The Faeman Quest fw-5 Page 18

  ‘And where is it now?’

  ‘In my bedroom,’ Mella said. ‘But it’s broken.’ Out of the corner of her eye she saw Companion Aubertin slip quietly from the chamber.

  Ysabeau turned to Houndstooth. ‘Companion Marshal, we need to install securities against any further intrusion from the Analogue World. And we need to install them at once.’

  ‘Yes, Companion Leader.’ Houndstooth nodded.

  ‘Level ten,’ Ysabeau said.

  ‘Of course.’ Houndstooth nodded again.

  ‘I want you to see to it personally.’

  ‘Indeed, Companion Leader. They shall be in place within the hour.’ He began to talk quietly into one of his medals.

  Surprisingly, Ysabeau turned back to Mella with a beaming smile. ‘I must thank you, Serene Highness, on behalf of the Table of Seven.’

  Mella blinked. ‘Must you?’

  ‘But of course!’ said Ysabeau expansively. ‘Your visit – which we so much welcome – has alerted us to a potential flaw in our national security defences.’ She leaned forward to tap Mella lightly on the arm. ‘Obviously we would never consider you or your charming aunt a threat to our country, but the fact that you found yourselves here, in the very heart of our administration – albeit accidentally, we appreciate – certainly shows that an enemy might have arrived by the same route. An assassin, perhaps, or even, quite frankly, an entire invading army. I know that might seem unlikely to one as young and innocent as yourself, but believe me…’ She allowed the sentence to trail, then added, ‘However, that particular loophole will soon be closed forever and -’

  Houndstooth glanced up from his medal. ‘Done, Companion Leader.’

  ‘Ah, there, you see: closed already! And all thanks to you, Princess Mella.’ Ysabeau’s smile vanished abruptly. ‘Now,’ she said sternly. ‘I want you to tell me what you overheard of our discussion in the Council Chamber.’

  Mella froze. The question, coming when it did, took her completely by surprise. She had gone a long way to convincing herself the talk of attacking an empire couldn’t possibly have meant the Empire and had almost managed to put it out of her mind. At least until she got back home where somebody else could worry about it. But now, suddenly, there was something in Ysabeau’s tone that told her what she’d overheard was even more important to the Table of Seven than the security breach; and given how paranoid they were about security, that meant very important indeed. This, Mella thought, was no time to keep telling the truth. She needed to lie and lie convincingly, otherwise – her whole instinct told her – she was in a deep well of trouble. She opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Aunt Aisling said loudly, ‘Well, I, of course, heard nothing.’

  Ysabeau turned slowly towards her. ‘Indeed?’

  ‘I was back in the other room upstairs, quite out of earshot. Well, we could hear voices, but not what they were saying. I tried to tell the girl it might be a private meeting, but she’s her father’s daughter and quite headstrong, so… I want to assure you, I personally heard nothing, nor did she tell me anything she may have heard. Not anything. ’

  Thank you, Aunt Aisling! Mella thought. To Ysabeau she said, ‘Actually, I heard very little either. Something about pumpkins, wasn’t it? I’m not sure. Honestly, we were so confused about where we were and how we might get back -’

  ‘Pumpkins?’ Ysabeau echoed. A twitch of her lips broke into a smile, then a laugh. ‘Pumpkins!’ she exclaimed again. Her companions joined in so that on the instant the room was filled with laughter.

  ‘No, honestly -’ Mella protested. Then, unmistakably, the smell of lethe was in her nostrils – heaven knows she’d used it often enough herself to recognise it – and Mella’s chair toppled over with a crash as she tried to run from the chamber. But before she reached the door she forgot why she was running, forgot where she was, forgot who she was and certainly forgot everything she had seen or heard since she arrived in Haleklind.

  Thirty-Three

  ‘Don’t die, my darling,’ Henry whispered. ‘My love, please don’t die. Oh, Blue…’ There were tears streaming down his cheeks. He cradled her head in his lap and stroked the long red hair. ‘Don’t leave me, Blue – I can’t live without you.’

  He was seated on a rocky apron that formed part of an outcrop rising up out of the Wildmoor Broads like the prow of some tall ship. Blue’s body lay sprawled like one who had fallen from the clifftop. (Fallen and died, his mind kept insisting.) They were surrounded by a sea of prickleweed that seethed and writhed and reached in their direction, but did not – apparently could not – intrude on the rock.

  There was blood by Henry’s feet, quite a lot of it. The blood was Henry’s own: a strip of flesh was missing from his forearm and there were lesions on his face, legs and hands. Blue exhibited scarcely a scratch, yet Blue was the one who was dead. ‘You mustn’t,’ Henry said emphatically. ‘Your subjects need you. I need you. You must not be dead.’ Her eyes were open, but blank, staring upwards at a distant sky. There was no gentle rise and fall of her chest, no whisper of breath from her mouth. There was no heartbeat, no pulse.

  Henry’s mind kept replaying what happened. It was at once so bizarre and so ordinary and, to start with, so triumphant. The fence-shields had worked. They had worked brilliantly. Chalkhill must have paid for some super-strong spell coating, because the weed could not touch them. It knew Blue and Henry were there. It reached towards them eagerly. But then it recoiled violently while it was still a foot or two away. That was distance magic, the costly kind. At the time, Henry thought it was their passport home.

  He should have known better. The Broads had claimed hundreds of lives. If the trick to crossing them was that easy, somebody would have discovered it years ago.

  But he hadn’t known better and now Blue was dead. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe how sudden it had been, how simple it had been. When he saw how the plants were reacting, he’d turned to smile at Blue. He actually remembered saying, ‘This is so easy. Now all we need to do is find a road.’ And then Blue said, ‘I think I’ve scratched my hand on something.’

  He was stupid, stupid, stupid! He could hardly see the scratch on the back of her hand, it was so tiny. He almost told her not to make a fuss, but then, without warning, she fell. It was a dreadful, spine-chilling fall. Not a trip or a stumble, but a total collapse. Her eyes rolled backwards in her head so that she looked, for just the barest moment, like one of Madame Cardui’s zombies, then her knees buckled and she sank in on herself like a squashed paper bag.

  Her shield of fencing fell from her hand.

  The weed was on her at once. Her back remained protected, but fronds whipped out viciously towards the front of her body and her face and there was not the slightest flicker of expression when they struck her. She must have been dead already, Henry thought. But at the time, Henry thought nothing, simply acted. He hurled himself forward with a roar, slashing blindly with his knife. Leaves and stalks flew and the weed, sensing attack, turned in his direction. He could feel the hundred tiny stings as it began to flay skin from his arms and legs. Something gouged his arm and blood began to flow, but he ignored it. Using his shield, he transposed himself between the writhing prickleweed and Blue, then grabbed her arm and heaved her up.

  Something in him hoped she might be able to stand, perhaps even walk if he supported her, but she was deadweight. ‘Arrrrgh!’ Henry screamed and slashed out with his knife again. The creeping weed fell back a little, but then – he could scarcely believe it – circled slowly around them like an animal searching for a weak point to attack. Henry swung Blue’s body across his shoulders in a fireman’s lift, staggered a little, then planted both feet firmly. His shield protected her legs, the fencing tied to her back protected the rest of her body. He threw himself forward, desperate to get clear of the weed, desperate to find somewhere safe, even temporarily, where he could revive Blue.

  After that, it was all a half-remembered nightmare, an ocean of prickleweed, a high for
est of prickleweed, moving, scratching, slashing, driven on by desperation, half mad with grief and fear until, abruptly, he emerged by sheer luck on to the rocky apron.

  He laid her down gently and stood for a moment, panting. He was aware of his own blood on his face, legs and body. Compared to himself, Blue looked completely uninjured. There was no blood, no swelling, no rash, no discoloration. If he closed her eyes, she would have looked almost peaceful. But he didn’t want to close her eyes, because that would mean admitting she was really dead.

  ‘Oh, Blue…’ he moaned.

  There was a sound behind him. Henry twisted, saw nothing, then quickly laid Blue’s head gently on the ground and climbed to his feet. For a second he thought the prickleweed might be encroaching on the rock, but while it still surrounded him, it kept its distance. He could see nothing to explain the sound. His guess was a displaced pebble. But what had displaced it? In a less hostile environment he would have assumed a small animal – a rabbit or rat – but no animals survived on the Broads, not in the areas infested by the weed. Any that ventured into prickleweed territory were eaten.

  He was about to return to Blue – to Blue’s body his mind told him savagely: he had to face facts if he was to survive, and he had to survive for Mella’s sake – when a movement on the cliff face attracted his attention. Something was crawling out of a dark opening about twenty feet above him. It emerged to cling to the cliff itself, then began slowly to edge its way downwards.

  Henry watched, fascinated. The creature had the shape of a man, but was much, much smaller; scarcely larger than a cat, in fact. The thought that it was a monkey passed through his mind, but he dismissed it: he was in the Faerie Realm and there were no monkeys in the Faerie Realm. As it drew closer, he realised that the humanoid appearance was, in any case, quite superficial. The little ‘man’ had no features: no mouth, no nose, no eyes or ears, simply a bulbous ball of a head. The body was incomplete as well. Although there were rudimentary feet and hands, there were no toes or fingers. It was as if somebody had started to carve a human figure from a piece of wood, then left it unfinished. But the figure, a greyish black in colour, could move. And move swiftly. It had already reached the rocky apron and was heading towards him.

  It never occurred to Henry he might be in any danger. The creature was too small to do him any harm. But when it headed towards Blue – towards Blue’s body – he stepped forward quickly and placed himself directly in its path. The creature stopped. He was not at all clear on how it sensed his presence, but it did. It stood for a moment, head tilted back as if looking up at him with invisible eyes, then moved a cautious pace or two to its right, as if preparing to circle around him. When he moved to block it, the creature scampered left again, then stopped as Henry moved. It was like a child’s game. It might even have looked cute if it were not so obviously determined to reach the body of his dead wife.

  Henry decided to end the game and made a little dash towards it, hoping to frighten it away. The creature’s head exploded.

  A choking cloud of spores struck Henry’s face, temporarily blinding him and sending him into a paroxysm of coughing. The spores were in his nose, in his mouth, in his eyes, in his ears. For a moment he could do no more than choke and retch, then his vision began to clear. The spores stung sharply where his skin was broken, but as he began to brush them off, he noticed that the gash on his arm was no longer bleeding. He blinked his eyes clear and caught sight of the little creature, headless now, climbing back up the cliff face towards its cave. As his gaze followed it, Henry noticed the sky had turned a luminous green. A nauseous, luminous green. He felt, quite suddenly, like throwing up. Then the wave of sickness died down and the inside of his mouth turned icy cold.

  Henry felt dizzy. The rock on which he stood was no longer firm, but undulated like the back of a great beast, throwing him off balance. For a moment it seemed it really was a great beast, but then he was on solid ground again.

  The air began to sing. Henry’s brother-in-law Pyrgus had once taken him to a simbala parlour and it was a little like that, except that then the music had flowed through the insides of his body while now it surrounded him in an expanding panorama that stretched out to distant horizons. He could see the music as well as hear it, smell it as well as see it. If he had reached out his hand, he might have touched it.

  Blue moved.

  Henry swung towards her, but she had not woken up, not returned from the dead. Her body was simply floating, drifting a little on the tonal currents of a sea of music. The music clung to her in a black lament.

  There were giant birds. At first they were far away, gliding lazily in the distant sky, but soon they circled closer and he saw they were vultures come to feed on Blue. Henry waved his arms and shouted, but one of the birds kept coming, growing larger and larger until it hid the sun, then blacked out the entire sky above his head. He could smell the foetid stench of its breath, the sickly stench of death and decay, as it settled beside Blue, poor Blue.

  Then it opened its stomach to lay a great, pale egg. As he stared, the egg emitted a tapping noise, cracked, then shattered. Out of it strode the Road Runner.

  Thirty-Four

  It was nice to get out of the house. Lord Hairstreak stepped down from his gold-plated ouklo shortly after sunrise and stared up at Kremlin Karcist, the Creen citadel and Table of Seven administration centre for the whole of Haleklind. The place looked a lot less flamboyant than he remembered from the days before the revolution. No flags, no pennants, no decorative spells. In their place was a dun-brown military camouflage security coating and a series of stark notices warning about the use of lethal force. The gently winding serpentine of the entrance avenue had been replaced by a dead-straight road, aimed like an arrow at the entrance steps. Fearfully poor feng shui, but so much easier to defend since you could see an approaching enemy some half a mile away. Even the ornamental shrubs and flowerbeds had been rooted out to make way for a series of stark sentry posts. Interestingly, they were manned by heavily armed warrior guards: for all of Haleklind’s world-famous reliance on magic, the Seven clearly did not altogether trust automatic spells. Paranoia was a wonderful thing, Lord Hairstreak thought: it made people so very easy to manipulate.

  His own military entourage fell into place, four soldiers to secure the ouklo – would never do to have anybody discover what was hidden inside – the rest surrounding Hairstreak himself. He had little practical need of personal protection now he was equipped with a body that might as well have been armour-plated, but the psychological need for an impressive escort remained. It would never be enough that he had financed the Seven’s coup, never be enough that he knew all their dirty little secrets. For total control, he needed to cut an impressive figure and that meant putting on a show. Not easy to do when you were confined to your Keep and wheeled round in a barrow. But now he had a whole new body, he could strut his stuff with the best of them; and Mella’s capture was the perfect excuse. He smiled a little, took a deep breath and strode towards the steps.

  Companion Ysabeau emerged to greet him, flanked by Marshal Houndstooth – a good sign since it suggested the military preparations were well underway. The Marshal saluted smartly, another good sign, but it was Ysabeau who skipped down the steps like a four-year-old, delivered a curtsy and an obsequious smile, then gushed, ‘This is such an honour, Lord Hairstreak. I never thought I should have the pleasure of seeing you here in Haleklind, in person.’ Her eyes swept over him as lightly as a feather duster. ‘And looking so well.’

  She couldn’t hide her surprise, which pleased Hairstreak enormously. He’d been in two minds about this trip. On the one hand, Ysabeau could easily have transported Mella directly to his Keep and he’d had a long-term policy of maintaining a low profile. On the other hand, times were changing. He had his new body now and the manticore invasion was only days away. He no longer had to hide his connections with Haleklind: even if Cardui discovered the full extent of them, it would give her no clue to what was coming.
And this trip had a wonderful cover story: he’d come to negotiate the return of Princess Culmella. What a comeback that would make to the political stage. What a preparation for the real comeback to follow.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to Ysabeau, then added sharply, ‘I should like to see the Princess immediately.’ A part of him still wondered if they really did have Mella. It was beyond him to imagine how – or why – she had found herself in Haleklind. It was not at all beyond him to imagine the Table of Seven had made a mistake and captured some poor deluded child who perhaps looked like his great-niece.

  ‘Of course,’ Ysabeau nodded. ‘We have her ready and waiting for you.’ She hesitated. ‘There’s one thing…’

  Hairstreak eyed her suspiciously. ‘What?’

  ‘We had to wipe her memory. As a precaution, you appreciate.’

  ‘A precaution against what?’

  ‘She overheard our invasion plan: at least she may have.’

  Hairstreak frowned. ‘How was that possible?’ The manticore invasion plan was the most closely guarded secret in the whole of Haleklind. It was incredible that a teenage girl might stumble on it.

  Ysabeau set her lips in a firm, hard line. ‘That is something we are investigating at the moment. The girl was not alone. It will not be long before we have some answers.’

  Hairstreak could well believe it. Haleklind interrogation spells were legendary. The Table of Seven would, quite rightly, be reluctant to apply them to a member of the royal house – they sometimes resulted in death and often in brain damage – but if she was accompanied…‘Who was with her?’

  ‘A woman claiming to be her aunt.’

  Hairstreak frowned. He didn’t think Mella had any aunts. ‘Has her interrogation begun?’

  ‘Not yet, but -’

  ‘Take no action until I see her.’ For all their skills, he trusted no interrogation methods but his own and preferred to apply them to someone who was neither brain damaged nor a corpse.