Faerie Wars Page 2

  The swing door swung open and a young waitress hurried out carrying two plates of eggs. ‘Hi, Tim,’ she said as she walked past.

  ‘Morning, Ellen,’ Tim said shortly.

  Henry blinked. Looked like his dad came here quite often. For some reason that felt just a little spooky. There seemed to be too much about his parents that Henry didn’t know.

  The waitress Ellen came back, tugging a notepad out of her apron. She was a pretty brunette, maybe eight years older than Henry, wearing a tight black skirt, a white blouse and sensible shoes. The shoes reminded him of Charlie, who kept saying she preferred comfort to looks and always would, even when she grew up.

  ‘Usual, Tim?’ she asked cheerfully. When he nodded she glanced at Henry and grinned. ‘Who’s the hunk?’

  Henry blushed. Tim said, ‘My son Henry. Henry, this is Ellen.’

  ‘Hi, Henry, you want a heart attack as well?’

  ‘Just tea,’ Henry murmured. He was aware he was blushing and that made him blush more.

  ‘Got some nice scones,’ Ellen said. ‘Fancy one?’

  ‘Yes, OK,’ Henry said to get rid of her.

  It didn’t work. ‘Plain or raisin?’

  ‘Plain,’ Henry said impatiently.

  ‘Butter or clotted cream?’

  ‘Butter.’

  ‘Strawberry jam or marmalade?’

  ‘Strawberry.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ Ellen said. She closed her notebook and went off at last.

  ‘Nice kid,’ Tim remarked.

  ‘You come to this place often, Dad?’

  Tim shrugged. ‘You know ...’ he said vaguely.

  Henry looked out through the window. ‘You want to tell me about Mum, Dad?’

  The bacon, eggs and sausages must have been waiting in a bain-marie because Ellen carried them right back through the swing door. She had a teapot in her other hand. She set the plate in front of Tim. ‘Your scone’s coming,’ she told Henry.

  They waited in silence as she bustled away and returned immediately with a scone that shared its plate with a pat of butter and a tiny plastic tub of strawberry jam. Henry stared at his father’s breakfast, thanking heaven he hadn’t ordered the same. The bacon was fat and the eggs were hard. With absolute revulsion he noticed there was a kidney lurking behind the fried tomato. This was his father’s usual?

  Ellen gave him his scone and laid out cups and saucers. ‘Milk’s on the table,’ she told them as she left.

  Tim glanced at his plate, then at Henry. ‘You sure you don’t want some of this?’

  Henry shuddered and reached for a knife to cut his scone. The sooner it was started, the sooner it would be over. ‘I want you to talk to me, Dad.’

  ‘Yes,’ his father said, ‘I expect you do.’

  Tim Atherton so didn’t want to tell his son anything. But he talked. He poked at his breakfast and talked and once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop.

  ‘You know your mum and I have been having ... problems ... don’t you, Henry?’ Henry didn’t. At least not before this morning. He opened his mouth to say so as his father said, ‘Of course you do, you’re not stupid. And you’re not a child any more. You must have seen the signs – God knows they’re obvious enough.’

  They hadn’t been obvious to Henry. To his profound embarrassment, a tear oozed out of his father’s eye and rolled down his right cheek. The worst of it was Dad didn’t even notice. Since he couldn’t think of anything else to say, Henry waited. Eventually his father said, ‘I don’t know if you’re too young for this, but our ... relationship started to go downhill a couple of months ago. Well, maybe a little more than a couple of months. She ... she just seemed to change. It got sort of obvious her heart wasn’t in the marriage any more. You ... you can tell. It’s not hard. That’s when I started to get irritable with you and Aisling. I’m sorry about that, but I couldn’t help it.’

  Well, you asked for this, Henry thought. He hadn’t noticed his dad getting irritable with him and Aisling, at least not any more than usual and only when they deserved it mostly. He kept his eyes on his plate.

  ‘So,’ his father said. ‘You see.’

  That was it? So. You see. Henry said quietly, ‘You have to tell me about Mum’s affair, Dad.’

  His father sighed. He looked wrecked, but curiously relieved. ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it? I still can’t get my head round it.’ He straightened up in his chair and pushed the plate away. Henry noticed he hadn’t eaten one of the congealing eggs, or the hideous kidney.

  Henry took a deep breath. ‘Who’s the man?’ he asked.

  His father looked at him blankly. ‘What man?’

  ‘The man Mum’s having an affair with.’

  The intensity of his father’s stare was almost frightening. ‘I told you, Henry. Didn’t you hear me? It’s not a man. Your mum’s having an affair with my secretary Anaïs.’

  The words lay there, stretched out across the air like a shroud.

  His father offered to drop him off, but Henry said he’d walk. He took to the back streets and they were all so empty it was spooky. He walked and thought. He felt he was moving on an island a yard or two across and the world ended right outside it. On this island (that moved right along with him as he walked) he kept replaying the conversation with his dad.

  Henry said, ‘You’re telling me Mum is having an affair with another woman?’

  The distress on his father’s face was pitiful. ‘Yes. I know it ... it ... it’s ...’

  Henry said, ‘But you and Mum – I mean, she’s had children. Aisling and me. If she’s ... you know ... that would make her a lesbian. Dad, that doesn’t make any sense!’

  His father shifted uncomfortably. He was obviously finding all this even more painful than Henry. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Henry. A lesbian isn’t something you’re born as. At least it can be, but not always. And it’s not all or nothing either. People can go for years not realising they’re attracted to their own sex.’

  It didn’t sound likely to Henry. ‘Yes, but Mum’s had children!’ he said again.

  His father managed a wan smile. ‘Having children isn’t all that difficult,’ he said. The smile disappeared. ‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt. Martha and Anaïs ... Martha and Anaïs ...’ He looked as if he might be about to cry again.

  Henry pushed it. ‘How can you be sure?’

  His father told him.

  In business you could set your watch by good old Tim Atherton. If he said he would be in at nine, he was in at nine. If he said he was going out for half an hour, you could be certain he’d be back in thirty minutes, not a minute more, not a minute less. Yesterday he’d said he would be back at five, but his appointment got cancelled due to some emergency. There was no reason for him to stay away from the office and he got back a few minutes before three.

  The office itself was in one of those tall buildings developers put up all over Britain in the 1980s. Tim’s company had all of the third floor. The doorman snapped a salute, a ground-floor receptionist gave him a nice smile. If you were a casual visitor, you had to be issued with a name tag that acted as a security pass, but Tim headed straight for the lifts.

  It took a while for one to come down, but when it did, he had it to himself. The ride to the third floor took perhaps fifty seconds. He stepped out into the Newton-Sorsen company reception and said hello to Muriel who told him his wife had just called and was waiting for him in his office. He wasn’t expecting Martha, but sometimes she popped in when she was shopping. Anaïs would tell her he was out until five of course – he hadn’t bothered to phone in to say the meeting had been cancelled – but maybe he’d catch her before she left again.

  He walked down the carpeted corridor to his office. Jim Handley came out of a door and collared him about the new presentation. By the time he’d finished with Jim and walked the rest of the way, it was seven minutes after three.

  To reach his own office, he had to walk through the smaller office of Anaïs Ward, who guarded him th
e way most secretaries did their bosses. He was a little surprised to find Anaïs wasn’t at her desk, but only a little – there was a coffee machine down the corridor or she might have slipped off to the loo. He was more surprised that Martha wasn’t there either. He’d have thought he would have bumped into her if she’d left in the lift. But maybe she’d gone down the back stairs: she did that sometimes for the exercise.

  He locked his office when he wasn’t in it – some important documents in there – so he pulled his keys from his pocket as he walked across Anaïs’s room. He had the key in the lock and the door open in maybe a second, two at the most. His wife and his secretary were both inside. They were startled, breaking apart at the sound of the door. They’d been kissing.

  ‘Maybe it was just ... you know, a friendly thing,’ Henry suggested, sick to his stomach. ‘Women kiss each other all the time.’

  ‘It wasn’t just a friendly thing,’ his father told him firmly.

  After a while, Henry said, ‘You only found out yesterday?’

  They were bound to divorce. He couldn’t see any way out of it after what his father had told him. The funny thing was Dad never said a word about divorce. Or leaving. Or separating or anything like that. But that could change tonight after he had his talk with Mum. Obviously he couldn’t just ignore what had happened. Unless, of course, he was hoping Mum would get over it. Did you get over being a lesbian? Henry was so far out of his depth he felt he was drowning.

  For once Mr Fogarty opened the door so fast you’d have thought he was standing behind it. ‘You’re late,’ he said. ‘And you look like shit.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Henry mumbled. ‘I had to do something for my dad.’

  ‘You want to talk or you want to get started?’ Mr Fogarty had a wiry, old man’s frame, no hair at all and on wet days his right hip hurt like hell. But his face looked as if it was cut from granite and his eyes were so sharp they were almost scary.

  Henry’d had enough talk for one morning. ‘I’d like to get started,’ he said. ‘Seeing as I’m late.’

  ‘Suits me,’ Fogarty said. ‘I can’t get into the garden shed any more. Bin the crap and tidy up the rest. But don’t touch the mower.’

  Mr Fogarty’s garden was a stretch of dusty-looking lawn with a tired buddleia bush and little else, all surrounded by a high stone wall. The shed was a ramshackle wooden affair that had seen better days. The old boy had pushed three empty wheelie bins outside. It looked as if he was expecting Henry to throw out a lot of rubbish.

  Henry straightened his back. It was going to be heavy, dirty work, but he wasn’t sorry. Heavy dirty work would take his mind off things for a while. As he pressed the latch of the shed door, a small brown butterfly detached itself from the buddleia bush and fluttered briefly on to the ledge of the tiny window before dropping to the ground. Mr Fogarty’s fat tomcat Hodge appeared out of nowhere to grab it.

  ‘Oh, come on, Hodge!’ Henry exclaimed. ‘Don’t eat butterflies!’ He liked cats, even Hodge, but hated it when they killed birds and pretty insects. The trouble was, once they got hold of something like a butterfly, you couldn’t take it from them without killing it yourself. ‘Drop it, Hodge!’ he shouted firmly, but without much hope.

  Then he saw the thing struggling in Hodge’s mouth wasn’t a butterfly.

  Three

  What Pyrgus Malvae valued most in all the world was his Halek knife. Since the fight with his father, he’d had to work for every little thing and the crystal blade had cost him six months’ pay on a bet.

  The hideous expense was the fault of the Halek. They refused to make more than ten knives a year, and eight of those were replacements for old blades broken or beyond their use. The new blades were cut from cold spires of rock crystal in the Halek homeland, then polished to a blue, translucent sheen. Blood grooves were sanded down each side and the blade bonded to an inlaid handle. Then the knife was charged and dedicated by a Halek wizard.

  The result was a weapon guaranteed to kill.

  There was no such thing as a minor wound from a Halek blade. Once it entered a living body – and it would pierce any known skin, hide or armour – fierce energies coursed through the victim, stopping his heart. There was nothing it wouldn’t kill, neither man nor beast. But there was a chance the blade would shatter. When that happened, the energies flowed backwards to kill the man who held it. Thus Halek blades were more often used in threat than anger, but they were always comforting to have when times got tough.

  Pyrgus fingered the handle of his now. He had a feeling there was someone nasty watching him.

  It was a weird place to get that sort of feeling. He was on Loman Bridge, the vast, creaking structure with its ancient shops and houses that spanned the river north of High grove. Day or night, the bridge was always thronged. It attracted bumpkins like a lodestone. They wandered slack-jawed past the shops and houses, waylaid by trulls, thieves, cut purses, pickpockets, huggers, muggers, card sharps, thimble-riggers and assorted lowlife, not to mention the packs of greedy merchants who were the worst of the lot. Goods of every description were on sale, but you had to learn to haggle – and recognise rubbish. Each merchant was as expert at extracting gold from a purse as any thief.

  "Ware!’ someone shouted from above. Pyrgus stepped nimbly sideways to avoid the curdled contents of a chamber-pot slopped out from a high window. The move took him underneath the awning of an apothecary’s cart and the feeling of being watched grew stronger. Pyrgus glanced cautiously around. He was surrounded by a thousand faces, most unwashed and none familiar.

  ‘A little chaos horn?’ the apothecary stallholder whispered.

  Pyrgus glared at him so fiercely he took a step backwards. ‘Sorree,’ the stall holder said. ‘Pardon me for breathing.’ Greed caught hold again and his expression softened. ‘Something else then? Gold attractors? A purple humunculus?’

  Pyrgus ignored him and stepped back into the heaving throng. His instincts were screaming at him now and he trusted them. He quickened his pace, elbowing his way through the crowd. A burly man with a shaven head cursed and tried to grab his jerkin, but Pyrgus dodged aside. He pushed and shoved and shouldered, ignoring all the protests, until he reached the far side of the bridge and left the river. There were fewer people here, but he still felt he was being watched. He headed towards Cheapside, neck hairs crawling as he waited for the hand on his shoulder.

  He knew what it was about, of course. Pyrgus had been caught leaving Lord Hairstreak’s manor at an unsociable hour. Well, not caught exactly, but certainly spotted. The fact he was leaving by an upstairs window was probably what made the guards suspicious. Or it could have been that he was carrying Black Hairstreak’s golden phoenix. Hairstreak wasn’t the type to let anybody get away with that. He wasn’t the type to go to court about it either. If his men caught up with Pyrgus now, he’d pay for the phoenix in broken bones and blood.

  Pyrgus wasn’t sure if he was safer among people or alone. The trouble with crowds was that you could never tell friend from foe. Not until it was too late. And Hairstreak’s men could leave him pulped before anybody found the courage to intervene. Cheapside was crowded – it was a warren of stews and music dens that attracted the best and the worst of the city – and his instinct told him he’d be better somewhere he could see an attacker coming. He moved like a crab into Seething Lane, which was nearly always empty now on account of the smell. He hurried down the narrow street, then stepped quickly into the shelter of a doorway and waited.

  He could see the head of the alley and the milling crowds of Cheapside. Nobody had followed him and he was just starting to relax when a broad form silhouetted at the junction. The man looked huge, but the other three who joined him looked larger still. Together they began to saunter down the alley.

  There was a chance they weren’t looking for him, but Pyrgus wasn’t about to bet his life on it. He began to wonder if Seething Lane was such a good idea. There was no way he could get past the four men and back to Cheapside. But if he made
a break south, he was running towards a dead end. Not so long ago the lane led into Wildmoor Broads, but since Chalkhill and Brimstone built their new glue factory there was no way through.

  A thought occurred to Pyrgus. In all the best adventure stories, heroes trapped in doorways pushed the door and found it open. Then they went inside, charmed the pretty young daughter of the household and persuaded her to hide them until the danger was over. Maybe he should try that now. He pushed the door and found it closed.

  Shoulder to shoulder, the four men filled the entire width of Seething Lane. Their movements appeared casual, but they were carefully checking every doorway they passed. In minutes they would be checking his. Pyrgus knocked softly, silently praying the pretty young daughter of the household had good ears. After a moment, he knocked again more loudly. The four men were so close now he could hear their breathing, which meant they could hear his knocking. They quickened their pace. Pyrgus kicked the door violently. When it failed to splinter he turned and ran.

  ‘That’s him!’ one of the big men shouted. All four broke into a lumbering run.

  Pyrgus was fast, but that just meant he reached the dead end quicker. Since Chalkhill and Brimstone built their smelly factory, Seething Lane ended in high metal gates, lavishly decorated with fierce warning notices about guards and lethal force. Why they needed that sort of security in a grotty glue factory Pyrgus had no idea, but Chalkhill and Brimstone were both Faeries of the Night, a notoriously suspicious breed. Besides which, they made a great fuss about the secret process that produced their glue. He grabbed the gates and found them locked. Behind him the running footsteps drew closer.