Читать книгу The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three - Jan Siegel - Страница 8

Bartlemy sent Hazel home in a taxi which he paid for, even though she insisted she could perfectly well walk. ‘I have iron,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m not afraid.’ She was determined to put Pobjoy in his place, to show him that in a world of dark magic – a world where being a policeman counted for nothing – she was the one who could handle herself. But Bartlemy overruled her and Pobjoy barely noticed. He had more than enough to think about.

‘What are those creatures?’ he repeated, when the two men were alone.

And, in the subsequent silence: ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘They are not ghosts,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Here, they might be called magical, but you must realise magic is merely a name for a force we don’t understand. Once we can analyse it and see how it works it becomes science.’

‘That’s an old argument,’ Pobjoy said. ‘Television is magical unless you’re a TV engineer. The things out there – how do they work?’

‘They come from another universe,’ Bartlemy explained matter-of-factly. ‘They are made of fluid energy, with little or no solid form; partly because of this, some can migrate between worlds. The species has the generic name of gnomons, but those which are able to cross the barrier are called Ozmosees. I heard about them – read about them – once, but these are the first I have ever seen, since although they did exist in this universe, they died out here long ago. They are hypersensitive to sound, smell, light, but they have no intelligence and must be controlled. I am not sure how that is done; possibly by the dominion of a very powerful mind.’

‘What are you saying?’ Pobjoy demanded, resolutely sceptical. ‘They got here through the back of a wardrobe?’ He had read few of the right books but had once inadvertently watched a documentary on the making of Narnia.

‘I doubt it.’ Bartlemy smiled. ‘Unfortunately, I know very little about them, and their behaviour – as you must realise – is hard to study, though I have tried. The process may be assisted by attaching them to a person or object in this world, thus drawing them out of their place of origin. We cannot know for certain. However …’

‘What object?’ Pobjoy interrupted. He was a detective, and even on such unfamiliar territory, he could work out which questions to ask.

‘I imagine you can guess.’

There was a short pause. ‘The cup?’ Pobjoy said, as illumination dawned. ‘The Grimthorn Grail?’

‘Precisely,’ said Bartlemy, looking pleased, like a teacher with a pupil who, after a long struggle, has finally grasped the principles of calculus. ‘They appear to have been sent to guard it. There are also indications that their guardianship extended to Nathan and Annie—’

‘Nathan and Annie? But – why? – how?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bartlemy admitted. ‘There is some connection between them and the Grail, too complicated to go into now. In any case, I am not yet sure exactly what it is, or how deep it goes.’

‘Did Nathan steal it that time?’ Pobjoy asked sharply.

‘Dear me no. In fact, he got it back. It’s a long story, too long for now. To return to the gnomons, the problem seems to be that they are no longer – focused. There was no reason for them to pursue you, yet they did. And there have been other incidents lately. Evidently they are getting out of hand. The power that manipulated them may be losing its grip, or merely losing interest. There could be other factors. At this time, we have no way of finding out.’

‘Are you saying someone here – some sort of wizard—’ Pobjoy enunciated the word with hesitation and distaste ‘—is controlling these creatures? Some local bigwig with secret powers?’ He didn’t even try to keep the irony from his tone.

‘Of course not,’ Bartlemy said mildly. He was always at his mildest in the face of scorn, anger or threat. ‘Their controller is in the universe from which they came. That’s why we know so little about him.’

‘If this is true,’ Pobjoy said, attempting to keep the world in its rightful place, ‘what’s his interest in the Grail?’

‘He placed it here,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Probably for safekeeping. A long time ago, I had a teacher who contended there were many otherworld artefacts secreted – or in some cases dumped – on this planet. He claimed they were responsible for almost all myths and legends, and several major religions. Apples of youth, rings of power, stone tablets falling out of the sky. That sort of thing. Of course, he may have exaggerated a little.’

He’s nuts, Pobjoy thought. Clever, yes – harmless – but nuts. I wonder if Annie knows?

Then he visualised the gnomons, waiting in the dark …

He spent the night in the guest room.

He was woken in the small hours by someone tapping on the window. It was only a gentle sound, barely louder than the rain, but it jerked him abruptly from sleep. Too abruptly. For a few seconds, he didn’t know where he was, or what he was doing there. His bleary gaze made out a shape through the panes, behind the raindrops. A face. A pale blurred face with midnight eyes and a floating mist of hair. A face he had seen somewhere before, the same and yet different, but he couldn’t quite catch hold of the memory. He got up and tried to make his way across the room, but he stumbled against the unfamiliar furniture and when he looked again the face was gone. Back in bed, he returned gratefully to the realm of sleep.

It was only in the morning that it struck Pobjoy that his room was on the first floor. He opened the window, surveying the crime scene, but there was no convenient tree nearby and the ivy on the wall would never support a climber. Downstairs, he slipped out into the garden, checking the earth for the imprint of a ladder, but there was none. Over the best breakfast he had ever eaten he called the AA for his car and the police station for a lift to work. For the moment, he wanted no further discussion with Bartlemy.

He needed some time to convince himself none of it had ever happened.

It was a long time since Hazel had walked through the woods without the comfort of the iron door-number in her pocket, and she was disturbed by how defenceless its loss made her feel. She had been in the habit of fingering the metal as she walked, fiddling with it like a worry-bead, and now her hand was stuck in her pocket with nothing to do, clenching involuntarily from time to time, relaxing again when she noticed her nails digging into her palm. She was some distance from the road, on a track that wound its way towards the valley of the Darkwood, where it petered out. All tracks failed in the Darkwood, a deep fold in the countryside with a stream running through it which would change course in a shower of rain, where the trees tangled into thickets and the undergrowth grew into overgrowth and any sunlight got lost on its way to the ground. Long ago Josevius Grimthorn, had performed bizarre rites in a chapel there – a chapel buried for centuries under the leafmould and the choking tree-roots. Nathan had stumbled into it once by accident, but there was a spell on the place which forbade him to speak of it, and it was long before he found it again. And Josevius’ house had been there too, burnt down in the Dark Ages, where Login the dwarf had been imprisoned in a hole beneath the ground.

Hazel was thinking of that as she walked, wondering if he was watching her from some hidden hollow in the leaves, or perched furtively among the branches. She glanced round every so often, watchful and wary, but there was only the great stillness of the trees, stretching in every direction. That’s the thing about woods, she thought: when you’re inside one it seems much bigger than it really is, as if it goes on forever. And they had their own special quiet, when they shut out the sounds of the free wind and the open sky, and you could hear a twig crack or an acorn drop a long way off. But that afternoon there was little to hear.

She knew this part of the wood well – she had come there as a child, when her father still lived at home and she wanted to be on her own. She would scramble up among the boughs and stay there for hours, watching mites creeping in the bark, or a caterpillar eating its way through a leaf, listening to the bird-chatter and the insect-murmur, and the great silence waiting behind it all. Later, when she was older, she had come to talk to the woodwose, Nathan’s strange friend, with his stick limbs and sideways stare, till he went back to his own place. She had always felt at ease here, on familiar territory – until now. Now, when she knew the gnomons were lurking somewhere, no longer bound to their purpose but aimless and astray, ready to turn on anything that crossed their path. Hoover was trailing her, some twenty yards back, which gave her a little security, but nonetheless she jumped when a squirrel’s tail whisked round a tree-bole, froze into alertness at the tiniest rustle in the leaf-mould.

But they did not come. There were a hundred small warnings, a hundred false alarms. And nothing. The path ran out, and the woodland floor dipped towards the valley. ‘Don’t go there,’ Bartlemy had said. ‘There’s no room to run, and you could easily get lost. If you reach the Darkwood, turn back.’

Hazel turned back. After a while, Hoover caught up with her, lolloping at her heel.

‘No luck,’ Hazel said. If luck was what she was looking for.

‘They inna there,’ said another voice close by – a voice with a brogue as old as the hills, and almost as incomprehensible.

‘Hello,’ Hazel said, politely. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘Nay,’ said the dwarf. ‘They’ll be in the auld capel, where the Magister used to consort wi’ the devil when he popped up from hell for a chat. I’ve seen them there o’ nights, a-heebying and a-jeebying, whispering thegither for hours, though I never heard they had aught to say.’

‘It’s not night,’ Hazel pointed out.

‘Night – day – at the runt end of the year, there’s no muckle difference.’

‘Could you show me the place?’ Hazel asked. ‘Not now – it’s a bit late – but another day?’

‘Aye,’ the dwarf said slowly. ‘But I’m thinking the goodman would not be wanting ye to go there.’

‘Then we won’t tell him,’ Hazel said, doing her best to sound resolute. ‘We have to trap the gnomons. If they won’t come to me, then I have to go to them.’

‘Ye’re a bold lass,’ said the dwarf, but whether in approval or criticism she couldn’t tell. ‘I’ll be seeing ye.’

He was gone, and ahead she saw Bartlemy, emerging from the gloom of the fading daylight.

‘They didn’t come,’ Hazel said.

‘So I gather. We’ll try again tomorrow.’

But on Sunday it rained too heavily for hunting phantoms, and in the week Hazel had school.

‘I could skive off one afternoon,’ she offered, nobly.

‘No,’ said Bartlemy. ‘We’ll wait for the weekend.’

‘The weekend,’ Hazel echoed, thinking of the Darkwood, and the chapel under the tree-roots, and her stomach tightened in anticipation of terrors ahead.

Nathan went back to school on Monday, still taking the painkillers each night, less to make him sleep than to keep him in his bed. It was always awkward wandering between worlds in the dormitory, since the more solid he appeared in his dreams, the more insubstantial his sleeping form would become. It was only when he was back home for the weekend, and assuring his mother he was restored to fitness, that he stopped taking the drugs.

That night, he lay for a while unsleeping, his body rigid at the thought of the planet undersea. The Grandir was right: he knew what he had to do. Find the third relic – the relic removed from Eos countless years ago by the Grandir himself, to shield it from the greedy and the misguided. The Iron Crown. The crown of spikes forged originally by Romandos, first of the Grandirs, to form a part of the Great Spell to save their people – a plan laid over millennia, woven into the legends of a thousand worlds, hidden in a web of folklore and lies. Nathan still had no idea what the spell itself involved, or how it could engender salvation – he knew only that it had more power than a galaxy imploding, and would shake the very multiverse to its core. Even the Grandir, he suspected, had yet to fill in all the gaps in his vision of destiny. The Grandir who thought he was a trueborn descendant of Romandos and his bridesister Imagen, though Nathan had seen in his naked face the ghost of Imagen’s lover Lugair.

Nathan lingered between sleep and waking, thoughts floating free in his mind. Lugair had betrayed Romandos – Romandos his friend – slaying him with the Traitor’s Sword, to be slain in his turn … the sword had been held in Carboneck for generations, a curse on the kings of Wilderslee and on their people … the Grail had been guarded by Josevius and the Thorns, the so-called luck of the family, its burden and its bane … and the Iron Crown must be in Widewater, somewhere in the deeps of the sea. The masculine principle, the feminine principle, and the circle that binds. Three elements that together might change a world, or all worlds … But Osskva the mage had told him it needed a sacrifice – it needed blood. Blood had begun it, Romandos’ blood, and blood must finish it – the blood of his descendant. It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people … who had said that? Suddenly Nathan was sure the Grandir was ready for that, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Not out of love perhaps – it was hard to imagine him loving his people, he seemed above such sentiment – but from a supreme sense of duty, from pride, from his absolute commitment to his heritage and his world. And for Halmé, whom he loved indeed, Halmé the Beautiful for whom he had said that world was made …

There must be another way, Nathan thought, knowing the thought was futile. He had no power to change things. He was caught up in this like a snowflake in a storm, a tiny component in a huge machine, and all he could do was whatever he had to do. Only this, and nothing more. (Why did he keep thinking of that poem, and Annie’s face when he talked of the Grandir, so pale and still?) He had to find the crown.

And then he remembered Keerye, speaking of the Goddess, and how she had an iron crown which never rusted, kept in a cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef.

How could he have failed to pick up the clue? But he had been inside Ezroc’s head, sharing his thoughts and feelings, no longer a boy but an albatross riding on the wind. Oh to fly again …

His mind turned to dragons – it would be dragons – great fire-breathing monsters, far more deadly than Urdemons or giant lizards. But no dragon could breathe fire under water. He visualised a vast serpentine creature, winged and clawed and fanged, rising in a storm of bubbles, the sea boiling against its flanks. Its mouth opened on a gullet of flame, its red-hot tongue crackled like a lava-flow in the alien element … The ocean erupted into steam as the dragon ascended, dripping wings driving it into the sky …

Somehow, in the midst of such visions, he fell asleep.

And now he was flying again, not the dragon but the bird. Soaring on the high air into a deep blue night. Southward and eastward there was a faint pallor along the horizon; light leaked into the sky. The sun’s disc lifted above the rim of the globe and the light washed over the ocean, turning the waves to glitter. Ahead, Nathan saw a broken shoreline of crags and peaks and towers, rough-facetted, glimmering here and there with a glimpse of crystal. The Ice Cliffs. As he drew nearer he made out a vast colony of seabirds stretching along the escarpment: gannets, puffins, auks, gulls, terns – the squawking of their competing chatter was like the din of a whole city. On the highest part of the ridge there was a group of albatrosses, twenty or thirty pairs, far bigger than the other birds – bigger than the albatrosses Nathan had seen on nature films – some, at a guess, nearly as tall as he was, or would have been if he had been solid. Ezroc, he realised, had grown too: his wingspan seemed to reach halfway across the world. He gazed down at the mating pairs – Nathan remembered that albatrosses mate for life – and he felt the sorrow in Ezroc’s heart because he was alone, he had chosen loneliness to pursue his long voyages in search of Keerye who was dead and the islands that were no more.

In Ezroc’s mind he heard a memory re-playing, the voice of an older bird, relative or mentor: ‘The islands are lost, young stormrider, if they ever existed. You have journeyed many miles further than your namesake – you have followed the great currents to the south – merfolk have hunted you, boiling spouts have singed your feathers, seamonsters have chased your shadow across the waves. You know the truth. The seas are empty. Stay here; settle down with your own kind. Until the Ice Cliffs melt, the northfolk will have a place to be.’

And Ezroc’s reply: ‘It is not enough.’ The words of a maverick, stubborn beyond reason, holding onto a vision no one else could see.

He passed over the colony, ignoring the birds that raised their heads to watch him, speeding along the floating shoreline. Below, Nathan glimpsed other creatures, refugees from the lost lands of long ago, surviving on the Great Ice. A troop of penguins waddling along a promontory, plopping into the sea – clumsy and comic on the ice, arrow-smooth in the water. A huddle of sealions and trueseals, nursing their newborn pups. A great snowbear waiting at a borehole till its dinner came up for air. And an enormous walrus, tusked and bristled, heaving itself up onto a floe, who raised a flipper in greeting.

Ezroc wheeled and swooped down to land on the ice beside him.

‘Greetings, Burgoss. May your moustache never grow less! I’ve been away a while – what is the word along the Ice Cliffs?’

‘Greetings, young ‘un,’ the walrus grunted. ‘What makes you think I have time for the jabber of chicks and pups? I don’t listen to children’s gossip, and when they’re grown their talk is all of food and sex. Enough to deafen you with boredom. If that’s the word you seek, ask elsewhere.’

‘You are the oldest and wisest creature in all the seas,’ Ezroc said, flattering shamelessly. ‘Except for the whales. If there is any news worth knowing, you will know it.’

‘Not so much of the oldest.’ The walrus shook himself, feigning displeasure. ‘You have a beak on you, young Ezroc, you always did. I’d say you were getting too big for your wings, if they weren’t grown so wide I can barely see from tip to tip. What’ve you been eating, down in the south? Hammerhead?’

‘Too small,’ Ezroc said airily. ‘I feast only on sea monsters.’

‘All boast and no bulwarks,’ the walrus retorted. ‘Hrrmph! Well, I can guess the kind of news you need to hear, and it ain’t good. A piece broke off the Great Ice away westward, maybe five longspans across. Perhaps Nefanu is bringing the sun north to melt us, though the days don’t seem any longer to me. But I’m not as young as I was, and could be I’m out of my reckoning.’

‘She won’t bring the sun,’ Ezroc said. ‘I don’t think she has that power. Anyway, she doesn’t need to. All she has to do is divert one of the warmer currents. If she hasn’t tried that yet, it’s only because she hasn’t thought of it.’

‘Those old gods are as dumb as dugongs,’ Burgoss remarked. ‘How else did her queenship manage to wipe out the rest of them? Anyhow, ice breaks in the spring. It may not mean much. You’ve got other things to worry about. The Spotted One says he saw merfolk scouting below the Cliffs last moondark. Says they took a snowbear, though there’s no proof. The bears don’t lair together; they wouldn’t know if one’s gone missing.’

‘The Spotted One …’ The albatross might have frowned, if birds could frown. Nathan could sense his unease.

‘The others don’t listen to him,’ the walrus said. ‘Since old Shifka died they’ve grown complacent – complacent and careless. Apathy! Huh! The biggest killer of all time. Once that sets in, you’re half way to extinction. I’m old – though not as old as you seem to think – but I can still smell trouble coming. If the Great Ice were to break up – if the merfolk mounted a serious attack—’

‘Do you believe him?’ Ezroc interjected.

‘Possibly. He’s surly and solitary, but that don’t make him a liar. Been an outcast since he was a pup, when they taunted him for his spots. Seal-brats can be cruel – cruel and stupid – just like any other young ’uns. He wasn’t quick with words so as he got older he fought – fought tough and fought dirty – teeth, flippers, fists, he didn’t care what shape he used as long as he won, and the odds were always against him. Can’t blame him for that.’

‘He killed someone,’ Ezroc said.

The walrus shrugged, a great rippling shrug that flowed right down his massive body. ‘It happens. Don’t think he set out to kill – he always wanted the others to feel their bruises, or so I guess – but the brat got his head smashed on the ice, and that did for him. Skull too thin or something.’

‘Brat?’ Ezroc was appalled. ‘He killed a pup?’

‘Nah. Just some half grown flipperkin shooting his mouth off. They’re all brats to me. Point is, after that they avoided him, and he – well, he’d have made himself an outcast, even if they didn’t. It suited his mood. I thought you’d know the story.’

‘I was only a chick,’ Ezroc said. ‘Keerye never went into details. He used to talk to Nokosha sometimes – he wasn’t like the rest of them.’

‘Young Spots was the only one he couldn’t best in a fight,’ Burgoss said. ‘Strongest selkie on the Cliffs. I daresay Keerye respected that.’

‘Nokosha still blames me for his death, I think,’ Ezroc said. ‘I’ve never had anything from him but foul looks.’

‘When you’ve only got one friend, you’d want someone to blame for losing him,’ the walrus said philosophically. ‘If you want to ask Nokosha about the merfolk, you’ll have to get past that.’

‘How?’ Ezroc asked.

‘Up to you.’

‘Where do I find him?’

‘No idea. Wherever the others aren’t. Those big wings of yours must be good for something. Use ’em.’

The albatross made a sound which Nathan knew for laughter – bird’s laughter, harsh as a cry. ‘Thanks, Burgoss,’ he said. ‘I owe you. You are the wisest – and the fattest – creature in the sea, except for the whales—’

‘Hrrmph! Be off with you, or you’ll find I’m not the slowest, whatever you may have heard.’

The albatross veered away, taking off in a few strong wing-beats, launching himself into a long glide out over the water. As he circled higher Nathan felt his doubts, the growing weight of fears still only half formed and founded on uncertainty. If he had learnt one thing in all his travels it was that the hatred of the Goddess was unrelenting and her hunger insatiable. Once, she had hated the islands and all those who lived there, man, beast or bird, drowning them in her tempests, driving out rival gods. Now, she had turned her enmity on the last vestiges of the People of the Air – the lungbreathers whom she saw as aliens, dwelling in her kingdom but not of it, corrupting the purity of the great ocean. And when we are gone, Ezroc thought, who will she have left to hate? The rocks that hold up her reefs? The whales and dolphins who are not true fish – the crabs and sea-scorpions because they have legs – any creature who ever tried to crawl or wriggle into the sun, when there was still something to crawl on?

But as long as the Great Ice endured, the northfolk could withstand her. If they were careful – if they were watchful – if the merfolk stayed in the warm seas of the south …

He flew over a blue-green inlet, walled with ice, where a group of selkies were leaping and diving; Nathan could see them changing shape as they plunged beneath the surface, shedding their half-human form for the seal-fell native to the element. He knew from his bond with Ezroc that selkies could transform themselves at will, though they rarely used their legs. A couple of them waved to the albatross, but although he dipped his head in acknowledgement he did not stop. A little further on he came to a place where a great berg had broken away from the Cliffs and was rocking gently on the swell. There was a figure on the lowest part of the berg, lying on its stomach, gazing into the depths below. Fishing, maybe. As Ezroc drew nearer Nathan saw it was a selkie, but unlike the others, his tail-fur dappled with curious markings, black spots within grey, his thick hair, also somehow dappled, bristling like the mane on a bull-seal. The bird lost height, and Nathan made out the ridged vertebrae along the selkie’s back, and the bunched muscles in arm and shoulder. There was even a faint mottling under his skin, the ghost-markings of his dual self.

Ezroc circled the berg, calling out: ‘Nokosha!’, but the selkie never raised his head.

The albatross landed on the water a little way off, sculling with his webbed feet to hold himself against the currents.

‘Nokosha!’ he repeated. ‘Can I talk to you?’

Still no response. What Nathan could see of the face, with its downswept brows and brooding mouth, seemed to be shaped for scowl. The shadow-spots spread across cheekbone and temple, making him look alien even among his own kind.

‘I hear you saw merfolk,’ Ezroc persisted. ‘A raiding party, or – or scouts checking out the terrain. If that’s true, we have to do something.’

‘What will you do?’ For a swift moment, Nokosha lifted his gaze. His eyes, too, were different, not velvet-dark like other selkies but pale and cold as ice. ‘Fly off round the world to gather tales from the smallfish of the reefs? Ask the sharks to tell us what their masters are doing? That will be a big help.’

‘Were these sharkriders?’ Ezroc said, ignoring Nokosha’s scorn.

‘What if they were? No one listens to what they don’t want to hear. It’s easier to call me a liar than to face the truth. Soon or late, the fish-folk will come in numbers, and for war. The ice won’t protect us. We’re lazy and unprepared: we’ll die like mackerel in a dolphin-hunt.’

‘Did they really take a snowbear?’ Ezroc said, keeping to the point. After all, he was getting information – of a kind.

‘They dived under the ice and came up through the borehole to seize him. They had spears tipped with blood coral, and stone knives.’ The selkie also carried a knife, a short stabbing blade which he fingered as they spoke, jabbing it into the ice. ‘No doubt their leader now wears its skin. Impractical under water, but he was that type. More ego than sense.’

‘Could you describe him? There are twelve merkings. If we knew which one he served—’

‘You could do what? Fly off on a mission of complaint?’

‘I have friends,’ Ezroc said, ‘even among the merfolk. They are not all her creatures. I might be able to find out more.’

‘Friends!’ Nokosha mocked, and there was real hatred under the scorn: his voice shook with it. ‘Friends among the coldkin – the fish-eyed, the fish-hearted! Friends among the killers of the south! You’re a traitor to your race, to all the People of the Ice. You abandoned Keerye – you led him to the killing seas, and left him there to die. Come a little closer, birdling, and I will have you by the throat, and this will be your last flight.’

There was no doubt he meant it. The albatross was bigger, far bigger, but the selkie was all knotted muscle and knotted rage. If he got his hands around Ezroc’s neck, there would be no more to be said.

The bird kept his distance, paddling his feet in the water.

‘I didn’t abandon Keerye,’ he said. ‘He fell asleep on a Floater – I slept too, but on the sea. We didn’t know what it was. He thought … we’d found an island. When I awoke, he was gone.’ And suddenly there was a memory in his head, a memory that didn’t belong. A pale figure struggling against a web of tentacles, and a dozen mouths opening to feast … His thought reeled from the horror of it.

‘I would never have abandoned him,’ he went on, struggling to suppress the unwanted vision. ‘He was my best friend.’

‘Keerye was everyone’s best friend.’ This time, Nokosha seemed to be mocking himself. ‘He was handsome and careless and beloved – the handsome and careless always are. You lost him. It’s easy to plead innocence, when there are no witnesses to give you the lie.’

I’m a witness, Nathan thought. A witness to the truth …

‘I have a witness,’ Ezroc said, and then flinched from his own assertion, the sudden certainty in his mind.

‘Who?’ Nokosha caught his bewilderment, staring at him with those ice-bright eyes.

‘I … don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’ Ezroc shook his feathers, trying to pull his thoughts together. ‘Your hate … doesn’t matter. The important thing is to find out what the merfolk are doing. If you could remember more about the ones you saw …’

‘I remember everything.’ Nokosha was studying him, distracted by his lapse into strangeness.

‘They were sharkriders?’ Ezroc resumed.

‘Yes. A dozen or so on blue sharks, but their leader rode a Great White.’

‘Great Whites cannot be ridden,’ Ezroc said.

‘Do you doubt me? It was a Great White. I saw the fragments of its last meal still caught between its teeth. He rode it with a bit that was metal, not bone, and it bucked beneath him once or twice like a spring wave.’

‘How come they didn’t see you? You must have followed them for a while, and close.’

‘You should know better than to ask. I watched them from a berg – like this – and when I entered the water I used the drifting ice to screen my movements. They were wary of open attack but they weren’t expecting to be stalked; they didn’t look for me. I can dive without a ripple, or haven’t you heard? If I came after you in earnest, you wouldn’t know until it was too late.’

Ezroc ignored the renewed threat. ‘Was there anything else about the leader?’ he asked. ‘Insignia of any kind – something like that?’

‘A tattoo on his chest. They do it with squid ink and the poison of the spiny tryphid. They say the pain of it will keep a strong warrior in torment for a week. I’ve never felt the need to prove my strength in such a way.’

‘I’ve heard of the process,’ Ezroc said. ‘Did you get a chance to see what it was?’

‘A sea dragon.’

‘Rhadamu’s emblem,’ Ezroc responded, and fell into silence, thinking his own thoughts.

The selkie dived so swiftly Nathan was barely aware he had moved before the outstretched hands came rushing upward, grasping at Ezroc’s legs. Albatrosses are slow in takeoff but his long journeys had developed abnormal flight muscles, and close encounters with danger had accelerated his reflexes. His beak stabbed down – he rose in a flurry of wings, scudding across the water – the selkie sank back, bleeding red in the foam. Then the bird was airborne, already twenty yards away, veering into a turn to see Nokosha shaking the wet hair from his eyes, watching after him, apparently oblivious to his injured hand.

‘You are vicious, albatross,’ he called out. ‘I will remember it.’

Presently, he climbed back onto the berg and resumed his scrutiny of the depths, though Ezroc no longer thought he was looking for fish.

The brief northern daylight was already fading as the sun wrapped itself in a mantle of flame and slid back into the sea. The albatross headed for an eyrie on the top of a lonely crag and landed there, tucking his head beneath a folded wing. Only when Ezroc slept did Nathan, too, slip into unconsciousness, back to the slumberlands of his own world.

Hazel found Login awaiting her in the woods, close to the point where the path ran out.

‘Follow me,’ he said.

Hoover, some way behind, gave an admonitory bark, but Hazel did not respond. The dog trotted after her as she descended into the valley, his intelligent eyes anxious under the sprouting whiskers of his eyebrows. If he had been human, he might have heaved a sigh; being canine, he merely panted.

Hazel picked her way downhill in Login’s wake, moving slowly now she had left the path, having to concentrate on every step. Perhaps because the dwarf had chosen his route well they made little noise: dead leaves swished about her feet, and every so often she slithered on a hidden patch of mud, but although she had to duck under low branches and step over knobbled roots there was no twig-crackle at her passage, no tearing of cloth on briar. Frequently, she paused to look back, checking the way she would have to run, making sure the ascent was straightforward: she must not get lost before she found the path again, and a stumble could be fatal. She told herself she was being brave – brave and not foolhardy – but her heart shook within her, and her stomach, always the main part of the body to react to fear, seemed to have become one large collywobble. The recollection of DCI Pobjoy staggering into Thornyhill Manor, his pale face paler than ever and his eyes haunted, gave her courage or at least encouragement. He was only a stupid policeman who didn’t believe in ghosts; she knew better.

And then Nambrok stopped her with an outstretched hand, raised a finger to his lips. Hazel nodded and followed his example as he dropped into a crouch, peering down through a fork in the tree-roots. She had been here before, she knew, but that had been in a summer storm, a freak of the weather or the backlash of old spells long gone rotten. The place looked different now, still but not peaceful, as if the very silence of the wood was tense with waiting. She could see the hole, ragged-rimmed with torn earth and hanging growths, and the dark beyond that suggested a hollow space, but nothing more. There was no spooklight to aid her vision, no eldritch glow in the blackness, and she lacked the weresight of the dwarf. This is it, she told herself, this is the chapel; yet all she could see was the dark.

But she could hear. The sound was so faint at first she was barely aware of it, distant as the rumour of traffic on a road more than a mile away, insidious as the mutter of someone else’s personal stereo. It was a sound with no shape, no definition; she knew it must come from the dark below but it seemed to be all round her, in the air, in the wood, inside her head. Whispering. There were no words, or none that she could hear, though Bartlemy had told her once that the gnomons whispered in the spelltongue of all the worlds, echoing the enchantments that bound them. But now the magic was fraying and their bonds had loosened, and their whispers had degenerated to a thread of noise, a menace without mind or purpose. Hazel listened, and felt her little store of courage draining away. The collywobble in her stomach crept down her legs. She knew she had to do something before terror immobilised her, and she straightened up, stepping backwards from the hole, checking out her escape route one last time.

‘What about you?’ she mouthed to the dwarf.

‘I rub the herb on me,’ he said. ‘The herb from the goodman’s garden. They’ll leave me be.’ His own odour was so strong, Hazel hadn’t even noticed the smell of the silphium.

I wish I’d done that, she thought, but Bartlemy had said they might not come after her, if she used any deterrent.

She called out: ‘Hoy!’ in the direction of the hole, feeling stupid and terrified all at once. It wasn’t the most dramatic summons, but it was all she could think of. ‘Hoy!’

Then she ran.

‘Don’t look back!’ Bartlemy had warned her. Looking back slows you down; you could miss your footing, miss your way. She didn’t look back. The whispering grew, becoming a stream of Fear that poured out of the hole behind her and came skimming over the ground, flowing uphill like a river in reverse. She leaped the tree-roots, snapped through branches. She needed no incentive to run, the Fear was on her heels. An invisible pursuit that tore through the wood like a swarm. Leaves she hadn’t disturbed whirled far in her wake.

She was gasping when she issued from the valley but she had tried harder at sport that year, taking up karate (a Year Eleven option), and so far neither her legs nor her lungs had let her down. And now she was on the path, following the track she had worked out with Bartlemy, and the ground was level, and running easier. But the hunt was catching up. She could feel their nearness, hear the dreadful whispering that, if she faltered or fell, would be on her in seconds, pouring into her thought, blanking her mind forever. Somewhere close by Hoover howled, a skin-crawling, hackle-raising sound, unfamiliar as a wolf on your hearthrug.

Hazel careered left, into a thicket of winter briars. Her knees buckled – she pitched forward and fell –

The iron grille dropped down behind her.

The gnomons recoiled, spinning the dead leaves into a maelstrom. A net of twisted wires came out of the sky, encasing them in a fragile cage; but its strength did not matter – it was iron, and it held them. There were wires even beneath the leaf-mould, embedded in the ground. The smell of silphium, coating the metal, impacted on their hypersenses, stinging them into a frenzy. Bartlemy came out of the bushes to see the very air boiling as if with a miniature sandstorm: earth-crumbs, leaf-fragments, twig-fragments whirled into a living knot of fury. The whispering had ceased; in this world, their pain was voiceless. He stood for a moment, his bland face more expressionless than usual, then he went to help Hazel to her feet. She was trembling with reaction and the aftermath of effort. Hoover came loping through the briars to his master’s side; some sort of wordless communication passed between dog and man.

Bartlemy said: ‘I see.’

Hazel gazed in horror at the tumult within the mesh. ‘Will they stay there?’ she demanded.

‘They must. Iron emanates a magnetic field that contains them; there is insufficient space for them to pass between the wires. And the smell of silphium torments them. I made the cage too small: they will be in agony as long as I keep them there.’

Hazel said: ‘Are you sorry for them?’

‘They cannot help what they are,’ Bartlemy responded. ‘Nature – or werenature – made them, who knows for what purpose. Like the wasp who lays its eggs inside a living grub, or the mantis who eats its mate’s head during intercourse. They have no intelligence to be held responsible for the suffering they inflict. Responsibility is for us. We know what we do.’

‘Will they die?’ Hazel asked in a lower voice.

‘I don’t know,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I’ve never captured such creatures before.’

The sandstorm showed no sign of abating.

‘Let’s go home,’ Bartlemy went on. ‘You need food.’

‘Yes, please.’

‘And then you can tell me why you disobeyed my orders, and went into the Darkwood.’

The following morning Bartlemy went to check on the cage. He had used his influence to steer dogwalkers – and their dogs – away from the place, and he saw immediately that it had not been disturbed. But the occupants were gone. He walked long and far that day, watching and listening, but there was no feel of them anywhere in the wood.

At last he came to the chapel on the slopes of the valley, though he had never found it before. The dwarf was there waiting.

‘They’re gone,’ he said. ‘Would ye be wanting to look inside? I’m thinking you’re a mickle too broad to be crawling into ratholes.’

‘And I’m thinking,’ Bartlemy said, ‘you’re a mickle too bold, leading a young girl into danger. I’d permitted her to take a little risk; I hadn’t intended it to be a big one. Or was that your idea of help?’

‘I didna suggest it,’ Login said. ‘She was the one who were so set on it. I warned her you wouldna be any too keen, but she—’

‘Warnings like that seldom deter teenagers,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Between Josevius and me, you’ve spent too much time with very old men. The young are more reckless, and more – perishable. Rose-white youth, passionate, pale.’

‘That maidy o’ yourn,’ Login said, ‘isn’t the sort I’d be comparing to roses, white or red. Too many thorns.’

‘It depends on the rose,’ Bartlemy said.

Nathan spent Saturday with his friend George Fawn, playing games on his PS2 (George’s brother David, had Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas), talking about music and television and school, and hearing how Jason Wicks, the village tough guy, had stolen his cousin’s motorbike to go joy-riding over the fields, been charged by Farmer Dawson’s bull, and fallen off into a bog.

‘There aren’t any bogs,’ Nathan quibbled.

‘Well, it was like a bog,’ George said. ‘A big patch of mud. Very muddy mud. A bog sounds better, though.’

‘Mm. I bet he got filthy.’

‘He looked like the swamp-monster. It was wicked. Mike Rayburn saw him, he said he couldn’t stop laughing. Libby was there – Jace fancies her, so he couldn’t do anything, and he was, like, seriously embarrassed. It was the best thing ever.’

‘I wish I’d been there,’ Nathan said.

‘You must be as tall as him now,’ George remarked. ‘Maybe taller.’

Nathan grinned. ‘You make me sound like a freak.’

‘No way. Girls like tall.’ George was on the short side. ‘I bet you could have lots of girls.’

‘Not much chance of that at Ffylde.’

‘No, but – here. There’s Hazel – she likes you. She’s not the prettiest girl in town, exactly – her tits are too small, for one thing – but she’s a girl, isn’t she? And you like her …’

‘Hazel is Hazel,’ Nathan said sharply. ‘She’s my best friend – only that – and don’t you ever, ever sneer at her again.’

‘I wasn’t sn—’

‘EVER!’

George subsided, mumbling an apology, and they changed the subject for the rest of the afternoon.

That night, Nathan was back in the dream. Not the same dream – the wonder of flying with the albatross, sharing his feelings and his fears – but a dream of the dark. He was falling through a hole in the world – through the faint lights and faraway stars of another universe – falling into a narrowing chimney of blackness, far beyond the reach of sun or supernova. He remembered the prison pits of Arkatron where he had once met Kwanji Ley – but there was light there, the soft unchanging light of Deep Confinement. And then he struck the bottom, thrown into his own body with a jarring sensation like a blow, and he saw the darkness was less dark, and there was a door in front of him which he had seen before. A door marked Danger.

It wasn’t locked – it never had been – though surely such a door should have been secured with secret codes, retinal scans, digital palm-print readers. Nathan pushed it ajar – cautiously, he was always cautious in that place – and slipped through. Inside, there was a strange mixture of low lighting and high technology. There were the benches stacked with scientific paraphernalia, with snarls of tubing like glass intestines, and pulsating metallic sacks, and cylinders glowing eerily at top or base, and jars where deformed things floated in preserving fluid, hopefully dead, and hunks of ominous machinery, glistening in the dimness.

And let into the walls were the cages, the cages that made Nathan both frightened and sad, mostly empty, but not all. In one a snake reared up, striking at the glass; globules of pale mauve venom spattered the surface and ran down in snail-tracks which smoked wispily. In another, there were what appeared to be giant locusts, until Nathan looked more closely and saw they had human faces and forelimbs ending in tiny hands. And in a third there was the familiar cat, stiff and dead with its paws in the air, and yet, from a different angle, somehow alive, tail twitching, watching Nathan through slitted eyes.

It was the Grandir’s laboratory, deep underground, the laboratory where he had bred the gnomons to protect the Grail, and imprisoned a primitive elemental, potent and savage, in the Traitor’s Sword. And there he was, leaning over a separate cage at the far end, accompanied by a man wearing a purple cowl. Nathan recognised the cowl if not the man; it might have been a symbol of office.

He thought: Am I in the past – the past of Eos? Is the Grandir doing something to the Iron Crown – magicking some awful spirit into it, like he did with the Sword?

There was a noise in the background which hadn’t been there before, a sort of faint cacophony, remote but persistent, as if a group of people with acute laryngitis were screaming in agony. It seemed to Nathan to be a long way off yet at the same time inside his head. He didn’t like it at all – it was too familiar – but he ducked under a bench and crept nearer, bent double, trying to hear what the two men were saying. He might have shown himself to the Grandir but not in front of Purple Cowl; instinct told him that would be a mistake.

‘It must be a smell,’ the Grandir said. ‘Nothing else would cause so much pain. Iron repels but does not torture them.’

‘What will you do?’ asked the other. ‘They should be killed. Some things are too deadly to be allowed to live.’

‘They are what they are,’ said the Grandir, sounding, had Nathan but known it, a little like Bartlemy. ‘They have served their purpose. I will call them back.’

‘But can you—’

‘They are bound to my edict, to my very thought. I can call them, even across the worlds. They ozmose.’

He straightened, raising his head, speaking a few words in the universal language of magic – a language Nathan could recognise but not understand. Purple Cowl drew back, perhaps afraid of fallout, but the words, though commanding, were quiet, creating scarcely a ripple in the atmosphere. Nathan thought the summons was as insistent as a tug on a noose, as compelling as hypnosis, but almost gentle, almost kind. As if the Grandir were saying: ‘Come home. Come home to me.’

And they came. There was no lightning flash, no crackling rent in the dimensions. They were simply there