“Maybe it’s a clue. Everything is about Light: Old Light. New Light. And the Books? He must have meant the Storybooks. Boris said a pattern was emerging. What if the Storybooks and Light are connected somehow?”
“But you didn’t do what he asked, Max. He won’t tell you any of the secrets.”
“He has to. It’s like he said. If I don’t become a Dragon Hunter, who will? We have to get back to Paris.”
“We don’t know the way. The sky’s been moving all this time. I don’t even know where we are.”
“We can ask for directions.”
“Ask who?”
“Just come on!”
They opened the moon and dropped down from the night.
Max ran with a BANG BANG BANG until he found the day.
Then he bounded about with a BANG BANG BANG until he saw what he was looking for: one of the Wind Towers, rising out of the trees.
The Wind Giant on duty was reclining in a deckchair with a handkerchief over his face.
BANG!
The Wind Giant toppled backwards.
Paris?
He was miles off!
This was the Canadian Yukon!
But that was easily fixed—the Giant let out a Wind and ordered it to Paris.
BANG!
Max followed the stirring of the treetops, as the Wind raced ahead.
By the time the Eiffel Tower appeared on the horizon evening was falling, and it was raining heavily. BANG! Soaked and shivering, Max made one final leap to the city boundaries, and hitched a ride into the centre on a turnip cart.
The wagoner was a small, wiry man with a long, pointed nose that twitched as he spoke—and he spoke almost constantly. It was a lonely ride in from the fields, he said, and it was nice to have company, even if it was a runaway ragamuffin who ought to know better. It wasn’t safe wandering around in the Woods, after all, now the Dragons had gone bad. Not that the Woods had ever been safe, but still, you knew how to deal with certain troubles, and there wasn’t much you could do against trouble in the form of a hundred-ton, fire-breathing monster, was there? Especially now the Dragon Hunters were gone.
“There’s still the Chief Dragon Hunter,” Max said, interrupting the man’s chatter.
“Died yesterday. Haven’t you heard? I wasn’t going to bother coming in. Don’t suppose there’ll be much business what with all the doom and gloom. But these turnips are in demand for winter feed. Best thing for a sheep is a turnip.”
Max huddled under the cloak the man had pulled over them. Rain dripped off the end of his nose. A dull shudder went through his body.
So that was it.
The last chance. Gone.
Even the people in the street seemed to know it. They were going about with heavy frowns. Now and again they glared at him angrily, and he could read their thoughts plain as daylight.
If you’d just dropped that tooth in the porridge like you were supposed to, you’d have got back in time. You’d have stopped the Tinker, you’d have learnt the secret, and who knows—found out about the Appearance. Now what have you got? A wagon of turnips and that’s it.
“Don’t look so glum, lad!” the wagoner chuckled. “It isn’t that bad. Me—this is my last load of turnips. I’m turning Woodcutter. That’s where the work is these days! And where there’s work, there’s money! Say—I’ll be looking for an Apprentice. Maybe you and I, we could work together?”
“I’ll get off here,” Max managed to croak out. “Thanks.”
“Suit yourself—hey, you want a turnip? You look like you could use one!”
Max jumped down and walked away, huddled against the rain. But he soon regretted not taking one. It was a long walk through the city, and he would have eaten one raw he was so hungry.
Turnips. They always reminded him of Halloween. Toffee apples. Chocolate.
Witches.
The Better Chocolate.
Turnips.
Hollowed out the head, he muttered, again and again. What was that about?
Turnips.
Halloween.
Hollowed out the head.
Turnip lanterns. Old Light.
His head was hollowed out. Hollowed out and dead.
Hollowed out the head.
By the time he reached the Trocadéro he was burning with fever. Somehow he made it up the steps. A Witch was arguing with a Wizard in the Grand Entrance. They threw up their hands when he came squelching through the entrance—they’d been at the Dragon Head dissection and recognized him at once. Doctor Peshkov? He’d been hunting high and low for him!
Stay there! Don’t move!
They rushed off in different directions.
He stayed. He stood, stood, under the vaulted roof, a pool of water forming on the marble floor round his feet. He couldn’t move, no, not another inch. Even when the door boomed open at the end of the hall and Boris appeared, half-running, he only stood and watched—not understanding how anyone could be so glad to see him, such a selfish dreamer, back from the dead, returned from the Woods.
And when the Dark Man lifted him off his feet and hugged him, he dissolved like the Squonk in a pool of bubbles and tears, helpless in the bottom of the Hunter’s bag.
The fever tore him apart.
The Dragon Fire came over him again and again, burning him, burning him, and following the fire came thousands of Imps with dark eyes. They tortured him, like a Dragon Hunter tweaking him where it hurt most. He was a Dragon, thrashing in front of a thousand Imps who were jabbing him with long metal spikes.
He was a Dragon.
He was a shark.
He was a grinder.
And there were a thousand boys with spikes…
And then he sat up, and there was only one boy and it was him. He was in a four-poster bed, the kind Queens slept in. Curtains all around him.
He crawled across the blankets, and peeked through the curtains. The room was crammed full of forest. Trees. Branches. Brambles. Thorns. Not a chink of space was left.
Then a Dragon’s head was pushing its way through the thicket. It floated forwards and hovered at the end of the bed.
“Well kid, this is it,” the Dragon’s head said. “You got to start over.”
“Do I have to?” he asked.
“It’s the only way,” said the Dragon.
“Well, all right then.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“I did it once. It’s just annoying having to do it again.”
The Dragon’s mouth began to open and close with the mechanical precision of a machine.
CLANG
CLANG
He crawled towards it.
CLANG
CLANG
He rolled into the flashing teeth.
CLANG
CLANG
Half of him went one way.
CLANG
Half went the other.
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
CLANG
Bells were ringing. CLANG CLANG CLANG—dull, iron bells sullen with disappointment. A funeral procession was moving through the city to the final resting place of the Dragon Hunters. There were only the Chief Wizard Theodore Mommsen, the High Witch Ulla Andromeda, Mrs Jeffers, Max, Boris and Porterholse, arrived that morning from London. Two Witches and two Wizards walked ahead with Roland Danann’s body, stumbling now and again on the slippery cobbles.
As they passed, Forest Folk stopped going about their business to watch, their faces showing little sympathy. It was common knowledge now. Before their migration, Dragons had gone on the rampage all over the Woods, not just in Paris. Some had even remained behind, attacking towns and villages. What defence could be raised against such mighty beasts?
What defence?
Well might
you ask!
Rumour had it a Tinker in the north had harnessed the power of electricity. The people of Gilead had become immune to Bio-Photonic Disintegration, and were keeping the Dragons at bay with New Light.
The power of New Light, here in the Woods?
That was an interesting development!
The cities were getting rather large, after all. If the Deep Woods could be cleared, the Wild Ones, not killed off (nobody was suggesting that!) but driven back—they could do with the space. They could do with the land for farms. A few more towns and roads. Why not? There were an awful lot of trees, after all. Did there need to be quite so many? A balance had to be struck. That was reasonable.
So no, they weren’t going to bother much about that Dragon Hunter’s funeral. He was a strange old fish. Kept himself apart. Never joined in. Had a good life, no doubt. Told some interesting tales, but now… well, bless him and all that, but it’s time for something new.
None of this surprised Max—it was exactly what Courtz had planned. On that first morning after his fever broke, Boris and Porterholse had sat with him to hear his story while Mrs Jeffers made preparations for the funeral. He told them about the Witch in her carriage, and the twins in the cottage. He told them about Courtz in his cave, and the escape with the Seven League Boots.
He didn’t say a word about the Dragon Fire.
He simply glided from the Witch’s cottage to the Tinker’s cave without mentioning Rosethorn. He just couldn’t bring himself to tell Boris he’d been in the Dragon Fire and still knew nothing about the Appearance.
The Dark Man had devoted his life to stopping the Vanishings.
If he found out the only way was to help Courtz destroy the Woods, Max feared it would tear him apart. Again.
Boris’s suspicions had fallen on Courtz from the moment he learnt about electricity in the Woods. Symposium expenditure was a matter of public record. On his short trip back to the World, he’d come across regular payments to a company that supplied and maintained street lamps—a company set up by Courtz himself.
After the funeral Boris planned to find the cave on Mount Gilead and confront his old rival.
Max wasn’t sure what the point was. It was too late to stop Courtz. The plan was already in motion.
And maybe it was for the best.
Maybe it really was time for the Era of Science to begin, for the Lindworm to take on its final, true form.
But he kept quiet about these doubts. All he cared about now was holding onto Martha for as long as possible.
She was fading away inside him. The pond was getting deeper, every hour adding a new fathom, making it harder for her to swim up to the surface.
And instead of sitting in a corner of Paris, in a quiet park under a tree, where he would be able to think himself down to her—he had to bury a Dragon Hunter.
The long march through Paris ended at Montparnasse Cemetery, the burial ground of the Dragon Hunters.
A high stone wall enclosed the graveyard, and they walked at least two miles along its length before they came to the only entrance—an iron door set deep in the crumbling masonry. The door was locked, but the Dragon Hunter had given Mrs Jeffers all the necessary instructions for his burial, along with a set of keys.
They waited in a silent huddle while she found the correct one. Despite the solemnity of the occasion, Porterholse was excited. Nobody except the Dragon Hunters had ever entered this door, he’d told Max several times. Nobody knew what they’d find behind it.
The cemetery, though, was just like any other. There were tombstones, statues and sepulchres, hundreds of them, all crowded closely together. Following the customs of the Woods, these too bore messages instead of names and dates, but it appeared these had never once been refreshed. The tombstones were old, the letters worn and faded:
I AM
NOT SORRY
I NEVER
RETURNED
IF YOU MISS
ME LIKE I
MISS YOU
YOU MISS ME
WHY DID
YOU DO
WHAT YOU
DID?
The words floated around them, half-obscured by lichen, shattered by cracks, soaked by rain. It seemed to Max the dead Dragon Hunters were whispering to him as he went by, and he saw behind their simple words deep sadness and long regret. All the Dragon Hunters ran away from home, Courtz had told him. He glanced over at the Chief Dragon Hunter on his litter of Briarback branches, remembering the sad story he had told of his childhood in New York. Though his body was wrapped in white cloth, the scarred face was still visible.
Do World Ones always smile like that when they’re dead?
No.
So why’s he smiling?
I don’t know…
The Dragon Hunter seemed to smile more with each step, until Max could have sworn he was positively grinning.
“What words did he choose for his gravestone?” he asked Mrs Jeffers.
“None,” she replied. “According to his instructions, Chief Dragon Hunters do not get buried in the main cemetery. They are interred in a special crypt.” She pointed to a squat circular tower in the centre of the graveyard. “That thing there, apparently.”
“I was wondering what that was,” Porterholse said. “It looks more like a windmill than anything else. With the sails removed.”
“Exactly as he described it!” said Mrs Jeffers.
When they reached the door she unlocked it and they all peered inside. Beyond was nothing more than a narrow space, and a trapdoor. A supply of lanterns hung from hooks on the walls, some dusty, some showing signs of recent use.
“This doesn’t look much of a crypt,” said Boris. “Are you sure this is the place?”
“Very sure,” Mrs Jeffers replied. “He said we’d have to go down through a trapdoor, and then there would be a door, and then everything would be made clear.”
Boris glanced at her. “Everything would be made clear? Those were his exact words.”
“That’s what the man said.”
“It’s an unusual choice of words, don’t you think?”
“He was an unusual man.”
Opening the trapdoor revealed a set of stone stairs that curled down into darkness.
Mrs Jeffers thought for a moment. “I think we’d better leave him up here until we find out what’s what. Stay with him until we send word,” she instructed the Witches and Wizards.
They set flames to the Argand burners and made their way down the steps single-file, Mrs Jeffers in front, then Porterholse, then Boris and Max, and finally Ulla Andromeda and Theodore Mommsen. At first the steps were quite dry, but quickly they became slick with underground moisture and the slimy trails of snails and worms.
“Why couldn’t they have one of those nice little crypts on the surface?” Mrs Jeffers muttered, holding her lantern before her and lifting the hem of her gown. “We must be below the level of the sewers already.”
“I’m not sure this is a place for burying bodies,” Boris replied.
“Indeed,” Mommsen muttered. “The only thing you bury this deep are secrets.”
In the stillness of the tunnel their voices sounded echoey and strange. The steps showed no sign of ending, and twisted deeper and deeper into the earth. Porterholse was emitting anxious gusts of Wind that made the lanterns flicker.
This is horrible down here.
It’s going to be even worse climbing back up.
They had grown so used to the never-ending steps uncoiling out of the darkness below them that the door, when it came, came as a shock. It was a solid thing and completely round, a cross-section of a gigantic tree trunk, the ever-decreasing circles of its life still clear in the dark wood.
It was cut from a Briarback tree.
None of them spoke. For some peculiar reason, they had all stopped to listen, holding their breath as if they expected to hear something, even this far underground.
But of course there was nothing.
They hu
ddled behind Mrs Jeffers while she bent over the lock.
In that moment before the door opened, Max felt a very strong urge to jump forward and stop her. It was as though he knew that once THIS door was opened nothing would be the same ever again. It would be better to just return to the streets, and sit somewhere in sunlight among lots of people—and above all, never, ever think of the door, ever again.
But he didn’t jump forwards, and Mrs Jeffers unlocked the door and threw it wide, without even opening it a crack to peek through.
Because of the silence, which really had been complete, nobody was prepared for the sudden surge of noise, the clamping, stamping and hammering, that burst over them.
Neither was anyone prepared for the flood of light, for the enormous size of the cavern, or for the bewildering number of small people within it, every last one of them naked, filthy and without a stitch of clothing.
Most of all, most of all, by FAR most of all, nobody was prepared for the fact that every one of these little people—of which there had to be hundreds—with their pale faces and large, black eyes, their spindly limbs and their gleaming teeth, was the dead and spitting image of Max Mulgan himself.
Nobody moved.
Nobody said a thing.
A minute passed—still they just stood there and watched all the Maxes running about.
Some kind of industry was going on, a coordinated activity in which every Max knew his place and his job. Some of the Maxes were turning mounds of leaves over with pitchforks, drying them under lanterns that dangled from long lines. Others stood at workbenches, rasping away at sheets of dark, burnished wood with sandpaper. A few stood beside long, narrow troughs that lined the walls, scooping handfuls of mud into their mouths and chatting quietly as they ate. But most of the Maxes were sitting at writing desks in the centre of the room, peacock-feather quills jiggling in the air as they scribbled away.
“By the Winds, they’re making Storybooks,” Porterholse said in hushed tones. “Genuine, bona fide, one hundred per cent original Storybooks.”
The Maxes were so involved in their work that almost a minute passed before they noticed the small group standing in the entrance. When they did, silence spread through the chamber. The bookbinders stopped carving and polishing. The writers looked up and set down their quills. Even the mudeating Maxes wiped their lips and looked round. All the Maxes put down their work, and all of them to a Max stared at Max.
The Beginning Woods Page 31