The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They were sharkriders?’ Ezroc resumed.

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

‘Great Whites cannot be ridden,’ Ezroc said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A sea dragon.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Follow me,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she ran.

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

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

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

The iron grille dropped down behind her.

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

Bartlemy said: ‘I see.’

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

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

Hazel said: ‘Are you sorry for them?’

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

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

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

The sandstorm showed no sign of abating.

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

‘Yes, please.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It depends on the rose,’ Bartlemy said.

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

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

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

‘Mm. I bet he got filthy.’

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

‘I wish I’d been there,’ Nathan said.

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

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

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

‘Not much chance of that at Ffylde.’

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

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

‘I wasn’t sn—’

‘EVER!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But can you—’

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

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

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