want that?’

‘N-no. But I’ve done enough thinking for one day …’

‘As it happens,’ Bartlemy said, ‘there is something with which I need your help. But it could be dangerous. I want to be sure you won’t lose your head.’

‘Dangerous?’ Hazel brightened, doubted, dimmed. In her experience, grownups didn’t normally ask you to do dangerous things. But then, Bartlemy was unlike any other grownup.

She said: ‘It’s usually Nathan who gets to do the dangerous stuff.’

‘This time it’s you,’ Bartlemy said.

‘What is it?’

‘The behaviour of the gnomons is becoming … unpredictable. Something needs to be done about them.’

‘I always carry iron when I walk in the woods,’ Hazel said, thinking of the number in her coat pocket – a number originally made to go on the door of a house – which Nathan had provided for her protection two years ago. ‘But I haven’t seen – sensed – them around for ages. Anyway, I thought they only attacked when someone threatened the Grail – or Nathan.’

‘So did I,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But the rules seem to be changing. I am told they are getting out of control. Someone saw a hare pursued and sent mad. The next time it could be a dog which will turn on its owner – or a person. They have to be neutralised.’

‘How?’ Hazel asked bluntly.

‘If we can trap them in an iron cage, perhaps sealed with silphium – the smell is inimical to them.’

‘What’s silphium?’

‘A herb, generally extinct, but I grow a little of it in my garden. The Romans used it extensively in cooking: they made a rather pungent sauce with it, served with fish. It has a very powerful odour which gnomons cannot tolerate. Remember, they have little substance but are equipped with hypersenses, reacting abnormally not only to the magnetic field of iron but to certain smells and sound levels inaudible to human ears. We should be able to use these elements to hold them, if they can be lured into the trap.’

‘Who does the luring?’ Hazel said with misgiving, already knowing the answer.

‘That would be your job. But I understand if you don’t wish to do it. Geometry is much safer.’

Hazel looked down at a diagram involving several interrelated angles, two triangles and a rhomboid. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is I have to do.’

‘I have a plan,’ said Bartlemy.

Afterwards, when she had gone, he poured himself a drink from an ancient bottle – a drink as dark as a wolf’s gullet and smelling like Christmas in a wine cellar. A woodfire burned in the hearth, an unmagical fire whose yellow flames danced their twisty dances above the crumbling emberglow and bark flaking into ash. The dog lay stretched out in front of it, pricking one ear to hear his master speak.

‘You will take care of her,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I don’t want her in real danger. But she needs to feel valued – that’s the important thing. She needs to know she can make a difference, if only in a small way.’

Hoover thumped his tail in agreement or approbation, or possibly in the hope of a morsel of cake from the plate at Bartlemy’s side.

‘There was a time when I thought nothing I did would change the world,’ Bartlemy continued, in a reminiscent vein. ‘I was too busy looking at what they call nowadays the bigger picture. But big things are made up of small things. Move one particle and you alter the shape of the universe. Perhaps Hazel will remember that, as the decades go by and disillusionment sets in. Meanwhile, you and I will alter the shape of her universe just a little – if we can.’

Hoover pricked the other ear and lifted a shaggy eyebrow.

‘Cake is bad for dogs,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Even my cake.’

Nathan had the accident about a week later. He called it an accident but he knew, as soon as he was capable of knowing anything, that it was his own fault. He was by the indoor pool (Ffylde Abbey had both an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool) with a group of boys, and Ned Gable was vaunting their prowess at diving in Italy that summer. They had visited a little bay a few times, and had taught themselves to dive off a low promontory into the sea, turning a somersault in mid-air on the way down. One of the boys looked sceptical and made a casually snide remark which Nathan would have ignored, but Ned rose to the bait, asserting the truth of his boast.

‘Okay, show us,’ challenged the sceptic. His name was Richard but he liked to call himself Rix. His father owned a merchant bank.

‘I can’t,’ Ned responded, looking both discomforted and angry. ‘Not with this ankle.’ He’d torn some ligaments in a rugger scrum and was banned from most sport for at least another fortnight. ‘You know that.’

‘Convenient,’ sneered Rix.

‘Nathan could do it,’ said a supporter, with a surge of misguided loyalty.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Nathan said. ‘The rocks in Italy were higher than this diving board, and the sea below was really deep. It would be a bit chancy here.’

‘The pool’s two metres at this end,’ Rix said. ‘Tom Holland, who left last year, he did all sorts of fancy dives off that board. I saw him.’

‘Tom Holland was the Inter-Schools Champion,’ someone else pointed out. ‘And he was dead short – about five foot nothing. He could’ve dived into a puddle.’

‘Of course,’ Rix said, with a little smile tweaking at his mouth. A smile at once patronising and faintly knowing. ‘Don’t worry, Nat. I understand.’

Nathan didn’t like anyone calling him Nat.

‘What do you understand?’ Ned growled, picking up his cue while Nathan was still trying to let it pass.

‘Oh, it’s easy to be chicken when you’re so tall people are too scared to tell you the truth.’

There was a short pause, then suddenly Nathan laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m the class bully. Everyone’s really scared of me.’ Since he was notoriously tolerant and had never bullied anybody most of the group laughed with him, and the tension of the preceding moment was defused.

Rix took the laughter personally. He was the sort of boy who would take it personally if it rained on his birthday or his favourite football team lost a match. ‘So what you’re saying,’ he resumed, ‘is that Ned here is a big-mouthed liar.’

Ned balled his fist. Nathan, who had thought the whole stupid exchange was over, said: ‘What?’

‘He says you did the dive when you were in Italy. You say you can’t show us now – the pool’s too shallow and all that crap. Excuses. You’re calling him a liar. Your best mate, right? Some friend you are.’

One or two of the others laughed at this piece of sophistry – not a relaxed sort of laugh, the way they had laughed with Nathan, but the uncertain kind that tightens up the atmosphere. If the teacher had been around he might have noticed something amiss and put a stop to it, but he had gone to the infirmary when one of his pupils started a nosebleed. Nathan had no fallback position; he knew he should call a halt himself, but Ned was looking at him with absolute confidence that his friend wouldn’t let him down, and Nathan couldn’t fail him. The dive wasn’t safe, but he had done many far more dangerous things, in the otherworlds of his dreams, and somehow he had always come through, protected by chance, by fate, by whoever watched over him – the Grandir, or the sinister forces that shielded the Grimthorn Grail. He had been plucked from the jaws of desert monster and marsh demon, from the spelltraps of Nenufar – he had lifted the forbidden sword, defeated the unknown enemy. Perhaps, on some subconscious level, survival had made him complacent. He shrugged, not looking at Rix, only at Ned.

‘I’ll do it.’

Then he climbed up the steps to the diving board, stood poised on the edge.

Dived.

He knew, immediately, that he’d miscalculated. Everything happened at once very fast and very slow – the world arced as he completed the somersault – he tried to straighten out, to cut the water cleanly – hit the surface at the wrong angle – felt the sting of the impact, the rush of bubbles as the pool engulfed him. He needed to tilt his arms, curve the dive upward, but there was no depth beneath him, no time to manoeuvre. He’d opened his eyes under water and for a long slow millisecond he saw the bottom of the pool coming for him like a moving wall. Then it struck, knocking the air out of him, and he was breathing water – his lungs clenched – the world spun away into darkness and pain …

It was Ned who got him out, jumping in fully dressed despite his sprained ankle, heaving him out of the water while the other boys reached down to haul him over the edge. They’d done life-saving techniques earlier that term and someone managed to pump at his chest while someone else tried mouth-to-mouth. Ned said: ‘Get Mr Niall,’ meaning the games master, but no one did and it seemed an incredibly long time before any adults appeared on the scene to take over. There was blood on Nathan’s head, on his arm, blood fanning out across the wet floor-tiles. Rix stood back from the rest of the group, looking pale and uncomfortable.

‘This is your fault,’ Ned said, struggling to evade his own guilt, knowing Nathan would never have reacted to Rix’s taunting if it hadn’t been for him.

‘He was sh-showing off,’ Rix stammered, determined to convince himself.

Later, in the headmaster’s study, he said the same thing.

Annie was informed and drove to the school in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, exercising all the self-control she possessed in order not to go too fast. By the time she got there they were able to tell her Nathan would be all right: he had concussion, a dislocated shoulder, severe bruising, and what the doctor called ‘extensive physical trauma’ but no broken bones or internal damage. His first words to her were: ‘Sorry, Mum.’ She sat by his bed in the infirmary, holding his hand until it occurred to her that might embarrass him, torn between standard maternal anxiety, pointless anger (why was he always doing dangerous things, even when it wasn’t necessary?), and the sneaking paranoia of other, deeper doubts. Romany Macaire, tumbling into the river … Nathan, diving into a pool too shallow for him … Water, water, everywhere… Was it mere coincidence, or some dark supernatural plot?

‘Don’t overreact,’ Bartlemy said when she confided in him. ‘We’re surrounded by water, all the time. It’s essential to life. Don’t start seeing demons in every raindrop. Teenage boys do rash and often stupid things. Children fall into rivers. Accidents happen. It’s a very human weakness, that we need someone to blame.’

Ned blamed Rix, at least to his classmates. To Nathan, he blamed himself, saying awkwardly: ‘It was me. I made you do it. I shouldn’t have—’

‘Forget it,’ Nathan said. ‘It was my own stupid fault. I knew the dive wasn’t possible there but I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t do it.’

He, too, was blaming himself, not just for his recklessness but for that seed of unthinking arrogance which had made him believe that whatever he did, no matter how foolhardy, somehow he would get away with it. His guardian angel (or devil) would always take care of him.

But the devil had let him down, and now he knew he was vulnerable, and a tiny germ of fear grew at the back of his thought, not the fear of danger but the fear of fear itself. He could be hurt – he might be killed. Knowing that, would he be able to explore the otherworlds as boldly as before, doing whatever he needed to do, or would his newfound fear hold him back?

He couldn’t talk to Ned about it, or any of his other classmates, because they knew nothing of the voyages he made in his dreams, and would only think him nuts if they did. He couldn’t talk to Annie, because she was his mother, and he knew she worried about him too much already. He couldn’t talk to Bartlemy, because although his uncle came to see him once he was back home, they had no privacy for confidences.

In the end, he talked to Hazel. Just as he’d always done.

‘You think too much,’ Hazel said. ‘Like what’s-his-name in Shakespeare who wanted to avenge his father’s murder and kept messing it up and killing the wrong people.’ She’d been on a school trip to see Hamlet the previous term. ‘He got rid of nearly everyone in the play before he killed the right person, didn’t he? The point is he spent too much time agonising and making long speeches to himself instead of just getting on with the job. You’re starting to do that. Picking your feelings to bits and worrying about them. It’s a waste of time.’

‘I don’t make long speeches,’ Nathan objected.

‘You’d better not,’ Hazel said grimly. ‘The play was quite good but the speeches were boring.’

‘They’re famous,’ Nathan said, quoting: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question – and something about to die, to sleep – to sleep perchance to dream … For in that sleep of death what dreams may come …’

‘Boring,’ Hazel said. ‘You’re going all thoughtful on me. That’s your problem. Thinking.’

‘Thinking is a sign of intelligence,’ Nathan said.

‘No it isn’t,’ Hazel argued. ‘Stupid people think too. It’s the thinking that makes them stupid. Like that guy in the play. He stuck his sword in a curtain and killed a harmless old man because he thought he was someone else. Hamfist, Prince of Denmark. Stupid.’

‘I don’t go around sticking swords into people,’ Nathan said. ‘At least, only once.’ He had picked up the Traitor’s Sword – the sword of straw – and slashed at the Urdemon of Carboneck, but killing a demon, he felt, wasn’t the same as killing a person. ‘Anyhow, that was self-defence. I didn’t have much of a choice. The point is, maybe I found it easy to be brave, because – subconsciously – I thought I was sort of looked after. And now I know I’m not … well …’

‘You were brave from the start,’ Hazel responded. ‘You couldn’t have felt looked after then. If you’re more scared now, you’ll just have to be braver. You’ll manage it. You’re a brave kind of person. As long as you don’t start thinking about it.’

She hadn’t told him about the gnomons. Bartlemy had said he would set the trap that weekend. Hazel had already decided that if she didn’t think about what she had to do she wouldn’t worry, and if she didn’t worry she wouldn’t panic, but the effort of not thinking was taking its toll of her. She knew she wasn’t as brave as Nathan but that only meant she had to try harder. Nathan’s self-doubts she regarded as trivial – yet it was strangely reassuring to find that he, too, was having to cope with the possibility of failure and fear. Somehow, it made her feel better about her own secret terrors.

‘No thinking,’ Nathan said. ‘Right. I’ll – um – bear that in mind.’

‘And don’t start being clever,’ Hazel added, throwing him a dark look. ‘I can’t stand that either.’

‘Sorry,’ Nathan said. ‘Am I treading on your inferiority complex?’

‘I don’t have one,’ Hazel snapped. ‘I don’t do complexes and stuff.’

‘Oh really? Then why—’

But that was the moment when Annie put her head around the door with an offer of tea and cake, and the downhill run to a juvenile squabble was averted.

Since the accident Nathan had been on painkillers to help him sleep at night, and his dreams had stayed inside his head. The drugs, he suspected, affected his sleep patterns, making it impossible for him to stray outside his own world, but as the concussion had made him sick and the bruising had left him too stiff to move he had been feeling far from adventurous. However, he was strong and resilient, with quick powers of recovery, and that night he decided he could do without the paracetamol, though he didn’t mention it to Annie. It was hard to get comfortable – his shoulder still twinged at any awkward movement – but eventually he drifted into sleep, and through sleep into dream.

Only it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.

He was diving into deep water, hurtling down and down through an endless gulf of blue. The seabed rushed towards him like a moving wall. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. He tried to close his eyes, to brace himself for the impact – but there was none. No impact, no eyes. With an exquisite surge of relief he realised he was only an atom of thought, a bodiless observer whose horrifying plunge had speed but no substance. He slowed as the sea-floor drew near and found himself gliding above the level sand which stretched away in every direction, featureless as a desert. He guessed it couldn’t actually be all that deep, since he could still see in the blue dimness, and high above there was the glimmer of the sun’s rays, reaching down through the water. Something like a cloud passed overhead, a huge shadow blotting out the far-off daylight. A ship, he thought, gazing upward – but no, this was Widewater, it must be, where the land had been devoured by sea and there were neither people nor ships. Yet it looked like a ship, a vast, deep-bellied tanker hundreds of feet long. Others followed, five, six, eight, one far smaller, another little more than a dinghy. Not ships: whales. A pod of whales far larger than any in our world, sailing the ocean like a convoy of giant galleons.

His thought floated up, passing between them, emerging into a world of sky and sea. A golden void of sunlight hung all around him. The backs of the whales arched out of the water, rising and falling like slow waves on their way to the horizon. Below him he heard a strange echoing boom, like the music of sea-trumpets blown in the deeps, and knew they were singing. He thought, on a note of revelation: This is their world. Nothing here can hurt them. All of Widewater was their kingdom.

Around the rim of the sky, clouds were piling up, great thunderheads swelling visibly, rank on rank of them, like mountain ranges marching across the sea. The sun was swallowed up; a wind came scurrying before the storm, whipping the waves into restless peaks. But the whales did not vary their pace, heaving and sinking to the same steady beat. A dark rain came slanting down; thunder-drums drowned out the whalesong. Purple lightning stabbed at the wave-caps, foiled by the salt water. A stem of cloud came writhing downward, sucking the sea into its vortex, until sea and sky were joined by a whirling cord as thick as a giant’s arm. The water seemed to be flowing up it, feeding the storm-heart.

Then Nathan saw the Goddess.

He could not tell if she were solid or phantom, vapour or water, but it made no difference: she was terrible. Her upper body seemed to spout from the wavering column of the tornado, filling the sky, a pale cloudy shape with billowing hair that mingled with the thunderheads and lightning eyes. Her arms were stretched wide as if to draw the whole ocean into her embrace; the storm flowed from her fingertips. This was the Goddess who had eaten the islands, destroying all human life, who had made Widewater into a sea without a shore – the Queen of the Deep, ruler of maelstrom and tempest, an elemental with no soul and no heart, made of rage, and power, and greed. Even as he was, without form or substance, Nathan feared her.

Not just because she was a goddess. Because he knew her …

She bent down over the whale-pod; he seemed to hear her voice like a giant whisper on the wind. Lungbreathers! The whales dived, eluding her cold grasp – all save one, the larger of the two calves, who hung back from curiosity, or because his reflexes were too slow. Her long fingers spanned his back, and the sea plucked him away from the others – away and away – sucking him into the storm, rolling him in the waves, spinning him into the tumult of the tornado. Nathan followed, drawn in his wake, closing his mind against the nightmare of engulfing water …

Long after, or so it seemed, the sea was calm again. The morning sun shone down through the water onto a coral reef flickering with smallfish. The young whale was coasting along its border, now far from family and friends, seeking the currents that would lead him back to the north. Then Nathan saw the fin cutting the water, just one at first, then another, and another. Following him. Circling. Nathan didn’t want to watch any more, but the dream would not let him go, not till the sea exploded into a froth of lashing bodies, and the red came, pluming up through the foam. Then at last it was all over, and the sea was quiet, and the finned shadows flicked and circled, flicked and circled, while the stain thinned like smoke on the surface of the water, vanishing into a vastness of blue.

Nathan sank out of the dream, and once again he thought he was drowning, plunging into a darkness without air or breath. He struggled in a growing panic, fighting against the familiar asphyxiation – and then he was in bed, breathing normally, and there was a hand on his forehead. A hand that felt unnatural, cold and leathern-smooth. A hand in a glove.

The hand was withdrawn, and when it returned it felt like skin. Nathan’s eyes were shut, but a picture formed in his head: the Grandir in his protective clothing, with his white mask and black gauntlets. It was an oddly comforting image. He found himself thinking about skin, human skin, the softness of it, its coolness and its warmth, the intimacy of its touch. Only a flimsy layer between hand and brow, between sense and senses, between heart and heartbeat. Animals had hide and scales and fur, feathers and down, protection and insulation. But humans wrapped themselves in a tissue-thin covering so transparent the blood-vessels showed through, so fragile it might puncture on a leaf-edge or a blade of grass, so sensitive it could feel the lightest pressure, from the footstep of a fly to the breath of a zephyr. Yet humans in their vulnerable skin were the most deadly predators in all the worlds …

It occurred to him that these thoughts didn’t come from him – they were unfamiliar, alien thoughts, which seemed to stretch his mind into strange dimensions. The Grandir’s thoughts, flowing from the touch of his fingers into Nathan’s head …

He opened his eyes.

A face was bending over him, a face that he had seen only once before, yet he seemed to know it well. A dark curving face with a metallic sheen on the hooked cheekbones and the blade of the nose. Hooded eyes, and beneath the hoods the glimmer of hidden fires, like glints of light in a black opal. Behind the eyes, deeps of power and thought, a force of personality that could re-shape the cosmos. But for now, it was all focused on Nathan. There was a tiny frown between the eyebrows that seemed to convey both anger and gentleness. The Grandir’s spirit was larger than that of other men; he could do many emotions at once.

He said: ‘You fear the water, don’t you? It is waiting for you in your dreams, but you fear to go there, to be overwhelmed by it – smashed against the rocks, crushed into the seabed. I have read the fear in your heart where there was none before. You must face it, and face it down. There are things you have to do, even in the dark of the sea.’

‘What happens if I become solid?’ Nathan said. ‘I won’t be able to do it. Whatever it is. I won’t be able to breathe.’

‘You must find a way. Your folly has made your fear – the risk you took, when no risk was necessary – and for what? For what?’ The frown intensified; for a moment, anger supervened. ‘To impress your peers! To vindicate the one you call friend! They are nothing – less than nothing – but you matter. You have no idea how much you matter. And you might have been killed – for a gesture! An instant of bravado!’

The hand had left Nathan’s forehead to stroke his hair. For all the Grandir’s fury and frustration, his touch was soft as a caress.

Nathan said: ‘Everyone matters.’ He was trying to hang onto that.

‘You don’t understand. One day – but not yet, not yet. You must take care. No more folly. No more rashness.’ Voice and face changed. The hard curve of his mouth appeared to soften. Almost, he smiled. ‘You are just a boy – so young, so very young. It is long and long since I had contact with youth. I had forgotten how it shines – how valiant it is, and how defenceless. You have tasks to do but your youth will find a way. You will go back to Widewater. I will care for you – when I can. But I cannot always save you. Remember that …’

Nathan said sharply: ‘Did you show me the whales? And the Goddess?’

‘These are things you needed to see—’

‘Who is she? I thought – I knew her.’

‘She is Nefanu, Thalasse, Queen of the Sea. You know her double, the witch from the river. But the spirit in your world is far less in power, though not in hunger. She would make Earth her kingdom, a desert like Widewater, landless and bare. She seeks to open the Gate and draw power from her sister-spirit, her other self – but that is unimportant. She has no part in my plans. It is Nefanu who dominates your task.’

‘But how can I face a goddess?’ Nathan demanded, trying to sit up.

The hand restrained him.

‘Only do what you must. Perform the task ordained for you; no more.’

‘What task?’

‘You know what task. Enough questions. There may be a time later, but not now. Now, Time is running out. My world is running out. Do your part. All my trust is in you …’

The dream was receding, almost as if the Grandir was thrusting him away, back into sleep, into his own universe. He knew a sudden fever of urgency – if he could only find the right questions maybe he would learn the answers at last. (One day, the Grandir had said.) He was groping blindly between worlds, fulfilling some obscure destiny that no one would ever explain – a pawn in an inscrutable chess game, a puppet on detachable strings. He knew it had to do with the Great Spell – with the Grail relics that he alone could retrieve – but there was still no answer to the great Why? Why was he born with this bizarre ability to travel the multi-verse – an ability he could not even control? Why was he sent on this unknown quest? Why him?

He tried to speak, to protest … but the Grandir’s face was slipping away, curving into the swirl of the galaxy, glimmering into stars. Darkness followed, and a sleep without dreams, and he woke in the morning to the pain in his shoulder, and the ache in his head, and a tangle of thoughts to unravel.

Annie brought him tea in bed, a rare indulgence which, as she explained to him, would run out as soon as his bruises unstiffened.

‘I’m not really stiff now,’ he said provocatively. ‘I could get up easily.’

‘No you don’t.’ She scrutinised his face, noting the sallow tinge to his complexion and the shadows under his eyes. ‘You look as though you’ve slept badly. Did you take your painkillers?’

‘I don’t like taking pills all the time.’

‘Yes, but the doctor said you’re supposed to take them at night for at least another week.’ She sat down on the bed, her exasperation changing to anxiety. ‘Have you – have you been dreaming again?’ And, after a pause: ‘Those dreams?’

He shrugged. Nodded.

‘For God’s sake.’ Annie fumbled for the right words, not wanting to hear herself fussing – knowing fussing would do no good. ‘You’re not fit enough yet …’

‘I don’t need to be fit. I wasn’t there physically; just in thought.’

‘Something’s scared you. You look done in.’

He wasn’t going to tell her about his fear of the water. ‘I’m okay,’ he assured her. ‘Just trying to figure out what’s going on.’

‘Can I help?’

‘Maybe.’ He hesitated. ‘How much do you know about the water-spirit who was after the Grail?’

Annie tensed, her nebulous fears returning like bats to their cave. ‘Do you think she had something to do with your accident?’

‘No. No, not that. But I’ve been to this place – Widewater – it’s all sea, a whole planet with nothing but sea. There was land once but it was overwhelmed. She devoured it. She hates all creatures of the air – lungbreathers – even whales and selkies. They call her the Goddess, the Queen of the Sea – the Grandir said her name was Nefanu. She seems to have some connection with the water-spirit here. Like an alter ego – a more powerful twin. And more evil.’

‘A Doppelganger,’ Annie said promptly. ‘I know. The theory is we all have other selves in other worlds, living out alternative lives.’

‘It’s something I’ve come across before, in a way,’ Nathan said. ‘Not exactly other selves but … parallels. The same stories running through every world, the same kind of people. Like, Nell always reminded me of Hazel – a mediaeval, princessly Hazel, much prettier and a bit spoiled—’

‘Don’t ever tell her that,’ Annie said hastily.

‘D’you think she’d mind?’ Nathan sounded a little surprised.

‘The phrase “much prettier” isn’t good. About this goddess—?’

‘This is different. The link seems to be much closer – as if the spirit in this world knows her counterpart is out there, and wants to reach her, to bond with her. That’s why she wants the Grail – and me. Or so the Grandir said.’

‘You’ve talked with him?’ Belatedly, Annie was picking up on the implications. More bats came home to roost.

‘Yes – but only briefly. He says he’s helping me, or guiding me, but he never answers my questions. Not the really vital ones.’

Annie asked, very carefully: ‘What kind of a – a being is he?’

‘Human.’ Nathan was startled. ‘Like Eric, only taller. Big shoulders. He makes you feel … like he’s huge, not so much

physically but his personality, his mind. His aura. He has the kind of vibes that fill up all the available space. He could talk to a crowd of millions, and every single person there would think and feel exactly what he wanted them to think and feel. And he wouldn’t even be trying: it would just happen. That’s how he is. Huge inside. It’s difficult to describe …’ He was running out of metaphors, gazing intently at Annie in an attempt to convey some impression of the man who had ruled a cosmos – who had laid an ungloved hand on his forehead, and stroked his hair. For a minute, he thought his mother had gone deadly pale. The way she might have looked if a raven had flown into the room and perched on the bedstead, croaking: Nevermore—

(And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted

Nevermore!)

—but he concluded it was a mere quirk of fancy, a footstep on his grave, that was all. The bleak winter daylight made everyone look grey and cold.

He said: ‘Mum …?’

‘Sorry,’ Annie said. ‘I was … wool-gathering. The goddess – what did you call her? Nefanu. Nefanu – and Nenufar. That’s almost an anagram. It can’t be coincidence.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. D’you suppose she’s still around – Nenufar, I mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ Annie said, but her expression gave the lie to her words.

She knew.

At Ffylde, the blame-chain had reached the headmaster. He had been in the job for less than a year, after his predecessor, the abbot, had left for higher things. Unlike Father Crowley he was a layman, who talked managementspeak and prided himself on his ability to bond with the boys, especially those with the wealthiest and most influential parents. Right now his main concern was that Nathan’s accident had occurred in the absence of the games master, laying the school open to possible charges of negligence. It was therefore imperative that blame – like the baton in a relay race – was passed on to someone else. The only question was whom. After interviewing Rix, sympathetically and at length, he talked to the other witnesses.

‘I gather Nathan was – hrmm! – showing off,’ he suggested.

Ned Gable said flatly: ‘No. Nathan never shows off. He isn’t like that.’

And, baring his chest for the knife: ‘It was my fault. I was the one who … I should’ve done the dive, but I couldn’t because of my ankle. So Nathan had to.’

‘Very fine of you,’ the headmaster said indulgently, ‘standing up for your friend, but you can’t take responsibility for his actions. That will be all.’

‘Sir—’

‘That will be all.’

The other boys received the headmaster’s suggestion with variations on a blank gaze and stony silence. Father Crowley would have known how to elicit the true facts, but the new head had neither his piercing eye nor his uncanny omniscience, and was only too ready to take that silence for assent. In the classroom omertà was the rule of the day: none of the boys would point the finger at Rix in front of an adult, whatever their private feelings – that would be the behaviour of a supergrass. However, many of them resolved secretly that on the rugger pitch they would make him pay.

All of which did Nathan no good at all.

‘The boys shouldn’t have been left unsupervised,’ the head told their form master, Brother Colvin. ‘That goes without saying. We can only hope the Ward woman won’t get herself an unscrupulous lawyer – that could cause us a lot of trouble.’

‘Mrs Ward,’ said Brother Colvin, laying some emphasis on the title, ‘is a very sweet person who would never dream of doing such a thing. A year or so ago Nathan had a problem with Damon Hackforth – he was a bit of a delinquent, we’d had a lot of problems with him – and Annie was quite amazingly kind and understanding about it. The whole business could have been very serious, both for the Hackforths and the school. If she hadn’t shown truly Christian forbearance …’

‘I see,’ said the headmaster. ‘I hadn’t realised Nathan had a track record as a troublemaker.’

‘Nathan wasn’t the one making trouble,’ Brother Colvin said. ‘I told you—’

‘No, no, Brother, say no more. He never makes trouble, he’s just caught up in it. That’s the danger with these scholarship boys: we all feel obliged to bend over backwards for them, no matter how badly they behave. They come to us from questionable homes – I gather Mrs Ward is a single parent – no discipline, no moral standards, and they’re thrown in the midst of decent kids from good families, and thanks to political correctness we have to make heroes of them. Well, I won’t have it. I infer Nathan fancies himself as a “tough guy” – he’d probably call himself streetsmart – and that sets a very poor example to the others. And word gets around, believe me. Many parents of prospective pupils could be discouraged by that sort of thing. I intend to see that Nathan’s scholarship entitlement for next year is going to be reconsidered.’

‘He’s very bright,’ Brother Colvin pointed out with deceptive mildness. ‘His results make an important contribution to our position in the league tables.’

‘Well, well. We’ll see. Perhaps Mrs Ward may be offered some kind of subsidy, providing she can come up with the bulk of the fees. This is a prestige establishment, not a charity school. I see no reason why she should freeload when other parents are prepared to dig into their pockets – often to make sacrifices – for their children’s welfare.’

Brother Colvin blinked. He wondered fleetingly what sacrifices bankers, stockbrokers and oil millionaires had to make to pay for their sons’ education. Living half the year in a tax haven, perhaps?

He said, still fighting his corner: ‘Nathan’s also an accomplished athlete. He’s on the school team for both rugby and cricket.’

‘No doubt,’ said the head, with a thin smile. ‘I don’t believe in favouring a boy for such reasons. This isn’t Cambridge, where they tolerate almost anything if a student can wield an oar.’ In his youth, he had been turned down for Magdalene, and still bore a grudge.

‘Father Crowley had a very high opinion of Nathan,’ Brother Colvin persisted.

A tactical error.

‘Father Crowley,’ said the head loftily, ‘was, I am sure, a naïve and trusting soul, as befits a man of the cloth. I, alas, am expected to take a more worldly view. The governors installed me as his successor since they needed someone with secular experience and the people skills that come from a life lived in the rough-and-tumble of the wider world.’ (He’s quoting from the speech he made when he first came here, Brother Colvin thought with a sinking heart.) ‘Trust me: I understand these boys. I can sense a bad apple even before I bite into it. Besides,’ he added, obscurely, ‘we have a good ethnic mix here.’ Belatedly, Brother Colvin realised this was a reference to Nathan’s dark complexion. ‘Think of Aly al-Haroun O’Neill – Charles Mokkajee – just the sort of pupils we need.’

‘If the corruption charges against Mr Mokkajee senior stick,’ Brother Colvin said rather tartly, ‘he’ll be spending a long time in a Bombay jail. Hardly the most desirable parent.’

‘Now, now,’ said the head, with a tolerant smile. ‘He’s innocent until proven guilty: we mustn’t forget that. Anyhow, I gather the case will be bogged down in the Indian legal system for some years. And by the way, it’s Mumbai, not Bombay. We don’t want to offend Charles’ ethnic sensibilities, do we?’

‘No – of course not,’ said Brother Colvin. Seething with frustration and other, still more unchristian, emotions, he took his leave.

On Thursday night Annie stood over Nathan while he took the painkillers. He tried not to be glad about it. He wasn’t yet ready to face the sea again.

In Thornyhill woods, it was raining. Water drizzled out of the sky and dripped through the trees with the peculiar persistence of English rainfall. Hazel, peering out of a latticed window, thought the weather could keep it up all night and all the next day and probably right through the following week. It was that kind of rain. Although it was barely seven, she felt as if it had been dark for hours. Evening had set in midway through the afternoon with no real daylight to precede it, just the grey gloom of overcast skies and general Novemberitis. Bartlemy had cheered her up by allowing her to abandon maths for supper – wild rabbit roasted in honey and chestnuts, creamed spinach, home-grown apple tart – and now they were discussing the shortcomings of Hamlet and why too much thinking was bad for you.

‘He was stupid, wasn’t he?’ Hazel insisted. ‘Not stupid like me, but clever-stupid, if you see what I mean.’

‘I see exactly what you mean,’ Bartlemy said. ‘He used thought as a substitute for action, and when he did act, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time – a common failing of highly-strung, over-sensitive adolescents. Of course, he was only sensitive to his own feelings, not other people’s, or he would have been less prone to commit haphazard murders. As it was, the native hue of resolution, got sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’

‘That’s what I said,’ Hazel averred.

‘However,’ Bartlemy resumed, ‘I didn’t know you were stupid. This is hardly a stupid conversation.’

‘My teachers say I am,’ Hazel mumbled, caught off guard. ‘Anyway, my mum’s not that smart – nor’s my dad. To be clever, you have to have clever genes. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t underrate your mother. Or your father, for that matter. Everyone has brains. The question is whether they choose to use them. How will you choose?’ Hazel was silent, briefly nonplussed. ‘Pleading bad genes is a very poor excuse for unintelligence,’ Bartlemy concluded.

That was the point when she wandered over to the window, evading a response, staring darkly into the dark.

Neither of them saw the figure on the road nearby: little could be distinguished through the rain curtain and the November gloom. Only Hoover lifted his head, cocking an ear at the world beyond the manor walls.

The man on the road wore jeans that flapped wetly round his calves and a heavy-duty sheepskin jacket without a hood. Raindrops trickled down his hair inside his turned-up collar. His face was invisible in the dark but if it hadn’t been a passer-by would have seen lean, tight features clenched into a lean tightness of expression, grimmer than the grim evening – grim with determination, or discomfort, or something of both. But there were no passers-by. The road was empty and almost as grim as the man.

He had left his car more than a mile back, close to the Chizzledown turning, when the slow puncture became too hazardous for driving. No one would want to change a wheel on such a night, but he was a chief inspector in the CID, on more or less official business: he could have rung a subordinate to pick him up, or called the AA, or a local garage whose owner owed him a favour after he had prevented a robbery there. Instead, he chose to walk through the woods, wet and growing wetter, wearing his grimness like a mask under the water-trickle from his hair.

It wasn’t even the best route for him to take, on foot or by car, but he often drove that way, though this was the first time in over a year he had found a reason to stop. There was no light on the road and from time to time he stepped in a puddle, cursing under his breath as the water leaked into his shoes. The only sounds were the squelches of his own footfalls, the hiss of the occasional oath and the murmur of the rain. He didn’t know what made him turn round – instinct perhaps, a sixth sense developed over years of seeing life from the dark side. He could make out little in the murk but he had an impression of movement along the verge, a rustle beyond the rain – the susurration of bending grasses, the shifting of a leaf. And then, light but unmistakable, the scurrying of many feet – small feet or paws, running over the wet tarmac. An animal, or more than one: nothing human. Nothing dangerous. In an English wood at night, the only danger would be human. There were no panthers escaped from zoos, no wolves left over from ancient times – he didn’t believe in such stories. No animal could threaten him …

He was not a nervous type but all his nerves tensed: Fear came out of the dark towards him. Fear without a name, without a shape, beyond reason or thought.

Fear with a hundred pattering feet, just out of rhythm with the rain …

He knew it was illogical, but instinct took over. He turned and ran. Ahead, he saw the path through the trees, the gleam of a lighted window. He slipped in the wet and almost fell, lurching forward. Inside the house a dog barked once, sharp and imperative. The front door opened.

The man stumbled through the gap into Bartlemy’s entrance hall.

‘Chief Inspector Pobjoy,’ Bartlemy said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

In the living room he found himself seated by the fire, sipping some dark potent drink that was both sweet and spicy. Hazel surveyed him rather sullenly; after all, he had once treated her as a suspect in a crime. He said: ‘Hello,’ and, on a note of faint surprise, ‘you’ve grown up.’ He wondered if he should congratulate her on becoming a young lady, but decided she didn’t look like an eager aspirant to young-ladyhood, and he would do better to keep quiet. In any case, the Fear had shaken him – the violent, inexplicable Fear reaching out of the night to seize him. It wasn’t even as if it was very late.

Bartlemy said: ‘There’s some apple tart left,’ and threw Hazel an admonitory look when she muttered something about waste.

The apple tart was hot, blobbed with clotted cream. If Eve had prepared such a tart, the gods would have forgiven her the theft of the fruit.

Between mouthfuls, Pobjoy said: ‘I had a puncture.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t phone for help,’ Bartlemy remarked. ‘On a night like this.’

‘Battery needs re-charging,’ Pobjoy explained.

Hazel thought with a flash of insight: He’s lying. Why? Has he come here to spy on us?

She said: ‘Let’s see.’

Pobjoy stared at her but didn’t answer.

‘Hazel, don’t be rude,’ Bartlemy said mildly. ‘I’m always happy to see the inspector. He helped save Annie from a psychopathic killer – or have you forgotten?’

‘She saved herself,’ Hazel argued. ‘She’s much tougher than she looks.’

‘I know,’ Pobjoy said. ‘She’s a very brave woman.’ He was disconcerted by his own recent cowardice, by the strange panic that had held him in its grip. He hid uncertainty behind the leftovers of his former grimness.

Bartlemy looked faintly amused, as if he knew. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’d better tell us what happened out there, before you fell through my door. You were running away from something, weren’t you?’

‘It was nothing,’ Pobjoy said. ‘Nothing I could see. The dark – some animal – I don’t know what came over me. I’m not one to jump at spooks, just because I’m on a lonely road.’

It was Hazel’s reaction which surprised him. ‘Them,’ she said, and her voice was gruff. And to Bartlemy: ‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘I fear so.’

‘But why were they after him?’

‘The rules have changed,’ Bartlemy reiterated. ‘They’re out of control. You did well to run, my friend. Had they caught you, they would have entered your mind and driven you mad. Remember Michael Addison.’

‘This is nonsense,’ Pobjoy said, setting down his plate, fortified by the apple tart on its way to his stomach and the afterglow of the unknown drink. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t believe it. All that supernatural crap. I was just – spooked. That’s all.’

‘Then go outside,’ Bartlemy said. ‘See for yourself.’

Pobjoy got up, walked through the hall, opened the door.

They were there, he knew it immediately. Watching for him. Waiting. Just beyond the reach of the light. He saw shadows shifting in the darkness – heard the whisper of the rain on the leafmould, and behind it another whispering, as of voices without lips, wordless and soulless. Suddenly, he found himself picturing Michael Addison’s drooling mouth and empty eyes. Fear reached out in many whispers. The hairs crawled on his skin.

He drew back, closing the door. Against the night, against Them.

Back in the living room he said, trying to keep his voice even: ‘What are they?’ And: ‘What do I do?’

‘For the moment,’ said Bartlemy, ‘you stay. I think you need another drink.’