Читать книгу The Traitor’s Sword: The Sangreal Trilogy Two - Jan Siegel - Страница 6

Bartlemy Goodman was home the night the burglars came. He usually was at home. For a man who had seen so much, and done so much, he now led a very tranquil life, or so it appeared, visiting the village of Eade mainly to see Annie Ward, who was widely thought to be his niece, and rarely venturing beyond Crowford. He was known to own the bookshop where Annie and her son lodged, and believed to be a collector, though no one was quite sure of what. The villagers accepted his unspecified eccentricities, and respected him for no particular reason, except that he appeared worthy of respect. It was a part of his Gift that he could pass almost unremarked in the local community, giving rise to no gossip, awakening no curiosity, though he had lived at Thornyhill, the old house out in the woods, since the original Thorns had sold up and all but died out generations before. Without really thinking about it, people assumed that the house had been bought by Bartlemy’s grandfather, or some other elderly relative, and had passed on from Goodman to Goodman until it reached the present incumbent. They never wondered why each successive owner should look the same, or remain apparently the same age, around sixty; indeed, had anyone been asked, they would have sworn to little differences between the Bartlemys, to periods of absence following the death of one when another must have been growing up somewhere abroad. Nor did they ever wonder about the dog.

Every Goodman had had a dog, a large shaggy creature of mixed parentage and universal goodwill, with bright, intelligent eyes under whiskery eyebrows, and a lolling tongue. This one was called Hoover, because he devoured crumbs, and indeed anything else that came his way. The most wonderful cooking smells in the world would foregather in Bartlemy’s kitchen, and the generosity of the leftovers made it canine heaven. Hoover had no reputation for savagery, welcoming every visitor, even the postman, with amiable enthusiasm, yet perhaps because of him the house had never been burgled before, except for the strange incident the previous year, and in that case the stolen object (which had belonged to someone else) had eventually been returned by Bartlemy himself, though no one knew how he retrieved it. The house was isolated, unprotected by alarms or security, and with the vague rumours that Bartlemy ‘collected’ it should have been an obvious target, yet until that night in late April the criminal fraternity had left it alone.

The burglars were two youths, as the newspapers would have called them, an Asian boy from Crowford who was only seventeen, and his sixteen-year-old sidekick, who was big and ginger-haired and not very bright. Getting in was easy: they broke a window, which was stupid, because the back door wasn’t locked, and were just checking out the sitting room when the dog pounced. He didn’t bark: it would’ve meant wasting time. Bartlemy came downstairs, wrapped in an enormous dark-blue dressing-gown with stars on it, to find the ginger-haired sidekick shivering in a corner while the other boy lay on his back with Hoover standing over him. He wasn’t growling – he never growled – but the boy could see, behind the panting tongue and doggy grin, two rows of large yellow teeth which wouldn’t have looked out-of-place on a wolf. There was a knife lying on the rug a little way away. Bartlemy picked it up by the blade. Afterwards, the boy puzzled over how the house owner had known to come down, when neither the intruders nor the dog had made much noise.

‘This is – this is assault,’ the youth stammered, keeping his voice to a whisper. ‘I can sue.’

‘I haven’t assaulted you,’ Bartlemy pointed out in his placid way.

‘The dog –’

‘He hasn’t assaulted you either.’ Yet, said the ensuing pause.

‘We didn’t mean no harm,’ offered Ginger, between sullenness and fright.

‘I’m sure you didn’t. I’ll telephone the police, and then you can sit down with me, and have a biscuit, and while we wait you can tell me what you did mean.’

The call was made, and somehow the boys didn’t argue, perching nervously on the edge of Bartlemy’s sofa and nibbling home-made biscuits while Hoover stood by, watching them in a proprietary manner. Ginger was known for beating up older boys, and the little Asian made up in aggression what he lacked in size, but they sat as quiet as if they were at a vicarage tea-party, and God was waiting with a thunderbolt for one of them to burp.

‘Someone sent you here, didn’t they?’ said Bartlemy. ‘What were you looking for?’

Mouths opened and shut, and Ginger choked on a biscuit crumb, but this time it was Ram who looked most afraid.

‘No one sent us,’ he said at last.

‘It was your own idea?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. I’m the one with the ideas.’

‘Do you think it was a good idea?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure no one sent you?’ Bartlemy persisted.

Ram turned pale, and his mouth closed tight, and he looked almost relieved when the police arrived. He knew just how not to talk to the police. He’d sat through many interrogations, he was still underage, and insofar as it concerned himself he knew the law as well as any solicitor. But this man with his unruffled manner, and his alarming dog, and his calm blue gaze that seemed to see straight into your mind – this was something far more demoralizing than any bullying copper. Ram had a horrible feeling that given time – and a few more biscuits – he would have been telling Bartlemy things even his mother didn’t know. He was secretly thankful to settle for the more familiar option.

Watching them go with a sigh, Bartlemy surmised that if they had been sent, Ginger, at least, knew nothing of it. He returned to bed, and in the half-hour before sleep considered possible lines of inquiry. A few days later, he telephoned an acquaintance in the CID.

Some months had passed since their last meeting, and Inspector Pobjoy had become Chief Inspector, helped by his recent arrest of a serial killer when most of his colleagues hadn’t believed any murders had actually taken place. Bartlemy had been involved in that affair, which had been vaguely connected to the former theft at Thornyhill, and Pobjoy still darkly suspected that he knew many facts which had never emerged. There had been too many loopholes in the case, too many loose ends. Not that Bartlemy had ever been a suspect, though perhaps he should have been, caught as he was in the middle of things. However, Pobjoy was curiously glad to hear from him, and intrigued at the news of the attempted burglary, and he agreed instantly to come to Thornyhill for a cup of tea and an informal chat.

‘You should lock your back door,’ he suggested when they met.

‘But if I did that,’ Bartlemy said, ‘people wouldn’t be able to get in.’ It was unanswerable. ‘Anyway, they broke a window. That’s the kind they were: crude, not very clever. The sort who would always break a window, if there was a window to break. I was rather surprised to find them so unsubtle. Kids like that usually give this place a miss. I would’ve expected any burglar who came here to be more … sophisticated.’

‘Apart from that business last summer,’ Pobjoy said – carefully, since he felt the subject required care – ‘I notice you haven’t really had any trouble here.’ He added: ‘I checked our records.’

‘Naturally,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I assumed you would. No, we haven’t had much trouble at Thornyhill. I prefer to avoid it, if I can.’ He didn’t say how, but Pobjoy, who was not a fanciful man, found himself wondering if the house had some intangible form of protection. Apart from the dog. He noted Bartlemy said ‘we’, perhaps including Hoover in the personal pronoun.

The canine hero of the recent burglary attempt was currently sitting with his chin in Pobjoy’s lap and the classic please-feed-the-starving expression on his face.

‘Which is why,’ Bartlemy was saying, ‘I was a little … disturbed by what happened. I can’t help feeling there must have been something – someone – behind it. On the surface, there is nothing to steal here but books, some old but unremarkable furniture, and my collection of herbs for cooking.’

‘The paintings?’ Pobjoy asked, glancing up at a landscape in oils which seemed to consist mostly of gloom and a framed drawing so crowded with detail it was almost impossible to distinguish what it portrayed.

‘Generally done by friends or acquaintances,’ Bartlemy said blandly. ‘That drawing, for instance, is unsigned. Richard wasn’t satisfied with it. Later, he went mad. People have sometimes been curious about my pictures, but their curiosity always seems to fade in the end.’

‘You said “on the surface”,’ Pobjoy resumed, his narrow eyes narrowing still further, dark slits in the lean pallor of his face.

‘I have a certain article concealed here,’ Bartlemy explained after a pause. ‘It was entrusted to me.’ He didn’t say I am telling you this in confidence. Pobjoy already knew that.

‘The article which was stolen last year,’ the inspector surmised. ‘The so-called Grimthorn Grail.’

‘Of course, it was never authenticated,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Technically, it’s valueless. But I am concerned. I have lived here a long time, and no one has ever broken in until now.’

‘Is it secure?’

Bartlemy smiled. ‘No burglar would ever find it, I assure you,’ he said. ‘No ordinary burglar.’

Pobjoy let that pass. ‘You think those boys were put up to it,’ he summarized, ‘by someone interested in the Grail.’

‘It’s a possibility I would like to check. You would know if there were any likely collectors in the market for such items.’

‘Those kind of gentlemen don’t usually have a record,’ Pobjoy said with a trace of bitterness. ‘Too rich, too influential. But – yes, I should know. I might know. I’ll ask around.’

‘Thank you.’ He poured more tea. ‘By the way, how is our murderer?’

‘What? Oh – I don’t know.’ Pobjoy looked startled. For him, once a villain was convicted and imprisoned, that should be the end of the matter. ‘We never found any trace of his accomplice – the woman who masqueraded as his wife.’

‘I suspect,’ Bartlemy said, ‘she wasn’t the kind of person who would allow herself to be traced.’ He was remembering a malignant water-spirit who had poured herself into the shape of a dead actress – a spirit now returned to the element from whence she came.

Pobjoy, who hated loose ends and didn’t believe in phantoms, fretted at the recollection. ‘Do you think she could be involved in this latest affair?’

‘Hmm … I doubt it. Still, it is an idea.’

As he drank his tea, Pobjoy seemed to become abstracted. Once, he asked: ‘How is … Mrs Ward?’, hesitating over the inquiry as if it embarrassed him.

‘She’s very well,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You should go and see her.’

‘I don’t think … she wouldn’t want …’ Pobjoy’s excuses faltered and failed; he looked around for a change of subject, but didn’t find one.

‘It’s up to you,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Annie doesn’t bear grudges.’

At one time, Pobjoy had wanted to arrest Nathan.

The inspector retreated into silence and stayed there, until Bartlemy began to talk of something else.

Nathan and Hazel Bagot had been friends from infancy, closer than brother and sister; they used to tell each other everything, but now they were getting older they needed their own secrets. Nathan didn’t tell Hazel about the city and the princess (not yet, he said to himself, not till it becomes important), and Hazel didn’t tell Nathan about the boy she was keen on at school. When they got together at the weekends and during the holidays, they talked about music and television and lessons, and feuds or allegiances with their classmates, and how parents never understood what it was like to be a teenager, because it must have been different for them. Hazel’s bedroom had evolved into a kind of nest, lined with prints and posters, cushioned with discarded clothing, floored with crisp packets and CDs, where she and Nathan could curl up and listen to her latest musical discovery – usually something twangy and foreign-sounding and faintly bizarre – while she related how her father, who had left last year, wasn’t allowed to come home any more because he’d tried to hit her mother again, and how her mother had a new boyfriend who was rather old and a bit dull but nice.

‘They met through an ad in the paper,’ Hazel said. ‘Lots of people do that now. Has your mum tried it?’

‘I don’t think she’s too keen on dating,’ Nathan said. ‘There was you-know-who last year – I’m not sure if he ever asked her for a date, exactly, but – well, obviously it didn’t work out.’ He didn’t need to say any more. Hazel knew what he was alluding to.

‘She must’ve loved your dad a lot,’ she remarked. Nathan’s father had died in a car accident before he was born, or so he had always been told. ‘I mean, she’s not forty yet and really pretty, but she hasn’t had a proper boyfriend for years, has she?’

‘No.’

‘You wouldn’t mind though, would you?’ They’d been over this territory before, but Hazel thought it was worth checking.

‘Of course not – as long as he was kind, and loved her. What about your mum’s new man? Do you think it’s serious?’

‘’Spect so. He brings her flowers, and that’s always a sign, isn’t it? She says he’s dependable, which is what she wants, after dad. He’d never knock her about, or get drunk, or anything. He’s sort of boring, but that’s okay for her. She likes boring.’

‘Have you talked to him much?’ Nathan queried.

‘Not really. He asked me about my homework once, but when I showed it to him he couldn’t do it.’

‘If you haven’t talked to him,’ Nathan said, ‘you don’t really know if he’s boring or not.’

‘You’re being reasonable,’ Hazel said sharply. ‘You know I can’t stand it when you do that. He – he gives off boring, like a smell. B.O. Boring Odour. He walks round in a little cloud of boringness. Please, please don’t start being open-minded and tolerant about things. It’s revolting.’

‘When you shut your mind,’ Nathan retorted, ‘you shut yourself inside it. That’s silly. Besides, I just said, give him a chance. You think he’s nice, don’t you? So he might surprise you. He might be fun after all.’

‘Mum doesn’t need fun,’ Hazel said obstinately. ‘She’s my mum, for God’s sake. I like him, okay? He’ll do. I don’t have to be thrilled by him.’

‘Okay.’ Nathan grinned, a little mischievously. Sometimes, he enjoyed provoking her. She was always too quick and too careless in judging people, and slow to alter her opinions, and he liked being the only person who could ruffle her certainties.

When he had gone she took out the picture she never showed anyone, cut off from the end of a group shot taken at the school disco. It was a picture of a boy with a fair childish face, wavy hair worn rather long (hobbit hair, said his detractors), blue eyes crinkled against the flashlight. He smiled less than his classmates and Hazel believed he nursed a secret sorrow, though she could only speculate what it might be. (Of course, he could have been merely sullen.) He rarely spoke to her, hardly seemed to notice her, but somehow that only made him more fascinating. He didn’t have Boring Odour, she reflected – beneath their lack of communication she sensed the wells of his soul were fathoms deep. She stared at the photo for what felt like an age, racked with the pain of impossible longing, with anger at the hopelessness of it all, with shame because she would never be pretty enough to fascinate him in return. Her girlfriends all expected her to be in love with Nathan – Nathan with his dark alien beauty, his lithe athletic body, his indefinable uniqueness, charms she had known all her life and regarded with the indifference of familiarity – but she would only shrug at the suggestion, and smile, and hug the secret of her true affection to herself. She liked to be contrary, to keep Nathan as a friend – only a friend – and give her heart to someone nobody would suspect. Until the moment she dreamed of – the distant, elusive moment when they came together at last. The moment that would never happen …

Presently, she dived underneath the bed, groping behind the schoolbooks and sweaters and CD cases, and pulled out a carrier bag that chinked as it moved. The bag of things which had belonged to her great-grandmother, Effie Carlow, who was supposed to be a witch – the bag she had always meant to throw away, only somehow she hadn’t got around to it. Hazel hadn’t wanted to believe in witchcraft but she had seen too much of Effie not to know what she could do – at least, until she drowned. ‘You too have the power,’ the old woman had told her. ‘It’s in your blood.’ The Carlows were offshoots of the Thorn family on the wrong side of the blanket: there was said to be a strain of the Gift in their genes, dating back to Josevius Grimling-Thorn, a magister of the Dark Ages who had reputedly sold his soul to the Devil. When Effie spoke of such things Hazel was frightened – frightened and sceptical both at once. (Scepticism was her protection from the fear, though it didn’t work.) She had no intention of taking up her great-grandmother’s legacy, of dabbling in spells and charms and other stupidities. But now there was Jonas Tyler, who wouldn’t look at her, and the moment that would never happen, and maybe … maybe … among the sealed bottles with their handwritten labels was a love-philtre, or in Effie’s notebook there was an incantation, something to make her irresistible, just to him.

One by one she took the bottles out of the bag and peered at the faded writing, trying to make it out.

Back at the bookshop, Nathan sat down to supper with his mother. In the summer months she tended to favour salads, but the weather was still vacillating and he noted with satisfaction that it was cauliflower cheese. ‘You should have brought Hazel back,’ Annie said. ‘There’s plenty.’

‘I wasn’t sure,’ he explained. ‘Have you met her mum’s new boyfriend?’

‘Yes.’

‘She says he’s nice, but boring.’

‘He seems very nice, certainly,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t know about boring. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to him.’

There was a brief interlude of cauliflower cheese, then Nathan resumed: ‘Has Uncle Barty said any more about the burglary?’

‘Apparently he called the inspector. You remember: the one from last year.’

‘The one with the funny name?’ Nathan said, with his mouth full.

‘Pobjoy.’ There was a shade of constraint in her manner. She hadn’t completely forgiven the absent policeman for his suspicions.

But Nathan had forgotten them. ‘He was clever,’ he said judiciously, ‘even if he did get lots of things wrong. I bet he guessed those burglars were after the Grail.’

‘We don’t know that. Anyway, Rowena Thorn has it, not your uncle.’

‘She gave it to Uncle Barty to look after. The traditional hiding place is at Thornyhill: they once discussed it in front of me.’

‘How do you know she –’

‘I just know.’

Annie didn’t argue any more. Even after fourteen years there were times when she found her son’s alert intelligence disconcerting.

‘The thing is,’ he went on, ‘they were just ordinary burglars, right? Not like the dwarf last time.’

‘Mm.’

‘So they wouldn’t know about the Grail unless someone told them. It couldn’t have been any of us, so they must have found out by magic.’

‘They’re just kids,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t think they’re the sort to use magic.’

‘Of course not. It was somebody else, somebody who paid them to try and steal the cup. That’s logical.’ He added, with a creditable French accent: ‘A kind of eminence grise.’

Annie smiled. ‘You’re a bit young to be turning into a conspiracy theorist.’

‘Uncle Barty thinks so too,’ Nathan pointed out. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t have called the inspector.’

Annie’s smile faded into a sigh. ‘You wanted something to happen,’ she said, ‘and now it has. Can we just try not to let it grow into something worse? No more conspiracies, and spectres, and horrors. Not this time.’

‘You talk as if it was my fault,’ Nathan protested, referring to their adventures the previous year.

‘Just don’t wish for trouble,’ his mother said without much hope. And: ‘You will tell us, won’t you, if you start having dreams again? Those dreams, I mean.’

He looked at her very steadily, and she was disturbed to find his expression completely unreadable. ‘Yes, I will,’ he said at last, adding, to himself, fingers crossed: When I’m ready.

In her room that night Annie, too, took out a picture she never showed anyone. Daniel Ward, the man who was assumed to be Nathan’s father. She had assumed it herself, until the baby was born. The face in the photograph was pleasant rather than handsome, fair-skinned, brown-haired, unremarkable. The eyes were a little dreamy and a secret smile lurked at the corners of his mouth. Even Nathan had never seen the picture; it would give rise to too many questions. Because there was nothing in genetics to enable two white Caucasian parents to produce a child so exotically dark … Annie herself had never really known what happened. In the instant of Daniel’s death she had reached out for him, and a Gate had opened, and in death she had found love, returning to the world of life pregnant, and it wasn’t until she saw the baby that she realized he couldn’t be Daniel’s child. He was the child of destiny, Bartlemy said, bridging the void between worlds; but it did not comfort her. One day, she would have to tell Nathan the truth – one day very soon – but she was still finding reasons to put it off. Keep him safe – keep him trusting – he doesn’t need to know …

She put the picture away again, the looming dilemma clouding her mind, excluding any memories of distant happiness.

In his own bed Nathan lay with his eyes closed roaming the landscape inside his head, looking for the way through. It was there, he knew: he had found it once before, in an emergency, taking the plunge into another universe not at random but by his own will – though the act had frightened him and he hadn’t attempted it again. But now curiosity – which kills even Schroedinger’s cat – impelled him on, stronger than fear. He wanted to see the princess again, to explore the abandoned city and find out more about Urdemons, and why the people left, and the curse on the king …

He fell a long, long way, through a whirling dark pinpricked with stars. Then there was a jarring thud, and his mind was back in his body, but his body was somewhere else. Not the city on two hills with the Gothic house on top but another city, a huge metropolis with buildings like curving cliffs and a blood-red sunset reflected in endless windows and airborne skimmers and winged reptiles criss-crossing in the deadly light. He had landed on a rooftop platform in the shade of a wall, with a door close by. He scrambled to his feet, touched a panel – after a second the door opened and he slipped inside, escaping the lethal sun. He had forgotten the hazards of willing himself into another universe. Here was no misty realm of dreams and incorporeal being: he was almost solid, as visible as a ghost on a dark night, and this was Arkatron on Eos, the city at the end of the world, and there were too many dangers both known and unknown here to menace him. Worst of all, or so he thought when he looked down, he had ignored the first rule of dream-voyages – that you will find yourself wearing the clothes you slept in. It is difficult to feel brave and adventurous in pyjamas. (The previous year, he had got into the habit of going to bed in tracksuit trousers and a sweatshirt.) However, there was nothing he could do about it now.

He found himself on a gallery overlooking a hollow shaft, too deep for him to estimate how far it was to the bottom. Transparent egg-shaped lifts travelled up and down it, supported by alarmingly slender cables. He had assumed he would be in government headquarters, since that was where his dreams usually placed him, but nothing here looked familiar. A lift stopped close by, its door opening automatically even as a section of floor was extruded from the gallery to meet it. The lift was empty. Nathan took the hint, and stepped inside. A panel offered a wide choice of buttons: he pressed the top one. Being only semi-solid he had to press twice, hard. The door closed and the lift shot upwards.

He emerged onto another gallery, but this time he had to walk all the way round to find an exit, and when he pushed the door, it didn’t move. He was too substantial to walk through it. He touched a square on the adjacent wall, but instead of the door opening there was a noise like a few bars of music – the kind of music Hazel would have liked, incorporating weird stringed instruments and very little rhythm. ‘Of course,’ Nathan thought, light dawning, ‘it’s a doorbell. This is a private apartment …’ He wondered if he should run, but there was no point. His dream had brought him here, and he had no real option but to go on.

The door opened.

A man was standing there, a very tall man (all Eosians were taller than the people of our world) wearing a long white robe with a wide hood much looser than the usual kind. Under the hanging sleeves his hands were ungloved and his mask only covered three-quarters of his face; where it ended, just above mouth and jaw, his beard began, a thick white beard unlike anything Nathan had ever seen outside the pages of a book, forked and braided almost to his waist. He stared at Nathan in silence. Nathan stared back, forgetting how shocking his appearance must be to his host. No children had been born here for perhaps a thousand years, and though Nathan was big for his age, in this universe he was shorter than the indigents, slight of build and obviously youthful. His pyjamas were too small for him, stopping well above ankle and wrist – his body had a suggestion of transparency – his face was naked. On Eos, it was rare for anyone to show their face.

When at last the man spoke, his words were strangely apposite. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘What in the world are you? A holocast? – or not …’

As always, Nathan understood the language. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m not really in your world. At least, I am, but –’

‘But?’

‘I’m from another world,’ Nathan explained. His voice didn’t sound quite right – eerily hollow and distant.

‘So it’s started, has it?’ The man’s tone sharpened. ‘It’s been long in the coming. The walls between the worlds are breaking down. Still, I don’t quite understand … What would you want of me? Whoever you are.’

‘I don’t know,’ Nathan admitted. ‘My dream brought me here.’

‘Your – dream? You mean, you are dreaming this? You are dreaming me?’

‘Yes.’

‘How very interesting. This couldn’t be part of a spell – some leakage through a portal?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Nathan said. ‘If there’s a portal, it’s in my head.’

‘Hmm.’ There was a pause.

Then the man said: ‘I am forgetting my manners. Won’t you come in?’

Nathan followed him inside. The apartment consisted of a cluster of irregularly-shaped rooms connected with arched doorways and hung with diaphanous drapes. Furniture curved with the walls; a small fountain bubbled out of what looked like a crystal cakestand in the midst of the main room; the light was vague and sourceless. Stronger light was condensed into two or three pillars of clouded glass, and in the outer wall oval windows were covered with translucent screens, flushed red from the sunset beyond. ‘My name,’ said the man, seating himself, ‘is Osskva Rodolfin Petanax. But perhaps you knew that already?’

‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I don’t know anything very much. Is this part of the Grandir’s palace?’

‘If you mean the seat of government and residence of our ruler and his bridesister, then – no. We wouldn’t call it a palace. This is accommodation for his senior advisers and others in the higher echelons of authority. I am a first level practor – if you understand what that means?’

‘I … think so. A kind of magician?’

‘So you do know something of this world. You have been here before.’

Nathan didn’t comment. There was a niggle at the back of his mind, another of those elusive connections which he couldn’t quite place. Whenever he sought for it, it slipped away into his subconscious, tantalizingly out of reach. He knew he was here for a reason – there was always a reason behind his dream-journeys – but he had no idea what it might be, and he felt like an actor dropped into the middle of an unfamiliar play, while the audience waited in vain for him to remember his lines. His host continued to study him with absorption but curiously little surprise.

‘Have you met the Grandir?’ Osskva asked.

‘Not met, no. I’ve seen him.’

‘Whom have you met, apart from me?’

Halmé, Nathan thought, but he didn’t say so. She had concealed him from the Grandir; he could not betray her. And Raymor, her former bodyguard. And the dissident Kwanji Ley, who had stolen the Grail in this world, and paid with her life …

Now he remembered.

‘Take it,’ she had said, giving him the cup, when she was dying of the sundeath in a cave in the desert. ‘To … Osskva …’ Osskva!

‘Who is he?’

‘My father …’

Nathan sat down abruptly, holding his head in his hands. When he looked up, the practor was standing over him. ‘What troubles you?’ he said. ‘What do you know?’ His hood fell back, showing hair to match the beard, long and white. Then – perhaps to observe Nathan more closely – he took off his mask. His face, like that of all Eosians, was disproportionately long, at least to Nathan’s eye, a structure all lean curving bones with a skin the colour of tarnished brass, contrasting sharply with the hair and beard. Thick white brows swept low over his eyes, which shone with a glint of pure amethyst. The same shade as Kwanji’s, Nathan remembered. There might be many people on Eos called Osskva, but he knew his dream had not deceived him. This was the one he sought.

Only he hadn’t been seeking him. He’d been looking for someone quite different. But the dreams, he now realized, couldn’t be controlled – or not by him …

‘I once … met someone called Kwanji Ley,’ he said.

‘I see.’ The man’s face changed, his eyes hooding, as if he did see.

‘She asked me to find you.’

‘Kwanjira. My daughter. Kwanjira the rebel.’ Suddenly, he looked up. ‘Did you know she was my daughter?’

Nathan nodded, feeling uncomfortable, even though this was a dream – or at least, a dream of sorts – waiting for the question he knew would come.

‘Is she dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve known it, I suppose – I’ve felt it – for months past. We didn’t keep in touch, but this time there was a differentness to her silence. There is a point when you sense no word will come again. But … you are the word. A word that has come to me. Can you tell me how she died?’

‘She was in Deep Confinement,’ Nathan said, remembering the pale emptiness of the prison pits. ‘She begged me to help her, to dream her out, and I tried, but you can’t really manipulate the dreams. I messed it up. I left her in the desert – in the sun. She made it to the cave, but not in time. When I got back – when I found her – it was too late.’ He didn’t tell Kwanji’s father what the sundeath had done to her. The guilt returned, like a sickness in his stomach, but Osskva made no move to apportion blame.

‘She always wanted to change things,’ he said with a curious smile. ‘The government – the magics – the fate of the world. In the cave … what was she looking for?’

‘The Sangreal,’ Nathan said, picturing the greenstone cup, held in Kwanji’s ruined hand. ‘She asked me to bring it to you. She thought you could perform the Great Spell.’

‘Did she find it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then she died happy. I couldn’t do a Great Spell; I haven’t the power. Even the Grandir may not have the strength for it, or our world would have been saved long since. Besides, the Cup alone is no use. It needs also the Sword, and the Crown. Once they were said to be in the cave, guarded by a monster of ancient days, but there are other rumours. I’d heard they were scattered throughout the worlds for safe-keeping, so they could not be brought together too soon, or by the wrong agency, lest the Spell of Spells should go awry … Yet you say the Sangreal was in the cave.’

‘It was a mistake,’ Nathan explained. ‘It had been kept in my world, but someone stole it. After … after Kwanji died, I wasn’t sure what to do, but I thought it was best to take it back.’

‘You did right,’ Osskva said, ‘I expect. Time will tell. If we have enough of it left. What about the sword? Was that stolen too?’

The sword. In Nathan’s head, something else clicked into place. The princess had mentioned a sword, the Traitor’s Sword …

With that question, that connection, the dream jolted. Tell me about the sword, Nathan wanted to ask, but the words wouldn’t come out. It was like in an ordinary dream, when you try to speak but your vocal chords don’t work, and everything slows down, and the person you want to speak to is receding, fading inexorably from your thought. He had felt insubstantial, a pyjama-clad teenage ghost, but now he was growing solid, and the world around him thinned, the world of Arkatron on Eos, becoming ghost-like while he alone was real. He heard the voice of Osskva, insect-small and faint with distance: ‘Don’t go. We have things … to discuss … Questions … answers …’

But he couldn’t respond, and sleep swallowed him, plunging him back into the dark.

A few weeks after the attempted burglary, Chief Inspector Pobjoy called at Thornyhill again. ‘Of course, they won’t get custodial sentences,’ he said, referring to Ram and Ginger. ‘They’re underage. Ginger has a record already, petty theft, petty assault, petty everything. Ram’s been smarter: no previous, just a government health warning. The really interesting thing is their lawyer.’

‘Dear me,’ Bartlemy said, replenishing his guest’s tea mug. ‘I had no idea lawyers were interesting.’

Pobjoy didn’t grin – he wasn’t a natural grinner – but a sharp-edged smile flicked in and out, quick as a knife-blade. ‘Boys like that – backstreet kids, no dosh – they usually get whoever’s on call that day. Legal aid, no frills. That’s what they had in the past. But this time they get a Bentley among lawyers, top-of-the-range with power-steering and champagne-cooler. Hugh Purlieu-Smythe, legal adviser to the very, very rich. It would be a giveaway – if we knew who was footing the bill. Still, it is interesting, isn’t it?’

‘Indeed. Do we know who else this Purlieu-Smythe has represented in the recent past?’

‘I’ve been finding out.’ Pobjoy sipped his tea, nibbling the inevitable seductive biscuit. Sometimes he fantasized about what lunch or dinner might be like at Thornyhill. He was a single man living alone on a diet of ready meals, takeaways, and the occasional omelette, and the mere thought of such home-cooking must be put behind him, or it would seriously disrupt his professional detachment. ‘He’s done a few white-collar fraudsters – big city types who’ve brought their cash and their bad habits into the area in search of rural peace and quiet. Then there was that local authority corruption case – he was for the developer, got him off too. Grayling made donations to police charities – all the right people wined and dined – lent his Spanish villa to a lucky few. You get the picture.’

‘Are you suggesting some of your colleagues could be … swayed by such things?’ Bartlemy inquired gently.

‘It wouldn’t be anything overt,’ Pobjoy explained. ‘Just a general feeling that Grayling was a good bloke, one of the lads. One of the chaps, I should say. Wouldn’t have thought he’d be interested in this place, though. Or that cup of yours.’

‘It isn’t actually mine,’ Bartlemy murmured, but the inspector held to his train of thought.

‘Grayling isn’t much of a one for history and culture,’ he said. ‘We’re looking for the classic movie villain, right? Sinister type with very big bucks and an art collection no one ever gets to see. I have to say, most of the super-rich around here like to show off their paintings, at least to their chums; no point in having them otherwise. They collect for status, not pleasure. The Grail’s a little obscure for them.’

Bartlemy made an affirmative noise.

‘Myself, I’ve only come up against Purlieu-Smythe once before,’ Pobjoy resumed after a pause. ‘Another kid. Not quite like our Ram and Ginger, though. Poor little rich boy wanted for stealing a car, even though Daddy has four and Mummy two. Beat up a girl about a year ago, but someone talked her out of going to court. The boy’s a nasty little psycho in the making. Not yet eighteen.’

‘And the father?’ Bartlemy queried. ‘I assume it was he who employed the lawyer.’

‘Respectable,’ said Pobjoy. ‘Squeaky-clean businessman, plenty of good works, pillar-of-the-community image.’

‘Highly suspicious, in fact,’ said Bartlemy with a faint smile.

Pobjoy read few novels, but he took the point. ‘Real life isn’t much like thrillers,’ he said. ‘Pillars of the community are usually stuffy, but …’

‘Upright?’

‘Yeah. Just one point: he’s a publisher. Educational books, art, that sort of thing. He might have heard of the Grail.’

‘His name?’

‘I shouldn’t be telling you that.’

Bartlemy offered the policeman another biscuit.

‘Hackforth. Giles Hackforth. The company’s called Pentacle Publishing.’

‘A long-established firm,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Very reputable. So … we can infer that Hackforth is a cultured man, who might well have an interest in local antiquities, and the folklore that accompanies them.’

Pobjoy nodded. ‘I’d say you were imagining things,’ he went on, ‘if it wasn’t for Purlieu-Smythe. But lawyers like him don’t do charity work. There has to be a connection with someone, and Hackforth seems to be your best bet. I don’t see what we can do about it, though. Suspicion isn’t evidence.’

‘As you say. However, all information is valuable. Is there anything more you can tell me about him?’

Pobjoy hesitated. ‘Your nephew, Nathan Ward …’ There was a certain constraint in his manner. He was still uncomfortable at the mention of Nathan’s name, not least because in his view any individual, once suspected, was suspect forever, and he found it hard to change his mindset.

‘What about him?’ Bartlemy’s tone, as always, was mild.

‘I heard he was at Ffylde Abbey. Scholarship boy.’

‘Yes.’

‘So’s the problem child. Damon Hackforth. Should have thought they’d expel him, but apparently not. I expect Daddy’s buying the school a new wing or something.’

‘Ffylde Abbey is fundamentally a religious institution, remember. Perhaps they feel they cannot abandon the stray lamb – they want to bring him back to the fold.’

The inspector, cynical from experience, made a sound something like a snort.

‘Don’t dismiss the possibility,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I’ve seen things that would surprise you.’ And, on a note of irony: ‘You do not know the power of the light side.’

But Pobjoy missed the allusion. ‘I ought to be going,’ he said, finishing his tea. The biscuit plate was empty.

‘Next time,’ Bartlemy said, ‘you must stay to lunch.’

Nathan was accustomed to his uncle’s cooking, but habit didn’t take the edge off his appetite. He, Hazel and their friend George Fawn were devouring roast lamb with teenage enthusiasm the following Sunday and talking about Jason Wicks, the village’s aspiring thug, when Bartlemy inserted his question.

‘Do you have any problems of that kind at Ffylde?’

‘The teachers keep a close eye on things,’ Nathan said. ‘They try to stamp out bullying before it gets really nasty.’

‘No school bad boys?’ Bartlemy persisted. Annie looked thoughtfully at him.

‘There’s Nick Colby … he was caught insider-trading. He overheard his father talking about a merger and bought up shares for half the class.’

‘Did you get some?’ George asked, awed.

‘He’s the year below me.’

‘Anyone else?’ Bartlemy murmured.

‘Well … Damon Hackforth, in the Sixth. He’s been in trouble with the police. We’re not supposed to know, but of course everybody does. There was a rumour he’d be expelled. He’s always having long talks with Father Crowley. I expect they’re trying to reclaim him – some of the monks are very idealistic.’

‘Do you think they’ll succeed?’ Bartlemy asked.

Nathan made a face. ‘Don’t know. I’ve never really had anything to do with him, but … he gives off very bad vibes. You can feel it when he walks past. A sort of – aura – of anger and aggression. Worse than Jason Wicks. Ned Gable’s parents know his parents, and Ned says they begged the school not to chuck him out. They must be pretty desperate about him.’

‘They care about him, then?’ Annie said, flicking another glance at Bartlemy.

‘I expect so.’ Nathan was still young enough to assume that parents generally cared about their children. ‘He’s got a sister who’s an invalid. Ned says Damon’s jealous because she gets all the attention. She’s very ill – something they can’t fix, where she just goes on and on deteriorating. Muscular dystrophy, maybe. Something like that. She’s in a wheelchair. Ned says she’s very pretty and clever.’

‘How awful,’ Hazel said, thinking of a girl who had everything she didn’t, trapped in a wheelchair, wasting away.

‘Awful,’ Annie echoed, thinking of the parents, with their violent, mixed-up son and dying daughter.

‘Stupid,’ said George, ‘being jealous of someone who can’t even walk.’

‘Good point,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Most of the unhappiness in the world is the direct result of stupidity – of one kind or another. Who’s for baked apple?’

Afterwards, when Nathan, Hazel and George had left, Annie said: ‘So what’s your interest in this boy Damian?’

‘Damon. Did I say I was interested?’

‘You didn’t need to say. I could see it.’

‘I don’t know that I am interested in him,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I might be interested in his father.’ He told her about his conversation with Pobjoy.

‘Is it going to start again?’ Annie whispered. ‘Like last year?’ She was remembering a man with a crooked smile who had been nice to her – a thing made of river-water with a woman’s face – a very old corpse in a white-cushioned bed. And the secret she had never shared with her son, the secret of his paternity …

‘You’ll have to tell him,’ Bartlemy said, as though reading her mind.

‘That’s for me to decide.’ Annie’s tone was almost tart. ‘He doesn’t have to know yet. Perhaps he never will.’

‘That’s just it,’ Bartlemy sighed. ‘He ought to know. It’s important. It may be relevant.’

‘To what?’

‘Trouble,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Like last year.’