The Scar-Crow Men

by Mark Chadbourn

  ‘Be strong,’ the spy whispered to her, ‘all is not yet lost.’

  Will realized the woman was staring at him in what he guessed was shock. No, he thought, recognition.

  She turned her head slightly so that the glow illuminated her face for the first time, and then it was Will’s turn to gape.

  ‘Grace?’ he gasped.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  IN THE RUDDY LIGHT OF THE SETTING SUN, GRACE HURRIED ALONG the Grand Gallery from the Queen’s chambers at the end of her day’s labours. With his black cloak wrapped around him and his red hair hidden beneath a felt cap, Strangewayes waited in the shadows to intercept her. He thought how beautiful she looked with her chestnut hair tied back with a blue ribbon, and a bodice the colour of forget-me-nots emphasizing her slim waist. From the moment the Earl of Essex’s spy had first laid eyes upon her, he had not been short of lascivious thoughts, imagining the body beneath the skirts, the young breasts, the pleasure of throwing her breathless with passion upon his bed.

  But from that day in the garden when she had offered him only sympathy and care after he had heard the news of his brother’s death, Strangewayes had been shocked by deeper feelings, each slow emergence changing how he felt about himself and how he saw the world.

  ‘Grace.’ He stepped out into the gallery.

  ‘Hello, Tobias.’ The young woman showed no surprise.

  Strangewayes was stung by the lack of warmth in Grace’s face, but it had been that way for days. ‘I do not want it to be this cold between us. You have ignored me for too long—’

  ‘I have work to do, Tobias. The Queen needs my full attention.’

  ‘I spoke harshly that day we stood outside the garden door. You had concerns. I was wrong to brush them aside as if they … as if you did not matter.’

  The woman gave the spy a practised smile and made to push by him.

  ‘Grace, you are the only person to have shown me any warmth in many a year,’ Strangewayes said, the desperation forming a hard weight in his chest. ‘I want us to be friends again.’

  In a moment of madness, the young man grabbed Grace’s shoulders and pulled her to him. He expected her to resist in her usual high-spirited way, but she folded compliantly into his arms and he pressed his mouth upon her. The spy was disturbed to find her unresponsive lips had a texture like fish-skin, and when he opened his eyes, she was staring at him, unblinking and emotionless, as if he had merely enquired about her health. Ruffled, the red-headed man broke the embrace.

  ‘What will it take to win you back?’ Tobias stuttered.

  Ignoring the question, the young lady-in-waiting gave another chill smile and walked away. The spy felt crushed.

  ‘I will do what you asked of me,’ Strangewayes called. ‘I will prove to you that I am deserving of your affection.’

  Grace continued on her way without looking back.

  The spy wanted to hate the young woman for making him feel such a fool. He had always mocked the lovelorn, and yet there he was, in the midst of great danger, facing a plot that could sweep away the Queen and important affairs of state, and all he could think of were his own petty feelings.

  Clenching his fists, Tobias swept through the deserted palace corridors. The Privy Council was meeting late and all of the advisers and record-keepers and snivelling hangers-on would be gathered in the Banqueting House, waiting for their masters to emerge from their discussions with Her Majesty. He had a brief opportunity.

  The sun had set by the time he reached the quiet rooms of the Secretary of State. None of the candles had yet been lit and he realized he would have to complete his business in the dark. Kneeling in front of Cockayne’s door, he took out his velvet pouch of tools and set to work.

  While probing the brass tumblers, he wondered if his loathing of Swyfte had been fired by the gossip that Grace mooned over his rival like a little girl, or if it had been because England’s greatest spy received all the adulation that he so deserved. When Essex had recruited him into his nascent spy network, the red-headed man had dreamed of fortune, adventure and acclaim. He had learned to loathe the less flamboyant spies of Cecil’s network – the killers, the thieves, the liars and torturers – and all the choices, and his future, had appeared clearly delineated. When had it all changed?

  The tumblers turned with a dull clunk. Strangewayes slipped into the chamber. Through the single window, the moon cast a silvery light over the jumbled piles of parchments, charts and books.

  After a few moments, the spy realized it would take him all night to sift through every paper in that cluttered chamber. He had to think clearly. Stepping back to the door, he looked around the sparse furniture and the towers of dusty volumes. There was nowhere to hide something of importance.

  Moving around the chamber walls, Tobias gently rapped each wooden panel. When none sounded false, he turned back to the room in frustration. In that moment, his gaze alighted on the honey-coloured Kentish ragstone of the hearth.

  Grinning, Strangewayes bounded across the chamber. During the hot summer, there had been no need to light the fires in the palace and the grey ashes in the rusty iron grate were long undisturbed. Reaching one hand up the chimney, he felt around, wrinkling his nose at the shower of sticky black soot. His fingers closed on rough sackcloth blocking the flue.

  In jubilation, the spy tore down the sack, coughing at the black cloud he raised. Inside was a sheaf of papers with Marlowe’s scrawled signature clear on the front.

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my chamber?’

  Strangewayes started at the harsh voice. Spinning round, he saw that Cockayne had entered silently. In his black robe, the adviser was a pool of shadow by the door with only his ruddy face and shock of grey hair visible.

  Tobias reeled from the terrible consequences of being discovered in the chamber of an adviser to the Secretary of State. ‘I … I was just—’ he stuttered.

  ‘Thief!’ Cockayne called, turning to the door. ‘I am robbed!’

  The younger man threw himself across the room. Clamping one hand across Cockayne’s mouth, the spy wrestled his opponent into the door with a crash.

  ‘Hush, I mean you no harm,’ Strangewayes hissed. But suddenly he could see no way out of his predicament. His reputation, and Grace, had been lost.

  The struggling adviser clamped his teeth on the spy’s fingers. When the younger man snatched his hand away with a cry of pain, Cockayne called out, ‘Traitor!’ and in that instant Strangewayes realized he had lost his life too.

  ‘No!’ the spy barked, tears of desperation stinging his eyes. Furiously, he flung the older man across the room. Books and papers flew everywhere. The chair was upended, and Cockayne crashed into the wood panelling next to the fireplace. Strangewayes was on him in an instant.

  ‘Traitor!’ the adviser barked.

  Tobias was consumed with fear. He drove his fist into the older man’s face. The nose burst underneath his knuckles. ‘Be quiet,’ the spy hissed. ‘I have no wish to harm you. Be quiet.’

  Yet Cockayne continued to struggle. ‘Essex’s man,’ he muttered through split lips.

  Half sobbing, Strangewayes made a decision. He pulled out his dagger and thrust it into the adviser’s chest. Recoiling, he snorted through hot tears of angry frustration, ‘I never meant for this.’

  Sucking in a juddering gasp of air to calm himself, the red-headed man tried to think clearly. There was still a chance the adviser might have returned early and no one had overheard the struggle. Forcing aside the thought that he might have killed an innocent man, he plucked up the sooty sack and leapt to the door.

  The spy allowed himself one glance back at the body of his victim – and was rooted in horror.

  It was no longer Cockayne.

  In disbelief, Strangewayes stepped forward to see more clearly. His eyes widened, his wits whirled and he thought he would go mad.

  Gripping the dirty sack to his chest, the spy bolted from the chamber.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT


  ‘WHERE IS GRACE?’ WILL ROARED.

  His throat was raw. He felt blood dripping from a gash on his forehead and a searing ache in his ribs from the beating dealt out by his Unseelie Court captors. Pulling himself up the damp stone wall, he stood in the corner of the low-ceilinged chamber and faced the pale figures who watched him dispassionately. Choking on the fumes from the brazier in the far corner, Will tried to see by the dull red glow of the coals. He sensed the brooding presence of more Enemies in the shadows.

  ‘Your friend is safe. For now.’ Dressed all in black, Fabian appeared to be floating in the greater darkness, his sad face bloodless.

  ‘Why is she here?’

  ‘Answering questions, providing information that will help us in the days to come. You are the spy, yes? Swyfte?’

  ‘And you are Fabian.’

  With a touch of surprise, the Fay nodded. ‘I am one of the High Family. In this place, I carry out my great and terrible responsibilities to my brothers and sisters, and thereby to my people.’ Stepping forward, he looked Will up and down.

  Will suppressed the concern for Grace that was gnawing in his chest. He had expected to see only contempt in his foe’s face. Instead, the looming, black-clad figure showed only a deep concern and, perhaps, pity. Unsettled by the revelation, Will reassessed his approach. ‘What is your business here?’ he asked.

  ‘Here I learn what it means to be human,’ Fabian replied in a quiet voice.

  From somewhere deep in that cavernous place, a man’s cry echoed and was cut short. The pale figure’s breath caught in his throat. Snapping his head around, he listened to the silence that followed the scream with a note of dismay. ‘You are an intriguing race. Inspiring in many ways. Your lives are so short, your suffering so great, and yet you find joy in the smallest things. You create beauty. You love. You care. Your bodies are tiny vessels, so fragile, seemingly too small to contain the vast oceans of emotion that shift within you. You are, all of you, miracles.’ He shook his head in awe.

  Will ignored the gentle words. With mounting revulsion, he was beginning to sense what truly transpired in the dark beneath the seminary. ‘What do you do here?’ he asked, each word a thrown stone.

  ‘I break wondrous things.’

  The bald statement was so at odds with the poetry of what his captor had been saying that Will at first thought he had misheard. But then he pieced together all the sounds, smells and sights he had experienced since his descent into the Unseelie Court’s realm and he recognized the truth. ‘Torture.’

  Fabian started as if he had been stung. ‘Nothing so crude. We know a myriad ways to extract information from your kind. Torture requires no skill. No, there is an artistry to what I achieve here. I have a unique ability, a talent perhaps, that also destroys me by degrees. But that is my curse. We must all live with the things that destroy us.’ Tapping one slender index finger on his lips, he prowled the dark in reflection. ‘We must know our enemy if we are truly to defeat them,’ he continued. ‘We must know the inner workings of your mind, and your body. What makes you, you. The very essence of what it is to be human. You are like us in many ways, and so different in others.’

  Will was sickened by the visions flashing through his mind. ‘You butcher us, then. Like cattle being prepared for table.’

  ‘No,’ the supernatural being cried. He bounded back to the spy and reached out a hand tenderly to frame Will’s face. ‘In my work, as I search for the secrets buried deep within you, I treat all of your kind with respect and tenderness.’

  ‘You dress it up in pretty words but you bring death, like all of your ilk,’ Will spat.

  ‘Death is not the end.’ Stepping back, Fabian looked askance, a curious gleam in his eye. ‘There are many secrets you have yet to discover.’ He turned away as if he had said too much and strode towards his fellows. ‘Over the years, I have worked tirelessly here. The mysteries always appeared elusive. But in recent years we have made a discovery.’ His breath caught with excitement. ‘It changed everything. All our plans, our very thoughts about what we should and could achieve.’

  ‘And what did you learn?’ the spy asked with contempt. ‘That we are more than the sum of our parts?’

  ‘That is understood.’ Fabian bowed. ‘The physical world can be altered by the great powers that surround us. Through ritual and potion, words of power, we can weave great things out of the lights of the world. The great and wise Deortha has been invaluable in these matters. You know him?’

  With a nod, Will recalled the mystic’s appearance on misty Dartmoor all those years earlier.

  ‘With Deortha’s help, and the discoveries made in these silent chambers, we learned how to shape your mortal clay, and imbue a spark of life within it, some semblance of being.’ He waved a hand towards something hidden in the dark.

  From the shadows stepped a lanky young man of perhaps twenty, a puzzled smile upon his smooth-cheeked face. Wearing a plain brown doublet, too large for him, and worn black breeches, he looked too innocent to survive in that awful place. And so it proved.

  Whisking out his dagger, Fabian plunged it into the man’s heart.

  ‘No!’ When Will lunged, the Unseelie Court’s silent watchers hurled him back into the corner, drawing their rapiers to underscore their unspoken threat.

  Almost comically baffled, the young man looked down at the blood pumping from his chest and then fell to the flags, dead.

  ‘Some semblance,’ Fabian continued as if nothing untoward had happened, ‘but not perfection.’

  ‘Devil,’ the spy growled.

  ‘These are straw men. Scar-Crow Men. They look like you, and speak, and think to a degree, but they cannot truly feel.’ Fabian wiped his dagger on the young man’s doublet and returned it to its sheath. ‘They do not understand emotions. And so they are useless as complete replacements for your people. But they can keep up appearances for a while, enough to adopt a position of power, and shepherd, and twist, and urge, and in that way achieve our aims, not yours.’

  With a wave of his hand, the Fay directed his prisoner’s attention to the body. It was no longer the young man. Sprawled on the stone floor, leaking bodily fluids, was a rotting corpse, of the same size, shape and sex as the puzzled figure the spy had seen, but much older. Yet what caught Will’s eye were the blackened swellings on the grey body that revealed the presence of the plague.

  The spy’s thoughts spun as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Running one hand through his black hair, he gasped, ‘You build these Scar-Crow Men from the remains of the poor souls who die from the sickness.’

  Fabian nodded slowly.

  ‘They are dead … yet alive.’

  ‘They make a play of being alive, and give as good a performance as many of the players who walk your stages.’ The pale-skinned being waved his hand and two of his fellows grabbed the remains by the arms and dragged it away. A wet trail gleamed blackly in the ruddy half-light. ‘But their inability to comprehend emotions, that is what betrays them,’ he continued. ‘And that is proof that they are not truly human, for it is the acuity of feelings that makes a man.’

  Will felt sickened by what he had heard, but he was already beginning to grasp the plot the Unseelie Court were weaving out of this frightfulness. ‘And with the plague in London you have no shortage of the raw materials you need to build your Scar-Crow Men.’

  ‘We brought the plague to London.’

  The spy was stung by Fabian’s bald statement. In that moment all he could think of were the plague pits and the bodies discarded in them like so much cordwood. Innocents who had died needlessly. The blood throbbed in his temple.

  ‘But it is not a simple task to construct our agents. It takes time, and effort.’ Looming over him, Fabian studied Will with a note of curiosity, as if he had found a new breed of beast. ‘Slowly, though, we are replacing the ones who have influence at the heart of your government. Those who are close to power, but not so close that their failings will be reveal
ed easily. The quiet people. The whisperers. Advisers, who stand in the shadows, ignored until their guidance is needed. Soon, though, we will replace more and more, until we rule your land completely without ever being seen by the common herd.’

  ‘And Grace. She too has been replaced?’

  ‘She holds a position close to your Queen, Elizabeth. We have influence there already, but one more is needed to achieve our aims.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to smite us all dead and burn the bodies. That was always the stated intent of the Unseelie Court.’

  ‘There will be some pain. There has to be vengeance for your grand betrayal, and the capture and imprisonment of our Queen,’ Fabian continued. ‘Once she is free … once our agent has destroyed the final defences that keep us from her … she will emerge from her prison like a tempest, furious and proud and terrible, blasting all that lies before her.’ A fleeting smile leapt to his lips. ‘But once her anger has abated, there is hope for your people. They will survive under the rule of our Scar-Crow Men … and our Scar-Crow Queen.’

  ‘While you make the puppets dance from behind the scenes.’

  ‘There can never be rebellion if a country does not know it has been conquered.’

  Will began to grasp the Unseelie Court’s plan, but there was one aspect he did not understand. ‘Why rule England from behind the veil? You have your own land, wherever it may lie, beneath hill or lake.’

  Absently, Fabian strode to the fuming brazier and began to prod the glowing coals with an iron poker. ‘My people have been as unchanging as the seasons since the beginning of the world, but in recent days our thoughts have shifted greatly. And you have played a part in that.’

  ‘I?’

  His face transformed into a grotesque mask by the ruddy light, the black-clad being looked at Will. ‘When you oversaw the murder of Cavillex of the High Family a vast shudder ran through the Unseelie Court,’ he said with a note of pity. ‘A mortal, killing one of our greatest! It was unheard of. And in that instant everything altered. We could no longer retreat to our home and pretend we were still the same.’