‘Stand down,’ Blue ordered firmly. The dagger, if nothing else, might have triggered an attack, but the demons would not move now unless she was directly threatened.
Although the runner could not possibly have seen her, he swerved to stop a few discreet yards away. Light alone knew how far he had come, but he was not even breathing heavily. His eyes gradually lowered and regained their spirit; then he sank to his knees. ‘Majesty,’ he said, extending his dagger, hilt first.
Blue took the weapon. The gesture was symbolic of the fact that the Guildsman meant her no harm, but it was more than that. Deftly she unscrewed the top of the dagger and shook a scrap of parchment out of the hollow hilt. There was a moment as the embedded security spells sensed her essence; then the parchment expanded into a standard Palace message scroll.
As Blue began to read, her eyes widened in sudden alarm.
Six
Since coffee had a psychedelic affect on faeries, Henry brewed them all a pot of tea. Nymph stared into her mug with suspicion, but Pyrgus had had it before and drank his in great draughts as he explained.
‘The Faeries of the Night organise their own health services and I’m afraid there still isn’t much communication between theirs and ours. Not that I think it would have made much difference. I can’t see why our people would have spotted anything amiss either. The very first case, the first one we know about anyway, was a kid called Jalindra and everybody thought she’d just caught the horse-sniffles. All Cretch kids get horse-sniffles sooner or later and the early symptoms are similar.’
Mr Fogarty, while he was still in residence, had amassed a peculiar assortment of mugs. The one Henry had given to Pyrgus featured a flock of poultry listening intently to one of their number who was singing. The title of the picture, running underneath the rim, was The Bantam of the Opera. He watched as Pyrgus set it to one side and went on seriously. ‘Jalindra was four years old when she caught the bug. A year later she was a middle-aged woman. Six months after that she was dead.’ He stared down at the table top and added, ‘From old age.’
‘We have that here,’ Henry said. ‘Premature aging. It’s called …’ He searched his memory for the name and surprised himself by finding it. ‘… Werner’s Syndrome. There was something about it on telly a couple of weeks ago. It’s a gene thing apparently. The youngsters never grow very much and they go grey and wrinkled while they’re still children and they get old people’s diseases like heart attacks and cataracts and they all die young.’ He set his own mug to one side. It had a fish motif below the words Cod Moves in Mysterious Ways.
But Pyrgus was shaking his head. ‘Not the same thing. This one has been spreading through the population. Not just Faeries of the Night, either. Faeries of the Light as well.’
‘Like Pyrgus,’ Nymph put in.
Henry became aware of a tightening in the pit of his stomach, as if he’d suddenly begun to feel afraid. Which he had. He didn’t want Pyrgus to have some ghastly disease that reduced his lifespan to eighteen months. He glanced at his friend and realised suddenly he now looked far more like his father, the old Purple Emperor, than he did like the boy Henry had known. It was creepy as well as scary. Henry said hesitantly, ‘But you’re not …? I mean, they’ve found a cure, haven’t they? You’re not, like – ’ he gave a sudden, very false laugh ’ – going to die or anything?’
‘No, he’s not,’ said Nymph firmly.
Henry looked at her. He didn’t like the fact she was the one who’d answered him. But before he could say anything else, Pyrgus was talking again. ‘Let me tell you the whole thing, Henry,’ he said easily. ‘It’s a bit tricky and I want you to understand.’
Understand what? Llenry thought. But he only said soberly, ‘Go on.’
Pyrgus said, ‘This isn’t a disease like anything we’ve ever seen in the Realm before. It isn’t in the medical records, and there’s nothing like it in our history. It started in the Cretch with poor Jalindra and moved outwards. It was a very slow spread at first. The healers thought it was a rare condition and didn’t pay much attention. Actually – ’ He stopped suddenly and licked his lips.
‘What?’ Henry asked.
A look of embarrassment crept over Pyrgus’s face. ‘To be honest, in the early days nearly everybody thought it was a Faerie of the Night disease – only Faeries of the Night could get it. Because that’s the way it looked.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘There’s still a lot of prejudice against Faeries of the Night. Blue’s doing all she can, but you can’t really make up laws about that. It all comes down to the way people think. And you can’t really blame them for being prejudiced against Faeries of the Night after all the stuff Hairstreak did.’
‘No,’ Henry agreed. He was a bit prejudiced against Faeries of the Night himself.
‘Anyway,’ Pyrgus said on a whistling out-breath, ‘by the time we did start to take it seriously, by the time Faeries of the Light started to get sick, it had spread too widely for us to tackle the problem by isolation. So the healing wizards had to study it properly and what they found out was weird.’
‘Really weird,’ Nymph said with emphasis.
Pyrgus leaned forward. ‘The thing is, Henry, this disease doesn’t just make you look old, or mess up your body so you go wrinkled and grey. The healers are calling it TF – temporal fever. It actually interferes with time. You start to live your life faster than you should.’
Henry blinked. ‘I don’t think I followed that.’
Pyrgus sat back in his chair again. ‘No, it’s not all that easy. Look, imagine you caught it from me – ’ He noticed Henry’s expression and added quickly, ‘Which you can’t; I’ll explain why in a minute. But imagine you had it now. Every so often, you’d come down with bouts of fever. Then you’d sink into a coma. We’d put you to bed and wait for you to come out of it and if it lasted for more than a day or so, we’d watch you getting older. That’s what happens from the outside. But inside – what you experience – it’s completely different. You don’t know you’re lying in a bed at all. Once the coma starts, everything around you suddenly speeds up. You find yourself thinking and doing things at breakneck speed. If you’d planned to go away on holiday tomorrow, that’s what you’d do. And you’d race around doing holiday stuff, but instead of it all taking weeks, it would all be over in a few seconds. You see?’
‘Yes …’ Henry said uncertainly. ‘Actually, no.’
‘You start living your life very fast. Then after a while it stops and you’re jerked back to the present and you’re in bed recovering and you start living again at the normal rate. Except you’ve aged by whatever number of years you’ve already lived. The fever has burned up your future.’
After a moment, Henry said, ‘So you come back remembering the future? You know what’s going to happen to you?’
Pyrgus chewed his lip. ‘Yes and no. It’s all a bit of a blur – even while it’s going on. But the thing is, the future you remember is burned up. You won’t live it, because you already have. Are you following?’
Henry blinked and said nothing. After a moment Pyrgus said, ‘What can happen, if you’re lucky, is you might pick out a detail or two about other people’s futures or what’s going on generally. But only where it touches your own personal future and you’d be surprised how little that is. I mean a big war in the Realm could pass you right by if you didn’t happen to be in it. Most people don’t remember enough to be useful.’ An odd expression crossed his face. ‘Most people …’
They sat looking at each other. After another moment, Henry said, ‘And this is what you’re going through?’
‘Was,’ Pyrgus said. ‘Was going through. The effect stops when you’re in the Analogue World. That’s why I said you couldn’t catch it from me. The disease goes dormant here. You don’t have the symptoms and you can’t pass it on.’
‘So that’s why the two of you are in my world?’ Henry said.
‘Yes,’ Nymph said. ‘Blue’s idea was that we wait it out until somebody finds a
cure.’
Henry grinned. ‘And that’s why you came to see me?’
But Pyrgus didn’t grin back. He shook his head. ‘We came to see you because Mr Fogarty is dying.’
Seven
The fear was back and this time it was much worse than it had been when he was worried about Pyrgus. ‘He can’t be!’ Henry said. But he knew Mr Fogarty could very well be. He might look tough as old boots, but he had to be nearly ninety. The reality was a lot of old people fell off their perches long before that. Not that reality would stop Henry going into denial. ‘He can’t be,’ Henry repeated. ‘What about his treatments?’ Mr Fogarty was getting rejuvenation spells from Palace wizards in the Faerie Realm. They were supposed to rebuild the vital organs. At the time they started, Henry frankly hadn’t noticed much change in Mr Fogarty’s appearance, but Madame Cardui had once remarked the treatments made him ‘frisky’.
Pyrgus ignored the question. ‘He’s caught the disease, Henry. He’s got TF.’
‘You said humans couldn’t get it!’ Henry snapped accusingly. He pushed his chair away from the table and began to walk nervously around the kitchen, his eyes suddenly moist.
‘I said the disease goes dormant in the Analogue World: it doesn’t seem to exist here,’ Pyrgus told him patiently. ‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘You see,’ Nymph said gently, ‘TF uses up your future. Young people have a lot of future to use up. But Mr Fogarty hasn’t. At his age it can’t be more than a few years, even with rejuvenation treatments. It’s what Pyrgus told you, Henry – bouts of fever, except the fever burns up time. When you’re young, you can afford several bouts. When you’re eighty-seven, like Mr Fogarty …’
‘How many has he had?’ Henry demanded.
‘Just two,’ Nymph said. ‘But they’ve left him very old and very weak. He can’t get out of bed.’
‘But he could recover,’ Henry said desperately. ‘I mean, he’s basically very strong and with spells and things …’
‘Another bout will kill him,’ Pyrgus said bluntly. ‘Even without one I don’t know how long he can last.’
Henry stared at them. He hadn’t laid eyes on Mr Fogarty for the past two years, but somehow that didn’t matter. Just as it didn’t matter that Mr Fogarty was difficult and cranky and paranoid and awkward. He loved the old man and it was only at this moment he realised just how much. ‘Then you must get him here!’ he said suddenly.
Pyrgus, the older, mature, greying Pyrgus, stared at Henry almost sorrowfully.
‘Come on,’ Henry said eagerly. ‘It’s obvious. You bring him back home, back to the Analogue World. Then he won’t have any more bouts. He can do what you’re doing and just wait here for a cure.’ Some of his eagerness died down. It was obvious – too obvious. They must have thought of it already.
‘He won’t come,’ Nymph said.
‘Then make him!’ Henry shouted. ‘What’s wrong with you? Just send him back!’
‘Have you ever tried to make Mr Fogarty do anything he didn’t want to do?’ Pyrgus asked.
Henry jerked his chair out and sat down again. He leaned across the table. ‘Wait a minute. Why won’t he come back? He’s still got his house here. He’s still got his cat. I can look after him.’ And bog university, he thought.
‘We don’t know,’ Pyrgus said. ‘It’s not somewhere to live, that’s for sure. Even if he didn’t want to come back here –’ he glanced around the gloomy kitchen ‘– he could stay with Nymph and me. Or we could buy him a mansion if he wanted. Gold goes a long way in your world, Henry. But he won’t come and we don’t know what’s going on inside his head.’
‘Have you tried to find out?’ Henry demanded.
For the first time, Pyrgus showed signs of losing patience. ‘Of course we’ve tried!’ he snapped. ‘Don’t you think I care about Mr Fogarty? If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have been dead years ago.’
‘Pyrgus delayed leaving the Realm himself to try to persuade Mr Fogarty to come too,’ Nymph said. ‘It cost Pyrgus another five years of his future.’
Henry seemed to collapse in on himself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Pyrgus – that didn’t come out the way I meant it to. Of course you’ve all done your best.’
‘We have,’ Pyrgus said. ‘The thing is, he might pay more attention to you.’
He never has in the past, Henry thought. Aloud he said, ‘You want me to go back to the Realm?’
Pyrgus nodded. ‘Yes. I can’t go with you – once I get back to my world the disease reactivates. But Nymph will make sure you get there safely.’ He looked at Henry expectantly.
And there it was, all laid out in front of him. Return to the Realm. It was something he’d thought about dreamed about – for the past two years. But how could he go back? How could he face Blue? He could feel the hideous embarrassment rising in him even now and prayed his face had not gone crimson. He wondered if Pyrgus knew that Blue had wanted to marry him. He wondered how Blue felt about that today. He wondered how he’d been such an idiot, such a coward, to run away. He couldn’t go back, not if it meant seeing Blue again; and it had to mean seeing Blue again. There was no way he could go back.
‘The other thing is,’ Pyrgus was saying, ‘he wants to talk to you.’
‘Mr Fogarty,’ Nymph said, as if Pyrgus’s words needed clarification. ‘He’s been asking for you.’
‘Has he?’ Henry asked foolishly. It tumbled through his mind that Mr Fogarty might want to sort out legal stuff. His will, or what to do with the house or whatever. Except he’d already done all that; and besides, there was absolutely no need for Mr Fogarty to die now, not when he could just come back and wait for a cure the way Pyrgus was doing. Surely even Mr Fogarty couldn’t be batty enough not to realise that?
‘There may not be a lot of time,’ Pyrgus said soberly. ‘Is it possible for you to go straightaway?’
Of course it wasn’t possible to go straightaway. He had school and exams and his mother and the business with Charlie, such as it was, and besides, there was absolutely no way he could ever face Blue again, not after what had happened.
Henry squeezed his eyes closed. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Eight
She could see the splash of blue on the Palace steps even before she landed the flyer. Chief Wizard Surgeon Healer Danaus was waiting for her in his full regalia, which meant the message was true – although she’d never doubted that for an instant – and suggested the situation might even have grown worse.
Blue slid from the craft and ran across the lawn. Her demon guards took wing to keep up with her. Danaus hurried down the steps to greet her. He was a big man, shaven-headed and overweight, but he managed to move nimbly with speed, so that they met by the rose bower. Danaus bowed deeply, a little out of breath. As he straightened, he glared at her flanking demons with distaste. They stared back at him impassively, their red eyes unblinking.
‘Is he …?’ Blue asked anxiously.
‘Another bout of temporal fever, Majesty,’ Danaus said. He was one of the old school who had been trained never to look a royal in the eye, so his gaze was trained on a spot beyond her right ear. It gave him a curiously shifty look, but Blue would have trusted his judgement anywhere, particularly in matters of medicine.
‘But he’s not …?’ she asked again, softly.
Danaus shook his head. ‘He still lives, Majesty. But I fear …’
‘Not long?’
‘No, Majesty.’
‘Is he in pain?’
‘No, Majesty.’
‘Can you do anything for him?’
‘We have introduced support elementals into his blood. They have raised his energy levels slightly. He continues to refuse stasis. Apart from pain control, there is nothing else we can do. I fear a cure for the condition eludes us. And even if one were discovered tomorrow ’ He hesitated.
‘You think it might be too late?’
‘Yes, Majesty.’
‘I want to see him,’ Blue said.
A pained
expression crawled across Danaus’s fleshy features. ‘Majesty, his condition has deteriorated considerably since his second bout of temporal fever. I fear the sight of him might prove distressing to Your Majesty …’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Chief Wizard Surgeon Healer,’ Blue said shortly, ‘but I still want to see him.’ Before he could protest further, she swept past him to hurry up the steps of the Palace.
As they followed in her wake, one of her guardian demons, perhaps sensing her dislike of the man’s pomposity, turned round to bite him in the bottom.
There were flowers in the sickroom, but the place smelled of old age and decay. Mr Fogarty was sitting up in bed, propped by a mountain of pillows. Madame Cardui was seated in a chair beside him, holding his hand, but apparently asleep. Despite the Surgeon Healer’s warning, Blue was shocked by his appearance. He’d always been a thin man, but now he was cadaverous. His skin stretched parchment-thin across his skull, his lips were drawn back over discoloured teeth and his eyes looked huge, yet sunken. She could count no fewer than seven glass containers of healing elementals on the shelf above his head. The creatures swam down translucent tubes to enter his body at the top of his spine. She suspected they were the only things keeping him alive.
All the same, his voice sounded strong as he shook Madame Cardui’s hand and said, ‘Wake up, darling Queen Blue’s here.’
Madame Cardui’s eyes jerked open. After a moment of obvious disorientation, she scrambled to her feet. ‘Oh, forgive me, my deeah – I must have nodded off.’ She gestured to the chair she’d just vacated. ‘Please sit down, Your Majesty.’ Some of the spirit returned to her eyes and she added, ‘Perhaps you can talk some sense into this old fool.’
‘Do sit, Madame Cynthia,’ Blue said. Although her spymaster hadn’t contracted the temporal fever, she was looking almost as old as the Gatekeeper. She must be worried out of her mind about losing him. To Mr Fogarty, Blue said, ‘How are you, Gatekeeper?’
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