But how? She had no map and (foolishly) not even a compass.
In the event, the decision was made for her. Some way on, a head rose clear of the grass, a feral head, all pointed snout and scrawny neck, flicking left and right, sniffing the air. A spear rose with it. Flames from the nearby forest bathed it in an orange glow, and she could not be sure the russet impression was natural. The head and the spear dipped back, grass furrowing as the creature barrowed along – a Lost Acre hybrid. She followed, lightening her tread to lessen her own wake. Her quarry held a line, which slowly took them away from the forest. Despite the conditions, the creature had a mission.
She followed for a good half-hour before the grass dwindled in thickness and height. The arms of a great tree spread-eagled the sky; vines or ropes hung from an outer branch. In the air nearby, all tricksy, like moonlight on fish-scales, she saw the mixing-point. The creature stood up, and again she glimpsed that characteristic flick of the head. Closer, on more open ground, the mix was clear: he was half weasel, half man, with a striking resemblance to Slickstone’s shield and ubiquitous mascot.
Below and to the left, she caught more movement in the grass. She’d been expecting Sir Veronal to emerge, but instead the spiderwoman lumbered out of the sward. Even in near-darkness the horrifying marriage of animal and human disgusted her, much aggravated by the fact that it had been deliberately contrived. Her respect for Valourhand blossomed into admiration. To have survived a close encounter with this creature with such equanimity suggested enormous reserves of courage and spirit. Likewise, her loathing for Sir Veronal deepened – to inflict this on a fellow human being . . .
The two creatures stood beside the tree. She could not hear their conversation, but the exchanges had the appearance of negotiation, with the weaselman in control.
The spiderwoman manoeuvred her bulk into a wooden cage beside the tree, legs slipping in and out of the bars. The weaselman walked round, stooping at each side. Questions clamoured for answers. The weaselman must have the stones – but Sir Veronal would hardly release them, unless perhaps he and the weaselman were one and the same, or the weaselman was a trusted servant. When had the cage been built? How did the weaselman know where to place the stones? What were they creating?
She could not make out the detail of the apparatus, but the weaselman hoisted the cage to just below the branch, where it swung crazily in the wind, before a yank on another rope sent the cage into the mixing-point where it disappeared.
The weaselman lounged on his spear, the devil-may-care pose suggesting he had used the mixing-point before, or seen others use it. The boom swung back out. At first she saw no change – the cage and the giant spider remained intact. But then she noticed that the spider’s eyes were lower in the head, the legs more even, the thorax more as Nature had intended. And now, behind the spider, she made out two pale arms, human arms, protruding from the bars and gripping them.
A naked body slipped out, lithe, pale, and visibly feminine. With balletic grace the young woman slipped from the cage to a rope to a branch to the ground and disappeared into the darkness.
The spider, reviving more slowly, thrashed against the bars, buckling them. The weaselman waited, his demeanour now more alert. He wishes to spare the girl, thought Orelia. He walked round the cage, stooping at each side, keeping the spider at bay with his spear – re-gathering the stones, no doubt. Then he released the spider, which stumbled out, turning full circle, flexing its legs, settling back into its old self. Orelia felt a flicker of pride that her own species had been quicker to adjust. Disconcertingly, the spider did not run off; it leapt high into the dark and disappeared downhill towards the forest.
Who was the woman? How had she been lured into this monstrous partnership? She recalled the books, the mosaic of the young Ferensen and the cookery, and it dawned on her that she must be Ferensen’s sister, Morval Seer, painter for the Eleusians. But what had been her crime? And why was the weaselman aiding her release? Orelia had a burning desire to help her, but felt obliged to stay. The weaselman must hold the key to Sir Veronal’s location.
The digression had distracted her – the weaselman had vanished. She zigzagged through the grass, pausing every fifty yards or so to check for pursuit. At the third stop she eased herself up for a longer look. The blow from behind struck the side of her neck. She dropped unconscious at Ferox’s feet.
11
Hostilities Resumed
Ferensen had followed Salt’s route in before dawn, taking the gardener’s tiny coracle across to the concealed gate. Gorhambury’s key gave access to the library. As he entered, he detected another human presence – he could do that in enclosed spaces; warm blood affected the atmospherics.
His fellow intruder awaited him in the basement. ‘Miss Valourhand.’
She was almost as unseasonally dressed as he was, and they both carried sticks, although his held a long concealed blade.
‘Gorhambury has gone to the Fair. Down here, he was beginning to turn yellow.’ She paused, before adding the truer explanation. ‘I thought you would come.’
Ferensen smiled. In the set of her eyes and her refreshing directness he caught a glimpse of Fortemain. ‘Let me guess. You’re a physicist, and witnessing a world at the end of its natural cycle is not an opportunity to miss. And then there’s the mixing-point . . .’
‘There’s nothing comparable here.’
‘But you haven’t gone in. You’re brave but not foolish. One meeting with the spiderwoman is enough.’
‘I’d take the risk if you were there.’
‘You would provoke its darker half, and that will reduce my slight chances to nothing.’
Valourhand recalled the words ‘fresh meat’, the spider’s brutal rejection of its gentler half’s call for restraint. Ferensen was right. ‘I’ll guard your back then.’
Ferensen nodded. She had not fully declared her intentions but he had no time, and moral lectures about the perilous temptations of Lost Acre would cut no ice with Valourhand.
They shook hands, and on impulse Valourhand gave him a secret. ‘Perhaps you should see this. It’s from Flask’s rooms in Box Street. He appears to have copied the Recipe Book.’
Ferensen glanced at the charred fragment. In the margin a silhouetted jester danced with pointed shoes, a simple soldier and other harmless human caricatures beside him. He felt uneasy. The former historian and outsider Robert Flask appeared to have come close to a great many secrets. He recalled the empty alcove in Escutcheon Place. Finch had not suggested any recent theft. The book had been removed long ago.
‘Let’s discuss this on my return,’ he said with a wink.
‘Bon voyage,’ she replied as he stepped on the tile and vanished.
*
Ferensen did not at first register the books, the smudged footprints or even the passageway. He stood transfixed by the image of his younger self in the domed ceiling above the entry point. The tiny coloured chips of stone had caught him body and soul – a tribute, but also an anchor for his sister to cling to.
His skin took over. So much contrary data – heat in the earth, electrical energy nearby, and, his palms told him, extreme cold fast approaching: all the seasons in quick succession – autumn blown out, now only winter to go, the final transition from high fever to death. The image galvanised him. Within a few paces he knew the spiderwoman had left – twins reach out; twins know. In the kitchen the hearth still glowed, illuminating shelf upon shelf of blood and offal. Morval’s predicament screamed from those bottles –
creatures poisoned, strangled in webs, sucked dry. He opened the front door a fraction – a scene from his namesake, Hieronymus Bosch, fire and devastation, only without the monsters, at least for the moment. They would be out there somewhere.
The observation troubled Ferensen. Any creature with any sense of self-preservation would be underground. Here the spiderwoman had walls of rock, food, insulation from extreme heat and cold and potential access to the only way out. So why leave?
He dampened his right palm and pressed it on the floor, catching mostly streaks of fur and tiny feathers, prey presumably. He tried again and retrieved a single long tapered russet hair with a fleck of white at the tip. A nearby footprint confirmed Ferensen’s suspicions: Ferox, Slickstone’s kindred spirit from Lost Acre, had been here – and recently, to judge from the freshness of the spoor. The odds on success lengthened – nobody knew Lost Acre like Ferox. But what had the three of them discussed?
Back in the kitchen he spotted two tell-tale muddy lines on the floorboards, with bare human footprints between them. Sir Veronal had brought a cage – unsurprising, as the mixing-point must be his destination. But all questions returned to the same conundrum: what power did Wynter’s last experiment confer?
He released the blade on his stick and ventured outside. The cut of the ground below suggested a wider river, its course now much reduced. Debris from the forest, including a few dead bird-insects, littered the ground. Coils of sundered gossamer hung from the trees.
Even now the past intruded. He and Morval had quickly worked out that the forest held more dangerous inhabitants than the meadowland; he saw no reason to change that opinion now.
Wynter had been clever in introducing his charges to Lost Acre, allowing them to wander before introducing the mixing-point as a crude phenomenon, lacking the refinement only they could provide. Design was the key. Paint without pattern, he had said, to prepare them for the trial and error of mixing. They progressed from small birds and insects to children. The Eleusians acclimatised to failures with horrifying speed, focusing on the triumphs, all carefully recorded in The Roman Recipe Book. Nobody asked Wynter how he had discovered the stones’ ability to shape.
Ferensen, still mulling over the past, reached the meadowland before the change struck him. He had suppressed these memories because they brought to mind his sister’s fractured essence, not as a memory but a present reality, communicated by a twin’s sixth sense. Yet now that connection had gone. He still felt her presence, but unpolluted – how had this happened? Where was she now? He cried out her name without success, but his conviction of her release fortified him for the fight ahead.
He strode through the meadow, surprised, weather conditions apart, how little the landscape had changed. Even the tree by the mixing-point was familiar. He assumed it too had been fashioned there, and shared with him unusual longevity.
Ferensen took a position close to the tree. Planting his stick, he stood and half-slept – another trick, this gift for shutting down while maintaining balance. The cold was closer. Frost and blizzard would envelope him in hours.
12
Nemesis
The sun rose sluggishly, a bloated deep crimson, quickly disappearing into a wall of deep grey. The lightning had passed; the wind too, and the temperature began to plummet.
Sir Veronal’s uneasy sleep gave way to instant anxiety. His hands flew to his pockets. The stones were gone: the stones. Ferox appeared at the mouth of the cave and slung Orelia down by the fire. Gagged and bound, she could only groan.
‘You had a visitor,’ said Ferox, returning the stones to Slickstone’s anxious hand. ‘A most stealthy visitor.’
‘How dare you take the stones?’
‘I judged them safer with me. As you see, there are thieves abroad.’
Orelia frantically tried to unravel the weaselman’s words: he was presenting her as a thief – but why? She could not speak, but she could shake her head. She decided against; the weaselman might yet be a force for good. He had rescued Morval Seer from the spider, after all.
Her thoughts were interrupted as Sir Veronal brutally kicked her body round to see her face. ‘Banter’s niece – kill her.’
‘Don’t you want her to watch?’ suggested Ferox.
Sir Veronal reflected and succumbed again to that temptation to toy with his prey. ‘Maybe I would.’
‘It’s harsh out there – all the seasons in no time,’ added Ferox.
‘Let’s get on with it then,’ barked Slickstone, noting how well Ferox’s English had held up since his absence.
Here and there trees smoked like snuffed candles, their trunks split, their branches blackened. Beneath their hurrying feet, the soil, soft the night before, was hardening. Then snow began to fall, soon turning heavy, and the landscape’s distinguishing features dissolved into isolated smudges and lines marking the undersides of branches and rocks. Sir Veronal kept close as Orelia stumbled along beside Ferox, tied to him by a rope. Ferox’s step and direction never wavered.
Even in this white-out, memories flooded back to Sir Veronal, as he succumbed to the excitement of changing the very nature of things. He recalled his own immersion in the mixing-point, the punishment of the Seers, and his final ordeal, tabula rasa et exsilium.
One particular thought stirred him. Always before, he had gone to the mixing-point with Wynter who, as master of the Eleusians, made the choices and gave the orders. It was he who had delivered the children to Wynter, but his shield in The Dark Devices had no more prominence than the others. Only his lightning hands confirmed his supremacy. The other men, even Wynter, chose pets, lacking the courage to enter the mixing-point themselves. Now he alone would enjoy the mixing-point’s ultimate power.
‘There!’ he cried, sighting the upper limbs of the tree, the distinctive silhouette little changed, and soon the mixing-point too was visible. In daylight Orelia found the patch of slippery sky no less unsettling.
‘Ferox!’ shouted Slickstone, gesturing ahead. At first sight the figure by the tree resembled a snowman or marble statue, set in guardian pose, leaning forward, peering down at its spear, but in a flurry of snow and flailing arms it came alive.
‘Welcome, Veronal Slickstone.’
Ferensen! But Orelia wished he had not come – he could have no chance against Sir Veronal and Ferox.
Sir Veronal instantly regained his composure. ‘If it isn’t Master Seer, the teacher’s pet!’
Identities slipped, and at last Orelia saw Hieronymus Seer, not Ferensen. She struggled to break free, but Ferox held firm.
Slickstone looked more amused than unnerved at the encounter. ‘Remember Hieronymus Seer, Ferox? Always happy to watch, always afraid to act.’
‘My mistake was in not acting sooner,’ replied Ferensen.
‘Let me deal with him,’ said Ferox, closing in.
‘Take pity,’ sneered Sir Veronal, ‘he doesn’t even know what he is.’
Ferensen played his only card. He turned to Ferox. ‘You think he’ll let you escape – but why should he? You know too much – and you wouldn’t last a minute where we come from. He won’t take you back.’
Ferox laughed. ‘What do you know?’
Ferensen turned back to Slickstone and tried a different tack. ‘Are you sure Wynter’s last experiment works? Are you sure about what it does?’
‘Wynter bequeathed that power to me. He was ready to die, but I was not.’
Ferox lowered his spear. There was urgency in the weaselman’s voice. ‘Let me kill him, we must get on,’ he said.
‘That would be too crude at this particular moment,’ Sir Veronal said grandly. ‘He must witness this first.’
Ferensen took his chance, charging straight at Slickstone, quick for one so old – but not quick enough.
Sir Veronal raised his hands.
The lightning did not strike Ferensen, it encased him. Sir Veronal had perfected the technique long ago, and revived the skill with hours of practice at the Manor. Now he moved his fingers to create fine lines of crackling electricity that shaped together like a birdcage. One touch would mean instant death, as Ferensen
knew.
‘Now, dance like your sister did!’ cried Sir Veronal, rotating the cage and so turning Ferensen to face the mixing-point.
The taunting continued. ‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ He flourished the stones as Ferox assembled the cage. The snow had stopped, but above their heads the sky began to change again, veins appearing in the cl
ouds. Such was the urgency that Sir Veronal quite overlooked the broken wooden cage lying in the grass.
Ferox bound Orelia’s ankles and tightened her gag. Something about his expression alarmed Orelia; she could not weave the threads together. The weaselman’s ambiguous behaviour, the release of Ferensen’s sister – something had gone right, but she sensed something was also wrong. She shook her head and made such noise as she could.
The blow from Ferox, delivered hard with the flat of his hand, caught her flush on the temple. This time she stayed down, barely conscious, but aware that Ferox could have killed her and had chosen not to.
Assembly of the cage took a matter of minutes. Sir Veronal clambered in and Ferox fastened the final section behind him. Crouching, his eyes alight with excitement, Sir Veronal passed the stones to Ferox, instructing him as to which stone fitted which receptacle. They could now see the hinged boom that would take the cage into the mixing-point.
A high singing note chimed in the distance, as if ice were threatening to crack.
‘On! On!’ cried Sir Veronal.
Ferox tugged at the weathered rope. The pulley held the cage stationary after every upward movement. Sir Veronal prowled about as it ascended, peering always at the mixing-point, reaching through the bars as if pleading for its power.
Ferox went up and down like a bell-ringer, rising from his haunches to upright and back, keeping the rhythm. Orelia caught something more in the weaselman’s face than physical strain: a look of triumph, as if a long-awaited moment had arrived.
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