The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three
‘No – of course not,’ said Brother Colvin. Seething with frustration and other, still more unchristian, emotions, he took his leave.
On Thursday night Annie stood over Nathan while he took the painkillers. He tried not to be glad about it. He wasn’t yet ready to face the sea again.
In Thornyhill woods, it was raining. Water drizzled out of the sky and dripped through the trees with the peculiar persistence of English rainfall. Hazel, peering out of a latticed window, thought the weather could keep it up all night and all the next day and probably right through the following week. It was that kind of rain. Although it was barely seven, she felt as if it had been dark for hours. Evening had set in midway through the afternoon with no real daylight to precede it, just the grey gloom of overcast skies and general Novemberitis. Bartlemy had cheered her up by allowing her to abandon maths for supper – wild rabbit roasted in honey and chestnuts, creamed spinach, home-grown apple tart – and now they were discussing the shortcomings of Hamlet and why too much thinking was bad for you.
‘He was stupid, wasn’t he?’ Hazel insisted. ‘Not stupid like me, but clever-stupid, if you see what I mean.’
‘I see exactly what you mean,’ Bartlemy said. ‘He used thought as a substitute for action, and when he did act, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time – a common failing of highly-strung, over-sensitive adolescents. Of course, he was only sensitive to his own feelings, not other people’s, or he would have been less prone to commit haphazard murders. As it was, the native hue of resolution, got sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Hazel averred.
‘However,’ Bartlemy resumed, ‘I didn’t know you were stupid. This is hardly a stupid conversation.’
‘My teachers say I am,’ Hazel mumbled, caught off guard. ‘Anyway, my mum’s not that smart – nor’s my dad. To be clever, you have to have clever genes. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t underrate your mother. Or your father, for that matter. Everyone has brains. The question is whether they choose to use them. How will you choose?’ Hazel was silent, briefly nonplussed. ‘Pleading bad genes is a very poor excuse for unintelligence,’ Bartlemy concluded.
That was the point when she wandered over to the window, evading a response, staring darkly into the dark.
Neither of them saw the figure on the road nearby: little could be distinguished through the rain curtain and the November gloom. Only Hoover lifted his head, cocking an ear at the world beyond the manor walls.
The man on the road wore jeans that flapped wetly round his calves and a heavy-duty sheepskin jacket without a hood. Raindrops trickled down his hair inside his turned-up collar. His face was invisible in the dark but if it hadn’t been a passer-by would have seen lean, tight features clenched into a lean tightness of expression, grimmer than the grim evening – grim with determination, or discomfort, or something of both. But there were no passers-by. The road was empty and almost as grim as the man.
He had left his car more than a mile back, close to the Chizzledown turning, when the slow puncture became too hazardous for driving. No one would want to change a wheel on such a night, but he was a chief inspector in the CID, on more or less official business: he could have rung a subordinate to pick him up, or called the AA, or a local garage whose owner owed him a favour after he had prevented a robbery there. Instead, he chose to walk through the woods, wet and growing wetter, wearing his grimness like a mask under the water-trickle from his hair.
It wasn’t even the best route for him to take, on foot or by car, but he often drove that way, though this was the first time in over a year he had found a reason to stop. There was no light on the road and from time to time he stepped in a puddle, cursing under his breath as the water leaked into his shoes. The only sounds were the squelches of his own footfalls, the hiss of the occasional oath and the murmur of the rain. He didn’t know what made him turn round – instinct perhaps, a sixth sense developed over years of seeing life from the dark side. He could make out little in the murk but he had an impression of movement along the verge, a rustle beyond the rain – the susurration of bending grasses, the shifting of a leaf. And then, light but unmistakable, the scurrying of many feet – small feet or paws, running over the wet tarmac. An animal, or more than one: nothing human. Nothing dangerous. In an English wood at night, the only danger would be human. There were no panthers escaped from zoos, no wolves left over from ancient times – he didn’t believe in such stories. No animal could threaten him …
He was not a nervous type but all his nerves tensed: Fear came out of the dark towards him. Fear without a name, without a shape, beyond reason or thought.
Fear with a hundred pattering feet, just out of rhythm with the rain …
He knew it was illogical, but instinct took over. He turned and ran. Ahead, he saw the path through the trees, the gleam of a lighted window. He slipped in the wet and almost fell, lurching forward. Inside the house a dog barked once, sharp and imperative. The front door opened.
The man stumbled through the gap into Bartlemy’s entrance hall.
‘Chief Inspector Pobjoy,’ Bartlemy said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’
In the living room he found himself seated by the fire, sipping some dark potent drink that was both sweet and spicy. Hazel surveyed him rather sullenly; after all, he had once treated her as a suspect in a crime. He said: ‘Hello,’ and, on a note of faint surprise, ‘you’ve grown up.’ He wondered if he should congratulate her on becoming a young lady, but decided she didn’t look like an eager aspirant to young-ladyhood, and he would do better to keep quiet. In any case, the Fear had shaken him – the violent, inexplicable Fear reaching out of the night to seize him. It wasn’t even as if it was very late.
Bartlemy said: ‘There’s some apple tart left,’ and threw Hazel an admonitory look when she muttered something about waste.
The apple tart was hot, blobbed with clotted cream. If Eve had prepared such a tart, the gods would have forgiven her the theft of the fruit.
Between mouthfuls, Pobjoy said: ‘I had a puncture.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t phone for help,’ Bartlemy remarked. ‘On a night like this.’
‘Battery needs re-charging,’ Pobjoy explained.
Hazel thought with a flash of insight: He’s lying. Why? Has he come here to spy on us?
She said: ‘Let’s see.’
Pobjoy stared at her but didn’t answer.
‘Hazel, don’t be rude,’ Bartlemy said mildly. ‘I’m always happy to see the inspector. He helped save Annie from a psychopathic killer – or have you forgotten?’
‘She saved herself,’ Hazel argued. ‘She’s much tougher than she looks.’
‘I know,’ Pobjoy said. ‘She’s a very brave woman.’ He was disconcerted by his own recent cowardice, by the strange panic that had held him in its grip. He hid uncertainty behind the leftovers of his former grimness.
Bartlemy looked faintly amused, as if he knew. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’d better tell us what happened out there, before you fell through my door. You were running away from something, weren’t you?’
‘It was nothing,’ Pobjoy said. ‘Nothing I could see. The dark – some animal – I don’t know what came over me. I’m not one to jump at spooks, just because I’m on a lonely road.’
It was Hazel’s reaction which surprised him. ‘Them,’ she said, and her voice was gruff. And to Bartlemy: ‘It is, isn’t it?’
‘I fear so.’
‘But why were they after him?’
‘The rules have changed,’ Bartlemy reiterated. ‘They’re out of control. You did well to run, my friend. Had they caught you, they would have entered your mind and driven you mad. Remember Michael Addison.’
‘This is nonsense,’ Pobjoy said, setting down his plate, fortified by the apple tart on its way to his stomach and the afterglow of the unknown drink. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t believe it. All that supernatural crap. I was just – spooked. That’s all.’
‘Then go outside,’ Bartlemy said. ‘See for yourself.’
Pobjoy got up, walked through the hall, opened the door.
They were there, he knew it immediately. Watching for him. Waiting. Just beyond the reach of the light. He saw shadows shifting in the darkness – heard the whisper of the rain on the leafmould, and behind it another whispering, as of voices without lips, wordless and soulless. Suddenly, he found himself picturing Michael Addison’s drooling mouth and empty eyes. Fear reached out in many whispers. The hairs crawled on his skin.
He drew back, closing the door. Against the night, against Them.
Back in the living room he said, trying to keep his voice even: ‘What are they?’ And: ‘What do I do?’
‘For the moment,’ said Bartlemy, ‘you stay. I think you need another drink.’
THREE A Touch of Death
Bartlemy sent Hazel home in a taxi which he paid for, even though she insisted she could perfectly well walk. ‘I have iron,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m not afraid.’ She was determined to put Pobjoy in his place, to show him that in a world of dark magic – a world where being a policeman counted for nothing – she was the one who could handle herself. But Bartlemy overruled her and Pobjoy barely noticed. He had more than enough to think about.
‘What are those creatures?’ he repeated, when the two men were alone.
And, in the subsequent silence: ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘They are not ghosts,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Here, they might be called magical, but you must realise magic is merely a name for a force we don’t understand. Once we can analyse it and see how it works it becomes science.’
‘That’s an old argument,’ Pobjoy said. ‘Television is magical unless you’re a TV engineer. The things out there – how do they work?’
‘They come from another universe,’ Bartlemy explained matter-of-factly. ‘They are made of fluid energy, with little or no solid form; partly because of this, some can migrate between worlds. The species has the generic name of gnomons, but those which are able to cross the barrier are called Ozmosees. I heard about them – read about them – once, but these are the first I have ever seen, since although they did exist in this universe, they died out here long ago. They are hypersensitive to sound, smell, light, but they have no intelligence and must be controlled. I am not sure how that is done; possibly by the dominion of a very powerful mind.’
‘What are you saying?’ Pobjoy demanded, resolutely sceptical. ‘They got here through the back of a wardrobe?’ He had read few of the right books but had once inadvertently watched a documentary on the making of Narnia.
‘I doubt it.’ Bartlemy smiled. ‘Unfortunately, I know very little about them, and their behaviour – as you must realise – is hard to study, though I have tried. The process may be assisted by attaching them to a person or object in this world, thus drawing them out of their place of origin. We cannot know for certain. However …’
‘What object?’ Pobjoy interrupted. He was a detective, and even on such unfamiliar territory, he could work out which questions to ask.
‘I imagine you can guess.’
There was a short pause. ‘The cup?’ Pobjoy said, as illumination dawned. ‘The Grimthorn Grail?’
‘Precisely,’ said Bartlemy, looking pleased, like a teacher with a pupil who, after a long struggle, has finally grasped the principles of calculus. ‘They appear to have been sent to guard it. There are also indications that their guardianship extended to Nathan and Annie—’
‘Nathan and Annie? But – why? – how?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bartlemy admitted. ‘There is some connection between them and the Grail, too complicated to go into now. In any case, I am not yet sure exactly what it is, or how deep it goes.’
‘Did Nathan steal it that time?’ Pobjoy asked sharply.
‘Dear me no. In fact, he got it back. It’s a long story, too long for now. To return to the gnomons, the problem seems to be that they are no longer – focused. There was no reason for them to pursue you, yet they did. And there have been other incidents lately. Evidently they are getting out of hand. The power that manipulated them may be losing its grip, or merely losing interest. There could be other factors. At this time, we have no way of finding out.’
‘Are you saying someone here – some sort of wizard—’ Pobjoy enunciated the word with hesitation and distaste ‘—is controlling these creatures? Some local bigwig with secret powers?’ He didn’t even try to keep the irony from his tone.
‘Of course not,’ Bartlemy said mildly. He was always at his mildest in the face of scorn, anger or threat. ‘Their controller is in the universe from which they came. That’s why we know so little about him.’
‘If this is true,’ Pobjoy said, attempting to keep the world in its rightful place, ‘what’s his interest in the Grail?’
‘He placed it here,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Probably for safekeeping. A long time ago, I had a teacher who contended there were many otherworld artefacts secreted – or in some cases dumped – on this planet. He claimed they were responsible for almost all myths and legends, and several major religions. Apples of youth, rings of power, stone tablets falling out of the sky. That sort of thing. Of course, he may have exaggerated a little.’
He’s nuts, Pobjoy thought. Clever, yes – harmless – but nuts. I wonder if Annie knows?
Then he visualised the gnomons, waiting in the dark …
He spent the night in the guest room.
He was woken in the small hours by someone tapping on the window. It was only a gentle sound, barely louder than the rain, but it jerked him abruptly from sleep. Too abruptly. For a few seconds, he didn’t know where he was, or what he was doing there. His bleary gaze made out a shape through the panes, behind the raindrops. A face. A pale blurred face with midnight eyes and a floating mist of hair. A face he had seen somewhere before, the same and yet different, but he couldn’t quite catch hold of the memory. He got up and tried to make his way across the room, but he stumbled against the unfamiliar furniture and when he looked again the face was gone. Back in bed, he returned gratefully to the realm of sleep.
It was only in the morning that it struck Pobjoy that his room was on the first floor. He opened the window, surveying the crime scene, but there was no convenient tree nearby and the ivy on the wall would never support a climber. Downstairs, he slipped out into the garden, checking the earth for the imprint of a ladder, but there was none. Over the best breakfast he had ever eaten he called the AA for his car and the police station for a lift to work. For the moment, he wanted no further discussion with Bartlemy.
He needed some time to convince himself none of it had ever happened.
It was a long time since Hazel had walked through the woods without the comfort of the iron door-number in her pocket, and she was disturbed by how defenceless its loss made her feel. She had been in the habit of fingering the metal as she walked, fiddling with it like a worry-bead, and now her hand was stuck in her pocket with nothing to do, clenching involuntarily from time to time, relaxing again when she noticed her nails digging into her palm. She was some distance from the road, on a track that wound its way towards the valley of the Darkwood, where it petered out. All tracks failed in the Darkwood, a deep fold in the countryside with a stream running through it which would change course in a shower of rain, where the trees tangled into thickets and the undergrowth grew into overgrowth and any sunlight got lost on its way to the ground. Long ago Josevius Grimthorn, had performed bizarre rites in a chapel there – a chapel buried for centuries under the leafmould and the choking tree-roots. Nathan had stumbled into it once by accident, but there was a spell on the place which forbade him to speak of it, and it was long before he found it again. And Josevius’ house had been there too, burnt down in the Dark Ages, where Login the dwarf had been imprisoned in a hole beneath the ground.
Hazel was thinking of that as she walked, wondering if he was watching her from some hidden hollow in the leaves, or perched furtively among the branches. She glanced round every so often, watchful and wary, but there was only the great stillness of the trees, stretching in every direction. That’s the thing about woods, she thought: when you’re inside one it seems much bigger than it really is, as if it goes on forever. And they had their own special quiet, when they shut out the sounds of the free wind and the open sky, and you could hear a twig crack or an acorn drop a long way off. But that afternoon there was little to hear.
She knew this part of the wood well – she had come there as a child, when her father still lived at home and she wanted to be on her own. She would scramble up among the boughs and stay there for hours, watching mites creeping in the bark, or a caterpillar eating its way through a leaf, listening to the bird-chatter and the insect-murmur, and the great silence waiting behind it all. Later, when she was older, she had come to talk to the woodwose, Nathan’s strange friend, with his stick limbs and sideways stare, till he went back to his own place. She had always felt at ease here, on familiar territory – until now. Now, when she knew the gnomons were lurking somewhere, no longer bound to their purpose but aimless and astray, ready to turn on anything that crossed their path. Hoover was trailing her, some twenty yards back, which gave her a little security, but nonetheless she jumped when a squirrel’s tail whisked round a tree-bole, froze into alertness at the tiniest rustle in the leaf-mould.
But they did not come. There were a hundred small warnings, a hundred false alarms. And nothing. The path ran out, and the woodland floor dipped towards the valley. ‘Don’t go there,’ Bartlemy had said. ‘There’s no room to run, and you could easily get lost. If you reach the Darkwood, turn back.’
Hazel turned back. After a while, Hoover caught up with her, lolloping at her heel.
‘No luck,’ Hazel said. If luck was what she was looking for.
‘They inna there,’ said another voice close by – a voice with a brogue as old as the hills, and almost as incomprehensible.
‘Hello,’ Hazel said, politely. ‘Have you seen them?’
‘Nay,’ said the dwarf. ‘They’ll be in the auld capel, where the Magister used to consort wi’ the devil when he popped up from hell for a chat. I’ve seen them there o’ nights, a-heebying and a-jeebying, whispering thegither for hours, though I never heard they had aught to say.’
‘It’s not night,’ Hazel pointed out.
‘Night – day – at the runt end of the year, there’s no muckle difference.’
‘Could you show me the place?’ Hazel asked. ‘Not now – it’s a bit late – but another day?’
‘Aye,’ the dwarf said slowly. ‘But I’m thinking the goodman would not be wanting ye to go there.’
‘Then we won’t tell him,’ Hazel said, doing her best to sound resolute. ‘We have to trap the gnomons. If they won’t come to me, then I have to go to them.’
‘Ye’re a bold lass,’ said the dwarf, but whether in approval or criticism she couldn’t tell. ‘I’ll be seeing ye.’
He was gone, and ahead she saw Bartlemy, emerging from the gloom of the fading daylight.
‘They didn’t come,’ Hazel said.
‘So I gather. We’ll try again tomorrow.’
But on Sunday it rained too heavily for hunting phantoms, and in the week Hazel had school.
‘I could skive off one afternoon,’ she offered, nobly.
‘No,’ said Bartlemy. ‘We’ll wait for the weekend.’
‘The weekend,’ Hazel echoed, thinking of the Darkwood, and the chapel under the tree-roots, and her stomach tightened in anticipation of terrors ahead.
Nathan went back to school on Monday, still taking the painkillers each night, less to make him sleep than to keep him in his bed. It was always awkward wandering between worlds in the dormitory, since the more solid he appeared in his dreams, the more insubstantial his sleeping form would become. It was only when he was back home for the weekend, and assuring his mother he was restored to fitness, that he stopped taking the drugs.
That night, he lay for a while unsleeping, his body rigid at the thought of the planet undersea. The Grandir was right: he knew what he had to do. Find the third relic – the relic removed from Eos countless years ago by the Grandir himself, to shield it from the greedy and the misguided. The Iron Crown. The crown of spikes forged originally by Romandos, first of the Grandirs, to form a part of the Great Spell to save their people – a plan laid over millennia, woven into the legends of a thousand worlds, hidden in a web of folklore and lies. Nathan still had no idea what the spell itself involved, or how it could engender salvation – he knew only that it had more power than a galaxy imploding, and would shake the very multiverse to its core. Even the Grandir, he suspected, had yet to fill in all the gaps in his vision of destiny. The Grandir who thought he was a trueborn descendant of Romandos and his bridesister Imagen, though Nathan had seen in his naked face the ghost of Imagen’s lover Lugair.
Nathan lingered between sleep and waking, thoughts floating free in his mind. Lugair had betrayed Romandos – Romandos his friend – slaying him with the Traitor’s Sword, to be slain in his turn … the sword had been held in Carboneck for generations, a curse on the kings of Wilderslee and on their people … the Grail had been guarded by Josevius and the Thorns, the so-called luck of the family, its burden and its bane … and the Iron Crown must be in Widewater, somewhere in the deeps of the sea. The masculine principle, the feminine principle, and the circle that binds. Three elements that together might change a world, or all worlds … But Osskva the mage had told him it needed a sacrifice – it needed blood. Blood had begun it, Romandos’ blood, and blood must finish it – the blood of his descendant. It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people … who had said that? Suddenly Nathan was sure the Grandir was ready for that, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Not out of love perhaps – it was hard to imagine him loving his people, he seemed above such sentiment – but from a supreme sense of duty, from pride, from his absolute commitment to his heritage and his world. And for Halmé, whom he loved indeed, Halmé the Beautiful for whom he had said that world was made …
There must be another way, Nathan thought, knowing the thought was futile. He had no power to change things. He was caught up in this like a snowflake in a storm, a tiny component in a huge machine, and all he could do was whatever he had to do. Only this, and nothing more. (Why did he keep thinking of that poem, and Annie’s face when he talked of the Grandir, so pale and still?) He had to find the crown.
And then he remembered Keerye, speaking of the Goddess, and how she had an iron crown which never rusted, kept in a cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef.
How could he have failed to pick up the clue? But he had been inside Ezroc’s head, sharing his thoughts and feelings, no longer a boy but an albatross riding on the wind. Oh to fly again …
His mind turned to dragons – it would be dragons – great fire-breathing monsters, far more deadly than Urdemons or giant lizards. But no dragon could breathe fire under water. He visualised a vast serpentine creature, winged and clawed and fanged, rising in a storm of bubbles, the sea boiling against its flanks. Its mouth opened on a gullet of flame, its red-hot tongue crackled like a lava-flow in the alien element … The ocean erupted into steam as the dragon ascended, dripping wings driving it into the sky …
Somehow, in the midst of such visions, he fell asleep.