by F. G. Cottam
The southern latitudes brought no increase in warmth. The count had provided me with a cloak of something that resembled sable and fur-lined boots and gauntlets. The steel of a helm would have frozen to the flesh of my face in such conditions and a sword been stuck useless in its scabbard by the frost, but I rode warm enough with a hood of fur about my head and a heavy blanket for the sturdy steed I rode. So hard was the frozen ground that when we travelled at dusk I saw sparks brightly struck about our progress by her iron-shod hooves.
The city, when I reached it, was ice-bound. In character it reminded me of the great cities of antiquity described in scholarly books. The vaunting dimensions of its surrounding wall and principle buildings gave the whole a cold and haughty grandeur. It lacked entirely the populous bustle of a great metropolis. At the edge of its frozen sea, the great waves paused and petrified beneath the harbour wall.
They had games in Salabra, martial in character, somewhat resembling the gladiatorial spectacles of ancient times. My strategy was to achieve prominence in these, all the time encouraging a rumour concerning my prowess and the reason for my successes. I duly entered the lists and distinguished myself.
My manner and tone, my voice and appearance, marked me by now as an Endrimorian of northern extraction. I passed with ease and conviction.
My opponents were successively more skilled and testing. My notoriety grew. The nobles of the court attended. After a dozen combats the Crimson King himself was drawn to the arena, curious to watch me. I had beaten all of their champions but one and the king rose to acclaim my skill. I bowed deep in secret mockery and it was announced I would fight, if I would agree to the match, a man called Edgar Maul.
‘It will please me to kill him,’ I said, the first true words I had uttered since entering the city. ‘The man has yet to be born who can defy the power of my sword.’
I am no friend of rhetoric. No sword is mightier than the arm that wields it, not even Arthur’s Excalibur, the legend of which was the inspiration for my scheme. But this was my plan: to make them believe that my sword was possessed of magical properties so potent that Slee himself would be curious to examine the weapon and question me on its power and provenance.
I prayed on the night before the duel. I had seen this Edgar Maul. Brooding and gigantic, he was like the city of Salabra made flesh, the muscles shaping his physique as sculpted and solid as marble itself. I did not fear him. I did not in truth fear death. I feared only failure. I prayed for the souls of my dead family and I prayed too for success on the morrow.
The arena was full. The air was raw with cold. It made sound brittle as the shouts of the spectators rose in it to encourage their man. I looked at the cobbles, sanded to absorb the gore, and thought that it would be a desolate place for a man from my world to die. No lonelier or more forlorn spot could be conceived, I thought, gripping my sword and gathering my strength within me for the fray.
He came at me boldly with a battleaxe between his brute fists. I have never encountered a man stronger but he was subtle also, carving at the air with short sweeps to limit the space allowed for counter-blows.
He was expert with the weapon, agile and quick, a smile like a leer stretching his mouth in relish as he fought, drawing first blood with a cut to the shoulder so powerful I could only half-parry it, steel clanging in collision on honed steel, my blood dripping down about our capering feet, sparks struck as we engaged our violent craft.
There is about a duel something similar to debate. It is an engagement, a dialogue that becomes more fluent the more skilled the two participants are. But it was not like that with Edgar Maul. It was more in the nature of trying to endure a tempest. I was bloodied after five minutes. In ten I was tired. I had never been obliged to fight at such a pace only to avoid the sundering of my own limbs.
The sword was lead in my grip and his two-headed axe the raging of a metal storm about me. He struck again, slicing open my right side, and stepped back to admire the work before closing for the kill.
The mind dictates what the body responds with in emergency. And in that brief moment of respite I pictured in my mind my daughter dead and unresponsive in my loving arms and found the venting fury of revenge from somewhere in me.
It roared and bellowed out of me and in this rally Maul withered under a ferocious rain of blows as I fought possessed by hatred, mad with it, filled with appalling strength, finishing him with a side-swipe that cut the shaft of his blocking weapon clean in half before burying my blade so deeply in him it stopped against the juddering bone of his spine.
He sank to his knees, trying to put back the guts spilling out of him, bright and blue in the cold air, with both hands. The expression on the large face under his shaven head was curious. He had not expected to lose this fight.
I freed my sword from him and as he knelt there on the cobbles used it to part his head from his body cleanly at the neck with my final blow of the morning. Blood gushed steaming from the great wound and I felt the heat of him dissipate as his life ceased.
The crowd was entirely silent. Pain from my own wounds began to throb through me. I skewered Maul’s head on the point of my sword and held the weapon high. This last was a gesture for Slee to observe and for him to ponder on.
The sword was taken from me as my wounds were dressed. I did not think to try to recover it. The mechanics of its confiscation were of no interest to me. I knew to whom it would have been delivered. I made for the lodgings I had taken as the scant population of that great marble mausoleum of a city pointed and stared at me.
I was sore and weary, and the recent, vivid memory of the daughter lost to me had brought a great, melancholy emptiness upon me. I took no pride in my victory over Edgar Maul. He was an obstacle removed from my path. No more.
The summons came on the afternoon of the following day. I was to present myself at court. Hieronymus Slee would receive me in his chambers. There were questions he wished to learn the answers to. I was not made aware by the herald of what subject they might concern. I thought I knew but it mattered not.
The audience was the thing. All that mattered to me was the alchemist’s proximity. I speculated on how he would appear. I could not imagine the countenance and manner of a mortal man responsible for the catastrophe he had willingly engineered. But I would know him when I saw him.
The royal palace was a gloomy labyrinth. Wood torches smeared with burning pitch lit its long passages. All the things that bring life to a building of distinction were absent. There was no music, no laughter, no conversation, no bustle of urgent business or vivid parade of great men attired in their finery. Instead it answered best my grandfather’s description of the catacombs he saw while wearing the red cross of a Crusader fighting in the Holy Land. Dreary and forbidding, the palace of the Crimson King felt like a place of death.
The alchemist slouched on a wooden throne at the centre of a vaulted chamber with my sword between his hands. He was dark-haired, thin and spectral pale. ‘Steel,’ he said. ‘Finely hammered and honed and prettily engraved though this object is, it is merely fashioned metal of a base sort, is it not, sir?’
‘Wield it in battle, sir,’ I said to him. ‘Its strength will confound and delight you.’
With the hilt held between delicate fingers, he turned and studied the blade. It was well balanced and finely tempered and had served me proudly. But it was little to look at, notched with the scars of old battles, worn and wearied now like the knight it had armed.
‘Tell me how you came by it,’ he said.
He was in the habit of command. He was the king’s favourite, after all. He knew nothing about my name or station and cared less. I did not answer him.
‘Have you crossed?’
‘No, sir, I have not.’ But you have, I thought, to do your awful misdeed to my world.
‘Yet this sword was fashioned on earth,’ he said. ‘It is crafted in the English style. I knew it from fifty feet distant the first time I saw you in the arena. There is no magick on
earth, sir. There is much superstition. But the miracle of your fight against Maul was not achieved for this weapon there; it was done here. I wish to know, by whom?’
He believed in the power I had claimed for the sword. Why not? In that warped world, a spell was the likeliest explanation for the outcome of the fight he had witnessed. This was my chance.
I turned my head slightly, to either side, as though wary of the guards behind me eavesdropping on what I might reveal and Slee motioned me towards him with an impatient wave. I bent close. He gave me his ear. I pulled open my doublet and groped for the hilt of the dagger concealed beneath the dressing wrapped thickly about my wounded body.
He recoiled like a snake. Something in his eyes changed. My limbs were frozen by the look, as stiff as the rigging I had seen on the ships in Salabra’s ice-bound harbour. But he had seen something when I’d torn open my doublet and doubt troubled him and then horror dawned, so that he could not sustain the petrifying glare. It was the pendant the count had given me. Slee had seen it and knew it from somewhere and it delivered a terror to him that broke his mesmeric spell.
I pulled the dagger free of my bandages and plunged it to the hilt into his right eye. I took my sword from his shuddering grip and turned and dispatched the guards. It was nothing to accomplish. After the speed of Edgar Maul they moved like men dazed. I turned my attention back to Slee. He was in the grip of some manner of seizure, having slipped from his throne on to the floor. I pulled the knife free and drew it across his throat to sever the cords of his voice so he would not be heard screaming. I whispered into his ear why I was there and at whose command I had come.
The brain is a great and complex puzzle. I was concerned that perhaps my injury to his had deprived him of the gift of pain, but it was not so. I carried out the king’s command and slowly butchered him. He sobbed. He tried to beg. His death was hard and long drawn and I am sure that he felt every cut and mutilation till the stroke that gutted him and put him beyond feeling for eternity.
I escaped the dread confines of the palace and trudged across the frozen sea in the direction the count had counselled I take. My wounds had opened in the combat with the guards in the alchemist’s chamber. I was careful not to bleed on the ice and leave a trail by which I could be followed.
I think I might have bled more grievously from such deeply inflicted wounds as Maul had given me, but the cold prevented it. The cold was my ally. It left no scent for pursuing dogs and of course, I left no tracks in my progress over that slippery waste.
What happened on my return to our beloved world is a tale for another time. This story is the proof of my survival. I commit it to the page in truth and in humility. It has been my privilege to serve a great sovereign and to be as beholden to my God as a sometimes hot nature allowed. Since He, in His infinite wisdom, endowed me with that nature, I hope He can find it in His merciful heart also to forgive me for its less fortunate consequences.
Adam and Jane finished reading the de Morey account in the stately comfort of McGuire’s sitting room. She was silent, pondering its implications. McGuire and Professor Grayling were on the other side of the spacious room, studying Martin Prior’s new website on Grayling’s laptop.
The professor had breached his own condition of confidentiality in allowing the de Morey pages to leave his office. Adam and Jane had not been told specifically why, but they thought the decision had probably been provoked by what Martin was up to. The tabloids were full of him and he had booked a berth on the forthcoming edition of ‘Question Time’. Events had taken an urgent turn.
Jane stood and neatened the pages she held, then placed them precisely on the arm of her chair. ‘I need some air,’ she said. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. She had perhaps an hour before dusk descended. The pier would not close until darkness fell and she thought she might stroll along its bracing length and breathe in some sea air. She had to get out of the flat. It was very comfortable, but she thought that if she did not get away for a few minutes she might scream or puke or tear at her hair like somebody mad.
It was not the de Morey account. That was bad enough. She now knew that Adam was his direct descendent, the bastard offspring of two conflicting worlds, a young man made a sort of fugitive by genealogy and the vengeful insult to Endrimor of an execution carried out centuries ago.
But it was not the de Morey deposition or the dreadful reach of its implications that had sickened her to the stomach. It was Delilah Crane and the thought that Adam had spent the night with his father’s glamorous and seductive lover.
‘Excuse me,’ she said.
Adam glanced up at her from where he sat. He had almost finished the story. She remembered her jokes about the speed at which he read, made in the cramped cockpit of Grayling’s Lotus on the way to the ferry terminal at Hull. Her teasing jibes had felt intimate between them then.
Now they rang hollow in her memory after only a couple of days – but it wasn’t the days, was it? It was the night she was concerned with, and the comfort in Delilah Crane’s voluptuous embrace she believed he had found.
She limped across the room and fumbled at the door.
‘Are you all right, Jane?’
The question came from Grayling. She ignored it and went out. In the lift she closed her eyes. It was the mirrors. She was not in the mood for study unto infinity of her own familiar reflection. She knew that she was pretty. Some men thought her beautiful. Evidently she was not beautiful enough.
She smiled to herself. It was a shame. She tried for sympathy, imagining how lonely and raw Adam must have felt in the aftermath of his father’s passing from life. But sympathy did not arrive. Instead, she thought what a shame and a waste it was that in such circumstances he could think only with his dick.
The pier was brisk and breezy, busy with late visitors, Wurlitzer music and bright lights assaulting the senses, burger grease in drifts meant to entice but which Jane found sourly stomach churning.
It was the English seaside. It was all of a piece. She thought that she should sit down and drink a cup of tea and try to compose herself. She did not know, after all. It had not been confirmed to her that Adam and the Siren of Rotterdam had shared a bed; it was only her supposition. He had described her with some relish after his first visit. He had also claimed she wasn’t interested in him.
Did it even qualify as infidelity? Jane had rejected his advances. They had not actually made love. At what point did a couple become such? She had thought in that desolate moment, for him, on the bank of the Cam, that they had become truly close, a real couple. Perhaps she had been wrong.
She had thought it right and natural to wait. Feelings of magnitude required a degree of respect and caution in how they were acted upon. Such emotions were too important for haste. But men and women were differently wired emotionally. Everybody said so. Popular books had been written on the subject. Adam Parker had just provided her with the proof.
She went into one of the cafés at the end of the pier at random and bought her cup of tea. It came with a complimentary biscuit, vacuum-wrapped in cellophane. There was a view through the western-facing window of the descending sun amid flushed frills of cloud. She sat at a table. Coldplay were oozing through speakers concealed in the ceiling. It would be fucking Coldplay, she thought. It was a very pretty sunset. Coldplay were yellow and the sunset was pink. She did not know when she had ever felt more desolate in her life.
Someone sat in the seat opposite hers. She did not look up from where she grappled with the cellophane. It was a café. People were entitled to sit where they liked. Someone with a taste for sunsets, she thought, or a thing about vacuum-packed biscuits, or just a Coldplay soundtrack. The biscuit broke between her fingers in its wrapper and she gave up on it, dropping it on to the lip of her saucer.
It was his stillness that made her look up. His size and his absolute stillness compelled it, eventually. It breached her Adam misery and her general indifference to where she was. Her human alertness to what was no
t natural summoned her attention and she was obliged to look at the man who had placed himself opposite her. And when she did, she was looking into the grinning, gleeful face of Rabanus Bloor.
He was dressed in conventional clothes. He wore jeans and a pea coat and a blue cotton shirt that highlighted, in the low, slanting sunlight, the alert blue of his eyes. There was a thin silver chain around his neck. His long hair looked more stylish than anachronistic in Brighton. It quite fitted in. Brighton was that sort of place. The angle of the sun made a dark crevasse of the scar beside his eye.
‘Dora,’ he said. His voice was Adam’s, deeper, vastly less innocent, only slightly accented.
‘Dora?’
‘She’s your twin, my dear.’
‘Yes.’
‘I know her.’ He winked. ‘Remember me to her.’
‘We don’t really speak,’ Jane said. The words sounded hollow and inadequate. She was so consumed by terror, by the sheer recumbent menace of the man lounging in the seat before her, that she trembled and was hoarse with it.
He pondered for a moment. His eyes did not leave hers but they dulled in thought before their bright focus returned. Something had amused him. ‘She’s the darkness to your light, isn’t she,’ he said, ‘the night to your day.’
He rose smoothly, turned and walked rapidly out, beyond sight.
ELEVEN
Sebastian Dray had as little appetite for the tests as he had for the executions. But this one was slightly different. They had caught one of the leaders of the Parasite Legion. He was sighted and possessed honed reflexes and an alert mind. He had been schooled in the rigours of combat. His rank had not been achieved by fluke, but was hard earned. Sarth did not suffer fools, especially among the monsters he bred. He would naturally cull the dull-witted and the weak. This was a specimen that would tell them much about the threat they faced from the north.