Whitemantle
Book Three of the Language Of Stones
Robert Carter

For Andrew Ritchie – the Brompton man – who gave me back my fitness.

‘I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, in order to keep it out of as many things as possible.’

Sean O’Casey

The Plough and the Stars

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

PART ONE THE ENCHANTED CHAIR

CHAPTER ONE DOUBLE DEPETRIFICATION

CHAPTER TWO TRINOVANT

CHAPTER THREE THE BIER OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER FOUR THE VANE

CHAPTER FIVE ‘KILL! KILL!’

CHAPTER SIX ONCE A FELLOW…

CHAPTER SEVEN LEIR’S LEGACY

CHAPTER EIGHT MAGOG AND GOGMAGOG

PART TWO THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT BE KING

CHAPTER NINE THE LAMB HYTHE YALE

CHAPTER TEN THE WINDOWLESS CHAMBER

CHAPTER ELEVEN PROMISES AND PIECRUSTS

CHAPTER TWELVE THE KING OF PENTACLES

CHAPTER FOURTEEN PROPHECIES, LIBELS AND DREAMS

PART THREE ON THE SEVENTH DAY

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE FAST-FLOWING STREAM

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE SLEEPLESS FIELD

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN MUCKLE GATE

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE DOOMSTONE OF THE WEST

PART FOUR THE END OF ALL THINGS

CHAPTER NINETEEN THE IRON TREE

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE SUNS

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THE SECOND DUEL

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO THE STONE THAT WAS HEALED

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE EDWARD

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR A BROKEN LAND

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE WHITE SNOW, RED RIVER

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S HISTORICAL NOTE

About the Author

By Robert Carter

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
THE STORY SO FAR

Whitemantle is the third novel in the Language of Stones cycle. The first two, called The Language of Stones, and The Giants’ Dance, recount the story of Willand, an ordinary boy who stands on the threshold of manhood. On the day that Will turns thirteen, the wizard Gwydion takes him away from home and explains certain extraordinary prophecies that concern the third and final coming of an ancient hero-king called Arthur. Gwydion suggests that Will himself is that predicted incarnation, but Will does not want to believe it.

However, as Will’s adventures progress dark forces are seen to be at work, chiefly embodied in the person of Maskull, a ruthless sorcerer and Gwydion’s arch-enemy, and the Sightless Ones, a sinister order of tax collectors who squeeze the common people and try to persuade them to believe in the mind-enslaving ‘Great Lie’. Gwydion is at pains to hide Will’s true identity from the world, and so the boy is lodged in secret, first with the fearsome hog-headed Lord Strange, then with the family of Duke Richard of Ebor, where he is educated in lordly ways. Will also comes to learn ‘the redes’ – the rules that govern magic – and he meets a girl named Willow who becomes his friend. He is also befriended by the House of Ebor’s venerable herbalist, Wortmaster Gort, and he stands up to Edward, the Duke of Ebor’s wilful heir, eventually winning his respect.

But while Will is learning, the Realm is slipping into war, for the present king is descended from a usurper, and there are many who believe he is not the rightful king. In fact, King Hal is being controlled by his beautiful but greedy queen, Mag, and her violent ally, Duke Edgar of Mells. Set against their party is the House of Ebor and its allies, who believe that Duke Richard must be recognized as sovereign. Duke Richard himself is content to wait until the sickly Hal dies, for the latter has no heir, but when the queen falls unexpectedly pregnant, rumours begin to circulate that the child has been fathered by the Duke of Mells as part of a scheme to keep Richard from his just deserts. The gauntlet of conflict is thrown down.

Meanwhile Will, who is now fifteen, has begun to see that, whatever dukes and earls may think, the world is actually maintained by magic, and the real reason the Realm is sliding into war is a magical one. Gwydion tells him of something called ‘the lore’, an ancient network of nine ‘ligns’, or earth streams, extending throughout the Isles, which carries power to an array of standing stones. Each of these ‘battlestones’ contains great harm and has the power, when awoken, to draw men to battle. Gwydion also explains that he and Maskull are the last remaining members of a wizardly council of nine whose task it once was to direct the progress of the world along the true path. But as Age succeeded Age and magic gradually left the world their numbers shrank, until there are now only two wizards left. At last, Maskull has revealed himself as ‘the betrayer’. He has turned to sorcery and is now directing the future along a path of his own choosing – but it is a path that will lead to a final Age of slavery and war.

Will and Gwydion set out to thwart Maskull by finding and uprooting the deadly battlestones. Will shows an extraordinary sensitivity to the lorc, and after many heroic struggles he locates the controlling ‘Doomstone’ in the town of Verlamion. There a bloody battle is halted when Will uses a talisman, a green stone fish he has had since birth, to crack the stone, while Gwydion fights a magical duel against Maskull. When Will confronts Maskull the sorcerer tells him, ‘I made you, I can unmake you just as easily,’ but then disappears as Gwydion lands a vanishing spell on him and transports him down into the Realm Below. In the end, the king and Duke Richard are reconciled. Will is rewarded and returns home with the greatest prize of all – Willow. But his origins, and his ultimate destiny, remain shrouded in mystery.

The second novel, The Giants’ Dance, takes up the tale more than four years later. Will and Willow are now nineteen and living at Nether Norton, Will’s home village, with their baby daughter, Bethe. One summer’s night Will sees the skies begin to blaze with a lurid purple light. Immediately he summons the wizard.

Will has recognized the purple light as that of Maskull’s magic, and when they investigate they find the village of Little Slaughter has been smashed to powder. In the ruins Will finds a little fish carved in red stone, the counterpart to his own talisman. Gwydion says that Maskull, who has escaped from the Realm Below, has directed a shooting star down onto the village. He asks for Will’s help once again.

Soon they meet with loremaster Morann who reports a rumour that the Doomstone Will once cracked has now repaired itself. But as they struggle to discover the whereabouts of the other battlestones and so hold back the tides of war, Will becomes the target of a killer, and realizes that Willow and Bethe have been brought into jeopardy also. After the battle they have all been dreading takes place at Blow Heath, Will finds himself in Ludford Casde, where Willow brings him his green talisman. Meanwhile, the political situation has continued to bend to the lorc. Edgar, Duke of Mells, who died at Verlamion, has passed his tide to his son, Henry. The latter now schemes with Queen Mag to end the agreement that saw King Hal rule with the Duke of Ebor as his ‘Lord Protector’. While the queen’s forces besiege Duke Richard at Ludford, Will becomes greatly affected by the lorc. He tries to find the battlestone that is located there, but is afflicted by madness, and a second attempt is made on his life by the dark-robed assassin who visited him once before. When Will admits to Gwydion that the red fish talisman he found at Little Slaughter has gone, the wizard says that the village was destroyed because Will’s would-be killer once lived there. He is called Chlu, ‘the Dark Child’, and the village was obliterated to make Gwydion believe Chlu was no more, whereas in reality he had become Maskull’s agent.

Will tries to understand the significance of Chlu and what he desires, but answers concerning him are few. Now Ludford is overrun and the Ebor forces flee over the seas. Gwydion magically disguises both Will and Willow so that they may masquerade as an emissary of the Blessed Isle and his wife. They attach themselves to the royal court, but they are ensnared by the wiles of Lord Dudlea who wants Will to arrange the murder of Richard of Ebor before he too can return into the Realm. Maskull is behind this demand and when his plan fails he punishes Lord Dudlea by turning his wife and son to stone.

Nothing is seen of Gwydion for many months and Will fears for him. Then news comes that an army loyal to the House of Ebor, and commanded by Edward, Duke Richard’s heir, has landed and is marching north. As The Giants’ Dance reaches its conclusion, Will battles Chlu face to face and drives him off from one of the battlestones, but in doing so he loses his main weapon against the battlestones – the red and green fish talismans fuse together and become a real, live fish, which escapes. However, there is better news when Will finds that Gwydion is being held in the queen’s dungeon at Delamprey. He works hard to free him, and also to redeem himself by thwarting the battlestone that lies buried there. He discovers that one reason Maskull has been so keen to see the war proceed is because he knows a way to tap malign power from the battlestones and use it for his own ends. He has even employed some of this power to make sorcerous manacles which have impaired Gwydion’s ability to do magic.

Seeing no other way, Will promises Lord Dudlea that if his forces will betray the queen and allow Edward an easy victory, then Gwydion will undo the spell that has made statues of Dudlea’s wife and son. Dudlea agrees, and in consequence the battle of Delamprey is soon over. Unfortunately, though King Hal falls into Duke Richard’s hands, the queen makes good her escape: this means that the war will go on.

Once Gwydion has the manacles stricken from his wrists, he tells Will all he knows about the Dark Child – Chlu and Will are twins. Chlu’s name is, in the old tongue of the west, ‘Llyw’, and according to prophecy Will must never pronounce that name in a spell or he will be no more. Gwydion goes on to reveal that almost twenty years ago, he surprised Maskull while he was conducting magical experiments on two baby boys. He rescued them and took them in secret to two separate villages, to lessen the chances of them being found. These places Gwydion then magically hid from prying eyes. Since discovering Chlu’s whereabouts, Maskull has been using him as a means of locating Will. The sorcerer knows he must destroy Will because Will stands between him and the future he is trying to bring about. Will is to become the third incarnation of Arthur, and once that is allowed to happen, Maskull will fail.

Will is angry that Gwydion has delayed telling all that he knows for so long for fear of affecting the outcome of the prophecies and appalled at the responsibility that now faces him. It is up to him to act, and to act heroically, but how can he become King Arthur, as Gwydion says he must? In addition, the wizard warns that the harm they have been drawing out from the battlestones in an attempt to prevent the fighting has not been destroyed, merely dispersed. Like a poisonous smoke, it is filling the world and bringing down the very future that Maskull so desires. And so, as the second book of the Language of Stones cycle ends, Will sees that he must solve the riddle of his own nature, the riddle that will rescue his world.

PART ONE THE ENCHANTED CHAIR

CHAPTER ONE DOUBLE DEPETRIFICATION

It was a mild summer night in July and the sun’s dying beams cast shadows from the elms. To the wise man the trees told of storm and strife and contentions in the upper airs, but down here in the evening glade neither breath of wind nor drop of rain threatened, for a strange peace enfolded all.

Four men dressed in the livery colours of Lord Dudlea sat quietly in the clearing – a waggoner, the waggoner’s lad, and two servants. They were warming themselves and spooning down chicken stew, but although they enjoyed the gentle cheer of their master’s camp fire, still a dull fore-boding shadowed their minds. The sleeping infant that had been left among them was the only one untroubled by the magic that lay heavy on the air, and each of the four knew that before the night was done weird deeds would be accomplished in the lordly tent that stood nearby. They knew it because the great wizard, Gwydion, had told them it would be so.

Only one of them had any idea of what was in the wooden crates they had brought with them, or why a wizard should be here with their lord in a forest clearing at dead of night.

Inside the tent that stood thirty paces away the mood had now become brittle. Lord Dudlea waited impatiently as Gwydion refreshed himself, drawing power from the meadow. Candlelight flickered as Willand carefully lifted the lid from one of the wooden caskets and began to tease out the straw packing and bare the stone cold flesh within. When Gwydion returned he asked Dudlea to sit alongside Willow on the far side of the tent then turned to look with close interest upon the fine-veined marble of the lady’s cheek.

‘This spell has been well worked,’ Gwydion said at last. ‘I have never seen detail like it.’

Will saw how stone eyelashes and other wisps of hair had been shattered under the first and least careful of the handlings that had brought her here. A sprinkling of fine-spun stone was to be seen in the folds of the statue’s wrappings as the last coverings came off.

It was an incredible transformation, a perfect statue of Lord Dudlea’s wife, but no mortal sculptor had made it. This was malicious work, that of a potent sorcerer.

As Gwydion reached a hand under the figure’s head, Dudlea stood up and said, ‘Please, let me—’

‘Sit down,’ the wizard told him shortly.

‘But if you’re going to lift her, I’ll call my—’

‘It’s not necessary,’ Will said, looking up.

Gwydion’s tone became compassionate. ‘Leave your men be. They are keeping true to their word, and on that much hangs. I asked them not to spy on us, come what may.’

‘Come what may?’ Dudlea blinked in alarm, and Gwydion laid a calming hand on his shoulder that made him draw in a long draught of air.

‘Take courage, John Sefton! You must be strong, for hope is one of our most important magical resources.’

Dudlea nodded and backed away. At Gwydion’s signal, Willow tied the tent’s flap firmly closed. Her daughter, Bethe, was sleeping by the camp fire, wrapped tight in a blanket. She and Will had been reunited with her only yesterday after a torturous separation. She had fared well in the care of the Duchess of Ebor, and as soon as Duchess Cicely had set foot in the Realm following her husband’s victory she had made every effort to return the child to her mother as quickly as possible. Still, Willow’s feelings had not yet fully settled. Will knew that was a concern to the wizard. He had tried to smooth their worries before the spell-working was begun. Any source of disturbance was best anticipated and dealt with ahead of time, for emotional auras would spark and fizz in bright display during magical transformations.

Will leaned over the nest of straw, checking the lady’s perfect visionless eyes informed by a glint of surprise, the knuckles, the fingers, so expressive in their attitude, gripping the stiffened folds of her robe.

‘She’s quite undamaged,’ he told Dudlea, touching the man’s spirit. ‘The delicacy of her face is scarcely blemished. Look how its waxy shine remains unscuffed. Nothing so much as a fingernail has been broken.’

John Sefton, Lord Dudlea, King’s Commissioner of Array and sometime commander of ten thousand men, broke down and wept. At Gwydion’s summons he came forward and his jaw flexed and his knuckles turned as white as his wife’s on the edge of what he feared might yet become her coffin. His tears fell upon her, but if he had imagined that tears alone would wake her, then he now discovered otherwise.

‘Open the second,’ Gwydion murmured.

The face of the lord remained bloodless as Will prised open the crate that contained the boy. The waggoner had been well paid and charged with two duties. But speed and care did not ride easily together over the Realm’s badly rutted roads, and the cart had bumped and bounced over thirty leagues to bring it to this place of particularly good aspect. The boy, too, was perfectly captured in stone. He lay mute in the finest alabaster, ten years old and innocent. Just like his mother, he was covered in fine spicules of stone. A little detail had eroded here and there, but he seemed to be undamaged.

At Will’s prompting, Dudlea came to gaze upon his son, and again he wept with relief. How different the man was now to the Lord Dudlea who had bare weeks ago tried to force Will into carrying out a murder. It was a satisfying change, a true redemption perhaps.

Gwydion’s voice rose, at once soft and sonorous, and gave the command, ‘Come to me, John Sefton.’

At that the lord went meekly. Without being asked, he knelt before Gwydion as an earl might kneel before his sovereign. Gwydion laid a hand on his shoulder, saying, ‘I want you to understand what I am attempting. It is done neither for your sake nor out of charity towards your kin. No offer that you could make would ever be sufficient to pay for this service, and it is to your credit that you did not sink to the proffering of silver or gold to me. This is to be a corrective. It is a private matter between wizard and sorcerer, and also the rescuing of a promise made by another to restore your wife and son to you.’ His eyes flickered to Will and back. ‘Fortunately for you, I happen to owe that person a favour. It is wise to power some spells on gratitude whenever possible.’

‘Thank you, thank you. I’m as grateful as any man could be,’ Lord Dudlea babbled, and it was plain to Will that he considered himself fortunate indeed. He had clearly remembered Will’s warning to him not to offer payment or reward and not to disrespect the wizard.

Gwydion’s face darkened. ‘However, when the promise was made, the promiser did not know whether there was a spell to reverse what had been done to your kin. He did not know if it was even possible. And in that falseness of promise resides my present difficulty, for lies do poison magic. They weaken it.’

‘I understand,’ Lord Dudlea said eagerly. Though he did not understand much at all, and his eyes were fever bright. ‘I can vouch that Master Willand’s word was given in true hope, at least – hope that a greater good would be born of it.’

‘That, alas, is not nearly enough. For magic springs from moral strength. In the true tongue the name of magic means ‘keeping the word’. Such stuff may not be coldly traded, for in that case the results will not be as expected. And those whose hopes are pinned upon debased magic are doomed to be disappointed.’

‘Then, if only for pity’s sake…’

‘Pity, you say? How that word has been warped over the years! Pity is properly what we feel for those who have given themselves over to weakness and so harmed others. What you mean is not pity, but fellow feeling. Do I have fellow feeling for you, John Sefton? Do I have enough? That is what you want to know.’

The lord stared back as if already stricken. ‘Do you?’

‘The question you are asking now is: have you merited it?’ He shook his head, apparently amused, and turned back to the crate. ‘I must not try to remove the spell directly, for that is now all but impossible. However, I may attempt the laying on of a counter-spell.’

Dudlea swallowed hard. ‘Do whatever you think, Master Gwydion. Only, I beg you, please do not fail them. I love my wife. I cannot live without her. And my boy is both son and heir to me.’

The wizard inclined his head. ‘You have a quick mind, John Sefton, and how uplifting it is to hear a squalid politicker such as you speak from the heart at last. Is it not time that you put on the mantle of statesman and set aside your childish plots? You are not yet become another Lord Strange. You may still choose dignity. So cease your peddling of lies and threats, keep the promise of your ancestors, even as I shall keep Willand’s promise tonight. And remember that men of privilege are but stewards of this Realm. You should not fail it in its hour of need.’

The lord had hung his head but as Gwydion finished he looked up boldly and met the wizard’s eye. ‘I’ve behaved like a fool, Crowmaster. I told myself that desperate times called for desperate measures, but I see now that I was only being weak. I will take your advice as my watchword.’

‘See that you do. What passes here tonight is not to be spoken about. And, since true magic depends upon truth of spirit, what you pledge to me here and now will take effect in the flesh of your wife and son. If you break your bonden word to me, the counter-spell will be undone and your kin will slowly – painfully – return to stone. Do you understand this warning that I give to you?’

Dudlea closed his eyes. ‘I do.’

‘Then return to me your solemn word that what you witness here tonight will remain with you alone unto death.’

‘I do so promise.’

Gwydion gathered himself. He stood gaunt and twisted as a winter oak as he drew the earth power inside him for a long moment. Words of the true tongue issued from his mouth. Cunning words coiled like ivy, blossomed like honey-suckle, gave fruit like the vine. Then he stepped around the crates, gathering up a charm of woven paces and waving hands, dancing out in gestures and speaking a spell of great magic that began to fall upon the two effigies.

A crackle of blue light passed over woman and child as they lay side by side. Will seized Lord Dudlea’s arm when he started forward, knowing he must not let the lord interfere once that blue glow had enveloped them.

A noise that was not a noise grew loud in their heads. And slowly, as Gwydion danced and drew down the power, shadows flew and the tent filled with the tang of lightning-struck air. Their skins prickled and their hair stood up, and slowly in those two strange beds of straw the cold whiteness of marble became tinted as living flesh is tinted, and the wax of death began to give way to the bloom of life.

Will felt the unbearable tension of great magic. He closed his mind against it, but it tore at him as a storm tears at a hovel. Willow, tougher by far, hung onto the lord’s flailing arms, holding him back as his wife and son rose up from their coffins like spectres. Lord Dudlea called out. His eyes bulged in helpless horror as a weird light played blue in his wife’s eyes. Something moved the boy’s lips, then jolted them again as the figures floated free above the ground. But just as Will began to think they could not hold the lord any longer, a shuddering racked both woman and boy and they fell down as if in a faint. Yet now they were moist and soft and alive, and as the noise and light vanished away they began to breathe again.

‘Oh, joy!’ Lord Dudlea called out as he attended his kin. He reached up to touch the wizard’s robe. ‘Thank you, Master Gwydion! With all my heart I thank you!’

Will opened the tent and stepped out as soon as he could. Willow went with the wizard to join those by the fire whom Gwydion said must now have their minds set at ease. They left Lord Dudlea to his family, and Will stood alone under the moon and stars, trembling, a mass of glorious emotions coursing through him. The power that flowed at Gwydion’s direction was truly awesome, and Will reminded himself that it was not every day the dead came to life again.

They parted company in the early morning.

Lord Dudlea took Gwydion’s hand. With bowed head, he pledged himself. ‘I shall keep my word, Crowmaster. I shall wait for the army that now marches south towards Trinovant, and I shall offer service to Duke Richard of Ebor.’

‘Is that wise?’ Will asked. ‘You were his captive before you escaped. Then you joined the queen against him.’

‘It was the king’s court to which I fled, not the queen’s.’

‘Oh, indeed? Rumour has it that you tried to arrange the murder of Richard while he was still in the Blessed Isle.’

The lord’s eyes opened wide and his wife looked to him as if she had been betrayed by a foolish act carried out in her absence. ‘That rumour is a lie.’

Gwydion looked upon the lord pityingly and spread his hands. ‘A lie, John Sefton? We have not even taken our leave of this clearing and already you have betrayed your promise to me. Is it so hard to be true to your word?’

‘Forgive him, Master Gwydion,’ Lady Dudlea begged. ‘I have been his staff. Without a wife to oversee his policies things naturally go awry with him.’

The wizard smiled. ‘It would be better if you let him be, lady. Grown men must learn to rely on their own consciences. It seems to me that the main question you now have before you is this: how will Lord Warrewyk receive you when next you meet? He murdered a great many of the queen’s friends after the battle.’

Lord Dudlea met Gwydion’s eye. ‘However he looks upon us, I shall lay myself upon the king’s mercy. If that means pleading for the Duke of Ebor’s mercy too, then that I shall do also.’

‘Do you think he has the strength to do the right thing?’ Willow asked when they were out of sight.

But Gwydion only smiled.

The wizard took them south on unfrequented roads, ones that went the longer way around but avoided the great chapter house at Verlamion. For that Will was grateful. He disliked and feared the Sightless Ones – or ‘red hands’ as the common folk privately called them – and he knew that at Verlamion they would be as thick as wasps about a honey pot.

The company spent the morning journeying through fruitful farm land. Will knew that if the weather kept dry for a month this part of the Realm would see a good harvest. But then, when the reaping and threshing was all done and the nights began to close in and leaves began spreading red-gold in the hedges, then out would come the Sighdess Ones with their tally sticks and counting frames to take away the best portion of the bounty from the churls who had grown it.

At Aubrey End Will announced that he could feel the presence of a green lane. The flow of earth power was strong in the soil and Gwydion marked the place with his sigil in the bole of a tree. The lign tasted, Will said, like that of the elder, and Gwydion said that, unless he was very much mistaken, they would soon cross the lign of the rowan too, and this they did before they had gone another league.

Will looked along the lign and knew it for the same stream of dark power that flowed through Ludford, many leagues to the west. And when he looked eastward he knew they could be no more than a couple of leagues west of Verlamion. A shiver passed through him. Gwydion had said that the Elders of the great chapter house there would stop at nothing to bring to book the defiler who had cracked their Doomstone. Will had not cared that it had turned out to be none other than the lid that sealed the tomb of their revered Founder. He had only wanted to break the lorc’s stony heart that day, and he had saved many a life by his actions.

They came to the banks of the River Gadden well before noon. It was here that Will felt yet another lign prickle his skin. This one was fainter and harder to follow, but it seemed to trend a little south of east, much as the rowan lign had. There was no doubt in Will’s mind that it was the yew lign, the same that passed close by the Vale.

‘Keep up!’ Gwydion called back, flicking the reins of his horse.

‘Master Gwydion, I can feel the Eburos lign.’

‘What of it?’

‘Nothing – except I thought it was our task to find more battlestones.’

‘There is no time to tarry at present. We must reach Trinovant before nightfall!’

‘Then ride on ahead of us!’ Will told him. ‘We’ve a young child to consider. And this old nag’s already tired out.’

The wizard waited for them to draw abreast. ‘I would rather you came along with me,’ he said with exaggerated patience. ‘This is not a safe time for anyone to be on the road. News of the battle has yet to reach these parts and there will be much uncertainty in men’s hearts.’

Will saw that Gwydion’s impatience was unsettling his horse. It had soon taken him fifty paces ahead and was champing to get on further still.

Willow watched the wizard with concern. ‘He’s getting grumpier by the hour,’ she whispered. ‘I hope he’s all right.’

‘He’s worried. And is it any wonder, when things have gone so far astray?’

He partly meant their quest to rid the Realm of battlestones, but he was also thinking of the unspeakable bloodshed that had followed the fight at Delamprey. While a greater battle had been narrowly prevented, the murder of so many noble prisoners at Lord Warrewyk’s hands had blighted the victory. Will was sure that act had sown the seeds of revenge – seeds that must eventually be reaped as a yet bloodier harvest.

So far as the battlestones were concerned, the loss of Will’s talisman had been an even greater blow, for it was the only real weapon they had ever possessed. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that Gwydion was right – Maskull had finally gained the upper hand.

‘And you can cheer up, too!’ Willow said. ‘Things might have gone a lot worse for us. That loathsome woman – I won’t dignify her with the title of queen – is running away into the north with what’s left of her friends. Things look set for a change at last, and probably a change for the better.’

‘Maybe. But Master Gwydion once told me to remember that we’re peacemakers – we shouldn’t be feeling pleased that Duke Richard’s forces won at Delamprey, even though he’s been a better friend to us than his enemies ever have. The balance has been shifted again, and that’s the important thing.’

Willow settled Bethe in a more comfortable position in front of her. ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t feel happy for the duke. We lived among his household. You were even schooled with his sons. Duchess Cicely helped my father and me when she might have sent us back to face Lord Strange’s displeasure. And she looked after Bethe as if she was one of her own.’

He sighed, trying to see how best to put it. ‘I’m not saying Duke Richard isn’t a good man at heart. He’s probably better than most, but he’s human like us all, and—’

Willow grunted. ‘And what? When fighting against him is that she-wolf who cares nothing for nobody. Tell me where’s our loyalty supposed to lie?’

‘You just have to try to see things more broadly. That’s what Master Gwydion means.’

‘Oh, is that it?’

Will sucked his teeth. He saw the way his infant daughter’s eyes swept across the land, drinking in everything they noticed, delighting in every bird and squirrel she saw. Her expressions were so much like her mother’s, and yet Willow said they were exactly like his own.

‘It’s got something to do with the way the past gets made out of the future,’ he said. ‘There’s the future where all is uncertain and yet to be fixed, and there’s the past, where all is done and cannot be undone. But where the future touches the past, there’s a thin line. That’s what we call the present. That’s where we live.’

‘I see,’ she said unconvincingly.

‘And the present’s the only part we can affect with our free will, don’t you see? Because what we choose to do in the present affects the way the future is turned into the past.’

‘Well, I know that,’ Willow said, unimpressed. ‘That much even Bethe knows, don’t you, sweet baby?’

‘But…but the point is, Master Gwydion says there’s only one “true path”, one track through time that’s the best of all possible destinies. If everybody did what was right by everybody else then the best possible world would come about as soon as blink.’

‘You mean like it does in the Vale when everyone argues and we all somehow come to a compromise in the end?’

‘Exactly! But you see not everybody can do right because there are powerful people out here and they’ve multiplied their strength so that now most people just take orders and don’t even think about what they’re doing. And then there’s Maskull, who’s done that more than anyone. And because he’s a sorcerer that means he understands the harm he’s doing, which is even worse.’

Willow let it all sink in. She shook her head. ‘Then why is he doing it?’

Will shrugged. ‘He’s a renegade, a cock who thinks the sun has risen to hear him crow. He’s broken his vows of guardianship and forgotten all about humility and kindness and all the things he always said he cared about. He wants to live forever and go on and on in charge of the world, and he thinks he might have found a way to make that happen.’

‘So that’s the path he’s leading us all towards.’

‘Yes. It’s one that will reward him alone. He’s started behaving as if he’s found a way to live forever and enjoy power forever. But to do that he needs to turn the future of the world far away from the true path. And Master Gwydion says that if we get pushed too far from the true path, then we’ll never be able to get back to it. Maskull will have won, and the world won’t ever be the same again.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘We won’t ever be able to get it back?’

‘No. If Maskull steers history along that terrible, false path, he’ll take us towards a world without magic – it’ll mean five hundred years of ceaseless war, and the end of the world that we know. Now you see what Master Gwydion’s really fighting for: he wants us to have the best of all possible worlds, or for us to come as close as we can to getting that. That’s why he wants us to follow the true path. It’s not all that complicated an idea in the end, but it’s hard to make it happen.’

Willow offered no reply. There was just the sound of horses’ hooves clopping along the dusty track, the buzz of flies in the hot July air and a baby gurgling to herself at all that she saw and heard.

After a while, Will said unhappily, ‘You know what? The batdestones are Maskull’s big chance. I’ve begun to see it all quite clearly now. Master Gwydion had everything going along nicely, but then the lorc awakened and the stones started the very war that Maskull needs to turn the destiny of the world to dust. While the stones stay in place they’re like rotten teeth in a jaw – there’ll be a lot of pain and suffering up and down the Realm, and that’s what Maskull needs if he’s going to work his designs. That’s why we have to root the stones out.’

Once more Will felt a pang of guilt at the way he had lost his talisman. It seemed suddenly to be a gigantic setback. He thought again of the moment when he had broken the malice of the Blood Stone at Ludford, and he was more certain than ever that he could not have done it without the green fish.

‘You told me you thought Master Gwydion was losing his powers,’ Willow said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘But it didn’t look like he was weakening last night. Lady Dudlea and her son woke up like nothing heavier than a troubled night’s sleep had lain upon them.’

Will’s gaze was fixed on the road ahead. ‘That’s true, but depetrification isn’t so difficult, and I helped him somewhat. Did you see how he milked it for all it was worth?’

‘Milked it? What do you mean?’

‘You must have noticed how he went as close as he could to trading without crossing the line. Trading magic for favours is against the redes. But he asked Lord Dudlea to change his ways while the fates of his wife and son were still in the balance. I’d call that pretty close to coercion.’

‘Oh, you’re reading too much into it.’

Will grunted. ‘Am I? Master Gwydion’s not above a little chess playing, you know. Look how he works on you and me to get his bidding done – tempting us out here, making us follow him all over the place. You shouldn’t underestimate him, you know.’

‘He’s done no such thing, Will. It was you who summoned him. And it was my choice to come with you.’

‘Oh, he makes it seem that way, but the truth is he’s a dozen times wilier than any fox.’

‘Master Gwydion can’t help it if the Vale’s become too dangerous for us to go home to. I’m just happy we’ve got somewhere else.’ She paused. ‘We have got somewhere else…haven’t we?’

Will sighed. ‘He told me he’s taking us to the royal palace – you can call that a home if you like, but I wouldn’t.’

‘The royal palace of the White Hall…’ Willow’s voice softened as she fussed with Bethe. ‘Just the place for King Arthur.’

He looked sideways at her and blew out his breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. ‘Master Gwydion said that in the days of the First Men Arthur was an adventurer-chieftain, but at his second coming he was a hero-king. I wonder what the third incarnation is destined to be?’

‘Gort told me that the legend of Arthur’s return speaks of his return as a crow…’

He laughed. ‘A crow! He probably meant I’m to become a bird.’

She resisted his amusement. ‘I think Gort meant you’re to become a wizard of sorts. He said the natural talent was strong in you – and getting stronger – whereas in all the rest of the world the magic is leaking away. He says your magic feels ancient.’

He grunted. ‘Sometimes it makes me feel very old, I know that much.’

‘Is it so hard to accept, Will? Arthur’s third and final appearance as wizard-king?’ She smiled privately, then abruptly changed the subject. ‘I wonder what it’s going to be like, living in the big city.’

‘Well, I’d guess the royal palace is no better than all the other lordly houses we’ve seen – a forbidding fortress and a boast when seen from without, yet a hive of treachery within.’

‘No place to bring a baby to, then?’

That focussed him. ‘No.’

As he settled into a morose silence he thought of the battle they had succeeded in spoiling at Delamprey. Though it would be remembered as a victory for the Duke of Ebor, the duke had not even been there. The fight had been won by his son, Edward, and by his fearsome ally, Lord Warrewyk, the greatest and richest man in the Realm. In truth, though, the entire result had been secured through Will’s own efforts.

Now Duke Richard had joined his son, and the victorious army was slowly marching south towards Trinovant where it was certain to be happily received by the townsfolk in a day or two’s time.

‘Please! Try to keep up!’ the wizard chided them.

‘We can’t go any faster, Master Gwydion!’ Will called back.

The wizard turned away, equally irritated. ‘We must reach the capital before Richard of Ebor does. You know that.’

‘But we’ll do that easily.’

‘And do you think Maskull has left no magic there? The White Tower and the White Hall will both be webbed about with all manner of mischief. I must find it and deal with it before it can bear on events. And I must find clues to the whereabouts of the secret place where he has done all his dirty work. That will be no easy task.’

Will lapsed into silence again. He had more than enough on his mind without troubling himself about Gwydion’s problems. Chlu lay heaviest upon his thoughts. It was strange to think that he had always had a brother, stranger still to know that brother was his twin, but strangest of all to find that it was Chlu who all along had been trying to kill him.

‘I must find out why, and make my peace with him if I can,’ he told Willow.

‘Some chance of that when all he wants to do is murder you. And mind what Master Gwydion said about speaking his true name. He said that if you did that you’d be destroyed.’

He shook his head. ‘He said that would happen only if I spoke Chlu’s true name as part of a spell. Don’t worry, the pronunciation is difficult, for it’s a Cambray name and the men of Cambray have their own tradition in both magic and words that is hard to approach and even harder to master. And anyway, Master Gwydion says that knowing a person’s true name always gives a measure of power over them.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t take the risk if I were you. Promise me you’ll keep away from Chlu if you can.’

‘I can’t promise that. I need to know what Maskull has done to him. Perhaps I can heal him. And perhaps in return he’ll be able to tell me what I most want to know.’

CHAPTER TWO TRINOVANT

As they rode south, shadowing the last league of the Great North Road, they crested a heath dotted with elm trees and Trinovant began to rise up out of the afternoon haze. Will saw the dark needle of the Spire, which rose up like a crack in the sky, and the blue-grey sprawl that lay below it, sunk in summer haze.

‘The Spire contains the shrine of Ercowald,’ Gwydion said, ‘to which many pilgrims make journeys on the days when its precincts are thrown open to the ill and the dying, the lovelorn and despairing. They are given to wash in the troughs that surround the building, and perhaps make bargains of the heart with the hidden agents who speak to them persuasively from behind the iron grilles. Pilgrims come here even in freezing weather, when the ice on the troughs must be broken. On two great days in November and February there is a special ‘Day of Whipping’ in which the most committed of the Fellows go in procession through the City, beating themselves with scourges, for these are the ones that are mad beyond repair and have come to revere, and even to love, the suffering of their own flesh.’

Will felt a shiver of revulsion go through him. He looked to his wife and daughter, anxious now about the ordeal that was soon to come. It was said that at each of the City’s seven great gates there was kept a pair of dragonets, silvery wyrms whose task it was to guard the capital. Gwydion said that in olden times they had been bred to smell out treachery, and would pick clean the ribs of anyone whom they thought unworthy to enter.

Gwydion had spoken many times of the great city of Trinovant. Often he had likened its size and power to that of Tibor, the Slaver capital of old.

‘Over the centuries this place has grown into a vast, walled capital, a city of spires and towers and palaces, of the Guild Hall and the White Tower and Corfe Gate. A sprawling, rollicking morass of people live here, huddling inside for warmth in the cold midwinter, sweltering in the sweats of high summer. It is a city of high and low, from the bright, castellated battlements of royal palaces to the crowded hovels of the poor. It is quite unlike anywhere else.’

Now, as the shadows of the elms stretched more and more, the wizard turned, pointing ahead. ‘And do you see the white heart weather vanes of the Sightless Ones? Look how they rise above the walls. Those walls that will soon pass on our right are not the walls of the City, but those of the House of Silence. Beyond it lies the College of Benedix and the glass-makers’ yards, which is another rich establishment of the Fellows…’

Will listened as Gwydion pointed out the various marvels that were to be seen as they approached the City wall proper. So much of Trinovant seemed to have burst out and overspilled into the land beyond. But these unprotected buildings were not all mean houses and trade stalls as he had thought. His eye passed along many a row of tall merchants’ houses, some of three and even four floors built right on top of each other. In the street there were all manner of people – such a flow of traffic coming in and out of the City that Will could hardly believe there was not some special reason for it.

As they came past the great chapter house to their right, Will got his first sight of Eldersgate. It was like the gate of a great castle, all decorated with the rough likenesses of several great wyrms – the five great dragons of Umberland, Gwydion said. Their heads snarled down at them stonily.

‘What you will never see of this city are the cellars down below,’ Gwydion told them. ‘The whole place is greatly undermined. There are the secret passageways of the Guilds and many a sunless dungeon that lies beneath every lordly mansion flanking the river. There are tunnels too, linking together the many places of secret power – places like Bayard’s Castle and the Fitchet’s Den. The lords dwell there and the streets around them are wide and throng with sellers of costly wares. You will see, but first we shall pass by more humble ways, for we must go by Fish Street, Salters Ride and the Cloth Market, and so by unstraight ways to our destination, for today I must speak with Magog and Gogmagog.’

‘Magog and Gogmagog…’ Willow mused. ‘Weren’t those two the last of the giants? The ones that were put to flight by King Brea in the olden days?’

‘Put to flight? Not at all. Do you not know your own history? They were taken captive by Brea. Chained by him, then brought to his oaken palace, which was from that time onward called the White Hall.’

Will said, remembering his lordly schooling, ‘I was told by Tutor Aspall that Magog and Gogmagog were sent to the White Hall to do service as porters. Perhaps they serve King Hal still, for I don’t know how long giants live.’

Gwydion grunted. ‘Long, but not that long. Today’s Magog and Gogmagog are not the same as those giants of yore, yet they serve the present king after their own fashion, for today they are two great statues which stand in niches on each side of the throne. They look down upon the king’s proceedings and call out to give warning whenever his throne is in danger.’

‘They must be crying themselves hoarse at present,’ Will muttered.

‘And so it may be for the next few months, unless I am allowed to set to work to prevent the catastrophe.’

‘What will you do?’ Willow asked.

‘Do? I must do many things. But first there is a far greater work of un-doing. As I have already told you, I must pull down the grey skeins of sorcery that festoon the White Hall. Maskull has dwelt here for many a month, and in that time he has crept over every wall and tower like a longlegged spider, spinning webs of deceit about the royal house. Those spells must be swept away before the king and his captor come to town. I must find the workshop of Maskull’s wickedness.’ He sighed and glanced to his left. ‘What say we slake our thirsts at The Bell Without?’

‘Bell without what?’ Willow asked.

‘Without its clapper, I guess,’ Will said. ‘The Fellows of the Charterhouse yonder are of the White Order, and they keep a ritual of silence.’

‘A creditable surmise, but you guess wrongly. The inn is called The Bell Without, because it is without the walls. There is another alehouse inside the City called The Bell Within.’

Will smiled at that. ‘They seem to like their drink here. That’s a good sign, at least, for those who can drink and be merry are good men indeed!’

He was pleased they were taking a rest, for his throat was dry. As he dismounted and looked around the inn yard his thoughts lingered on the captive King Hal. The queen had wrought her easy-melting king like wax, but since the fight at Delamprey, she and her allies had fled into the north to find succour and no doubt try to regroup their forces. The captured king had been invited to ride in Duke Richard’s company. The plain truth was that the king was now as much in the duke’s power as he had once been in his wife’s.

‘What do you think Duke Richard intends?’ Will asked as they sat down. ‘Do you think he’ll play fair, or does he mean to keep the king under his thumb?’

The wizard drew a deep breath. ‘That is a most pertinent question. In truth, I am no longer able to read Friend Richard’s heart in matters of state. As for Hal, he wants little more than to be allowed to return to a scholarly cell and to peruse the parchments and papers that are his delight. But still he knows he is the king, and he may not prove as pliable to Friend Richard’s plan as the latter might wish.’

Willow frowned. ‘Do you remember what Mother Brig once told Duke Richard at the Ewle revel at Ludford all those years ago? She warned him that he’d die if ever he dared lay his hand upon the enchanted chair. Could she have meant the throne of the Realm do you think?’

The wizard became circumspect. ‘We all die – eventually.’

‘But she said more than that,’ Willow insisted. ‘She said that Duke Richard would die in his first fight after he touched the chair.’

‘You have a surpassing excellent memory, my dear.’

‘It was a surpassing memorable night, Master Gwydion. But tell us – did Mother Brig really mean the throne of the Realm? And is what she foretells bound to come to pass?’

Gwydion looked down the passageway towards the stables. ‘Brighid makes many a claim regarding future happenings. Some are important, while others are not. It is the way with seers.’

‘But all she says does come to pass, one way or another,’ Will said, not letting Gwydion off the hook. ‘I believe she swore a destiny upon the duke.’

But the wizard was not to be drawn further on the matter of great prophecies. Instead he said, ‘You know, one thing has already come to pass as you foretold – Duke Richard has given the Delamprey battlestone to Edward.’

‘A gift of thanks to recognize his victory, I suppose.’

‘Indeed.’

Since the fight, the battlestone had shrunk down twice. The first time was just after pouring forth its stream of malice, when it had transformed itself into a nondescript plinth of brown ironstone incised with words that even Gwydion could not read. Later it had shrunk again, once Will had used the remaining powers of the stump to burn away the manacles from Gwydion’s wrists. That time, it had been as if the very substance of the stone had collapsed, and it had faded to grey.

‘What can Edward want with it, I wonder?’ Gwydion mused.

Willow said, ‘I suppose he’s fetching it to Trinovant in hopes that it’ll be a touchstone to his ambitions. But isn’t it now drained of the power even to confer boons?’

Will nodded. ‘If I know Edward, he’ll delight in it mostly because his father has given it to him. He’ll value it because his father values the stumps of Blow Heath and Ludford, and he’ll tell himself it has virtues even when it does not.’

‘In that, then, he will be like most men,’ Gwydion said regretfully.

‘But aren’t you going to claim it from him, Master Gwydion?’ Willow asked.

The wizard shrugged. ‘I might have to.’ Then he took a draught of ale.

‘Have you had any fresh thoughts on the inscription?’ Will asked. ‘Or are you still, ah – stumped?’

Gwydion raised an eyebrow. ‘If that was meant to be a joke it was not very funny. But since you ask, I am no further forward. The verse is not written in any tongue that I have ever met with.’

‘At Delamprey you said that that was Maskull’s doing.’

‘It is one of his nasty little snares. His arrogance shines through in all that he attempts.’

‘And he knows you well enough to be able to pose a problem that you cannot solve,’ Will said. ‘But that in itself could be a clue, don’t you think?’

The wizard gave him a look that told Will it was a mistake to teach grandmothers to suck eggs. ‘Maskull has done enough dirty work – I could not read the marks I found in the stone.’

‘Well perhaps it’s only the script that’s unknown to you,’ Will said, hoping his optimism would infect the wizard. ‘The language itself may be one that you know.’

Gwydion stroked his beard. ‘True. It might only be a cipher that I have to crack…’ He fell silent, but it was a silence unlike the dark ones that had overtaken him lately.

Willow had taken out a heavy bronze coin and she had begun spinning it on the table top. Will watched it whirl faster and faster as it settled down. He picked the coin up and spun it again, fascinated for the moment by its odd behaviour, at the rising sound it made before it came to a sudden dead stop. Is that what’s happening to us, to the war? he thought oddly. Getting faster and faster until suddenly everything stops on doomsday?

Knives and trenchers were laid before them, and with more ale came pie and cheese and warm bread. As they ate and drank, they talked of lesser matters, and when Willow excused herself and Bethe briefly from their company, Will took the opportunity to ask a rather more pressing question.

‘Chlu’s true name, Master Gwydion – pronounce it again for me.’

Gwydion flashed a glance at Willow’s departing figure. ‘And give you a knife to fall on?’

‘I think I must have that knife, whether it is safe or not.’

‘Very well then – Llyw.’

‘Thloo.’

‘That will not do at all. It is a difficult sound for those unused to the language of Cambray. But see – put the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth as if you are making a luh sound, then breath past it.’

‘Dzzllll…’

‘Do not voice the sound! Just breathe.’

‘Shlllew.’

‘Almost. Again.’

‘Llyw.’

The wizard smiled. ‘You see? The rede is correct: practice does make perfect. But take care how you use your new-found knowledge, for there is danger in it.’

By now Willow was coming back, so they made ready to go. Gwydion steered them away from the stables, out of the inn and then onto the high road, saying that he had arranged for their horses to be left at The Bell Without and now they must walk.

They had almost reached the moated bastions that flanked the triple arch of Eldersgate. The soaring stone structure, deftly wrought and set with dragons, seemed dour and unwelcoming. A group of travellers waited gloomily beside a barrier.

Will waved a hand in front of his face as he caught his first clue that this was no ordinary gateway – the smell took him back to the wyvern’s cage he had seen at Aston Oddingley. He now understood why Gwydion had left their horses at the inn. All travellers wishing to enter the City were made to dismount fifty paces before the Eldersgate. Stolid Midshires cart horses stamped their shaggy hooves as they approached the drawbridge. Even brave warhorses were unharnessed and led aside to be specially blinkered and let in by a side arch so they would catch no sight of the dragonets.

Will saw that this brought good trade to the gate-keepers and porters who dealt with the animals or worked in gangs to pull carts and wains in through the main arch. It gave them the opportunity to charge twopence a time for their labours, and Will smelled more than the stink of wyrm about it.

Once they were nodded through the barrier he glimpsed the two dragonets that were chained inside the middle arch. They were not great dragons, being only about the size of bulls, yet they seemed to be more dangerous than lions. They were flighdess wyrms, specially bred to their task, small-winged but powerfully clawed, with barbed tails and flickering red forked tongues. Their hides shone like quicksilver as the muscles beneath rippled. They snarled and trod back and forth fearsomely.

Willow clutched Bethe to her as she approached the gate. Gwydion walked beside her. ‘It is best not to look the wyrms in the eye,’ he said. ‘Such beasts as these have attended the gates since the time of King Ludd. They are supposed to safeguard the City against the entry of people of ill purpose, for it is said they can smell guilt in the sweat of a man like dogs can smell fear. But over the centuries their keepers have fallen into sorry disrepute. For a silver coin they will give an easy passage to any wayfarer who happens to rouse the guardian beasts to wrath – which you will see happens most often whenever a wealthy person arrives. Do you see that merchant in the blue hat? Watch how they winch the chains back so there is a wider way for him to pass. They drive the animals back with those white shields quartered in red.’

The keepers set up a loud banging on their shields, hitting them with red-painted truncheons shaped like short swords until the dragonets turned their heads aside.

‘The keepers seem careless of the danger,’ Willow said.

Gwydion surveyed the goings on in the gatehouse. ‘The colour red and the number four are held to be worrisome to the beasts. They are said to shy away from the good-hearted, but it is just the loud noise and how these rogues have trained them, for they are also the ones who give them their feed.’

Then, all of a sudden, Gwydion cast up the wing of his travelling cloak and ushered Willow and Bethe past the beasts. The nearer of the two dragonets was momentarily quieted, and Will saw in his black eyes a spirit more touched by sadness than rage. On an impulse, he put out his hand to the creature and felt its moist red tongue flicker with interest over his palm.

‘It wants for salt,’ he said, pitying it its life trapped in this acrid stall. ‘And it wishes for a run in the fields.’

‘Get on by!’ one of the keepers shouted. ‘No lingering! No loitering!’ He shoved Will through the door and spat insultingly when he saw he was not going to be offered any coin for his assistance.

‘Beggars coming through!’ the head keeper shouted. ‘Get you gone out of the City quickly again. We already have too much vagrancy here!’

‘And too little respect!’ Gwydion told him. ‘This outrageous preying upon travellers goes too far. I shall speak to the king about it!’

But seeing no staff in his hand, the keeper said, ‘Oh, my lord, so sorry! Come here and I’ll give you a kick, and you can pass that on with my compliments to his grace the king when next you see him!’ And he laughed them away with the usual welcome he kept for customers who made no donation.

‘Is everyone so rude and ruffianly here?’ Willow asked.

‘It is a game they play hereabouts.’ Gwydion gestured up at the tall dwellings that made a deep gorge of the street. ‘And is it any wonder they keep rough manners, when they must live piled one atop the other like bees in a hive? The lives of too many here are ruled by greed and false ideas about the getting of gold. You will soon see how it is.’

He hurried them on until they had passed inside the gates, and Will began to savour the curious character of the City. He reacted to it with an odd mixture of disgust and delight. The place was filled with people, yet it seemed dirty and dangerous. There seemed to be countless shining possibilities to be found at every turn, but no easy way for him to get at those possibilities without a purse full of silver. The great heap of buildings stretched as far as his eye could see in every direction. There were throngs of people, but not a tree or any splash of green. A tumbled roofscape blocked the view of the River Thamesis, which Gwydion said was also called Iesis. There was one landmark that could be plainly seen – a huge black steeple of sinister aspect that rose high above more humble rooftops and made Will’s spirits dip. The sight of the great Black Spire of Trinovant struck him with an immovable dread.

Gwydion followed his gaze. ‘No taller tower was ever made in the Realm. It stands six-score times the height of a man, and is guarded by special Fellows who dress in robes of grey and yellow. They are called Vigilants. You will see them, for we must go by that place. But first, we must go another way – not a pleasant way, for it is now the junction of two vile sewers. I knew them long ago as pretty brooks lined with willow trees. The Wall Brook drains the Moor Field. It meets with the Lang Bourne, and goes thence down into the Iesis and so carries with it all the refuse and offal and filth that the population of a city such as this cares to throw into it.’

As they walked on through the hot, close afternoon Gwydion remarked on the uneven and filthy state of the streets. ‘But you will see little of this unpleasantness about the mansions of the wealthy, for those whose task it should be to care for the City even-handedly have long since given themselves over to the far more agreeable business of supping at lordly tables, or else wrangling with one another for the privilege of doing so.’

‘I can see how the lords and those who serve them might live well here. But what of the rest? How do the poor live?’

‘As the poor always live. But here there is also a middle ground – every trade still has its guild, though their power is not as it was, and whenever things become too oppressive a great mob takes to the streets and there is a riot. Burning and looting happens more often than you might imagine. Why do you think there are no thatched roofs allowed here in Trinovant?’

Will was almost sorry he had asked. As they got deeper into the commercial heart of the City, the streets began to teem. He saw great flocks of sheep in the road, and stockmen herding cattle to the pens that stood near the shambles. He followed on in silence, watching as Gwydion stopped here and there at corners to search out strange marks that had been left chalked on posts or scratched into beams. They seemed to guide him like secret clues. Often he tasted the air for spell-working tell-tales and magical resonances. And when he found them he quietly danced, undoing the dismal tokens of bone and blood that his rival had hidden in so many nooks about the City.

‘They do much mischief,’ Gwydion said, holding up his latest find. It was a severed finger and a cockerel’s claw that had been bound together with a silken thread and put high up on a ledge. ‘This and others like it overlook many of the City’s crossroads. They power the spells that Maskull has trussed about the commerce of the streets. Six or seven of them will have to be rooted out if the stock market here is to flourish again!’

A pack of Fellows watched from a little way off. They slunk away from the wizard’s eye as he turned to face them, then dissolved among the crowds. Will was amazed to see so many Sightless Ones walking openly and almost at liberty within the City. They were always in groups of at least three, sometimes led by a sighted guide. Fellows from different chapter houses dressed in different coloured robes, and there seemed to be a certain coolness, or perhaps even rivalry, between them. Will was reminded that although called ‘Sightless Ones’, they possessed a strange, groping sense that served in place of vision, and the more he walked the City streets, the more he began to fear there were those among them who had already identified him as the defiler of Verlamion and were passing the news to a higher authority.

‘Come!’ Gwydion whispered sharply. ‘You do right to beware the Sightless Ones, Willand, for they do not forgive and they are surely hunting for you. But do not gawp so plainly at them. See how they tilt their heads at you! Mind you do not give your thoughts away so easily.’

Will did as he was told and guarded his face as the wizard took them past narrow alleys that stank ripely in the heat. There were many beggars and peddlers and barrow-men here. Gwydion said they would do well to get quickly across the Wartling, the main Slaver road that cut diagonally through the City. They passed down thronging lanes, and in time came to another market. There was much that Will had never seen before, and more for which he saw no good reason. The street sellers offered too many wares that were unneedful – dubious foods, badly made flutes, sweetmeats, vain hats, posies of wilting flowers, false charms, and little songbirds confined in tiny cages, too distraught to do anything but hop back and forth and chirrup warnings to one another.

Nor could Will’s own talent find silent rest. Threat and malign intent bubbled among the press of bodies, and there was such a cacophony of human weakness in the air that it pained him to feel it all. He was relieved when the wizard steered him away from the Cheap and down a lane towards the wide river where the brown-grey waters sparkled in the sun. Ships from beyond the seas rode at anchor, loading and unloading their cargoes at Queenhythe. There were the smells of faraway places here – salt and spice and spiritous liquors. Oddly, it made him feel homesick, though he could not say why.

‘In the days of the First Men a great burgh stood here,’ Gwydion told them. ‘It was known as Ludnaborg by the seafarers, and was the greatest and most famous of all the burghs in the Land of Albion. Then came the Desolation, when giants and dragons ruled here, but afterwards came Brea, out of a far land. A descendant of Abaris and son of Frey, he built the Wooden City after the style of Trihan, which was the place of his birth. And he called it “New Trihan” or in his own speech “Trinh Niobhan” and that was eleven hundred years before the founding of the Fellowship of the Sightless Ones.’

Will looked up at the unfinished buildings, and at the men who climbed over them like squirrels. New warehouses were being thrust ever higher, packed tight against one another. ‘When will this city be finished?’ he asked.

‘Finished?’ Gwydion laughed. ‘Never! Here they do not think about reaching perfection, only of staggering greedily onward, for in this city bigger is always held to be better, despite what the redes have to say on the topic.’

Will could not but marvel at the monstrous bridge of twenty-one piers that had been flung across the Iesis. A traffic of small boats and wherries shot under it where the water flowed rapidly in shadow, while above many houses stood crowded upon the span. There were fortified gates at each end that could be closed to prevent entry into the City, though Gwydion spoke of the many times that the bridge gates had been forced, such as when Jack the Carter had led fifty thousand Kennetmen in revolt against the king and then given the order to kill all the lawyers.

‘Not all revolts are to be discouraged, then,’ Willow said wryly.

And Gwydion laughed. ‘Sometimes a good bonfire serves to cleanse the body politic.’

Beyond the bridge to the east a great castle brooded on the northern shore, revealed now by the sweep of the river. Soaring lime-white walls stood out bold and square above the waters, and Will knew that this must be the White Tower, the main fortress which the Conqueror had built to control the City almost four hundred years before.

A strange feeling began to course through Will’s body, making him feel faint.

‘Will you take us to Tower Hill?’ he asked, pointing to the great keep.

Gwydion’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Do you think I should?’

‘I…’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘We cannot go there, for the White Tower remains under siege both by land and by water.’

‘Under siege?’ Willow said, surprised. ‘Who’s attacking it?’

‘Men wearing the Earl of Sarum’s livery. A body of them stayed while the rest of his host marched north to Delamprey. Friend Sarum has begun calling himself the military governor of Trinovant if you please!’

Willow sniffed. ‘But I thought Duke Richard’s allies were welcomed into the City by the Lord Mayor and his Aldermen.’

‘They were. And the White Tower was the bolt-hole into which all the king’s supporters jumped for safety. They’re still there and dare not come out.’

‘They’ll have to when the king himself orders it.’ Willow resettled Bethe on her hip. ‘Don’t they know that he’s coming here?’

Gwydion offered a vinegary smile. ‘I expect they do. My own best guess is that Richard and Hal will arrive in three days’ time, which is why I must get on with my work—’

‘What does the mystical head of Bran say about the matter?’ Will asked suddenly.

The question came out of the blue. Gwydion halted and squinted at Will. ‘Again?’

‘I asked you about Bran, Master Merlyn!’ Will’s voice was deep and otherworldly. ‘Or does his head lie elsewhere these days?’

Gwydion continued to look hard at Will as he made his reply. ‘Bran’s head remains buried within the grounds of the White Tower. It is still attended by thirteen ravens, just as I promised you, Sire.’

Will, pale-faced and uncertain now, put a hand to his head. ‘I…I don’t feel…’

And it seemed suddenly that he was falling.

When he opened his eyes again he found it hard to breathe. He struggled, but quickly realized that Willow was holding a cloth to his nose, which was bleeding.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘You banged your head.’

‘I must have…fainted.’

‘What do you remember about Bran?’ Gwydion asked as Will stood up.

‘Who?’

‘Bran. He was the twenty-eighth king of the blood of Brea, a great king who with his brother, Beli, took armies across the Narrow Seas and led them against the rising power of sorcery in the East. The brothers sacked the great city of Tibor, and later Bran took his men under the earth. That was the last time any mortal king ever attempted to journey into the Realm Below. It is a place from which few have ever returned. The feat was achieved only once – by a far greater adventurer than King Bran. That man’s name was—’

‘Arthur…’

‘Indeed. Arthur.’

Will felt as if he had been reminded of things that he had once known but had later forgotten. ‘Bran’s name signifies “raven”. He was…the son of Dunval the Lawmaker…who was himself the first king to wear a golden diadem as the sign of kingship in these Isles. Dunval’s two sons were Beli and Bran, and his daughter was Branwen the Fair. And Bran married the daughter of Isinglas – but I can’t recall her name.’

‘Esmer.’

‘Yes! Esmer. Esmer…’ Will looked up. ‘Gwydion, did I know these folk in my former life?’

Gwydion laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You did not. They lived in a time that lay between your first and second comings. Perhaps you know their names for another reason – for they are part of the histories that I taught to young Wart.’

Will closed his eyes, and put his face in his hands for a moment. When he took them away again he began to sing.

‘Then made Great Dunval his sacred laws,

Which some men say

Were unto him revealed in vision—’

He paused. ‘But why should I bring King Bran to mind now, Master Gwydion? Of all the histories you must have taught me in a previous life, why this one?’

‘I cannot say for certain. Do you not remember what happened at Bran’s last battle at Gerlshome when he was wounded by a poisoned spear? That wound caused him such great agony that his head was cut off by his brother as an act of mercy. Bran’s bodyguards bore his head to the White Tower, and all the way it spoke to them, telling where it must be buried—’

‘It was to protect the Realm against invasion,’ Will continued. ‘The head was set to face the Narrow Seas. But after many years Great Arthur dug it up again, so that he would henceforth be the sole guardian of the Realm.’

Gwydion nodded. ‘I found the head shut up in a golden box after Arthur’s death. It was I who re-interred it at a place then called the White Mound. Oh, the head was quite clear about where it wanted to rest, and enough of its protective power lingered on for the Conqueror to fear it considerably five hundred years after. He built the White Tower over the very place where I buried it.’

Will looked suddenly to the wizard. ‘Gwydion, the White Tower lies upon a lign! I’ll wager my life on it. Bran’s head became a part of the lorc! That’s how it spoke to Arthur during his second coming.’

‘Well, we cannot go to the White Tower now. Nor can we go across the river. Over the bridge lies the Cittie Bastion of Warke. There the Grand High Warden, Isnar, keeps his winter hearth. It is a main counting house wherein the Elders of the Fellowship keep a great stock of gold. They have many rituals concerning the accounting of it. Come along, Will – a thousand hollow eyes stare out from that place. It is best not to spend too long looking back at it, for its golden glimmer ensnares many.’

But Will did not take his gaze away from those blank walls across the water until the morbid feelings that emanated from the place made him turn about – and then he saw the Spire again. Its gigantic presence shocked him now. It seemed to have followed him and grown huger in the hazy sky. Its dark surface was a mass of strange ornament, pillared and fluted, with arches and niches and buttresses and every kind of conceit carved in stone.

The whole weight of it seemed to be falling upon him, and as he looked away he thought that the character of the City had changed. Hereabouts the streets were narrower, and the aspect of the ground felt dull and blighted. They were now so close to the Spire that he could see dark motes in the air, circling its top. Ill-begotten things were fighting and disputing, or so it seemed, about some high platform.

‘Birds?’ Willow said, following his gaze.

‘They are not birds,’ Gwydion muttered darkly. ‘Do you not realize the size of them? They are bone demons, come to feed on human remains.’

‘Bone demons?’

‘Ugh!’ Will grimaced. ‘You mean, there are dead bodies left up there? Exposed?’

‘They call it the Bier of Eternity. When a High Warden dies, his remains are not hidden within a chapter house like those of lesser Fellows.’

‘That’s horrible.’

Gwydion’s grunt was dismissive. ‘The Sightless Ones make singular claims about what happens when a man ends his days, dangerous claims that play upon the weakness of fear, and one form in particular: the fear of death. They intensify it greatly, for they know that in the end they can make a profit from it. What do you think they sell to make such stores of gold? Have I not already told you what is meant by the Great Lie?’

Will did not care to hear more. He fell back and walked a pace or two behind his wife, watching to see that nothing unpleasant happened. She would not let go of Bethe for a moment, nor did she pay any heed to the ragged men who reached out to tug at the hems of her skirts. Yet Will did pause, touched, despite his fears, to see a press of beggars crowding expectantly on the other side of a barred portal. It was the begging hole of a hospice or lazar house, one of the morbid lodgings that Gwydion had once mentioned. The Sightless Ones maintained such houses to draw in the sick, though those who were admitted were expected to feed themselves by imploring passers-by to give them alms. Deformed men whose auras burned dim thrust hands and stumps up through the bars, crying pitifully. Skull-like faces pressed together into the light and the stench of unwashed bodies gusted from the hole. The spectacle was horrifying and made Will take a step back. But he could not look away. The beggar who most caught Will’s eye was heavily mantled in grey. A deep hood hid his face, but it did little to disguise him.

Suddenly, Will’s belly clenched – his feelings flashed dangerously, and he thought of Chlu – but it was not Chlu. Chlu could not be here, surely, for the queen and Maskull had gone into the north and the Dark Child must have gone with them…

Will continued to stare at the beggar, unsure why he had been so affected by him. What had marked him out, packed as he was among so many other beggars? He was certainly large. Will looked at his outstretched forearm. It was solidly muscular, though his hand was swathed in filthy rags. He seemed troubled, and, for all his strength, less adept at beggary than the rest, though hardly a man on the point of losing his will to live.

Will understood from the way the beggar inclined his head as he thrust his bowl through the iron bars that he was blind. Then with a shock he realized that the rags the man wore were the tattered remains of a Fellow’s garb. He was no beggar, but their warder…

Will recoiled, but then he steadied himself and some strange impulse of charity came over him, for this man, though he was a Fellow, seemed somehow more needy even than the beggars who surrounded him.

When Will brought out an apple from his pack it was quickly seized and josded away before the Fellow could take it, so he brought out another and deliberately guided the man’s bandaged hand to it. This time it was taken and Will turned away, driven back in part by the foul stink of the place.

‘Why did you do that?’ Gwydion asked as Will caught them up.

‘Even their warden was hungry. He was begging too. Don’t they feed their own inside the Fellowship in Trinovant?’

Gwydion brushed the matter off. ‘They are drinkers of blood. Why did you give him an apple?’

‘Because he wanted it. And because giving is getting.’ Will’s solemnity melted away and he smiled. ‘That’s something I once learned from feeding ducks.’

When they came to the end of the street the way opened out into a space dominated by the massive structure of the Spire. The foundation storeys and the monument that stood opposite its entrance were wholly faced in black stone. The Spire itself was railed off and the area around it paved in a complicated pattern of black and white stone across which Fellows in yellow garb patrolled. Surrounding the Spire beyond the spiked rail was what looked at first like a market, but Will soon saw there were no buyers at these craftsmen’s stalls. Each booth had its own canvas awning. Each was occupied by a different kind of worker. There were butchers and bakers, metalsmiths and wood-turners, coiners and token-makers, bodgers and cobblers, tinkers and money-changers. Smoke was rising from many of the stalls, and there was the smell of charcoal and the ringing of hammers upon anvils.

‘See how the Fellowship draws in so many of the useful trades and binds folk unto itself,’ Gwydion said. ‘But these craftsmen are not serving the commerce of the City. None of what they make is used beyond the Fellowship.’

‘Then, is the rest of it set in store?’ Will asked, seeing the quantity of goods that was made here.

The wizard grunted. ‘That question shows that you little appreciate the scale of wealth that the Fellowship commands. What you see here is power, for through it the Grand High Warden exercises a torturesome control.’

Will frowned. ‘Torturesome, you say?’

‘Surely. For on the other side of the Spire is a yard such as this, except that there the artisans’ business is the breaking apart of whatever is made on this side.’

Will balked. ‘What on earth is the point of that?’

‘By this means Grand High Warden Isnar regulates every key trade in the City. He can quickly destroy any cooper or candle-maker or any other producer of wares who dares to displease him. He has succeeded in strangling this city and many another, for what could be more torturesome to a man than the prospect of having his livelihood taken away?’

‘But what about the famous Trinovant Guilds?’ Willow asked. ‘The mercers and drapers? The grocers and vintners and ironmongers and all the rest? Don’t they fight back?’

‘They cannot. Their power is now all but broken by the Fellowship.’

As they drew closer to the Spire grounds, Will saw rows of money-changers’ booths and beyond them the block-like monument. Such an edifice stood outside every Chapter House, no matter how small, but no other in the land was like this. It was as big as a house, and its top was decked with statues of monstrous animals and its sides cut with mottoes in the Tiborean tongue. The words were mostly obscured by spills of wax from ten thousand red candles that forever burned among the bronze or basalt legs of the beasts, but the letters were carved deeply and Will made out the legend.

SEIUQ OLEAC NI ALOS

When he asked Gwydion what it said, the wizard told him, ‘The Sightless Ones cherish many strange utterances, though their meanings are more often than not meant to be mysterious to outsiders. That one says, “There is rest only in the sky.”’

‘What does it mean?’ Willow asked.

But Gwydion only shrugged and said, ‘Who can say? They call it “a mystery”. They call by that name every piece of nonsense they choose to spout, for they hope in that way to pinch off all reasoned thought about it. Remember: it is ever their aim to convince others of that which is not. That is how they gather power to themselves.’

Will heard coughs and the clink of mason’s steel on stone. A row of skinny prisoners were chained in a line, white as millers with the dust of their task. They were rough-fashioning stone blocks into balls of the sort that were shot from great guns, and Will grieved to think that such a destructive trade must now be profitable. He wondered if these products were likewise broken up on the far side of the Spire, or if they had already been sold to an arsenal of war.

Next to the shot-carvers was a row of decaying tents that served as stable and fodder store for half a dozen chestnut horses. A large brown and black dog sniffed suspiciously at the air, while men with cruel faces lounged at their ease nearby. All were dressed in well-used riding suits of red leather.

‘Are they messengers?’ Will whispered doubtfully as they came almost to the monument.

Gwydion grunted and lowered his voice. ‘The Fellowship has no need of messengers. The vanes of their spires and towers do all their talking for them.’

‘Then what do these men do?’

‘They are the enforcers of the Iron Rule.’

‘You mean these are the men who take children away from villages that cannot pay the tithe?’ Will’s eyes narrowed as he met their stares. Two or three of them were looking towards Willow now, showing frank interest in the child in her arms.

A flash of anger burst in Will’s heart, but just then the dog came roaring forward, teeth bared, barking ferociously, until it was yanked back by its chain. The sight made Willow flinch away, and as Bethe’s cry pierced the air, Will turned towards her. Then something brushed his cheek and struck the ground a pace or two away.

It was a crossbow bolt.

CHAPTER THREE THE BIER OF ETERNITY

Those enforcers of the Iron Rule who saw what had happened rose to their feet and a shout went up. Daggers were drawn, cover taken. The enforcers were men well used to coming under attack. They moved to cover, alert as weasels, looking high up on the monument to the place from which the crossbow bolt must have been shot, but they lacked the means to reply and so their caution was all the greater.

Will saw that the shaft of the bolt was short and set with two triangular leather flights. So powerfully had it been flung into the earth that its iron head had been wholly buried. He knew with utter certainty who had shot at him and why, and when a black-swathed man moved from behind the rump of a great stone griffin Willow knew it too.

‘So Chlu didn’t go north after all!’ she cried as Will bundled her between the tents and pressed her hard up against the monument’s base. Then she saw the look on his face and knew what was in his mind. ‘Will, no!’

But he was already climbing. His hands thrust against the pole that held the nearest awning taut. His feet found purchase on the letters graven into the plinth. When he reached to grip a bronze griffin’s claw and haul himself up, a red waterfall of molten wax cascaded over him and froze in his hair and on his skin.

He gasped at the sudden burning on face, neck and hands, but as the pain passed he saw that above him the crossbow’s string was being drawn two-handedly upwards. Chlu straightened his back, fingers straining as he pulled on the cord. A second bolt was clamped between his teeth.

Time stood still in Will’s head, blotted out by a certainty as strong as any rage. The wax slid under his feet and fingers, but in another moment he had pulled himself upright and was facing his twin. When Chlu saw there was not enough time to cock and raise his weapon, he stood up straight, ready to face him.

Their eyes met. Will felt a tremor pass through him, a moment of horror to be looking into eyes so like his own, yet so informed by hatred.

‘Tell me what I’ve done to make you want to kill me,’ he demanded. ‘If you bear a grievance, tell me what it is or, by the moon and stars, I’ll stamp your face into the mud here and now!’

The other’s malicious stare wavered as a laugh gurgled from him, but he made no reply.

‘I know who you are. Master Gwydion told me everything. I don’t blame you for what you’ve done. I just want us to talk out our differences.’ Will held out open hands. ‘Listen to me! Don’t you know that we’re brothers?

But Chlu’s growling laugh cut him off. It was a deep, barely controlled, animal noise that seemed to catch in the back of his throat. ‘I’m not your brother – I am your doom!‘ He swung the weapon in his hand at Will’s head.

Will raised an arm and fended off the blow, but he was not fast enough. One of the steel prods caught in his face, tearing open his left cheek, and as the crossbow clattered to the ground Will was knocked backwards across the plinth and tangled among bronze limbs. By the time he had recovered his feet Chlu had fled.

There were cries below as the men in red tried to shadow Chlu along the monument, but he had already found a way down where they could not follow him. A stone yale, a horned, tusked animal, rearing up on its hind legs, stood at one end of the monument. Chlu had threaded his way between its legs and leapt down into the maze of black and white paving that formed the closed precinct beyond the iron fence. Now he ran unmolested towards the base of the Spire itself.

The Vigilants who guarded the gate were ill-prepared for their swift-moving trespasser. Chlu dodged them easily and disappeared inside the Spire’s vast, ornamented gates. Will felt a warning turn over his guts, but a great surge of desire thrust him onward. This was not a simple wish to corner Chlu, but an overwhelming need to find the answer. He knew he must not let his twin get away.

‘Who comes?’ came the cry from the Fellows. ‘Who comes?’

They lifted their heads, turning like beasts testing the air, and Will saw how difficult it would be to follow Chlu now that the guardians of the Spire had been stirred up.

Blood dripped from his cheek. He wiped his hand on the waxy shoulder of his jerkin, then he leapt down from the monument and ran straight to where the knot of gate guards were standing. More were hurrying in from all quarters now, groping towards the great iron doors. They moved slowly, no match for Will’s own fleetness of foot, but they were armed: cudgels had been drawn, and whips snaked from sleeves and cracked out towards him, but only four Vigilants directly barred the way.

He put his shoulder down and charged, knocking them aside like so many skittles. Ahead the vast doors were closing. Three Fellows pushed on each, heaving them round on massive hinges. He threw himself forward, dived headlong through the gap into a darkness that was suddenly filled with echoes as the great slabs slammed shut.

He felt himself skidding along an ice-smooth floor, then he lay for a moment trying not to breathe. He was in total blackness. Whatever sense had given him warning before he entered the Spire, it screamed at him now. He stared hard, willing his eyes to pierce the gloom, then he began to see dim shapes in the vast cavern that soared above him. Brown light was seeping in from somewhere, and as his eyes adjusted so the thought began to harden that he had been deliberately drawn into a trap.

He was at the bottom of a curving stair that rose up to an immense height. As the echoes died away, there came the sound of footfalls from above, mounting higher and higher. Again Will strained to hear, but the more he tried the more the sounds faded and the less sure he was.

If he opened his mind he would know instantly where Chlu had gone, but he dared not do it in this place. The air was rank and thick and quiet as a blanket, but he was sure there were Fellows groping silently in the darkness, and still more coming from hidden holes to left and right.

When he drew breath the stink of burnt grease laced the air. That and some oversweet fumigant seemed to rob his breath of vigour. And there was something else too, a musty note that he could not quite recognize. He crawled towards the stair, then began to feel his way up. The surfaces were cold here, solid and unmoving, made of dense basalt that drank in what little light there was. But he could feel the intricate decoration that was carved into every part of this curious ceremonial staircase as it carried him up in a spiral. Beneath his fingers the steps were dished, worn down by use, and in the middle the stone was smooth, whereas everywhere else the surfaces were sticky, as if years of accumulated grease had varnished them. Feeling his way forward on all fours kept him away from the place he most feared, the stair’s unguarded edge, but after a while going blindly forward he was hit by a sudden terror and halted. In the dark corner of the stair he saw guards.

That frozen moment spun out longer and longer, then the stinging in his cheek pushed itself back into his consciousness. He flung himself into a corner, not knowing whether to go on or turn back. They can smell blood, he reminded himself, but then shouts came from below, words ringing in the air.

‘Follow the defilers…’

By now the pursuit had gathered in strength in the concourse far below. Fifty of them at least, a hundred maybe. Too many to burst through, too many to escape – and if those massive entrance doors were the only way out…?

It seemed his decision had been made for him. When he turned again, he had resolved to fight his way past the motionless guardians above no matter what. He approached the first of them stealthily. It made no sound, nor any move towards him. He had almost crept past it when the dam that held back his fear broke. He lashed out with all his strength and almost broke his arm against the unyielding breast. It was only then that he realized that what had checked him was a statue – a row of Grand High Wardens, standing there on the landing, eternally guarding their dark niches.

A mixture of relief and anger flooded him. His heart hammered as he climbed ever upward, until his breath heaved in the bad air and he had to halt again. But not for long. Maybe, after all, there was an undercurrent of meaning in the mysterious message inscribed on the monument far below: ‘There is rest only in the sky.’

Up it must be! he thought, pushing himself onward. It’s the only way. And if there’s no escape, what does it matter? That’s not the reason I came here.

But what had decided him? Had it really been his choice to wildly follow Chlu? He doubted it now, for it felt like the insistent power that sometimes showed itself within him. The power that Gwydion called Arthur. That power had flowed before, and always at crucial moments. It was a mighty power – ancient, courageous and strong – but it was a flower that had not yet fully bloomed. Its mark was a sure and certain impulse, so that when it lay upon him he did not think of consequences but behaved as if he was doing exactly what was needed to urge the world towards the true path. Whatever that power was, it had sent him to corner Chlu, so corner him he must, and what better place could there be than a dead-end way up in the sky?

But what then? a less certain voice inside him asked. What will you do when you have him at your mercy? Will you have the strength to do what must be done?

It seemed when he looked up that the gloom within the Spire had lifted a little. And so it had – the walls here were pierced by narrow shafts of light. They revealed tiers of ever-narrowing, ever steepening steps circling the column of stale black air. Will’s foot skidded off a broken tread. A sudden fear of falling into the pit stabbed his groin and he gasped and threw himself hard against the wall. Here, far above the hubbub below, sound carried with greater clarity. Again he drew breath, a cold sweat spangling his face. Blood was still dripping freely from his left cheek, leaving a trail that would unerringly lead his pursuers to him.

But at least the Vigilants had satisfied him on one point. The voice below had said ‘defilers’, which meant not only that Chlu was still at large, but that he was not working with the Fellowship to spring a trap on him.

It was scant comfort, as the sound of clicking footfalls came from above. Will’s eyes tracked a faint shape stepping ever upward on the far side of the darkness. He wanted to call out, but knew he had better not give himself away to those eyeless men scanning the darkness below. He pressed on, grimly determined, climbing until the steps gave out. The great spiral had many turns, but here, at a mouthlike portal in the wall, it abruptly ended.

He passed through the arch, glad to be off the stair and away from the void, but he saw that much lay between the inner and outer skins of the Spire. To left and right there were doorways and stairs, landings and passages, many of them numbered, but bafflingly so. Some ways were sealed behind iron doors, while others stood open. All directions led off into darkness, but near the stairs thin lancets admitted spears of daylight. Better still, the ground was dusty and there were scuff marks. He followed the trail to the foot of a stair and climbed higher, pausing occasionally to make sure he was still closing on his quarry. When he had mounted to the forty-ninth stair, the Spire suddenly grew meaner in its decoration and he halted again, oppressed by a mighty warning from within.

Was Chlu now in his trap…or was it the other way around?

The idea still troubled him that Chlu had led him into the Spire on purpose. Why? Why should he think that? This was certainly a place where he would be stripped of Gwydion’s help. And if Chlu had not gone north with the fleeing queen, then maybe Maskull hadn’t either…

The air was rank here. The musty smell had grown worse. Will tried to swallow his burgeoning fear, but tasted the taint of death. He took stock. Each flight of stairs was plainly made now, every one a little narrower and steeper than the last. He had come to unfrequented heights, and whereas the floor had been greasy with spots of old candle wax, now the stonework was bare. Stark landings opened onto the great void within the Spire, and the stairwells through which he climbed looked down dizzyingly past dozens of floors. Flimsy iron rails were set around the edges, low enough that Will imagined himself crashing through. But at least the mute statues had disappeared along with all the carved and patterned marble. Here was only dust and pigeon droppings on the grey flags, and around him plain arches and slender pillars of iron, so that his journey seemed to him shadowed by the shedding away of earthly power. He saw that an ascent of the Spire was meant to parallel the life of a Fellow, from his entry into the Fellowship up through the various grades and degrees, losing his sense of self, until finally he came to death. And here, written in stone, were the austere last stages of the journey that an Elder made into the darkness as he departed his sour life.

A shriek shocked him out of his thoughts. He heard groaning and grinding in the bowels of the building. The nearest of the pursuing Fellows was still many floors below. It would be some time before they arrived. Yet Will was forced to search each landing before moving on, listening warily now so as to be certain that no ambush awaited him and to make sure that Chlu could not double back and slip past him.

Will could not easily tell how high he had climbed. All he knew was it was a long way. His breath came in gasps and his legs ached. And there was that foetid smell again, something vile that carried down on the draughts lacing these dismal corridors.

As the Spire narrowed, so the fear of Maskull weighed more heavily on Will’s mind. He cast about for ways to encourage himself. ‘Chlu thinks I fear the Sightless Ones,’ he muttered through gritted teeth. ‘He chose this as his refuge because he thought I wouldn’t come here. I bet he hasn’t counted on being hunted down. He hasn’t bargained for this!’

He clenched his fists. No fear, not even the fear of Maskull, would undermine him. This time Chlu was going to have to turn at bay. This time he would be brought to account.

Something heavy lashed out at him from the gloom. Will ducked and it glanced off the top of his head. A length of chain clanged then pulled taut, wrapping itself in a spiral grip around the nearest pillar. He saw his chance and slammed his fist into Chlu’s face, but Chlu put his head down and Will felt the bones of his hand jar in pain as his punch connected instead with the bow of Chlu’s skull. Chlu roared and charged him down onto the filthy floor, then reached out again for his weapon. But Will kicked out with his foot and the force of the blow threw him back. They both watched as, between them, the chain unwound itself from the pillar, snaked slackly over the side of the staircase and vanished.

It was as if a spell had been broken. They roared at one another and came to grips again, falling down, rolling over and over. Dust swirled up, stinging throat and eyes and blurring everything that Will saw. His knuckles were soon skinned raw, but every punch he landed drew a reply and every kick a counter. Thoughts of the aid that magic might give in the moment of last resort were no comfort to Will, for he knew that powers taken for granted were powers that betrayed. And when Chlu put a deadly hold on his neck, he found he could not summon the power. Try as he might he could not ask in the right way and his escape was made only through the explosive strength that desperation put in him.

They slid across the floor in opposite directions. Chlu fell against the steps, winded and dazed, but he was up first. He drew something from the back of his belt and held it before him like a dagger in the shaft of light.

Will struggled on heels and elbows. He was gasping for breath and half-blind in a haze of dust and dry bird-lime, but he had seen the deadly spike clearly enough – it was Chlu’s unused crossbow bolt.

He put out a hand behind him and found – clear space – no rails, no banister, nothing but a thin current of foul air falling from above into which his fingers grasped emptily. He froze, suddenly knowing his peril, for he saw that he was lying on the edge of the precipice. It would take barely a touch to send him over. If Chlu were only to toe-poke him he would go spinning down into the dark, and that would be the end. A powerful fear surged up inside him. How quickly the tables had turned, and how faulty had been the inner feelings that Gwydion had so often recommended. Where Chlu was concerned, it seemed, such warnings were no help.

Terror filled his mind as Chlu came forward and rose over him menacingly. The weird light from above enfolded them. Will gasped.

‘Llyw, no!’

The Dark Child froze. He flinched back as echoes died on the air like a faint detonation – the noise of the chain hitting the bottom far below. It was followed by distant voices calling out in confusion. Will’s dust-filled eyes stung, but he could see that Chlu had begun to back away from the stairwell. A groan escaped him, and then he turned and fled.

Will rolled away from the edge. He coughed, tried to wave away the dust, got to his feet and sought the safety of the wall. He found that he was shaking as he drank in the relief that flooded through him. What had driven Chlu off? The effect had been almost magical, as if some bogeyman of the Fellowship had appeared and frightened him away.

But there was nothing to be seen. The Vigilants were far below, and there was no monster here, nothing save dust and the shafts of light cutting the scene at crazy angles. And then he realized what it must have been – he had pronounced Chlu’s name in the old tongue of the west. The name had worked the trick, for had not Gwydion warned him never to speak Chlu’s true name? If he ever did so as part of a spell, then his own doom would be sealed also.

He spat and laughed thinly. Blood soaked his sleeve. He was cut and bruised, but no serious damage had been done.

I have Chlu’s true name, he told himself, thinking out the consequences. And now he knows that, he’ll believe he’s in my power. He’ll think that I’ve already won. How desperate he’ll be – and how dangerous! I mustn’t underestimate him again, and I mustn’t forget that he’s a match for me in head and hand, however much our hearts may differ.

He gathered himself ready to press on up the stair, then saw there was blood in the dust. Big drops, red as rubies. He smeared fingers across his own wounded cheek. But, no – this blood was not his own.

And there were new sounds now – scuffling sounds – this time from above. Then a muffled screeching set Will’s teeth on edge. What was Chlu doing? Moving something heavy to the edge, ready to pitch it down the stair?

No…

When he rounded the next corner a flood of daylight came from above. This was no tiny brown-glazed pore opening on the outside world, no mean-spirited lancet pierced through the fabric of the building. This was direct light – full sunshine. The hairs were lifting on Will’s neck. He screwed up his eyes and half turned away from the gust of warm, filthy air that assailed his senses as the landing opened onto a scene of horror.

Here were a dozen hunchbacked figures, part-man, part-bird, creatures that might have been made long ago by vile sorcery out of some vain desire to fly. The beasts stood no taller than children. They wore coats of quills, and their heads were wrinkled and pink. So cruel and quarrelsome were their manners that they took Will’s breath away. They danced excitedly, snapping at one another and ripping at the open ribcage of a corpse that lay between them. The creatures were fighting over what was inside. Mottled brown wings opened and flapped as they strove to drive one another away from the carrion. But despite their preoccupation with the ghastly feast they nevertheless took notice of Will as he mounted the final stair.

They did not bear the interruption well, hissing and spitting at him, their pink-and-grey snouts sneering up to reveal long yellow eye-teeth. Will stared, horrified by the scene. If this was the Bier of Eternity, Will knew, then these must be the bone demons who came here to strip the bodies of flesh. The mortal remains of some high officer of the Fellowship had been stretched out upon a grey granite funerary bed and elaborately chained there. The Bier was low, its edge no higher than Will’s knee. It was carved with token-words and with locks and skulls and other symbols of death, and Will saw that the decayed corpse had been presented like an offering upon a grim altar. Over it all a pale canopy was spread, splashed now with the liquor of death and tattered by violence.

As Will’s eyes took in the scene, the creatures began to make menacing advances. They bounded towards him, testing him by darting in and out. Then, as if at a signal, they rushed him all at once, leaping forward in a flurry of clawing and ripping.

Will threw them off, then took up the only weapon that lay to hand – a thigh bone. He slashed back and forth, seeing that he must drive them back, that an all-out attack was his only hope.

He realized with horror that the weapon he had snatched up was slimy with rotting meat, but this was no time to scruple. He struck the nearest creature on the head as if with a mace, and it fell down. But the second tore at him furiously until he grabbed its tail and whirled it away out into empty space. By then, a third had used its hind claws to slash the sleeve of his jerkin open. He knocked it against a pillar, but now a fourth fastened its jaws on his calf and a fifth took him painfully by the forearm. Before he could shake them off others came to menace him, crowding upon his head like so many hornets. He threw down the bone, put everything out of his mind and, among the scatter of brown ribs, danced out two steps of a spell of magic.

This time the power ran through him strongly. When it blasted forth it flung the creatures off in a burst of pale green light and sent them tumbling. Those that were tangled in the canopy tore it down in their panic. The rest gathered themselves in rage and fear and scuttled back towards the open air. When Will approached them closer, the least fierce of them threw itself into panicked flight and the others soon followed.

The whole pack screamed at him impotently as he stepped over the Bier of Eternity. The stinking, part-dismanded body entangled his ankles and the rusty chains with which it had been ceremonially shackled threatened to trip him. Disgust overcame him, but as he tore down the rest of the canopy, he wiped his hands, then moved out into the light, where the yellow rays of the afternoon sun seemed to wash him clean.

Out on the parapet there was some respite from the stench, but he dared not step any closer to the edge than this – the fall was unfenced and the bone demons swooped and wheeled in the air beyond. They were looking for their chance to return, hesitating only when Will came fully out into the open to throw a magical gesture of satiety at them.

‘Go on, you bloody-snouted curs! You’ll feast no more today! Away with you!’

Then his eyes widened. How high he had come! All of Trinovant was laid out for him, its sprawl of roofs, its rich palaces and prickle of lesser spires all encompassed by that many-gated wall. There, the White Tower, and yonder, the bridge, tiny now, with the great shining river Iesis also made small, a twisting, turning ribbon of light…

But where was Chlu?

When Will looked up he saw there was still a great deal more of the Spire rising above his head. Its summit cone went up dizzyingly for a dozen more levels and came to a point that was topped by a large iron vane. This carried the device of the bloodless heart, the letters A, E, E and F standing out starkly, and a great gold-headed, gold-fletched arrow that acted as a pointer. Will knew the letters stood for a phrase in the language of the Slavers that meant ‘to and from the Fellowship’. Unlike ordinary weather vanes, this pointer was not pushed around by the wind. It was swung by some ingenious means so as to send out messages.

Seeing the moving sky made Will feel as if the Spire were toppling. A sudden fear of the immense height gripped his belly again and made him step away from the edge. As he did so, he saw Chlu. The latter was standing astride the Bier, and it appeared that he was ready to parlay.

‘Why have you stopped running?’ Will asked.

Chlu stared back. ‘I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me.’

Will faced him warily. ‘What did Maskull tell you? What spells did he place upon your head to make you want to hurt me?’

Chlu’s face was as bloodied as Will’s own, laid open beneath his right eye where Will had kicked him, but there remained an ember of arrogance in his expression, a hidden glow that would easily re-kindle.

‘I’m not bound to Maskull,’ Chlu said. ‘My will is as free as your own. It always has been.’

‘You don’t even realize how he’s using you!’

A humourless half-smile passed over Chlu’s face, and he prepared to take a step forward. ‘Oh, I am the sorcerer’s stooge while you’re the wizard’s favoured accomplice. I am the blind man, but your hawk eyes see forever. Is that the way it is? I’ll tell you plain, Willand: Maskull uses me no more than the enchanter, Gwydion Crowmaster, uses you!’

‘That’s enough!’ Will raised a hand to stay Chlu’s sly approach. ‘Maskull said he made me, and that he could just as easily unmake me. For years I thought that meant he must be my father. Master Gwydion told me not to believe it, but I couldn’t help myself. And now I’ve learned the truth, and so must you – we were twins, Chlu, two babies stolen away from our natural parents. By Maskull.’

Chlu shook his head, spread his hands in an open gesture that nevertheless showed he did not accept Will’s words. ‘So you were told, and so you believe…’

‘Hear me, Chlu! Maskull worked a spell upon us in a secret workshop. Neither of us are natural men. He’s altered us. He didn’t make us, but his tampering caused us to be as we are. Now don’t you see why we must work together?’

Chlu’s eyes were slitted against the glare. He threw up a hand against the golden light that haloed Will’s head. The shape of his fingers echoed Will’s own half-formed magical gesture, but there was a wounded quality about him that seemed too much like self-pity. He began slowly shaking his head. ‘Why should I believe a word you say?’

‘Because it’s the truth.’

‘Truth?’ Chlu spat out the word. ‘What? That you are the Deliverer, and I the Destroyer? Why should I choose to believe a truth like that, when it so clearly does not serve me?’

‘The truth is not there to serve you, Chlu. It simply is.’

Chlu rapped out his words mockingly. ‘Truth! You can put that name to anything you please!’

‘No! No, you can’t! Do you think you can just choose to believe whatever pleases you? You can’t do that! You have a duty to respect what is. It’s the nature of our world!’

‘I would rather believe what Lord Maskull tells me. He has shown me wonders. And he’s promised that as soon as I’ve rid our world of you I shall have my desire.’

Will stared, incredulous. ‘Your…desire?’

Chlu’s gaze was unfaltering. ‘I am to join Lord Maskull in the future that he’s going to make. He’ll be the king and I the prince, and we’ll rule a whole world between us!’

‘Do you really believe that? Chlu, he’ll use you for his present purpose and afterwards discard you without a second thought.’

‘Oh, no, little brother. A new world is coming.’

‘But it’s not coming, is it? Because I’m here to prevent it.’

‘You have it in a nutshell.’ Chlu’s eyes became murderous and hard. ‘And that’s why you have to die!’

‘Listen to me!’ Again Will’s hands rose up in a spellmaker’s gesture and kept Chlu from taking another dangerous step forward. ‘You should know that Maskull was labouring at the very limit of his art when he made us. Something went wrong. Master Gwydion saw it all: a great, spinning ray, then a burst of violence that tore a tower to pieces. And that blast tasted of fae magic, a magic from the olden times that was once mighty but now is all lost, except in the stones of the lorc – and in you and me.’

‘Gwydion is a deceiver. He lies to you.’

‘Why should he lie? Whatever separates us, Chlu, comes of the same power that fills the battlestones. Maskull tampered with that power so he could alter us. Can’t you feel it? The power that runs in the lorc – it’s the same magic that was used to change us. It binds our destinies to the stones, and to one another.’

‘Very neat. Only Lord Maskull tells quite a different story.’

Will let his hand fall. ‘Of course he does.’

‘You were chosen by the deceiver as his favourite. It was Gwydion Crowmaster who stole us away and then hid us in two ready-prepared places. They were shrouded in magic, kept secret so that no one else could find us. And there, as the years went by, that meddler worked his spells upon our minds. He grew us like barnyard animals, all the while twisting us to his scheme. And when he found which child was the most compliant to his magic, that was the one he chose to further at the expense of the other.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

Chlu’s voice rose and he jumped from the Bier. ‘Oh, but it was. While I was sent to tend pigs among filthy villagers, you were taken to be schooled alongside the sons of a duke! But Lord Maskull found me and pulled me from my torment! He took me out of the prison village of Little Slaughter, withdrew me before the evil enchanter could shatter it and murder me! Lord Maskull rescued me! He set me free!’

Will was aware that the bone demons had gathered once more, and were spitting and cackling. ‘You’ve got it the wrong way round. It was Maskull who broke Little Slaughter. Maskull found you, Chlu, on that we agree, but he removed you from Little Slaughter not to help you or to set you free. He doesn’t want to share overlordship of the future with anyone. He’s using you as his instrument. He needs to have you as his lodestone to seek me out. That’s been his purpose all along.’

‘That’s a view that puts you at the centre of all things, and makes me the villain!’ Again that bitter, unbelieving laugh. ‘Lord Maskull wants to find you all right. He wants more than that. He’s sent me to kill you. And so I shall.’

Chlu threw wide his hands and the bone demons flocked as if at his command. A purplish-red glow like an angry wound pulsed from him. ‘You see how I make them obey me?’

The creatures jostled forward, encircling Will, pulled by Chlu’s hatred, pushed by their own fear. They dared not close on the green-blue aura that rippled around Will’s form. But then Chlu bent down, scooped up the dripping skull of the dead Elder and flung it with all his strength. As Will blocked it filth, stinking and foul, blinded him, and he spat the vileness from his lips. Then, without warning, his aura exploded in all directions, filling the world with an immensely bright green light.

All Will could hear were the shrieks of the bone demons as they took to the air, and then came the rattling of chains. When Will regained his sight he saw that Chlu had vanished once more.

CHAPTER FOUR THE VANE

There was no doubt where Chlu had gone. A chain dangled from a hole in the vaulting. It hung over the Bier, and was swinging. Chlu must have hauled himself up through the hole, and Will knew that he must follow.

But as he pulled himself up on the chain he felt Chlu’s struggles cease and knew that his twin had found a ledge higher up. Once through the hole, Will saw that the space that formed the tip of the Spire was hollow. The sharp cone rose up a dozen times the height of a man, its interior lit by four great vents.

The light was dim and diffuse – dust had been kicked into the air, but Will saw that six huge chains depended from a platform at the top. The structure was trussed internally with huge beams and straps of iron that held the stonework together. Chlu had swung up into these rafters and had begun to climb along them and up a series of ladders.

‘Come on, little brother!’ Chlu howled. ‘Catch me if you can!’

Will heard the undertones of his own spirit in the challenge, and, undaunted, he climbed onward. But the way was treacherous. Always go first through a thicket, but second through a mire – that was something Wortmaster Gort used to say while out on his long walks. Going second here definitely put the follower at a disadvantage.

The ladders were crumbling – many rungs were wormy. They cracked under Will’s feet. Even the lashings that held them to the beams were dry and brittle. No stonemason or carpenter had come into the summit in many a long year, so that nothing had been done by way of repair or renewal. Now that Chlu had climbed some distance ahead he began to unrope the ladder tops and kick them away. He laughed as he tore up whatever was at hand to throw down, but he could not halt Will’s progress up into what, for one of them, would be a dead end.

Will fended off the missiles and pressed on doggedly, coming at last to a place about two ladder-lengths below the top platform. Here his daring faced a sterner test. The walkway had been almost wholly smashed by Chlu. In the middle all that remained was a single balk of timber. Will knew that one false step would mean falling to his death. He stopped and raised his arms to Chlu in a last appeal to see sense, but his twin’s reply was to fling at him the iron he had been using to tear up the planks.

Will took a step forward, but was immediately thrown off balance, and when he put out a hand he found one of the giant chains. Each link was as long as a man was tall and all six chains came out of a line of holes pierced in the upper platform. They disappeared far below, somewhere near the Bier, but what their purpose was, Will could not see.

He hugged the nearest link to save himself. It shivered as it came under tension and began to move downwards. Having grasped it, Will dared not let go, and so he was pulled to his knees then dragged down off the beam. For a moment he swung out wide over the drop, all his weight held on one twisted forearm. His legs dangled and his guts filled with a paralysing terror that snatched away all power over his body.

Don’t look down, he told himself in a silent scream. Keep your head up and hang on!

Distant grinding noises rose up from the space below when the chains jerked into motion. Will felt terror engulf him. His breath came in short gasps. The imperative to keep his grip consumed him as the pain in his wrist peaked. The struggle locked his muscles in a death-like cramp. He cried out, thrashed, managed to turn himself, then captured the link gratefully between his thighs. He squeezed his chest against the link and knew that he had bought enough time until the pain subsided and he could regain his courage. It had not been elegant, but he had avoided the fall.

Of course! he thought as he clung on. It’s the vane! These chains are how they work the mechanism. They must be sending out a message.

He forced himself to recall what was up above. On the very top of the Spire the great vane would be swinging and dancing this way and that, its various parts clacking and clanging as it sent the news of an unthinkable defilement to every chapter house in Trinovant.

‘What’s the matter?’ Chlu shouted in delight. ‘Are you finding it hard to get close to me?’

Will hung on, both in body and mind. He was shaking with shock, but the pain was ebbing and it was clear from the fingers he could still flex that his wrist had not been broken. Cramp complained in every muscle, sweat streamed down his back. It was hot up here, and he realized how much closer he must have come to the sun by now, way up in the middle airs of the sky, where Gwydion said the air lost its virtue and a man’s breathing came hard.

He calmed himself, then he began to think out his best chance. He could fit his foot into the eye at the end of the link and so let one of his legs bear his weight. The chains were within reach of one another and as one stopped moving down another began moving up. So he jammed his other foot into a link on the next chain, which fortunately soon jolted into motion. When that chain stopped, he moved on to a third, which disappointed him by going down again. But still it was clear how he might be carried up and up by making correct guesses. With luck he might get as far as the platform with its six holes.

He clambered from chain to chain, feeling for advantage, but as his mind opened he felt Chlu’s malice interfering with his judgment, willing him to fall. He overshot and saw with horror that just one more upward movement of the chain would carry him up through one of the holes. He would be stripped off the chain like a beetle from a corn stalk.

Fortunately, the next movement took him lower, but his relief lasted only a moment because now he came level with Chlu.

Having kicked away the ladder and guard rail to fling down on Will’s head, Chlu had trapped himself on a narrow ledge. Had they chosen to touch hands they could have done so, but Will’s twin crouched against the wall in that hot, dark space. He snarled, repelled by a consuming hatred, and struggled with something that protruded from the wall.

Will could see no way down, but then Chlu’s hunched shoulder moved, a catch gave way and a bar of brightness pierced the gloom as Chlu threw open a heavy wooden shutter and let in a flood of sunlight. Will saw with amazement that the builders of the Spire had seen fit to place a hatch here.

The grumbling sounds that issued from the chain holes were now complemented by the squeaking and squealing of iron joints. For a moment, Chlu’s body blocked the light, but then he climbed through the hole and once more Will was left alone.

The square of blue sky beckoned urgently. He leapt towards it and his fingers scrabbled for purchase, but he managed to get one hand on the sill and launch the other at Chlu’s ankle. The latter kicked him off, and when Will looked out he saw above him the final ladder – a series of iron staples, maybe a couple of dozen in all – leading to the uttermost tip of the Spire.

Chlu was already halfway up that deadly route by the time Will emerged and started after him. The rake of the Spire’s summit cap was severe. The ascent, which was almost vertical, became an overhang as the stone bellied out just below the vane. Brilliant sunshine burned the outline of Will’s shadow onto the weathered sandstone as he forced feet and hands to follow one another. Despite the danger he felt vastly alive. The sun’s heat burned his back, and had filled the rusty iron rungs with heat. The air up here was clean, sweet and he could taste blood in his mouth. It was as if the danger itself had sharpened all his senses, made him aware of every detail…

He looked to himself suspiciously, testing for evidence of magical attack. Was Maskull watching from somewhere? Was that the plan? Had the sorcerer been waiting all along on some rooftop down below, ready to cast a burst of violet fire skyward and sear both his troublesome creations into flaming brands?

Will blocked out the thought and put all of himself into the climb. He also tried to put out of his mind what he had glimpsed from the corner of his eye, but that was more difficult. It seemed as though the wide world below curved away from the Spire in every direction, the drab roofs of the City and then a green land, losing itself in a bright haze of blue which was neither earth nor sky. And against that background he had seen a speckling of dark shapes – bone demons, gathering again.

Will’s certainties told him that a reckoning was at hand. He tried to pull the shreds of his spirit together and scramble faster up the iron staples. The thinking part of him stood aghast at the course he had taken. Why had he done this? He was no murderer. What did he hope to gain by chasing Chlu to this lonely, lofty place? Now he had arrived his actions seemed bizarre and inexplicable. No one could climb such an overhang with a foe like Chlu guarding its top. Only a fool would throw himself at death without surer knowledge that his leaving the world would make a crucial difference.

Even so, there had been no mistaking his inner promptings, the ones he had promised Gwydion he would always try to take account of. The desire was unquestionable: Find him! Get to him! You must!

But what had driven Will on had not been determination, nor any righteous plan. It was not fear or hope of gain that made Chlu attack him. It was a force as elemental as day and night.

Soon, he thought grimly, one or both of us is going to have to die. I feel that, and he feels it too.

A raucous croak awoke Will’s fears. Black wings fluttered, dappling the brightness with shadows. He gritted his teeth then he looked up to see that it was Chlu who had attracted the wrath of the creatures. He had hauled himself up the double rows of ornamental carvings that lay just below the vane, and there he was being swooped upon by black shapes that wheeled and dived at him. But they were not bone demons.

Ravens! he told himself with sudden relief. They’re Bran’s ravens, come from the White Tower!

He took his chance. Hand over hand, he pulled himself up through the overhang, jamming his toes behind the rungs until he had hauled his upper body round to where the capstones were sheathed in lead.

Chlu was struggling on the leaden base of the vane, fighting off the birds that mobbed him. Above, the mechanism’s ribs were grinding and squealing as they turned, a heavy iron pointer wheeling this way and that. Seen this close, the letters were huge, each taller than a man, and the ribs on which they were mounted swept shudderingly around a huge white heart – a heart bled dry of all desire. Like the letters, the fearsome token was no more than a peeling sheet of thin, white-painted copper thrown into motion by levers and sprocket wheels turning below. The haphazardly rotating ribs threatened to cut Will off at the ankles, while the heart turned crazy somersaults in its cradle as it spelled out its arcane message.

Without another word, Will leapt at Chlu and seized him. The ravens scattered as he slammed Chlu up against a stanchion. He tried to hold him there, but Chlu’s fists beat him back with hammer blows. Will threw off the onslaught, knowing he must not use magic to overcome his twin. They traded punch for punch, kick for kick, dodging the flailing vane, somehow avoiding the randomly moving ironwork, and little by little Will forced Chlu back. At last he was pushed out onto the rib that supported the letter E.

Will told him, ‘There’s nowhere left for you to go.’

‘Nowhere’ Chlu gasped, ‘but Hell!’

Arms outstretched for balance, Chlu turned and teetered along the rib in an insanely risky dance. He reached the safety of the giant letter before the support could move and throw him off. There he turned again – not at bay, but triumphantly. He banged the copper sheeting that made up the letter with the flat of his hand, sending out a sound that rolled like thunder.

‘So what’s it to be? Do you have the guts to come for me? Or shall we sit here looking at one another until the Fellows come for you?’

Will shook his head and shot out an accusing finger. ‘You think you can find a way to live forever? You can’t!’

‘It’s the end of this Age. Your old world is finished! Only Lord Maskull has seen what’s coming next. He’s shown me there is a way!’

Will spoke the words that Gwydion had first taught him long ago.

‘First there were nine,

Then nine became seven,

And seven became five.

Now, as sure as the Ages decline,

Three are no more,

But one is alive.’

Chlu showed his teeth. ‘You see? All was prophesied! The one is Lord Maskull!’

‘But what if it’s not like that? What if Master Gwydion is the last phantarch? What then, Chlu?’

Chlu laughed. ‘You’re an ignorant fool, little brother. Your mind is too busy with small things to understand the greatness of the change that’s now upon us. Lord Maskull does not claim to be a phantarch. He never wanted to be that.’

‘Then what?’

‘It’s as I told you. You know nothing of the wonders that were shown to me! This is not just the ending of another Age, not just the passing over of one phantarch for another. This is the end of the world!’

‘The end of the world? What do you mean?’

‘Magic has always been draining away, right from the beginning of the world, and now it’s almost gone. This is the end-time, and when the last Age closes our world will become subject to a new power. Another world is coming for us, little brother, and it’s going to swallow us up!’

The ravens cawed and circled, but kept their distance. Down below, the whole beautiful world seemed to have been laid out beneath them. Will held on to the ornamental iron that supported the rib. He was jolted as it revolved, stopped, then revolved again, but nothing could tear his gaze from Chlu’s own. It did not matter what nonsense Chlu talked. It was the strangest of fascinations just to look at him.

Will let Chlu’s words wash over him, barely aware when they broke off. He knew he had no choice but to go out along the rib and see his labour through to the end. He let his eyes fall, tried to judge the best moment to start out along the rib, but its shifts were capricious. They lacked all pattern, so the direction it would next move in was impossible to foresee, and even if he did choose correctly and even if he did reach the end, Chlu would just be able to push him off.

He watched the golden-headed arrow of the pointer as it swept under the ribs, then he put a hand to his left cheek. When he opened it there was blood in his palm: the cut was bleeding again. Chlu’s right cheek was cut in exactly the same place. Out on the rib, Chlu’s every move mirrored his own. When Will wiped his hand clean against his breast, Chlu did the same. They both looked up and then away, and in that moment Will saw the hideous connection operating.

A confusion of fear and pain reached up to enmesh his thoughts. There was only one way forward. He must clear his mind of all clouding images. His inner promptings had brought him here, they must be allowed to guide him now. He closed his eyes until his mind became ice clear, then he jumped from the rib and ran forward into empty air.

As he reached the edge, the arm of the pointer swung neatly under his foot. One step – two, three – each footfall landed miraculously square on the iron strut. The fourth step brought him crashing hard up against the side of the giant white letter E and there he hung as the pointer swung away again.

The impact shivered the sheet of copper and clattered Chlu hard. Only a knee hooked around the lowest horizontal of the letter saved Chlu from falling, but the copper was flimsy and the rivets corroded, and it began to come away from its support. The next time the rib kicked into motion, the letter tore like dry parchment. Chlu pitched suddenly forward. Will, clinging like an insect to the top of the letter, reached a hand down and grabbed Chlu by the shoulder. But in reaching out, he too lost his balance and they were flung from the vane in opposite directions.

CHAPTER FIVE ‘KILL! KILL!’

They fell at hurtling speed, but the copper sheet worked briefly like the wing of a bird. The air rushed against it and pushed them clear of the Spire. Then they tumbled and the world began to spin faster and faster. The metal’s edge was caught by a billow of air and ripped from Will’s grasp. He tried to call out, but the gale that tore his jerkin open also forced its way into his mouth and nose and stopped his breath.

The ground was roaring up to meet him, threatening to slam him into the patterned precinct below. But while a part of him recognized that he was no more than a count of three away from oblivion, another part of his mind froze. Time drifted, then crawled. His headlong dive slowed more and more the closer he came to the ground. The fall would take forever, and the crowds gathered below with horror and disbelief captured on their faces would look up at him until Doomsday before they would see him land. He felt his body become as light as a hawk’s pinion. There was time enough to minutely examine the smooth black and white stones below, the patchwork of artisans’ booths and the enforcers in their red leather gear. He saw the way that unwelcome sunlight bathed the Vigilants in their yellow and grey robes, hampering them as they turned their empty eye sockets to scan the sky.

Will studied without concern the spiked rail that was rushing up to impale him. In that strange, pliable moment he noticed that the green glow had lit once more around his body. He stretched out his arms and legs, steering his dive, then turned over onto his back and threw his limbs wide.

But the glow was already burning away like the light of a shooting star, and then time came back with a bang.

Suddenly he was tearing through old canvas and into a mass of hay as the fodder tent exploded around him. All the air in his chest was blasted out and everything went dark. He struggled to draw breath, trapped now in a formless chaos, dazed, numbed and drained by so sudden a calling up of magical effort. He blacked out and came to again in what seemed like a single moment. He was still unable to draw breath, choking on dry grass, aware only that horses were bucking and bolting dangerously nearby. His hand made contact with something hard and dry, and it seemed he had never felt anything so solid before. It was the hard-baked ground. He burrowed and twisted along it, pushing forward through the loose hay like a mole, until a spangling of sunlight showed him where holes in the collapsed awning lit a possible way out.

When he poked his head from under the corded canvas edge what he saw amazed him. The entire row of tents which the enforcers had used as a stable had come tumbling down. Their horses had stampeded through the row of money-changers’ booths that stood nearby, carrying several of them down and scattering piles of coin into the street.

The crowd that had gathered to watch the drama unfolding on the Spire top saw their chance and fell on the silver. Men, women and children were filling fists, aprons, hats, fighting one another for what they could get. When Will turned his head he saw the enforcers’ fierce dog. It was roused up, but undecided about what to bark at next. Geese and ducks fluttered all around him. A column of Vigilants, led along by their sighted helpers, men in belted black shirts who had thrown open the precinct gates, were crowding purposefully into the space before the monument.

Their masters were giving them orders, calling out at the sacrilege, shouting up a hue and cry. Already some were beating at the fallen tents with their rods of office, aware that they had come close to the place where one of the defilers had landed. They were whipping the crowd into a ferment with their shouts.

‘It’s a bone demon!’

‘Seize it! Kill it!’

Seeing the whips of the Vigilants, those of the crowd who had not been quick enough to get at the coins turned to this new sport. It was terrifying to see, and worse still for Will to know he was its target. As the Vigilants’ shouts turned into a chant, individual will dissolved, and what was left was a thirst for blood. Will saw the unreasoning frenzy that entered men’s faces, the raised fists that began to pump the air. The mob became a single, many-legged monster.

Will was still dazed from his fall and drained by the involuntary magic that had saved him. He knew he could not fight or outrun a mob. He doubted he could summon any kind of defence now. And the Vigilants were drawing ever closer, using their uncanny sightless sense to close on him.

By the moon and stars, he thought. I’m a dead man!

He cast about, looking for Gwydion or Willow, but they were nowhere to be seen. He twisted and turned, untangling himself from the fallen awning. He ducked under a horse’s belly and dived through a tattered curtain that screened off the back of one of the few remaining moneychangers’ booths. Then he burst out into a space that was piled high with sacks of charcoal and set about with three or four small ironworker’s forges, all of which had been abandoned in the excitement.

His head was spinning – at least his knees had not given way yet – but he had not made his escape unnoticed. A new shout went up behind him.

‘There he goes!’

Will was no bone demon, but a mob sees only what it wants to see, and the hunt was on. Men thundered after him. He stumbled, then crashed on through the forges, throwing down a bellows and a hearth of hot embers in his wake. He emerged into an aisle between two rows of booths. The lane was almost empty, and those who were in it had not yet been caught up in the riot. He ran along it towards the nearest buildings, swaying past a woman carrying a yoke and pails, almost colliding with a bullock cart. He side-stepped neatly round a corner and swung into the open road.

But when he looked back he saw the pursuit surging into sight once again. Ahead, and coming west from another part of the City, were more Fellows, this time wearing brown robes. He had only one option, and that was to take to his heels again. He turned back and saw a huge Fellow in grey rags blocking his path. There was a side alley no more than twenty paces away, and Will made for it, but as soon as he entered he decided he had made a mistake.

The grey-robed Fellow moved into view and scanned the air sightlessly. Will ran on, for now this place reeked of danger – narrow ways such as these were likely dead ends, and he felt as if he was already caught in a trap. He shook his head to clear it, tried to open his mind, to drive out the hubbub of thoughts and fears.

There were dozens of people in the alley. It led to a small square surrounded by badly kept houses with a stinking dunghill at its centre. It was deep in shade, with only a meagre patch of sky above. The noise of over-crowded life came from the dwellings. Too many people lived here – women looking out from jutting upper floors, dirt-nosed children playing in the filth, men watching what passed.

Goats foraged and dogs ran out to snap at him as he sprinted by. Two men looked up from their work at the tail of a water cart. Beyond the square, several narrower ways branched off. He dared not take any of them, but ran on down the main alley until it forked and he was faced with a choice.

The noise of the pursuit grew louder. He noticed cart ruts underfoot running to the right. He chose the same fork, hoping they would lead him out of the maze. By now he was breathing hard, his heart pounding fit to burst, and he flattened himself against a wall, filling his lungs, needing to listen out. If only he could get away, then he would head for the royal palace of the White Hall. Gwydion would be bound to take Willow and Bethe there, no matter what they thought had happened at the Spire.

But just as he began to think he had foxed his pursuers he heard cries and a clatter of footsteps. Men in black shirts were running across the junction ahead of him. When they turned, they saw him.

‘That way!’

‘He’s there! Spread out!’

Will cursed and dodged back the way he had come. As soon as he reached the corner and moved out of sight, he jinked into one of the narrower ways, fervently hoping that this was no blind alley.

It was certainly deserted, running for thirty paces or so until it reached a dog-leg. Beyond that was only a small yard, hemmed in by house ends and walls that would be impossible to climb. The building that dominated the yard sent Will’s hopes plummeting. It was different to the others, built of expensive dressed stone, heavy and dark, and set back beyond a dry moat that was half choked with rubbish.

Could this be the back of some large, lordly house? he wondered. But he knew he was grasping at straws. A wide flight of steps bridged the moat and ran up to an arched door that was flanked by ornamental carvings. At the centre of the door there hung a brazen fist.

His heart sank. This was the sure sign of a chapter house. Will halted, angry at his false choice, fearful that his other options had disappeared. There were shouts and yelps echoing from the walls – no way out forward or back, and by the sound of it the mob had already decided correctly which way he had gone. They would be here very soon.

He planted his feet with deliberate care, and opened his mind, to invite what powers might be here to emerge from the dry, compacted earth underfoot. He felt the flows, but they were feeble, as if they had been pinched off by the tumble of mean hovels. Barely a tingle ran through his toes, and the aura that usually sheathed him like a cool, blue flame hardly flickered into life. Yet when his eyes rolled back in his head, he was able to give himself over to the ecstasy for a brief moment. A spangle ran over his ribs and launched an upwelling along his spine that drove fatigue before it and refreshed him.

But the joy did not last long and the light of forget-fulness soon faded. When he stepped out of his rhapsody he began straight away to spin and dance out a spell of alteration upon himself. Having assisted Gwydion with the restoring of Lord Dudlea’s wife and son, the appropriate formulas of the true tongue came readily to his lips. He had been the subject of magical disguises before, and so his flesh did not resist the changes that came over him. When he emerged from the alteration he had assumed the form of an old man, a beggar. He was filled with hope that this would be a sufficient armour in which to hide.

He could feel the wrath of the mob. A weird pressure on the nape of his neck made the hairs there stand up and caused him to turn. Picking his way among the filth that clogged the dry moat was the Fellow in tattered grey garb. His head was cowled within a deep hood, and it was tilted in the manner that Will had seen each time he had come under the sightless scrutiny of a Fellow.

A shout came from behind. ‘This way!’

Will turned to see the first forerunners of the mob coming into the yard. They stopped in their tracks. Bigger men joined them, sweating and breathless. They would not approach their prey, though they were roused for blood, for an Elder was coming.

‘Kill! Kill!’ some fool shouted, hoping that a chant would be taken up, but it failed: there was no one to kill, save an old beggarman and a brooding Fellow who was now rising up menacingly out of the moat.

They stared at the Fellow as he came forward. He was a huge man. By now a dozen helpers had closed off the yard and three Vigilants were led forward. The men in belted black shirts who carried cudgels and clubs deferred to the Elder as if he had the power of life and death over them. But still they looked with unavoidable respect upon the tattered Fellow who came to meet them.

‘Who comes?’ the Fellow boomed.

His way of speaking was strange, his voice somewhat lisping, though deep and laced with a quiet kind of menace. When he gathered himself he was a figure to behold, the rends in his robes showing glimpses of a frame of tremendous power.

Unseen now, Will backed up the steps of the chapter house. Above him, the brass fist came to life on the door and splayed grasping fingers from which he was forced to draw away.

One of the Vigilants was ushered forward, but the big Fellow raised a denying hand to him.

‘Who comes?’ he repeated. ‘Who comes to disturb the peace of this House?’

One of the black-clad men spat. ‘Yaaah, Hell-damned Grey Robes!’

‘There!’ shouted another of the Vigilants’ sighted helpers. He pointed towards Will, whose bewilderment at the various competing orders within the Fellowship was not helping him make sense of his danger. ‘That’s what we’ve come for. Him. That’s a bone demon, sitting on your stair! A bone demon from the Spire!’

The Vigilants tilted their heads, their attention focussing now on Will. The big Fellow took a short step forward, which made the others draw back. ‘There is no bone demon here. Only an old man whom I hope will yet be persuaded to our purpose.’

The leader of the Yellow Robes sniffed the air then threw up his hands. ‘Magic!’ he said. ‘Foul magic has been done here! The demon has taken on new form!’

They all looked towards Will.

‘Let us fall upon the beggar!’ one of the mob shouted.

‘Aye!’

They began to surge forward, but the ragged Fellow did not move aside. Instead, he stood four-square and let slip from inside his sleeve a heavy chain. Raising it on high he swept an arc clear before him. Then he said in a stolid but commanding voice, ‘It may be that this old man already belongs! You may believe that approaching him is forbidden!’

The Vigilants drew back from the death-dealing chain that circled and swung over their heads. It filled all the yard with the soughing of stirred air, and no one dared come within its compass for fear that it too was touched by the magic the Vigilant had smelled. It was plain to the stupidest that, in so narrow a space, a chain in the hands of a man like this might easily murder a dozen of them if they tried to take the recruit away from him.

‘You may imagine that we are angry with you,’ the Vigilant Elder said in a high, wheedling voice. ‘One might ask: who is this Fellow? And where does he belong?’

The hooded head turned to face the questioner. ‘And some may hear that he is Fellow Eudas, and that he belongs to the Black House. But certain exalted ones may choose to take care! For perhaps the lowly Fellow was a soldier before he begged admission to the Happy Family.’

Will marvelled at the oddly indirect language of the Fellowship. He had heard Gwydion use it when they had visited Clifton Grange disguised as mendicant Fellows. Now the curious but deadly exchanges sent a shiver down his spine.

‘How then if the lowly one might be commanded to stand aside? How then?’

‘All respect to the exalted! But he may suppose that this Fellow, lowly or not, might decide to send the first man to take another step towards him down to see for himself the fires of Hell.’

A different Fellow pushed his way to the front. He too was an Elder, but one of the senior Brown Robes whose order dwelt in the House-by-Cripplegate. When he drew back his hood, painted eye sockets seemed to stare out from his skull like the eyes of a madman.

‘Why, oh why, should a lowly Fellow be believed, if Fellow he really is? Perhaps it is only an impostor who speaks in such a rude and obstinate way to Elders. Proof may be required! Else one may say that he himself is an incarnation of the very demon which fell to earth!’

‘Aye!’ the helpers cried, taking up the idea with enthusiasm. ‘Let him throw back his hood and show himself!’

The crowd that now filled the alley was fifty or sixty strong. As those at the back began to chant, ‘Show! Show! Show!’ the brown-robed senior gathered himself as if for a fight, and spoke as directly as his station would allow. ‘Can it be this lowly servant has not heard our friends a-calling? Let him show himself! Or must these same friends force him to uncover?’

‘Force?’ There was scorn in the reply. ‘Such an ugly word. Shall it be said that these friends are going to force a lowly Fellow who is doing his duty by the Iron Rule, who moves in zeal and commits nothing contrary to the holy principle that binds all members of the Happy Family? Force, is it?’

The Elder trembled with fury. He was not used to backing down. He cried, ‘How best to put an order such as this? Come now, friends: the lowly Fellow cannot kill us all! Now let him prove himself. Show, show, show!’

The chant started again, but Eudas stood unmoving in the face of it, until it died away. Then he said, ‘The lowly Fellow has stated his case: the beggar belongs to him. However—’

A moment passed. The chain continued to circle over-head, but then Eudas snapped his wrist and brought it snaking down into a dead heap beside him. With the next movement he put his hands to his hood and pulled it back onto his shoulders.

Those who stared gasped at what they saw. From where Will crouched he could not see what had caused the reaction, but there were many in the crowd who turned away, while the rest goggled in frank horror.

The Elder’s fingers reached out briefly, then he nodded, disappointed that the orbits of Fellow Eudas’ eyes were indeed vacant. The realization struck a dull note of fear in Will’s belly as he huddled lower against the foot of the chapter house door. Above him the brazen arm reached down as far as it could in a vain attempt to seize him.

‘Is it not wholly as the lowly one said?’ the big man asked in his quiet, deep voice. ‘Now, if the exalted ones please…he may be left to his work, and may peace attend all.’

‘There is peace only in Heaven,’ the brown-garbed one cried, making a sign in the air. ‘Perhaps this is something the lowly Fellow forgets!’

‘One may say he knows which of those gathered here upholds the Iron Rule, and which is trying to break it. How if someone should take report of what has passed to the Council of High Wardens? How if due consideration was made upon the facts?’

Will watched as heads were bowed in fear, but then a voice at the mouth of the alley shouted, ‘This way, everybody! The bone demon went down Fish Street!’

When the last of the crowd had bled away, the big man quickly pulled up his hood and hid the face that had so horrified the crowd. He stooped and picked up the chain, feeding it artfully inside his sleeve and across his shoulders. Will watched him, his mind still crawling with fears, certain that his best hope was to remain an old beggar for the time being.

But there was another danger to be handled now.

‘I thank you, sir. I thank you for my life,’ Will muttered, rising. He made humble nods, gathered his tattered coat about him, and began to make away, but the Fellow moved across his path.

‘If you really do want to thank me for your life,’ he said simply, ‘there is only one way to do it.’

‘No, no,’ Will said, trying again to slide past. ‘I’m truly grateful that you’ve helped me, but I’ve no wish to spend my latter days inside a chapter house. Kind though your offer undoubtedly is, I—’

‘Hear me out, friend.’

Will shivered with revulsion. ‘Oh, but the life would be hateful to me. In fact, it would be worse than the death from which you’ve just saved me.’

But Eudas placed a staying hand on Will’s breast. ‘I also have made that choice.’

That brought Will up sharp. ‘What did you say?’

‘I am trying to tell you that I have escaped the Fellowship.’

Astonishment made Will stare. ‘But how can that be? Once a Fellow, always a Fellow – isn’t that part of the Iron Rule? No one ever leaves the embrace of the Sightless Ones.’

‘I did.’

Will began to feel the integrity of his disguise running thin. Very slightly, the mottling of age on his hands had started to lighten…

Hands! Of course!

‘Let me see your hands,’ he told the Fellow.

‘You don’t believe me.’

‘Do you blame me for that?’

Straight away, Eudas unwrapped the dirty cloth strips that were bound over his hands. Will’s fast-improving eyesight could see that the knuckles were not as cracked and red as those of other Fellows, and the nails, always horn-hard and yellow, had begun to grow out normally.

Will dropped the hands, amazed. ‘You’ve stopped washing.’

The dark hood gave a single nod. ‘I have.’

‘You’ve abandoned the ritual!’

‘I have not washed in a month.’

‘But that’s impossible! The strength of mind that would be required to break free from such coils as the Fellowship winds around a man’s spirit…’

‘It has not been easy.’

Will knew it was time to put aside his astonishment and ask the crucial question. ‘But tell me, ex-Fellow Eudas, if you are not recruiting lost souls to your house, why did you risk yourself to help a worthless beggar?’

There came a growl from deep inside the big man’s chest, and his strangely accented words gave Will even more to think about. ‘There was little risk. If they had not gone away I would have killed them all. And if there is justice in the world, it will be you who helps the worthless beggar.’

CHAPTER SIX ONCE A FELLOW…

By now, Will’s suspicions were fully aroused. He peered hard at the hooded Fellow, trying with all his mind to penetrate the disguise. There was more to this man than met the eye.

‘You must forgive an old man,’ he said, sticking to his story. ‘I’m in no position to help anyone. Now, if you don’t mind—’

The big man seized him by the shoulders. ‘The worthless beggar I want you to help is…me.’

Will imagined that in a moment he would slap the Fellow playfully on the shoulder and say, ‘Come now, Master Gwydion, without your staff you are not so nimble in magic as once you were. Don’t you think I can see through your disguises as well as you see through mine?’ But that moment was not to be, for it seemed there was something even stranger than magic about this man.

‘Who are you?’

‘If you would know that, then listen and I will tell you.’

The big man sat down on the steps and began to lay out his life’s tale, and Will, unable to do otherwise, sat down beside him and listened.

‘I have always been lucky. My given name was Lotan, which in my native tongue means “the fortunate one”. I was born seven-times-seven years ago in a land far beyond the Narrow Seas, in a country that you call the Tortured Lands. One day, when I was still a child, all my family was murdered. It was my good fortune to be the only one who escaped alive.’

‘Good fortune indeed,’ Will murmured, though the irony of his remark went unappreciated.

‘Since then, I have roamed upon land and roved upon the sea. I have carried myself to all corners of the world. I have lived in many strange places, and in a few of them my luck has been sorely tested, but never was I bested in fight, and never was I made a slave. This does not mean that I have not done dark deeds, but sometimes a man is given no choice.

‘At last I tired of travel. I came into the port of Callas, and being somewhat skilled in the arts of war I decided to make my fortune as a mercenary soldier. I was accepted into the garrison by the captain there.’

Heavy chain links clinked inside Lotan’s robe as he finished.

‘It would have been a fool of a captain who turned you down,’ Will said, aware of the man’s powerful frame.

Lotan shrugged. ‘I am what I am.’

‘Lord Warrewyk. Is it not he who has been Captain of Callas these five years?’ Will said, unable to resist probing after loyalties.

The hood turned. ‘The time about which I speak was long before Earl Warrewyk’s day. I served three dukes who were captains before he – the Dukes of Gloustre then Southfolk, and latterly Duke Edgar of Mells, who was my last commander. That was six years ago.’

Will showed no reaction, but the information was sound. Duke Edgar had been killed at Verlamion – hacked to death by Lord Warrewyk’s men. Edgar had been a staunch supporter of the queen, and his cruel son was her chief supporter now.

The big man continued speaking, and soon Will heard a burr in his voice that spoke of fond recollections. ‘Strife and easy living were mine in equal measure during my time in Callas. I ate two good meals every day. I lived a manly life. I fought alongside men I trusted, men who trusted me. But the life of a man-at-arms is, at its end, always hard to bear, for a soldier feels more sharply than others the passing of his prime. As the first grey hairs grow he feels the aches begin in his flesh. There came a day when I began to think of retirement, of using what little gold I had gleaned to open an alehouse. I wanted no more than to pass my remaining days in quiet kind, but my plans were overtaken by greater events.

‘Five summers ago, in the last month of my service, war threatened, and I was sent with the bodyguard of my Lord of Mells to a new place. We took ship across the Narrow Seas and came into this Realm to prosecute war.’

‘Did you go to Verlamion?’

The hood stirred again. ‘You know of that place?’

‘I went there…once.’

‘It has a rich chapter house. But it was in the streets of the town that spreads around the chapter house that the battle was fought. In truth it was not much of a battle, but it was the one fight in which my luck failed me. Duke Edgar became trapped. His bodyguard were slain around him, and though I tried to protect him, I took for my troubles an axe blow – here. It cut through the steel brow-strap of my helm and robbed me of half my face. The blow was given to me by one of Lord Warrewyk’s men. It has been my ruination.’

Will winced, echoing the reaction of those who not long before had stared at Lotan and screwed up their faces at the sight of him.

‘When the battle at Verlamion was over, I was left for dead. But then a Wise Woman found me and bound up my head and stayed with me, thinking that I would soon die. She could not heal me beyond the laying on of gentle herbs, but even so I did not die for there was something about her ministering that lifted me up. Instead I lived on for three years, begging in the streets of Trinovant in a red cloud of torment. At last I could bear the suffering no more. I gave myself into the keeping of the Sightless Ones who, to have me, plucked out my eyes.’

Will heard the rumble of Lotan’s regret, and looked up at the blank walls of the chapter house, which for all their impressive size and strength seemed also inhuman and cold-hearted in their proportions.

‘At first, the losing of my eyes felt like a mercy, for all pain leaves a man who surrenders himself. Forgetfulness enfolds him like a blanket and for some that is a powerful comfort. But not for me. The longer I remained within the chapter house, the more doubts came to plague me. I was sure I had made the biggest mistake by going there, for though my head had been deeply cloven and now I was blinded also, still I remained whole in spirit. I have never been one who runs with a flock. My thoughts are my own. How could I surrender myself to that which I did not truly believe?’

Will’s brow creased as he tried to understand. ‘Surrender yourself? To what? To the service of the Fellowship?’

The big man seemed to struggle with the idea. ‘Not to the Fellowship exactly, but to that power which they would make all men bow down before.’

‘What’s that?’ Will asked, horrified. ‘A monster?’

‘It is an invisible power, one that all other Fellows swear they can feel in the world. But try as I might, I could never feel it. That is why I could not progress.’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know. They have a name for it, but that name may not be spoken.’

‘I’ve often wondered what could be at the heart of the Fellowship,’ Will said, still unable to grasp what he was being told. ‘Do they mean a power of magic? I know the Sightless Ones use a form of sorcery, and I can tell you for a certainty that natural magic is real, but—’

‘Oh, it is not natural magic they revere, but something else. An ancient invention, a great piece of wickedness…it did not originate with the Fellowship – they have come about because of it. But they have used it ruthlessly.’

‘But what is it?’

A gurgling laugh escaped the big man. ‘Only an idea. But one so powerful that it has made slaves of all those who were rash enough to open their minds to it.’

And Will suddenly recalled what Gwydion had said about the Great Lie. That too was only an idea, but the wizard had said that it was immensely dangerous – an idea that, in a manner of speaking, had the power to turn other ideas to stone. It worked upon men, women and children, not by shackling their bodies as the Slavers had done, but by imprisoning their minds.

Lotan turned. ‘The axe that made me so terrible to look upon has left me good for little beyond the terrifying of mobs, or perhaps the begging of pennies from those who desire to buy a glimpse of horror, but I remain my own man. I can do no other.’

Will heard no self-pity in Lotan’s voice, rather a wry humour that spoke of inner strength. ‘Friend Lotan,’ he said, ‘you still haven’t told me why you chose to save an old beggarman from the mob.’

‘Because you decided to be kind to me.’

‘I?’ Will peered hard at the dark shadow that lay beneath Lotan’s hood. ‘How was I kind?’

‘You gave me an apple.’

Will froze. ‘That…was you?’

‘I sensed your magic, even then, and so I followed you. I have no eyes, but in consequence I can feel much that was once hidden from me. I was drawn towards the Spire when you went there. And when I heard the hue and cry, I came here to make your acquaintance. I have hunted down many a man before, though few throw off the sparks that you do. It was not difficult to direct you here.’

Will was astonished. ‘You knew about me all the time?’

‘I was here when you entered this yard. I witnessed your change of form. I knew what you were, and—’ he grasped Will’s wrist,’—I chose to help you.’

‘But…what do you want from me?’

‘I want you to help me.’

Lotan suddenly threw back his hood and showed his ruined face. Empty sockets yawned, and Will saw what work the axe-blade had done – livid flesh ran from ear to chin and his cheek was sunken where an entire upper row of teeth had been smashed away. ‘Please, I beg you, sorcerer – give me back my sight!’

The word sorcerer made Will recoil, but a spasm of sympathetic pain flashed through him.

‘I am no sorcerer,’ he said. ‘It’s true that I’m somewhat versed in magic, but—’

‘But you will not help me.’

‘I cannot. The restoring of your sight is a task far beyond any magic that I can work. Even the healing powers of a king could not—’

Lotan’s grip tightened on Will’s arm. ‘You transformed yourself! I felt you do it. I sensed it all from where I stood in the shadows. Nor was that any spell of seeming. You have powerful magic in you, powerful enough to shift shape, powerful enough to give me back my eyesight – if only you would decide to use it!’

‘You’re right—’Will said, pulling away, overawed by the bodily presence of the man.

‘I knew it!’

Will’s disguise was quickly reverting now, and he felt uncomfortably exposed. ‘What I mean is, you’re right that it’s no simple thing to make transformations. It takes powerful magic, but it’s a thousand times harder to unpick the spells of another – especially when the original change is one that was agreed upon freely. For that very reason, such magic as I am able to call upon cannot so much as remove a tattoo – not unless it was printed in the flesh by force.’

‘Please help me!’

‘Listen to me, Lotan! You gave yourself under oath to the Sighdess Ones. That was your given word. Such an oath is binding. It is not within the scope of my powers to reverse that change.’

The other slumped, like a great brazen statue being melted down in a crucible. ‘The gold I saved while I was a soldier, I buried it in a meadow near Verlamion before the battle. Even after all this time I could help you to find it—’

As Will shook his head more grey vanished into thin air. ‘Magic does not work through payment. The rede says, “Magic may be neither boughten nor sold.”’

‘Then I am going down into the fires of Hell…’

Lotan’s head collapsed into his hands and he rocked back and forth in silence. For a moment he seemed to be sobbing soundlessly, and Will considered the full misery into which this man had sunk. It was frightful.

What he had said to Lotan had hurt because, as the rede said, ‘Refusals disappoint, and great refusals disappoint greatly.’ And Will knew he would have to hurt Lotan even more.

Unable to wait any longer, Will stood up and began to unravel the transformation that had disguised him. He stepped out the gestures that helped the magic to unwind and restore him to his true condition and at last grew still.

‘You move with elegance,’ Lotan said emptily. ‘I could feel it. I think you must be a very handsome young man.’

Will knew he must check himself. In too short a space of time he had been placed under a tremendous obligation. His feelings had been slammed from pillar to post, and now he felt an overwhelming desire to do something that he might regret.

I can’t so easily walk away from a man who has just saved my skin, he thought. I can’t leave him in this alley and tell him there is no hope, when I know a man who might just be able to set everything to rights.

He tried not to think of Gwydion, but it was no good. The part of him that wanted to see the world become what it ought to be overflowed like a fountain. Of course, it was horribly wrong to presume upon a wizard’s powers – he had learned that lesson only too well at Delamprey. And it would be cruel to offer false hope to Lotan. But how could he just cut a man’s hopes adrift?

What shall I do? he asked himself. It would compromise Gwydion greatly if I were to tell any stranger that an Ogdoad wizard had entered Trinovant recently.

He scratched his head, but no better idea came into it. ‘There is a man I know who is far wiser than I. He may have some advice for you. Only advice, I say. But I will ask.’

‘I knew you would help me!’

Will felt a wave of gratitude break over him. ‘I make no promises,’ he cautioned. ‘And now I must go. Shall I look for you again in this place?’

‘Yes!’ Lotan’s empty eye sockets gazed towards the narrow patch of sky that opened above the alley. He threw himself to his knees and clasped his hands together in an attitude of such rapture that Will was embarrassed. ‘Have I your word of honour that you will come back?’

‘You may count that as a promise.’

‘I do not know why, young sorcerer,’ Lotan said fervently, ‘but I believe you.’

Will looked sharply around as Lotan seized his hand again. ‘You must not call me “sorcerer”, “enchanter”, “warlock” or “magician” – these words are easily misunderstood and lead to trouble. I’ll look for you again here about midnight, though I can’t say which midnight it will be.’

‘Then I will wait for you here every night.’

Will turned and looked down the alley. ‘Which way should I go if I’m to find the White Hall?’

Lotan drew back. ‘You have business at the royal palace?’

‘If I do, it’s my own business.’

‘Then you should avoid the Spire and go out of the City by the Luddsgate and along the roads they call the Fleete and the West Strande.’

‘You mean the White Hall lies outside the City?’

‘Didn’t you know? It’s on the north bank of the river, maybe half a league from here. To find it keep the warmth of the setting sun on your face, but always follow the stink of the river as it bends south. You will not mistake the place for the walls are high and the echoes carry there like the ghosts of the past.’

As Will emerged from the alley he found the small street deserted. The overhangs of the houses closed in above him, and in the quiet he was aware of cooking smells and the distant sounds of commerce on a busy street. The way out of the maze was easier to find than he expected.

On the main street there were crowds of people hurrying this way and that, occupied, but seldom speaking to one another. A few, Will saw, were born to indulgence, rich merchants who rode upon horses and had men to clear a way for them and their well-adorned ladies. But there were many others aimless and rat-like: cut-throats, pick-pockets, dirty-faced women, some wanton, some carrying babes-in-arms the better to further their trade in pity. He melted into the crowds, meeting very few inquiring looks but following his feelings as best he could. He took bearings from glimpses of the Spire and noted the colours of the robes the Fellows wore. Grey signified the chapter house of Farring-withoutthe-Wall, the Black Robes were Fellows of Hollbourne-bythe-Spire, but others robed in white were heading westward in large numbers, as if they were required to leave the City before the curfew bells tolled.

By following the White Robes Will soon came in sight of a gate and found it was the one they called the Luddsgate. There he supposed he would meet with more unhappy dragonets, but there was a paupers’ footway that led out, just a simple passage for those carrying no goods. It stank in the heat, but a different smell assailed him once outside, for the road ran across a stout bridge, and below it stretched brown mud banks between which the waters of a tributary ran. When Will looked down it towards the Iesis he was amazed to see that the level of the river had dropped right down. He hurried on, and soon he saw serjeants-at-law by the dozen sitting around the Inns at Linton Greene. They all wore gowns of dark green, and they had long, green-dyed feathers in their caps, which Will knew showed the number of their successes. Gwydion had told him how all lawyers had been compelled by a king of old to dress in this fashion in order that common men might know the greatest of villains on sight.

Will went on again, leaving behind the steeples of the Inns, then past the lordly houses of Arandel, Mells and Southfolk, until an almost unseen figure passed close by and crossed his path, pulling him suddenly into a doorway.

His aura flared green and he threw up a self-protective hand, but immediately he felt it seized and bent down hard in a grasp that forced him to his knees.

‘Agh!’

‘You fool!’

‘Master Gwydion!’

‘Shhh!’ The wizard’s eyes accused him. ‘Now that was a fool’s errand was it not?’

Will understood but was unrepentant. He shook himself out of the wizard’s now-relaxing grip. ‘You have your errands and I have mine. Were you watching when we fell? Did you see what happened to Chlu?’

‘I saw the pair of you lighting up the entire City with your rude magic.’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I was falling to my death.’

‘And every Fellow within a dozen leagues must have turned his head upward when you leapt off that vane.’

‘I didn’t leap, I fell.’

‘You should not have been up there in the first place.’

Will felt anger churning inside and stabbed a finger at the wizard. ‘Don’t you tell me what I should and should not be doing! I was following my feelings.’

‘Oh, dangerous man! It would be better for you if you got far away from the City now. The Fellows are very greatly roused up and most unhappy with you!’

‘I don’t care about them. And I’m not running away.’ He reached out and prevented Gwydion from turning aside. ‘I asked you if you saw Chlu fall. Did you?’

Gwydion’s face was granite as he looked down at the presumptuous hand on his sleeve. ‘Chlu came down on the far side of the Spire. I cannot say what happened to him.’

Despite his anger, Will wanted to tell the wizard all that had passed, but he could see Gwydion was in no mood to receive complicated news. Instead he demanded, ‘Where are Willow and Bethe?’

‘Safe.’

‘I said “where?” Answer me fully now, Master Gwydion, or I swear—’

‘At the palace. Do you remember Jackhald, who helped us raise the Blood Stone from the well at Ludford? He’s been made captain of the guard here. He’s agreed to find you lodging.’

‘Well, that’s something at least.’

‘But no thanks to you. Follow me, for we have work to do.’

Will pulled up short again, his hotness cooling. ‘Master Gwydion, that’s not the way to the White Hall.’

‘Indeed it is not.’

‘Then I’m not going that way. I know the importance of your work as well as anyone, but it’s as I’ve told you, I have one or two errands of my own, and the first of them is to see my wife and child!’

CHAPTER SEVEN LEIR’S LEGACY

Three days later, on the day of Duke Richard’s arrival, Will announced his intention to go down to Luddsgate to see the duke’s army make its triumphal entry into Trinovant. Willow said she wanted to come and insisted that she would bring Bethe too.

Will agreed only reluctantly. He was worried that another attack might be mounted. In the time since their encounter on the Spire nothing more had been seen or heard of Chlu, but in quiet moments when Will turned his mind towards the City he could feel an ache in his bones. It told him that his twin was alive and nursing malice somewhere within the walls.

Willow had already told Gwydion of Will’s plan to go down to see the arrival. Now she went further, suggesting that the wizard should break off his single-minded search for Maskull’s magic tower and come along also. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘it’ll be helpful to take note of which nobles are riding alongside Duke Richard in the parade. Shouldn’t you see what order of precedence they come in?’

The wizard was about to say something in reply, but then he stared at her hard, as if reading another intent in her request.

‘Willand’s drawn,’ Gwydion said. ‘And you feel that in him, don’t you?’

‘Drawn? What on earth do you mean, Master Gwydion?’

‘Drawn towards the City, or more precisely someone at present biding his time out there. Does it not worry you, the prospect of another quarrel? Another bolt from the blue? I think it should. Though it will be something else next time.’

‘Will’s already thought about that,’ she said, shutting the idea out and replacing it with another notion – that perhaps not all of the harm that had flowed from the magic bracelets and into the wizard’s wrists had been emptied from him, for he seemed darker and wearier than ever before. ‘Now, are you staying or coming?’

Now that the last moment had come, Gwydion decided he would indeed accompany them into the City. They took a small river boat which rowed them to the Saltwharf Steps. After landing, they went up the slope towards Luddsgate, just managing to avoid the Spire precincts, and pressed in with everyone else who had lined the route.

Thousands of people had come from all parts of the City. They filled the streets, crowding upon balconies and even climbing up to roof-ridges and chimney stacks to see the great Duke of Ebor admitted through the Luddsgate.

The gate itself, Will saw, was a broad tower of limestone banded with Slaver brick and carved with the achievements of the kings of old, just as the Eldersgate was carved with northern dragons. Gwydion explained, ‘The duke has chosen to enter Trinovant by its grandest gate as a reminder to all the inhabitants where their loyalties ought to lie. It was upon the timbers of this great portal that the burgesses of the City, bare months ago, nailed a daring proclamation.’

‘What did it proclaim?’ Will asked.

‘They bravely declared all the gates of Trinovant barred against the return of their own king – until “redress and remedy” might be found for the duke concerning the king’s actions in besieging him at Ludford Castle.’

‘Good for them,’ Will said.

But Willow was not so sure. ‘It doesn’t seem all that brave of the townsfolk in hindsight. They must have been thinking about their own skins, and what Lord Sarum and Lord Warrewyk would do to the City if its people sided with the queen.’

Gwydion examined the gate expectantly. ‘It looks like the City’s gamble has been good. Queen Mag and her friends were up to their necks in debt with every merchant in Trinovant. That is a matter that would take some settling before she could be welcomed back.’

Willow’s head craned forward with the rest of the crowd as the first beating of drums and blowing of shawms was heard on the west wind.

Will lifted Bethe and sat her astride his neck, and she rode there agog at everything she saw.

‘Why doesn’t the duke go straight to the White Hall?’ Will asked. ‘That’s the place where all royal business is done, isn’t it?’

The wizard waved a dismissive hand. ‘First, Friend Richard must be at pains to show how much the people love him. The governance of Trinovant depends on shows of respect as much as it does on force.’

‘Then he’s going to the Guild Hall?’

‘To be received by the City’s notables – the Lord Mayor, his Bailiff, the Sheriff, and the Aldermen of the twenty-six wards. All of these tom-fools he will shower with promises and praise, and they will do him a show of honour in return before he sets himself to the real work of the day.’

‘Do you think he’s testing the water?’ Willow asked.

‘Certainly he will be watching how the people regard him. And showing them what force he has at his command, in case there’s a riot in the offing.’

‘A riot?’ Willow asked in alarm. ‘Is that likely?’

‘He has already made the king call a Great Council.’

Will snapped round. ‘Well, thank you for telling me! When?’

‘Every lord in the land is ordered to present himself in three days’ time.’

‘To bend the knee before King Hal?’ Will asked.

Gwydion nodded. ‘Richard wants those who can be persuaded to stay – where he can keep an eye on them.’

‘Yes,’ Willow agreed. ‘And all those who will not come will be forced to declare as much.’

‘Three days…’ A vivid memory of Lord Warrewyk’s bloody handiwork came into Will’s mind. ‘Well, apart from the noblemen who were done to death following the battle at Delamprey, I imagine there are quite a few others who won’t be turning up.’

The wizard paused, considering carefully. ‘Perhaps more lords will heed the call than you imagine. Of course, there will be diehards, men like Henry, Duke of Mells, who have gone into the north with the queen, but there are many more who, in truth, want only to tend their own flocks. They will pay lip service to whichever camp is the stronger. If I am any judge, most of the lords who attended the Council at Corben Castle will attend here also.’

Will dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘Then they must be sweating rivers just now – a few days ago half of them swore they would see Duke Richard’s head chopped off for treason. Some of them would even have done it themselves if it meant getting a share of his lands.’

‘But do not forget in whose interest lies the peace now, Willand. Friend Richard wants to maintain the comfortable fiction that Hal is back on his throne and that all is now right with the Realm. Richard will be graciously pleased to forgive all who come to Trinovant to kneel before the king.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Will looked hard at the gate. ‘Will Richard settle for that? For myself, I wonder what he’s really up to.’

Gwydion tapped his nose and winked. ‘Soon we will know how it is going to be.’

Will saw a band of men appear under the great arch. City waits, they were, musicians in motley garb who played merrily upon sackbuts and shawms and beat upon tabrets with long sticks to herald the coming of the king. Each of the Guilds had sent liverymen, and they lined the road. Near them were arrayed the serjeants-at-law in their green finery, and walking at their centre the King’s Serjeant, carrying a golden mace upon his shoulder. Behind him came the Recorders and Justices – the judges of the law, and regulators of the people.

‘I’m surprised Duke Richard trusts to his safety at all,’ Will murmured, ‘with so many kinds of lawyer gathered in the road to greet him.’

‘Ha!’ Gwydion sniffed. ‘Our falcon does not mind a few toads strewing his path when he has the king himself in his talons. But if you are asking about the niceties of the deal, I will tell you that all the legalities have already been tidied up. Several edicts have been issued in the name of the king. These are writs that overturn those given out at the Great Council that was held under the CorbenTree – the ones that attainted Friend Richard. None of it was ever ratified, and so says the king: “All that was Ebor’s, is Ebor’s once again.” You see how much has been done in preparation for Duke Richard’s arrival? Not least all the counter-magic that I have expended!’

Despite the heat, Will felt a frostiness issuing from the wizard that seemed to confirm what Willow had said. He wondered, and not for the first time, what exactly happened when a wizard began to fail. Gwydion himself had said that the end of the present Age was nigh. What would become of Gwydion before he went into the Far North in search of his philosopher’s stone?

Will shut his eyes, feeling a familiar nausea move into the pit of his stomach. His heart began to thump faster. Chlu was somewhere in the crowd, searching, coming ever closer…

He closed his mind, guarding his talent, doing the equivalent in magical terms of hanging back quietly in the shadows. He was not sure whether that would be enough to hide him from his twin’s murderous awareness, but when Chlu appeared again he would meet him face to face. Beads of sweat stood out on Will’s forehead, but the feeling of danger passed away and his heart slowed again. He wiped his face and scanned the crowd, but there was no one familiar to be seen there.

‘Are you expecting anyone in particular?’ Gwydion asked from the side of his mouth.

‘Hmm?’

‘You seem pensive. Scared perhaps. Are you expecting Chlu?’

Will grimaced at the wizard’s imputation, and said uncomfortably, ‘The only reason I escaped from the Spire is that Chlu fled his true name.’

‘You should have told me that sooner.’

‘Should I?’

‘Do you feel him now in the crowd?’

‘He dare not attack me here.’

‘I agree. But only because there is no clear shot of you. He will not keep away for long.’

‘I hardly need you to tell me that.’

‘Nor will the fact that you know his true name afford you even a meagre measure of protection for long, for sooner or later Chlu will speak with Maskull about the matter and Maskull will tell him the truth.’

‘Which is?’

‘That you can only use his true name to destroy him by destroying yourself. He will gamble that you have not the skill, or more likely the courage, to use a power like that.’

‘Then he’ll be wrong!’ Will said, but he instantly regretted his unconsidered reply.

‘Is that so?’ Gwydion nodded judiciously, absorbing the remark and weighing it carefully. ‘Is that truly so, Willand? For, if it is, then you are as great a fool as any that I have ever met.’

But now the music had grown louder and the ironcollared dragonets were roused to groaning and flapping their stubby wings. The keepers at the capstans heaved on the bars to make the silver beasts draw back into the depths of the gatehouse and the stalls where they were out of sight.

High up between the towers of the Luddsgate itself stood a great, weathered statue of the ancient Brean king, Ludd. Men had climbed perilously to bedeck it with garlands and oak branches, and now sweepers were rushing to clear the way below. Fellows from nearby chapter houses came with incense burners and sprinklers of rose-water to disguise the air so the horses would not bolt at the stink. And then, almost too suddenly, the waiting was over. Three heralds in royal tabards came in sight. Then Duke Richard of Ebor appeared, bare-headed, sitting astride his famous white warhorse. Save for his helmet, he rode in full battle armour.

Through that tremendous portal Duke Richard passed in splendour, but it was not his own sword that he raised aloft, but rather King Hal’s. He lifted it up like a sign – or perhaps a boast – while a few paces behind, on a little bay horse, rode the quiet, plainly dressed figure of the king himself.

Duke Richard’s intention, Will knew, was to show himself to the people – this was Richard of Ebor, the king’s great saviour and Lord Protector once more. He must be seen to be the hero who had saved the sacred sovereign from the grip of greedy friends and a wicked wife. But Will read another message, for in the middle of it all the humble, pale-faced figure of the king seemed hemmed in by gaolers – Sir Thomas Cyrel and Lord Bonavelle, square-chinned men who sat upon massive chargers, and who else but the iron-handed seneschal, Sir Hugh Morte, loyalest of Ebor retainers, bringing up the rear?

Yet, imprisoned though the king was by these huge forces, a moment came when, to Will’s mind at least, everything was stood upon its head and Hal appeared to be the serene embodiment of kingship. The whiff of dragonet made the larger destriers skittish, and though they were blinkered and under short rein it was only with difficulty that their illtempered riders were able to control them. Yet through the commotion the little bay walked on at ease, as if enfolded by the mystic aura that only a true king possessed.

And then clarions called – the sound of silver trumpets recognizing the return of the king to the City, and Will tried to gauge how much of the cheering proclaimed the arrival of the king and how much his captor. There were many in the crowd who waved wreaths of victory, or pinned on their breasts the badge of the fetterlock and falcon. They called out loudly, ‘A Ebor! A Ebor!’ But despite their raucous shouts, Will still detected King Hal’s subde empowerment, for many more of the people were glad to have their monarch back than cared how his deliverance had been accomplished. And Will shook his head in amazement because although Duke Richard knew it not, the truth was that he had placed himself wholly in the king’s power.

As the leading columns of the duke’s formidable army entered the City, drums were beaten at their head and the penetrating buzz of crumhorns and the drone of bladder pipes waxed suddenly loud. Pans of sorcerer’s powder flared up in shows of light and smoke, and petals scattered down from the arch upon the helmeted heads of the soldiery. Suddenly, the whole scene became a riot of flags bearing the colours of the victors. Helmets and bright armour glittered as ranks of mounted knights came on steadily, five abreast. There was a clattering of hooves on flagstones. A great cheer was raised and all the ghastly, glorious panoply of war came surging through the gate, edged weapons displayed to awe the minds of those who gazed on.

Will frowned as he saw the train of great guns. The three greatest of them were named ‘Toune’, ‘Tom o’ Linton’ and – perhaps worryingly – ‘Trinovant’. They had been named for three cities by way of a warning, for these three had the strongest circuits of walls, and the names were a boast that nothing could withstand the might of these engines of war.

Close after the guns came Lords Sarum and Warrewyk, and riding between them Edward, Earl of the Marches and heir of the House of Ebor. Will saw his wife’s eyes as her head turned to follow the duke’s son. Edward was handsome, a manly figure, made even more attractive – or so it had once seemed – by a cultivated air of superiority that was copied from his father. It had been a youthful jealousy of Will’s that Willow must have been in love with Edward.

How easy it was now to see that the lorc had exploited in him one of the three human weaknesses. But back at Ludford Castle he had been ready to kill the heir of Ebor. Despite their boyhood friendship he had been ready to run his heart through with a dagger. Though the murderous impulse appeared ludicrous in hindsight, still he had been scarred by the incident. He had been left with a feeling of shame that was unearthed each time he thought of it.

In response to the burn of embarrassment, Will opened his mind to draw an inner breath and so quench it. Now that Willow had seen the results of Edward’s headstrong, even merciless, nature, the notion that she might ever have harboured desire for him seemed doubly absurd. Before the battle at Delamprey Edward had promised to give common quarter. Yet he had regarded that undertaking so lightly that an unthinkable crime had been allowed to pass. Willow had seen the freshly stained grass, the bloody beheading block, and Will had noted the disgust written in her face. So many captive noblemen had died at Warrewyk’s hands in that hour of madness that a continuation of the war had been virtually guaranteed.

But that’s how ill-wielded magic breaks back, Will thought ruefully. In truth, it was all my fault, and not Edward’s or Warrewyk’s. That’s how the Delamprey stone succeeded against me in the end; though I managed to curtail the fight, I continued the war.

‘There’s Edward,’ Willow said, squeezing Will’s hand. ‘And to think you two were schooled together. Little good it did him, the oathbreaker.’

‘Don’t blame him so easily,’ Will said. ‘It was his bad fortune to have tangled his destiny with the battlestones. The lorc lays out many pitfalls to swallow the unwary.’

She scowled. ‘I suppose Warrewyk and Sarum are bound to be bad influences on anybody.’

‘That’s right enough.’

‘How d’you think Lord Dudlea has fared?’ she asked, scanning the knightly host. ‘Has he kept to his word and thrown himself on Duke Richard’s mercy?’

‘I doubt it. I expect Master Gwydion’s warnings will all have washed off him along with the first shower of summer rain. And even if he does as he promised, Warrewyk will probably take him aside and talk him into some other kind of skulduggery.’ Will’s eye followed Warrewyk and Sarum. ‘Look at them in their finery – they think they’re so important and grand. Yet for all their vanity they’re as driven by the lorc as straws are before the wind – and the joke is they don’t even know it’s happening to them.’

Will looked around at the crowd, then raised a hand to his temple and winced as if afflicted by a sudden pain.

‘What is it?’ Gwydion asked, concerned.

‘Nothing.’

‘Your manner belies your word, my friend. Have you seen some stir among the red hands?’ he asked, looking around. ‘Tell me quickly now!’

‘No, no…’

Gwydion looked beyond him at the crowd. ‘Then is it Chlu? Did you feel him?’

Will gave no answer except a scowl which was meant to tell the wizard that he had again shot wide of the mark. But the truth was that he had indeed felt Chlu.

Gwydion clapped a hand on his shoulder. ‘I think it is time we were gone from here.’

‘Gwydion, no!’

But this time the wizard was adamant. They slipped away, following Gwydion along the City wall and down beside the Luddsgate. As they went out through the paupers’ passage, a new concern overtook Will. He remembered his so-far unfulfilled promise to Lotan.

Master Gwydion must have laid a powerful spell on himself, he thought, one that turns aside seekers after unwelcome favours…

But Will knew he was making excuses. Gwydion was four paces ahead and striding out. Will could easily catch him up and tell him about Lotan right away, but he made no effort. Instead he half convinced himself that he would make a better job of it once they had a little privacy.

The wizard strode on ahead as they made haste across the Hollbourne and along the West Strande towards the main road junction at the Charing Crossroads. There stood the infamous monument, a miniature spire, before which was a place of ashes. From time to time, unfortunates were dragged here in chains by the Fellowship and slowly roasted to death, a punishment reserved for those suspected of being warlocks, though sometimes visited upon the heads of those who voiced open criticism of the Fellowship and were then found to have intractable natures.

Happily no such grim entertainment was in progress now. All along the way there were men-at-arms in steel bonnets, leaning on their pole-arms as they waited to march into the City. Will noted that the soldiers were all wearing either red and white or red and black, and upon their breasts were the devices of the white bear of Warrewyk or the green eagle upon yellow of Sarum.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Willow asked, seeing his face.

‘I have the strongest feeling that I ought to tell Master Gwydion something.’

‘Then you must, and right away.’ She stared at him. ‘What is it?’

‘Something that might seem unimportant now, but which might just turn out to be otherwise. Come on.’

As they went, a rambling assemblage of buildings grew up around them, sprawling royal mansions, all of different sizes and styles and apparently put up at quite different times. Ahead, Gwydion had already turned off the common highway. He came now to an arched gate where they were given access by the palace guard, but only after Will showed Captain Jackhald’s men the warrant that carried the seals of the royal household.

‘Gone are the days when such as I could come and go without let or hindrance,’ Gwydion muttered.

‘So you’ve noticed the way our liberties have been boiling away?’ Will said, half jocularly.

The wizard scowled at him. ‘It is no laughing matter. What is to become of this city? We need a king, Willand, one who has the courage to set things to rights!’

Will made no reply, for he knew the barb with which the remark was set.

Within the walls lay smooth-scythed lawns, a little brown in patches now, and two large oak trees. There were tiny, neat hedges. Beds of roses and cobbled quads were surrounded by turrets of red brick and stone that rose up in some places four floors high. In one of the two towers a statue of King Dunval stood in a niche, holding, Will presumed, a scroll of law in his hand, and in the other tower, facing the royal lawmaker of old, was the great dial of an engine of time.

This clock was the latest thing, Gwydion said, sent as a present to the king a few years ago by Duke Richard. ‘To remind Hal that time was passing, but perhaps not passing swiftly enough.’ It had come from near the town of Awakenfield in the north, in lands where the Ebor writ ran more strongly than the king’s. It had been made in the workshops of the famous Castle of Sundials, and its chime was loud and commanding.

Will drew a deep breath and looked around. Many centuries were piled up here, the newer parts scrambling over the old like ivy in the place where Brea had first raised his halls and houses of carved oak so long ago.

But the chief splendour of the present palace was the White Hall. This huge oblong of pale limestone carried mock battlements at roof level and a series of pinnacled buttresses along each side. Its most arresting aspect was its lights. Each panel was artfully made to be both tall and wide, and was gorgeously decorated with what must have been an acre of coloured glass. All was ingeniously supported by traceries of lead and narrowly cut stone, and each panel told in pictures a history of a different Brean king. Will recognized in the first of them King Bladud the Leper in conversation with his unforgiving father Hudibrax. The next carried a portrait of the long-beard, Old King Coel, with night to his left and day to his right to show the passing of his one hundred and twelve years. Then came Gurgast, being eaten by the dragon, and after that a grave depiction of King Sisil leaving Queen Meribel and his infant son to sail off into the Western Deeps to search for the land of Hy Brasil. But what caught Will’s eye most were the bright greens and yellows shining from the last panel, for it showed Leir and his three daughters, two of them undoubtedly wicked, and a third who could do no wrong.

Perhaps it was just a trick of the light or the position of the sun, but Will had the impression that the king winked at him. And it was easy to imagine that a dozen gargoyles made faces and rude gestures as they passed below, showing that even here the traditional humour of the masons’ guild had not been forgotten. And though Gwydion insisted there was much dark magic still waiting to be swept away, there was much here also that seemed benign.

They went straight up to the small, comfortable apartments that the royal chamberlain had grudgingly afforded them – through an arch, up some stone stairs and along a cool passageway onto which three doors opened. By the time they came to their own door, Will had decided he must speak urgently to Gwydion of the strange Fellow who had stepped forward to save his life.

But no sooner was Will’s decision made than it was dashed aside, for as their own door opened they found a surprise waiting for them.

‘Now then! Ha-har! And look who’s here to greet you!’

‘Oh!’ Willow cried out. ‘It can’t be!’

‘Wortmaster?’ Will said, equally delighted. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Where else should I be? Hey? Answer me that! I’m come down with the rest of my Lord of Ebor’s people. And just lately I have been as busy as a bee in June! Ha-har! Look at you!’

Gort opened his arms in a wide embrace and hugged them left and right, until Bethe started up such a howling at being pressed into the face of so bewhiskered a monster that Gort was driven into retreat.

‘There, there, kitten! Oh, she doesn’t know me…’ Gort said, dabbing a fond finger at Bethe’s nose. ‘Do you, hey, little poppy-kin?’

‘Aye, and maybe she knows you too well, Wartmonster,’ Will said, grinning.

‘Oh, Will! How can you say such a thing?’ Willow patted Bethe’s back until she drew breath. Then Willow began to grin and coo in the way that mothers do to disconcerted babes everywhere.

‘That child has lusty lungs,’ Gort said, poking a finger in his ear.

‘She’s tired.’

‘Maybe she’d like a nice piece of cheese. I’ve fetched down a fine Cordewan Crumbly for you.’

‘Not for Bethe, I don’t think. But I’ll take some of it gladly. Here, have a chair, and tell us your latest news.’

They all sat down. Bethe’s storm of tears dried up and soon she was at Gort’s knee and smiling up at him as he cut pieces of Cordewan Crumbly.

‘Did I tell you the young victor of Delamprey has brought the stump away with him?’ the Wortmaster said.

‘The battlestone?’ Will asked with sudden interest. ‘We thought he might do that.’

‘Hmmm, well he has. It came south in Edward’s own baggage train. It’s being heavily guarded.’

Will got up and began to walk about. ‘You’re going to have to speak to Edward, Master Gwydion. How will we ever be able to decipher the stone if we can’t get to see it?’

Gort waved a hand towards the window. ‘It’s sitting down there in Albanay Yard, Master Gwydion, but they won’t let me near. Me, or anyone.’

‘Edward will quickly tire of it.’ The wizard tossed his head in dismissal. ‘But Wortmaster, surely you have news of greater import than this?’

‘Oh, I’ve been much abroad since last we met, Master Gwydion, and busier still since the king was taken – going here and there, sowing appleseeds and bringing to mind things once said by Semias.’ He grinned and looked out from under the overgrowth of his eyebrows. He cast a meaningful glance at the wizard. ‘I did as you wanted.’

‘Then you have brought it…’ the wizard said, as if hardly daring to believe. His eyes roamed to every corner of the room, but evidently did not find what they were searching for. ‘Well? Where is it?’

‘I have it. I have it indeed. It is here somewhere,’ Gort said distractedly. ‘And I have something else too!’

Gwydion’s expression grew suddenly suspicious. ‘What else? Wortmaster Gort, what else?’ He wagged a finger. ‘I hope you have not gone beyond my request and made a tomb robber of yourself.’

‘Pooh!’ Gort took the comment like a slap, and said to no one in particular, ‘Did you ever hear such a charge? And me a right stout and dependable spirit when it comes to the doing of favours for people, hey?’

Gwydion closed his eyes, and a look of sorely-tried patience came over him. ‘Wortmaster, what have you done with the staff?’

‘Have no fear. It’s been well looked after. There now! You can’t see it because it’s packed up small in your old crane bag! Appleseeds, appleseeds, appleseeds…’

Will and Willow exchanged uncertain glances as Gort bent down and began to rummage in a small bag that suddenly appeared from under the skirts of his robe. Will recognized it from his first days travelling with the wizard. When the Wortmaster straightened up he had in his hand a gnarled stick of wood. It was a full fathom in length and it gleamed and sparkled. Under ordinary circumstances it could not possibly have come out of a bag so small, but Will knew the crane bag was no ordinary scrip.

‘Master Gwydion, is that your staff?’ Will asked doubtfully. Then he turned to the Wortmaster. ‘Have you remade it, Gort? It seems different.’

Gort shuffled and shrugged. ‘Not I. Making staffs? I’m not suited to that kind of work. Oh, not me!’

‘No one is these days,’ Gwydion said, taking the staff and looking it over closely. ‘This is not mine, Willand. Mine was broken, and no power in the world can remake it.’

‘Then whose is this?’

Gwydion’s eyes looked far away and he seemed to be seeing the ghosts of a distant time when the world was yet young. ‘This is quite a piece of work. It once belonged to Maglin whose self-sacrifice is famous – he who was Phantarch after Celenost failed and went into the Far North.’

‘Maglin?’ Will said uncertainly, hardly knowing why he felt dismay at the name. ‘The second phantarch? Wasn’t it Maglin who presided over the Ogdoad during…the Age of Giants?’

‘Maglin’s rule was sorely troubled,’ Gwydion said, ‘for it was his lot to steer the Isle of Albion through turbulent waters. In Maglin’s time we of the Ogdoad were much taken up with the healing of the world after a great mishap befell. We repaired the fabric – plugged a hole you might say, through which all the magic had been draining. We seven guardians stood our ground, and Maglin was our champion. There was a furious fight, and though in the end we succeeded, it was a costly victory. Maglin himself closed up the hole, but he had to give too much of himself. You may judge the bitterness of his fate for yourself, for though he was phantarch for a thousand years, yet in all that time no men dared come into these Isles.’

Gort shook his head at the memory. ‘During Maglin’s phantarchship the last of the First Men died, you see? Only wyrms and giants thrived here after that.’

‘Until King Brea came?’ Willow asked.

‘Until King Brea came.’

Will looked at the staff with new eyes. ‘So is this the Staff of Justice, then?’ he asked in amazement. ‘The third of the Four Hallows of the Realm?’

Gwydion was quick to undo that idea. ‘Oh, this is not the hallowed staff. This is just an old wizard’s helpmeet. But well-fashioned and supple enough still, I hope, to do daring deeds when put into the right hands. I asked the Wortmaster to bring it out from a place that you know well, Willand.’

‘A place that I know well?’

‘You mean the Vale?’ Willow asked.

‘Not the Vale!’ Gort laughed.

Puzzled, Will turned to Gort, but the Wortmaster merely stooped and reached into the crane bag to lift out another article, this time a cloak of white feathers. ‘Appleseeds, appleseeds, appleseeds…ha-har!’

And Will instantly knew the cloak for what it was. ‘That’s the kind that wizards once used to wear. It’s a swan cloak. Maglin’s staff must have come from the tomb of King Leir!’

‘Ah-ha…Right you are!’ Gort danced the cloak by the shoulders so that the sheen on the feathers became otherworldly. ‘This is the White Mande, the cloak that was once draped over that great king’s dead body by Semias.’

‘Leir’s cloak,’ Will breathed, recalling the moment he had discovered the lost tomb. Wonderful things had been arrayed around that vault, but they all belonged to a dead man. He turned to Gwydion. ‘You told me that the cloak was brought out of the Realm Below long ago by Arthur, and whoso-ever wore it would become invisible.’

Gwydion shook his head. ‘These, I believe, were my words. “He who wears Leir’s mantle shall remain unseen by mortal eye.”’

‘Well, isn’t that the same thing?’

‘My meaning at the time was that Leir’s tomb was fated to remain undisturbed by lesser men, until such time as it should be found by one who is greater than Leir. However, you are right that a swan cloak will cause anyone who wears it to fade from view unless that person is a true king.’

Will slowly understood the implications and he began to redden in the face. Then Gort threw the cloak neatly about Will’s shoulders and stood back. ‘It fits! It fits!’

Will tried to shrug it off. ‘Oh, Wortmaster, what are you doing? Of course it fits – it’s a cloak.’

‘Fit for a king, I’d say,’ Gort insisted.

‘Master Gwydion, you’ve put him up to this nonsense.’

But the wizard merely drifted into the shadows as the shimmering feathers settled around Will, sheathing him in glory.

‘Please, Wortmaster,’ he said unhappily. ‘Take it off me. I daren’t wear such a fine thing.’

But Gort would not take it off him. Will looked down at the empty clasp of gold and silver, the setting that had once held a great blue-white diamond called the Star of Annuin, and he could not help but think that the world was rushing headlong towards an unthinkable chasm, and that a great weight would soon fall upon his inadequate shoulders.

CHAPTER EIGHT MAGOG AND GOGMAGOG

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

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

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

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

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