Boris glimpsed Miss Trimble some way behind and beckoned her over, feeling a pang of guilt. Invisible in his Master’s gown and absorbed in his work, he had not acknowledged her until now. She gave a small wave back – and disappeared into the crowd. ‘Damn,’ he muttered to himself.
Finch continued, ‘If Bolitho was being literal, the dark cloud consumed four different colours – which gives us four murders. We know about Ferox and Flask, so – two more. Who were they?’
‘Slickstone,’ suggested Bert, but Orelia shook her head.
‘No, his death was different,’ Finch agreed.
Orelia recounted her visit to The Agonies: Vibes must be another.
‘Who was that becoming young man with the sketch pad?’ Finch asked Orelia, in his old-world roundabout way.
Bert answered for her. ‘He’s called Everthorne; he’s an artist.’
‘Why do artists always look like artists?’ mused Finch.
‘He’s the grandson of Castor Everthorne,’ said Orelia, trying not to sound defensive.
‘He’s out of sorts,’ said Finch, adding, ‘it takes one to know one.’
Nothing express had been said, but Orelia caught a hint of suspicion in the politesse. Boris provided a pithy defence. ‘He’s helped us, he’s kind, he has his grandfather’s talent, and he was attacked by a Fury on Aether’s Way.’
Above them, the final beacon flickered and Boris jumped. ‘Jehosephat! I completely forgot Jones – he’s still up there!’ he bellowed, and took to his heels.
Only, he wasn’t.
When they reached Vulcan’s forge, stained with gunpowder and yawing in the rising wind, Jones, basket and balloon were gone.
*
Strimmer had watched Tighe watching the fireworks with her distinctive mix of knowingness and wonder. He sidled up and whispered in her ear, ‘Fancy a nightcap?’ She gazed at him as a stranger might, more bafflement than rejection in her face. ‘Pomeny, I’m talking to you.’
‘I’m working on my fisherman,’ she said at last.
‘Your what?’
‘My mechanical – the fish pulls him in, it’s that big.’
‘I’m not in the mood for games. You coming or not?’
‘Come and see when it’s ready.’
But for the crowd, he might have struck her. Instead, he transferred his attention to the pretty linguist.
‘First reserve?’ she responded tartly.
‘New favourite,’ countered Strimmer, loud enough for Tighe to hear, and the linguist laughed.
‘Enjoy your evening,’ replied Tighe cheerily.
At that moment, even Strimmer, for all his insensitivity to others, wondered what had afflicted Pomeny Tighe. Had her loyalties switched back to Snorkel? Surely not – but why lose interest in him at the climax of their campaign? Her lack of engagement made no sense.
*
Miss Trimble trudged home. She was more observant than Boris gave her credit for. The physique beneath the Master’s gown had unmistakably been Boris. Nor did she begrudge his commitment to his duties. She was cross with herself: she had failed a test of nerve on seeing him with the Herald, an electoral candidate, the former Head of Biology and the brother to whom she had yet to be introduced.
Minutes later, Gorhambury asked her to ensure no children strayed between the Island Field and home. She readily agreed, that was her proper station.
12
Fall of the First-Born
The changelings slept in hammocks, each marked with a name embossed in a leather tag, on the top floor of the treehouse. Portholes provided ventilation. There were bathrooms at each end, with pipes running into a sophisticated sewage system designed by Fortemain and improved over the centuries.
In Tyke’s absence, the changelings had withdrawn, locking the trapdoor to the rooms below and extinguishing all lights save for slow candles above the bathroom doors.
The Mance remained the most mobile and dextrous: he could stand on his hind legs like a man and run on all fours like a dog. His claws might not grip, but they could drag, pull or turn, and he had a highly refined sense of smell. Only the set of jaw and eyes hinted at his more complex ancestry. Black curly hair covered his body, with straighter, finer hair on his face.
An unnatural acrid scent had woken him. He pulled the blanket off with his teeth, clambered onto the bedside chair and pressed his nostrils to the porthole. The scent was moving closer.
As he stepped down, the floor shook violently as a beam end swung free from the ceiling. The Mance hooked open the trapdoor and dropped through – just as the frame split. It felt like a shipwreck: the hull shattered by rocks as their workbenches, tables, bookbinding gear, all their cherished possessions, slid through a gaping hole in the planking of the floor below.
Around him, the dormitory disintegrated, a slow candle fell and fired the floor and the screaming started.
The Mance weighed his choices. He could not climb back through the shattered ceiling, so his friends would have to fend for themselves . . .
A winged changeling with an arrow through the throat fell into the workshop, howling in pain, its skin smoking and dissolving . . .
The Mance suppressed his human side and engaged the animal. Think for yourself. Forget sentiment. He leaped through the widening chasm to the ground below. A large bat-winged creature wheeled above him, bow in hand, unmistakably a child of the mixing-point: an Eleusian returned.
As the fire took hold, the massacre took on a garish glow.
*
Jones steered the basket towards the blazing tree as planks and beams cascaded down. He heard unnatural cries of panic and saw the Fury soaring and diving around the blaze.
‘We’re going in, Obbers!’ he cried with martial brio, but Oblong did not hear.
His ankle, the back of his knees, his upper thighs and his arms throbbed from the chaffing of the chain and they were still too high to jump.
‘Obbers!’ screamed Jones again, and this time Oblong caught the sound and raised his head. He half thought it hallucination: a giant moth with a bow circling a guttering candle. Then he saw the falling planks and beams. How could arrows bring down such a structure?
The basket was moving at a stately pace and the primitive rudder made steering cumbersome. Despite their vulnerable position, Gregorius Jones – now Gorius of the XX Valeria Victrix, legion of Imperial Rome – elected for counter-attack. He braced his legs, thrust his left arm forward and grasped the lighter-stick – or rather, his pilum – in his right hand. Javelin time.
Oblong, below, felt powerless. He could not fight, alter course or defend himself.
The Fury wheeled away towards them, loosing an arrow as she did so. The elastic skin of the balloon had sufficient give to keep the glass phial in the shaft intact, even as the tip of the arrow pierced two of the balloon’s three chambers. The basket started falling as a second arrow struck the chain securing Oblong. He caught a whiff of corroded iron as the links sundered and he plunged into the treetops, now just a few feet below. The branches of an ancient cedar cushioned his fall to the escarpment slope.
Oblong’s departure levelled the basket, and, as it cleared the trees on the escarpment edge by inches, Jones took advantage. Achieving balance in this brief moment of relative stability, he hurled the lighter-stick. The Fury shrieked as a third arrow ruptured the balloon’s surviving chamber, sending the battered basket into a topiary hedge in the walled vegetable garden.
Jones clambered out and ran towards the blazing remains of the treehouse. To his horror, Oblong’s distinctive silhouette appeared, clambering up onto open, level ground. Above, the Fury wheeled about and closed on the dazed historian. It had exchanged bow and arrow for a stiletto in each hand.
Jones knew his own speed. He would not reach Oblong in time.
Panjan came from nowhere, a scissor-dive, claws
extended, wings tucked in. Like a crow mobbing an eagle, the pidgeboy rolled and wheeled, giving his adversary no time to settle. The Fury shrieked again, an ear-splitting cry of primal rage, and flailed with her knives, but Panjan gracefully eluded them and harried the creature out beyond the valley rim. Soon, both were out of sight.
‘The basket started falling, as a second arrow struck the chain . . .’
Jones cast an expert eye over Oblong. Grazes crisscrossed cheeks, forehead and hands, but he detected nothing deep and nothing broken. ‘Clean yourself up, Obbers,’ he said. ‘Nothing like a slap of cold water!’
Oblong, still dazed, trailed his blistered fingers through the stone water trough in the garden wall.
‘Splish, splash and no moping,’ added Jones heartily.
The reprimand echoed Valourhand’s rebuke after the attack on Lazarus Night – that attacker had favoured stilettos too. The connection shook him from his torpor. ‘I have a light,’ he said, struggling to extricate the tube from his pocket.
Jones grabbed it. ‘Stay here while I check for survivors. Keep out of the firelight – and zigzag if the Fury shows up, not that I’m expecting her. Grand display by Panjan.’
‘Yessir,’ stammered Oblong, without irony.
Jones let the tube-light fade – better safe than sorry – and loped towards the wreckage at the optimum speed for acceleration or evasive action. Split-seconds divide the living from the dead.
The smoke puckered the nostrils, redolent of scorched timber and burned flesh. Nothing approaching a room remained. Jones listened for the quickened breath of survivors, but heard nothing. He shook the light. A spool of cotton dangled from a bough; a small iron vice protruded from the ash. The Fury had destroyed a workplace as well as a home. Remains scarred the wreckage: not people but creatures – here an outsized wing-bone, there a scaly foot. Even as he watched, flesh dissolved, leaving no torsos, only extremities. Spent arrows littered the ground.
At a rustle of bracken Jones spun around.
A young man with striking looks materialised. He looked desperate. ‘Thank you for trying,’ said the stranger.
‘You are . . . ?’
‘I live here. I left them unguarded.’ He sifted through the ash. ‘We must build a pyre.’ He set about collecting the wooden remnants of his home. Jones had built a pyre to pay tribute to Ferox, better than mumbled words over cold ground. He joined in as Oblong materialised and, to their astonishment, Valourhand. Jones, Valourhand and Oblong introduced themselves.
The young man’s voice barely held. ‘I am Tyke, and these were my charges. They lived here for centuries, blamelessly binding books.’ He grimaced. ‘Do not blame yourselves. Your presence would have made no difference.’
Valourhand stepped into the firelight and produced a bow from behind her back, ebonised wood carved with fantastical heads. In her other hand she held a single arrow, the glass phial in the shaft still intact.
‘Yours,’ she said, handing them to Jones, ‘but watch the arrow, it’s armed with acid.’
Oblong had seen Jones, standing stock-still in the falling basket, his arm outstretched, aiming the lighter-stick like a spear. His throw must have dislodged the Fury’s bow and arrow, which explained the creature’s recourse to knives. And Valourhand – whose presence he could not begin to explain – had found the weapons and awarded them to Jones as spoils of war.
Valourhand’s analysis probed deeper. She discounted Jones’ length of throw – he was a PE teacher, after all – but his accuracy had been uncanny. Her presentation was as much trap as tribute, and Jones fell for it, unstringing the heavy bow in a single expert movement.
Valourhand broke a difficult silence with familiar directness. ‘How did it know where to come and why did it come?’
Jones’ stock had risen as a man of action, but not as an analyst; she put her questions to Tyke and Oblong, who half-answered the second.
‘Wynter liked omens and prophecies, and his servants want to please. We’ve had “someone will come before me”; we’ve had Lazarus Night and that “pricking of my thumbs” business, we’ve had a star in the sky, and now . . .’ Oblong stopped, baulking at the tastelessness.
‘No time to be squeamish,’ said Valourhand.
‘It’s the Massacre of the Innocents,’ he muttered, ‘or the first-born.’
Valourhand saw more than Biblical connection in this mass-murder. Wynter’s acolytes did not want the first – failed – experiments to sully their master’s return. She continued her forensic enquiry. ‘What does Wynter need to return?’
‘A body and a mind,’ replied Oblong.
‘Tyke?’ she asked, which made Oblong wince – the poor man had just lost his home and his friends, hardly the time.
Jones remained silent, working on the pyre.
‘I’m a nothing from the mudflats of London – what do I know?’
Valourhand might be drawn to Tyke, but she did not tolerate evasion. ‘You’ve met Wynter.’
‘I exchanged words with him once.’
‘Orelia told me you survived the mixing-point.’
‘Survived? I did not say that.’ I’m a freak in my way, he appeared to be saying.
Valourhand felt his calmness like a knife. Why didn’t he rail against Wynter? Why wouldn’t he say more? ‘Where were you from originally?’
‘I remember Old Father Thames and the mudflats of London,’ Tyke replied softly. ‘I remember Malise – he came in search of children. I remember Wynter. Mr Oblong is right: he needs a mind and a body,’ he added.
And both were atomised, thought Valourhand. We’re getting nowhere . . . ‘How did Panjan track down the Fury?’ she asked Tyke.
‘Panjan is from the mixing-point, so he would have sensed her.’ He paused. ‘Fortemain rescued Panjan, as he rescued all of us.’
Valourhand developed Tyke’s answer. ‘Panjan lived with Bolitho in Rotherweird, so he knows Ferensen, Boris, Salt – everyone who matters. He carries their messages. So, Bolitho gives him to Boris for safekeeping because he, Bolitho, is going to be needed elsewhere – but who else is Panjan in contact with? Who else does he serve?’
‘He serves only his friends,’ Tyke replied.
The loyalties of the poor, thought Oblong, picturing a scene of sixteenth-century estuarial decay, muddy urchins scuttling for filthy scraps in the flotsam. These denizens of the foreshore would have had their own code, their own argot, their own leader. Tonight, Tyke had lost his family.
Tyke pointed down to the valley below, where scintillas of light jostled along the Island Field. ‘Stragglers,’ he said, ‘but the gates won’t stay open all night. You’d best hurry.’
‘Ah yes, what happened? Where did that firework take you?’ asked Oblong.
‘Not now,’ replied Valourhand. ‘We’ll explain on the way.’
‘Up for a jog?’ asked Jones, asinine heartiness restored, but Valourhand ignored him.
‘What about you?’ she asked Tyke.
‘The Mance is not here.’
‘The Mance?’ parroted Oblong.
‘More dog than man, a survivor, like Panjan,’ he explained. ‘I must find him.’ He gave a shallow bow to the fire and was gone.
Valourhand took command. ‘Set the pace, Jones, but remember, Oblong is pigeon-toed.’
‘Just like Panjan,’ countered Jones loyally, giving Oblong a supportive punch on the shoulder.
As Jones ran, memories of the pilum’s versatility flooded back: you needed four to frame a hide for a tent; three for a tripod; two for a stretcher and one for a walking staff. He thought of what he had gained and what he had lost, then turned to counting his steps to oust these echoes from another life: Unus, duo, tres, quattuor, quinque . . .
Or was he in fact striving to banish the thought prompted by his first aerial view of the valley or, more particularly, the view of th
e marshland east of the river? It had felt too grotesque to be believable, but . . . A speculator had to trust to instinct, and instinct said he was right. He shuddered at the thought of a terrible secret which nobody should know . . .
Behind him, Oblong reflected on the end of the changelings and the vicious cruelty of the Eleusians. Valourhand thought only of Tyke’s remarkable dancing feet.
Jones called a rest at the foot of the escarpment. Valourhand updated them on Vulcan’s Dance, its sequel and Finch’s subterranean adventures. ‘Don’t go writing this down, Oblong!’ she concluded.
The air felt uncomfortably close, an unseasonal humidity building as if the heat of so many exploded fireworks had been harvested by the heavens to be returned with interest. Valourhand mentioned the display’s closing scene, a sky filled with spinning umbrellas, and they hurried on.
Recent History
2005. Switzerland, winter.
The clientele, women of a certain age and would-be class, come here in sleek, chauffeur-driven cars with smoked-glass windows. She takes the U-Bahn and a bus, then walks. The road runs straight, the view a layering of colours, dull green pasture giving way to grey rock and snow. The white porticoed house stands alone outside the village, incongruous in a landscape dotted with functional farm buildings. It has its own meadow, filled in early summer with blue-purple lupins the colour of veins; she knows because they crowd the brochure cover, below the cod shield and Latin motto.
The waiting room is pristine but soulless. Picasso lithographs adorn the walls: bullmen eyeing women half their age – rich bullmen, presumably. She flicks open a magazine: diamonds on a sable fur on one page, a tiny cut-glass phial on the other with a name from myth.
She is from a different universe. She wears neither jewellery nor scent. Her shoes are laced; her skirt a dull beige pleat. But she has an aura, sufficient for the receptionist not to question whether she has the right address or, if she has, the means. The expensive pen helps, as does the ornate, educated script. She writes Nona Lihni, an exotic name for such an unassuming woman.
Wyntertide Page 32