Recomposing himself, Chortley thought for a moment, remembering the story Corporal Stickler told. “How can there have been a war? People would remember it. My father would have told me, he’d have soldiers stationed here.”
“Your father, and almost everyone else who wasn’t involved in the final encounter, was made to forget, it was part of the Faerie magic. But don’t you think it odd that this out-of-the-way area has a garrison town like Crapplecreek. Within a few miles of the stones, after all. There have been several Faerie wars, and they get closer and closer to victory each time. If you let him out, there’s now no-one who can oppose him.”
Brianna’s eyes flicked across to Bill.
“What? Are you suggesting he can oppose this Faerie king?” Chortley said, pointing at Bill who wasn’t sure whether the contempt was aimed at him or the notion that there should even be such a thing as a Faerie.
Bill’s pride let him down.
“I can cast fire,” he said, “though I’m only just learning to control it.”
To reinforce his point, Bill told the story of how he gained the gift from the copper scuttle in Vokes’s cottage and how he found out, by accident, that his hands could emit flames.
“Interesting. Because I was also at the cottage, more recently than you, and I found this.”
He walked over to a corner of the room where, after rummaging beneath his travelling coat, he produced a long, smooth stick. “There was a letter with it, addressed to me, that said I was to bring this to you. You say that you received this talent simply by touching the scuttle?”
Bill stood and reached out for the staff, the tip of which glowed as his hand neared it.
“Yes,” he said, distracted. “Vokes had put it in the scuttle before he died, that’s the only way to pass it from one to the other without doing it directly.”
Chortley held the staff back. “Hold on a minute, are you saying you can choose to transfer this talent to another?”
“Bill!” warned Brianna.
“Oh, so you can! Then the meaning of Vokes’ letter to me is clear. In order to rescue my mother, I must have the staff and your power since they were plainly intended for me in the first place!”
Bill retreated behind the table. “No, Vokes left it to me, he was quite specific.”
“You were told to bring it here, were you not?” said Chortley. “Here you are, and here I am. Now, hand over the power or I’ll kill you both myself.” He drew his sword and waved it expertly at them.
“You utter bastard,” Brianna spat. “I hope the power kills you, as is more than likely. It’ll burn you from the inside, you toad!”
Chortley leapt forward with surprising speed and slashed at the space Brianna had just been occupying. She had rolled out of the way and came, unsteadily, to her feet by the fireplace.
“Stop!” shouted Bill, coming between them. “I’ll give you the power on condition that you swear not to harm her!”
Chortley let his sword arm drop. “You have my word,” he said, “and I’ll spare you also, brother, for the sake of our mother. Let’s hope she’s worth it.”
Bill sighed. What a fool he’d been. They’d walked straight into a trap set by this snake, and now he was going to take Bill’s newly found gift. It was only now, as he realised he was going to have to give it up, that he realised just how much it had meant to him - and how much Bill Strike was now defined by it.
“I’m not sure I know what to do.”
“You’d better,” said Chortley. “Or your girlfriend dies.”
“Brianna? What do I do?”
Brianna grunted. “Sorry, Bill. My life isn’t worth the destruction this monster will wreak if he has your power and that staff.”
“Then you die,” snarled Chortley, prodding Bill with the staff in an attempt to get at Brianna. Bill grabbed the staff and, in an instant, felt the flames build in his arms and explode out of his wrists. But rather than erupting, the power flowed into the staff, turning it a glowing, hot, red colour. Chortley was holding the other end and, as the steadily expanding scarlet band touched his hand, he screamed and fell back, the room illuminated in a blinding flash that floored Bill and Brianna, their hands over their eyes.
Chortley was the first to recover. Hauling himself up, he ran across to where the staff lay, inert and as wood-like as before, then picked it up and ran for the door.
“Farewell, brother. You can remain here under the hospitality of the garrison commander until I return. Perhaps I’ll bring mother here, if it pleases me to forgive her, so she can see to which of her sons she owes her freedom and life and who simply waited for another to do the dirty work. Goodbye, charcoal burner.”
The door slammed shut.
Chapter 22
It was silent in the rooms of the garrison commander, save for the crackling of the fire and the sound of a guard walking up and down outside. Chortley had locked the door as he’d left but he was clearly taking no chances, though quite what reason he’d given for incarcerating two people in the commander’s chambers, Bill didn’t know. Or care.
It was gone. He’d known it the instant Chortley flew off the end of the staff. It felt as though he was empty; a husk of a man with no use and no point.
Brianna sat, cross-legged, in front of the dying fire. She’d not said a word in the hours since Chortley had left. Bill couldn’t blame her, she’d seen the sudden unravelling of her world, and she knew better than him the likely consequences.
“We need to get out of here,” said Brianna without turning to face him.
“Did you hear me?” she asked when she got no response.
“What? Oh, yeah, I suppose,” mumbled Bill, “but then, what’s the point?”
Brianna got up and stood in front of the fire. “The point is not to be here when that monster gets back.”
“But from what you said, all hell will break loose when the Faerie King is released, so why not face it here rather than anywhere else?”
Brianna put her hands on her hips and adopted the pose.
“Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself. The minute people like us stop fighting, the end really has come. There’s three women in the gaol who need our help and, if the apocalypse is on the way, I’d rather face it at home, on the farm, than in here.”
It was as if, by trying it on for size, Brianna had decided that belligerence was, after all, the right approach. It was certainly the most familiar.
She sat down next to Bill on the commander’s bed and put her arm around him. Bill felt a warmth returning to his body and his spirits rose a little.
“Come on, Bill. Let’s think this through, there has to be a way we can get out,” she said. “Perhaps we should look around for weapons, we might be able to overpower the guard. Although we don’t know how many more there are in the tower…”
Her voice trailed off as her enthusiasm petered out.
“Up the chimney,” Bill said. “That’s the only way out, unless there’s a metal guard up there, in which case we’re stuffed.”
Brianna leapt off the bed.
“Genius!” She said before planting a kiss on Bill’s forehead. His spirits rose a little more, and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to leave just yet, on reflection.
But there was no stopping her now. Before he could say anything else, she had spread the ashes from the fire to extinguish the last of the embers before crouching and looking up the chimney.
“I can’t tell for sure,” she said, her voice echoing in the chimney breast, “it’s pitch black up there, but I think I can see the sky.”
“I’ll give it a go,” he said and, before she could protest, he’d barged past her in a fog of testosterone and now stood with his feet at either edge of the hearth. There was the smell of leather burning, and he quickly leant back onto the rear of the mantelpiece and pushed with his feet before raising his legs and stepping up the wall.
“Wow, you’re good at that!” Brianna’s voice said from the other side of the hearth.
<
br /> Bill smiled in the dark. “I’ve been up my fair share of chimneys over the years, it’s what comes of being skinny. Mind you, it’s been a while.”
He looked up, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the extreme darkness. “I think you’re right, I can’t see any bars.”
There was the sound of scraping clothes and the quiet plodding of boots, accompanied by the trickle and splat of soot falling into the fireplace. Brianna stepped back out of the way, using the time to pick up their packs and to scan the room for anything useful.
A voice echoed down the chimney: “Oh bollocks, there is a metal grid up here, probably to stop pigeons falling down.”
There was the sound of much grunting and then the painful screech of corroded metal giving way. A fresh batch of soot fell and spread a black cloud over the commander’s finery.
“Done it, I’m out!” came the echoey whisper.
Brianna waited for the last of the soot to settle and then looked up the chimney. She thought she could just make out Bill’s head looking down from above, but she couldn’t be sure. Doing her best to copy his posture, she pushed herself backwards and lifted her legs onto the brickwork at the back of the hearth, one at a time. That, it turned out, was the easy bit, actually moving upwards seemed next to impossible.
“Use your arms and find some finger-holds in the bricks and mortar, they’re really crumbly.” said Bill, his view of her being better than hers of him.
Brianna felt to the sides and pushed her fingers into the cracks she found there. Inch by inch, she was able to wriggle her way up the chimney. It took ten minutes to reach the halfway point and, at that moment, she lost heart.
“I can’t do it,” she said, “I just don’t have the strength.”
“You have to,” Bill said. “Just do it a bit at a time, I’ll be able to help once you’re closer.”
She puffed and panted her way up a few more feet, but Bill could see she was totally exhausted. Climbing a chimney, it seemed, used a set of muscles Brianna hadn’t known existed. She looked as though she was going to give up, so Bill, in a flash of inspiration, yanked the belt from his trousers and dropped the buckle end down the chimney.
“Hold onto this and I’ll pull,” Bill said, his voice not betraying his fear that, at any moment, his trousers would drop, and there would be two moons in the sky that night.
Brianna grabbed the buckle in both hands and used it to take her weight while her feet walked up the wall. She had to squeeze through the remnants of the bird grid but, in the end, and totally exhausted, she finally emerged into the fresh night air.
Bill hugged her impulsively, and they stood there for a moment before realising they were in full view of the garrison.
“This way,” said Bill, getting down on all fours and crawling along the apex of the roof. When he reached its edge, he looked down. It was a long drop.
“So that’s why they didn’t bother with iron bars in the chimney,” said Brianna, gazing into the darkness below. “If anyone tried to take the tower, it’d be a whole lot easier to break down the front gate than to climb up here.”
Bill scanned the skyline. He could see the basilica and forum illuminated by guttering torches and knew that the gaol was on the other side.
“Look,” he said, pointing down. There was a large and ancient tree, growing in a courtyard alongside the tower, “we’ll climb down the drainpipe until we can transfer across into that tree there.”
Brianna peered into the gloom. “That’s insane. One slip and we’d fall thirty feet.”
“I don’t see any other way down, I wouldn’t want to go all the way on the drainpipe - it’s too likely to give way and, in any case, I don’t fancy emerging right outside the tower.”
Nodding, Brianna said. “The whole of the past week has been insane, so I suppose we might as well risk it. What’s a broken bone, or ten, between friends.”
Taking this for assent, Bill planned his descent. Crawling to the edge of the roof nearest the tree, he grabbed the corner gutter and gave it a tug. Good, strong, iron. If a little rusty.
“Right,” he said, “here goes nothing.”
He swung his leg over the edge, rotated onto his front, and dropped.
Rupert Rupert de Chesterton’s mother had harboured ambitions for him. She’d given him a name that would not be ill-suited to an important official in the highest royal courts, even adding the “de” to lend a Varman air to an otherwise low-born boy, and it never hurt to have two first names, even if they were the same. To her delight, he had embarked on a career in the Uncivil Service and, in her imagination, he was even now working his way up the hierarchical ladder towards his destined high position.
In reality, however, Rupert was more used to the slimy steps of the prison stairway than any metaphorical ladder. And his ascent hadn’t so much halted as, in fact, never started. Luckily, his career had taken him far from home, so he was able to keep his mother happy with letters containing stories of meetings with important courtiers (they were always asking his advice) without fear of being discovered. Which was just as well because tonight his duties consisted of feeding three strange women in a cell on the lowest level of the gaol. As it happened, he didn’t mind much. He enjoyed taunting them and one of the three was an absolute cracker. Unlike his mother, Rupert’s ambitions for himself were limited to doing as little as possible and indulging in silly buggers from time to time.
He reached the bottom of the steps carrying a wooden tray on which sat three bowls of gruel. Being a “cheeky chappy”9, he’d hidden the various hind parts of a rat he’d found in the kitchen, within the already foul mush. He was looking forward to waiting at the top of the steps for the first screams. Ha, this was the life!
Rupert looked into the cell before reaching for the key at his belt. As the lowest floor of the gaol, it was mandatory to have only minimal lighting, but he could see the three of them, sitting together, at the far end of the rough-hewn room.
“Stay over there,” he said as he turned the key in the lock and swung the door open. In truth, he didn’t need to come in, but he wanted to get a look at the beauty as he was certain she’d given him the come-on last time he brought them food. He wanted to be sure to give her the right bowl - the one that didn’t contain rodent genitals or tail - since he suspected their discovery might damage his chances.
He edged into the cell, one hand carrying the tray, the other resting on the knob of his truncheon. Yeah, she was there alright - he’d noticed that when she moved her head, her hair caught whatever light there was and it seemed to shimmer. In the half-light, she seemed to be getting to her feet.
“Have a care, lady,” he said in his most masculine voice, “come and take this tray, but no sudden movements.”
“Of course, sergeant,” she said, prettily, as she stood upright and began to move towards him.
Sergeant, ay? It must be his natural authority, he thought, watching her closely.
“You forgot your spoon,” said another voice from the corner. One of the old crones, thought Rupert, and gave her no more thought.
“Silly me,” the beauty sighed. She turned and went to stoop to pick something up when, with a shriek, she fell forwards. There was a flurry of legs, arms, clothes and, yes, perfectly round buttocks.
Rupert’s universe, in that instant, contained nothing but those half visible, sacred orbs.
In the next instant, his universe contained nothing but pain.
“Take that ya gogglin’ pervert,” said a voice from behind him, a voice that belonged to the foot that had appeared between his legs. “What’s the macker? Has my boot in your knackers taken all the backle out of you?”
Rupert was doubled over, belatedly protecting his crown jewels when he was hit by the flying body of Jessie Hemlock who tackled him to the ground. Someone else, the beauty with the perfect arse, he supposed, flipped him over to his front and tied his hands together. As a final indignity, something silk was wrapped around his mouth and tied at the back
, so he couldn’t make a sound. He was set on his back and looked up at the beauty, her cheeks red with, he assumed, embarrassment.
“Did we have to use my knickers?” she asked one of the others.
“Well, they were already off, weren’t they?” sniggered the one who’d floored him.
Rupert sank back and decided to inhabit the moment. In a few minutes, half an hour at most, he’d be discovered by another guard, and the current discomfort in his privates would be as nothing to the punishments that would be meted out by his superiors.
But, for right now, he pondered, as the three women scampered off, he was lying on his back, tied like a hog, with the drawers of the most beautiful woman in the world stuffed in his mouth. He knew plenty of higher-ups who’d pay for this kind of thing.
He drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes.
Chapter 22
Percy the horse hurtled through the countryside as dawn spread across the horizon. His main ambition was to arrive at his destination as soon as possible so the man on his back would get off. Being a horse, Percy didn’t possess any psychiatric qualifications, but he could recognise bat-shit crazy when it climbed into the saddle.
Chortley flattened himself on the horse’s back. The creature, technically the property of the garrison commander at Crapplecreek, had seemed the ideal choice when brought out to him earlier in the night. Pale as a ghost and fit as a fiddle, Percy had seemed up for a ride at speed into the countryside but, as the journey had gone by, the horse had become increasingly agitated, as had Chortley himself.
He’d felt the power flow into him as soon as his idiot brother had grasped the staff. It had warmed every vein in his body and filled his mind. He could only imagine how empty and cold his half-brother must be feeling now. To begin with, this power had left him energised, almost bouncing off the walls. He’d felt as though he could run anywhere, do anything, but his rational mind had stopped him before he left Crapplecreek and he’d gone back to the garrison tower to borrow the commander’s horse.
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