by Manda Scott
The spiralling marks on the entrance stone were more solid now; were she close enough, Stella could have traced her fingers along their grooves. Their magic seemed less, but the draw was as strong. As lodestone to lodestone, she knew exactly where to go and what to do and when to do it; without ever looking at her watch, she could count the falling minutes: six, perhaps five, until dawn.
Tony Bookless was less than ten paces away. She could not tell if the hand that remained in his pocket held a gun, but she could see his face clearly in the growing light. His flat, hard eyes held hers, grey as the pale sky. There was no friendship there, only warnings of violence.
Davy’s voice rolled through her head. Whatever they’ve sold their souls to doesn’t have the best interests of humanity at heart, but by God, they’re convinced they’re right. And long before, when she knew him less well, Your skull carries the heart of the world. What man would not kill to own that?
Stella made herself stare back, and not into the beeches to her left wherein branch rasped upon branch in the dawn wind. Under it, she could believe Davy Law was crawling.
Stella lifted the skull level with her own head. Grey light became blue around it. Gordon made a small, hurt noise in his throat. Abruptly, Tony Bookless stopped moving. As if merely curious, Stella said, ‘Tony, what are you doing?’
‘Trying to keep you alive.’ He gave a smile she knew well. It did not soften his eyes. ‘I told you before, the skull-keeper always dies. For all of my life I’ve believed Ursula was going to be the keeper and I could protect her. Clearly I was wrong, so I’m here to see what I can do to rectify matters.’
He took another idle step towards her, waving a hand towards the grave mound. ‘I know you think the fate of the world hangs on its going in there, but I remain of the belief that no stone is worth dying for. I promised Kit I’d keep you alive. I am doing my best to achieve that.’
He was so plausible. The fragile safety of the morning hung on the fiction that she believed him. Too late, Stella took breath to answer, to keep the fiction going. To her right, Gordon Fraser had already lost the last threads of control.
‘You did your best to murder Ursula Walker, you hypocritical bastard. Don’t pretend you’re here to help.’
‘I’m sorry?’ There was ice in Bookless’s voice, of a weight to crush the heat of Gordon’s rage. He was so tall, so cool, so composed. Beside him the small Scotsman was a burr of unkempt fury, catastrophically lacking in self-control.
Tony Bookless ignored him. With perfect diction, he said, ‘Stella, what exactly happened to Ursula?’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know, Anthony sir fucking Bookless. I worked you out days ago. You’re a cold-blooded killer, hiding behind your sham charm. You—’
‘Gordon, stop.’
Once started, the small Scotsman was all but unstoppable. He spat on the ground. Propelled by his own rage, he took the final bound towards Stella, making of himself a wall between her and Tony Bookless. He was her friend, her mentor, the man who had courage in the dark places. In the silence of her heart, she thanked him even as she reached out to catch his arm and hold him silent.
She said, ‘It’s kind, but I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. I’ll do this for myself.’
She directed her coolest smile at Tony Bookless. ‘Ursula’s on a ventilator in the Radcliffe ICU suffering from smoke inhalation. She stayed in the farmhouse too long after Kit and I got out. The fire caught her in the kitchen. There was chlorine in the smoke. The police will be investigating this one as attempted murder.’
‘Chlorine?!’
Bookless was an exceptional actor. Stella saw the blacks of his eyes flare out to the rims, squeezing away the colour. More slowly, she saw the colour leach from his face. He raised his head to look past her. ‘Kit, why did you not tell me this in the car?’
They had all his attention. If ever there was a time to act, it was that moment. Stella gave a silent call, and was answered the same by the shifting leaf patterns in the woods behind. The murmur of birdsong broke off suddenly.
‘Stella, go to Kit, now.’
Tony Bookless snapped in a way she had never heard from him. Gone was the urbane, cultured humour. Left behind was the man who had served in Northern Ireland and advised in Iraq, the man who gave orders and was heard and obeyed. There was a relief in the honesty of that.
The time for pretending was past. Stella did not move. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘So you can kill us both as you tried to kill Ursula?’
‘Quite the reverse, so that I can do my utmost to keep you safe while— Davy Law, don’t do it! You’ve got the wrong man!’
He took his hand from his pocket. He did not hold a gun, but a bunch of keys. He threw them, hard, straight at Stella, who ducked sideways with a speed she did not know she had, and rolled, holding the stone.
Tony Bookless filled her spinning world, and Gordon, closing in on him, and at last Davy Law, running low and hard from the encircling trees from quite another place than she – or anyone else – had expected.
The morning was lost in a brutal collision of flesh and the crack of a shattered bone – and after it, a gunshot. Someone grabbed for the skull-stone. Stella clutched it, kicking, and was pulled clear by her elbow.
Davy Law stood over her, in a breath of nicotine and wrath. One arm hung useless at his side. With the other, he shoved the small of her back.
‘It’s dawn. The mound’s waiting. Go!’
In broadest Aberdonian, Gordon Fraser shouted, ‘Stay where you are!’
‘No, Stell, go for it!’
She trusted Gordon with her life, but she would not have stopped for him, whatever he had shouted. It was the unrooted terror in Kit’s voice, even as he urged her forward, that cut through the pull of the stone. She tripped to a halt, with the mound’s mouth an arm’s length away, and turned.
Kit was standing rigid. A gun held at his temple kept him still; it kept everybody still. Gordon Fraser, her friend in this world of the friendless, was the person holding it.
‘Step back from the tunnel,’ he said, when he saw her looking. ‘Put down the stone, and nobody else gets hurt.’
‘Gordon?’ Stella stared at him, not believing. His red hair was everywhere. His face was a pale and sallow green. His eyes fed on the skull and it was not fear that fired them, but a depth of yearning she had never seen before, in him or any man.
Floundering, she said, ‘Is this a joke?’
A grunt from the ground made her look down. Tony Bookless lay there, holding his arm across his body. Blood spread in a narrow band, staining the dawn turf. His eyes burned. He shrugged something that might have been an apology. ‘First rule of warfare,’ he said, drily. ‘Always do what the man with the gun tells you.’
‘Right.’ Gordon gestured with his free arm. ‘So put it down and step away.’
She could not; the stone would not have let her even if her mind had encompassed the need. Numbly, she said, ‘I thought you were here to help.’
‘Some things are beyond helping.’ He sneered, unprettily. ‘You won’t save the world like this, whatever Davy Law’s told you. The time for that’s long past. It’s every man for himself now, just like it’s always been.’
Stella said, ‘What do you want?’
‘The stone, what else?’
She gaped. ‘But you’re scared of it. You could hardly go near it the day you washed the chalk off. You wanted me to crush it under the pile driver.’
‘There was no danger you’d do it, though, was there? And you’d not think of me wanting to take it if I’d told you to grind it to dust.’
‘Come off it, Gordon, that wasn’t a bluff; you were terrified of it.’
He flushed a sore, angry red. ‘We just need time to get to know each other, it and me.’ His hand was steady if his voice was not. ‘It’ll be different when this dawn’s past and it’s lost its hope. It’ll not be so savage, then. You just keep clear of that doorway until the sun’s well up and we�
��ll all be happy.’
Dawn was already upon them. The birds had fallen silent at the gunshot, but the sun was a razor line of light melting the horizon.
Flatly, Davy Law said, ‘What makes you think the stone will be anything but a piece of flashy sapphire when the dawn’s past? If you stop it from going into the mound now, you’ll break its soul, then what will you have?’
Gordon’s grin was fast and full of loathing. ‘I’ll have the biggest gemstone in the western world at no risk to myself. But I don’t think it’ll be like that; it’s not going to let go of its power that easily. And don’t even try to say you wouldn’t do this in my place, David Law. You’ve done your taking of beautiful things and you know the power of this one. You’d do the same if you had the guts.’
‘I would never have pushed someone off a cliff for it.’ Even as he spoke, Davy was moving, sliding his nearest foot slowly towards Stella.
Gordon laughed. He sounded perfectly sane. ‘I’ve been looking for Cedric Owen’s blue heart-stone since I came up to the college thirty years ago. I’ve looked in every cave in England and a few beyond. I’ve risked my life more times than you’ve had women; a lot more times. Kit O’Connor had barely been in a real cave in his life. What right had he to find the stone for half a day’s looking? The Rescue are a bunch of wet pansies. They’d never have found the thing if it had gone over the edge with him. I’d have got it later, no problem at all, and there’s not a caver in Europe could have done that alone but me. I’ll have it now and there’ll be justice done for once.’
As if to commend him, the band of sun to the east broke through a thin strap of cloud. Gordon looked at it and back. He gave a short nod and squared his shoulders, as Stella had seen him do in countless caves before the big descents.
With military sharpness, he said, ‘David, if you move another muscle, Kit dies and you after him. If you don’t believe me, you only have to try. Stella, put the stone down by the count of three or he’s a dead man anyway. One.’
‘Don’t do it, Stell.’ Kit had more colour, suddenly. Heedless of the gun, he turned his head. ‘He can’t kill both of us in time to stop you.’
‘You’re welcome to try me. Two.’
‘Stella, you have a choice: me or the stone. We’ve been coming to this all along. You know which matters more.’
Suddenly, unexpectedly, she did.
‘Thr—’
Against the scything panic in her head, she bent and set Cedric Owen’s blue skull-stone on the earth before the mound. The noise did not become less as she straightened, but was lost in the sudden cacophony of small birds that rose to announce the moment of dawn.
The lust in Gordon Fraser’s eyes was a hard thing to contemplate. The cry of the stone broke open her mind. She set her heart against it.
‘Have it then.’ She stepped back. ‘It won’t give you what you think— Kit! No!’
He was unsteady and half-maimed and he made the choice she had just turned down. She saw him wrench to his left, heard the gunshot, louder than thunder, saw blood, and did not know if it was his or Gordon’s before they fell together to the ground.
From the hard earth, Kit shouted, ‘Stella, run!
He was alive; it was all she needed. She was already snatching up the stone, running like a hare from its form, over the sworl-scripted stone that blocked the entrance to the mound, down the short tunnel into the embracing darkness. As Davy Law had said, the solid rock did, indeed, open to let her through.
She heard the gun fire again, and the crack of an impact, and a man’s scream, but she was in the dark by then with the dawn blazing behind and the stone and the mound sang to her, equally, so that it was impossible not to go on, and on and in to meet the light waiting at the tunnel’s end.
33
Ingleborough Fell, Yorkshire Dales, April 1589
OWEN HAD NOT known Martha carried a knife, but in the time it took him to cross the water, he saw her use it once to good effect.
That her attackers were Walsingham’s men was not in doubt; all that remained to be learned was how many of them were there and whether they had seen the blue stone fall into the pool.
Before that, he had a promise to keep: that Martha Walker would not be captured and taken alive to London to face the agonies of the Tower at Walsingham’s pleasure.
It was this promise that spurred him to leap the river, a feat he would have believed impossible. He met the ground running and flung himself forward, screaming the same high note as the blue stone, so that the sound seemed to lance out of his head and shatter from the walls.
Even so, he thought he was too late. There were at least two of them fighting Martha, and only one wounded by her knife. He had hold of her hair with his one good arm and was pulling her head back and round, towards the tunnel. The other seemed intent on grabbing her feet, but that her kicking was stopping him. By the half-light of the candles, Owen saw him abandon that endeavour and reach to his hip for his sword.
‘Martha!’
The sound of her name, or the closeness of the shout, caused her to cease her struggling and temporarily spared her life. The sword-bearer spun snarling to face the new danger. At the sight of Owen and his three-inch knife, he barked a laugh.
‘They said you were no swordsman. I had not hoped to find they spoke so true.’
The man was black-haired and bearded and spoke with a Devonshire accent. He held a blade easily the equal of the one owned for so many years by Fernandez de Aguilar; that much Owen could tell as he skidded to a halt on the wet limestone floor of the cave.
‘Drop your knife, doctor.’ Blackbeard used it as an insult. ‘Be sensible and we’ll let you live.’
‘In the Tower? I would rather be dead.’
The man grinned, showing white teeth in the fuzz of his beard. He had the same build, the same easy way with a weapon as had Maplethorpe’s mastiffs. He said, ‘Join your friend, then, the one-armed Spaniard. Though he died slowly enough. We only need one of you and we’ll have the wife if we can’t have the husband.’
At the mention of Fernandez, the fight went out of Martha. Owen heard it, even although he could not see it. Before Blackbeard could turn, he dropped his knife. The clatter was lost in the rush of the waterfall. He held out both hands, palms up. ‘Let her go and I’ll come with you.’
The man advanced, raising his black brows high. ‘Or we’ll take you both, now that you’ve so kindly offered, and then you can both tell us what we need to know and we’ll compare your answers.’
The knife was useless anyway. Owen kicked it sideways. It skittered across the floor and splashed into the river, taking Blackbeard’s attention with it for the moment Owen needed to scoop and pick up a stone the size of his hand from the cave’s floor.
He was no swordsman, but he had spent thirty years in New Spain playing ‘catch-and-throw’ with generations of children. In England, it would have been a pretty game, to keep them amused. In Zama, it was the beginnings of the hunt and Owen had found a flair for it.
The piece he held now was light, if satisfyingly jagged. He balanced its weight in his palm. Behind Blackbeard was a flurry of action. He thought Martha was fighting again, but could not see to be sure.
‘What of Fernandez?’ Owen asked. ‘Did he tell you to come here?’
Blackbeard sneered. ‘He told us everything we asked of him.’
Owen wanted to disbelieve him, but Barnabas Tythe had told them of Walsingham and he could believe any man would reveal his soul if asked aright.
‘When did he die?’ he asked. His heart was a hollow void. He dared not look at Martha.
Blackbeard made a show of counting back on his fingers. ‘February,’ he said, ‘near the end of the month.’ He was wary of the stone, and began to circle, pushing Owen away from the candle’s light to the darker, less even places in the back of the cavern. His sword moved always ahead of him, a streak of dull light that marked him even as they stepped further away from the tunnel’s mouth.
&n
bsp; Owen stepped sideways, and ducked under an outcrop of rock. He felt pressure on his right sleeve and knew that the wall was there. He slid left and found that way, too, blocked.
‘Come out, doctor. Why make me hamstring you when you could ride to London in comfort?’
There were loose pebbles underfoot. Owen stooped and dragged up a handful and threw them into the man’s eyes. The point of the sword lowered enough. He flung his rock, as well as he had ever done.
Not well enough.
It was a difficult throw; Blackbeard was twisting away, thinking more pebbles were coming, and the candles played tricks with their light, shoving it sideways and then pulling it back. Thus did Owen hit the shape of where Blackbeard had been, and not the man himself. The stone sank into his shoulder, biting deep into flesh and sinew and bone, but it did not hit his head and make a kill.
Some men retreat when injured, others rouse themselves to fury. Blackbeard was of the latter mould. He raised his sword before him like a lance and ran at Owen, roaring fit to drown the river.
Slow as a dream, Cedric Owen saw his death approach. Somewhere far away, at the tunnel’s mouth, he heard Martha scream his name and then a man’s shout and then Blackbeard was on him and he heard the iron pierce his shirt, his skin, his flesh, his lungs, and felt the wet gush of blood long before he felt the fierce, hot pain.
Owen’s body crashed against the limestone wall. His left elbow shattered; in his new place of distant objectivity, he could count the pieces and knew it would never mend. His knees buckled and he felt his back slide down the wall, and was surprised to see Blackbeard topple also, but in the other direction.
And then he knew he was truly dying, for Fernandez de Aguilar was standing in front of him, with Robert Maplethorpe’s dark-wet sword in his hand and anguish on his face.
A memory came, sharply. With grim humour, Owen said, ‘Do not grieve for me, my friend. Death is not so bad a thing when it has been preceded by joy.’ He tried to lift his hand and failed. ‘Your presence gives me great joy. I had not thought that death would be so forgiving as to bring us both together.’