Witch’s Honour
Jan Siegel
Witch's Honour concludes the lyrical, richly atmospheric and enthralling tale begun in Prospero's Children and continued in The Dragon-Charmer. Spellbinding in its depiction of places both familiar and strange, of characters both magical and sinister, it is classic English fantasy at its finest.He sat outside the light. Neither moonbeam nor starfire reached his unseen features. All she could see was the hint of a glimmer in narrowed eyes. Perhaps he smiled. 'I knew you would come to me,' he said, 'in the end.'It is New Year's Eve, and the start of the third millennium, and in celebration tonight the ancient house of Wrokeby will host a masked ball. However, among the invited guests in their exotic finery walks one who does not belong. A witch has come to Wrokeby, seeking power, seeking revenge. Her first victim is Dana Walgrim, daughter of the host, who suddenly collapses at the party, dead to the world.Dana is plunged into a mysterious coma, and her brother, Lucas, is losing hope until he learns of a similar case. The patient's name is Fernanda Capel.Suppressing her wild talents, Fern has established a successful career in PR. But the magic of the Gift will not so easily be laid aside, and now she is plagued by a recurring nightmare: of being drawn to the pinnacle of an immense Dark Tower to meet a flame-eyed shadow-figure, and signing an unholy alliance in blood.Lucas tracks Fern down; but when they meet she is convinced that they have met before… Intrigued, Fern decides to help Lucas save his sister. With the aid of her brother, Will, her friend, Gaynor, and the enigmatic Ragginbone, Fern draws upon all her power as a witch to try to bring Dana back.Fern and Lucas soon find themselves in a deadly confrontation with the new occupant of Wrokeby. As the stakes are raised, and losses are sustained on both sides, she discovers that appearances are deceptive, and that not everyone is to be trusted. And perhaps this time, Fern will find herself engaged in a battle she cannot win.
WITCH’S
HONOUR
Jan Siegel
PRAYER (#ud7e47bb6-d49c-5c3e-97a7-99edf63b8e88)
Ah, once I lived my life in every breath,
I gave my first love to a unicorn
and rode the shadows on the edge of death
and pierced my heart with his enchanted horn.
I saw the mountains soar ice-white, cloud-tall,
and moonfoam on an endless waterfall,
and felt the petals of my flesh unfold,
and mountains, waterfalls and heartbeats rolled
down long blue valleys to a distant sea.
Oh Lord, even the pain was dear to me,
if Lord there be.
And now my life is filled with little things,
little moments crowding little days,
my thought has shackles where it once had wings
and narrow vistas overstretch my gaze,
and daily work, and daily growing care
trundle me down the road to God-knows-where
if God is there.
I fear the hour when the world turns grey
and in the hollow midnight try to pray;
mountains and waterfalls have flowed away
leaving leaving me nothing much to say,
nothing but questions, till my thought runs dry—
I ask and ask, but never hear reply:
Is there a dream to set my spirit free?
In all the dead void of eternity
is there a God—and Love—and Phantasy—
or only me?
Is there Another, Lord, or can there be
no God but me?
PROLOGUE (#ud7e47bb6-d49c-5c3e-97a7-99edf63b8e88)
Enter First Witch (#ud7e47bb6-d49c-5c3e-97a7-99edf63b8e88)
The name of the island was Æeea, which, however you attempt to pronounce it, sounds like a scream. It was a gold-green jigsaw fragment of land a long way from any other shore, laced with foam and compassed with the blue-shaded contours of the sea. Near at hand, the gold dulled to yellow: slivers of yellow sand along the coastline, dust-yellow roads, yellow earth and rock showing through the olive groves on the steep climb to the sky. The central crag was tall enough to hook the clouds; in ancient times the natives believed such cloud concealed the more questionable activities of their gods. Nowadays, the former fishermen and peasant-farmers catered to the discerning tourist, telling stories of smugglers and shipwrecks, of mermaids and heroes, and of the famous enchantress who had once lived there in exile, snaring foolish travellers in the silken webs of her hair. Æeea was overlooked by the main holiday companies: only the specialists sent their customers to a location with little night-life and no plate-smashing in the quiet tavernas. Most of the more sumptuous villas were owned by wealthy mainlanders who wanted a bolthole far from the madding crowd of more commercial destinations.
The villa above Hekati Beach was one of these. More modern than most, it had seaward walls of tinted glass, black marble pillars, cubist furniture standing tip-toe on blood-coloured Persian carpets. There was a courtyard, completely enclosed, where orchids jostled for breathing-space in the jungle air and the cold silver notes of falling water made the only music. At its heart the latest incumbent had planted a budding tree, grown from a cutting, a thrusting, eager sapling, whiplash-slender, already putting forth leaves shaped like those of an oak but larger, and veined with a sap that was red. The house was reputedly the property of a shipping owner, a billionaire so reclusive that no one knew his name or had ever seen his face, but he would loan or rent it to friends, colleagues, strangers, unsociable lessees who wanted to bathe on a private beach far from the prying eyes of native peasant or straying tourist. The latest tenant had been there since the spring, cared for by an ancient crone who seemed to the local tradespeople to be wilfully deaf and all but dumb, selecting her purchases with grunts and hearing neither greeting nor question. Her back was hunched and between many wrinkles the slits of her eyes appeared to have no whites, only the beady black gleam of iris and pupil. The few who had glimpsed her mistress declared she was as young as her servant was old, and as beautiful as the hag was ugly, yet she too was aloof even by the standards of the house. They said she did not lie in the sun, fearing perhaps to blemish the pallor of her perfect skin, but swam in the waters of the cove by moonlight, naked but for the dark veil of her hair. In the neighbouring village the men speculated, talking in whispers over the last metaxa of a goddess beyond compare, but the women said she must be disfigured or diseased. She had a pet even stranger than her servant, a huge sphinx-cat hairless as a baby, its skin piebald, greyish-white marked with bruise-black patches. It had been seen hunting on the mountain-slopes above her garden; someone claimed to have watched it kill a snake.
Behind the glass walls of her house, the woman heard the villagers’ stories though her servant never spoke, and smiled to herself, a sweet, secret smile. She still bathed by night, secure in the power of the moon, and by day she stayed in a darkened room, lighting a cold fire on the cold marble hearth, and gazing, gazing into the smoke. Sometimes she sat in the courtyard, where little sun found its way through the vine-trellised canopy. No cicadas strummed here, though the slopes beyond throbbed with their gypsy sawing; no bee buzzed, or not for long. The hungry orchids sucked up all insect-life in their spotted mouths. There was no sound but the water. The woman would sit among the carnivorous plants, dressed in a thin red garment spotted like an orchid, with the black ripples of her hair falling around her shoulders. Watching the tree. The cat came to her there, and rubbed its bald flank against her limbs, purring. Will it fruit, Nehemet? she would murmur. It grows, but will it fruit? And if it does, what fruit will it bear? And she would touch the leaves with her pale fingertips—leaves which trembled at that contact, not after but before, as though in anticipation.
For Panioti, son of the woman who owned the general store and gift shop, there came a night when the last metaxa was a drink too far. He was handsome as only a child of the sun can be, high of cheekbone and brown of skin, with the gloss of youth on him like a velvet down and the idle assurance of absolute beauty. In the summer, he minded the shop for his mother and made love to all the prettiest visitors; in the off-season, he went to college in Athens, took life seriously, and studied to be an engineer. ‘I do not believe in the loveliness of this unknown siren,’ he maintained over the second-to-last drink, ‘or she would not hide herself. A beautiful woman puts on her smallest bikini and shows off her body on the beach. Has anyone seen her?’ But none of them had. ‘There you are. I won’t take her charms on trust; like any rumour, they will have grown in the telling. I want proof. I want to see her with my own eyes, swimming naked in the moonlight. Then I will believe her a goddess.’
‘Why don’t you?’ said one of his companions. ‘Hide in the olive grove, down by the rocks. See for yourself.’
‘He would never dare,’ said another. ‘I bet you five thousand drachma.’
By the last drink, the bet was on.
The cove was inaccessible save by the path down from the house, so the following evening Panioti swam round the headland, coming ashore on the rocks in order to leave no footprints, and concealed himself among the olive trees at the base of the slope. He carried a camera in a waterproof case, the kind that would take pictures in the dark without need of a flash, and a bottle of beer. He sat under the leaves in the fading sunset, leopard-spotted with shadow, drinking the beer slowly, slowly, to make it last. The dark had come down before the bottle was empty and he thrust it upright into the sandy soil. He waited, impatient of the crawling hours, held to his vigil only by the thought of his friends’ scorn, if he were to return too soon. At long last his wristwatch showed the hands drawing towards midnight. Now she will come, he thought, or I shall leave. But I do not think she will come.
She came. He saw her as a white movement on the path, her form apparently wreathed in a glittering mist, her dark hair fading into darkness. She seemed to glide over the uneven ground with a motion that was smooth and altogether silent; he almost fancied her feet did not touch the earth. The hair prickled on his neck. For a moment he could have believed her a pagan spirit, a creature of another kind, whose flesh and substance was not of this world. Then as she descended to the beach he realised the mist-effect was a loose, transparent garment which she unfastened and shed on the sand; her body glowed in the moonlight, slender and shapely as an alabaster nymph, a cold, perfect thing. She raised her arms to the sky as if in greeting to some forgotten deity, then she walked out into the water. The sea was calm and all but waveless: it took her with barely a ripple. He saw her head for a while as a black nodule silhouetted against the sea-glimmer, then it dipped and vanished. Belatedly, he remembered the camera, extracting it from its case, waiting for her to re-emerge. He half wondered if she would show in a photograph or if, like some supernatural being, she would leave no imprint on celluloid. He moved forward, lying along the rocks, poised and ready; but the swimmer did not return. She was gone so long his breath shortened in fear and he put the camera aside, braced to plunge in a search he knew would be hopeless.
She reappeared quite suddenly, within yards of the rocks where he lay. He thought her eyes were wide open, staring through the night with the same dilated gaze with which she must have pierced the darkness undersea. She began to swim towards the shore—towards him—with a sleek invisible stroke. Then abruptly she rose from the water; the sea streamed from her limbs; her black hair clung wetly to breasts, shoulders, back. For the first time, he saw her face, dim in the moonglow but not dim enough—he looked into eyes deep as the abyss and bright with a lustre that was not of the moon, he saw the lips parted as if in hunger…He tried to move, to flee, forgetful of the camera, of the bet, of his manly pride; but his legs were rooted. The whisper of her voice seemed to reach into his soul.
‘Do I look fair to you, peasant?’ She swept back her hair, thrusting her breasts towards him, pale hemispheres surmounted with nipples that jutted like thorns. ‘Look your fill. Tell me, did you feel bold coming here? Did you feel daring, sneaking among the rocks to gawp, and ogle, and boast to your friends? What will you say to them, when you return—if you return? That you have seen Venus Infernalis, Aphrodite risen from a watery grave, reborn from the spume of the sea-god’s ecstasy? What will you say?’
Closer she came and closer; his spirit recoiled, but his muscles were locked and his body shuddered.
‘Nothing,’ he managed. ‘I will say nothing. I swear.’
‘I know you will say nothing.’ She was gentle now, touching a cold finger to his face. ‘Do you know the fate of those who spy on the goddess? One was struck blind, another transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own dogs. But you have no dog, and the blind can still see with the eyes of the mind. So I will blank your mind, and put your soul in your eyes. You came here to see me, to behold the mystery of my beauty. I will give you your heart’s desire. Your eyes will be enchanted, lidless and sleepless, fixed on me forever. Does that sound good to you?’ Her hands slid across his cheeks, cupped around his sockets. His skin shrank from the contact.
‘Please,’ he mumbled, and ‘No…’ but her mouth smiled and her fingers probed unheeding.
In a velvet sky the moon pulled a wisp of cloud over its face, hiding its gaze from what followed.
The next morning a rumour circulated the village that the woman and her servant had left in the small hours, taking the hairless cat and uprooting plants from the courtyard. The taxi-driver who had driven them to the airport confirmed it, though his tip had been so generous he had got drunk for a week and was consequently confused. For some reason, the house was not occupied again. The owner left it untenanted and uncared for, the blood-red carpets faded; only the orchids thrived.
They found Panioti’s body two days later, borne on the sea-currents some way from Hekati beach. He had not drowned and there was no visible injury on his body, save where his eyeballs had been plucked out. But that was not a story they told the tourists.
Contents
Title Page (#ua8344a5b-1698-5810-b981-08f3b4ca62c5)Prayer (#u31309e87-37d8-58a3-aec4-17cb7d0e3b43)Prologue: Enter First Witch (#u6a9e507d-071c-5aaf-9f3b-b1c2b7192a5f)Part One: Succour (#u9d77ad47-d8f1-51d6-acff-ca071a137f48)Chapter I (#u5e85fdc5-2004-5b8e-b7bf-3bb6afdd4fe8)Chapter II (#u1f3d88f4-f686-53c2-992b-554308b07c8f)Chapter III (#ufd75185d-8759-58ab-8e33-b09fb52e05ab)Chapter IV (#litres_trial_promo)Part Two: Valour (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter V (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VI (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VII (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VIII (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter IX (#litres_trial_promo)Part Three: Honour (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter X (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XI (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XII (#litres_trial_promo)Epilogue: Exit Third Witch (#litres_trial_promo)Glossary: Names (#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)By Jan Siegel (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#ud7e47bb6-d49c-5c3e-97a7-99edf63b8e88)
Succour (#ud7e47bb6-d49c-5c3e-97a7-99edf63b8e88)
I (#ud7e47bb6-d49c-5c3e-97a7-99edf63b8e88)
It was New Year’s Eve 2000. The ancient house of Wrokeby normally brooded in silence under the eaves of the Wrokewood, a haphazard sprawl of huddled rooms, writhen staircases, arthritic beams and creaking floors, its thick walls attacked from without by monstrous creepers and gnawed from within by mice, beetles, and dry rot. English Heritage had no mandate here; only shadows prowled the empty corridors, draughts fingered the drapes, water demons gurgled in the plumbing. The Fitzherberts who built it originally had, through the vicissitudes of history, subsequently knocked it down, razed it, and built it up again, constructing the priest’s hole, burrowing the secret passages, and locking unwanted wives and lunatic relatives in the more inaccessible attics, until the family expired of inbreeding and ownership passed to a private trust. Now, it was leased to members of the nouveau riche, who enjoyed decrying its many inconveniences and complained formally only when the domestic staff fell through the mouldering floorboards and threatened to sue. The latest tenant was one Kaspar Walgrim, an investment banker with a self-made reputation for cast-iron judgement and stainless steel integrity. He liked to mention the house in passing to colleagues and clients, but he rarely got around to visiting it. Until tonight. Tonight, Wrokeby was having a ball.
Lights had invaded the unoccupied rooms and furtive corridors: clusters of candles, fairy stars set in flower-trumpets, globes that spun and flashed. The shadows were confused, shredded into tissue-thin layers and dancing a tarantella across floor and walls; the glancing illumination showed costumes historical and fantastical, fantastical-historical and merely erotic wandering the unhallowed halls. Music blared and thumped from various sources: Abba in the ballroom, Queen in the gallery, garage in the stables. The Norman church-tower which was the oldest part of the building had been hung with red lanterns, and stray guests sat on the twisting stair smoking, snorting and pill-popping, until some of them could actually see the headless ghost of William Fitzherbert watching them in horror from under his own arm. Spiders which had bred undisturbed for generations scuttled into hiding. In the kitchen, a poltergeist was at work among the drinks, adding unexpected ingredients, but no one noticed.
Suddenly, all over the house—all over the country—the music stopped. Midnight struck. Those who were still conscious laughed and wept and kissed and hugged with more than their customary exuberance: it was, after all, the Second Millennium, and mere survival was something worth celebrating. The unsteady throng carolled Auld Lang Syne, a ballad written expressly to be sung by inebriates. Some revellers removed masks, others removed clothing (not necessarily their own). One hapless youth threw up over the balustrade of the gallery, in the misguided belief that he was vomiting into the moat. There was no moat. In the dining hall, a beauty with long black hair in a trailing gown of tattered chiffon refused to unmask, telling her light-hearted molester: ‘I am Morgause, queen of air and darkness. Who are you to look upon the unknown enchantment of my face?’
‘More—gauze?’ hazarded her admirer, touching the chiffon.
‘Sister of Morgan Le Fay,’ said a celebrated literary critic, thinly disguised under the scaly features and curling horns of a low-grade demon. ‘Mother—according to some—of the traitor Mordred. I think the lady has been reading T.H. White.’
‘Who was he?’ asked a tall blonde in a leather corselette with short spiked hair and long spiked heels. Behind a mask of scarlet feathers her eyes gleamed black. She did not listen to the answer; instead, her lips moved on words that the demon critic could not quite hear.
After a brief tussle, Morgause had lost her visor and a couple of hair-pieces, revealing a flushed Dana Walgrim, daughter of their host. She lunged at her molester, stumbled over her dress, and crashed to the floor: they heard the thud of her head hitting the parquet. There was a minute when the conversation stopped and all that could be heard was the invasive pounding of the music. Then people rushed forward and did the things people usually do under the circumstances: ‘Lift her head—No, don’t move her—She’s not badly hurt—There’s no blood—Give her air—Get some water—Give her brandy—She’ll come round.’ She did not come round. Someone went to look for her brother, someone else called an ambulance. ‘No point,’ said Lucas Walgrim, arriving on the scene with the slightly blank expression of a person who has gone from very drunk to very sober in a matter of seconds. ‘We’ll take her ourselves. My car’s on the drive.’
‘You’ll lose your licence,’ said a nervous pirate.
‘I’ll be careful.’
He scooped Dana into his arms; helpful hands supported her head and hitched up the long folds of her dress. As they went out the literary critic turned back to the spike-haired blonde. ‘Drugs,’ he opined. ‘And they only let her out of the Priory three months ago.’
But the blonde had vanished.
In a small room some distance from the action, Kaspar Walgrim was oblivious to his daughter’s misfortune. One or two people had gone to search for him, thinking that news of the accident might be of interest although father and child were barely on speaking terms, but without success. The room was reached through the back of a wardrobe in the main bedchamber, the yielding panels revealing, not a secret country of snow and magic, but an office equipped by a previous owner, with an obsolete computer on the desk and books jacketed thickly in dust. Beside the computer lay a pristine sheet of paper headed Tenancy Agreement. Words wrote themselves in strangely spiky italics across the page. Kaspar Walgrim was not watching. His flannel-grey eyes had misted over like a windscreen in cold weather. He was handsome in a chilly, bankeresque fashion with an adamantine jaw and a mouth like the slit in a money-box, but his present rigidity of expression was unnatural, the stony blankness of a zombie. The angled desk-lamp illumined his face from below, underwriting browbone and cheekbone and cupping his eyes in pouches of light. A glass stood at his hand filled with a red liquid that was not wine. Behind him, a solitary voice dripped words into his ears as smoothly as honey from a spoon. A hand crept along his shoulder, with supple fingers and nails like silver claws. ‘I like this place,’ said the voice. ‘It will suit me. You will be happy to rent it to me…for nothing. For gratitude. For succour. Per siéquor. Escri né luthor. You will be happy…’
‘I will be happy.’
‘It is well. You will remember how I healed your spirit, in gratitude, as in a dream, a vision. You will remember sensation, pleasure, peace.’ The hand slid down across his chest; the man gave a deep groan which might have been ecstasy. ‘Do you remember?’
‘I remember.’
‘Finish your drink.’
Kaspar Walgrim drank. The liquid in his glass held the light as if it were trapped there.
The spiked blonde hair was screwed into a ball on the desk. The knife-blade heels prowled to and fro, stabbing the floorboards. The bird-mask seemed to blend with the face of its wearer, transforming her into some exotic raptor, inhuman and predatory.
When he was told, Kaspar Walgrim signed the paper.
The year was barely an hour old when a minicab pulled up outside a house in Pimlico. This was smart Pimlico, the part that likes to pretend it is Belgravia: the house was cream-coloured Georgian in a square of the same, surrounding a garden which fenced off would-be trespassers with genteel railings. Two young women got out of the taxi, fumbling for their respective wallets. One found hers and paid the fare; the other scattered the contents of her handbag on the pavement and bent down to retrieve them, snatching at a stray tampon. The girl who paid was slender and not very tall, perhaps five foot five: the streetlamp glowed on the auburn lowlights in her short designer haircut. Her coat hung open to reveal a minimalist figure, grey-chiffoned and silver-frosted for the occasion. Her features might have been described as elfin if it had not been for a glossy coating of makeup and an immaculate veneer of self-assurance. She looked exquisitely groomed, successful, competent—she had booked the taxi, one of the few available, three months in advance and had negotiated both fare and tip at the time. Her name was Fern Capel.
She was a witch.
Her companion gave up on the tampon, which had rolled into the gutter, collected her other belongings, and straightened up. She had a lot of heavy dark hair which had started the evening piled on her head but was now beginning to escape from bondage, a wayward wrap and a dress patterned in sequinned flowers which was slightly the wrong shape for the body inside. Her face was in a state of nature save for a little blusher and some lipstick, most of which had been smudged off. For all that she had an elusive attraction which her friend lacked, an air of warmth and vulnerability. The deepset eyes were soft behind concealing lashes and the faintly tragic mouth suggested a temperament too often prone to both sympathy and empathy. In fact, Gaynor Mobberley was not long out of her latest disastrous relationship, this time with a neurotic flautist who had trashed her flat when she attempted to end the affair. She had been staying with Fern ever since.
They went indoors and up the stairs to the first floor apartment. ‘It was a good party,’ Gaynor hazarded, extricating the few remaining pins and an overburdened butterfly-clip from her hair.
‘No it wasn’t,’ said Fern. ‘It was dire. The food was quiche and the champagne was Blank de Blank. We only went for the view of the fireworks. Like all the other guests. What were you discussing so intimately with our host?’
‘He and Vanessa are having problems,’ said Gaynor unhappily. ‘He wants to buy me lunch and tell me all about it.’
‘You attract men with hang-ups like a blocked drain attracts flies,’ Fern said brutally. ‘So what did you say?’
Gaynor fluffed. ‘I couldn’t think of an excuse to get out of it.’
‘You don’t need an excuse. Just say no. Like the anti-drugs campaign.’ Fern pressed the button on her ansaphone, which was flashing to indicate a message.
A male voice invaded the room on a wave of background noise. ‘Hi sis. Just ringing to wish you a Happy New Year. I think we’re in Ulan Bator but I’m not quite sure: the fermented mare’s milk tends to cloud my geography. Anyway, we’re in a yurt somewhere and a wizened rustic is strumming his souzouki…’
‘Bouzouki,’ murmured Fern. ‘Which is Greek, not Mongolian. Idiot.’ What music they could hear was pure disco, Eastern-Eurostyle.
‘Shine jiliin bayar hurgeye, as they say over here,’ her brother concluded. ‘Be seeing you.’ Bleep.
‘Shin jillian what?’ echoed Gaynor.
‘God knows,’ said Fern. ‘He’s probably showing off. Still,’ she added rather too pointedly, ‘he hasn’t any hang-ups.’
‘I know,’ said Gaynor, reminded uncomfortably of her abortive non-affair with Fern’s younger brother. ‘That’s what scared me. It gave me nothing to hold on to. Anyhow, he’s obviously airbrushed me from his memory. You said you told him I was staying here, but…well, he didn’t even mention my name.’
‘He doesn’t have to,’ Fern responded. ‘He wouldn’t normally bother to phone just to wish me Happy New Year. I suspect he called for your benefit, not mine.’
‘We never even slept together,’ Gaynor said. ‘Just one kiss…’
‘Exactly,’ said Fern. ‘You’re the one that got away. A career angler like Will could never get over that. You couldn’t have done better if you’d tried.’ Gaynor flushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ Fern resumed. ‘I know you weren’t trying. Look…there’s a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the fridge. Let’s have our own celebration.’
They discarded coat and wrap, kicked off their shoes. Fern deposited her jewellery on a low table, took a couple of glasses from a cabinet, and fetched the champagne. After a cautious interval, the cork gave a satisfactory pop. ‘Happy New Year!’ Fern curled up in a big armchair, tucking her legs under her.
Gaynor, on the sofa, sat knees together, feet apart. ‘Happy New Century. It’s got to be better than the old one.’
‘It doesn’t start quite yet,’ her friend pointed out. ‘2001 is the first year of the century. This is the in-between year, millennium year. The year everything can change.’
‘Will it?’ asked Gaynor. ‘Can you see?’
‘I’m a witch, not a seeress. Everything can change any year. Any day. Dates aren’t magical—I think. All the same…’ Her expression suddenly altered, hardening to alertness. She set down her glass. ‘There’s something here. Now. Something…that doesn’t belong.’ Her skin prickled with an unearthly static. The striation of green in her eyes seemed to intensify, until they shone with a feline brilliance between the shadow-painted lids. Her gaze was fixed on the shelving at the far end of the room, where a vase rocked slightly on its base for no visible reason. Without looking, she reached for the switch on the table-lamp. There was a click, and the room was in semi-darkness. In the corner beside the vase there seemed to be a nucleus of shadow deeper than those around it. The light had extinguished it, but in the gloom it had substance and the suggestion of a shape. A very small shape, hunch-shouldered and shrinking from the witch’s stare. The glow of the street-lamps filtering through the curtains tinted the dark with a faint orange glimmer, and as Gaynor’s vision adjusted it appeared to her that the shape was trembling, though that might have been the uncertainty of its materialisation. It began to fade, but Fern moved her hand with a Command hardly louder than a whisper, soft strange words which seemed to travel through the air like a zephyr of power. ‘Vissari! Inbar fiassé…’ The shadow condensed, petrifying into solidity. Fern pressed the light switch.
And there it was, a being perhaps three feet high assembled at random from a collection of mismatched body parts. Overlong arms enwrapped it, the stumpy legs were crooked, mottled fragments of clothing hung like rags of skin from its sides. Slanting eyes, indigo-black from edge to edge, peered between sheltering fingers. A narrow crest of hair bristled on the top of its head and its ears were tufted like those of a lynx. It was a monster in miniature, an aberration, ludicrously out of place in the civilised interior.
Neither girl looked particularly shocked to see it.
‘A goblin,’ said Fern, ‘but not resident. And I didn’t ask anyone to advertise.’
‘How could it come in uninvited?’ asked Gaynor. ‘I thought that was against the Ultimate Law.’
‘Some creatures are too simple or too small for such laws. Like cockroaches, they go everywhere. Still…this is a witch’s flat. Even a cockroach should be more careful.’ She addressed the intruder directly. ‘Who are you, and what are you doing here?’
The goblin mumbled inaudibly.
‘Louder,’ said Fern. ‘Intona!’
‘Not a house-goblin,’ the creature said with evident contempt. ‘I’m a burglar.’
‘What have you stolen?’ asked Fern.
‘Nothing,’ the goblin admitted. ‘Yet.’
‘You know who I am?’
Mumble.
‘Good,’ said Fern. ‘So you came here to steal something specific, from me. I expect you thought I would be out much later on Millennium New Year’s Eve. Who sent you?’
Warty lids flickered briefly over the watchful eyes. ‘No one.’
‘Was it Az—. Was it the Old Spirit?’ said Gaynor.
‘He wouldn’t use an ordinary goblin,’ said Fern. ‘He thinks they’re beneath him.’ She lifted her hand, pointing at the intruder with forked fingers, murmuring words too soft to be heard. A tiny gleam of light played about her fingertips, like the sparkle in a champagne glass. ‘Who sent you?’
The goblin held its breath, flinched, squeezed its eyes tight shut and then opened them very wide. ‘The Queen!’ it squeaked. ‘I steal for the Queen! Not for gods or demons! I’m a royal burglar, I am! I—’
‘Mabb,’ said Fern, relaxing slowly. ‘I see. I suppose she…Of course, I know what she wants. Tell her it isn’t here, and it’s not mine anyway. It’s held in trust, tell her, a sacred trust. It’s not a thing to be stolen or bartered. Say I know she will understand this, because she is a true queen who appreciates the value of honour.’
‘Who’s Mabb?’ asked Gaynor, sotto voce.
‘The queen of the goblins,’ whispered Fern. ‘Not much fairy in her, so I hear.’
‘Does she appreciate the value of honour?’
‘I doubt it, but I’m told she responds to flattery. We’ll see.’ She raised her voice again. ‘What’s your name?’
The goblin pondered the question, evidently considering whether it was safe to answer. ‘Humans call me Skuldunder,’ he conceded eventually.
‘Well, Skuldunder,’ said Fern, ‘since you’re here, and it’s a special occasion, will you have some champagne?’
‘Is it good?’ The goblin scrambled down from the shelf and approached warily, radiating suspicion.
‘Have you never stolen any?’
There was a shrug, as if Skuldunder was reluctant to admit to any shortfall in his criminal activities.
Fern took another glass from the cupboard and half filled it. ‘Try it,’ she said.
The goblin sniffed, sipped, grimaced.
‘We will drink to your queen,’ Fern announced. ‘Queen Mabb!’
They drank, solemnly. When Fern judged their visitor was sufficiently at ease she left him with Gaynor and went to her room, returning presently with a small quilted bag, unzipped to show the contents. ‘These are gifts for your queen,’ she told Skuldunder, ‘as a gesture of friendship and respect. I have heard she is a great beauty.’ Fern uttered the unaccustomed lie without a wince, ‘so I have chosen presents to adorn her loveliness. These coloured powders can be daubed onto her eyelids; the gold liquid in this bottle, when applied to her fingernails, will set hard; in this tube is a special stick for tinting her lips. There is also a hand mirror and a brooch.’ She indicated a piece of costume jewellery in the shape of a butterfly, set with blue and green brilliants. ‘Tell her I honour her, but the Sleer Bronaw, the Spear of Grief, is something I and my people hold in trust. It is not mine to give up.’
Skuldunder nodded with an air of doubtful comprehension, accepting the quilted bag gingerly, as if it was a thing of great price. Then he drained his glass, choked, bowed clumsily to the two women, and made an awkward exit through a window which Fern had hastily opened. ‘I don’t think it will dematerialise,’ she said, referring to his burden. ‘I hope you can manage…’ But the goblin had already disappeared into the shadows of the street.
‘What was that all about?’ Gaynor demanded as Fern closed the window.
‘The Sleer Bronaw is the spear Bradachin brought with him from Scotland when he first came to Dale House,’ Fern explained. ‘It’s still there, as far as I know. I believe it has some mythic significance; Ragginbone thinks so, at any rate.’ Bradachin, the house-goblin who inhabited her family’s Yorkshire home, had migrated from a Scottish castle after the new owners converted it into a hotel. Ragginbone was an old friend, a tramp who might once have been a wizard and now led a footloose existence in search of troubles he could not prevent, accompanied by a faithful dog with the mien of a she-wolf. ‘It’s unusual for something like that to be left in the care of a goblin, but Bradachin knows what he’s doing. I think. You saw him use it once, remember?’
‘I remember.’ There was a short silence. Then Gaynor said: ‘Why would Mabb want it?’
‘I’m not sure. Ragginbone said someone had offered her a trade, but that was a long time ago. I suppose she must have latched onto the idea again; he says her mind leaps to and fro like a grasshopper on speed—or words to that effect. Anyhow, none of the werefolk are focused in Time the way humans are.’
‘It was an interesting start to the New Year,’ Gaynor volunteered. ‘A goblin-burglar.’ She gave a sudden little shiver of reaction, still unused to encounters with such beings.
‘Maybe,’ said Fern. ‘Maybe—it was a portent.’
When the bottle was empty, they went to bed, each to her own thoughts.
Gaynor lay awake a long time as two-year-old memories surfaced, memories of magic and danger—and of Will. Somehow, even in her darkest recollections, it was the image of Will which predominated. There were bats—she hated bats—flying out of a TV set, swarming around her, tangling in her hair, hooking onto her pyjamas. And Will, rushing to her rescue, holding her in his arms…She was waiting behind a locked door for the entrance of her gaoler, clutching a heavy china bowl with which she hoped to stun him, only it was Will—Will!—who had come in. Will who had escaped and come back to find her, Will beside her in the car when the engine wouldn’t start, and she switched on the light to see the morlochs crawling over the chassis, pressing their hungry mouths against the windscreen. Will whom she had kissed only once, and left, because he had too much charm and no hang-ups, and he could never want someone like her for more than a brief encounter, a short fling ending in long regret. ‘He’s your brother,’ she had said to Fern, as if that settled the matter, the implications unspoken. He’s your brother; if he breaks my heart it will damage our friendship, perhaps for good. But her heart, if not broken, was already bruised and tender, throbbing painfully at the mention of Will’s name, at the sound of his voice on a machine. Ulan Bator…what was he doing in Ulan Bator? She had been so busy trying to suppress her reaction, she had not even thought to ask. She knew he had turned from painting to photography and abandoned his thesis in mid-stream, ultimately taking up the video camera and joining with a kindred spirit to form their own production company. Whether they had any actual commissions or not was a moot point, but Fern had told her they were working on a series of films exploring little-known cultures, presumably in little-known parts of the world. Such as Ulan Bator, wherever that might be. (Mongolia?) And what the hell was a yurt? It sounded like a particularly vicious form of yoghurt, probably made from the fermented mare’s milk to which Will had alluded.
Gaynor drifted eventually into a dream of bats and goblins, where she and Will were trapped in a car sinking slowly into a bog of blackberry-flavoured yurt, but a morloch pulled Will out through the window, and she was left to drown on her own. Fortunately, by the next morning, she had forgotten all about it.
Fern stayed awake even longer, speculating about Mabb, and the goblin-burglar, and the spear whose story she had never heard, the ill-omened Spear of Grief. She remembered it as something very old, rust-spotted, the blade-edge pitted as if Time had bitten into it with visible teeth. It had no aura of potency or enchantment, no spell-runes engraved on shaft or head. It was just a hunk of metal, long neglected, with no more power than a garden rake. (Yet she had seen it kill, and swiftly.) She wondered whose tears had rusted the ancient blade, earning it its name. And inevitably, like Gaynor, she slipped from speculation into recollection, losing control of her thought and letting it stray where it would. She roamed through the rootscape of the Eternal Tree, in a world of interlacing tubers, secret mosses, skulking fungi, until she found a single black fruit on a low bough, ripening into a head which opened ice-blue eyes at her and said: ‘You.’ She remembered the smell of fire, and the dragon rising, and the one voice to which both she and the dragon had listened. The voice of the dragon-charmer. But the head was burned and the voice stilled, for ever and ever. And her thought shrank, reaching further back and further, seeking the pain that was older and deeper, spear-deep in her spirit, though the wound, if not healed, was all but forgotten. Now she probed even there, needing the pain, the loss, the guilt, fearing to find herself heart-whole again for all time. And so at last she came to a beach at sunset, and saw Rafarl Dévornine rising like a god from the golden waves.
But she had been so young then, only sixteen, in an age ten thousand years gone. And now I am different, she thought. In Atlantis, they thought I was a star fallen from the heavens. But now I am a witch—not some pagan crone from a dream of the past but a witch of today, a twenty-first century witch. My skills may be ancient but my spirit is as modern as a microchip. As modern as a hamburger. Would I love him, if I met him now? When Someday comes, if it comes, will I even know him, or he me? And the tears started, not from the return of pain but from its loss, so she thought the lack of pain hurt the more, and there was an ache inside her that was not her heart. Gaynor suffers, she sensed, for her Gift or their friendship showed her what the other sought to hide, but at least she suffers because she loves. I have lost all the love I ever had, and it will not come again, because you love like that just once, and then it’s gone for good. I must be a fickle creature, to love so deeply and forget so fast. And her tears dried, because she saw them as an indulgence, playing at grief, and she lay in the dark empty of all feeling, hollow and cold, until at last she slept.
And dreamed. She moved through the dream as if she were an onlooker behind her own eyes, with no control over her actions, traversing the city with the desperate certainty of someone who was utterly resolved on a dreadful errand. It was a winter evening, and the glare of the metropolis faded the stars. Many-windowed cliffs rose above her, glittering with lights; modern sculptures settled their steel coils on marble plinths; three-cornered courtyards flaunted fountains, polished plaques, automatic doors. Recent rain had left sprawling puddles at the roadside which gave back headlamp and streetlamp in glancing flashes. In places the city looked familiar, but at other times it seemed to change its nature, showing glimpses of an underlying world, alien and sinister. Sudden alleyways opened between buildings, thick with shadows that were darker and older than the nightfall. Flights of steps zig-zagged down into regions far below the Underground, where crowds of what might be people heaved like boiling soup. Faces passed by, picked out briefly in the lamplight, with inhuman features. It came to Fern that she was looking for something, something she did not want to find, driven by a compulsion that she could not control. She had always believed in the freedom to choose—between right and wrong, good and evil, the choices that shape the soul. But she knew now that she had already chosen, a choice that could not be unmade, and her feet were set on a deadly path.
Presently she came to the turning that she sought, a pedestrian walk that passed under an arch in a façade of opaque windows. When she emerged at the other end of the tunnel she was in an open square. It was large—far too large for the buildings that enclosed it on the outside, as if she had passed through a dimensional kink into some alternative space. Stone pavings stretched away on either hand; distant groups moved to and fro, busy as ants on their unknown affairs. In front of her, broad steps spread out like low waves on an endless beach, and above them rose the tower. She had been expecting it, she knew—she had been seeking it—but nonetheless the sight gave her a sick jolt in her stomach, a horror of what she was about to do, her fearful necessary errand. It was taller than the surrounding buildings, taller than the whole city, an angular edifice of blind glass and black steel climbing to an impossible height, terminating in a single spire which seemed to pierce the pallor of the clouds. Reflected lights gleamed like drowning stars in its crystal walls, but she could see nothing of what lay within. It was of the city and yet not of it, an architectural fungus: the urban maze nourished it even as a hapless tree nourishes a parasitic growth, which has outgrown and will ultimately devour its host. For this was the tower at the heart of all evil, the Dark Tower of legend, rebuilt in the modern world on foundations as old as pain. Fern looked up, and up, until her neck cricked, and dragged her gaze away, and slowly mounted the steps to the main entrance.
Guards stood on either side, scarlet-coated and braided across the shoulders. They might have been ordinary commissionaires were it not for the masks of dark metal covering their faces. Iron lids blinked once in the eye-slits as Fern passed between them. The double doors opened by invisible means and she entered a vast lobby a-gleam with black marble where a dim figure slid from behind the reception desk. A voice without tone or gender said: ‘He is waiting for you. Follow me.’ She followed.
Behind the reception area there was a cylindrical shaft, rising out of a deep well surrounded by subterranean levels, and ascending beyond the eye’s reach. Each storey was connected to the shaft by a narrow bridge, unprotected by rail or balustrade, open to the drop beneath. Transparent lifts travelled up and down, ovoid bubbles suspended around a central stem. Fern flinched inwardly from the bridge, but her legs carried her across uncaring. The lift door closed behind them and they began to rise, gently for the first few seconds and then with accelerating speed, until the passing storeys blurred and her stomach plunged and her brain felt squashed against her skull. When they stopped her guide stepped out, unaffected, unassisting. An automaton. For a moment she clutched the door-frame, pinching her nose and exhaling forcefully to pop her ears. She didn’t look down. She didn’t speculate how far it was to the bottom. Her legs were unsteady now and the bridge appeared much narrower, a slender gangplank over an abyss. Her guide had halted on the other side. She thought: It looks like a test, but it isn’t. It’s a lure, a taunt. A challenge.
But she could not turn back.
She crossed over, keeping her gaze ahead. They moved on. Now, they were on an escalator which crawled around the tower against the outer wall. At the top, another door slid back, admitting them to an office.
The office. The seat of darkness. Neither a sorcerer’s cell nor an unholy fane but an office suited to the most senior of executives. Spacious. Luxurious. Floor-to-ceiling windows, liquid sweeps of curtain, a carpet soft and deep as fur. In the middle of the room a desk of polished ebony, and on it a file covered in red, an old-fashioned quill pen and a dagger that might have been meant for a letter-opener but wasn’t. There was a name stamped on the file but she did not read it: she knew it was hers. Her guide had retreated; if there were other people in the room she did not see them. Only him. Beyond the huge windows there were no city lights: just the slow-moving stars and the double-pronged horn of the moon, very big and close now, floating between two tiers of cloud. A scarlet-shaded lamp cast a rusty glow across the desk-top.
He sat outside the fall of the lamplight. Neither moonbeam nor starfire reached his unseen features. She thought he wore a suit, but it did not matter. All she could see was the hint of a glimmer in narrowed eyes.
Perhaps he smiled.
‘I knew you would come to me,’ he said, ‘in the end.’
If she spoke—if she acknowledged him—she could not hear. The only voice she heard was his: a voice that was old, and cold, and infinitely familiar.
‘You resisted longer than I expected,’ he went on. ‘That is good. The strength of your resistance is the measure of my victory. But now the fight is over. Your Gift will be mine, uniting us, power with power, binding you to me. Serve me well, and I will set you among the highest in this world. Betray me, and retribution will come swiftly, but its duration will be eternal. Do you understand?’
But Fern was in the grip of other fears. She felt the anxiety within her, sharp as a blade.
‘The one you care for will be restored,’ he said. ‘But it must be through me. Only through me. No other has the power.’
She heard no sound yet she seemed to be pleading with him, torn between a loathing of such a bargain and the urgency of her need.
‘Can you doubt me?’ he demanded, and the savagery of aeons was in his voice. ‘Do you know who I am? Have you forgotten?’ He got to his feet, circling the desk in one smooth motion, seizing her arm. Struggle was futile: she was propelled towards the glass wall. His grasp was like a vice; her muscles turned to water at his touch. She sensed him behind her as a crowding darkness, too solid for shadow, a faceless potency. ‘Look down,’ he ordered. She saw a thin carpet of cloud, moon-silvered, and then it parted, and far below there were lights—the lights not of one city but of many, distant and dim as the Milky Way, a glistening scatterdust spreading away without boundary or horizon, until it was lost in infinity. ‘Behold! Here are all the nations of the world, all the men of wealth and influence, all the greed, ambition, desperation, all the evil deeds and good intentions—and in the end, it all comes to me. Everything comes to me. This tower is built on their dreams and paid for in their blood. Where they sow, I reap, and so it will always be, until the Pit that can never be filled overflows at the last.’ His tone softened, becoming a whisper that insinuated itself into the very root of her thought. ‘Without me, you will be nothing, mere flotsam swept away on the current of Time. With me—ah, with me, all this will be at your feet.’
Fern felt the sense of defeat lying heavy on her spirit. The vision was taken away; the clouds closed. She was led back to the desk. The red file was open now to reveal some sort of legal document with curling black calligraphy on cream-coloured paper. She did not read it. She knew what it said.
‘Hold out your arm.’
The knife nicked her vein, a tiny V-shaped cut from which the blood ran in a long scarlet trickle.
‘You will keep the scar forever,’ he said. ‘It is my mark. Sign.’
She dipped the quill in her own blood. The nib made a thin scratching noise as she began to write.
Behind her eyes, behind her mind, the other Fern—the Fern who was dreaming—screamed her horror and defiance in the prison of her own head. No! No…
She woke up.
The sweat was pouring off her, as if a moment earlier she had been raging with fever, but now she was cold. Unlike with Gaynor, there was no merciful oblivion. The dream was real and terrible—a witch’s dream, a seeing-beyond-the-world, a chink into the future. Azmordis. Her mouth shaped the name, though no sound came out, and the darkness swallowed it. Azmordis, the Oldest Spirit, her ancient enemy who lusted for her power, the Gift of her kind, and schemed for her destruction. Azmordis who was both god and demon, feeding off men’s worship—and their fears. But she had stood against him, and defeated him, and held to the truth she knew.
Until now.
She got up, shivering, and went into the kitchen, and made herself cocoa with a generous measure of whisky, and a hot water bottle. It seemed a long time till daylight.
II (#ud7e47bb6-d49c-5c3e-97a7-99edf63b8e88)
At Wrokeby, the house-goblin was no longer playing poltergeist. He lurked in corners and crannies, in the folds of curtains, in the spaces under shadows. The newcomer did not appear to notice him but he sensed that sooner or later she would sweep through every nook and niche, scouring the house of unwanted inmates. He watched her when he dared, peering out of knotholes and plaster-cracks. He was a strange wizened creature, stick-thin and undersized even for a goblin, with skin the colour of ageing newspaper and a long pointed face like a hairless rat. His name when he had last heard it was Dibbuck, though he had forgotten why. The piebald cat which prowled the corridors could see him or scent him, and hunted him like the rodent he resembled, but so far he had been too quick for her. He had known the terrain for centuries; the cat was an invader, on unfamiliar ground. But the presence of Nehemet made him more nervous and furtive than ever. Yet still he crept and spied, half in fascination, half in terror, knowing in the murky recesses of his brain that the house in his care was being misused, its heritage defiled and its atmosphere contaminated for some purpose he could not guess.
The smaller sitting room now had black velvet curtains and no chairs, with signs and sigils painted on the bare floor where once there had been Persian rugs. A pale fire burned sometimes on a hearth long unused, but the goblin would not enter the room then, fearing the cold hiss of its unseen flames and the flickering glow that probed under the door. Instead, he ventured to the cellar, hiding in shadows as old as the house itself. The wine racks had been removed and shelves installed, stacked with bottles of unknown liquids and glass jars whose contents he did not want to examine too closely. One bottle stood on a table by itself, with a circle drawn around it and cabalistic words written in red along the perimeter. It had a crystal stopper sealed in wax, as if the contents were of great value, yet it appeared empty: he could see the wall through it. But there came an evening when he saw it had clouded over, filled with what looked like mist, and in the mist was a shape that writhed against the sides, struggling to get out. He skittered out of the room, and did not return for many days.
On the upper floors he found those Fitzherberts who had stayed this side of Death, their shrunken spirits rooted in age-old patterns of behaviour, clinging to passions and hatreds, the causes of which were long forgotten. They dwelt in the past seeing little of the real world, animate memories endowed with a glimmer of thought, an atom of being. Yet even they had felt an unfamiliar chill spreading through every artery of the house. ‘What is this?’ asked Sir William, in the church tower. ‘Who is she, to come here and disturb us—we who have been here so long? This is all that we have.’
‘I do not know,’ said the goblin, ‘but when she passes, I feel a draught blowing straight from eternity.’
The ghost faded from view and the goblin skulked the passageways, alone with his dread. At last he went back to the cellar, drawn, as are all werefolk, by the imminence of strong magic, mesmerised and repelled.
She wore a green dress which appeared to have no seams, adhering to her body like a living growth, whispering when she moved. There were threads of dull red in the material like the veins in a leaf. Her shadow leaped from wall to wall as she lit the candles, and her hair lifted although the air was stifling and still. The cat followed her, its skin puckered into gooseflesh, arching its back against her legs. There was a smell in the cellar that did not belong there, a smell of plants and earth and uncurling fronds: the goblin was an indoor creature so it took him a while to identify it, although his elongated nose quivered with more-than-human sensitivity. He avoided looking at the woman directly, lest she feel his gaze. Instead he watched her sidelong, catching the flicker of white fingers as she touched flasks and pots, checking their contents, unscrewing the occasional lid, sniffing, replacing. And all the while she talked to her feline companion in a ripple of soft words. ‘These herbs are running low…the slumbertop toadstools are too dry…these worm eggs will hatch if the air reaches them…’ At the end of one shelf he saw a jar he had not noticed before, containing a pair of eyeballs floating in some clear fluid. He could see the brown circle of iris and the black pupil, and broken fragments of blood vessel trailing around them. He knew they could not be alive but they hung against the glass, fixed on her, moving when she moved…
He drew back, covering his face, afraid even to brush her thought with his crooked stare. When he looked again, she was standing by a long table. It was entirely taken up by an irregular object some six feet in length, bundled in cloth. Very carefully she uncovered it, crooning as if to a child, and Dibbuck smelt the odour more strongly—the smell of a hungry forest, where the trees claw at one another in their fight to reach the sun. Her back was turned towards him, screening much of it from his view, but he could make out a few slender branches, a torn tap-root, the leaves that trembled at her caress. She moistened it with drops from various bottles, murmuring a sing-song chant which might have been part spell, part lullaby. It had no tune but its tunelessness invaded the goblin’s head, making him dizzy. When she had finished she covered the sapling again, taking care not to tear even the corner of a leaf.
He thought muzzily: ‘It is evil. It should be destroyed.’ But his small store of courage and resource was almost exhausted.
‘The workmen come tomorrow,’ she told the cat. ‘They will repair the conservatory, making it proof against weather and watching eyes. Then my Tree may grow in safety once more.’ The cat mewed, a thin, angry sound. The woman threw back her head as if harkening to some distant cry, and the candleflames streamed sideways, and a wind blew from another place, tasting of dankness and dew, and leaf-shadows scurried across the floor. Then she laughed, and all was quiet.
The goblin waited some time after she had quit the cellar before he dared to follow.
He knew now that he must leave Wrokeby—leave or be destroyed—yet still he hung on. This was his place, his care, the purpose of his meagre existence: a house-goblin stayed with the house, until it crumbled. The era of technology and change had driven some from their old haunts but such uprootings were rare, and few of goblinkind could survive the subsequent humiliation and exile. Only the strongest were able to move on, and Dibbuck was not strong. Yet deep in his scrawny body there was a fibre of toughness, a vestigial resolve. He did not think of seeking help: he knew of no help to seek. But he did not quite give up. He stole down his native galleries in the woman’s swath despite his fear of Nehemet, and eavesdropped on her communings with her pet, and listened to the muttering of spells and schemes he did not understand. Once, when she was absent for the day, he even sneaked into her bedroom, peering under the bed for discarded dreams, fingering the creams and lotions on the dressing-table. Their packaging was glossy and up-to-date but he could read a little and they seemed to have magical properties, erasing wrinkles and endowing the user with the radiance of permanent youth. He avoided the mirror lest it catch and hold his reflection but, glancing up, he saw her face there, moon-pale and glowing with an unearthly glamour. ‘It works,’ she said. ‘On me, everything works. I was old, ages old, but now I am young forever.’ He knew she spoke not to him but to herself, and the mirror was replaying the memory, responding to his curiosity. Panic overcame him, and he fled.
On the tower stair he found the head of Sir William. He tried to seize the hair but it had less substance than a cobweb. ‘Go now,’ said Dibbuck. ‘They say there is a Gate for mortals through which you leave this place. Find it, before it is too late.’
‘I rejected the Gate,’ said the head, haughtily. ‘I was not done with this world.’
‘Be done with it now,’ said the goblin. ‘Her power grows.’
‘I was the power here,’ said Sir William, ‘long ago…’
Dibbuck left him, despairing, running through the house uttering his warning unheeded, to the ghosts too venerable to be visible any more, the draughts that had once been passing feet, the water-sprites who gurgled through the antique plumbing, the imp who liked to extinguish the fire in the Aga. In the kitchen he saw the woman’s only servant, a hag with the whiteless eyes of the werekind. She lunged at him with a rolling-pin, moving with great swiftness for all her apparent age and rheumatics, but he dodged the blow, and faded into the wall, though he had to wait an hour and more before he could slip past her up the stairs. He made his way to the conservatory, a Victorian addition which had been severely damaged fifty years earlier in a storm. Now, three builders were there, working with unusual speed and very few cups of tea. The one in charge was a gypsy with a grey-streaked ponytail and a narrow, wary face. ‘We finish quickly and she’ll pay us well,’ he told the others. ‘But don’t skimp on anything. She’ll know.’
‘She’s a looker, ain’t she?’ said the youngest, a youth barely seventeen. ‘That figure, an’ that hair, an’all.’
‘Don’t even think of it,’ said the gypsy. ‘She can see you thinking.’ He stared at the spot where the goblin stood, so that for a minute Dibbuck thought he was observed, though the man made no sign. But later, when they were gone, the goblin found a biscuit left there, something no one had done for him through years beyond count. He ate it slowly, savouring the chocolate coating, feeling braver for the gift, the small gesture of friendship and respect, revitalised by the impact of sugar on his system. Perhaps it was that which gave him the nerve to investigate the attics.
He did not like the top of the house. His sense of time was vague, and he recalled only too clearly a wayward daughter of the family who had been locked up there, behind iron bars and padlocked doors, supposedly for the benefit of her soul. Amy Fitzherbert had had the misfortune to suffer from manic depression and what was probably Tourette syndrome in an age when a depression was a hole in the ground and sin had yet to evolve into syndrome. She had been fed through the bars like an animal, and like an animal she had reacted, ranting and screaming and bruising herself against the walls. Dibbuck had been too terrified to go near her. In death, her spirit had moved on, but the atmosphere there was still dark and disturbed from the Furies which had plagued her.
That evening he climbed the topmost stair and crept through the main attics, his ears strained for the slightest of sounds. There were no ghosts here, only a few spiders, some dead beetles, a scattering of mouse-droppings by the wainscot. But it seemed to Dibbuck that this was the quiet of waiting, a quiet that harkened to his listening, that saw his unseen presence. And in the dust there were footprints, well-defined and recent: the prints of a woman’s shoes. But the chocolate was strong in him and he went on, until he reached the door to Amy’s prison, and saw the striped shadow of the bars beyond, and heard what might have been a moan from within. Amy had moaned in her sleep, tormented by many-headed dreams, and he thought she was back there, that the woman had raised her spirit for some dreadful purpose, but still he took a step forward, the last step before the spell-barrier hit him. The force of it flung him several yards, punching him into the physical world and tumbling him over and over. After a long moment he picked himself up, twitching with shock. The half-open door was vibrating in the backlash of the spell, and behind it the shadow-bars stretched across the floor, but another darkness now loomed against them, growing nearer and larger, blotting them out. It had no recognisable shape, but it seemed to be huge and shaggy, and he thought it was thrusting itself against the bars like a caged beast. The plea that reached him was little more than a snarl, the voice of some creature close to the edge of madness.
Let me out…
Letmeout letmeout letmeout letmeout …
For the third time in recent weeks Dibbuck ran, fleeing a domain that had once been his.
* * *
Lucas Walgrim sat at his sister’s bedside in a private nursing home in Queen Square. Their father visited dutifully, once a week, going into prearranged huddles with various doctors, signing dutiful cheques whenever required. Dana was wired up to the latest technology, surrounded by bouquets she could not see, examined, analysed, pampered. The nursing home sent grateful thanks for a generous donation. Nothing happened. Dana’s pulse remained steady but slow, so slow, and her face was waxen as if she were already dead. Lucas would sit beside her through the lengthening afternoons, a neglected laptop on the cabinet by the bed, watching for a quiver of movement, a twinge, a change, waiting until he almost forgot what he was waiting for. She did not toss or turn; her breast barely lifted beneath the lace of her nightgown. They combed her thick dark hair twice a day, spreading it over the pillow: there was never a strand out of place. In oblivion her mouth lost its customary pout and slackened into an illusion of repose, but he saw no peace in her face, only absence. He tried talking to her, calling her, certain he could reach her wherever she had gone; but no answer came. As children they had been close, thrown into each other’s company by a workaholic father and an alcoholic mother. Eight years the elder, Lucas had alternately bullied and protected his little sister, fighting all her battles, allowing no one else to tease or taunt her. As an adult, he had been her final recourse when boyfriends abandoned her and girlfriends let her down. But in the last few years he had been busy at the City desk where his father had installed him, and she had turned to hard drugs and heavy drinking for the moral support that she lacked. He told himself that guilt was futile, and she had made her own decisions, but it did not lessen the pain. She was his sister whom he had always loved, the little rabbit he had mocked for her shyness and her fears, and she had gone, and he could not find her.
At his office colleagues eyed his vacant chair and said he was losing his grip. The malicious claimed he had succeeded only by paternal favours, and he did not have a grip to lose. His latest girlfriend, finding him inattentive, dated another man. In the nursing home the staff watched him covertly, the women (and some of the men) with a slight degree of wistfulness. Purists maintained that he was far from handsome, his bones too bony, his cheeks too sharply sunken, the brows too straight and sombre above his shadowed eyes. But the ensemble of his face, with its bristling black hair and taut, tight mouth, exuded force if not vitality, compulsion if not charisma. Those who were not attracted still found themselves intrigued, noting his air of controlled tension, his apparent lack of humour or charm. In Queen Square they thought the better of him for his meaningless vigil, and offered him tea which he invariably refused, and ignored the occasional cigarette which he would smoke by the open window. He was not a habitual smoker but it was something to do, a way of expressing frustration. The bouquets came via florists and had little scent, but their perfume filled his imagination, sweet as decay, and only the acrid tang of tobacco would eradicate it.
He came there late one night after a party—a party with much shrieking and squirting of champagne and dropping of trousers. He had drunk as much of the champagne as had found its way into his glass, but it did not cheer him: champagne only cheers those who are feeling cheerful already, which is why it is normally drunk only on special occasions. At the nursing home he sat in his usual chair, staring at his sister with a kind of grey patience, all thought suspended, while his life unravelled around him. There were goals which had been important to him: career success, a high earning potential, independence, self-respect. And the respect of his father. He had told himself often that this last need was an emotional cliché, a well-worn plotline which did not apply to him, but sometimes it had been easy to lapse into the pattern—easier than suspecting that the dark hunger which ate his soul came from no one but himself. And now all the strands of his existence were breaking away, leaving nothing but internal emptiness. The excess of alcohol gave him the illusion that his perceptions were sharpened rather than clouded and he saw Dana’s face in greater detail: her pallor appeared yellowish against the white of the pillow, her lips bloodless. He did not touch her, avoiding the contact with flesh that felt cold and dead. Somewhere in the paralysis of his brain he thought: I need help.
He thought aloud.
Without realising it, he had fallen asleep. The unfamiliar words touched a chord deeper than memory. He was in a city—a city of long ago, with pillars and colonnades and statues of men and beasts, and the dome of a temple rising above it all flashing fire at the sun. He heard the creak of wooden wheels on paving, saw the slaves shovelling horse-dung with the marks of the lash on their backs. There was a girl standing beside him, a girl whose black hair fell straight to her waist and whose eyes were the pure turquoise of sea-shallows. ‘—help,’ she was saying. ‘You must help me—’ but her face changed, dissolving slowly, the contours re-forming to a different design, and he was in the dark, and a red glimmer of torchlight showed him close-cropped hair and features that seemed to be etched in steel. The first face had been beautiful but this one was somehow familiar; he saw it with a pang of recognition as sharp as toothache. There was a name on his lips—a name he knew well—but it was snatched away, and he woke abruptly not knowing where he was, reaching for the dream as if it were the key to his soul.
One of the male nurses was leaning over him, clasping his shoulder with a scrubbed pink hand. ‘You called out,’ he explained. ‘I was outside. I think you said: “I need help.”’
‘Yes,’ said Lucas. ‘I did. I do.’
The young nurse smiled a smile that was reassuring—a little too reassuring, and knowing, and not quite human.
‘Help will be found,’ he said.
A damp spring ripened slowly into the disappointment of summer. Wizened countrymen read the signs—‘The birds be nesting high this year’—‘The hawthorn be blooming early’—‘I seed a ladybird with eight spots’—and claimed it would be hot. It wasn’t. In London Gaynor moved back into her refurbished flat and stoically withstood the advances of her host of New Year’s Eve in his quest for extramarital sympathy. Will Capel returned from Outer Mongolia and invited his sister to dinner, escorting her to the threshold of the Caprice restaurant before recollecting that all he could afford was McDonald’s. Fern drank a brandy too many, picked up the tab, and went home to dream the dream again, waking to horror and a sudden rush of nausea. In Queen Square, Dana Walgrim did not stir. Lucas devoted more time to the pursuit of venture capitalism, doing adventurous things with other people’s capital, but rivals said he had lost his focus, and the spectre that haunted him was not that of greed. And at Wrokeby the hovering sun ran its fingers over the façade of the house, and poked a pallid ray through an upper window, withdrawing it in haste as the swish of a curtain threatened to sever it from its source.
It was late May, and the clouds darkened the long evening into a premature dusk. The sunset was in retreat beyond the Wrokewood, its lastlight snarled in the treetops on Farsee Hill. Three trees stood there, all dead, struck by lightning during the same storm that had shattered the conservatory at the house, and although there was fresh growth around each bole the three crowns were bare, leafless spars jutting skyward like stretching arms. Folklorists claimed that Farsee Hill was a contraction of pharisee, or fairy, and liked to suggest some connection with an occult curse, the breaking of a taboo, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, though no one had yet come up with a plot for the undiscovered story. That evening, the clouds seemed to be building up not for a storm but for Night, the ancient Night that was before electricity and lamps and candles, before Man stole the secret of fire from the gods. The dark crept down over wood and hill, smothering the last of the sun. In the smaller sitting room, another light leaped into being, an ice-blue flame that crackled and danced over coals that glittered like crystal. On the floor, the circle took fire, in a hissing trail that swept around the perimeter at thought-speed. The witch stood outside it, close to the hearth. Her dress was white, sewn with sequins that flung back the wereglow in tiny darts of light. But her hair was shadow-black, and her eyes held more Night than all the dark beyond the curtains.
Dibbuck crouched in the passage, watching the flicker beneath the door. He heard her voice chanting, sometimes harsh, sometimes soft and sweet as the whisper of a June breeze. He could feel the slow build-up of the magic in the room beyond, the pull of power carefully dammed. The tongue of light from under the door licked across the floorboards, roving from side to side as though seeking him out. He cowered against the wall, shivering, afraid to stay, unable to run. He did not fear the dark but the Night that loomed over him now seemed endless; he could not imagine reaching another dawn. Within the room the chant swelled: the woman’s voice was full of echoes, as if the thin entities of air and shadow had added their hunger to hers. There was a whoosh, as of rushing flame, and the door flew open.
The wereglow sliced down the passage like a blade, missing the goblin by inches. It cut a path through the darkness, a band of white radiance brighter than full moonlight, stretching down the stair and beyond, piercing the very heart of the house. And then Dibbuck heard the summons, though it was in a language he did not understand, felt it reaching out, along the path, tugging at him, drawing him in. He pulled his large ears forward, flattening them against his skull with clutching hands, shutting out all sound. But still he could sense the compulsion, dragging at his feet, so he dug his many toes into crevices in the wood, and wrenched a splinter from the wainscot, driving it through his own instep, pinning himself to the floor with a mumbled word which might have been flimsy goblin-magic or a snatch of godless prayer. He had closed his eyes but when his ears were covered again he reopened them. And he knew that if he endured another thousand years, he would never forget what he saw.
There was a mist pouring past him along the beam of light—a mist of dim shapes, formless as amoeba, empty faces with half-forgotten features, filmy hands wavering like starfish, floating shreds of clothing and hair. Even though his ears were blocked he heard a buzzing in his head, as if far-off cries of desperation and despair had been reduced to little more than the chittering of insects. He wanted to listen but he dared not, lest he respond to the summons and lose himself in that incorporeal tide. He saw the topless torso of Sir William grasping his own head by its wispy locks: the eyes met his for an instant in a fierce, helpless stare. He glimpsed the tonsure of a priest, slain in the Civil War, a coachman’s curling whip and flapping greatcoat, the swollen belly of a housemaid, impregnated by her master. And amongst them the fluid gleam of water-sprites and the small shadowy beings who had lived for centuries under brick or stone, no longer able to remember what they were or who they had once been. Even the imp from the Aga was there, trailing in the rear, clutching in vain at the door-frame until he was wrenched into the vortex of the spell.
When the stream of phantoms had finally passed Dibbuck plucked out the splinter and limped forward, still blocking his ears, until he could just see into the room. The pain of his foot went unregarded as he watched what followed, too petrified even to shiver. Within the circle, the ghosts were drawn into a whirling, shuddering tornado, a pillar that climbed from floor to ceiling, bending this way and that as the spirits within struggled to escape. Distorted features spun around the outside, writhing lips, stretching eyes. The witch stood on the periphery with her arms outspread, as if she held the very substance of the air in her hands. The spell soared to a crescendo; the tornado spun into a blur. Then the chant stopped on a single word, imperative as fate: ‘Uvalé!’ And again: ‘Uvalé néan-charne!’ Blue lightning ripped upwards, searing through the pillar. There was a crack that shook the room, and inside the circle the floor opened.
The swirl of ghosts was sucked down as if by an enormous vacuum, vanishing into the hole with horrifying speed. The goblin caught one final glimpse of Sir William, losing hold of his head for the first time since his death, his mouth a gape of absolute terror. Then he was gone. What lay below Dibbuck could not see, save that it was altogether dark. The last phantom drained away; the circle was empty. At a word from the witch, the crack closed. On the far side of the room he registered the presence of Nehemet, sitting bolt upright like an Egyptian statue; the light of the spellfire shone balefully in her slanted eyes. Slowly, one step at a time, he inched backwards. Then he began to run.
‘We missed one,’ said the woman. ‘One spying, prying little rat. I do not tolerate spies. Find him.’
The cat sprang.
But Dibbuck had grown adept at running and dodging of late, and he was fast. The injury to his foot was insubstantial as his flesh; it hurt but hardly hindered him. He fled with a curious hobbling gait, down the twisting stairs and along the maze of corridors, through doors both open and shut, over shadow and under shadow. Nehemet might be swifter, but her solidity hampered her, and at the main door she had to stop, mewing savagely and scratching at the panels. Outside, Dibbuck was still running. He did not hesitate, nor look back. Through the Wrokewood he ran, and up Farsee Hill, and in the shelter of three trees he halted to rest, hoping that in this place his wild cousins of long ago might have some power to keep him from pursuit.
The conservatory was completed; the gypsy and his co-workers had been paid and dismissed. ‘You have not found him,’ Morgus said to the sphinx-cat. ‘Well. It is not important. He was only a goblin, a creature of cobwebs and corners, less trouble than a dormouse. We have greater matters in hand.’ It was four days since the exorcism, and the house grew very still when she passed: the curtains did not breathe, the stairs did not creak. Somewhere deep in its ancient mortar, in the marrow of its walls, it felt lonely for its agelong occupants, lonely and uncomprehending. It sensed the invasion of alien lights, the laying down of new shadows, the incursion of elementals lured by the force of dark magic. It missed the familiar ghosts, as a stray dog given a well-meaning bath misses its native fleas. Inside, the atmosphere changed, becoming bleak and watchful, though no one was watching any more.
The prisoner in the attic felt it, if only because there was nothing else to feel. Morgus rarely visited him any more, even to gloat, so he would talk to himself, and the house, and a moth which was slight enough to slip past the spells, until he grew impatient with it, and crushed it in one vicious hand. He had the strength to wrench the iron bars from their sockets and snap the chains that bound him as if they were made of rust, but magic reinforced both chain and bar, and though he tugged until his muscles tore it was futile. ‘What is she doing?’ he would ask the house, and when it made no answer he could sense the new silence and stillness permeating from below. He lay long hours with his ear to the floor, listening. He knew when the ghosts were gone, and he heard the padding of Nehemet’s paws as she hunted, and the softest rumour of Morgus’ voice grated like a saw on his thought. Sometimes he would howl like a beast—like the beast he was—but nobody came, and the sound bounced off the walls of his prison and returned to him, finding no way out. Sometimes he wept, hot red tears of frustration and rage which steamed when they touched the ground. And then he would curse Morgus, and the attic prison, and the whole world, until he was hoarse with cursing, and in the silence that followed his lips would shape the name of his friend—his one friend in all the history of time—and he would call for help in a moth-like whisper, and crush his mouth against the floor in the anguish of the unheard.
In the reconstructed conservatory, Morgus was planting the Tree. It was midnight, under the pale stare of an incurious moon. The triangular panes of the roof cast radiating lines of shadow around the stone pot in which Morgus placed the sapling. Here was a different kind of magic, a magic of vitality and growth: the air shimmered faintly about the bole, and the leaves rippled, and the sap ascended eagerly through slender trunk and thrusting twig with a throb like the beat of blood. Morgus crooned her eerie lullabyes, and fed it from assorted vials, and the cat sat by, motionless as Bastet save for the twitch of her tail. ‘We are on the soil of Britain: my island, my kingdom,’ said the witch. ‘Here, you can grow tall and strong. Fill my flagons with your sap, and bring forth fruit for me—fruit that will swell and ripen—whatever that fruit may be.’ She gathered up the discarded wrappings and left the conservatory, Nehemet at her heels. Behind them, unseen, the heavy base of the urn began very slowly to split, millimetre by millimetre, as the severed taproot forced its way through stone and tile, flooring and foundation, down into the earth beneath.
‘I wish you’d stop giving me advice,’ Will Capel complained. He and his sister were returning from Great-Aunt Edie’s funeral in the West Country, an event that many of her relatives felt was long overdue. She had ended her days in a retirement home near Torquay, but this had not prevented her from descending on hapless family members for Christmas, Easter, weddings, anniversaries and christenings, not to mention the funerals of those less hardy than herself. Since she had been ninety-one when she died, Fern felt excessive grief was not called for. While she drove, she found she was remembering her own aborted wedding, and Aunt Edie’s hovering presence there, usually clutching a copita of sherry.
‘What did you say?’
‘I said, I wish you would stop giving me advice.’
‘I didn’t,’ Fern said serenely. ‘I never give advice.’
‘It’s the way you never give advice,’ said Will. ‘I can feel the advice you’re not giving me radiating out from your brain in telepathic pulses. And there’s your expression.’
‘I haven’t got an expression.’
‘Yes you have. It’s your favourite cool, you-can’t-guess-what-I’m-thinking expression. If we were playing poker, I’d know you had a particularly sneaky Royal Flush. As it is, I’d be prepared to bet you’re thinking about Aunt Edie’s last trip to Yorkshire, and your wedding-that-wasn’t, and that means you’re about to criticise my love life.’
‘Your love life,’ said Fern, ‘is entirely your own affair. Or several affairs, as the case may be.’
‘You see?’ said Will. ‘Love life: criticism.’
Fern sucked her lip in an attempt to suppress a smile. ‘I hate to disappoint.’
Will gave a grin which stiffened gradually into something more artificial. ‘How is Gaynor?’
‘You’ve been a long time asking,’ Fern said lightly. Her eyes were on the road; Will found that her profile was no longer something he could read. ‘She got over the flautist very quickly, which may indicate that there was not much to get over. A recent news bulletin told me she was still resisting the advances of Hugh, slightly estranged husband of Vanessa. However, sources close to Miss Mobberley inform me that she may not be able to hold out. When men cry on her shoulder, she has a tendency to go soggy inside.’
‘Has she tried waterproof clothing?’ said Will, a little too sharply. ‘Anyway, I didn’t want a resumé of her sexual activities. I just wanted to know how—she—is.’
‘Last weekend,’ said Fern scrupulously, ‘she was perfectly well.’
There was complete silence for almost a mile. Since Fern had decided recently she did not want music on while she drove, believing it was a serious distraction, the quiet was as noticeable as a power-cut in a shopping mall.
Eventually, Will said, changing the subject without apology: ‘I may be going to India later this year.’ Fern made an interrogative noise. ‘Looks like Roger and I might have got our first real commission. Someone at BBC 2 likes the Himalayan idea. You know: tales of the hidden kingdoms. Power politics in Buddhism, the true origins of Shangri-La, that kind of stuff. I told you about it in the Caprice.’
‘If it comes off,’ said Fern, ‘you can take me to the Caprice.’
‘I did take you to the Caprice!’
‘Next time,’ his sister said darkly, ‘you pay for it as well.’
It was late by the time they reached London and Will accepted an invitation to share a takeaway in Fern’s flat. They bought an assortment of Thai nibbles and a bottle of Chardonnay and took them back to Pimlico. Once inside, Fern switched on lamps, drew the curtains, lit a scented candle. ‘There’s something about funerals,’ she said. ‘The smell always stays with you. That damp, rusty sort of smell you get when people take out the black coat they haven’t worn for years and then stand around for too long in the rain.’
‘It didn’t rain,’ Will pointed out, uncorking the wine.
‘The air was wet,’ Fern insisted.
It was after they had sat down and were opening up the cartons that she went suddenly still and quiet. ‘What is it?’ Will asked, watching her face change.
Fern said nothing for a few seconds. When she spoke again, it was a half-tone louder. ‘Show yourself. This is my brother: his presence need not trouble you. He is accustomed to the ways of your folk.’ And, after a pause: ‘I don’t wish to Command you. That would be discourteous, and I should deeply regret any further discourtesy. You know I want friendly relations with the Queen.’
The Queen? Will mouthed, his eyebrows shooting upwards.
Fern ignored him. Her gaze had focused on a place at the foot of the curtains, where the drapes were bunched together in many folds beside the looping leaves of a pot-plant. Presently, Will saw some of the shadows detach themselves and move forward, taking shape in the light. A diminutive, ungainly shape, hunch-shouldered and bow-legged, with long simian arms. Fern noticed his patchwork clothing looked newer than last time and he had acquired a species of malformed hat, squashed low over his brow, with the words ‘By Appoyntmnt’ embroidered on it in crooked stitches. His tufted ears were thrust through slits in the brim; his sloe eyes gazed slyly from underneath.
‘Skuldunder,’ Fern acknowledged.
‘Who invited you in?’ Will demanded.
‘It isn’t necessary,’ Fern sighed. ‘He’s a burglar. We’ve met before. He usually burgles on behalf of Mabb, Queen of the goblins. So are you here on private business, or does this visit have an official sanction?’
‘The Queen sent me,’ the goblin prated, briefly inflating his hollow chest. ‘She says, she is graciously pleased to accept your gifts, and…and your friendship. It is a great honour.’
‘For whom?’ Will murmured, fascinated. Fern stood unobtrusively on his foot.
‘A great honour,’ the goblin repeated. ‘She knows you are a powerful witch, but she believes you mean no harm to her and her people. And me,’ he added, throwing her an apprehensive glance and clutching his hat-brim for support.
‘Of course not,’ said Fern. ‘I would prefer not to harm anyone.’ Will, noting the language of diplomacy, thought the statement held an element of warning, but Skuldunder appeared tentatively relieved. ‘Have a glass of wine,’ she continued. ‘Is there something I can do for the queen?’
‘It is she who has sent me to help you,’ the goblin declared. ‘She says she will overlook the matter of the bodkin—’
‘Bodkin?’ Fern frowned. ‘Oh—the spear.’
The goblin took a wary mouthful of Chardonnay. ‘There is Trouble,’ he announced, giving the word an audible capital T. ‘We have heard of another witch, perhaps more powerful than yourself. We think she is new to this country. She is performing great magics, sorcery of a kind beyond our ken. The queen felt you should know of this.’
‘The queen is wise,’ Fern said, adding, in an aside to Will: ‘It may be nothing. Some street-witch playing games with fireworks, or an old woman who looked at Mabb sideways, and gave her a spot on her nose. All the same…’ She turned back to the goblin. ‘Does she have a name, this witch?’
‘We do not know it,’ said Skuldunder.
‘An address?’
‘She has taken over a mansion north of this city. Already she has done great evil there. It was the property of a human family who died out years ago, and few mortals came to trouble it, leaving it to the ghosts and lesser creatures of the otherworld. But she made a terrible spell to purge it, and now they are all gone, and the only beings who dwell there are those who have come in her train.’
‘An exorcism,’ said Fern.
‘Ethnic cleansing,’ said Will.
‘Exorcism is not necessarily terrible,’ Fern elaborated. ‘It shows lost spirits how to pass the Gate: that is all.’
But Skuldunder was shaking his head and kneading his hat-brim with nervous fingers. ‘No—no—it wasn’t like that. We think she—she opened the abyss. They were all sucked through—all of them. Into nothingness …’ He was trembling visibly. ‘Only the house-goblin escaped. He is very old, and not as brave and cunning as those of us who live wild, but he did well. He fled from the house and hid in a place where the old magic lingers. Her minions could not find him there. We don’t know how long he was in hiding; he could not tell us. Some of the queen’s folk came across him, when they were hunting toads. He must have wandered a fair way from his hiding place by then.’
‘The name of the house?’ asked Fern.
Skuldunder frowned. ‘It was a name of rooks,’ he said. ‘Rooks and oak-trees. Roake House…something like that.’
‘And all we know about this witch is what the house-goblin has told you?’
‘Yes…But he is very frightened. He did not want to leave the house, and now he is lost and confused, even among his own people. Truly, he has seen dreadful things.’
‘House-goblins frighten easily,’ said Fern. ‘Most of them, anyway. Tell the queen…tell the queen I would like to question him myself. This matter of another witch could be important; our information must be carefully sifted. Since this is such a serious issue, perhaps the queen would honour me with her presence here. Then we could consider the problem together.’
‘Here?’ said Skuldunder. ‘The queen?’
‘She would be my most royal guest,’ said Fern—implying, Will thought, that lesser royalty came to her flat on a regular basis.
‘I will ask her,’ Skuldunder said doubtfully. He retreated towards the window, fading into a pattern of shadows.
‘Well?’ Will inquired.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ Fern conceded. ‘A storm in an acorn-cup. I’m just curious to meet Mabb. Ragginbone is too aloof. Even a witch needs friends.’
‘Especially a witch,’ said her brother.
* * *
‘She reminds me of another case I had,’ said the new doctor. The medical team who briefed Kaspar Walgrim normally varied little, but every so often they would call for a second opinion, and a third, and a fourth, and another cheque would wing its way towards the clinical bank balance. The doctors accepted advice to prove they were not rigid or hidebound; Walgrim needed both the input of wisdom and the output of cheques to prove he was doing something. The regularity of his attendance had fallen with the passage of time; now, he came only once a fortnight, or once a month. ‘What is the point?’ he said to his son. ‘She doesn’t know we’re here.’ But Lucas was still there, night after night, though his days were filled with a feverish intensity of work which he hoped might divert his mind if not his heart. He was on hand when the new doctor dropped in—not a fifth opinion so much as an interested party, an expert in coma cases to whom Dana was a novelty specimen. At the remark, which was addressed to the colleague accompanying him, something in Lucas’ brain switched on to alert.
‘It was when I was up in Yorkshire,’ the doctor continued. ‘Another girl—a bit older than this one, but not much. I don’t know if that’s significant. She had a history of what looked like psychosomatic symptoms, and the case itself had several bizarre features…However, there’s nothing like that here. It just seems to have started in the same way: a night out, too much to drink, and then total blackout. Slowed heart-rate—’ he lifted an eyelid ‘—eyes turned up. No known allergies?’
‘None,’ said the other.
‘No physical injury?’
‘A minor contusion on the head. Nothing serious. Her skull is normal. Erm…this is her brother.’
‘Lucas Walgrim,’ he introduced himself, extending a hand. ‘What happened to the girl in Yorkshire?’
‘She revived. Very suddenly. After about a week.’ For no obvious reason, the doctor looked uncomfortable. ‘She discharged herself the same day.’
‘The same day?’ His fellow medic was startled.
The new doctor shrugged. ‘It was an odd business. One moment, barely alive; the next, sitting up, throwing her weight around, getting out of bed. I believe the first thing she did was to dump her fiancé. Most people would have given themselves a couple of days to think it over, but not her. She was…difficult.’
I like her already, thought Lucas. I want Dana up and about, being difficult with doctors.
He said: ‘I’d like to talk to that girl.’
‘You know that’s not possible. Patient confidentiality.’
‘You’ve already breached that confidentiality,’ Lucas pointed out, his manner honed to an edge in backrooms and boardrooms. ‘You’ve discussed various aspects of her case with someone outside your profession. I want to talk to her. Arrange it.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s out of the question.’
His colleague interceded with a smoothness doubtless oiled by the size and regularity of the Walgrim cheques. ‘Perhaps we can deal with this another way. If my associate were to contact the patient in question and explain the position, giving her your name and number, I’m sure—under the circumstances—she would be willing to get in touch with you. Although I’m afraid she won’t be of much help. The patient rarely understands the illness: that’s why they come—’
‘Thank you,’ Lucas cut in. ‘I’d be grateful if you would do that. I’ll expect to hear something shortly.’
The new doctor looked unconvinced, but was hustled from the room. Lucas turned back to his sister, but his attention was no longer focused on her. Something in his posture had changed: his body was rigid, taut as wire, the anticipation strong in him, filling all his thoughts. Suddenly his mind slipped; he was in a time outside Time, and the figure in the bed, though still white and immobile, was not that of Dana. Other images crowded in on him, flickering through his brain so fast he could not pin them down: a mass of leaves, shuddering in an unnatural wind—what looked like a disembodied head—more leaves—grey fields—water falling into a basin of stone —horns—fire—and then the figure again, but now her breathing had quickened, and her eyelids lifted, and he saw she was the second girl in his dream of weeks before, a girl sharp and bright as steel, with a glint of true green in her eyes. And then the world jolted back into place, and there in the bed was Dana, and his heart hammered as if he had been running.
‘What is happening to me?’ he whispered, and inside his head a voice that was almost—but not quite—a part of his thought answered him. It is the Gift. Don’t fear it. Don’t fight it. It will guide you.
The Gift. In Atlantis long ago the aura of the Lodestone had infected mortal men, endowing the earthly with unearthly powers. The Lodestone was broken and Atlantis sank beneath the waves, but the mutant gene had already spread throughout the world, and it was passed on, dominant, often dormant, warping all who abused it. They were called the Gifted, Prospero’s Children, the Crooked Ones, the Accursed. Lucas did not understand what had altered him but he felt its influence growing, opening his vision on new dimensions, twisting his thought. But this was the way to restore his sister, the way to redemption. There was no other road.
It was one in the morning before he left the nursing home, walking towards his Knightsbridge flat as if indifferent to the distance and the hour, until a taxi waylaid him, and persuaded him to accept a ride.
Fern was in her office about a week later when the call came in. She worked for a PR company in Wardour Street with a short list of stressed-out employees and a long list of lucrative and temperamental clients. She had recently risen to a directorship, partly because of her diplomatic skills with the aforementioned clientèle. When she picked up the phone she was in a meeting to discuss the launch of Woof!, a new glossy magazine on celebrity pets, and it was a few minutes before she absorbed what the call was about. ‘Sorry? Say that again? You want me to…No, I don’t think we should have Coquette, she goes to absolutely everything these days, it’ll be news if we can keep her out…His sister? And who’s he?…Sushi’s always reliable, provided we get the best…Sorry?’ By the end of a confused conversation, she found she had written down a name and number with only the haziest idea of why.
It was several days before she got around to using them.
‘Hello? I’d like to speak to Lucas Walgrim. Fern Capel…’
Presently, a male voice said rather brusquely: ‘Miss Capel? I’m afraid I—’
‘I understood you wanted me to call you,’ Fern said with frigid courtesy. ‘A clinic in Yorkshire where I spent a brief stay a couple of years ago got in touch with me. I was a coma patient there. They said you had a sister in a similar condition…’
‘Yes.’ Even down the telephone, Fern detected the slowing of pace, the shift in focus. ‘I’m so glad you called. I may be clutching at straws, but Dana collapsed under circumstances which I’m told parallel yours—’
‘Really? Who told you?’
‘A doctor was indiscreet. He didn’t name you, but I pressed him to put you in contact with me. I hope you don’t object?’
‘N-no.’ Fern wasn’t sure. ‘It’s just—I don’t think there’s anything I can do for you. I lost consciousness, I was out for about a week, then I recovered. It didn’t teach me anything about diagnosis.’
‘There’s nothing to diagnose. She just lies there, hardly breathing. Her heartbeat’s slowed to hibernation rate. She’s been like that for months. Since New Year’s Eve.’ A pause. ‘I wanted to talk to someone who’s been there, who knows. Perhaps I could buy you lunch?’
His determination was a tangible thing, reaching out, compelling her.
‘I’m awfully busy right now…’
‘What about a drink?’
Fern hesitated, then gave in. ‘All right. But I really don’t see how I can help you.’
‘Tomorrow? After work?’
They agreed a place and time, and Fern hung up, preparing to put the matter out of her mind. But it nagged at her, though she did not know why, and she lay awake far into the night, picturing the unknown girl lying as she had lain, death-white, death-still, wired up to the mechanics of life support, heart monitor, drip, catheter, for month after month after month…
III (#ud7e47bb6-d49c-5c3e-97a7-99edf63b8e88)
The hardest thing was being back inside Time. I had spent so long in a dimension where no time passed, where the illusory seasons revolved endlessly in the same circle, never progressing, never changing, where day and darkness were mere variations in the light. I had spent so long—but ‘long’ was a word that did not apply there, for in the realm of the Tree there is no duration. A millennium or a millionth of a second, it is all one. The Tree has grown and grown until it can grow no further, and it is held in stasis, bearing its seedless fruit, bending the space around it as a black hole bends the stuff of the universe. (I know about these things, you see. I have watched them in the spellfire, the witches and wizards of science, poking at the stars.) I glutted myself on the power of the Tree, and was reborn from the power of the river, after she burned me in the pale fire of sorcery. And then I could not go back. I called the birds to me: the blue-banded magpies, the heavy-beaked ravens, the woodpeckers and tree-creepers. I sent them across the worlds to the cave beneath the roots where I and my coven-sister had dwelt, to bring me my herbs and powders, my potions and crystals. I bound tiny waterskins about the necks of the woodpeckers and taught them to tap the bark until it bled sap, and return to me when the vessel was full. The sap of the Tree has a potency I alone have ever learned: from it I can make a draught that will drain individual thought, leaving the intoxicated mind to think whatever I desire. Last, I summoned the great owl, wisest of birds, and told him to find for me the single branch hidden in the cave, wrapped in silk, the branch I had plucked long before with many rituals, and to bear it carefully back. I planted it in my island retreat, fearing it might not root, but the magic was strong in it, and it grew.
I chose the island because of my coven-sister Sysselore, who lived there once. In those days she was Syrcé the enchantress, young and beautiful, and lost sailors came to her with their lean brown bodies, and she turned them into pigs, and grew thin on a diet of lean pork. I hoped the island would be a place of transition, where I could reaccustom myself to the living world. The sudden racing of Time made me sick, so there were moments when I could not stand, and I would lie down on a bed that seemed to tilt and rock like a speeding carriage on an uneven road. Even when the nausea passed, there was the terror of it, of being trapped in the rush of Now, snatching in vain at seconds, minutes, hours which are gone before you can take hold of them. I could not believe I used to live like this: only the iron of my need and the steel of my will kept me from flight. But as Time moved on, so I became habituated to it.
There were more people on the island than in ancient days; humans have bred like insects, and the earth is overrun. Many have strange customs: they lie in the sun and go brown like peasants, and the women show their bodies to all men instead of a chosen few. I do not lie in the sun; white skin is the acme of beauty, and I am beautiful again. The fire purged me, the river healed me, and I emerged from the waters of Death as Venus reborn, a Venus of the night, star-pale and shadow-dark. I turn from the sun now, preferring the softer light of the moon, the moon who has always been a friend to witchkind. In the moonlight I am a goddess. But when I look in the mirror I see the old Morgus there still, the power-bloated mountain of flesh not eroded but compressed, constricted into a form of slenderness and beauty. The lissom figure is somehow subtly gross, and the loveliness of my face is like a shifting veil over the face beneath. That realisation fills me with a joy that is not of this earth, for I know that the dark within is strong in me, and beauty alone is a shallow, insipid thing without the power beneath the skin. And sometimes, in that same reflection, I seem to see the Eternal Tree, winding its twig-tendrils and root-tendrils in my hair, and blending its night with the shadows in my eyes. That is the sweetest of all, for with the Tree I am immortal, both human and unhuman, and I can challenge even Azmordis for the throne of the world.
I left the island after the incident with the man. There would be curiosity and questions, and though I could deal with both I did not wish to be troubled. And so I came home at last, to Britain, which was called Logrèz, the land where I was born and where I will one day rule alone. Let Azmordis flee to the barbarian countries across the Western sea! This was my place, and it will be mine again, until the stars fall. I hid in the cave in Prydwen where Merlin was said to have slept, many centuries ago; though he is not there now. But I had had enough of caves. The entrance was concealed with enchantments older than mine, and in the gloom of that safety I lit the spellfire, and sought a house to suit both queen and witch.
I had conjured a creature to be my servant, part hag, part kobold; I bought her labour with a bag of storms. When seven times seven years are done, and she is free of me, she will open it and raze the village where she was scorned and stoned, at some remote time in a forgotten past. She does not talk, which pleases me; I know these things because I have seen the pictures in her mind. But she is sharp of ear and eye, adequate at housework and skilled in the kitchen, and the loyalty that I have purchased is mine absolutely. Her meaningless vengeance binds her to me more surely than any spell. And I have Nehemet, Nehemet the goblin-cat, who was not conjured but came to me, there on the island, as if she had been waiting. Who she is, or what she is, I do not know. Her name came with her, spoken clearly into my thought, though she has never spoken again. Goblin-cats are rare; according to one legend they were the pets of the king of the Underworld, losing their fur because they did not need it in the heat from the pits of Hell. But Nehemet is no mere animal: there is an old intelligence in her gaze, and her poise is that of a feline deity who steps haughtily from a new-opened tomb. She is my familiar, in every way. Somewhen in the passing centuries we have met before.
I am glad they are both female. I prefer to surround myself with females, whatever their kind. Men are to be manipulated or enslaved; they are necessary for procreation, but that is all. I loved a man once: that desire that can never be sated, that madness where even suffering is dear to the heart. I lay with him and he took me to the place where sweetness is pain and pain is bliss, and in the cold grey morning he looked on me and turned away, and left me alone for always. So I took my love and buried it deep in my spirit, so deep that I have never found where it lies. He was my half-brother, and he became the High King, but the son I bore him was his downfall, though it gained me nothing. Enough of him. I remember Morgun, my blood-sister, my twin. As children we played together, exchanging kisses, touching each other until our nipples swelled like spring buds. But in the end she turned to the love of men, submitting to the rule of lords and masters, and betrayed me, and herself, and died in bitterness. I saw her head, hanging on the Eternal Tree, vowing even then to be my doom. Now, there is only one man in my house—if man you can call him.
I brought my possessions and my entourage to Wrokeby after New Year’s Eve. I have a use for both the house and its owner: Kaspar Walgrim is a monarch in a world I do not know, the world of Money. And Money, like magic, is the key to power. With magic you can bemaze the minds of men, but with Money you can buy their souls. Walgrim is one of the rulers in the realm of Money: they call it the City, Londinium of old, Caer Lunn. The High King never kept his seat there, but the head of Bran the Blessed was once entombed beneath its white tower, gazing outward over the land, shielding it from enemies. My half-brother dug it up, saying it was a pagan thing, and he could hold his kingdom alone; only the kingdom was lost and the god of greed sits on the throne where a hundred kings have sat before, playing the games of power and spending their people’s gold. I need Money, and Walgrim has my magic in his blood. He will harvest the City’s gold for me.
Wrokeby is an old house by the standards of today, though its first stones were laid long after I quit the world. But there are bones underneath, green and rotten now, which were flesh when I was born: I can feel them there, reaching up to me through the dark earth. I cannot destroy them without uprooting the house itself, but I have cleaned out the ghosts which cluttered every empty room, even the imp which made mischief in the kitchen. Grodda, my servant, complained it was always extinguishing the flame in the stove. As I opened the abyss they were sucked through; I heard their thin wailing, felt their helpless terror. It is long and long since I have tasted such terror, even from flimsy, lifeless beings such as these: I drank it like wine. My half-brother laid down the knightly precepts: help the oppressed, outface fear, do nothing dishonourable. The laws of Succour, Valour, Honour. But they were for warriors and heroes, not for women and witches. We were to be loved and left, abused and disempowered. And so I made precepts of my own, turning his on their heads: oppress the helpless, weild fear, honour nothing. Succour. Valour. Honour. I have never forgotten those three words. It was good to feel fear again, the fear of lesser, weaker creatures. It makes me strong, stronger than I have felt in time outside Time. There was little fear to feed on, beneath the Eternal Tree.
I moved my prisoner here, from the borders of the Underworld where I had caught and bound him. The house on the island was not suitable, but here there is the attic room already equipped with locks and bolts and bars. I chained him with many chains, and I locked the locks, and bolted the bolts, and walled him in with spells stronger than bars. He did not speak, not then, but sometimes I hear him snarling, chewing on his own fury. Soon the nightmares will begin, and he will howl like a beast in the darkness, and then I will visit him, and watch him grovel, and whine for mercy, and call me ‘mother’. I have not yet decided on his punishment, only that it will be slow, sweet and slow, and before I am done he will be offering me the soul he does not have—the soul he longs for and dreams of—for a moment of surcease.
I like to feel them around me: my collection. Not the corpse-cuttings and cold relics that warriors prize, but living trophies. My prisoner, the girl who mocked me, the eyes of the spy. And one day, she will be there. She who failed me, and cheated me, and made my own blood rise up against me. For she is in this world, this Time. Somewhere she lives and breathes, wakes and sleeps, unsuspecting, believing me dead. I named her Morcadis, my coven-sister, my disciple and my weapon. I would have made her as Morgun, my long-dead twin—Morgun as she should have been—sharing her body, owning her soul. But she escaped from the domain of the Tree, and when Sysselore and I followed she turned on us with the crystal fire, and we burned. Sysselore was gone in an instant, but I had my mantle of flesh—flesh and power—and I crawled to the icy river, and plunged in, and was remade. And now I have returned to the world alone, to reclaim my kingdom—my island of Britain—to challenge Azmordis himself for the dominion of Men.
But first I will find her, and write my vengeance in blood on her naked flesh.
Fern found the note on her doormat before she went to work. The paper was pale brown and shredded around the edges; from the print on the back it might have been the fly-leaf of an old book. The writing was in greenish-blue ink, with many splotches, the words ill-formed and badly spelt. ‘The queane wil come and see you to nite at midnite. She sends you greting.’ There was no signature, but Fern suspected that this was because Skuldunder, if he was the scribe, could not spell his own name. She folded the note carefully, put it in her jacket pocket, and went to the office. She had half promised to keep Will informed of any developments, but a busy day left her little leisure for personal calls and anyway, she did not want to have to explain where she was going in the evening. There was no real reason for her reluctance, or none she could identify, but the thought of the forthcoming meeting with Lucas Walgrim filled her with both impatience and unease. Impatience because she was sure it was a waste of time—her time and his—and unease because it would touch on matters that were too near the bone, too close to the heart, to be discussed with a stranger. But she could not let him down. Good manners had ensnared her.
‘How will you recognise me?’ she had asked. ‘Carnation buttonhole? Rolled up copy of Hello!?’
‘I’ll know you,’ he had said, with a quiet certainty that was unnerving.
Not for the first time in her life, she wished she wasn’t quite so well brought up.
They met in a City bar not long after six. Fern arrived in time to get a small table to herself, reserving the spare chair, before the bulk of the rush-hour drinkers flooded in. As always when awaiting someone she’d never met, she checked each new arrival, particularly the men on their own, trying to match a face to the voice on the telephone. At one point, a young man stood in the entrance for a couple of minutes, peering round the room, and she thought with a sense of resignation, ‘This is it,’ but it wasn’t. He had the pink-faced, slightly smug good looks that youth so often assumes when it has too much money, but there was no sign of the single-mindedness or the underlying tension she had detected in the brief telephone conversation. He moved across the room, waylaying a blonde who had been screened by a pillar, and Fern switched off her expression of polite welcome and stirred the froth into her cappuccino.
When he finally arrived, only five minutes late although it seemed like much longer, he took her off guard. She was expecting someone who would pause, gaze about him, vaccillate; but he came towards her without hesitation or doubt, sat in the empty chair with no invitation. ‘Miss Capel. Hello. I’m Lucas Walgrim.’
Her initial reaction was that this was not a face she would trust. Attractive in the wrong way, with that taut-boned, clenched-in look, like a person who is accustomed to suppressing all emotion. A suggestion of something unsafe, an element of ruthlessness carefully concealed. No sense of humour. Under the black straight line of his brows his eyes were a startling light grey, nearly silver. She had never liked pale eyes. A lack of pigment, she had been told in her school years. Lack of colour, lack of warmth, lack of soul.
She said: ‘How did you recognise me?’
‘I’ve seen you before.’ She was the girl in his dream of the city, though older, the girl he had seen waking from oblivion. But there was no sign of the intense, arresting creature he remembered. She was just a classic London type, more woman than girl, discreetly power-suited, elegantly pretty, aloof, so inscrutable that she appeared almost bland.
She asked: ‘Where?’ and he didn’t know how to answer. He could not tell this cool sophisticate that he had seen her in his dreams. Instead, he was conveniently distracted by a waitress, ordering coffee and whisky for himself and, at Fern’s request, gin and tonic for her. Then he adopted boardroom tactics, changing the subject before she had time to repeat her question.
‘It was good of you to come. You said you were busy, so I won’t keep you. If I could just tell you about my sister—’
‘And then what?’ Fern knew he had deliberately evaded her earlier demand and was beginning to feel uneasy in a totally different way.
‘I don’t know. I was hoping it might strike a chord of some kind. I’m going on instinct here. I don’t have anything else to go on.’
‘I honestly don’t think I’ll be much help. What you need is some kind of support group…’
‘No. What I need is someone who’s been there—wherever Dana’s gone. Can’t you just try and talk to me?’
‘All right.’ Fern felt cornered. ‘What exactly happened to your sister?’
‘We had a New Year’s Eve bash at my father’s place in the country. I wasn’t in the room at the time, but I’m told Dana fell and hit her head. Not very hard. The doctors said she shouldn’t even have had concussion. When she passed out—well, I thought it was drink or drugs. She’s had a problem with both. I took her to the hospital, but they said she hadn’t taken anything and her alcohol level was high but not excessive. She just didn’t come round. They couldn’t understand it. They waffled about “abnormal reactions”, that sort of crap, but it was obvious they were stumped. She hasn’t even twitched an eyelid since then. Her pulse is so slow she’s barely alive. I heard it was like that with you.’
‘A little,’ Fern acknowledged. ‘I was very drunk, I blacked out, I stayed out. Then a week or so later, I came round. That’s really all I can tell you.’
His eyes looked lighter, she noticed, because of the shadows beneath. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘I know it isn’t. Tell me where you went, when you were unconscious.’
He noted with interest that her expression became, if possible, a shade blander. ‘Answer my question,’ she said.
‘Which question?’ he queried unnecessarily.
‘The one you dodged.’
He paused, thinking it over. ‘You might not believe me: that’s why I didn’t answer. I saw you in a dream. Twice. Nothing sentimental, don’t get that idea. The second time you were in a hospital bed, regaining consciousness. I only saw you for an instant, but the picture was very sharp. Too sharp for dreaming. You looked…intensely alive. More than now.’
He realised too late that he had been offensive, but her manner merely cooled a little further. She inquired noncommittally: ‘Do you often have such dreams? Dreams that stay with you?’
‘Occasionally. Did you dream, when you were in a coma?’
‘No.’ Their drinks arrived, covering a momentary stalemate. When the waitress had retreated, Fern pursued: ‘You said you dreamed about me twice. What happened in the first one?’
‘It didn’t make sense. There was a city—an ancient city—a bit like Ephesos in Turkey, only not in ruins—and a girl asking me for help. Then it changed suddenly, the way dreams do, and we were in the dark somewhere, and the girl turned into you. She looked much younger—fourteen, fifteen—but it was definitely you. The strange thing…’
‘Yes?’
‘I recognised you. I mean, the person I was in the dream recognised you. Whoever you were.’ When she did not respond, he added: ‘Do you follow me?’
‘Yes.’ Both expression and tone seemed to have passed beyond circumspection into a realm of absolute detachment. She sounded so remote, so blank, he knew that his words had meant something to her. Her drink was untouched, her hand frozen in the act of lifting her glass.
When he saw that she wasn’t going to elucidate he said: ‘Your turn.’
‘My…turn?’
‘You were going to tell me what happened when you were comatose. If you didn’t dream…?’
‘I couldn’t,’ she said slowly. ‘I wasn’t there. I was—outside my body, outside the world.’ She concluded with a furtive smile: ‘You might not believe me, of course.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Under a tree.’
‘Where? In a wood? A field? What kind of tree?’
He knew the questions were meaningless, but she answered them. ‘The only kind of tree—the first tree. The Tree all other trees are trying to be, and failing. No wood, no field. Just tree. Under the Tree, there was a cave, with three witches. It’s always three, isn’t it? The magic number. I was the third.’
‘Are you a witch?’ he asked, unsmiling. She looked very unmagical, with her sleek short hair and svelte besuited figure. But it troubled him that she did not either affirm or deny it. She glanced down at her hand—her left hand—as if it did not belong to her, and remembered her gin and tonic, and sipped it, slowly, as though she were performing an exercise in self-restraint. He had developed similar methods in business, learning to curb his occasional impetuosity, to suppress any inner weakness or self-doubt, to control every nuance of his manner. But she does it naturally, he thought. Without trying.
‘What happened next?’ he persisted. ‘You woke up?’
She gave a small shake of the head. ‘I had to find the way back. It was difficult. Dangerous. I had a guide…At this party, when your sister passed out, do you remember anything unusual? Or peculiar?’ He saw the alteration in her attitude, a new alertness in her looks, and experienced a pang which might have been hope, or might have been fear.
‘There were people taking coke and E. They were drinking thirty-year-old Scotch and forty-year-old brandy and absinthe and champagne. Some were discussing literature and French cuisine, religion and sex. Others were talking to the furniture. Many were incapable of talking at all. Nearly everyone was in fancy dress. How unusual do you want?’
If he was witty, Fern did not laugh. (No sense of humour, he thought.) ‘Did anyone see…a bird, an animal, a phantom? Something unexpected or uncanny?’
‘At least six people saw a headless ghost in the old tower—one or two had a conversation with it—but I understand that’s par for the course. Several of the guests wore animal costumes. I noticed a woman with a bird mask, rather beautiful and predatory, but—no, not that I know of. Nothing real.’
‘What is real,’ sighed Fern. It wasn’t a question.
There was a silence which he felt he should not break. She was looking at him in a way people rarely look at each other in a civilised society, as if she were assessing him, without either animosity or liking, fishing for clues to his character, trying to peer into his very soul. She made no attempt to disguise that look, and he thought it changed her, bringing her closer to his memory of the girl in the dreams. He found himself responding in kind, scanning her face as if it were the estimated output from some new investment project, or a painting he admired which rumour told him might be a fake.
Eventually she said: ‘You really believe your sister’s condition isn’t…mere oblivion, don’t you? You think she’s somewhere else?’
‘Mm.’
‘And I expect,’ she went on, ‘you sometimes know things without knowing how. You’re very good at second-guessing the market, or whatever it is you do in the City. Your colleagues think it’s sinister; they may suspect you have access to inside information.’
‘I don’t make many mistakes,’ he conceded.
‘You have a Gift,’ she said lightly—so lightly that he knew the phrase meant more than it said, he heard the importance of the final word.
‘So I’ve been told.’
‘By whom?’ Her tone had sharpened.
‘There was a nurse at the clinic, late one night. He was from an agency, filling in for someone who was off sick; he hasn’t been back since. He told me that there are people with certain powers…that I might be one of them.’
He has power, she thought. I can sense it coming off him like static. He has power, and he uses it, but he doesn’t know how. He’s like I was before I learnt witchcraft: he’s playing by feel. Only it’s far more dangerous, because he’s desperate, living on the edge. If his control should snap…
She asked: ‘Does your sister have this Gift?’
‘I don’t think so. Her only real talent is for making a mess of her life.’ After a minute, he went on: ‘I didn’t do enough for her.’
It was a bald statement of fact, not an apology, but for the first time Fern came close to liking him. ‘You’re doing something now,’ she said. ‘We’re doing something. At least, we’re going to try.’
She looked into his eyes: smile met smile. There had been few smiles throughout the meeting and these were understated, hers close-lipped, his tight-lipped, curiously similar. Something passed between them in that moment, something slight and intangible, connecting them.
Fern said: ‘There’s a lot here I don’t understand. Most of it, to be frank. It could be that your sister’s spirit was taken because of you, or even instead of you, but I’ve no idea by whom.’ The one who stole my spirit is dead, she thought, but there’s a new witch at large in the world, according to the goblins. I must learn more from Mabb. ‘I have to make some inquiries.’
‘Who do you ask,’ he said sceptically, ‘about something like this? A medium?’
‘A medium is just a middleman,’ Fern said. ‘Or middlewoman. I don’t need one. I’d like to visit your sister, if I may. I don’t suppose it will tell me anything, but I want to see her.’
‘I’ll arrange it.’ Suddenly, he gave her a full smile, gentling the tautness of his face. She noticed that there was a single broken tooth in his lower jaw, relic perhaps of some childhood accident. He obviously hadn’t cared enough to have it capped, and that tiny act of indifference made her warm to him another degree or two.
He said: ‘I knew you’d help.’ He didn’t thank her.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Fern responded. She didn’t promise.
Fern went home by tube, so absorbed in her own thoughts that she almost missed her stop. When she got back to the flat she made preparations, diligently, her mind elsewhere. She set out bottles, glasses, candles. Knowing she had left it too late, she tried to call Will, but on his home number she got a machine and his mobile was switched off. But she did get through to Gaynor.
‘What are you doing tonight?’
‘I’ve already done it,’ Gaynor said. ‘I went to a dreary film at an arts cinema with Hugh, I think because he hoped it would impress me, and then he told me that Vanessa doesn’t understand him, and then I declined to have sex with him again—I mean, I declined again, not that I had sex with him before—and now he says I don’t understand him either, but—’
‘Why should you want to?’ said Fern. ‘Forget about Hugh; this is important. Can you come round? I’m expecting a visit from royalty and I think I’d like someone else here. It saves explaining afterwards.’
There was a short pause. ‘Did you say royalty?’
‘Not that kind. Mabb, the goblin queen. Skuldunder dropped in the other night and I asked him to arrange it. I wasn’t going to tell you about it—’
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t want you involved,’ Fern temporised. ‘After last time…’
‘Look, I was scared last time, and I’ll probably be scared again, especially if there are bats. I scare easily. But it doesn’t matter. I’m your best friend. We’re supposed to be a team.’
‘Are we?’
‘Yes, of course. You, me, and…and Will.’
‘Some team,’ said Fern. ‘Two members don’t even speak to each other. Swallows and Amazons had better look out.’
‘Do you want me to come round or not?’ Gaynor interjected.
‘Yes, I do. Something’s happening, and I need to talk it over. You’re nearer than Ragginbone—’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘—and you don’t wear a smelly coat. Come round now?’
Gaynor came. Fern had already made coffee and they sat down amidst a scattering of candles while she explained about her meeting with Lucas Walgrim and the information she had received from Skuldunder.
‘You think there’s a connection?’ Gaynor asked.
‘Maybe. In magic, there are no coincidences. It’s very difficult for someone to separate another human soul from its body. I’ve been doing some reading in the last couple of years—Ragginbone gave me a load of stuff—and even the spells for it are obscure. It takes a lot of power. The Old Spirit has done it, and he still had to have the consent of his victim. He seems to be able to bend the rules sometimes; after all, I didn’t actually consent the night I was taken, but I had called him, and I was unconscious, and vulnerable. But when Morgus sent the owl for me I should have been able to return to myself, instead of being wrenched into another dimension. She took you once, too: remember?—only you were the wrong person so she sent you back again. Apparently, she used to collect souls. She would seal them in djinn-bottles.’
‘Gin-bottles?’ Gaynor queried.
‘D-J-I-N-N. The point is, she was very powerful. There is no record of Zohrâne managing spirit-body separation, though the evidence suggests Merlin could, and maybe Medea. It’s impossible to be sure when there’s so little contemporary documentation. Mostly, people wrote about what magicians did centuries afterwards, basing it on legend and hearsay.’
‘I didn’t know there was anything contemporary to Merlin or Medea,’ Gaynor said. Her job was the study and restoration of old books and manuscripts—the older the better—and a glimmer of professional enthusiasm had come into her eye.
Her friend reverted firmly to the original subject. ‘As far as I can tell, it takes a special kind of concentration to split someone from their physical body. I couldn’t begin to do it, though I can separate myself—that’s quite simple, many people do it in dreams, with no spell involved. You only need to be a little Gifted. The majority of people have some magic in them, even if they never use it. But Morgus’ power was exceptional. It looks as if Dana Walgrim’s spirit was stolen, like mine—only Morgus is dead. So we’re looking for someone with the same kind of power, which is not a nice thought. And Skuldunder has already come to me with a story of a new witch who may be both powerful and evil…’
‘Are you sure Morgus is dead?’
‘Of course I am. I saw her burn.’ Fern’s expression assumed a certain fixity, concealing unknown emotion. ‘I killed her.’
Gaynor knew she was trespassing in private territory. ‘She deserved it,’ she offered, aware it was no consolation.
‘“Many who die deserve life. Can you give it to them?”’ Fern retorted, paraphrasing Tolkien, and there was a sharp edge to her voice. She leaned forward too quickly, reaching for the coffee pot, knocking a candle from its holder and crying out in pain as the flame seared her left hand.
‘Put it under the tap,’ said Gaynor, fielding the candle with rather more caution.
‘It doesn’t hurt much.’
‘Yes, but you know it will. Why have you got all these candles? The place looks like a fire hazard.’
‘Atmosphere,’ said Fern on her way to the kitchen. ‘Atmosphere is very important to werefolk. And Mabb is royalty, of a sort. I thought I should make an effort.’
‘She’s late,’ said Gaynor, glancing at the clock. ‘You said she would come at midnight.’
‘Of course she is,’ Fern responded from the next room, over the sound of the tap running. ‘Punctuality may be the politeness of kings, but she’s a queen. Ragginbone told me all about her. Outside her own kind, her prestige is limited, so she exercises caprice whenever she can. She’s behaving like any Hollywood superstar, keeping the audience waiting.’
Gaynor was staring fixedly at the curtains over the central window. The unstable candleflames made the shadows move; creases that should have been motionless seemed to twitch into life. She tried to picture a shape or shapes there, developing slowly. She was sure she could see something—the crook of an elbow, the point of an ear—when the smell reached her. It was a smell both animal and vegetable, a rank, hot, stoaty smell mingled with the green stink of an overripe bog. It invaded her nostrils from somewhere just to the left of her chair, making her gorge rise. She gasped: ‘Fern—!’ even as she looked round.
The goblin was standing barely a yard away. Her appearance was almost as vivid as her odour, the large head swivelling curiously on a worm-supple neck, the stick-thin limbs dressed in some garment made from dying flowers and spidersilk, with a rag of fawnskin over one shoulder. Wings plucked from a swallowtail butterfly fluttered in vain behind her. Another butterfly, in blue and green brilliants, secured the fawnskin; her nails were painted gold; the lids of her slanting eyes were zebra-striped in cream and bronze. A crown of leaves, set with the wing-cases of beetles, adorned hair as short and colourless as mouse-fur, and by way of a sceptre she held a peeled switch as tall as herself, topped with a bunch of feathers and the skull of a small bird. Gaynor found herself thinking irresistibly that the queen resembled a nightmare version of a flower fairy who had recently raided a children’s makeup counter. She made a desperate attempt to rearrange her expression into something polite.
‘You must be the witch,’ said the goblin, lifting her chin in order to look down her nose. ‘I honour you with my presence.’
‘Thank you, but…I’m not a witch,’ Gaynor stammered. ‘I’m just her friend.’
‘Councillor,’ said Fern, resuming her place on the sofa. ‘We are indeed honoured.’ Her tone was courteous but not fulsome. She’s a natural diplomat, Gaynor thought. It must be the years in PR. ‘May I offer your Highness some refreshment?’
The queen gave a brief nod and Fern mixed her a concoction of vodka, sugar, and strawberry coulis which seemed to meet with the royal approval. Gaynor, remembering Skuldunder’s reaction to the wine, wondered secretly if she had any previous experience of alcohol. Having accepted the drink Mabb seated herself in a chair opposite, leaning her switch against it. Her eyes, black from edge to edge, gleamed in the candlelight like jet beads.
‘It is well that you have come,’ Fern went on. ‘This new witch, if she is indeed powerful, could be a threat to both werefolk and Men. In time of danger it is necessary that those of us with wisdom and knowledge should take council together.’
‘What wisdom does she have?’ Mabb demanded, flashing a glare at Gaynor. ‘I have not talked to a witch in many a hundred year. I do not talk to ordinary mortals at all.’
‘She is not ordinary,’ said Fern. ‘She may be young, but she is learned in the ancient histories, and wiser than I. She stood at my side in a time of great peril, and did not flinch.’
Yes I did, I flinched frequently, Gaynor said, but only to herself.
Mabb evidently decided she would condescend to approve the extra councillor. ‘Loyalty to one another is a human thing,’ she said. ‘I am told it is important to you. Goblins are loyal only to me.’
‘We may have different customs,’ said Fern, ‘but we can still be allies. I am gratified to see your Highness wears my gifts.’
‘They please me,’ said the queen, scanning her gilded nails. ‘More gifts would be acceptable, and would confirm our alliance.’
‘Of course,’ said Fern. ‘When our meeting is concluded, I have other gifts for you. But first, I need to know more of this witch.’
Mabb made a strange gesture, like a parody of one Fern had learnt to use in summoning. ‘Skuldunder!’
The burglar materialized hesitantly.
‘Bring the exile,’ ordered the queen.
Skuldunder duly vanished, reappearing presently with another goblin in tow. He looked as brown and wrinkled as a dried apple, and there was the stamp of past terror on his face, but now he seemed in the grip of a lassitude that exceeded even fear. ‘He was a house-goblin,’ the queen explained with a flicker of contempt, ‘but he was forced to flee his house. He withers from loss and shame.’ She turned to her subjects. ‘This witch is my friend, our ally. She is not like the rest of witchkind. You must tell her about the sorceress who drove you from your house. I command you!’
The old goblin shivered a little and blinked, but said nothing.
‘What is his name?’ asked Fern.
‘Dibbuck,’ said Skuldunder.
‘Dibbuck,’ Fern dropped to the floor, bringing herself on a level with his vacant gaze, ‘I need your help. I have to learn all I can about this woman, in case I have to dispose of her. I know it’s hard for you to talk about it, especially to someone like me, but please try. It may be vital.’ And, after a pause: ‘Is she young or old?’
‘Young,’ said Dibbuck at last. His voice was not soft but faint, as if it had already begun to fade. ‘Young-looking. Old inside.’
‘Could you describe her?’
But this Dibbuck did not seem able to do. Goblins, Fern realised, see humans differently, not feature for feature but more as we see animals. ‘Green dress,’ he volunteered, and then: ‘White dress.’ For some reason he shuddered. ‘Much hair.’
This was hardly unique, Fern reflected. Most witches favoured long hair. Perhaps that was why she kept hers so short.
She groped for the right questions to ask. ‘Do you know when she came to the house?’
Dibbuck was largely oblivious to dates. ‘The party,’ he said. ‘Big party.’ A faraway echo of remembered mischief brightened his face. ‘I added things to the drinks. Salt. Red pepper. There were many people in many clothes. Long clothes, short clothes. Masks.’
‘Fancy dress?’ Fern said quickly.
Dibbuck looked bewildered.
‘Never mind. So the witch was there?’
‘Didn’t see her. Too many people. But she was there after.’ He added: ‘The hag came later, and the cat, and the gypsy.’
Fern tried to elicit further details, with limited success. The hag appeared to be some kind of servant, the gypsy maybe a temporary worker. ‘Tell me about the cat.’
‘It was a goblin-cat,’ interrupted the queen. ‘A sallowfang. He was afraid of it.’
‘What’s a goblin-cat?’
‘They were the cats of the king of the Underworld,’ Mabb explained, with the complacency of a child who has access to privileged information. ‘They have no fur, and their skin is black or white, sometimes striped or piebald. They are bigger than normal cats, and very cunning.’ She concluded, with a narrowing of the eyes: ‘They used to hunt goblins.’
‘A sphinx-cat,’ suggested Gaynor. ‘I’ve never seen one, but I know they’re hairless.’
‘These sound as if they’re magical, or part magical,’ said Fern. ‘Could be a relative.’
‘This one chased him,’ said Mabb, indicating Dibbuck. ‘He was lucky to escape. A sallowfang can smell a spider in a rainstorm.’
‘What about the household ghosts?’ said Fern. ‘Skuldunder said something about an exorcism.’
‘She made the circle,’ Dibbuck said, ‘in the spellchamber. I saw them all streaming in—they couldn’t resist—Sir William—the kitchen imp—little memories like insects, buzzing. I pinned myself to the floor with a splinter, so I couldn’t go. They were trapped in the circle, spinning round and round. Then she…’ His voice ran down like a clockwork toy, into silence.
‘She opened the abyss,’ Mabb finished for him. ‘I thought my servant told you.’
‘You mean—Limbo?’ hazarded Gaynor.
‘Limbo is a place of sleep and dreams,’ Mabb responded impatiently. ‘It is a part of this world. The abyss is between worlds. It is—emptiness. They say those who are cast into it may be swallowed up forever. When mortals die they pass the Gate. We go to Limbo, until this world is remade. But no one may return from the abyss until all worlds are changed. I thought even humans would know that.’
‘We have our own lore,’ said Fern. ‘It must take a great deal of power, to open a gap between worlds…’
‘And for what?’ Mabb sounded savage with indignation. ‘A few ragged phantoms—an imp or two—a handful of degenerates. So much power—for so little. She is mad, this witch, mad and dangerous. She might do anything.’
For all her eccentric appearance and freakish temperament, thought Fern, the goblin-queen showed a vein of common sense. ‘Can you recall her name?’ she asked Dibbuck, but he shook his head. ‘The name of the house, then?’
‘Wrokeby.’ His face twisted in sudden pain.
‘Is there anything else I should know?’
Dibbuck looked confused. ‘The prisoner,’ he said eventually. ‘In the attic.’
‘What kind of prisoner? Was it a girl?’
‘No…Couldn’t see. Something—huge, hideous…A monster.’
Not Dana Walgrim, Fern concluded. ‘What else?’
Dibbuck mumbled inaudibly, gazing into corners, seeking inspiration or merely a germ of hope. ‘She had a tree,’ he said. ‘In the cellar.’
‘A tree in the cellar?’ Fern was baffled. ‘How could a tree grow in the dark?’
‘Seeds grow in the dark,’ said Mabb. ‘Plant-magic is very old; maybe the witchkind do not use it now. You take a seed, a fortune-seed, or a love-seed, and as it germinates so your fortune waxes, or your lover’s affection increases. They used to be popular: mortals are always obsessed with wealth or love. If the seed does not sprout, then you have no fortune, no love.’
‘Not a seed,’ said Dibbuck. ‘It was a tree, a young tree. It was uprooted, but it was alive. I smelt the forest, I saw the leaves move. She wrapped it in silk, and fed it, and sang to it.’
‘Does this ritual mean anything to you?’ Fern asked Mabb, inadvertently forgetting to give her her royal title.
But Mabb, too, had forgotten her dignity. Possibly the vodka had affected her. ‘I have never heard of such a thing,’ she said. ‘A woman who wraps a tree in swaddling clothes, and lullabyes it to sleep, sounds to me more foolish than magical. Perhaps, if she is besotted with these fancies, she may not be dangerous after all. When I wanted to play at motherhood, I would steal a babe from a rabbit’s burrow, or a woodman’s cradle, not pluck a bunch of dead twigs. Of course,’ she added with an eye on Fern, ‘that was long ago. I have outgrown such folly. Besides, human babies scream all the time. It becomes tiresome.’
‘So I’m told,’ said Fern. ‘I need to think about all this. Your Highness, may I have some means of calling on you and your servants again, should it be necessary? This witch may indeed be mad or foolish, but I fear otherwise. I must make a spell of farsight, and then I may know what further questions to ask your subject.’
‘I will have the royal burglar pass by here othernights,’ Mabb decreed, magnanimously. ‘If you wish to speak with him, pin a mistletoe-sprig to your door.’
‘It’s out of season,’ Fern pointed out.
‘Well,’ Mabb shrugged, ‘any leaves will do.’ She waited a minute, beginning to tap her foot. ‘You mentioned gifts…’
Fern went into her bedroom for a hasty trawl through makeup drawer and jewel-box.
‘Can you make a spell of farsight?’ Gaynor asked when they were alone.
‘I could light the spellfire,’ Fern said, ‘if I had any crystals. That might tell me something. Do you want a G and T?’
‘Actually,’ said Gaynor, ‘just tea would be good. I’ll make it.’
‘No, it’s all right.’ Fern headed for the kitchen.
‘Are you—are you going to tell Will about this?’
‘Probably.’ There was a pause filled with the noise of gurgling water, and the click of a switch on the kettle. ‘Why?’
Gaynor stiffened her sinews, screwing her courage, such as it was, to the sticking point. ‘I just think you should. Because he’s your brother. Because three heads are better than two. Because we’re a team.’
‘Are we?’
‘You said so.’
‘I think that was your idea.’ Fern came to the kitchen doorway, propping herself against the frame. ‘Last time you both nearly got killed. That’s not going to happen again. I can protect myself, but I can’t always protect you, so you must—you must promise—to do exactly what I say, and stay out of trouble. I don’t like the sound of this witch. I didn’t fully understand what he meant when Skuldunder said she opened the abyss, but I do now. You must promise me—’
‘No,’ said Gaynor, baldly. ‘I mean, I could say it, but it wouldn’t be true, and anyway, you haven’t the right. I may not be Gifted like you but that doesn’t mean you can control me, or exclude me. Or Will. I got involved last time because you were in denial, and now I’m involved for good. You can’t change that.’ She spoke in a hurry, determined to get the words out before Fern could interrupt or she lost her nerve.
After a minute the set look that was becoming habitual to Fern relaxed. ‘Sorry,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘I’ve been a control freak from childhood. Years of managing Dad. Just…be careful this time. No rushing off into the dragon’s den. Please.’
‘No fear,’ said Gaynor with an uncertain smile.
Fern returned to the kettle, reemerging presently with two mugs of tea, both overfull. As she set them down the contents of the left one splashed over the rim. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Not again.’ She sucked at the injury, then lowered her hand, extending it until it was directly under the lamplight. ‘Gaynor…’ The scald-mark faded even as she watched, leaving her skin unblemished. There was no other burn to be seen.
‘What did you do?’ Gaynor demanded. ‘Is it more magic?’
‘Maybe,’ said Fern, ‘but not mine.’ There was a long moment while recollection and doubt turned over in her mind. ‘This happened before…when I set fire to Morgus. My hand was burned. Kal made me dip it in the river…’
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