by F. G. Cottam
‘You never sent any money.’
‘McGuire was very insistent on that. You needed to be brought up tough.’
‘It was harsh. My mother has suffered.’
‘It was necessary, Adam. We’ve all suffered. You’ll get everything of mine when I’m gone. I’ve saved faithfully on your behalf. You’ll get your legacy. You would be very wrong to think it has been easy on me.’
Adam nodded. But money was not what he wanted from his father now. It was too late. It was too late also for what he did want from him. Delilah had measured his remaining time in weeks.
‘I’m going to kill Rabanus Bloor.’
‘It’s easy to talk about killing a man, Adam. It is a much harder thing to do.’
‘Have you met him?’
‘I’m tired.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes. He is not a son of whom a father could be proud. I expect you do have it in you to kill. And if you do not kill him, you will die at his hands.’
Adam did not say anything more. It grew quiet and very still in the cabin, and he knew eventually that his dad had fallen asleep. He went over and plumped a cushion for him and placed it gently under his head. Then he found a blanket and covered him. The only source of heat was a small oil stove, and he left that lit on a low and steady flame to keep his father warm. There was not much flesh left on his bones to repel the cold approach of the coming winter, but he would not live to endure it.
His dad had been little more than a boy himself when he had fathered Rabanus Bloor. So his half-brother was much older than Adam was, probably in his mid-forties. Yet Jane had said they resembled one another as strongly as twins. People did age differently in the shadow world, where they spurned scientific advancement, and probably still settled disputes in star chambers or at the point of a sword in single combat. There were spells there, and curses, and sorcerers who were not the silly charlatans and fantasists of earth. They conjured real and potent magic. They harnessed ancient power that earthly civilizations had chosen to forget about in the ascent towards enlightenment.
If he had ever thought his existence bland and boring, he did not think so any longer. There was such a thing as alien life. It had been proven to him. It was here. It had not arrived aboard spaceships from galaxies light years away. It had been here all the time, no further than a blink away.
It was hostile, but he had always imagined it would be. Whether you studied history or anthropology or zoology, the lesson was always the same. No species tolerated open competition. You fought and you won or you were vanquished. That was the immutable law of nature.
His father’s sleep was blessedly deep. The meeting with his son had been a happy one, a reconciliation in the end. But it had still worn him out. It had taken its emotional toll. It had on Adam, too. He would go back to Delilah’s, he decided. It wasn’t far; he remembered the way.
There were no doubt more salubrious venues for a few beers in Rotterdam, but in Delilah’s he was guaranteed to be greeted by at least one relatively friendly face. He had liked her immediately. Partly, he supposed, the attraction lay simply in how sexy she was, but it was more than that.
He walked outside. There was a glimmer of moonlight on the water of the creek. A derelict dockside crane cast a sprawling spider web of shadow over the quayside. A rat scuttled close to his feet. It was an ugly place, this, but at least he did not feel followed. For the moment, the danger had receded. For now, at least, Adam Parker felt that he was safe.
SEVEN
Sebastian Dray did not enjoy the spectacle of public execution. He could not see the taking of life as sport. He had no appetite for wagering on how long the condemned prisoner could elude death. Perhaps he was too fastidious by nature for it.
The Vorp was a bird that enjoyed killing slowly. Some philosophers held that man was the only animal deliberately capable of cruelty. The lesser species killed out of necessity. Any torture they apparently inflicted on their prey was just man’s fanciful misinterpretation of what was actually taking place.
But Dray had seen too many executions to think the Vorp anything but a truly sadistic creature. He was always disconcerted by its relative enormity. He did not like the carrion stench when you found yourself downwind of it. It was ugly to watch in repose, in flight and in the kill.
He was obliged to attend the executions. It was not politic to be thought weak, either in mental resolve or in the stomach, but in his heart he had long wearied of occasions such as the one he was attending today. The truth was that he had come over recent years to loathe them.
Today’s victim had been broken on the wheel during the questioning carried out by the prosecution in the court. The prisoner had been crippled. Jakob Slee had repaired the damage.
There had been nothing benevolent about the healing. It merely guaranteed the prisoner’s legs were sound for the chase. How far they would travel would depend upon the hunger and alertness of the Vorp. Terror could propel a human at prodigious speed, but the great carnivorous bird could not be outrun.
Only once had Dray seen one outfought and that, he remembered now, had been real competition.
That Vorp, a much admired and feared female specimen, had turned on its handler in a deadly attack. It had been marked reluctantly for extermination. The Crimson King himself had taken an interest in the fate of the creature. He had asked if anyone was willing to fight the avian predator to the death.
Proctor Maul had answered the challenge. Not verbally, of course. Like all the assassins marked for the cross, he was rendered dumb. But it had been made known that he would take on the Vorp, armed only with the short sword condemned criminals carried as they fled from its murderous pursuit.
Maul had not fled; he had stood his ground. The fight had been terrible. But it had been fascinating too, Dray thought, to see a man match a monster for bloodlust and ferocity.
It had not been an equal contest, but the betting had been even, despite the natural physical advantages enjoyed by the Vorp. Dray had wagered that day and his stake had been on Maul. He had won handsomely and so, he remembered, had Slee. It was rumoured that the king too had favoured the human protagonist. Certainly he had led the applause in the aftermath of the fight.
Dray shivered as he made his way to the killing ground on the drear outskirts of the hovels. It was cold and a bitter winter seemed a likely prospect. Smoke rose from the hovels. It darkened the low morning sky and was acrid in the nostrils.
In summer the hovels were busy with human industry as their inhabitants scavenged and scrapped, the urchin children of the poor playing amid the garbage piles and piss runnels. There was the consolation of sunlight and warmth.
There would be nothing there now but endurance until the spring. It was a wonder there was not more unrest, Dray thought. It was a wonder and it wasn’t. Rebellion required energy and ideology and leadership. There was precious little of any of those hazards in the vast slum warren under its pall of smoke. There would be even less after the execution that people were gathering to witness.
The crowd was smaller than usual for an execution, he thought. The most recent cull had left the population of the hovels comparatively thin. He suspected also that there might be some general sympathy abroad for the victim and that the sparse crowd might be a reflection of that.
He was obliged to pass close by the Vorp in order to get to his seat. Since it was caged he could only guess at the wingspan of this particular specimen. But its beak was about five feet long, horny and white, splintered at its edges by conflict with its own kind during its training. Its lidless eyes were the size of dinner plates and blank with instinctive menace. Its breath emerged in white plumes at ponderous intervals from twin slits above the beak. It was breathing slowly, conserving energy.
The chill of the morning repressed the stink of the giant bird and, as he slithered over patches of frozen mud on the start of the run, Dray was grateful for that. But he thought it would be difficult for a runner to gain purchase on s
uch treacherous ground, especially barefooted. The chase would likely be brief.
He took his seat in the stand and nodded to Slee. He was senior enough in the hierarchy to be only three rows down from where the stand topped out and the king occupied his solitary throne. He found the proximity of their ruler considerably more uncomfortable than the sensation of passing close to the Vorp.
The hovel dwellers behind the rope barrier on the far side of the run roused themselves into cheers and whistles and odd cries of insult and encouragement. It was the signal that they were bringing her out.
Naked, she did not shiver. She held her head high. Her bearing was regal and there was no affectation in this. She was nobly born. Her hair was still a luxuriant wonder, despite the filth with which it had become caked during her incarceration. She was still beautiful. And Slee had done his work of restoration well. She walked without the hint of a limp out on to the course.
Proctor Maul emerged from among a cluster of officials at the start to present her with the sword with which she would attempt her hopeless fight and at the unexpected sight of him, Dray thought that she flinched slightly. He heard a deep chuckle to his rear and as the hairs rose and prickled on the back of his neck at the sound, he knew that Maul’s attendance and the ceremonial duty he had just performed, was the king’s ironic jest.
Maul grinned and indulged a bow so extravagant before the condemned woman that his head descended to the level of her knees. Doing so, of course, exposed his neck and beyond the rope the crowd gasped as one at this act of bravado and provocation.
A single swift blow with the sword in her hand and she could surely decapitate the man who had hunted her down. That was the crowd’s thinking. But compared to the liquid swiftness of Proctor Maul, his preternatural speed of reaction, others moved as though their limbs struggled through treacle. And the countess of Sarth knew it.
The sword trailed from her limp hand, its point grazing the ground. She might still struggle for her life, but the cause for which she would die was dead in her heart already. Dray thought again that the morning’s entertainment would be brief. Maul rose and retreated, and at a distance Dray could not be sure but thought that as he did so he winked at her.
She was on her own. The crime of which she stood convicted was explained to the throng. The verdict was repeated. The punishment was described. And the countess began to run as the Vorp’s handlers wrestled with the stiff bolts on the cage containing her drear living instrument of execution.
Dray wondered how his young visitor of a couple of nights ago would react to this particular spectacle. In the prelude to the real hypnotism, Slee had all but mesmerized the boy with a series of small but authentic miracles at their table in the library, achieved to show him how civilized and superior they were in Endrimor to the world from which he had been lured.
He had given the boy a sort of tour before his departure. Martin had been suitably impressed. But he had not shown him the hovels or the pit of spoil from the most recent cull. He had told him about the Great Lie. He had spared him problematic details concerning the Miasmic Sea and the Kingdom of Parasites and other domestic issues.
He had said nothing about the justice system on Endrimor that was about to see a woman from whom a confession had been extracted under torture consumed by an avian monster bred for the purpose. Martin had departed in thrall to them, but he had not witnessed this sordid killing in the frozen mud of the morning.
The Vorp flapped free of its cage with a clang of juddering metal. It opened its beak wide and expelled a shriek that would have shattered glass. In the silence that followed Dray distinctly heard the fleeing woman cry out in despair. The sword clattered from her grip on to a puddle of ice. He was obliged to watch. He could not look away. If he did, someone looking at him might conclude he lacked an appetite for justice. The king had eyes everywhere and men of rank were obliged to possess a hunger for righteous punishment.
Once airborne, the great bird was upon her in two or three strokes of its vast wings. With horrible precision, it swooped and bit at the base of her spine as the countess ran, closing the very tip of its open beak with an audible snap.
She fell, face forward on to the track. The Vorp settled beside her and raised a talon to begin the flaying. Dray prayed that the spinal severing had paralysed her completely, had cut the nerves cleanly and put her beyond the reach of physical pain. But as the first strip of flesh was torn from her shoulder, she screamed and he knew that this entreaty had gone unanswered. On the cold air of the morning, even at this distance, he could smell the coppery welling of fresh blood.
Adam travelled back to Cambridge from Rotterdam after two days.
‘You’re different,’ Jane said, when she met him at the station on his return, as he had made her promise before his departure that she would.
He kissed and hugged her. Then he let her go and tried to smile. ‘Sadder?’ he said. ‘Wiser?’
She still had her arms around him. She was looking at him and the look was appraising and shrewd. It should have made him feel self-conscious, but it didn’t.
‘There’s more substance to you,’ she said. ‘Not that you were exactly lacking in substance before, but you seem to have grown, somehow. You look very strong and resolute, Adam.’ She smiled, then, perhaps aware of the solemnity of her language. ‘It’s a good look,’ she said. ‘You should stick with it.’
‘I need a haircut,’ he said. He felt very grateful for her company. He had felt bad on the ferry, desolate on the train. He had discovered that he still loved his father very deeply.
‘No,’ Jane said. ‘You absolutely do not need a haircut. You are growing your hair. I’ve decided. It’s official.’
‘Have you spoken to Grayling?’
‘I called him this morning, after speaking to you last night. I told him you were coming back. He wants to see us both this afternoon. He wants us to read something my father unearthed a long time ago.’
‘So your dad was keeping a secret.’
‘It would seem so. He said the details contained in this document will come as a great shock to me, less of one to you. It was written in Middle English. But Grayling has transcribed it into something a bit more idiomatic and reader friendly.’
‘And he’s done that just for us?’
‘No. I asked him exactly that question. He said he always thought he would be compelled to reveal the story some day, but he did not think he would ever be obliged to do so to some of his own students.’
They walked the distance from the station to the college. Adam assumed that they were on their way to learn a lesson Grayling had prepared for them about the secret magnitude of events. They walked through a light rain. Jane wore a fawn raincoat that made her face look very pale and the hair loosely framing it rich and lustrous.
She stopped walking. ‘I’ve lied to you, Adam,’ she said. ‘I had dinner with the professor last night, at his invitation. I didn’t tell him about your phone call this morning; I didn’t have to. He was there when I took it at the table in the restaurant last night.’
Adam did not know what to say. He let go of her hand and stood on the street in the strengthening rain as cars swished by and water dribbled down the shoulders of Jane’s raincoat on to the slope of her breasts. He swallowed. ‘Why did you lie?’
‘I find him attractive. He’s about as attractive an older man as I have ever met and I think that the attraction is mutual. It isn’t that, though. I accepted his invitation because I wanted to hear what he had to tell me about his meeting in Canterbury with my father and to learn about my father’s part in this mystery. I lied because I thought you might be angry, that’s all. I don’t want to lose you before I’ve even properly got you. Do you mind?’
‘I mind the lying.’
‘You don’t mind the dinner?’
‘I only mind the dinner if you stayed for breakfast.’
‘I didn’t.’
Adam frowned. Then he laughed. ‘You should see the compa
ny I’ve been keeping over the last two evenings.’
‘Picturesque?’
‘Very.’
‘But chaste?’
‘My virtue remained unsullied. Anyway, she wasn’t interested.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Please don’t lie to me again, Jane. Please don’t.’
‘I won’t, ever, I promise.’
‘We should be walking. We’ll get soaked, standing here.’
She reached for his hand. ‘He was a soldier, the professor. He served in military intelligence before his career in archaeology and teaching began.’
‘I’ve always thought him a bit fit for an academic.’
‘Old habits, I suppose.’
‘What did he tell you? I mean, apart from impressing you with his adventures in espionage serving queen and country in a fetching uniform.’
‘You sound just like Martin.’
‘He’s my evil twin.’
‘No he isn’t.’ She shivered. ‘I’ve seen your evil twin and it isn’t Martin.’
‘Did Grayling tell you much?’
‘He hinted at something pretty cataclysmic. But he said the material we’re going to read this afternoon should be looked at first. Apparently it supports some of the other claims he wants to discuss. He told me very gently but quite firmly that I can’t just walk away from all this now. I’ve been compromised in some way by that confrontation in the forest at Cree. I’m involved. He said he had been obliged to tell my father that.’
‘How did your father react?’
‘By the sound of it, he was apparently very shaken and upset. I think we’re in quite a lot of trouble. There’s something else, too. I think something happened to the professor in Canterbury. I think he was physically injured. When I arrived at the restaurant, he was already sitting there. He rose to greet me and grimaced. Then he kept touching his chest tenderly through dinner.’
‘That’s just Jane Dobb syndrome.’