The Threads of Magic

by Alison Croggon

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For all the revolting witches

  Chapter One

  PIPISTREL WAS DEEP IN THE CHOKE ALLEYS. IT WAS black night, blacker than the inside of a cash box, so black you couldn’t see your hand in front of your eyes.

  This suited Pip. He didn’t want to be seen, and when he didn’t want to be seen even a witch’s cat would have trouble spotting him. He scuttled through tiny alleys, some little wider than his own body, making his way unerringly with senses other than sight. Up and down broken and slimy steps, through courtyards the size of wardrobes where even in summer only a few shamefaced rays of sunlight ever visited, along streets that were no more than tunnels of blackened brick and stone, past windowless walls and doorways like carious mouths exhaling rottenness.

  Pip knew the Choke Alleys like the back of his hand. Better, probably: it was so long since his hands had been washed that he might have had trouble recognizing them clean.

  Tonight he was proceeding with rare caution. He’d slither into a passage only when he was sure beyond all doubt that it was empty. When the rubbish stirred and snored, some drunkard sleeping off his last flagon of gin, the boy started and ran as if a demon were at his heels. A cat fight that exploded by his ear made him jump out of his skin. If he saw any shadow that looked vaguely human, he retraced his steps and went another way.

  When at last he reached his destination – a doorway that looked no different from any of the other doorways, its lintel cracked, its wood battered and discoloured – he studied it doubtfully from a distance, and decided to use the back way. He climbed a pipe and slipped in silently through a third-floor window, and stood in the tiny bedroom that belonged to him and his sister, breathing fast, his bony chest going up and down.

  God’s nails! he thought to himself. By the Ghost of the Holy Mother, that was wild.

  There was no sign of El’s sleeping form. She was waiting up for him, and he’d said he’d be late, he’d said.

  When he recovered his breath, he stole down a short passage until he reached another door. A dim light wavered through the gap underneath it. He wiped his hand over his nose, squared his shoulders and entered.

  In the main room stood a girl maybe a year or two older than he was – fourteen, fifteen, it was hard to tell. Even in the kind light of the oil lamp her face looked pinched and pale, and her mouth was drawn down in two deep lines.

  “Where’ve you been, Pipistrel?”

  Using his whole name meant she was angry.

  Pip shrugged. He didn’t feel like a fight tonight, after all he had been through. “None of your business.”

  “Don’t you give me face like that. I’ve been sitting here eating out my heart for hours and hours. I thought you were dead.”

  “You always think I’m dead.” Pip shrugged past her and into the room beyond, and flung himself on one of the two rough stools which, with an old chest that served as a table, were its sole furnishing. “I’m dead tired, is all.”

  The girl looked at him, her lips pressed together, her eyes blazing. Her face was eloquent with all the things she wanted to say, but instead she shut the door and sat down next to Pip.

  “I don’t want to fight,” she said.

  “Me neither,” said Pip.

  They sat in brooding silence for some seconds, while he pondered whether to tell El what had happened. The problem was, he was bursting with it. He had to tell someone.

  “I’m hungry,” said El dolefully.

  “Listen, I didn’t get anything to eat. I got something else. Something precious.”

  “Gold?” said El in a whisper, her pale face lighting up. For El, gold conveyed a picture of impossible romance and adventure. One of her ambitions was to someday make her way to the Royal Plaza in Clarel, where nobles lived in airy palaces with carriages of gold and jewels in their hats.

  “I don’t know. It’s something precious, something very precious.” Pip was leaning forward, talking low. He didn’t want anyone else to hear, and the walls here were thin as hessian. “I robbed the wrong person. He didn’t look like a noble, but he was.” For a moment his voice rose indignantly. “Nobles have got no call going around dressing like commoners. Anyway, I reckon that if we play our cards with what I’ve got, we might end up eating like kings every night off plates of gold.”

  El, her anger forgotten, looked at Pip with her eyes glowing with hope. It transformed her: suddenly she seemed like an angel, with her fair hair standing out all around her head like a halo.

  Pip almost turned away. It broke his heart when his sister looked like that. She was older than he was, but he felt that he was more grown up. There was something too innocent about El. He often feared for her. Sometimes she was very like a small child, and it often took her longer than most people to understand things. But there was a light in El, the way her face would glow when she was happy or hopeful, that made your heart lift. She saw things that other people didn’t, because they were in too much of a hurry. And her word was always true.

  He reached into his shirt and pulled out a silver box. El’s face filled with awe. The silver was tarnished and it was a little battered, but she had never been so close to anything so beautiful. The lid and sides were moulded with a relief design of dragons studded with amethysts, and in the middle of the lid was engraved a coat of arms featuring a bird with a woman’s face and another dragon embellished with red gems.

  “That’s a coat of arms, the sign of the noble,” said Pip. “As clear as clear.”

  Slowly, as if she hardly dared to touch it, El reached out and stroked the lid with the tip of her finger. The metal felt smooth and soft and cool.

  “What’s inside it, Pip?” she whispered at last. “It must be something very valuable, to have a box like that.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Let’s look.”

  They caught each other’s eyes, suddenly frightened, although they didn’t know why. They stared at the box a w
hile longer. It didn’t have a lock, just a little silver catch – shaped like a tiny claw – under the lid.

  Very carefully, Pip tried to spring the catch with his grimy fingernail. It wouldn’t budge.

  “Let me have a go,” said El. She was fascinated now, leaning so close her hair brushed Pip’s cheek.

  “No, it’s mine.” He held it possessively against his chest.

  El pouted, but didn’t argue. Pip examined the box more closely. Maybe it had rusted shut. But silver didn’t rust… He took out his knife from his belt and slid the tip under the catch, but again it wouldn’t move.

  “Maybe it’s soldered,” he said.

  “You’ll have to break it.”

  Pip struggled with the catch a little more, breathing noisily through his nose, and then tried pushing the knife under the lid and prising it open. That didn’t work either. At last he sat back, staring at the casket in frustration.

  “I can’t see why it won’t open,” he said, shaking it. There was definitely something inside. He held the casket up in front of his eyes and addressed it directly. “Why won’t you let me in?”

  Pip’s hands prickled, like an attack of pins and needles, and he let out a soft curse. El looked at him enquiringly.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just my hands went all funny. Probably just because I’m tired.”

  The pins and needles were getting worse, and he put the box down to shake out his fingers. This was frustrating. What was the point of a treasure if you couldn’t see what it was?

  “Maybe if you ask it more politely,” El said.

  “It’s a box.”

  “It can’t hurt. Being nice, I mean.”

  Pip shrugged and picked it up. The pins and needles got worse when he held the box, but he tried to ignore them. He stroked the lid gently, as if it were a frightened kitten. “All right then. Please, box, let me open you up.”

  There was a tiny snick, and Pip and El’s eyes met.

  “It heard you!” said El.

  “I probably loosened something before,” said Pip. His chest was tight with excitement. He eased the lid open slowly to prolong the moment of anticipation, and they peered inside.

  For a few moments both of them were silent with bafflement. Nestled on a bed of red velvet was something that looked like a rough black stone, about the size of a small apple.

  “It’s nothing, really,” said El, her voice thick with disappointment.

  Pip was disappointed too, but he didn’t want to believe that his find was of no worth. He took out the object and turned it around in his hands.

  “It must be precious,” he said. “Why would they put it in a box like this if it wasn’t precious?”

  He tested its weight in the palm of his hand. It wasn’t heavy and felt like leather, he thought, but hard, like leather gets when it’s dry and cracked, almost as hard as stone…

  Suddenly he started, almost dropping the thing, and put it back in the box as if it burned his fingers. He slammed the lid down shut, breathing hard.

  “What is it, Pip?” El looked into his face, which had gone as white as paper. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He had thought he knew what the object was. It looked like a very old, very shrivelled-up heart, like the lambs’ hearts he had seen at the butchers, only smaller, and black and hard with age. There were the thick veins at the top, chopped all roughly, and the shape of it, the different muscles smooth against each other … a lamb’s heart, he thought, or a child’s. And as those thoughts went through his head he had felt it squirm in his hands, as if the heart was beating. As if it had come alive.

  Chapter Two

  “YOU LOST THE STONE HEART.”

  The statement was said in a flat, unemotional voice, but in such a way that Sibelius d’Artan began to tremble. He licked his lips and looked around the room in a panic. It was illuminated by a single gold candelabra that cast more shadows than light. The richly decorated walls had several dark alcoves, each of which, Sibelius suddenly thought, might hold an assassin. He tried to speak, but his mouth was too dry.

  “I said, you lost the Stone Heart.”

  Sibelius fell to his knees in terror. “Your Eminence,” he gabbled. “Forgive me. It was no fault of ours. The most lamentable intersection of events conspired to—”

  “Silence, you fool!”

  Cardinal Lamir, the most powerful man in the Holy Church of Clarel, looked down thoughtfully at the figure trembling before him. The price of incompetence was death. He would ensure that Sibelius’s was most interesting.

  “Let me reprise. Disguised as commoners, you and your companion were skulking through the poor quarters at twilight when you were surprised by a pair of thugs. Having fought them off, you found that the box was missing. It’s possible that you dropped it, but it could be that someone picked your pocket.”

  Not daring to speak, Sibelius nodded. In dressing as commoners and eschewing an armed guard, Sibelius had followed the Cardinal’s precise instructions. But Sibelius knew that reminding the Cardinal that the error was in fact his own would do nothing to deflect his wrath.

  “Having searched the area, you return to me more than twelve hours later, by which time it is impossible to put any enquiries into motion with any guarantee of efficacy.”

  Sibelius didn’t even dare to nod. There was a long, agonizing silence.

  It was often said of the Cardinal that he was like a snake. This was a little defamatory against snakes who are, on the whole, timid, sun-loving creatures that would have to work hard to attain the Cardinal’s air of Arctic implacability. But at this moment the comparison seemed more apt than usual. His thin, reptilian face was pinched with fury and his eyes glittered venomously. His black robes, stiff with golden embroideries of fleur-de-lys, stood out from his shoulders, so that he looked like nothing so much as a huge cobra, poised to strike.

  “I don’t suppose that you actually remember the urchin you saw?” said the Cardinal emotionlessly.

  “I – I got a very quick glimpse of— That is,” said Sibelius, recollecting that his life hung by a thread, “I’m sure I’d recognize him if I saw him again.”

  The Cardinal let his cold eyes rest on Sibelius’s back, which was shaking visibly. The man was probably lying, but he might yet be of some use and, after all, he needed his skills. It made little difference whether he had him killed now or later.

  “You are dismissed.”

  Sibelius shuffled out backwards on his knees, scarcely able to believe that he was alive.

  Taking up this work for the Office for Witchcraft Extermination had been the worst mistake of his life. The Cardinal had recruited him shortly after he arrived at the Palace of Kings to tutor the Princess. He had been a gentleman scholar with a modest but growing reputation when the Crown had summoned him. Back then he certainly could not afford golden buckles for his shoes. Now he had two pairs, one studded with emeralds, plus four pairs of silver buckles for second best. Yet increasingly he wished he had been able to remain in his comfortable house in the country, where he had spent most of his time staring out of the window, pursuing his research into arcane scripts and writing execrable but terribly correct poetry.

  Five years before, when Cardinal Lamir had first approached him, Sibelius had been flattered. He’d had a heady sense that he was entering a mysterious world of real power, that he would be privy to dark secrets only known to the initiated. But as time passed, doubts began to creep in.

  Secretly Sibelius had begun to wonder if the people the Office arrested and tortured were witches at all. But now he was trapped: if he refused the work, it would be considered at best suspicious and at worst treacherous. And the Cardinal, an intimidating figure even at a distance, became much more frightening on closer acquaintance. He was incalculable and ruthless, with a seemingly uncanny ability to read the minds of his subordinates. While the rewards for those who did well were enormous, the punishments for displeasing the Cardinal were horrifying.<
br />
  When the door shut behind Sibelius, the Cardinal tugged at a bell-pull. Shortly afterwards a man entered the room.

  Like the Cardinal, he was dressed entirely in black, but unlike the Cardinal his clothes were not relieved by the dull sheen of gold. He looked as if he were cut out of sheerest night. All that was visible beneath the hood which covered his head was a cruel, sensual mouth.

  His name, Milan Ariosto, was incongruously gentle, bestowed on him by his despairing mother in the few hours she lived after he was born. Since that moment, gentleness had not been a feature of Ariosto’s life. Anyone who saw him knew instantly that his business was death. When he passed people in the street they crossed themselves, even if they did not know that Ariosto was the most senior and most feared of the Cardinal’s assassins.

  “Have Sibelius d’Artan watched,” said the Cardinal. “And summon your spies from the Choke Alleys.”

  Chapter Three

  THE PRINCESS WAS BORED. SHE WAS TOO WELL trained to fiddle; instead her mouth pursed in an attractive moue of discontent and her blue eyes misted with a hazy aura of inattention. Her tutor droned on in the background, his mustachios drooping disconsolately. Like the Princess, he was having trouble concentrating on his work.

  Sibelius glanced mournfully out of the open window, through which he could hear the clack of croquet balls on the lawn and irregular puffs of laughter. “Marcus Candidus told us in his Geographica that the seas of Oceania swirl in a whirlpool around the Continentia, before plunging into the eternal void off the edges of the world,” he said. “And as we well know, he calculated that the City of Clarel is at the centre of the Kingdom of Clarel, which is itself at the centre of Continentia, and thus constitutes the very fulcrum of the world. And the Palace of the Kings is at the centre of Clarel, and the Most Royal Family of the Avergons is at the Centre of the Palace. Which makes Your Royal Personage the fulcrum of all fulcrums, upon which turns the fate of the entire world.”

  The Princess nodded absently, and Sibelius suppressed an irritation that even his carefully turned compliments could not lift the fog which so charmingly veiled those aristocratically blue eyes.