by James Fahy
Karya had been drawn to the kitchens by the commotion, having only just returned from her expedition to the village.
The girl now stood across the kitchen, staring at Robin and Woad in utter disbelief. She was ashen faced and Robin couldn’t tell if she was worried or furious with him.
“I leave you two alone for two minutes!” she said. “Two minutes!”
Robin, wrinkling his nose at the smell from Hestia’s medicine, looked at her sternly. “We didn’t know a Grimm was going to show up, did we?” he said. “We thought, well, Woad thought, and I agreed, that the sirens might be able to help us with the puzzle. It was worth a shot.”
Karya pursed her lips. “A shot that nearly got you killed,” she said. “Of all the stupid, foolhardy … Robin Fellows, you really are a hornless wonder!”
Woad has explained, in his own colourful way, to Karya and Hestia, the events that had transpired in the forest.
“It was the girl we met down in the village,” Robin said, gritting his teeth as Hestia, muttering inventively and constantly, dabbed none too gently at his grazed ribs. He shook his head in disbelief. “She was never a girl, she was a Grimm – but she passed for human, I swear.” He considered. “A very pale, kind of weird human, yeah, but lots of people are pale and weird. I mean, she didn’t look anything like Mr Strife or Mr Moros. How was I supposed to know? Strife and Moros were both creepy old guys! She was…”
Karya folded her arms, still staring at him furiously and wide eyes.
“She was what, Scion?”
“She was different,” he hissed a little, in pain.
“Oh hold still, you bothersome child,” Hestia insisted with little sympathy. “Unless you want the sirens’ barbs to leave enough marks to match your silver wings there!”
Robin already had scars on his back, four thin lightening pale stripes from shoulder to hip where he’d had a run in with a skriker’s claws the previous year. He felt very self-conscious sitting here in the kitchen, covered in herbal gunk and being glared at by everyone.
“She said her name was Penny,” he told Karya. “She’s been after my blood apparently, for some time now.”
“Not all the Grimms are old men,” Karya said. “You’d be surprised the forms the Grimms take. They’re an odd bunch of misfits, to say the least.” She unfolded her arms, sighing and shaking her head. She seemed to be trying to calm down.
“Young, you say. Or young looking at least, purple hair,” she muttered to herself.
“And pretty,” Woad piped up. He was sitting beside Robin on the tabletop in brotherly solidarity, his legs swinging happily. Karya blinked at him, her eyebrows disappearing into her hairline. Her golden eyes fixed on Robin like an inquisitive owl.
“Pretty?” she asked, spluttering.
Robin cringed a little. “Well, sort of, I suppose, in a weird way. Maybe a little intense. She didn’t look like a monster anyway.”
“Not all monsters do, stupid boy,” Hestia twittered to herself. “Spend enough time in the world, little man, and you will learn that for sure. The worst wolves hide their teeth in soft fur, until they want to bite.”
“She’s right!” Karya pointed a finger at Hestia, a little dramatically. “From the description, that was not ‘Penny’ you met. That was Miss Peryl. She is the youngest of the Grimm Organisation. In many ways, she’s the runt of the litter, but trust me when I say, Scion, that she is no less dangerous than Strife himself. She has the blood of countless on her hands. Countless. Fae and Panthea.”
“She has Pinky’s blood on her lips,” Woad corrected the girl. Karya looked confused.
“Get dressed in something dry now,” Hestia said, shooing Robin down off the tabletop. “You are not poisoned, and these little scratches and bites are less that you deserve for being so foolish!” She shook her head. “And do not make things worse by dripping all over my kitchen floor!”
Robin thanked Hestia. Despite her manner, she had leapt into action to ensure he was not hurt and tended his wounds expertly and quickly. The woman utterly ignored his thanks, shuffling off to wash out the herbal gunk from the bowl she held.
“Her … lips?” Karya raised an eyebrow.
Robin pulled on his shirt again, feeling tender all over and smelling a little like sage and onion stuffing from Hestia’s unguent. “She bit me. I told you, she wanted my blood. Bloody mental-case. If she’s as bad as you say, I don’t know why she didn’t just come at me with a knife.”
“You think Eris wants you dead?” Karya asked. “Trust me, if she did, you’d be dead by now. You’re her prize. You’re Eris’ lottery ticket, and woe betide anyone who damages the goods. Peryl wouldn’t dare harm you.” She considered this. “Maim a little, hobble, disfigure, incapacitate probably. She’s more than a little twisted in her head that one. Very odd idea of ‘fun’, but she wouldn’t have actually killed you. It wouldn’t have been entertaining enough for her. Peryl likes games.”
“She saved me from the sirens though,” Robin said, doing up his buttons clumsily. “That’s like being saved from a shark attack by … another bigger shark. And how did she manage to look human?”
Karya considered this, leaning back against the worktop and drumming her fingers. “She probably wasn’t wearing her mana stone, deliberately,” she guessed. “We are all … less of what we are without them. You’d be less Fae, she’d appear less Grimm. Quite a clever idea I suppose. For a mass-murdering, psychopathic monster, that is.”
“But she did magic. On the sirens. And those moths … Wait, I’ve been seeing them all summer,” Robin exclaimed. “What are they?”
“Totems, brain-death,” Woad said. “All of the Grimms have them. Tower of Darkness magic. Shadow made form. Will made mobile.”
“Woad’s correct,” Karya said. “Strife has his skrikers, Moros his grimgulls. Peryl, clearly, specialised in extremely morbid emo butterflies. They’ve been watching you, no doubt, waiting for the time to get your blood, from the needle in this keyring, or directly from your face, which is apparently how these things are done by preference.” She cleared her throat tactfully. “If one is a psychotic and evil shapeshifting agent of pure evil that is.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you kissed a Grimm.”
“I did not kiss her!” Robin said hotly. “I’d drowned, she gave me the kiss of life, it’s not the same thing!”
“How would you know?” she asked pointedly. “Done a lot of kissing have you?”
“That’s … you … what’s that got to do with anything?” Robin flushed. “She did it to bite me. Believe me, that’s not my idea of a good time either. Having your face chewed by a mass murderer from another world is not how I like to spend my weekends, thanks very much, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop making fun of me.”
Karya gave him a look, but she reigned in her scorn a little. She seemed to have managed to calm down now that it was evident that Robin wasn’t seriously hurt.
“Well,” she said. “You’re safe anyway. Nobody died, even if she did get away with your blood. Though what on earth the Grimms need your blood for is a mystery to me. She said it was the key to something?”
Robin nodded. Woad was stood very close, sniffing him with interest, as Hestia’s herbal poultice wafted through the room. He waved the faun away. “Give it a rest, Woad.”
Robin held up the scroll, tightly bunched in his fist. “Grimms aside though, the important thing is this!”
“She didn’t take it?” Karya all but leapt across the room and snatched the scroll out of Robin’s hands. “Why not? If it’s what she came for?”
“She already looked at it,” Woad said. “While we were dragging Pinky like a floppy fish away from the pool. After she’d used all her shadow flapping tornado magic. She looked at it, and then she said…” He tilted his head a little, frowning to remember. “Then she said ‘ah, bingo!’” he finished.
“So she didn’t need it anymore,” Robin said. “But she still left it for us? If it was me I
would have scarpered and took it with me. Left my enemies clueless.”
“But where would be the fun in that?” Karya waggled the scroll at Robin. “Peryl is a game-player. She wants us to figure it out. I doubt her brother, Mr Ker, would agree with her on that, but she’s not the kind of Grimm to take advisement from others. We need to look over this right now! Are you well enough, Scion?”
Robin nodded, whatever mixture Hestia had salved his wounds with, they were already healing under his shirt, his skin tingled like pins and needles. “I’m fine,” he assured them.
Karya smiled darkly. “Right, Woad, clear this table. We need room to roll this out and—”
There was a clatter of dishes in the sink and Hestia whirled around, furious. “There will be no clearing of the kitchen table, thank you very much!” she said tremulously. “It is not enough for you that you interrupt Hestia in her duties with your mindless tangles with death? And that you steal her time to put your broken body back together again like an egg on a wall? Now you wish to mill around her kitchen? To move her things? To make the centre of this household into your … your … campaign room? I think most assuredly not! No, you must go. Everybody must go, and especially the little beast who has left buttock-prints in the rolled flour on my workspace! It is unsanitary!”
Woad pulled his tongue out at Hestia as soon as she turned her back. “I only sat on the table,” he said. “It’s not like I squashed her scones.”
A voice from the doorway made them all turn.
“I overheard,” Calypso said. Robin’s tutor stood casually in the doorway, a vision of calm in her flowing dress, her hand was resting lightly on the lintel. “Your voices are remarkably loud when you are all speaking together.” She regarded the children. “Robin Fellows, you almost died being eaten by sirens? Then you were, in specific order, rescued, bitten, robbed and abandoned by a Grimm, is this an accurate summary?”
Robin nodded sheepishly. Calypso blinked. “Are you likely to die imminently?” she enquired, as though asking about the weather.
“The boy will live,” Hestia grumbled, without turning around. She clattered pots and pans in her sink. “No thanks to his own stupidity. And no thanks, of course, directed to old Hestia. Has the nymph come hoping for grief? For tears to feed on? There’s nothing wet in here for you but suds.”
Calypso ignored Hestia completely. “You have solved the riddle in your aunt’s absence,” she observed, looking to the rolled up scroll Karya held. “And the Grimms have solved it too, I hear. In that case, be under no illusion. They will be headed already to the Janus station’s location.” She shrugged. “Come.”
They followed her out of Hestia’s domain, along a corridor and into an empty side parlour, filled with old, empty trophy cases, where she indicated with a sweep of her hand that Karya should lay out the scroll on a darkly polished tabletop.
The girl unrolled the yellowing parchment carefully, and they gathered around with interest. It was covered in hieroglyphic script weaved around an odd central symbol, a flat, horizontal line, and radiating down from it, three strokes, like sunbeams spreading out from the centre.
“These glyphs are the same as the translation I’m working on for Irene,” Karya observed. “No … wait. Not quite. It is the Undine language, but a later version, not as ancient. I think … I can actually translate this. But I’ve no idea what this symbol means.” She tapped the line and its three strange legs. She looked to the nymph, who shrugged.
“A curse, perhaps?” she suggested.
“Maybe a spell of some kind,” Karya guessed.
“It could be a magical glyph,” Robin peered closely at it. “I’ve seen a lot of these in my study books, words of power. But nothing quite like this before.”
They were all clearly baffled.
“Maybe it’s the name of some terrible demon,” Woad said eagerly. “And saying it out loud will summon it here!”
“Nah, it’s none of those,” a voice over Robin’s shoulder said. They all looked around in surprise to see Henry standing just behind them, still in his school uniform and with his bag slung over one shoulder. “Afternoon all. I know what that is,” he said casually, nodding to the symbol. He dropped his bag onto a nearby chair. “What are you all up to then?”
“You?” Karya said doubtfully, not bothering to hide the disbelief in her voice. “You, of all people, know what this is?”
“Yeah, me, why?” he replied.
“A magical symbol, an ancient glyph, or possibly a word of great power, hidden on an ancient scroll that neither I nor this nymph can decipher, but you say you can?” she snorted.
“Is there a bloody echo in this room?” Henry said, frowning at her. “What’s up, Rob? Why’s everyone clustered round this old thing then. Have I missed much today?”
“Henry,” Robin urged, he tapped the scroll impatiently. “You were saying?”
“Oh, that. We’ve been doing about architecture, stuff like this in class. That’s not a magic spell, it’s just a masonry symbol that is.”
“A what?” Karya demanded, practically snapping.
“You know, masons, people who build things. Houses and that. That’s a tideline. Shows other craftsmen where on a building the flood level is, or something like that anyway. It’s on loads of old buildings.”
Karya stared at Henry in disbelief. “You’ve been … useful,” she said with an air of wonder. He gave her a look.
“It has been known to happen, you know, from time to time. What’s going on here then anyway? Why is everyone so agitated? And why does Robin smell like Christmas dinner?”
Robin shooed away Woad, who was trying to lick his elbow experimentally. “Hestia’s unguent,” he said by way of explanation. “Monsters in the water, nearly drowned, long story.”
“Pinky kissed a girl,” Woad piped up happily, with an air of delicious scandal.
Henry made a face. “Gross.”
“Not a girl … a Grimm,” Karya corrected.
“Grosser!” Henry declared. “Is this the sort of thing you lot get up to while I’m at summer school then? The most exciting thing that happened to me today was multiplication squares. And why I still have to wear my uniform is beyond me. It’s inhumane during summer.”
“Perhaps if you studied your lessons as studiously as the Scion,” Karya said loftily. “You would not be required to attend this ‘summer school’.”
Henry made a rude gesture. Thankfully, Calypso interrupted Karya’s indignation.
“I believe it to be another riddle, or so it seems,” she said.
Robin groaned. “Another!? What is it with Netherworlders and their ruddy riddles? It’s supposed to be the location of the lost Janus Station, isn’t it?” he complained. “I was expecting co-ordinates or something.”
“Well, whatever it is, Miss Peryl figured it out quickly enough,” Karya said darkly. “So we better had too.” The girl looked up at the nymph, as Henry grumbled to Robin,
“I’d probably pay more attention in class if my teachers looked like yours. Miss Windsor has a lazy eye.”
Calypso leaned over the unfurled parchment, tucking a floating lock of pale hair behind her ear as her delicate finger traced across the glyphs.
“In essence,” she declared. “We are told here that the doorway to the vale lies ‘at the centre of all things, beneath Satan’s holy feet’.”
“Nah, you’d just spend your classes making goo-goo eyes and not paying attention,” Robin muttered back to Henry with a grin.
Karya cleared her throat, pinning each boy with her death glare. “Pot, kettle, black?” She jerked her head in the nymph’s direction.
Calypso looked up at the boys expectantly with a wan and distant smile.
They returned her look blankly.
“Satan’s holy feet,” she repeated helpfully.
“Satan?” Robin was deeply confused. “As in, the devil?”
“The what?” Woad asked.
“Big bad guy in our world, tradi
tionally,” Henry explained to the faun knowledgeably. “Enemy of light, daddy of demons. Cloven hooves, pointy tail, bright red.”
Woad wrinkled his nose. “What kind of ridiculous colour is red for a person?”
Karya filled them in on what they’d missed.
“Wait, this can’t be right,” Robin insisted. “That’s Christian mythology, isn’t it? It doesn’t sound very Netherworlde-y. What does the devil have to do with anything?”
Karya rubbed her chin. “Well, it might not mean that at all,” she mused. “The term Satan originally just meant enemy. It was anything or anyone who opposed. The word only got attached to Lucifer, the angel who rebelled against God, after he … well … rebelled. Maybe it’s talking more about the enemy of the Shard? Or of the Sidhe-Nobilitas?”
“Satan’s holy feet though?” Robin said, shaking his blond head. “It’s all wrong. Nothing about the devil is holy, right? I mean, Gran was never much of a church goer. We went at Christmas for the carols and she always sent me at harvest with about ten tins of sweetcorn to drop off for charity, but even so, I’m sure I would know if there was anything particularly holy about Lucifer’s feet.”
“At the centre of all things?” Karya was tracing the odd glyph with her fingertips. “Henry, you said this was a stoneworker’s symbol?”
The boy nodded. “S’right. They’re on all the old important buildings,” he added, knowledgeably. “Town halls, libraries, churches, that sort of thing.”
Karya’s eyes flashed. Robin swore he actually saw the gold in them grow brighter.
“That’s it!” she cried. “Wait here, I’ll just be a minute.” She bolted from the room.