Читать книгу Whitemantle - Robert Goldthwaite Carter, Robert Carter - Страница 16

Three days passed, and the wizard came and went, busying himself in the seeking out of tokens. Much had been hidden away in the palace by Maskull. Three dried toads were found nailed to the rafters of the royal bedchamber. Maskull’s magical traps still tied up parts of Trinovant in a spider web, nor could Gwydion’s dancing unweave it all. He had made many libations at key points, shaping counter-spells at crossroads and leaving sigils under stairs. Yet too often the working required the moon to be at the full, or a vial of royal blood that was hardly to be had. Still, the wizard erected a cordon around the palace in the form of a single flaxen thread, and within its circuit he made scatterings of ash. Various woods were needed to cleanse and restore the White Hall, and so he had hung swags of holly and twisted dried mistletoe over door lintels, and sent Gort out to the royal forests beyond Hammersmyth to fetch back a boatload of oak, ash and elm.

One thunderstruck evening he had ranged up and down like a demon, flinging open shutters to light and air to admit the purifying blast of the west wind. That cool messenger of the middle airs had swept out the stink of incense and guttered the votive candles placed in so many corners by the Sightless Ones. Gwydion had found slips of paper containing malign formulae, seed pods, withered berries, dead flowers, knots of hair and knuckle bones, old cod-heads, the mummified body of a black cat with the halter still tight about its neck. But nothing had worked to remove the last lingering stench of dismal fortune that hung about the palace.

In cellars as dank as dungeons he had found the carefully arranged shards of a broken mirror, things stolen, things lost, things entombed under stone flags. Equerries and under-chamberlains were disturbed from their beds at midnight. High palace officials were roused up in the misty dawn as the wizard came in bearing in his hands the bones of a long-dead prince, to mutter and dance and run his new-found wand over chest and chimney-breast alike. And finally, in a tower occupied by no one at all, Gwydion had felt his way forward with remorseless care, for in a solitary cell at the top of a stair Maskull had kept his workshop of vile creation.

The sorcerer’s chamber was not without subtle defences. Magic was set, ready to snare the unwary. Walls that were not walls, seemingly thin air that was. And so Gwydion halted his attack. He let his investigation flow around the problem, then proceeded crabwise. At last, he went at it like the village worthy who goes to the local well, draws out on the end of long tongs the wriggling, spitting young of a water drake and dashes out its brains against a rock. A huge wasps’ nest was smoked out and taken down from the roof space, and when the wizard broke it open he found it to contain a human skull. Inside that was a dripping honeycomb that Gwydion sealed in a great jar.