Darkwells

by R. A Humphry

  “Ah yes, the wild prodigy. Henry did a bad thing, you know, teaching you. We can’t undo it, but we can discourage it. Strongly. You have neither the training nor the breeding to be allowed to meddle with these things. Desist.”

  Henry saw Heather open her mouth to argue then shut it as she realised that the group were no longer in the little pub in Oxford.

  #

  They were by the side of a large brown river. After a moment Henry realised that it was the Thames. How on earth had he managed that? A barge went past and blared its horn. Bluuuurrrm. To their right was the unmistakable shape of Tower Bridge and ahead of them was…

  “The Tower of London,” Henry said in a small voice. The Raven-Master smiled at them and sauntered along the path and into the Tower. Henry noticed that there wasn’t a single person around. No-one. When would that ever be the case at the Tower? Surely there would be some tourists?

  The group followed the Raven-Master through into the inner ring. Once again Henry felt the waves of energy pulsing off the walls. He didn’t dare cast anything. The white tower rose up ahead of them and dread rose up in his guts. A pair of ravens fluttered up from the ground and landed on the Raven-Master’s shoulders. They waddled along and seemed to whisper in the old man’s ears as he walked.

  One of the birds turned and then there was a voice in Henry’s head, squawking and screeching. We remember you, spawn of Hrólfr. We knew your forefathers’ forefathers back in the ice and dark forests. How Alfred would howl to see the beaten Hrólfr’s sons striding the lands of Wessex as Lords. Henry shivered as an avian laugh cackled in his head.

  The ravens swapped places on the Master’s shoulders, the other turning to face him. We think of you, Lord Grenville, and all the works you might do. Yes, we wonder. Did his mother read the signs correctly? Or will he disappoint us after all?

  “Harrington!” Manu cried out as he spotted his family friend being dragged across the empty ground and towards the tower by two black clad figures.

  “That’s right,” the Raven-Master said in a low, unpleasant voice. “The Ranger has been judged. The Emperors find him guilty of dereliction. He is to be held in the Black Hall.”

  “Harrington!” Manu cried out again and Henry was forced to hold him back. He hoped that Manu wouldn’t try something rash. The Black Hall. Jesus Christ. A more sinister place was hard to imagine. Deep in the heart of the white tower it was an abyss that held some of the most powerful entities and practitioners for endless time. It was a timeless place of endings, where English magic had packed away its horrors.

  “The ravens will watch him. The ravens will talk to him.”

  Henry dragged his friend away with Heathers help. Message received, Raven-Master.

  Chapter Twenty Four: Seeking

  A dark purpose had settled into Manu as he watched Harrington get pushed through the gates. Ancient power or no they had misjudged his character if they thought that this would cow him. Did they not know his father? There would be no peace between him and them now; he felt it in his bones as sure as he felt the promise of his full height. His eyes, usually soft and chocolate and wide were black marbles, so dark that no iris could be seen.

  Heather was also outraged. Her natural contrariness manifested as a Sean-like hatred for what she saw as self-important elitism. She chafed against any restrictions and vowed to Henry and Manu that she would never bow her head to ‘those pigs’.

  Manu had expected Henry to step in as the voice of reason, to calm Heather down and explain, with saint like patience, how they were too small and too insignificant to take on the might of an organisation like the Raven-Banner. Manu was mistaken.

  “Fuck them,” Henry spat once they had reconvened in The King Arthur a day or so after Killynghall brought them back. “I am done with being pushed around.”

  Manu almost smiled as Heather shocked Henry by leaning over and giving him a wet kiss on the lips. “I love it when you are all manly,” she purred.

  #

  Life at Darkwells took on a clandestine air. Henry spent sleepless night after sleepless night pouring over his books by lamplight, concocting spells of concealment to keep him out of Killynghall and the other Valravens’ gaze. Manu had never seen him like this. Henry was such a scatter-gun person. His interest would jump at tangents as his diffused awareness settled on one thing or another. Now he was laser-like in his focus and the result was unsettling. Manu realised that he would not eat unless he brought him food to his place of work. He would not go to the toilet unless Manu suggested that he might want to. He ignored everyone. Fawad gave up waiting for Henry to re-appear for their study sessions. Alex stopped fishing for gossip. From the hours where class ended to the hours they started again Henry was interested in one thing only: escape from Killynghall, escape from the Raven-Banner.

  #

  “I think I’ve cracked it,” Henry croaked to him from behind bloodshot eyes about a week in. Manu was delirious himself with sleep deprivation by this point. Henry had decided that his new rituals required the use of a blow-torch and Manu was terrified that, without Watkins, Henry would burn down Princes. “I think I can make him believe I am trying to cast spells in my room,” he said proudly.

  “Fantastic,” Manu replied, rubbing his eyes. He wondered if he looked as terrible as Henry did. “But isn’t that what we are not supposed to be doing?”

  “That’s why it’s brilliant. They’ll expect me to disobey is some small, pathetic way. It is my way.”

  “Won’t Killynghall be able to tell?”

  “No. This spell is… new. I’ve just invented it. That should be quite important, I suppose. I have never invented a spell before. I’ve always just done old ones.”

  “Will it work?”

  Henry frowned at him. “If it makes you feel better I was trying for something else and it just happened. It will work.”

  #

  “Mr. Wardgrave, please read the first four lines.”

  He had been day-dreaming in English again. His mind was so occupied with Henry’s mad search through the Darkwells grounds, the desperate fate of his parents, and the betrayal of Harrington by the Raven-Banner that he had not been anything like himself during lessons. Had Alex not kicked him under the table he wouldn’t have heard Mr. Gale at all. His eyes ran down the poem.

  “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer,

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

  Manu stopped and Mr. Gale nodded in approval. “Good, good. Fawad; what is Yeats trying…”

  Manu lost the rest of it as his mind wound back to the figure of Harrington disappearing into the Tower. Things fall apart. Yes. That he could agree with.

  #

  Heather invited Henry and him to dinner aboard The Black Swan. Manu felt a little awkward about it. He liked Heather and they had always got on well together, but he clearly liked her a great deal less than Henry did and he didn’t want to be a third wheel. They also had never talked much, without Henry present as their broker.

  He felt a bit of an outsider when Henry and Heather were together. They would lapse into talking about spell-working and Manu would be forgotten in a second. It was worse when they were flirting under the cover of arguing, and expecting Manu to be a referee.

  Henry cast his diversion spell and they set off out of Darkwells. The towpath was tranquil in the early evening. The water reflected the moonlight in a silver strip and the overhanging trees swayed and rustled in the gentle wind. A dog-walker smiled and nodded to them and a friendly collie snuffled at Manu until he bent down to stroke him. The Black Swan was emitting warm, inviting light from its portholes and there was an exotic, delicious smell wafting out into the evening air.

  Heather met them wearing her apron and hurried them inside. “Come in, come in! Sorry I’ve not tidied the place,” she said as she clambered back through the door. Manu watched Henry enter then fo
llowed him inside.

  They walked into a skyscraper apartment building in the heart of New York with a peerless vista of Central Park. The furnishings were all expensive, modern, minimalist pieces and the walls were littered with framed examples of Heather’s costume designs.

  Henry shook his head. “Show off,” he admonished. “This must have taken you days. Did you use Gowdie?”

  Heather beamed and shook her head. “Balsamo.”

  Manu saw Henry’s eyebrows go up. “Very good,” he said in congratulations. “But I quite like the real boat,” he said, dispelling the illusion with a stamp of his walking stick.

  “Spoilsport,” Heather said pouting. Manu sat down on the long comfortable couch. It is happening already, he thought.

  Dinner was a Heather special: burnt sausages and lumpy mashed potato with microwaved gravy. As they ate, Heather drilled Henry on his plan. “What is it that are you trying to find?” she asked, drowning her plate in the thin, tasteless gravy.

  “The Seal of Solomon. It is what Harrington was after. It is what he said we needed to help Manu’s parents.”

  “And you think it’s in Darkwells?”

  “Killynghall as much as admitted it. It is here. If we can find it then…”

  “Killynghall will sense it and throw you in the Tower?”

  “I doubt it. Didn’t you see his face when we came back? It affected him, what they did to Harrington. He was upset, or at least as upset as Killynghall can be. I don’t think he will stop us, if we can find it before he notices. It is about getting into the tomb fast.”

  “It won’t matter,” Manu interjected. “Harrington is in the Tower. We can’t get the ring to him.”

  “Ah, but, being a genius, I have thought of this problem,” Henry replied as he moved a charred piece of sausage around his plate in an attempt to look like he was eating. “Once we have the Seal, we can break him out.” Manu joined Heather in giving him a look of profound scepticism. “I’m serious. I grant you that in normal circumstances we are talking about thermonuclear levels of power required to crack into the Black Hall, or magic of such deviousness that it exists on another plane. But with the Seal… We can use a faerie lord.”

  “Oh God,” Heather groaned.

  “Not again Henry, you can’t be serious.”

  “Hear me out! Not just any faerie lord, we can free Gwyn ap Nudd himself. We can control him with the Seal and use him to break into the Tower. The Valravens will be so busy battling the faerie host that they won’t interfere. Gwyn ap Nudd is strong enough to rend the walls.”

  “So your plan,” Manu said as he hacked into the mash potato, “is to release a hoard of murderous faeries into the centre of London.”

  “Well, yes. But under our control. If we control Gwyn, we control the host. We can instruct him on what to leave alone.”

  Manu glanced up at Heather for support and was dismayed at the interest on her face. “You need the Seal to free Gwyn?”

  “What? Oh, well, no. There are a few spells in the collection back at Hawksworth that can break the cage, with enough brute force. But that is major Spell-work, as big as anything I’ve ever heard of.”

  “So why wait?” she asked. “We don’t need this Seal. Let’s go blow a hole in the Tor. We can control Gwyn with Weyer.”

  Henry shook his head. “It won’t work. Weyer is focused on demons. Gwyn is a faerie lord.”

  “We can adapt it. Don’t try to pretend you are a master of faerie control with us, Henry.”

  “No. It is too risky. We need the Seal.”

  Heather looked on the point of arguing further and so Manu stepped in. “Tell her about the secret passages,” he suggested. Heather stopped her fork hung in midair. “Tell her about the door.”

  “Well, alright. So, I guess this is no great surprise; the ring-wall of Darkwells is riddled with secret passageways. Manu seems to have a talent for sniffing them out. We have found one that goes between the Chapel and Alchemy and another between Arithmetic and Divinity. There is also another that leads out from under Lingua towards the centre of the grounds.”

  “Are you telling me that you two idiots have been crawling around spider infested warrens looking for the chamber of secrets?”

  “You are so belittling,” Henry complained. “And besides, we found it. Or at least the door. I am pretty sure it is a door.”

  “He hates it,” Manu supplied. “He can’t open it.”

  “Yet.”

  “Have you tried saying ‘friend’ in elvish?” Heather asked, laughing lightly to herself. She paused when neither of the boys replied. “You have! That is priceless!”

  “It not that stupid, I’ll have you know. The Raven-Master hinted quite hard that Tolkien was some form of practitioner.”

  “Oh he did not.”

  “Anyway. It doesn’t work. So we are left with this huge brass door with runes all over it and no way to open it. I am still not sure if I believe any of this King Arthur’s tomb rubbish, but there is something powerful on the other side of that bloody door.”

  “I can think of nothing that could be so perfectly designed to drive Henry Grenville crazy than a magically locked door that he can’t get inside.”

  “I can’t decipher the runes, either.”

  “Poor, poor Henry. Do you want me to blast it?”

  Henry shook his head. “Reflection ward. It would tear your face off if you tried.”

  “Maybe we can get Gwyn to open it?”

  “No. I told you, we can’t control him without the Seal.”

  #

  They traded theories back and forth about how to open the brass door while Heather served out ice-cream. The topic petered out as they ran out of any useful, or amusing, ideas. They then moved on to the topic of Heather’s mother, who had got something of a promotion in the fortune telling business and was now working in a psychic call centre.

  “The number is one digit off from some sex-line, so she gets a lot of heavy breathing. She says that when she gets one like that she likes to say, ‘I sense someone behind you,’ in her most mysterious voice.” The boys chuckled and Heather cleared away the plates. She told them that it was a good thing, that it was a step in the right direction. “Who knows,” she said, “maybe we can get someone to buy this dump and we can move into a house with heating. Anyway, enough about me.

  “Manu, why don’t you ever talk about your Mum? We hear lots about your father the great white hunter, we hear about your exotic home and even your old servant man, what was his name?”

  “Arap Milgo.”

  “Yes, that’s right. We hear about him, but you never talk about your mother. Even Henry here has spoken about his more.”

  “Heather, this is not fair.” Henry warned, but she pressed on.

  “No, come on. I’m curious. If we are all friends here then we shouldn’t be afraid to talk about these things.”

  “No one asks about your father,” Henry said.

  There was a silence. “OK, that was deserved. Not much to tell. He ran out on my mum when I was two years old and I don’t even remember his face. Mum never talks about him much and I’ve never thought to ask.”

  “Heather, I’m sorry,” Henry started, “I didn’t mean…”

  “I am ashamed of my mother,” Manu declared. His two friends stared at him. “A big part of me feels shame. She is so… traditional and… and native. She is so much the opposite of everything that I have made myself. When I look at her I am reminded that the Raven-Master was right. I will never be entirely what I see myself as. I will always be partly her. I will always be just a grass skirt away from everyone’s idea of a primitive.”

  “Oh, Manu.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Manu continued, letting knot loosen itself in his breast. “I won’t ever be a part of that world either, you see. I don’t talk about her because she reminds me that everything falls apart at some point. That I can’t hide from my flaws forever.”

  “I can’t believe you think li
ke that,” Heather said. “I can’t understand what there is to be ashamed of being exotic. God knows being English is about as dull as can be imagined.”

  “You don’t understand. You all take it for granted you see. Your towering culture that defines your identity. Your all-conquering language. It is your unthinking heritage. What about those of us who have none of that? What am I to choose, the culture and history of my father which conquered half the world - or that of my mother which languished in huts and canoes?”

  Henry, who had been silent while Manu let out his fears, spoke. “We make our own history, Manu. We start our own traditions. You and me and Heather. We have more than enough to build a legacy you are proud of. Your mother made you, just as your father did. Whatever you achieve will show the world the value of both of your parent’s heritage, so let’s make it grand. We can start by opening that bloody door.”

  Chapter Twenty Five: Glass and Riddles

  Life at Darkwells went on. Manu went to his classes and attended training with a distracted discontent. Henry’s obsession with the door continued to consume him. Heather came and went and seemed to spend as much time at Hawksworth Hall as she did in The Black Swan, which had a new ‘For Sale’ sign painted on its side. She seemed, to Manu at least, to be more distracted since their meeting with the Raven-Master. There was an edge to her, now, just as he felt there was an edge to himself. There was a tension and jumpiness that he had never seen in her before, just beneath the layer of playful confidence and quick retorts. She seemed always on the brink of a spell and he fancied that he could hear the ghost of a whisper sometimes as he got close to her. His fingers would tingle as well, as if he was on the brink of manifesting his Warden abilities.

  Rugby kept his mind off his problems. The Under Fifteens were having a fine season and were on their way to a historic clean sweep. Even Manu was caught up in the excitement. A couple of wins against the oldest enemy, Sedburgh, and they would have the Darkwells record. It was a chance to get up on the honours board that hung in The Old Hall. The team picture would go up in the cabinet that sat in the Gate-house. It was a shot at immortality and Manu discovered that he ached for it even as he realised how small it was. He stared to wonder at the power these little goals held and if enough of them would make up the milestones to a well lived life. Was that all it was, in the end? The long coach trips and the treadmill of training took up much of his time he would otherwise have spent worrying.