SANGREAL TRILOGY

IIITHE POISONEDCROWN

Amanda Hemingway

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Tarot

Prologue The Albatross

Chapter One Ripples

Chapter Two Terror Firma

Chapter Three A Touch of Death

Chapter Four Eye of Newt

Chapter Five The Visitor

Chapter Six Pooping the Party

Chapter Seven How to Stop a War

Chapter Eight The Dragon’s Reef

Chapter Nine The Horn of Last Resort

Chapter Ten How to Stop a War

Chapter Eleven Father and Son

Chapter Twelve Scarbarrow Fayr

Epilogue Spring

About the Author

Other Works

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

TAROT

Fimble famble sift the boards pentacles and cups and swords fingers fleet as beetles’ wings fiddlefeet and twiddlestrings sift and shuffle, spiel and deal, Hand of Fortune spin the Wheel weave together strands of fate Ace of Wands opens the Gate – turn the card to learn your doom Death’s a portal not a tomb.

Double-deal and deal them double, eggs and bacon, toil and trouble, kings and queens and knights and knaves cups and coins and swords and staves lay them crooked, lay them straight, splay the pattern of your fate.

Earth and water, fire and air, Strength the maiden waiting there bold to part the lion’s jaws someone’s friend, but is she yours?

Sift and shift and wrap and weft the Emperor stands on your left authority, conviction, power – above your head the Falling Tower – see through the cobwebs of the Moon the silver lies unravel soon.

Fimble famble fi-fo-fum there we go and here we come.

Mist and magic, truth and lies Moon’s a card to fool the wise strangely lie with truth accords – now we turn the Three of Swords: alone, forsaken and betrayed another card must yet be played; veil the future while you can beyond the veil – the Hanged Man!

Double-deal and deal them double earth and water, toil and trouble, cups and coins and swords and wands fate is never set in bronze, eggsand bacon, blood and bone, betrayed forsaken and alone sift the cards and let them fall fate is never set at all

Humpty Dumpty runs through town knights and knaves will all fall down best-laid plans gang aft agely words on water flow away – when the cards are scattered far still you may turn up the Star.

Fimble famble fi-fo-fum therewego, and here we come …

PROLOGUE The Albatross

He was the bird, and the bird was him. He was Ezroc, son of Tilarc, fifteenth grandson in a direct line from Ezroc Stormrider, the greatest albatross who ever lived. He had flown the Four Oceans and the Ten Seas, and had seen the South Pole rising like a spire of emerald from the violet hills of the Land-Beyond-Night, and the white foam of the combers on the pink coral beaches, and had smelt the perfume of the last flowers that ever were, before the hungry waters took it all away. He had lived to a hundred and two, and had died in the season his fifteenth-generation grandson was born, so the name had been passed on, but young Ezroc knew he could only dream of touching the legend.

They had set out from the Ice Cliffs more than two moons past, the albatross flying on wings still short of three spans from tip to tip – three spans would mark him for an adult – leaving the cold clean seas of the north far behind, heading south, always south. Keerye could not match his speed, for all his seal-swiftness, and from time to time the bird would descend onto the rocking waters, waiting for his friend to catch up. Some nights they would rest together, sea-cradled, Keerye half-human, steadying himself on the swell with his tail-flippers, while they gazed up at the unfamiliar stars.

‘Do you think we’ve reached the Fourth Ocean yet?’ Ezroc said once.

‘There are no Four Oceans any more,’ said Keerye, who was older and wiser, or at least more knowledgeable. ‘No Ten Seas. When people speak of them, it’s just words. Now, it’s all one big ocean, without any land in between to divide it up.’

‘But we’re looking for land,’ Ezroc pointed out. ‘We’re looking for the islands in the stories – the Jewelled Archipelago, and the Giant’s Knucklebones, and the Floating Islands of the utter south. There must be land somewhere.’

‘Islands are different,’ Keerye said sagely. ‘Islands grow, like plants. They come out of the sea sprouting fire and when they cool down there are great weeds on them with stems as thick as a monster eel, poking up into the sky all by themselves.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Ezroc said. He had dismissed such tales before. ‘Without water to support them, they’d fall down.’

‘I heard it from Shifka,’ said Keerye, naming the most venerable of the selkies, ‘and he heard it from the great whales, so it must be true. Whales don’t lie.’

Ezroc duly tried to picture weeds growing on dry land, standing up by themselves, and failed. But it was something to search for.

The seas were growing warmer now, and more dangerous. They were coming to the realms of the seakings, where they worship the Goddess, who hates all creatures of land and air. Ezroc was anxious, since it was said the merpeople would kill a selkie, if they found one in their territory, but Keerye was scornful. ‘They are fish,’ he scoffed. ‘I can outswim any fish. Let them catch me if they can.’ Ezroc wanted to know why the Goddess should hate them, but Keerye said there was no why. The Goddess was an elemental, who felt but could not reason, as strong as the currents which circle the world, in fury like the tempest, with a heart as black as the uttermost deeps where nothing can live. She was supposed to have a crown of iron that never rusted, but was kept in a mysterious cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef. Had anyone seen her? Ezroc asked. What did she look like? In their rest-times, they speculated about it, visualising her as a huge ray, a hundred spans wide, whose creeping shadow brought death to the sea bed, or a squid as big as an iceberg, belching poisoned ink, or a merwoman tall as a tidal wave with coiling sea-snakes for hair and fins that crackled blue with electricity. Once, they met a great purple grouper which Ezroc thought might be her, but Keerye tickled it under its prognathous jaw and it mooched along with them for a while with no sign of hostility.

‘Do you know any islands?’ Keerye asked, but the fish didn’t answer.

‘Maybe it doesn’t speak our language,’ Ezroc suggested, so Keerye tried the other tongues he knew, the click-click of secret Dolphinspeech, the croaking of Penguin, the burble of Smallfish and even a few words of Shark, but the grouper never spoke at all. Presently it turned aside, heading west towards the shadow of sunken rocks.

This was reef-country, and now they grew very wary. Above the corals the shallow water was green with sunlight and teeming with smallfish, but there were deep blue chasms in between where the merfolk might hide, and cruising sharks in search of more substantial prey than yellowstripe and fairyfin, and dark clefts which might conceal monsters they had heard of but never seen, creatures of the tropical waters who didn’t venture into the north. Giant sea scorpions, crabs whose pincers could slice a selkie in half, things part fish, part reptile, which had no name and no real species, armoured with spikes and spines, their flippers half way to feet, their mouths agape with rows of dagger-teeth. Ezroc felt himself safe enough in the air, sustained on near-motionless wings, but concern for Keerye made him fly low, and the selkie was both reckless and curious, diving to peer under every rock. They met a turtle coasting the reefside who told them he was the last of his kind; his mate had been gone twenty years, searching for a place to lay her eggs.

‘Do you know any islands?’ Keerye said.

‘If I did, my mate would have buried her eggs there, and I would have found her again,’ the turtle replied. ‘The islands are all gone. Swim to the absolute south, and you’ll find only sea-swirl around the Pole, and the sun that never sets shines on the endless waters without even a rock to break the surface.’

Keerye asked the same question of those smallfish he could persuade to listen, a green octopus that was slithering over the coral, a frilled purple sea slug and even a passing shark. The smallfish responded with bubbletalk, meaning little, the octopus turned red and disappeared into a crevasse, the sea slug tied itself into a slow-motion knot and rippled away, and only the shark snapped a coherent answer.

‘There are islands,’ he said, ‘but you must move fast, to catch up with them.’

‘Which way?’ asked Keerye. ‘South?’

‘South – west – east.’ The shark flicked his tail by way of a shrug, and glided on.

‘The Floating Islands,’ Keerye said. ‘That’s what he means.’

‘I don’t trust him,’ Ezroc said. ‘My father says, a shark is a stomach with fins. He doesn’t talk, he just opens his mouth.’

But Keerye was too eager on their quest to take warning.

They met the mermaid on a night of shooting stars, at the full of the fourth moon since they left the Ice Cliffs of home. On an unknown signal the corals released their spores, uncurling like smoke into the sea-surge, glittering with reflected light, until both sky and sea seemed to be heaving with the dust of stars, and leaping fish, come to feast on the coral’s beneficence, left phosphorescent tracks like meteor-trails through the black water. Keerye lay on his back in the sway of gentle billows, made careless by the beauty, luxuriating in the night magic. ‘The sky fires of the north are lovelier,’ he insisted, but the star-glitter was mirrored in his dark eyes as he turned his head this way and that. Ezroc sat the wave beside him, skulling with web feet, dazzled by the wonder of it. Neither of them saw the watcher until she was very close.

Her hand brushed Keerye’s tail, feeling the strangeness of his fur, flinching away and returning to touch again. The selkie, whose reflexes were lightning, somersaulted and caught her arm, holding her though she wriggled, fish-like, trying to escape. Her skin felt cold and slippery, like bladderwrack. He forced her head out of the water and saw the gill-slits in her neck widen as she gasped in the alien element. Her wet hair looked black in the starlight but he guessed it was darkly purple, and the sheen on her arms was like pearl. Her eyes were unlike his, being narrow and slanting, with no whites; he could not tell their colour.

She was small, barely half his size; he guessed she was still a child.

‘You’re merfolk,’ he said. ‘Are you alone?’ And, when she didn’t answer: ‘What is your name?’

Her mouth opened and shut, but no noise emerged.

‘What is your name?’

‘Maybe she can’t talk out of water,’ Ezroc suggested.

Keerye had never met merfolk before, but he knew enough of them from rumour and hearsay. ‘She can talk,’ he insisted.

And again: ‘What is your name?’

‘Denaero,’ she said at last. Her voice sounded thin and strange in the air, more accustomed to carrying underwater. ‘I am Rhadamu’s daughter. If you hurt me, he will kill you.’

‘We won’t hurt you,’ Ezroc said. ‘We wouldn’t hurt anyone.’

‘If you answer my questions,’ Keerye amended.

‘I answer or not, as I please,’ said the girl, trying to toss her head; but Keerye held her by the hair. ‘I am not afraid of you, even if you eat me.’

‘Why should I eat you?’ Keerye demanded, startled.

‘Selkies eat merpeople,’ Denaero said. ‘We are fish. Lungbreathers eat fish. That is the way of things.’

‘I won’t eat you,’ Keerye said. ‘You are too small. When we catch fish which are too small, we throw them back.’

‘My father is the High King,’ Denaero declared. ‘When the Festival of Spawning is over, he will come looking for me, and hunt you with spears. You will be stuck full of spears till you bristle like a sea urchin. You won’t be so scornful then.’

Keerye laughed out loud at her defiance and her pride, and the girl sulked, then laughed too, ducking her head underwater when he let go her hair to inhale her native element.

‘Why must we talk like this?’ Denaero asked, meaning above water. ‘Can’t you talk undersea?’

‘I can, but Ezroc can’t. He’s a bird,’ Keerye explained.

‘I heard, there are birds that fly through the water,’ Denaero said, not wanting to appear ignorant, ‘called pinwings. If you can fly underwater, why can’t you talk there too?’

‘I’m not a penguin,’ Ezroc said. ‘I’m an albatross.’

The girl shivered, and shrank away. ‘A windbringer,’ she said. ‘I thought they were only in stories. Is it true, you can fly round the whole world in a day, and you bring ice storms from the north to destroy us? Did you bring the ice now?’ She glanced from side to side, as if expecting ice floes to emerge from nowhere.

‘I don’t bring ice,’ said Ezroc. ‘I don’t want to harm you.’

‘The stories say you are much bigger,’ said Denaero, recovering her courage.

‘He’s only young,’ said Keerye. ‘Like you. When he’s full grown, his wings will be as wide as – as the entire reef.’

‘Could I ride on you then?’ Denaero begged suddenly. ‘Could I fly – really fly – up in the sky among the stars?’

‘Well …’ Ezroc temporised.

‘One day,’ said Keerye. ‘But now we are on a quest. We are looking for islands. Do you know of any?’

‘Only in stories,’ Denaero said. ‘The Goddess ate the islands. She is always hungry. Once, there were whole kingdoms above the sea, full of creatures that didn’t swim, and strange people, neither merfolk nor selkie. I wish I could have seen them. But the Goddess swallowed them all up. Then she devoured the islands, one by one, crunching up the rocks that were their bones. There are no islands any more.’

‘We heard there were Floating Islands,’ Keerye persisted, ‘south of here, or east, or west. Have you seen them?’

The girl’s face changed; her hair lifted of its own accord, rippling with sparks.

‘Those are not islands,’ she said. ‘Don’t go near them … Listen!’ She dipped below the waves, the better to pick up vibrations, reappearing a moment later. ‘The Festival is over,’ she said. ‘My father is coming to look for me. If he finds you, you will be stuck full of spears like a sea urchin. I do not want that. You must swim fast, fast, till you come to the Great Reef Wall where the sea boils and the steam goes up a hundred spans into the air. If you can cross that, you will be safe. But you must go fast. Your swimming makes an echo-pattern that we can detect from far away; that was how I found you. If my father senses it, he will hunt you down.’

‘How far to the Great Reef Wall?’ asked Ezroc.

‘Can’t you stop the king?’ Keerye said.

‘I will leap and dance in the water and make a great splashing which will overlay the echo-pattern, but you must go now. Please!’

‘Thank you,’ said Keerye, and he kissed her cold little cheek.

‘Thank you!’ cried Ezroc, and he spread his wings, driving himself into the air.

The mermaid held her hand to her face for a second or two, as if she feared to lose the imprint of the kiss, though it was a gesture she had never known. Then she forgot it in the wonder of the bird’s rising.

‘Come back when you’re grown!’ she said. ‘Come back and fly me to the stars! Promise?’

‘I promise!’ Ezroc called, as he veered southward. Below, Keerye streaked like a javelin through the still-gleaming water.

Behind them, Denaero arced and plunged and dived, churning the midnight waves to a tumult of foam.

It was dawn when they reached the Great Reef Wall, and saw the steam of the boiling sea like a cloud over the sun. Keerye swam to the edge of the shallows, where the reef fell away in a submarine cliff, down to unguessable depths. Far below there must have been vents in the seabed, emitting gas-jets from the planet’s core, and so the water beyond the Wall bubbled like a cauldron, and the stink of sulphur hung in the air. Ezroc flew high above, soaring on the thermals, but he could see no way for a selkie to pass. ‘The steam-barrier stretches as far as the eye can see,’ he told Keerye, ‘and at its narrowest it must be more than twenty spans across. We might travel a sennight and find no way through.’

‘Show me the narrow part,’ the selkie said. ‘In seal form I can leap high and far, higher and farther than any from the Ice Cliffs.’

‘Not that high and not that far,’ said Ezroc. ‘You’ll scald in the water and bake in the steam. It will kill you.’

‘If you were to lift me, I could do it,’ Keerye said.

‘I cannot bear you. I am not yet strong enough.’

‘But if you swoop as I spring, and hold my fore-flippers, the joint impetus of both leap and flight will carry us over the barrier,’ Keerye declared.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Ezroc said doubtfully. ‘The risk is too great. Let us turn west. Somewhere, there will be a break.’

‘You said there were none,’ Keerye pointed out.

They might have argued about it long, but Ezroc, rising to scan the seas again, saw shadow-shapes skimming the reef towards them – the vanguard of the hunt. Mermen mounted on blue sharks wielding spears of bone tipped with blood coral, barracuda trained for the chase with fin rings that rattled to denote their route, and behind them on huge hammerheads the king and his court, trailing cloaks of whalehide and brandishing axes of polished obsidian. The king himself wore a helm or crown adorned with the claws of a giant lobster and mail of oyster-shells gleaming with mother-of-pearl.

‘Now we have no choice,’ said Keerye. ‘Swoop on me as I leap – catch me and hold firm – and we will make it.’

‘Suppose I cannot …? If I let you fall …’

‘I have faith. You won’t let me fall.’

Keerye could not go deep – the reef was too near the surface – nor give himself a long run – the hunt was drawing close. But he swam back as far as he dared and then arrowed towards the Wall, driving himself forward with his powerful tail, all seal now, breaking the water and rising up … and up … The sun glittered in the spray around him, then the sea-smokes stung his eyes, and he felt the talons of the albatross digging into him, tugging, lifting, sweeping him through the fume towards clear air and cool sea. Sudden pain scorched his flank – a well-aimed spear glanced off him and dropped into the fog. And then before he knew it he was plunging down, betrayed by his own weight, torn from the albatross’ grip to fall into the seething water …

It was hot, but it did not burn. He was through the barrier. They had done it.

They swam south for many days at leisure while the spear-wound healed and fur and feathers, singed in the sulphurous vapours, grew again. The days were longer, and the sun had barely dipped below the horizon before re-emerging to resume its orbit of the sky. Once, they came across a great shoal of silvertail, and fed until they were almost too full to float, but they saw no creatures they could talk to save a few smallfish who spoke a dialect they did not recognise. Another time they found a vast mat of kelp, rootless, drifting on the current with all its mobile populace. Ezroc thought it might be one of the Floating Islands in the stories, but Keerye said no, islands were solid, and did not wallow in the water.

‘I think there are no islands any more,’ Ezroc said.

But they kept on searching.

And then they saw it, on a day without sunset, a great hump looming out of the water ahead of them. It looked like a boulder or cluster of boulders, sea-smoothed, rose-tinted and marbled in blue, with occasional fan-like growths sprouting from cracks and testing the air with feathery tendrils. Keerye swam eagerly towards it, ran his hands over the boulders, then pulled himself out of the water and sat in the sun, shedding even the semblance of a tail, naked in his skin and gilded with light. Only his long silver hair and velvet-dark eyes showed him for a selkie.

‘This is what we sought,’ he said. ‘A Floating Island. Where there’s one, there will be more. Maybe there’s real land still, in the utter south, land with roots that go all the way to the world’s heart. The stories must be true after all.’

‘Are you sure it’s an island?’ Ezroc said, circling the atoll, still too wary to land there. ‘Denaero warned us—’

‘Denaero was a child, afraid of ghosts. This is solid: look!’ He slapped the boulder, making a wet sharp thwack!, but to Ezroc’s ear, it didn’t sound quite right.

‘It doesn’t feel like rock,’ he said, alighting beside Keerye. ‘Rock should be hard.’

‘It’s hard enough. I’m going to sleep here for a while. It’s too long since I slept out of water.’

‘I’m not tired,’ Ezroc lied. ‘I’ll keep watch.’

He took off again and drifted on the high air, scanning the sea in all directions, but could see no other island nor any living thing. The translucent water seemed to be empty even of smallfish, clear and limpid as a lagoon. That troubled him, though he couldn’t define why, and he widened the radius of his flight, covering a large area round the atoll, but still there was nothing to be seen. At last he settled on the water close to the island, folded his wings, and slept.

When he awoke he was alone. The sun was low, though it would not set; sky and sea met on the horizon in an arc of reflected fires. And in every direction there was only water. The island – and Keerye – had gone.

Ezroc hurled himself into the air with a great cry which seemed to carry to the ends of the world. He told himself it was a Floating Island: it had simply floated away. He would find it soon, and Keerye still sleeping, stretched out on the blue-veined boulders. He had only to fly high enough and he would see it: how could you lose an island?

‘Those are not islands,’ Denaero had said. ‘Don’t go near them …’

The dread lay coldly on his heart, dread and worse than dread, the terrible foreknowledge that it was too late, it had been too late from the moment he fell asleep. The island was gone and Keerye was gone and he would never see his friend again. The wide wastes of the ocean ached with his desolation, a void that could not be filled. He flew higher and higher, and the sun fell away beneath his wings, and the huge solitude of the sea unrolled below him, without land or life, empty now forever more. He would fly all the long lonely miles back to the north, and tell his tale to those who would mourn, or curse his name – Ezroc the faithless, who lost his childhood playmate and dearest friend – and then return to the south, travelling the seas for countless moons, until he knew every wave, every tug of the world’s current, every whim of the winds. His journeys would become a legend to outdo his ultimate grandsire, his adventures a fairytale for children; but he would never find Keerye again. His keening wail echoed over sky and sea, harsh with longing and despair.

‘Keeeeryeee … KEEEEEERYEEEE

No answer came.

He was the bird, and the bird was him. He felt the air under his wings, bearing him upward, the sun warming his feathers, the huge angry pain of his heart. It was too much pain, too much to endure, and he pulled his mind away, letting the bird go, watching its flight track into the sun while his thought sank seawards and drifted into a dim blue realm, no longer sharp with the awareness of the bird but soft and dream-like. In the azure gloom he saw the island, not floating on the surface but moving through deep water, the rose-stained boulders swelling and shrinking like the bulb of a vast jellyfish. A skein of tentacles trailed behind it, fifty yards long or more. Something pale was tangled in their grasp, something that barely struggled now. Vision dipped under the bulb and he saw a dozen mouths opening and closing, each with a ring of needle-tipped teeth. The pale thing, still wriggling slightly, was manoeuvred towards them, passed from one to another as each took a bite. Blood smoked on the water, but not much: the feeder did not believe in waste. Above, the bulb turned from pink to crimson as it gorged, pulsing with a glow of its own; the blue veins empurpled and swelled into ridges. Briefly, he touched its mind, such as it was – the mind of a glutton enjoying a rare special feast.

He wrenched his thought away in horror, out of the sea, out of the dream, through the veils of sleep to his own world.

ONE Ripples

‘Define the Irish Question between 1800 and 1917,’ Nathan read aloud.

‘If we knew the question,’ his mother said, ‘we might be able to work out the answer.’

‘I don’t think that’ll satisfy Mr Selkirk,’ Nathan sighed. He pushed his history essay aside and replaced it with a plate of buttered toast with honey and cinnamon, a recipe of his uncle’s. The honey had oozed just the right distance through the toast and he bit into it with enthusiasm, if a little absent-mindedly.

His mother noted his abstraction and knew or guessed the reason, but was prudent enough to say nothing. He was fifteen now, too old to press for confidences. She only hoped, if there was trouble, he would tell her in the end. The summer had been long and uneventful, a summer of normal teenage preoccupations: success (and failure) at cricket, doing homework, not doing homework, friends, fads, hormonal angst. They had managed a trip to Italy, looking at palaces and pictures in Florence and then staying with Nathan’s classmate Ned Gable and his family in a villa in Umbria. Annie had feared they would never afford their share of the rental but somehow Uncle Barty had found the money, though he wouldn’t accompany them. These days, he rarely left the old manor at Thornyhill, deep in the woods.

Yet he wasn’t really a stay-at-home sort of person. He had told Annie once that he was born in Byzantium before the fall of the Roman Empire, which, she worked out, made him about fifteen hundred years old. He called himself Bartlemy Goodman, though it was probably not his name. She might have thought him mad or unusually eccentric if she hadn’t known him so well and seen what he could do, when the occasion demanded it. He had taken her in on a cold lonely night long ago when she was pursued by invisible enemies, becoming an uncle to both her and Nathan; and as her son grew up into strange adventures, Bartlemy had been their councillor and support. But there had been no adventure this summer, and now autumn was failing, and the wind blew from the north, plucking the last ragged leaves from the tree-tops, and Nathan was restless with the feeling of deeds undone, and worlds to be saved, and time slipping away.

Soon, Annie thought, he’ll start sleeping badly, and there was a tiny squeeze of fear at her heart which she could not suppress.

I sleep too deeply, Nathan thought, and I dream too little and too lightly. The portal was closed, the connection broken: he could no longer roam the multiverse in his head, following trails he could not see on a quest he did not understand. He had dreamed his way through other worlds – the ghost city of Carboneck in Wilderslee, and the skytowers of Arkatron on Eos, where the Grandir, supreme ruler of a dying cosmos, sought for the Great Spell that would be the salvation of his people. Nathan had retrieved the cup and the sword to bind the magic, and now only the crown was wanting – the crown and the sacrifice and the words of power, whatever they might be. But there had been no dreams for nearly a year, and the pleasures of cricket and the problems of history were not enough to fill his life.

‘How’s Hazel?’ his mother asked, helping herself to a piece of his toast. ‘I haven’t seen her lately.’

Hazel was Nathan’s closest friend: they had grown up almost as brother and sister, though getting on rather better than most brothers and sisters. Adolescence had brought friction, but had never driven them apart.

‘You know Hazel.’ Nathan spoke around munching. ‘She didn’t exactly like her mum’s old boyfriend, but I think she approved of him. She doesn’t approve of the new one at all.’

‘Because he’s so young?’

‘Mm.’

Annie smiled. ‘Well, all I can say is good for Lily. I think Franco’s very sweet.’

‘He’s Italian,’ Nathan objected.

‘How insular! Besides, you didn’t mind the Italians last summer.’

‘That was in Italy!’

‘Supposing I got myself a toyboy,’ Annie said. ‘How would you feel about that?’

‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ Diverted from thoughts of other worlds, Nathan looked really alarmed.

‘Maybe.’

‘Look, you know, if there’s someone, it’s cool with me – as long as he’s nice, and really cares about you – but … well, I’d rather have a stepfather than an elder brother!’

‘Nicely put,’ Annie said. ‘Still, I doubt the situation will arise.’

Nathan couldn’t ever recall her having a proper boyfriend, even though several men had been interested. He said: ‘You must have loved dad very much.’ Daniel Ward had died before he was born, killed in a car crash when he fell asleep at the wheel.

‘Very much,’ she said. Only he wasn’t your dad … Your father was a stranger who waited beyond the Gate of Death, waited for my love and longing to open the unopenable door, and when I would have given all that I had for all I had lost he took me, body and soul. He seeded my womb and sealed up my memory, and until you grew up so unlike Daniel – until I found the courage to unclose the old scar in my mind – I never knew the betrayal and rape that was hidden there.

But she loved Nathan, conceived in treachery, child of an unknown being from an unknown world, so she kept her secret. She saw his father’s legacy in the mysteries that surrounded him, but she told herself, over and over, that he did not need to know. One day, perhaps, but not yet. Not yet.

That night, Nathan went to bed thinking of the Irish Question, and dreamed of the sea.

At Thornyhill Manor, Hazel Bagot was having a lesson in witchcraft.

‘But I don’t want to be a witch,’ she protested.

‘Good,’ said Bartlemy. ‘That’s the way to start. Now, you need to learn what not to do. Otherwise you could bumble about like you did last year, conjuring dangerous spirits and letting them get out of control. Someone might get hurt. It nearly happened once, you know that; you don’t want it to happen again. The Gift is in your blood; you need to know how not to use it.’

‘Why couldn’t we have done it in the summer, when the evenings were still light?’ Hazel said. She was wishing she had stayed at home, watching Neighbours and annoying Franco.

‘Dark for dark magic,’ Bartlemy said. ‘In summer, magic is all sparkle and fun, and the spirits come to us dressed in their best, scattering smiles and flowers. In the winter, you get down to the bone, and the true nature of things is revealed.’

Hazel said no more, remembering how she had summoned Lilliat, Spirit of Flowers, to win her the love of a boy at school, and how Lilliat had turned into Nenufar the water-demon, and nearly drowned her rival.

Bartlemy gave her tea and biscuits and she sat for a while eating, insensibly reassured. Bartlemy made the best biscuits in the world, biscuits whose effect was almost magical, though he insisted there was no spell involved, just good cooking. Anyone who ate those biscuits felt immediately at home, even if they didn’t want to, comforted if they needed comfort, relaxed if they needed to relax. Long ago another cook had tried to steal one for analysis, hoping to work out the ingredients, but he had eaten it before he got it home, and the urge to commit the crime had vanished.

‘I don’t want to be like my great-grandmother,’ Hazel explained at last. ‘She lived for two hundred years, until she didn’t care about anyone but herself, and she’d curdled inside like sour milk. I don’t think I want to live on when my friends are dead; it would be so lonely. And I don’t want to be mean and bitter like her.’

‘Then learn from her mistakes,’ Bartlemy said equably. ‘You won’t be mean and bitter, unless you choose to be. I will teach you what you need to know, for your safety and others, but how you use the knowledge – if you use it – is up to you. Tonight, I think we will make the spellfire. That will do for a start.’

He showed her how to seal the chimney and light the fire-crystals, which cracked and hissed, shooting out sparks that bored into the carpet. Then he threw on a powder which smothered the flames, and the room grew smoky, and Hazel’s eyes watered from the sting of it. Presently, Bartlemy told her to speak certain words in Atlantean, the language of spell-craft, and the vapour seemed to draw together, hovering in a cloud above the hearth, and then the heart of the cloud opened up into a picture.

To her astonishment Hazel saw her mother with Franco, climbing the stairs to the bedroom, laughing and hurried. She was embarrassed, and looked away. ‘Remember, the magic responds to you,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Magic is always personal. The pictures may have meaning for you, or they may not – sometimes, their purport won’t become clear till long after – but it is something in your thought, in your mind, which engenders them. You are the magnet: they are the spell-fragments which are drawn to you. What do you see now?’ ‘The past,’ Hazel said.

‘At least, I think so.’

She saw the Grimthorn Grail surrounded with a greenish nimbus: the snake-spirals round the rim seemed to move, and a man with a dark alien face was gazing into it, speaking words she couldn’t hear. In the background stood a woman with black hair bound up in a white veil or scarf, the ends of which hung down behind her in fluted creases. Her features, too, were somehow alien – her eyes too large, the proportions of her face elusively wrong – yet she was the most beautiful woman Hazel had ever seen. She held a tall yellow candle, and either they were indoors or the night was windless, because the flame burned absolutely still. Then Hazel saw the same man lifting a sword – the Traitor’s Sword, which Nathan had brought back from Wilderslee – and there was a dim figure sprawled in front of him, on a kind of table or altar, and when the sword fell blood jetted up, and as the woman proffered the cup to catch it red spattered on the cloth that bound her hair. Both man and woman drank from the cup, and she lifted a crown from the thing on the ground, and put it on his head – a misshapen crown of twisted metal spikes – and lightning stabbed up from the crown, splitting the sky in half. For an instant Hazel glimpsed a symbol drawn in lightning, something she recognised, though she couldn’t think from where: an arc bisected by a straight line, enclosed within a circle. Then the vision went dark, and she heard a voice crying out in an unknown language, words that seemed full of anguish or regret.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked Bartlemy, but he shook his head.

‘This is Nathan’s story,’ she said, ‘not mine,’ but her smoke-reddened eyes were wide, fixed on the changing images, and she no longer looked away.

‘Keep in mind,’ he pointed out, ‘the pictures are relevant, but there may be no logic to them, and no chronology.’

Now, they were looking at a river – a slow lazy river, dimpled with sunlight, with the occasional overhanging willow, and little eddies scooping out pools under the bank which vanished in a mudslide. A tidal river with hazardous currents beneath its dimpled surface, and lurking weeds that could entangle flailing limbs, and rafts of floating rubbish wedged here and there, hiding among the debris a child’s shoe, a water-logged teddy bear, an upturned hand. The River Clyde, which flowed through the village of Ede down the valley to the sea – the river where Effie Carlow, Hazel’s great-grandmother, had been found drowned, though Hazel knew she had never left the attic of their house. She heard the voice of the spirit called the Child, chanting an old doggerel, though the smoke-scene showed only the stream.

‘Cloud on the sunset,

Wave on the tide,

Death from the deep sea

Swims up the Glyde.’

And suddenly Hazel found herself wondering whose hand she had seen among the flotsam – whether it was her great-grandmother or some more recent victim, someone yet to be discovered …

A boat moved up the river, surely too large a boat for such a narrow waterway. It was all white, with white sails and a white-painted mast and a white prow without name or identification, and it looked faintly insubstantial, almost like a ghost ship. A woman stood in the bows, wrapped in a long white cloak pulled tight around her body, with a drooping hood covering both hair and face. The picture shifted, until Hazel thought she should be able to glimpse a profile – the tip of a nose, the jut of a chin – but under the hood there was only darkness. The boat drifted on, fading into mist, and then there was just a swan, wings half furled, floating on the water. Hazel had always hated swans, ever since one attacked her as a child; she thought they had mean little eyes.

She said: ‘That was her, wasn’t it?’

Bartlemy said: ‘Perhaps. But remember: to come, she must be called. Nenufar is a spirit; there are laws she cannot evade. Have you called her?’

‘Of course not!’

The vision dimmed, dissolving into smoke, and at a signal from Bartlemy she unblocked the flue. Gradually the air cleared, and she saw the fire-crystals had burned away, and the room was ordinary again. An old room with heavy wooden beams, diamond-paned windows, lamplight soft as candle-glow on the shabby Persian rugs and worn furniture. And in the middle Bartlemy, fat and placid and silver-haired, with eyes as blue as the sky. There were more biscuits, but Hazel didn’t take one, not yet, though his dog sat looking hopefully at her – a huge shaggy dog of questionable ancestry, known as Hoover, whose age was as indeterminate as his master’s. Suddenly, it seemed to Hazel that the world was complex and baffling beyond her understanding, and magic and reality were no longer separate but part of the same puzzle, tiny fragments of a jigsaw so vast and intricate that its billion billion pieces could never be fitted together, not though she had a hundred lifetimes. Her thought was too small, and infinity was too big, and she felt crushed into littleness by its immensity, its multiplicity, by the endless changing patterns of Chaos. Bartlemy asked her: ‘What troubles you?’ and she tried to explain, groping for the words to express her diminishment, her confusion, her fear.

Bartlemy smiled faintly. ‘We all feel that way sometimes,’ he said, ‘if we have the gift of perception. Embrace your doubts: if there is such a thing as wisdom, they are part of it. I’ve had my doubts for more than a thousand years. Actually, I’ve always believed that the answer to everything must really be very simple.’ And he added, unconsciously echoing Annie on Irish history: ‘The problem is finding out the question.’

‘So Riverside House is sold at last,’ Annie said to Lily Bagot in the deli. No one had lived in Riverside House since the tragedy, though rumours of new tenants had circulated from time to time, only to fade as another sale fell through. ‘Do you know when they’re moving in?’

‘They’re already there,’ Lily said. ‘Came down last week. Some family from London.’ All the newcomers in the village were from London these days, big-city types in search of a rural paradise, bringing with them their big-city lifestyle and their big-city needs – and their big-city income. ‘I daresay they’ll be coming into the bookshop soon.’

Annie managed a second-hand bookshop, owned by Bartlemy; she and Nathan lived in the adjacent house.

‘I hope so,’ she said. She couldn’t help being a little curious. She had been so closely involved in the events at Riverside, two years ago now. She wondered what kind of people would buy a house with such a well-publicised history of disaster.

A few days later, she found out.

A woman came in to browse among the books, a woman with a frizz of dark hair and a thin body that grew wide around the hips, dressed in antique shoulder-pads, hand-printed scarves, carved jewellery from the remoter parts of Asia. She studied the shelves for a while, enthused over an early edition of Mrs Henry Wood, then seemed to make up her mind, and pounced.

‘You’re Annie Ward, aren’t you? I know: I asked around. I’m Ursula Rayburn. We’ve just moved in to the oast house down by the river. Of course, I expect you’ve heard, haven’t you? – gossip travels so fast in a village. Such an intimate little community – I can’t wait to get to know everyone. Although Islington is really just a village enclosed in a city … Anyway, I’ve been dying to meet you. I hope you don’t mind me introducing myself like this.’

‘Not at all …’

‘You see, I did my homework. I know you’re the one who found the body …’

Slightly at a loss, Annie said: ‘Yes.’

‘Was it awful? I gather she was there for months, slowly decaying, while her husband lived on in the house with his mistress, who was pretending to be her. I suppose he’s in an asylum now … and they never caught the mistress, did they? I expect it was all her idea. Mind you, I don’t really see the necessity – I mean, everyone gets divorced these days, it’s as normal as eating your dinner. I’ve had two and Donny’s had one and the kids are totally well adjusted. They say more parents mean more presents at Christmas and birthdays! Are you divorced?’

‘Widowed,’ Annie said.

‘Oh dear. And then to have to go through all that … you poor child. You must have been in therapy for months. Bereavement and then post-traumatic stress …’

‘My husband died fifteen years ago,’ Annie said. She and Daniel hadn’t been married, but she’d taken his name anyway. ‘And I don’t have post-traumatic stress.’

‘But … you did find the corpse, didn’t you? You found Rianna Sardou?’

‘Oh, that.’ Annie was unable to resist lapsing into nonchalance. ‘Of course, it was rather unpleasant, but …’

‘Unpleasant? I heard she was lying in the bed, little more than a skeleton, with her hair all spread out – it goes on growing, doesn’t it? – and—’

‘In a village,’ Annie said serenely, ‘you learn to take these things in your stride. Part of the great cycle of life and death, you know. I expect it’s much the same in Islington.’

‘Well …’ Disconcerted by Annie’s composure, Ursula’s gush of words ran down. ‘Not – not exactly …’

Annie took pity on her. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

While the contents of the cafetiére were brewing, Ursula Rayburn filled in the details of her extended family. Her two exes, plus new wife/girlfriend/offspring, all on very good terms – ‘We wanted a big place where everyone could come and stay’ – and Donny’s ex and mother, ‘frightfully bitter, even after four years – they bossed him around all the time, and now they’re like two cats without a kitten.’ There were five resident children, all Ursula’s by previous fathers: Jude, Liberty, Michael, Romany and Gawain.

‘Michael?’ Annie queried, before she could stop herself.

‘His father insisted,’ Ursula explained, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘His first name is Xavier – I always called him that when he was little – but now he’s a teenager he’s gone so peculiar, he won’t answer to anything but Michael. Or Micky, which is almost worse. And the psycho’s name was Michael, wasn’t it? I told him – I said it’s ill-omened – but he refuses to go back to Xavier, no matter what I say.’

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Annie said. ‘Lots of people are called Michael, and they don’t go around committing murders.’

‘Of course not. But in this house, with the atmosphere …’

‘Frankly,’ Annie said, ‘I never thought it had any. It’s an old building, but the renovations made it so bland inside, all shiny new paint and unused furniture. Rianna was dead, her husband was so busy pretending to be normal his personality never made any impact, and the – the mistress was hardly ever there. I’m sure, with so many of you, you’ll find it easy to change the feel of the place.’

‘Oh, but you can’t wipe out the past,’ Ursula said. ‘I don’t believe in the kind of ghosts that come with clanking chains, naturally, but there are vibrations. I won’t use the tower room till it’s been purified – I’ve got crystals hanging there now – and Melisande wouldn’t even go through the door. She’s my cat, pedigree Burmese, so sensitive. I know it’s a cliché but animals do feel things, don’t they? They’re so much more telepathic than people.’

Annie said something noncommittal and dispensed the coffee.

‘They never found out her name, did they?’ Ursula went on. ‘The mistress, I mean.’

Nenufar, Annie thought. Nenufar the water-spirit, the primitive goddess from the dark of the sea …

‘No,’ she said.

‘Strange, that. Nowadays they seem to have files on everyone – d’you know the police keep your personal details even if you were just caught smoking dope twenty years ago? It’s an abuse of human rights. I’m a member of the campaign for civil liberties, of course … But it’s curious they couldn’t even find a name for her. Names are so significant, don’t you think? We’re not going to stay with Riverside House. It’s really a bit ordinary. I thought Rivendell, but that’s been done to death lately. Perhaps Hesperides … there are apple trees in the garden.’

‘Dundrownin’?’ Annie hazarded. She wondered if she had overstepped the mark, but after a tiny pause Ursula burst out laughing.

‘Still, Rianna didn’t drown, did she?’ she resumed. ‘It was some old woman who drowned.’

Annie couldn’t recall if they’d been able to prove how Rianna died, but she knew.

‘You have to be careful of the river,’ she said. ‘It’s not deep, but there are treacherous currents.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Ursula said. ‘I hoped the children would be able to play there – I had this mental picture before we came: rustic bliss, swimming in the river, maybe a boat. There’s a mooring place, but everybody says boating’s a bit chancy unless you’ve got experience.’

‘Why did you buy the house?’ Annie said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking. Since you know its history …’

‘It was cheap,’ Ursula said candidly, ‘and it doesn’t need work. Just re-painting – like you said, it’s white all through, very boring. We’ve been looking to move out of London for a while. And I thought the murders would give it character …’

Annie opened her mouth and shut it again, saying nothing.

‘Actually, there is a bit of a problem,’ Ursula continued. ‘Do you know a good plumber? The surveyor didn’t pick up on it – he said everything was fine – but we keep getting leaks from somewhere. There was a puddle – really a puddle – in the living room only the other day. I don’t know where it came from. No, of course it wasn’t the cat – it was water, not pee. I said to Donny, if the surveyor missed something major, we’ll sue. Anyway, I need a plumber to come and check the pipes.’

‘Yellow Pages?’ Annie suggested.

‘Isn’t there – you know – a little man in the village? One of the natives who’s brilliant and inexpensive and does all the jobs round here?’

‘There’s Kevin Bellews,’ Annie said. ‘He’s brilliant but he charges the earth. He only works for City ex-pats – none of the locals can afford him any more. Besides, he’s always on the golf course near Crowford.’

‘The country isn’t what it used to be,’ Ursula mourned. ‘What happened to – to rural innocence, and all those nice dumb yokels in stories?’

‘They got smart,’ Annie said.

It was only after Ursula had gone that she found herself growing uneasy. There was never anything wrong with the plumbing at Riverside House before, she thought. Leaks … leaks meant water.

Water…?

‘Jude’s at uni,’ Hazel volunteered. ‘He’s at least twenty. The next two are at the Tertiary College up the road from Crowford Comp; Micky’s seventeen, Liberty’s sixteen. George fancies her, but she wouldn’t look at him: she’s far too grown up. The point is, they’re none of them our age, so nobody can expect us to be friends with them.’

‘Ageist,’ Nathan said. ‘What about the younger ones?’

‘They’re just kids.’ Hazel was dismissive. ‘They’re still at primary school. They’ve got a different surname – Macaire – it sounds Scottish but I think their dad must be black. They’ve both got dark skin and fuzzy hair.’ Mixed-race children were still an innovation in Ede, though the villagers had finally got used to Nathan, with his Asiatic colouring and exotic features.

‘Coming to think of it, Mum said the little girl was adorable,’ Nathan commented, tolerant of maternal sentiment. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to be so hostile.’ Hazel, he knew, was using the old-fashioned village mentality to shield her own space and the people she didn’t want to share. ‘We should try to be friendly, at least to the two at Tertiary. I can handle the age gap. They’re our neighbours, after all.’

‘I suppose you fancy Liberty too?’ Hazel said.

‘I haven’t seen her. Is she pretty?’

Hazel shrugged. ‘Ask George.’ George Fawn had formed part of a threesome with them when they were younger, though they saw less of him now. ‘She’s thin – long legs – tight jeans. She has this don’t-care attitude, like she’s way above anyone else. Probably ’cos they come from London. London people always think they’re so cool.’

‘Maybe you’ll live in London one day,’ Nathan remarked.

‘You might; I won’t. I’m not clever enough.’

‘You don’t have to be clever—’

‘You know what I mean!’ Hazel flashed. ‘To live in London you need a good job, and to get a good job you need to pass exams, and everyone knows I’m going to eff up my GCSEs. So don’t talk to me about living in London, okay?’

‘I thought Uncle Barty was helping you with school work and … stuff?’

‘Sometimes,’ Hazel said. ‘When I can be bothered.’

‘Bother!’ Nathan gave her a dig with his foot, almost a kick. Best friend’s privilege. He didn’t say: Do you want to be stupid? because he knew that in a way she did, being stupid was her protest in the face of the world, her little rebellion against education and convention, her insurance against any expectations he or others might have of her. I’ll do nothing, I’ll go nowhere, I’ll be no one. I’m stupid. That’s that. He wanted to tell her it was childish but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. ‘What about the witching?’ he asked. ‘Have you done any of that?’

She hunched a shoulder, tugging her hair over her face in a gesture she had still to outgrow. ‘You know I don’t like it.’

‘You tried it yourself last year,’ he pointed out, brutally. ‘You made a complete mess of it, too. Ellen Carver nearly got killed and so did I. Uncle Barty said—’

‘All right, all right, I’m learning it.’ She pushed her hair back again, and some of the sullenness left her face. ‘He taught me how to make the spellfire the other night.’

‘Wow … What did you see?’

‘Smoke,’ Hazel said.

‘Just smoke?’

‘Pictures,’ Hazel conceded. ‘Smoke-pictures. The past, the future – it’s all mixed up and you can’t tell which is which, and Uncle Barty says there are so many possible futures, you don’t know if any of it’s true, so what’s the point of looking? Magic is all shadows and lies: you can’t trust it. Anyway, I saw scenes from your life, not mine – the Grail, and some kind of sacrifice, and people from another world.’

‘Our lives run together,’ Nathan said. ‘But … you’re not supposed to see other worlds in the smoke. The magic can’t look beyond the Gate. Uncle Barty’s always told me that. Are you sure—?’

‘I’m not sure of anything,’ Hazel said irritably, ‘except that I’m hungry.’ They were in her bedroom, and her private store of crisps had run out. ‘D’you think your mum would have anything to eat?’

They went round to Annie’s, and although Nathan pressed her, Hazel wouldn’t be any more specific about what she’d seen.

Annie supplied them with cereal bars (‘I don’t like those,’ Hazel muttered. ‘They’re too healthy.’) and the information that the Rayburns were having a Christmas party the following month, holding open house for anyone from the village.

‘They’re not the Rayburns,’ Hazel said, nitpicking. ‘I told Nathan, the two little ones are Macaires, and the husband’s something else too. Coleman, I think.’

‘Donny Collier,’ Annie said. ‘Boyfriend or husband. Let’s keep it simple – just call them the Rayburns. Go with the majority. Anyway, it looks like they’re planning a pretty lavish do. At least half the village disapproves of them, but I bet they’ll all go.’

Hazel was surprised into a laugh.

‘Stay for dinner,’ Annie went on. ‘It’s cauliflower cheese.’

‘That’s healthy too,’ Hazel quibbled.

‘Are you sure there’s enough?’ Nathan said. ‘I’m not going short – that’s my favourite.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said Hazel.

Annie allowed herself a secret smile.

Once in a while Bartlemy had visitors not from the village, strangers whom few saw come or go and fewer still remembered. The man who hurried through the November dusk that year was one such, a tall, stooping figure as thin as a scarecrow, in a voluminous coat and hood that had seen better days, probably two or three centuries ago. Under the hood he had wispy hair and a wispy beard and a face criss-crossed with so many lines there was barely room for them all, but his eyes amidst all their wrinkles were very bright, and green as spring. A dog accompanied him, a wild-looking dog like a great she-wolf, who trotted at his heel and stopped when he stopped, without collar or lead or word of command. She never barked or panted, following him as silently as his own shadow. The man came striding along the lane through the woods on that chill winter’s evening, too late to have got off a local bus, too far from the train, and the dead leaves stirred behind him, as if something waked and watched.

There was a patter of pursuing feet on the empty road. Neither man nor dog looked back, though the hackles rose on the beast’s nape and her ears lay flat against her skull. When Bartlemy opened the door, the visitor said: ‘They are out there. I fear I am not welcome.’

‘You’re always welcome here,’ Bartlemy said, ‘though I could wish you would change that coat.’

‘It has travelled far with me,’ the visitor retorted. ‘It smells of the open road and open sky.’

‘Not quite how I would have put it,’ said Bartlemy. ‘Take it off for once and sit down.’

‘I expect,’ said the visitor, ‘you were just making tea.’

‘I am always just making tea,’ Bartlemy admitted.

In the living room, the two dogs surveyed each other, acknowledging past acquaintance, exchanged a sniff, and lay down on opposite sides of the fire. The wolf-like dog was big, with a wolf’s elegance and poise, but Hoover was bigger, shaggier, shambling, somehow more doggy. They both knew she would have deferred to him if he had made an issue of it, so he didn’t.

‘What brings you to my quiet corner of the world?’ Bartlemy inquired over the tea-tray.

‘I heard it was not so quiet of late,’ said the stranger.

‘You heard … from whom?’

‘I am not too much an outcast to read the newspapers,’ the man said. ‘There was the reappearance of the Grimthorn Grail – a few murders – an arrest but not, I believe, a complete solution. These are matters of interest to people like us.’

‘Indeed,’ said Bartlemy, ‘but that was two years ago. Why come now?’

‘It’s a long walk from the north. I no longer have the power to put wings on my feet.’

‘Your power may be worn out,’ Bartlemy responded, ‘but you can still move swifter than any of us, at need. Don’t fence with me, Ragginbone. You’ve always claimed to be a Watcher: what have you seen?’

‘I saw a peacock with a fiery tail,’ Ragginbone quoted. ‘I saw a blazing comet drop down hail. I saw a cloud … There have been omens and portents, some too strange to be easily read. There is a pattern in the stars pointing to a time of great significance, but whether good or evil is unclear. And more than that, there are whispers among the werefolk, tales of a Gate that will open at last, a loophole in the Ultimate Laws – a chance to snatch at power unguessed. No one knows quite when, or where – or how – but I heard you named, as a guardian, or an obstacle.’

‘Who—?’

‘I cannot be sure. They were voices in a crowd, on a dark street, and it was not a place where I wished to linger. There are many streets in the city, some darker than others, and not all those who use them are as human as they look.’

Ragginbone was not obviously a man of the city, even without his coat, but Bartlemy knew better than to categorise him.

‘Your wanderings take you to strange places,’ he said.

‘There are strange places round every corner, if you walk on the dark side,’ Ragginbone said. ‘Belief creates its own kingdoms, even in this world. As the legends change so do the pathways, but the shadows linger as long as memory, and the shadow-dwellers are always there. Some of them may be coming your way, or so rumour has it. Some may be already here.’

‘Nenufar,’ said Bartlemy.

‘The name I heard was Nephthys, but it is the same. She is old, and cold, and forever angry. Once, men sought to soften her with worship, but she could not be softened, not she. Now, she has been sailed and chartered, polluted and abused, netted and dragged and mined, and the tale of her grievances is the lullabye she sings to the storm. What she may hope for, should the Gate open for her, I do not know, but the drowning of all humanity is in her dearest dream.’

‘You’re well informed,’ said Bartlemy. It was almost a question.

‘I have heard her in the scream of the wind, in the roar of the waves,’ Ragginbone said. It was not an answer. ‘And there are those who flee from her, bringing word of her wrath.’

‘The word on the street,’ Bartlemy concluded. ‘Have you come to offer help?’

‘I have no help,’ the other said. ‘My spells have all gone stale. I came to warn you – and to wish you well.’

‘Thank you,’ said Bartlemy. ‘I need all the wellwishing I can get. Or rather, Nathan does.’

‘Who’s Nathan?’

‘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

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?’

‘A herb, generally extinct, but I grow a little of it in my garden. The Romans used it extensively in cooking: they made a rather pungent sauce with it, served with fish. It has a very powerful odour which gnomons cannot tolerate. Remember, they have little substance but are equipped with hypersenses, reacting abnormally not only to the magnetic field of iron but to certain smells and sound levels inaudible to human ears. We should be able to use these elements to hold them, if they can be lured into the trap.’

‘Who does the luring?’ Hazel said with misgiving, already knowing the answer.

‘That would be your job. But I understand if you don’t wish to do it. Geometry is much safer.’

Hazel looked down at a diagram involving several interrelated angles, two triangles and a rhomboid. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is I have to do.’

‘I have a plan,’ said Bartlemy.

Afterwards, when she had gone, he poured himself a drink from an ancient bottle – a drink as dark as a wolf’s gullet and smelling like Christmas in a wine cellar. A woodfire burned in the hearth, an unmagical fire whose yellow flames danced their twisty dances above the crumbling emberglow and bark flaking into ash. The dog lay stretched out in front of it, pricking one ear to hear his master speak.

‘You will take care of her,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I don’t want her in real danger. But she needs to feel valued – that’s the important thing. She needs to know she can make a difference, if only in a small way.’

Hoover thumped his tail in agreement or approbation, or possibly in the hope of a morsel of cake from the plate at Bartlemy’s side.

‘There was a time when I thought nothing I did would change the world,’ Bartlemy continued, in a reminiscent vein. ‘I was too busy looking at what they call nowadays the bigger picture. But big things are made up of small things. Move one particle and you alter the shape of the universe. Perhaps Hazel will remember that, as the decades go by and disillusionment sets in. Meanwhile, you and I will alter the shape of her universe just a little – if we can.’

Hoover pricked the other ear and lifted a shaggy eyebrow.

‘Cake is bad for dogs,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Even my cake.’

Nathan had the accident about a week later. He called it an accident but he knew, as soon as he was capable of knowing anything, that it was his own fault. He was by the indoor pool (Ffylde Abbey had both an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool) with a group of boys, and Ned Gable was vaunting their prowess at diving in Italy that summer. They had visited a little bay a few times, and had taught themselves to dive off a low promontory into the sea, turning a somersault in mid-air on the way down. One of the boys looked sceptical and made a casually snide remark which Nathan would have ignored, but Ned rose to the bait, asserting the truth of his boast.

‘Okay, show us,’ challenged the sceptic. His name was Richard but he liked to call himself Rix. His father owned a merchant bank.

‘I can’t,’ Ned responded, looking both discomforted and angry. ‘Not with this ankle.’ He’d torn some ligaments in a rugger scrum and was banned from most sport for at least another fortnight. ‘You know that.’

‘Convenient,’ sneered Rix.

‘Nathan could do it,’ said a supporter, with a surge of misguided loyalty.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Nathan said. ‘The rocks in Italy were higher than this diving board, and the sea below was really deep. It would be a bit chancy here.’

‘The pool’s two metres at this end,’ Rix said. ‘Tom Holland, who left last year, he did all sorts of fancy dives off that board. I saw him.’

‘Tom Holland was the Inter-Schools Champion,’ someone else pointed out. ‘And he was dead short – about five foot nothing. He could’ve dived into a puddle.’

‘Of course,’ Rix said, with a little smile tweaking at his mouth. A smile at once patronising and faintly knowing. ‘Don’t worry, Nat. I understand.’

Nathan didn’t like anyone calling him Nat.

‘What do you understand?’ Ned growled, picking up his cue while Nathan was still trying to let it pass.

‘Oh, it’s easy to be chicken when you’re so tall people are too scared to tell you the truth.’

There was a short pause, then suddenly Nathan laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m the class bully. Everyone’s really scared of me.’ Since he was notoriously tolerant and had never bullied anybody most of the group laughed with him, and the tension of the preceding moment was defused.

Rix took the laughter personally. He was the sort of boy who would take it personally if it rained on his birthday or his favourite football team lost a match. ‘So what you’re saying,’ he resumed, ‘is that Ned here is a big-mouthed liar.’

Ned balled his fist. Nathan, who had thought the whole stupid exchange was over, said: ‘What?’

‘He says you did the dive when you were in Italy. You say you can’t show us now – the pool’s too shallow and all that crap. Excuses. You’re calling him a liar. Your best mate, right? Some friend you are.’

One or two of the others laughed at this piece of sophistry – not a relaxed sort of laugh, the way they had laughed with Nathan, but the uncertain kind that tightens up the atmosphere. If the teacher had been around he might have noticed something amiss and put a stop to it, but he had gone to the infirmary when one of his pupils started a nosebleed. Nathan had no fallback position; he knew he should call a halt himself, but Ned was looking at him with absolute confidence that his friend wouldn’t let him down, and Nathan couldn’t fail him. The dive wasn’t safe, but he had done many far more dangerous things, in the otherworlds of his dreams, and somehow he had always come through, protected by chance, by fate, by whoever watched over him – the Grandir, or the sinister forces that shielded the Grimthorn Grail. He had been plucked from the jaws of desert monster and marsh demon, from the spelltraps of Nenufar – he had lifted the forbidden sword, defeated the unknown enemy. Perhaps, on some subconscious level, survival had made him complacent. He shrugged, not looking at Rix, only at Ned.

‘I’ll do it.’

Then he climbed up the steps to the diving board, stood poised on the edge.

Dived.

He knew, immediately, that he’d miscalculated. Everything happened at once very fast and very slow – the world arced as he completed the somersault – he tried to straighten out, to cut the water cleanly – hit the surface at the wrong angle – felt the sting of the impact, the rush of bubbles as the pool engulfed him. He needed to tilt his arms, curve the dive upward, but there was no depth beneath him, no time to manoeuvre. He’d opened his eyes under water and for a long slow millisecond he saw the bottom of the pool coming for him like a moving wall. Then it struck, knocking the air out of him, and he was breathing water – his lungs clenched – the world spun away into darkness and pain …

It was Ned who got him out, jumping in fully dressed despite his sprained ankle, heaving him out of the water while the other boys reached down to haul him over the edge. They’d done life-saving techniques earlier that term and someone managed to pump at his chest while someone else tried mouth-to-mouth. Ned said: ‘Get Mr Niall,’ meaning the games master, but no one did and it seemed an incredibly long time before any adults appeared on the scene to take over. There was blood on Nathan’s head, on his arm, blood fanning out across the wet floor-tiles. Rix stood back from the rest of the group, looking pale and uncomfortable.

‘This is your fault,’ Ned said, struggling to evade his own guilt, knowing Nathan would never have reacted to Rix’s taunting if it hadn’t been for him.

‘He was sh-showing off,’ Rix stammered, determined to convince himself.

Later, in the headmaster’s study, he said the same thing.

Annie was informed and drove to the school in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, exercising all the self-control she possessed in order not to go too fast. By the time she got there they were able to tell her Nathan would be all right: he had concussion, a dislocated shoulder, severe bruising, and what the doctor called ‘extensive physical trauma’ but no broken bones or internal damage. His first words to her were: ‘Sorry, Mum.’ She sat by his bed in the infirmary, holding his hand until it occurred to her that might embarrass him, torn between standard maternal anxiety, pointless anger (why was he always doing dangerous things, even when it wasn’t necessary?), and the sneaking paranoia of other, deeper doubts. Romany Macaire, tumbling into the river … Nathan, diving into a pool too shallow for him … Water, water, everywhere… Was it mere coincidence, or some dark supernatural plot?

‘Don’t overreact,’ Bartlemy said when she confided in him. ‘We’re surrounded by water, all the time. It’s essential to life. Don’t start seeing demons in every raindrop. Teenage boys do rash and often stupid things. Children fall into rivers. Accidents happen. It’s a very human weakness, that we need someone to blame.’

Ned blamed Rix, at least to his classmates. To Nathan, he blamed himself, saying awkwardly: ‘It was me. I made you do it. I shouldn’t have—’

‘Forget it,’ Nathan said. ‘It was my own stupid fault. I knew the dive wasn’t possible there but I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t do it.’

He, too, was blaming himself, not just for his recklessness but for that seed of unthinking arrogance which had made him believe that whatever he did, no matter how foolhardy, somehow he would get away with it. His guardian angel (or devil) would always take care of him.

But the devil had let him down, and now he knew he was vulnerable, and a tiny germ of fear grew at the back of his thought, not the fear of danger but the fear of fear itself. He could be hurt – he might be killed. Knowing that, would he be able to explore the otherworlds as boldly as before, doing whatever he needed to do, or would his newfound fear hold him back?

He couldn’t talk to Ned about it, or any of his other classmates, because they knew nothing of the voyages he made in his dreams, and would only think him nuts if they did. He couldn’t talk to Annie, because she was his mother, and he knew she worried about him too much already. He couldn’t talk to Bartlemy, because although his uncle came to see him once he was back home, they had no privacy for confidences.

In the end, he talked to Hazel. Just as he’d always done.

‘You think too much,’ Hazel said. ‘Like what’s-his-name in Shakespeare who wanted to avenge his father’s murder and kept messing it up and killing the wrong people.’ She’d been on a school trip to see Hamlet the previous term. ‘He got rid of nearly everyone in the play before he killed the right person, didn’t he? The point is he spent too much time agonising and making long speeches to himself instead of just getting on with the job. You’re starting to do that. Picking your feelings to bits and worrying about them. It’s a waste of time.’

‘I don’t make long speeches,’ Nathan objected.

‘You’d better not,’ Hazel said grimly. ‘The play was quite good but the speeches were boring.’

‘They’re famous,’ Nathan said, quoting: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question – and something about to die, to sleep – to sleep perchance to dream … For in that sleep of death what dreams may come …’

‘Boring,’ Hazel said. ‘You’re going all thoughtful on me. That’s your problem. Thinking.’

‘Thinking is a sign of intelligence,’ Nathan said.

‘No it isn’t,’ Hazel argued. ‘Stupid people think too. It’s the thinking that makes them stupid. Like that guy in the play. He stuck his sword in a curtain and killed a harmless old man because he thought he was someone else. Hamfist, Prince of Denmark. Stupid.’

‘I don’t go around sticking swords into people,’ Nathan said. ‘At least, only once.’ He had picked up the Traitor’s Sword – the sword of straw – and slashed at the Urdemon of Carboneck, but killing a demon, he felt, wasn’t the same as killing a person. ‘Anyhow, that was self-defence. I didn’t have much of a choice. The point is, maybe I found it easy to be brave, because – subconsciously – I thought I was sort of looked after. And now I know I’m not … well …’

‘You were brave from the start,’ Hazel responded. ‘You couldn’t have felt looked after then. If you’re more scared now, you’ll just have to be braver. You’ll manage it. You’re a brave kind of person. As long as you don’t start thinking about it.’

She hadn’t told him about the gnomons. Bartlemy had said he would set the trap that weekend. Hazel had already decided that if she didn’t think about what she had to do she wouldn’t worry, and if she didn’t worry she wouldn’t panic, but the effort of not thinking was taking its toll of her. She knew she wasn’t as brave as Nathan but that only meant she had to try harder. Nathan’s self-doubts she regarded as trivial – yet it was strangely reassuring to find that he, too, was having to cope with the possibility of failure and fear. Somehow, it made her feel better about her own secret terrors.

‘No thinking,’ Nathan said. ‘Right. I’ll – um – bear that in mind.’

‘And don’t start being clever,’ Hazel added, throwing him a dark look. ‘I can’t stand that either.’

‘Sorry,’ Nathan said. ‘Am I treading on your inferiority complex?’

‘I don’t have one,’ Hazel snapped. ‘I don’t do complexes and stuff.’

‘Oh really? Then why—’

But that was the moment when Annie put her head around the door with an offer of tea and cake, and the downhill run to a juvenile squabble was averted.

Since the accident Nathan had been on painkillers to help him sleep at night, and his dreams had stayed inside his head. The drugs, he suspected, affected his sleep patterns, making it impossible for him to stray outside his own world, but as the concussion had made him sick and the bruising had left him too stiff to move he had been feeling far from adventurous. However, he was strong and resilient, with quick powers of recovery, and that night he decided he could do without the paracetamol, though he didn’t mention it to Annie. It was hard to get comfortable – his shoulder still twinged at any awkward movement – but eventually he drifted into sleep, and through sleep into dream.

Only it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.

He was diving into deep water, hurtling down and down through an endless gulf of blue. The seabed rushed towards him like a moving wall. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. He tried to close his eyes, to brace himself for the impact – but there was none. No impact, no eyes. With an exquisite surge of relief he realised he was only an atom of thought, a bodiless observer whose horrifying plunge had speed but no substance. He slowed as the sea-floor drew near and found himself gliding above the level sand which stretched away in every direction, featureless as a desert. He guessed it couldn’t actually be all that deep, since he could still see in the blue dimness, and high above there was the glimmer of the sun’s rays, reaching down through the water. Something like a cloud passed overhead, a huge shadow blotting out the far-off daylight. A ship, he thought, gazing upward – but no, this was Widewater, it must be, where the land had been devoured by sea and there were neither people nor ships. Yet it looked like a ship, a vast, deep-bellied tanker hundreds of feet long. Others followed, five, six, eight, one far smaller, another little more than a dinghy. Not ships: whales. A pod of whales far larger than any in our world, sailing the ocean like a convoy of giant galleons.

His thought floated up, passing between them, emerging into a world of sky and sea. A golden void of sunlight hung all around him. The backs of the whales arched out of the water, rising and falling like slow waves on their way to the horizon. Below him he heard a strange echoing boom, like the music of sea-trumpets blown in the deeps, and knew they were singing. He thought, on a note of revelation: This is their world. Nothing here can hurt them. All of Widewater was their kingdom.

Around the rim of the sky, clouds were piling up, great thunderheads swelling visibly, rank on rank of them, like mountain ranges marching across the sea. The sun was swallowed up; a wind came scurrying before the storm, whipping the waves into restless peaks. But the whales did not vary their pace, heaving and sinking to the same steady beat. A dark rain came slanting down; thunder-drums drowned out the whalesong. Purple lightning stabbed at the wave-caps, foiled by the salt water. A stem of cloud came writhing downward, sucking the sea into its vortex, until sea and sky were joined by a whirling cord as thick as a giant’s arm. The water seemed to be flowing up it, feeding the storm-heart.

Then Nathan saw the Goddess.

He could not tell if she were solid or phantom, vapour or water, but it made no difference: she was terrible. Her upper body seemed to spout from the wavering column of the tornado, filling the sky, a pale cloudy shape with billowing hair that mingled with the thunderheads and lightning eyes. Her arms were stretched wide as if to draw the whole ocean into her embrace; the storm flowed from her fingertips. This was the Goddess who had eaten the islands, destroying all human life, who had made Widewater into a sea without a shore – the Queen of the Deep, ruler of maelstrom and tempest, an elemental with no soul and no heart, made of rage, and power, and greed. Even as he was, without form or substance, Nathan feared her.

Not just because she was a goddess. Because he knew her …

She bent down over the whale-pod; he seemed to hear her voice like a giant whisper on the wind. Lungbreathers! The whales dived, eluding her cold grasp – all save one, the larger of the two calves, who hung back from curiosity, or because his reflexes were too slow. Her long fingers spanned his back, and the sea plucked him away from the others – away and away – sucking him into the storm, rolling him in the waves, spinning him into the tumult of the tornado. Nathan followed, drawn in his wake, closing his mind against the nightmare of engulfing water …

Long after, or so it seemed, the sea was calm again. The morning sun shone down through the water onto a coral reef flickering with smallfish. The young whale was coasting along its border, now far from family and friends, seeking the currents that would lead him back to the north. Then Nathan saw the fin cutting the water, just one at first, then another, and another. Following him. Circling. Nathan didn’t want to watch any more, but the dream would not let him go, not till the sea exploded into a froth of lashing bodies, and the red came, pluming up through the foam. Then at last it was all over, and the sea was quiet, and the finned shadows flicked and circled, flicked and circled, while the stain thinned like smoke on the surface of the water, vanishing into a vastness of blue.

Nathan sank out of the dream, and once again he thought he was drowning, plunging into a darkness without air or breath. He struggled in a growing panic, fighting against the familiar asphyxiation – and then he was in bed, breathing normally, and there was a hand on his forehead. A hand that felt unnatural, cold and leathern-smooth. A hand in a glove.

The hand was withdrawn, and when it returned it felt like skin. Nathan’s eyes were shut, but a picture formed in his head: the Grandir in his protective clothing, with his white mask and black gauntlets. It was an oddly comforting image. He found himself thinking about skin, human skin, the softness of it, its coolness and its warmth, the intimacy of its touch. Only a flimsy layer between hand and brow, between sense and senses, between heart and heartbeat. Animals had hide and scales and fur, feathers and down, protection and insulation. But humans wrapped themselves in a tissue-thin covering so transparent the blood-vessels showed through, so fragile it might puncture on a leaf-edge or a blade of grass, so sensitive it could feel the lightest pressure, from the footstep of a fly to the breath of a zephyr. Yet humans in their vulnerable skin were the most deadly predators in all the worlds …

It occurred to him that these thoughts didn’t come from him – they were unfamiliar, alien thoughts, which seemed to stretch his mind into strange dimensions. The Grandir’s thoughts, flowing from the touch of his fingers into Nathan’s head …

He opened his eyes.

A face was bending over him, a face that he had seen only once before, yet he seemed to know it well. A dark curving face with a metallic sheen on the hooked cheekbones and the blade of the nose. Hooded eyes, and beneath the hoods the glimmer of hidden fires, like glints of light in a black opal. Behind the eyes, deeps of power and thought, a force of personality that could re-shape the cosmos. But for now, it was all focused on Nathan. There was a tiny frown between the eyebrows that seemed to convey both anger and gentleness. The Grandir’s spirit was larger than that of other men; he could do many emotions at once.

He said: ‘You fear the water, don’t you? It is waiting for you in your dreams, but you fear to go there, to be overwhelmed by it – smashed against the rocks, crushed into the seabed. I have read the fear in your heart where there was none before. You must face it, and face it down. There are things you have to do, even in the dark of the sea.’

‘What happens if I become solid?’ Nathan said. ‘I won’t be able to do it. Whatever it is. I won’t be able to breathe.’

‘You must find a way. Your folly has made your fear – the risk you took, when no risk was necessary – and for what? For what?’ The frown intensified; for a moment, anger supervened. ‘To impress your peers! To vindicate the one you call friend! They are nothing – less than nothing – but you matter. You have no idea how much you matter. And you might have been killed – for a gesture! An instant of bravado!’

The hand had left Nathan’s forehead to stroke his hair. For all the Grandir’s fury and frustration, his touch was soft as a caress.

Nathan said: ‘Everyone matters.’ He was trying to hang onto that.

‘You don’t understand. One day – but not yet, not yet. You must take care. No more folly. No more rashness.’ Voice and face changed. The hard curve of his mouth appeared to soften. Almost, he smiled. ‘You are just a boy – so young, so very young. It is long and long since I had contact with youth. I had forgotten how it shines – how valiant it is, and how defenceless. You have tasks to do but your youth will find a way. You will go back to Widewater. I will care for you – when I can. But I cannot always save you. Remember that …’

Nathan said sharply: ‘Did you show me the whales? And the Goddess?’

‘These are things you needed to see—’

‘Who is she? I thought – I knew her.’

‘She is Nefanu, Thalasse, Queen of the Sea. You know her double, the witch from the river. But the spirit in your world is far less in power, though not in hunger. She would make Earth her kingdom, a desert like Widewater, landless and bare. She seeks to open the Gate and draw power from her sister-spirit, her other self – but that is unimportant. She has no part in my plans. It is Nefanu who dominates your task.’

‘But how can I face a goddess?’ Nathan demanded, trying to sit up.

The hand restrained him.

‘Only do what you must. Perform the task ordained for you; no more.’

‘What task?’

‘You know what task. Enough questions. There may be a time later, but not now. Now, Time is running out. My world is running out. Do your part. All my trust is in you …’

The dream was receding, almost as if the Grandir was thrusting him away, back into sleep, into his own universe. He knew a sudden fever of urgency – if he could only find the right questions maybe he would learn the answers at last. (One day, the Grandir had said.) He was groping blindly between worlds, fulfilling some obscure destiny that no one would ever explain – a pawn in an inscrutable chess game, a puppet on detachable strings. He knew it had to do with the Great Spell – with the Grail relics that he alone could retrieve – but there was still no answer to the great Why? Why was he born with this bizarre ability to travel the multi-verse – an ability he could not even control? Why was he sent on this unknown quest? Why him?

He tried to speak, to protest … but the Grandir’s face was slipping away, curving into the swirl of the galaxy, glimmering into stars. Darkness followed, and a sleep without dreams, and he woke in the morning to the pain in his shoulder, and the ache in his head, and a tangle of thoughts to unravel.

Annie brought him tea in bed, a rare indulgence which, as she explained to him, would run out as soon as his bruises unstiffened.

‘I’m not really stiff now,’ he said provocatively. ‘I could get up easily.’

‘No you don’t.’ She scrutinised his face, noting the sallow tinge to his complexion and the shadows under his eyes. ‘You look as though you’ve slept badly. Did you take your painkillers?’

‘I don’t like taking pills all the time.’

‘Yes, but the doctor said you’re supposed to take them at night for at least another week.’ She sat down on the bed, her exasperation changing to anxiety. ‘Have you – have you been dreaming again?’ And, after a pause: ‘Those dreams?’

He shrugged. Nodded.

‘For God’s sake.’ Annie fumbled for the right words, not wanting to hear herself fussing – knowing fussing would do no good. ‘You’re not fit enough yet …’

‘I don’t need to be fit. I wasn’t there physically; just in thought.’

‘Something’s scared you. You look done in.’

He wasn’t going to tell her about his fear of the water. ‘I’m okay,’ he assured her. ‘Just trying to figure out what’s going on.’

‘Can I help?’

‘Maybe.’ He hesitated. ‘How much do you know about the water-spirit who was after the Grail?’

Annie tensed, her nebulous fears returning like bats to their cave. ‘Do you think she had something to do with your accident?’

‘No. No, not that. But I’ve been to this place – Widewater – it’s all sea, a whole planet with nothing but sea. There was land once but it was overwhelmed. She devoured it. She hates all creatures of the air – lungbreathers – even whales and selkies. They call her the Goddess, the Queen of the Sea – the Grandir said her name was Nefanu. She seems to have some connection with the water-spirit here. Like an alter ego – a more powerful twin. And more evil.’

‘A Doppelganger,’ Annie said promptly. ‘I know. The theory is we all have other selves in other worlds, living out alternative lives.’

‘It’s something I’ve come across before, in a way,’ Nathan said. ‘Not exactly other selves but … parallels. The same stories running through every world, the same kind of people. Like, Nell always reminded me of Hazel – a mediaeval, princessly Hazel, much prettier and a bit spoiled—’

‘Don’t ever tell her that,’ Annie said hastily.

‘D’you think she’d mind?’ Nathan sounded a little surprised.

‘The phrase “much prettier” isn’t good. About this goddess—?’

‘This is different. The link seems to be much closer – as if the spirit in this world knows her counterpart is out there, and wants to reach her, to bond with her. That’s why she wants the Grail – and me. Or so the Grandir said.’

‘You’ve talked with him?’ Belatedly, Annie was picking up on the implications. More bats came home to roost.

‘Yes – but only briefly. He says he’s helping me, or guiding me, but he never answers my questions. Not the really vital ones.’

Annie asked, very carefully: ‘What kind of a – a being is he?’

‘Human.’ Nathan was startled. ‘Like Eric, only taller. Big shoulders. He makes you feel … like he’s huge, not so much

physically but his personality, his mind. His aura. He has the kind of vibes that fill up all the available space. He could talk to a crowd of millions, and every single person there would think and feel exactly what he wanted them to think and feel. And he wouldn’t even be trying: it would just happen. That’s how he is. Huge inside. It’s difficult to describe …’ He was running out of metaphors, gazing intently at Annie in an attempt to convey some impression of the man who had ruled a cosmos – who had laid an ungloved hand on his forehead, and stroked his hair. For a minute, he thought his mother had gone deadly pale. The way she might have looked if a raven had flown into the room and perched on the bedstead, croaking: Nevermore—

(And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted

Nevermore!)

—but he concluded it was a mere quirk of fancy, a footstep on his grave, that was all. The bleak winter daylight made everyone look grey and cold.

He said: ‘Mum …?’

‘Sorry,’ Annie said. ‘I was … wool-gathering. The goddess – what did you call her? Nefanu. Nefanu – and Nenufar. That’s almost an anagram. It can’t be coincidence.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. D’you suppose she’s still around – Nenufar, I mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ Annie said, but her expression gave the lie to her words.

She knew.

At Ffylde, the blame-chain had reached the headmaster. He had been in the job for less than a year, after his predecessor, the abbot, had left for higher things. Unlike Father Crowley he was a layman, who talked managementspeak and prided himself on his ability to bond with the boys, especially those with the wealthiest and most influential parents. Right now his main concern was that Nathan’s accident had occurred in the absence of the games master, laying the school open to possible charges of negligence. It was therefore imperative that blame – like the baton in a relay race – was passed on to someone else. The only question was whom. After interviewing Rix, sympathetically and at length, he talked to the other witnesses.

‘I gather Nathan was – hrmm! – showing off,’ he suggested.

Ned Gable said flatly: ‘No. Nathan never shows off. He isn’t like that.’

And, baring his chest for the knife: ‘It was my fault. I was the one who … I should’ve done the dive, but I couldn’t because of my ankle. So Nathan had to.’

‘Very fine of you,’ the headmaster said indulgently, ‘standing up for your friend, but you can’t take responsibility for his actions. That will be all.’

‘Sir—’

‘That will be all.’

The other boys received the headmaster’s suggestion with variations on a blank gaze and stony silence. Father Crowley would have known how to elicit the true facts, but the new head had neither his piercing eye nor his uncanny omniscience, and was only too ready to take that silence for assent. In the classroom omertà was the rule of the day: none of the boys would point the finger at Rix in front of an adult, whatever their private feelings – that would be the behaviour of a supergrass. However, many of them resolved secretly that on the rugger pitch they would make him pay.

All of which did Nathan no good at all.

‘The boys shouldn’t have been left unsupervised,’ the head told their form master, Brother Colvin. ‘That goes without saying. We can only hope the Ward woman won’t get herself an unscrupulous lawyer – that could cause us a lot of trouble.’

‘Mrs Ward,’ said Brother Colvin, laying some emphasis on the title, ‘is a very sweet person who would never dream of doing such a thing. A year or so ago Nathan had a problem with Damon Hackforth – he was a bit of a delinquent, we’d had a lot of problems with him – and Annie was quite amazingly kind and understanding about it. The whole business could have been very serious, both for the Hackforths and the school. If she hadn’t shown truly Christian forbearance …’

‘I see,’ said the headmaster. ‘I hadn’t realised Nathan had a track record as a troublemaker.’

‘Nathan wasn’t the one making trouble,’ Brother Colvin said. ‘I told you—’

‘No, no, Brother, say no more. He never makes trouble, he’s just caught up in it. That’s the danger with these scholarship boys: we all feel obliged to bend over backwards for them, no matter how badly they behave. They come to us from questionable homes – I gather Mrs Ward is a single parent – no discipline, no moral standards, and they’re thrown in the midst of decent kids from good families, and thanks to political correctness we have to make heroes of them. Well, I won’t have it. I infer Nathan fancies himself as a “tough guy” – he’d probably call himself streetsmart – and that sets a very poor example to the others. And word gets around, believe me. Many parents of prospective pupils could be discouraged by that sort of thing. I intend to see that Nathan’s scholarship entitlement for next year is going to be reconsidered.’

‘He’s very bright,’ Brother Colvin pointed out with deceptive mildness. ‘His results make an important contribution to our position in the league tables.’

‘Well, well. We’ll see. Perhaps Mrs Ward may be offered some kind of subsidy, providing she can come up with the bulk of the fees. This is a prestige establishment, not a charity school. I see no reason why she should freeload when other parents are prepared to dig into their pockets – often to make sacrifices – for their children’s welfare.’

Brother Colvin blinked. He wondered fleetingly what sacrifices bankers, stockbrokers and oil millionaires had to make to pay for their sons’ education. Living half the year in a tax haven, perhaps?

He said, still fighting his corner: ‘Nathan’s also an accomplished athlete. He’s on the school team for both rugby and cricket.’

‘No doubt,’ said the head, with a thin smile. ‘I don’t believe in favouring a boy for such reasons. This isn’t Cambridge, where they tolerate almost anything if a student can wield an oar.’ In his youth, he had been turned down for Magdalene, and still bore a grudge.

‘Father Crowley had a very high opinion of Nathan,’ Brother Colvin persisted.

A tactical error.

‘Father Crowley,’ said the head loftily, ‘was, I am sure, a naïve and trusting soul, as befits a man of the cloth. I, alas, am expected to take a more worldly view. The governors installed me as his successor since they needed someone with secular experience and the people skills that come from a life lived in the rough-and-tumble of the wider world.’ (He’s quoting from the speech he made when he first came here, Brother Colvin thought with a sinking heart.) ‘Trust me: I understand these boys. I can sense a bad apple even before I bite into it. Besides,’ he added, obscurely, ‘we have a good ethnic mix here.’ Belatedly, Brother Colvin realised this was a reference to Nathan’s dark complexion. ‘Think of Aly al-Haroun O’Neill – Charles Mokkajee – just the sort of pupils we need.’

‘If the corruption charges against Mr Mokkajee senior stick,’ Brother Colvin said rather tartly, ‘he’ll be spending a long time in a Bombay jail. Hardly the most desirable parent.’

‘Now, now,’ said the head, with a tolerant smile. ‘He’s innocent until proven guilty: we mustn’t forget that. Anyhow, I gather the case will be bogged down in the Indian legal system for some years. And by the way, it’s Mumbai, not Bombay. We don’t want to offend Charles’ ethnic sensibilities, do we?’

‘No – of course not,’ said Brother Colvin. Seething with frustration and other, still more unchristian, emotions, he took his leave.

On Thursday night Annie stood over Nathan while he took the painkillers. He tried not to be glad about it. He wasn’t yet ready to face the sea again.

In Thornyhill woods, it was raining. Water drizzled out of the sky and dripped through the trees with the peculiar persistence of English rainfall. Hazel, peering out of a latticed window, thought the weather could keep it up all night and all the next day and probably right through the following week. It was that kind of rain. Although it was barely seven, she felt as if it had been dark for hours. Evening had set in midway through the afternoon with no real daylight to precede it, just the grey gloom of overcast skies and general Novemberitis. Bartlemy had cheered her up by allowing her to abandon maths for supper – wild rabbit roasted in honey and chestnuts, creamed spinach, home-grown apple tart – and now they were discussing the shortcomings of Hamlet and why too much thinking was bad for you.

‘He was stupid, wasn’t he?’ Hazel insisted. ‘Not stupid like me, but clever-stupid, if you see what I mean.’

‘I see exactly what you mean,’ Bartlemy said. ‘He used thought as a substitute for action, and when he did act, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time – a common failing of highly-strung, over-sensitive adolescents. Of course, he was only sensitive to his own feelings, not other people’s, or he would have been less prone to commit haphazard murders. As it was, the native hue of resolution, got sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’

‘That’s what I said,’ Hazel averred.

‘However,’ Bartlemy resumed, ‘I didn’t know you were stupid. This is hardly a stupid conversation.’

‘My teachers say I am,’ Hazel mumbled, caught off guard. ‘Anyway, my mum’s not that smart – nor’s my dad. To be clever, you have to have clever genes. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t underrate your mother. Or your father, for that matter. Everyone has brains. The question is whether they choose to use them. How will you choose?’ Hazel was silent, briefly nonplussed. ‘Pleading bad genes is a very poor excuse for unintelligence,’ Bartlemy concluded.

That was the point when she wandered over to the window, evading a response, staring darkly into the dark.

Neither of them saw the figure on the road nearby: little could be distinguished through the rain curtain and the November gloom. Only Hoover lifted his head, cocking an ear at the world beyond the manor walls.

The man on the road wore jeans that flapped wetly round his calves and a heavy-duty sheepskin jacket without a hood. Raindrops trickled down his hair inside his turned-up collar. His face was invisible in the dark but if it hadn’t been a passer-by would have seen lean, tight features clenched into a lean tightness of expression, grimmer than the grim evening – grim with determination, or discomfort, or something of both. But there were no passers-by. The road was empty and almost as grim as the man.

He had left his car more than a mile back, close to the Chizzledown turning, when the slow puncture became too hazardous for driving. No one would want to change a wheel on such a night, but he was a chief inspector in the CID, on more or less official business: he could have rung a subordinate to pick him up, or called the AA, or a local garage whose owner owed him a favour after he had prevented a robbery there. Instead, he chose to walk through the woods, wet and growing wetter, wearing his grimness like a mask under the water-trickle from his hair.

It wasn’t even the best route for him to take, on foot or by car, but he often drove that way, though this was the first time in over a year he had found a reason to stop. There was no light on the road and from time to time he stepped in a puddle, cursing under his breath as the water leaked into his shoes. The only sounds were the squelches of his own footfalls, the hiss of the occasional oath and the murmur of the rain. He didn’t know what made him turn round – instinct perhaps, a sixth sense developed over years of seeing life from the dark side. He could make out little in the murk but he had an impression of movement along the verge, a rustle beyond the rain – the susurration of bending grasses, the shifting of a leaf. And then, light but unmistakable, the scurrying of many feet – small feet or paws, running over the wet tarmac. An animal, or more than one: nothing human. Nothing dangerous. In an English wood at night, the only danger would be human. There were no panthers escaped from zoos, no wolves left over from ancient times – he didn’t believe in such stories. No animal could threaten him …

He was not a nervous type but all his nerves tensed: Fear came out of the dark towards him. Fear without a name, without a shape, beyond reason or thought.

Fear with a hundred pattering feet, just out of rhythm with the rain …

He knew it was illogical, but instinct took over. He turned and ran. Ahead, he saw the path through the trees, the gleam of a lighted window. He slipped in the wet and almost fell, lurching forward. Inside the house a dog barked once, sharp and imperative. The front door opened.

The man stumbled through the gap into Bartlemy’s entrance hall.

‘Chief Inspector Pobjoy,’ Bartlemy said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

In the living room he found himself seated by the fire, sipping some dark potent drink that was both sweet and spicy. Hazel surveyed him rather sullenly; after all, he had once treated her as a suspect in a crime. He said: ‘Hello,’ and, on a note of faint surprise, ‘you’ve grown up.’ He wondered if he should congratulate her on becoming a young lady, but decided she didn’t look like an eager aspirant to young-ladyhood, and he would do better to keep quiet. In any case, the Fear had shaken him – the violent, inexplicable Fear reaching out of the night to seize him. It wasn’t even as if it was very late.

Bartlemy said: ‘There’s some apple tart left,’ and threw Hazel an admonitory look when she muttered something about waste.

The apple tart was hot, blobbed with clotted cream. If Eve had prepared such a tart, the gods would have forgiven her the theft of the fruit.

Between mouthfuls, Pobjoy said: ‘I had a puncture.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t phone for help,’ Bartlemy remarked. ‘On a night like this.’

‘Battery needs re-charging,’ Pobjoy explained.

Hazel thought with a flash of insight: He’s lying. Why? Has he come here to spy on us?

She said: ‘Let’s see.’

Pobjoy stared at her but didn’t answer.

‘Hazel, don’t be rude,’ Bartlemy said mildly. ‘I’m always happy to see the inspector. He helped save Annie from a psychopathic killer – or have you forgotten?’

‘She saved herself,’ Hazel argued. ‘She’s much tougher than she looks.’

‘I know,’ Pobjoy said. ‘She’s a very brave woman.’ He was disconcerted by his own recent cowardice, by the strange panic that had held him in its grip. He hid uncertainty behind the leftovers of his former grimness.

Bartlemy looked faintly amused, as if he knew. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’d better tell us what happened out there, before you fell through my door. You were running away from something, weren’t you?’

‘It was nothing,’ Pobjoy said. ‘Nothing I could see. The dark – some animal – I don’t know what came over me. I’m not one to jump at spooks, just because I’m on a lonely road.’

It was Hazel’s reaction which surprised him. ‘Them,’ she said, and her voice was gruff. And to Bartlemy: ‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘I fear so.’

‘But why were they after him?’

‘The rules have changed,’ Bartlemy reiterated. ‘They’re out of control. You did well to run, my friend. Had they caught you, they would have entered your mind and driven you mad. Remember Michael Addison.’

‘This is nonsense,’ Pobjoy said, setting down his plate, fortified by the apple tart on its way to his stomach and the afterglow of the unknown drink. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t believe it. All that supernatural crap. I was just – spooked. That’s all.’

‘Then go outside,’ Bartlemy said. ‘See for yourself.’

Pobjoy got up, walked through the hall, opened the door.

They were there, he knew it immediately. Watching for him. Waiting. Just beyond the reach of the light. He saw shadows shifting in the darkness – heard the whisper of the rain on the leafmould, and behind it another whispering, as of voices without lips, wordless and soulless. Suddenly, he found himself picturing Michael Addison’s drooling mouth and empty eyes. Fear reached out in many whispers. The hairs crawled on his skin.

He drew back, closing the door. Against the night, against Them.

Back in the living room he said, trying to keep his voice even: ‘What are they?’ And: ‘What do I do?’

‘For the moment,’ said Bartlemy, ‘you stay. I think you need another drink.’

THREE A Touch of Death

Bartlemy sent Hazel home in a taxi which he paid for, even though she insisted she could perfectly well walk. ‘I have iron,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m not afraid.’ She was determined to put Pobjoy in his place, to show him that in a world of dark magic – a world where being a policeman counted for nothing – she was the one who could handle herself. But Bartlemy overruled her and Pobjoy barely noticed. He had more than enough to think about.

‘What are those creatures?’ he repeated, when the two men were alone.

And, in the subsequent silence: ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘They are not ghosts,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Here, they might be called magical, but you must realise magic is merely a name for a force we don’t understand. Once we can analyse it and see how it works it becomes science.’

‘That’s an old argument,’ Pobjoy said. ‘Television is magical unless you’re a TV engineer. The things out there – how do they work?’

‘They come from another universe,’ Bartlemy explained matter-of-factly. ‘They are made of fluid energy, with little or no solid form; partly because of this, some can migrate between worlds. The species has the generic name of gnomons, but those which are able to cross the barrier are called Ozmosees. I heard about them – read about them – once, but these are the first I have ever seen, since although they did exist in this universe, they died out here long ago. They are hypersensitive to sound, smell, light, but they have no intelligence and must be controlled. I am not sure how that is done; possibly by the dominion of a very powerful mind.’

‘What are you saying?’ Pobjoy demanded, resolutely sceptical. ‘They got here through the back of a wardrobe?’ He had read few of the right books but had once inadvertently watched a documentary on the making of Narnia.

‘I doubt it.’ Bartlemy smiled. ‘Unfortunately, I know very little about them, and their behaviour – as you must realise – is hard to study, though I have tried. The process may be assisted by attaching them to a person or object in this world, thus drawing them out of their place of origin. We cannot know for certain. However …’

‘What object?’ Pobjoy interrupted. He was a detective, and even on such unfamiliar territory, he could work out which questions to ask.

‘I imagine you can guess.’

There was a short pause. ‘The cup?’ Pobjoy said, as illumination dawned. ‘The Grimthorn Grail?’

‘Precisely,’ said Bartlemy, looking pleased, like a teacher with a pupil who, after a long struggle, has finally grasped the principles of calculus. ‘They appear to have been sent to guard it. There are also indications that their guardianship extended to Nathan and Annie—’

‘Nathan and Annie? But – why? – how?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bartlemy admitted. ‘There is some connection between them and the Grail, too complicated to go into now. In any case, I am not yet sure exactly what it is, or how deep it goes.’

‘Did Nathan steal it that time?’ Pobjoy asked sharply.

‘Dear me no. In fact, he got it back. It’s a long story, too long for now. To return to the gnomons, the problem seems to be that they are no longer – focused. There was no reason for them to pursue you, yet they did. And there have been other incidents lately. Evidently they are getting out of hand. The power that manipulated them may be losing its grip, or merely losing interest. There could be other factors. At this time, we have no way of finding out.’

‘Are you saying someone here – some sort of wizard—’ Pobjoy enunciated the word with hesitation and distaste ‘—is controlling these creatures? Some local bigwig with secret powers?’ He didn’t even try to keep the irony from his tone.

‘Of course not,’ Bartlemy said mildly. He was always at his mildest in the face of scorn, anger or threat. ‘Their controller is in the universe from which they came. That’s why we know so little about him.’

‘If this is true,’ Pobjoy said, attempting to keep the world in its rightful place, ‘what’s his interest in the Grail?’

‘He placed it here,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Probably for safekeeping. A long time ago, I had a teacher who contended there were many otherworld artefacts secreted – or in some cases dumped – on this planet. He claimed they were responsible for almost all myths and legends, and several major religions. Apples of youth, rings of power, stone tablets falling out of the sky. That sort of thing. Of course, he may have exaggerated a little.’

He’s nuts, Pobjoy thought. Clever, yes – harmless – but nuts. I wonder if Annie knows?

Then he visualised the gnomons, waiting in the dark …

He spent the night in the guest room.

He was woken in the small hours by someone tapping on the window. It was only a gentle sound, barely louder than the rain, but it jerked him abruptly from sleep. Too abruptly. For a few seconds, he didn’t know where he was, or what he was doing there. His bleary gaze made out a shape through the panes, behind the raindrops. A face. A pale blurred face with midnight eyes and a floating mist of hair. A face he had seen somewhere before, the same and yet different, but he couldn’t quite catch hold of the memory. He got up and tried to make his way across the room, but he stumbled against the unfamiliar furniture and when he looked again the face was gone. Back in bed, he returned gratefully to the realm of sleep.

It was only in the morning that it struck Pobjoy that his room was on the first floor. He opened the window, surveying the crime scene, but there was no convenient tree nearby and the ivy on the wall would never support a climber. Downstairs, he slipped out into the garden, checking the earth for the imprint of a ladder, but there was none. Over the best breakfast he had ever eaten he called the AA for his car and the police station for a lift to work. For the moment, he wanted no further discussion with Bartlemy.

He needed some time to convince himself none of it had ever happened.

It was a long time since Hazel had walked through the woods without the comfort of the iron door-number in her pocket, and she was disturbed by how defenceless its loss made her feel. She had been in the habit of fingering the metal as she walked, fiddling with it like a worry-bead, and now her hand was stuck in her pocket with nothing to do, clenching involuntarily from time to time, relaxing again when she noticed her nails digging into her palm. She was some distance from the road, on a track that wound its way towards the valley of the Darkwood, where it petered out. All tracks failed in the Darkwood, a deep fold in the countryside with a stream running through it which would change course in a shower of rain, where the trees tangled into thickets and the undergrowth grew into overgrowth and any sunlight got lost on its way to the ground. Long ago Josevius Grimthorn, had performed bizarre rites in a chapel there – a chapel buried for centuries under the leafmould and the choking tree-roots. Nathan had stumbled into it once by accident, but there was a spell on the place which forbade him to speak of it, and it was long before he found it again. And Josevius’ house had been there too, burnt down in the Dark Ages, where Login the dwarf had been imprisoned in a hole beneath the ground.

Hazel was thinking of that as she walked, wondering if he was watching her from some hidden hollow in the leaves, or perched furtively among the branches. She glanced round every so often, watchful and wary, but there was only the great stillness of the trees, stretching in every direction. That’s the thing about woods, she thought: when you’re inside one it seems much bigger than it really is, as if it goes on forever. And they had their own special quiet, when they shut out the sounds of the free wind and the open sky, and you could hear a twig crack or an acorn drop a long way off. But that afternoon there was little to hear.

She knew this part of the wood well – she had come there as a child, when her father still lived at home and she wanted to be on her own. She would scramble up among the boughs and stay there for hours, watching mites creeping in the bark, or a caterpillar eating its way through a leaf, listening to the bird-chatter and the insect-murmur, and the great silence waiting behind it all. Later, when she was older, she had come to talk to the woodwose, Nathan’s strange friend, with his stick limbs and sideways stare, till he went back to his own place. She had always felt at ease here, on familiar territory – until now. Now, when she knew the gnomons were lurking somewhere, no longer bound to their purpose but aimless and astray, ready to turn on anything that crossed their path. Hoover was trailing her, some twenty yards back, which gave her a little security, but nonetheless she jumped when a squirrel’s tail whisked round a tree-bole, froze into alertness at the tiniest rustle in the leaf-mould.

But they did not come. There were a hundred small warnings, a hundred false alarms. And nothing. The path ran out, and the woodland floor dipped towards the valley. ‘Don’t go there,’ Bartlemy had said. ‘There’s no room to run, and you could easily get lost. If you reach the Darkwood, turn back.’

Hazel turned back. After a while, Hoover caught up with her, lolloping at her heel.

‘No luck,’ Hazel said. If luck was what she was looking for.

‘They inna there,’ said another voice close by – a voice with a brogue as old as the hills, and almost as incomprehensible.

‘Hello,’ Hazel said, politely. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘Nay,’ said the dwarf. ‘They’ll be in the auld capel, where the Magister used to consort wi’ the devil when he popped up from hell for a chat. I’ve seen them there o’ nights, a-heebying and a-jeebying, whispering thegither for hours, though I never heard they had aught to say.’

‘It’s not night,’ Hazel pointed out.

‘Night – day – at the runt end of the year, there’s no muckle difference.’

‘Could you show me the place?’ Hazel asked. ‘Not now – it’s a bit late – but another day?’

‘Aye,’ the dwarf said slowly. ‘But I’m thinking the goodman would not be wanting ye to go there.’

‘Then we won’t tell him,’ Hazel said, doing her best to sound resolute. ‘We have to trap the gnomons. If they won’t come to me, then I have to go to them.’

‘Ye’re a bold lass,’ said the dwarf, but whether in approval or criticism she couldn’t tell. ‘I’ll be seeing ye.’

He was gone, and ahead she saw Bartlemy, emerging from the gloom of the fading daylight.

‘They didn’t come,’ Hazel said.

‘So I gather. We’ll try again tomorrow.’

But on Sunday it rained too heavily for hunting phantoms, and in the week Hazel had school.

‘I could skive off one afternoon,’ she offered, nobly.

‘No,’ said Bartlemy. ‘We’ll wait for the weekend.’

‘The weekend,’ Hazel echoed, thinking of the Darkwood, and the chapel under the tree-roots, and her stomach tightened in anticipation of terrors ahead.

Nathan went back to school on Monday, still taking the painkillers each night, less to make him sleep than to keep him in his bed. It was always awkward wandering between worlds in the dormitory, since the more solid he appeared in his dreams, the more insubstantial his sleeping form would become. It was only when he was back home for the weekend, and assuring his mother he was restored to fitness, that he stopped taking the drugs.

That night, he lay for a while unsleeping, his body rigid at the thought of the planet undersea. The Grandir was right: he knew what he had to do. Find the third relic – the relic removed from Eos countless years ago by the Grandir himself, to shield it from the greedy and the misguided. The Iron Crown. The crown of spikes forged originally by Romandos, first of the Grandirs, to form a part of the Great Spell to save their people – a plan laid over millennia, woven into the legends of a thousand worlds, hidden in a web of folklore and lies. Nathan still had no idea what the spell itself involved, or how it could engender salvation – he knew only that it had more power than a galaxy imploding, and would shake the very multiverse to its core. Even the Grandir, he suspected, had yet to fill in all the gaps in his vision of destiny. The Grandir who thought he was a trueborn descendant of Romandos and his bridesister Imagen, though Nathan had seen in his naked face the ghost of Imagen’s lover Lugair.

Nathan lingered between sleep and waking, thoughts floating free in his mind. Lugair had betrayed Romandos – Romandos his friend – slaying him with the Traitor’s Sword, to be slain in his turn … the sword had been held in Carboneck for generations, a curse on the kings of Wilderslee and on their people … the Grail had been guarded by Josevius and the Thorns, the so-called luck of the family, its burden and its bane … and the Iron Crown must be in Widewater, somewhere in the deeps of the sea. The masculine principle, the feminine principle, and the circle that binds. Three elements that together might change a world, or all worlds … But Osskva the mage had told him it needed a sacrifice – it needed blood. Blood had begun it, Romandos’ blood, and blood must finish it – the blood of his descendant. It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people … who had said that? Suddenly Nathan was sure the Grandir was ready for that, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Not out of love perhaps – it was hard to imagine him loving his people, he seemed above such sentiment – but from a supreme sense of duty, from pride, from his absolute commitment to his heritage and his world. And for Halmé, whom he loved indeed, Halmé the Beautiful for whom he had said that world was made …

There must be another way, Nathan thought, knowing the thought was futile. He had no power to change things. He was caught up in this like a snowflake in a storm, a tiny component in a huge machine, and all he could do was whatever he had to do. Only this, and nothing more. (Why did he keep thinking of that poem, and Annie’s face when he talked of the Grandir, so pale and still?) He had to find the crown.

And then he remembered Keerye, speaking of the Goddess, and how she had an iron crown which never rusted, kept in a cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef.

How could he have failed to pick up the clue? But he had been inside Ezroc’s head, sharing his thoughts and feelings, no longer a boy but an albatross riding on the wind. Oh to fly again …

His mind turned to dragons – it would be dragons – great fire-breathing monsters, far more deadly than Urdemons or giant lizards. But no dragon could breathe fire under water. He visualised a vast serpentine creature, winged and clawed and fanged, rising in a storm of bubbles, the sea boiling against its flanks. Its mouth opened on a gullet of flame, its red-hot tongue crackled like a lava-flow in the alien element … The ocean erupted into steam as the dragon ascended, dripping wings driving it into the sky …

Somehow, in the midst of such visions, he fell asleep.

And now he was flying again, not the dragon but the bird. Soaring on the high air into a deep blue night. Southward and eastward there was a faint pallor along the horizon; light leaked into the sky. The sun’s disc lifted above the rim of the globe and the light washed over the ocean, turning the waves to glitter. Ahead, Nathan saw a broken shoreline of crags and peaks and towers, rough-facetted, glimmering here and there with a glimpse of crystal. The Ice Cliffs. As he drew nearer he made out a vast colony of seabirds stretching along the escarpment: gannets, puffins, auks, gulls, terns – the squawking of their competing chatter was like the din of a whole city. On the highest part of the ridge there was a group of albatrosses, twenty or thirty pairs, far bigger than the other birds – bigger than the albatrosses Nathan had seen on nature films – some, at a guess, nearly as tall as he was, or would have been if he had been solid. Ezroc, he realised, had grown too: his wingspan seemed to reach halfway across the world. He gazed down at the mating pairs – Nathan remembered that albatrosses mate for life – and he felt the sorrow in Ezroc’s heart because he was alone, he had chosen loneliness to pursue his long voyages in search of Keerye who was dead and the islands that were no more.

In Ezroc’s mind he heard a memory re-playing, the voice of an older bird, relative or mentor: ‘The islands are lost, young stormrider, if they ever existed. You have journeyed many miles further than your namesake – you have followed the great currents to the south – merfolk have hunted you, boiling spouts have singed your feathers, seamonsters have chased your shadow across the waves. You know the truth. The seas are empty. Stay here; settle down with your own kind. Until the Ice Cliffs melt, the northfolk will have a place to be.’

And Ezroc’s reply: ‘It is not enough.’ The words of a maverick, stubborn beyond reason, holding onto a vision no one else could see.

He passed over the colony, ignoring the birds that raised their heads to watch him, speeding along the floating shoreline. Below, Nathan glimpsed other creatures, refugees from the lost lands of long ago, surviving on the Great Ice. A troop of penguins waddling along a promontory, plopping into the sea – clumsy and comic on the ice, arrow-smooth in the water. A huddle of sealions and trueseals, nursing their newborn pups. A great snowbear waiting at a borehole till its dinner came up for air. And an enormous walrus, tusked and bristled, heaving itself up onto a floe, who raised a flipper in greeting.

Ezroc wheeled and swooped down to land on the ice beside him.

‘Greetings, Burgoss. May your moustache never grow less! I’ve been away a while – what is the word along the Ice Cliffs?’

‘Greetings, young ‘un,’ the walrus grunted. ‘What makes you think I have time for the jabber of chicks and pups? I don’t listen to children’s gossip, and when they’re grown their talk is all of food and sex. Enough to deafen you with boredom. If that’s the word you seek, ask elsewhere.’

‘You are the oldest and wisest creature in all the seas,’ Ezroc said, flattering shamelessly. ‘Except for the whales. If there is any news worth knowing, you will know it.’

‘Not so much of the oldest.’ The walrus shook himself, feigning displeasure. ‘You have a beak on you, young Ezroc, you always did. I’d say you were getting too big for your wings, if they weren’t grown so wide I can barely see from tip to tip. What’ve you been eating, down in the south? Hammerhead?’

‘Too small,’ Ezroc said airily. ‘I feast only on sea monsters.’

‘All boast and no bulwarks,’ the walrus retorted. ‘Hrrmph! Well, I can guess the kind of news you need to hear, and it ain’t good. A piece broke off the Great Ice away westward, maybe five longspans across. Perhaps Nefanu is bringing the sun north to melt us, though the days don’t seem any longer to me. But I’m not as young as I was, and could be I’m out of my reckoning.’

‘She won’t bring the sun,’ Ezroc said. ‘I don’t think she has that power. Anyway, she doesn’t need to. All she has to do is divert one of the warmer currents. If she hasn’t tried that yet, it’s only because she hasn’t thought of it.’

‘Those old gods are as dumb as dugongs,’ Burgoss remarked. ‘How else did her queenship manage to wipe out the rest of them? Anyhow, ice breaks in the spring. It may not mean much. You’ve got other things to worry about. The Spotted One says he saw merfolk scouting below the Cliffs last moondark. Says they took a snowbear, though there’s no proof. The bears don’t lair together; they wouldn’t know if one’s gone missing.’

‘The Spotted One …’ The albatross might have frowned, if birds could frown. Nathan could sense his unease.

‘The others don’t listen to him,’ the walrus said. ‘Since old Shifka died they’ve grown complacent – complacent and careless. Apathy! Huh! The biggest killer of all time. Once that sets in, you’re half way to extinction. I’m old – though not as old as you seem to think – but I can still smell trouble coming. If the Great Ice were to break up – if the merfolk mounted a serious attack—’

‘Do you believe him?’ Ezroc interjected.

‘Possibly. He’s surly and solitary, but that don’t make him a liar. Been an outcast since he was a pup, when they taunted him for his spots. Seal-brats can be cruel – cruel and stupid – just like any other young ’uns. He wasn’t quick with words so as he got older he fought – fought tough and fought dirty – teeth, flippers, fists, he didn’t care what shape he used as long as he won, and the odds were always against him. Can’t blame him for that.’

‘He killed someone,’ Ezroc said.

The walrus shrugged, a great rippling shrug that flowed right down his massive body. ‘It happens. Don’t think he set out to kill – he always wanted the others to feel their bruises, or so I guess – but the brat got his head smashed on the ice, and that did for him. Skull too thin or something.’

‘Brat?’ Ezroc was appalled. ‘He killed a pup?’

‘Nah. Just some half grown flipperkin shooting his mouth off. They’re all brats to me. Point is, after that they avoided him, and he – well, he’d have made himself an outcast, even if they didn’t. It suited his mood. I thought you’d know the story.’

‘I was only a chick,’ Ezroc said. ‘Keerye never went into details. He used to talk to Nokosha sometimes – he wasn’t like the rest of them.’

‘Young Spots was the only one he couldn’t best in a fight,’ Burgoss said. ‘Strongest selkie on the Cliffs. I daresay Keerye respected that.’

‘Nokosha still blames me for his death, I think,’ Ezroc said. ‘I’ve never had anything from him but foul looks.’

‘When you’ve only got one friend, you’d want someone to blame for losing him,’ the walrus said philosophically. ‘If you want to ask Nokosha about the merfolk, you’ll have to get past that.’

‘How?’ Ezroc asked.

‘Up to you.’

‘Where do I find him?’

‘No idea. Wherever the others aren’t. Those big wings of yours must be good for something. Use ’em.’

The albatross made a sound which Nathan knew for laughter – bird’s laughter, harsh as a cry. ‘Thanks, Burgoss,’ he said. ‘I owe you. You are the wisest – and the fattest – creature in the sea, except for the whales—’

‘Hrrmph! Be off with you, or you’ll find I’m not the slowest, whatever you may have heard.’

The albatross veered away, taking off in a few strong wing-beats, launching himself into a long glide out over the water. As he circled higher Nathan felt his doubts, the growing weight of fears still only half formed and founded on uncertainty. If he had learnt one thing in all his travels it was that the hatred of the Goddess was unrelenting and her hunger insatiable. Once, she had hated the islands and all those who lived there, man, beast or bird, drowning them in her tempests, driving out rival gods. Now, she had turned her enmity on the last vestiges of the People of the Air – the lungbreathers whom she saw as aliens, dwelling in her kingdom but not of it, corrupting the purity of the great ocean. And when we are gone, Ezroc thought, who will she have left to hate? The rocks that hold up her reefs? The whales and dolphins who are not true fish – the crabs and sea-scorpions because they have legs – any creature who ever tried to crawl or wriggle into the sun, when there was still something to crawl on?

But as long as the Great Ice endured, the northfolk could withstand her. If they were careful – if they were watchful – if the merfolk stayed in the warm seas of the south …

He flew over a blue-green inlet, walled with ice, where a group of selkies were leaping and diving; Nathan could see them changing shape as they plunged beneath the surface, shedding their half-human form for the seal-fell native to the element. He knew from his bond with Ezroc that selkies could transform themselves at will, though they rarely used their legs. A couple of them waved to the albatross, but although he dipped his head in acknowledgement he did not stop. A little further on he came to a place where a great berg had broken away from the Cliffs and was rocking gently on the swell. There was a figure on the lowest part of the berg, lying on its stomach, gazing into the depths below. Fishing, maybe. As Ezroc drew nearer Nathan saw it was a selkie, but unlike the others, his tail-fur dappled with curious markings, black spots within grey, his thick hair, also somehow dappled, bristling like the mane on a bull-seal. The bird lost height, and Nathan made out the ridged vertebrae along the selkie’s back, and the bunched muscles in arm and shoulder. There was even a faint mottling under his skin, the ghost-markings of his dual self.

Ezroc circled the berg, calling out: ‘Nokosha!’, but the selkie never raised his head.

The albatross landed on the water a little way off, sculling with his webbed feet to hold himself against the currents.

‘Nokosha!’ he repeated. ‘Can I talk to you?’

Still no response. What Nathan could see of the face, with its downswept brows and brooding mouth, seemed to be shaped for scowl. The shadow-spots spread across cheekbone and temple, making him look alien even among his own kind.

‘I hear you saw merfolk,’ Ezroc persisted. ‘A raiding party, or – or scouts checking out the terrain. If that’s true, we have to do something.’

‘What will you do?’ For a swift moment, Nokosha lifted his gaze. His eyes, too, were different, not velvet-dark like other selkies but pale and cold as ice. ‘Fly off round the world to gather tales from the smallfish of the reefs? Ask the sharks to tell us what their masters are doing? That will be a big help.’

‘Were these sharkriders?’ Ezroc said, ignoring Nokosha’s scorn.

‘What if they were? No one listens to what they don’t want to hear. It’s easier to call me a liar than to face the truth. Soon or late, the fish-folk will come in numbers, and for war. The ice won’t protect us. We’re lazy and unprepared: we’ll die like mackerel in a dolphin-hunt.’

‘Did they really take a snowbear?’ Ezroc said, keeping to the point. After all, he was getting information – of a kind.

‘They dived under the ice and came up through the borehole to seize him. They had spears tipped with blood coral, and stone knives.’ The selkie also carried a knife, a short stabbing blade which he fingered as they spoke, jabbing it into the ice. ‘No doubt their leader now wears its skin. Impractical under water, but he was that type. More ego than sense.’

‘Could you describe him? There are twelve merkings. If we knew which one he served—’

‘You could do what? Fly off on a mission of complaint?’

‘I have friends,’ Ezroc said, ‘even among the merfolk. They are not all her creatures. I might be able to find out more.’

‘Friends!’ Nokosha mocked, and there was real hatred under the scorn: his voice shook with it. ‘Friends among the coldkin – the fish-eyed, the fish-hearted! Friends among the killers of the south! You’re a traitor to your race, to all the People of the Ice. You abandoned Keerye – you led him to the killing seas, and left him there to die. Come a little closer, birdling, and I will have you by the throat, and this will be your last flight.’

There was no doubt he meant it. The albatross was bigger, far bigger, but the selkie was all knotted muscle and knotted rage. If he got his hands around Ezroc’s neck, there would be no more to be said.

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

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