The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you believe him?’ Ezroc interjected.

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

‘He killed someone,’ Ezroc said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How?’ Ezroc asked.

‘Up to you.’

‘Where do I find him?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They were sharkriders?’ Ezroc resumed.

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

‘Great Whites cannot be ridden,’ Ezroc said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A sea dragon.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Follow me,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she ran.

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

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

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

The iron grille dropped down behind her.

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

Bartlemy said: ‘I see.’

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

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

Hazel said: ‘Are you sorry for them?’

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

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

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

The sandstorm showed no sign of abating.

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

‘Yes, please.’

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

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

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