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‘I think,’ said Bartlemy, ‘he’s the key.’
‘I have experience of keys,’ said Ragginbone. ‘Perhaps I should have said, what is he?’
‘A boy. A relatively normal boy, insofar as anyone is normal. Intelligent, resourceful, courageous – but a teenager.’
‘He’ll grow out of that,’ said Ragginbone. ‘Is he Gifted?’
‘Not in the accepted sense. The power of the Lodestone on which Atlantis was founded has never touched his genes. But he has … ability. To be precise, the ability to move between worlds. There is a portal in his mind – he passes it in dreams – in extreme cases, his sleeping form disappears altogether, materialising in another universe. He seems to have little or no control over the phenomenon, but I suspect that someone else may be controlling him – guiding him – even protecting him. Someone from beyond the Gate. He has dreamed of a dying world, of a few survivors on the last planet, one stop from extinction. The ruler there is trying to perform a Great Spell. Plainly, Nathan has a vital part to play, presumably as a gatherer of certain objects. He has already retrieved the Grail, as you have heard, also a sword.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Ragginbone, after a pause. For him, this was strong language. ‘Great Spells are perilous, and may be millennia in the preparation. Are you sure?’
‘The necessary elements are there. The feminine principle, the masculine principle, the circle that binds. A cup, a sword, a crown. The crown appears to have been mislaid, but no doubt it will turn up in time. Whenever that time may be.’
‘A cup … The Grimthom Grail?’
Bartlemy nodded. ‘I have been wondering,’ he said – changing the subject, or so it seemed, but Ragginbone knew better – ‘about a theory of yours. The Gift, as we know, is not native to the human race: the Stone of Power in Atlantis warped those who lived in its vicinity, giving them the talents their descendants still possess. Longevity, spellpower, the various madnesses that they engender. You have always maintained that the Stone itself was the essence of another universe – a universe with a high level of magic – accidentally catapulted into our own. Supposing, instead, it was just a part of another universe – an entire galaxy, for example – and its presence in our world was no accident …?’
‘In infinity and eternity,’ Ragginbone said, ‘all things are possible. What are you suggesting?’
‘Perhaps our universe was chosen – as a refuge or an escape route – many ages ago, at least in our Time. The Gift may have been given so that certain individuals could perform their part: Josevius Grimling-Thorn, called Grimthorn, who accepted the Grail, and myself, as Nathan’s protector when he was a baby. My role has been very minor; nonetheless …’
Ragginbone was frowning. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said abruptly.
‘It was merely a hypothesis,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I was looking for a pattern in Chaos, but—’
‘You misunderstand me. The theory is viable. That’s what I don’t like.’
‘You mean—’
‘I was thinking of the classics,’ Ragginbone said. ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’
‘I fear Greeks bearing gifts. A reference to the Trojan Horse, a gift whose acceptance by the Trojans led to the downfall of their city.’
‘Exactly,’ Ragginbone said.
It rained heavily that night. In the visitor’s bedroom under the eaves the roof leaked, though it had never leaked before. Ragginbone woke, or dreamed he woke, and saw the steady drip-drip from the ceiling, and the water spreading in a puddle on the floorboards. Presently, a hand emerged – a white cold hand with bluish nails, like the hand of someone who has drowned – and groped round the edge of the puddle, seeking for purchase. The wolf-dog approached and growled her soundless growl, snapping at the crawling fingers, and the hand withdrew, slipping back into the water. The puddle shrank and vanished. The dripping stopped.
‘No spirit can enter here uninvited,’ Bartlemy said in the morning. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t just a dream?’
‘The time is out of joint,’ Ragginbone said. ‘The old spells are unravelling; even the Ultimate Laws may no longer hold. The future casts more than a shadow. Whatever is coming, it may change everything.’
‘Keep in touch,’ Bartlemy adjured, seeing his visitor to the door.
‘I will,’ promised Ragginbone. He did not say how. He strode off under a drizzling sky with the she-wolf at his heels, and Bartlemy returned to the sanctum of his living room, looking more troubled than he had done in a long, long while.
Another visitor came to Thornyhill Manor that week, but he came to the back door and would have been seen by no one, unless they had weresight. He was barely four feet high and bristled with tufts of hair and beard, sprouting in all directions as if the designer of his physiognomy had never quite sorted out which was which. His clothing was equally haphazard, rags of leather, Hessian, oilcloth tacked together more or less at random, covering his anatomy but unable to produce a recognisable garment. But the most noticeable thing about him was his smell – the stale, indescribable smell of someone who has slept in a foxhole for a hundred years and thinks bathing is bad for your health.
Bartlemy seemed oblivious to it. He made food for his guest, rather strange food, with ingredients from a jar that sat on an obscure little shelf in the corner of the kitchen all by itself. His cooking gave off the usual aroma of herbs and spices and general deliciousness, but Hoover sniffed suspiciously at a morsel that fell to the floor, and let it lie. While his guest was eating Bartlemy poured two tankards of something home-brewed and flavoured with honey and sat back, waiting with his customary patience.
The dwarf made appreciative noises as he cleared his plate.
‘Ye can chafe up a mean dishy o’ fatworms,’ he remarked in an accent whose origins were lost in the mists of time, ‘e’en though they were no fresh. Howsomedever …’
‘You didn’t come to talk of cooking, I imagine,’ Bartlemy supplied.
‘Nay. Nay, I didna, but there’s no saying I wouldna rather talk o’ food and drink and the guid things in life, instead o’ the dark time to come. Ye’ll be knowing it, I daresay. Ye’re one who would read the signs and listen to the whisperings. The Magister, he used to say to me: There’ll be one day, one hour – one hour o’ magic and destiny – one hour to change the world. I didna care for that, ye ken. The world changes, all the time, but slow, slow. What kind o’ change can ye be having in a wee hour? It canna be anything guid, not to be coming that quick. Aye, and the Magister’s face would light when he spoke of it, wi’ the light o’ greed and madness, though he were niver mad. He didna have that excuse.’
Some time in the Dark Ages the dwarf had worked for Josevius Grimthorn, scion of the ancient Thorn family – once owners of Thornyhill – and a sorcerer rumoured to have sold his soul to the devil. What he had gained from the transaction no one knew, but he was said to have lived nearly seven hundred years and died in a fire in his own satanic chapel, leaving the Grimthorn Grail to the guardianship of his descendants. That guardianship, like the manor, had passed to Bartlemy. The dwarf had fallen out with his master and been imprisoned for centuries in a subterranean chamber in the Darkwood, until Nathan and Hazel inadvertently released him. The lingering dread of his old master’s activities still remained with him.
His name, when he remembered it, was Login Nambrok.
‘Did he tell you exactly when this hour is due?’ Bartlemy asked.
The dwarf heaved his shoulders in a shrug bigger than his whole body. ‘He said I would feel it,’ he offered, ‘i’ the marrow o’ my bones. I’m no siccar there’s much marrow left – my bones are auld and dry – but there’s an ache in me like a warning o’ foul weather to come. And there are other signs than my auld bones. The sma’ creatures i’ the wood, they’re leaving – aye, or scurrying round and round like they dinna ken where to go. And there’s birds flying south wi’ tidings o’ darkness in the north, and birds flying north wi’ rumours o’ trouble in the south, and so it goes on. There’s times I think the wind itself has a voice, and it’s whispering among the leaves, but mebbe that’s a’ fancy. And there’s them – the invisible ones – they’d gather down by the chapel ruin, under the leaves, muttering together in the auld tongue, though I doot they understood the words – muttering and muttering the charms that magicked them. But lately …’ He broke off with something like a shudder.
Bartlemy looked a question.
‘There was a hare I’d been following,’ Nambrok said. ‘I’d fancied him for my dinner, and I’d been stalking him a while, quiet as a tree spider, and he went that way. They saw him. Time was, they wouldn’t have troubled any beast, but they saw him and chased him, down the valley and up the valley, chased him till he couldna run further, and then they were on him and crowding in his head, and now the puir creature is madder ‘n March, and bites his own kind, and snarls like a dog when ye come near him. That’s no honest end for a beastie. And ye canna eat a creature that’s been so enspelled. There’ve been others, too … and one day it’ll be man, not beast. It’ll be some chiel walking in the woods, or a dog that sets on his master. There’s no reason to it – nothing to guard – no threat – but …’
‘They’re out of control,’ Bartlemy concluded. And he repeated, more to himself than his companion: ‘The old spells are unravelling. Things are beginning to fall apart …’
‘Aye,’ said the dwarf, ‘and there’s little ye can be doing aboot it, or so I’m thinking.’
‘Maybe,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But we can try.’
Above Nathan’s house a single star shone. The night was misty and the sky obscured, but that one star shone brightly, a steady pinpoint of light looking down on the bookshop, while Nathan sat on the edge of the rooflight, looking up. When the dreams were most intense – when half his life seemed to happen in worlds whose reality was still unproven – he would climb up to the roof and gaze at the star, and that kept him sane. Winter and summer, its position never altered. It had been there now for two years and more, a star that did not twinkle or move along the set pathways of the heavens – a star that could not be seen beyond the borders of Ede – fixed in its place like a lamp to guide him home. His star.
He went to bed, reaching in his mind for the portal that would once more let him through, and dreamed of the star.
It hung in a chamber of darkness at the top of a tower a mile high. Light streamed outwards from its heart but seemed to go nowhere and illuminate nothing, absorbed into the gloom around it. Other stars were suspended round the periphery of the room, pale globes emitting a similar radiance, but it was his star at the centre, turning slowly on its own axis, a crystalline eye of intercosmic space. A lens on another world. Here, his world was the otherworld, the alien country. This was Arkatron on Eos, a city at the end of Time. In this room with no visible walls or floor a ruler thousands of years old – a ruler who had held a whole universe under his sway – gazed beyond the Gate to find a refuge for the last of his people, a way of escape from the Contamination that had eaten the numberless galaxies of his realm. By day, his subjects went robed and masked against the poisonous sun; by night, they slept uneasily, anticipating the End. But in this chamber it was always night. Nathan’s thought floated in the darkness, waiting. Presently, the Grandir came.
If he had a name, no one knew it. Other Grandirs had come and gone, leaving their names behind them, but he was last, and nameless. In a universe with a high level of magic, to know someone’s name is to have power over him: the power of summons, even of Command, if the summoner is strong enough. Like knowing the Prime Minister’s mobile number, Nathan reflected, smiling to himself in thought. I bet he doesn’t give that to just anybody. But the Grandir didn’t tell his name even to his nearest and dearest – if he had them – not even to his bridesister Halmé, Halmé the childless, whose beauty was a legend among her people, though few had ever looked on her face. She went unmasked only in private chambers, for the eyes of a privileged few. As for the Grandir, Nathan had seen his face naked just once, in a dream that plucked him from danger, and the memory of it still made him shiver, though he wasn’t sure why.
The Grandir wore a mask now, a white mask with perfect sculpted features, lips slightly parted to allow for speech, eye-slots covered with bulbs of black glass. He was tall even for a tall race, and his protective clothing either padded or emphasised the great width of his shoulders and the mass of what must be a muscular torso. A cowl concealed both head and hair; gauntlets were on his hands. In the gloom of the chamber Nathan could distinguish few details, but he knew the costume from many times before. He watched with the eyes of his dream as the Grandir moved among the star-globes, not touching them yet somehow controlling their rotation. It was strange to be intangible where he had once been solid, invisible where he had once been seen. He wanted to say something, but knew he would have no voice.
Every so often, a picture was projected onto the ceiling from one of the globes, a glimpse into another world. Nathan saw a castle which looked familiar – not really a castle, more a house with castle trimmings – and with a sudden shock he recognised Carboneck, where he had found the Traitor’s Sword. There were people crowding outside, in a city which had once been empty, people with bright happy faces, and a girl came out onto the steps, arm-in-arm with a young man, a girl with a lot of hair falling in many waves almost to her waist. She wore a crown of white flowers like tiny stars and a white dress which glittered with gems or embroidery. Nell, Nathan thought with a sudden stab in his heart. Nell in her wedding gown … Princess Nellwyn, who had been his friend and ally in the alien kingdom of Wilderslee, when he’d drawn the sword it was forbidden to touch, the sword possessed by a malevolent spirit and endorsed by legend … He’d kissed her in the Deepwoods under the many-coloured trees – but that was ages ago, more than a year, in a dream long faded. And in her time many years must have passed, and her face was lit with love, and Carboneck of the shadows had put out all the flags and was garlanded for a party …
Another picture, another place. A world of sea – the world of Nathan’s latest dream – a world he had visited, though only briefly, once or twice before. ‘Widewater,’ said the Grandir as if to himself, and though he spoke softly his voice was a shock, breaking the silence of that high chamber. A voice like the rasp of iron on velvet, like the whisper of thunder, like the caress of fire. ‘The realm of Nefanu the mer-goddess, who hates all things that breathe the air. But there is always land under the sea, under the blue deeps and the green shallows. One day the mountains will lift up their heads, and touch the clouds once more.’
The star-globe could not see beneath the waves, but the image showed several marine animals leaping and diving in a glitter of spray – seals? No: dolphins or porpoises. But there was one among them who looked different, a mercreature with arms which glowed like pearl and a purple tail, flying higher than the others, almost as if she would take wing. And when the school had moved on she remained, head above water, dark hair uncoiling like smoke in the wave-pattern, gazing up into the sunlight, up at a star she could not see. Denaero? Nathan wondered, but the vision was too far off to tell.
Then Widewater vanished, and now it was his star upside down on the ceiling. His world. The patchwork of roofs and gardens that was Ede, little streets and twittens and paths, the meadows stretching down to the river. The mooring at Riverside House, with an inflatable tied up there, and children jumping on and off – presumably the Rayburns – under the casual supervision of their mother. One little girl – a brown-skinned elf with nubbly plaits – slithered down the bank and fell in, disappearing immediately under the water. No one noticed. Nathan wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t be heard in the dream, let alone beyond. For what seemed like an age the river-surface remained unbroken. Then her head bobbed up again, mouth open in a wail, as though she had been thrust up from below, and her family were snatching at her, too many rescuers tangling with each other in their haste, and she was plucked out of the water, onto the bank, and hugged and fussed over and dried.
The picture blinked out, and Nathan was just a thought in the dark. The Grandir was standing close to him, a huge physical presence where he had none – Nathan could hear the murmur of his breath through the mask, sense the steady motor of his pulse which seemed to make the air vibrate. And suddenly Nathan felt the Grandir was aware of him, listening for his thought, reaching out with more-than-human senses for the ghost that hovered somewhere near, unseen but not unknown. An inexplicable panic flooded his spirit, violent as nausea, and the dream spun away, and he was pitched back into wakefulness on the heaving mattress of his own bed.
Gradually, the mattress stabilised and Nathan subsided into normal sleep. There were no more dream-journeys to other worlds, but he was haunted by images of Princess Nell in her wedding dress, running and running through an endless network of corridors, while he tried in vain to follow. Her laughter woke him in the morning, fading into music as the alarm went off and his radio started to play.
TWO Terror Firma (#ulink_92548cc0-179e-5b00-94b2-dd9fe199c7fc)
For a place where a murderer had lived, Riverside House seemed to Annie, as ever, curiously lacking in atmosphere. The round towers which had formerly been oast houses were joined by a two-storey building with all mod cons, currently littered with boxes – boxes sealed or opened, half unpacked or collapsed into folds for re-use – and assorted furniture, often in the wrong place. There was a sofa in the kitchen and a double bed in the living room. Daubs of paint on the walls indicated experimentation with future colour schemes. Much of the kitchen had turned lemon yellow, decorated with random stencils of art nouveau vegetables. The Rayburns were bringing their own atmosphere, Annie thought, but there was nothing underneath. Several murders and the residence of a dark enchantress had left little impression.
‘Have a seat,’ said Ursula Rayburn. ‘No – not there! Sorry. That’s Gawain’s school project.’ She picked up a fragile construction that seemed to consist mostly of paper, feathers and glue. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? I think it’s meant to be a phoenix.’
‘I’m sure it’s just like one,’ Annie said obligingly.
‘Those pink fluffy bits look awfully like Liberty’s feather boa. She was wondering where it had got to. Oh well, it’s such a tiny sacrifice for her to make for her brother’s artistic development. All my children are so creative.’ She sighed happily. ‘Except Michael, but he’s a sort of mathematical genius, so that’s all right … I hear Nathan’s frightfully brilliant too?’
‘He does okay,’ Annie said, feeling uncomfortable. She had no desire to boast of Nathan’s genius or creativity. All she wanted was for him to be as normal as possible – and under the circumstances, that was difficult enough.
‘Did you get hold of a plumber?’ she went on, changing the subject.
‘Oh yes,’ Ursula said. ‘Some firm in Crowford – but he said he couldn’t find anything wrong, and I said, there’s got to be. We keep finding water on the floor. So he said, maybe the roof leaks – it has rained a lot lately – but I said, then it would be on the top floor, and it isn’t, it’s downstairs. Anyway, he thinks it could be sort of funnelled down somehow, but I don’t believe it. I haven’t found any damp patches on the walls or ceiling.’
Annie asked, a little hesitantly: ‘Could I see where—?’ She expected Ursula to find her curiosity bizarre, but her hostess clearly thought she was just trying to be helpful.
‘Of course you can.’ She led Annie through into the ground floor room in one of the towers, which had once been a study. ‘This is going to be a sitting room,’ she explained. ‘I love the shape. At the moment, Romany’s sleeping here—’ a vague gesture encompassed a mattress on the floor ‘—and Michael and Gawain are upstairs. Jude and Lib are too old to share so they have their own rooms. The murder room’s going to be a guest bedroom – but only when I feel it’s been completely purged of bad vibes.’
Annie grinned. ‘So when people come to stay you can tell them: We’ve put you in the haunted room…?’
‘Actually,’ Ursula said, ‘I haven’t really sensed any ghosts. It’s a bit disappointing. At least, not exactly disappointing, but when a house has a history like this – well, you’d expect more than just vibes, wouldn’t you? It isn’t that I want to see an apparition or anything, but I did think … You know, a bloodstain that won’t scrub out, or – or perhaps moaning in the night. Something.’
‘And all you’ve got is a puddle on the floor,’ Annie said thoughtfully. In the middle of the room was a large damp patch where the carpet still hadn’t dried out.
‘There’s nothing ghostly about that,’ Ursula retorted. ‘It’s just a bloody nuisance. I suppose we’ll have to get someone to look at the roof next. I tell you, I’m going to sue that surveyor …’
They went back into the kitchen and she poured coffee.
‘We had an awful fright last weekend,’ she went on. ‘The kids wanted a boat so much, so Donny got them an inflatable – it’s on the bank now, down by the jetty – and they were messing around with it, and Romany fell in. I don’t know how it happened – that river is dodgy, isn’t it? She must’ve gone right under, and then she popped up again, and we got her out somehow, and she was fine, but it absolutely terrified me. I mean, she’s eight, she can swim a bit, but she kept saying how the weeds pulled her under. I told them all, they’re to stay away from the river, but of course they won’t.’
Absently, Annie found herself murmuring the familiar lines:
‘Cloud on the sunset
Wave on the tide …’
‘What’s that?’ Ursula asked.
‘It’s a sort of local folk-rhyme,’ Annie said. ‘About the river.
Cloud on the sunset
Wave on the tide
Fish from the deep sea
Swim up the Glyde.
The river’s tidal, you see.’ She didn’t go on with the poem.
‘Does that mean you can get dolphins and things? Like in the Thames?’ Ursula looked enthusiastic, then dubious. ‘Surely not – this river’s far too small. I expect that’s just fanciful.’
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Fanciful.’ She gazed pensively into her coffee, unsure of her own thoughts – or fears. Unsure what to say, and what to leave out.
Water on the floor – in the room where Romany slept. And it was Romany who fell in the river …
‘I think,’ she said, ‘you should keep an eye on her.’
‘On who?’
‘Romany.’
‘I always do. Though in the main, she’s such a good child. A bit solitary – always inventing her own games, making up imaginary friends, going off on adventures with them. Of course, she includes Gawain sometimes – he’s her baby brother, after all. I expect she’ll grow up to be a great novelist, or playwright, or something.’
As long as she does grow up, Annie thought.
Or was she being paranoid?
She would have to discuss it with Bartlemy when the opportunity offered.
Hazel thought too much of her time at Thornyhill Manor was spent on school work. She didn’t know quite how it had happened, but in the last few months she had begun re-doing her lessons with Bartlemy, and although a tiny part of her was secretly pleased that her grades had gone up, the stubborn, awkward, Hazelish part still told her lessons weren’t exactly her thing, and she would never do really well, so it was all a waste of effort. Besides, school work was boring, and she was supposed to be there to learn about magic. Despite her stated aversion to it, magic wasn’t boring.
‘Could we try the spellfire again?’ she said one day, off-handly. ‘I’m sick of maths. I never get it right.’
Bartlemy’s mild gaze narrowed with a hint of amusement. ‘You’re doing fine with that geometry,’ he pointed out. ‘Maths teaches you to think. If you do magic without thought you’ll end up like your great-grandmother. Do you want that?’
‘N-no. But I’ve done enough thinking for one day …’
‘As it happens,’ Bartlemy said, ‘there is something with which I need your help. But it could be dangerous. I want to be sure you won’t lose your head.’
‘Dangerous?’ Hazel brightened, doubted, dimmed. In her experience, grownups didn’t normally ask you to do dangerous things. But then, Bartlemy was unlike any other grownup.
She said: ‘It’s usually Nathan who gets to do the dangerous stuff.’
‘This time it’s you,’ Bartlemy said.
‘What is it?’
‘The behaviour of the gnomons is becoming … unpredictable. Something needs to be done about them.’
‘I always carry iron when I walk in the woods,’ Hazel said, thinking of the number in her coat pocket – a number originally made to go on the door of a house – which Nathan had provided for her protection two years ago. ‘But I haven’t seen – sensed – them around for ages. Anyway, I thought they only attacked when someone threatened the Grail – or Nathan.’
‘So did I,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But the rules seem to be changing. I am told they are getting out of control. Someone saw a hare pursued and sent mad. The next time it could be a dog which will turn on its owner – or a person. They have to be neutralised.’
‘How?’ Hazel asked bluntly.
‘If we can trap them in an iron cage, perhaps sealed with silphium – the smell is inimical to them.’
‘What’s silphium?’
