The Prince of Lies

by Anne Lyle

  “It was fear that made you hesitate,” Sandy replied, reaching out to rest a hand on Mal’s wrist. “And hesitation made you vulnerable. That is not what our fencing-master taught us.”

  “I know.” It came out as barely more than a whisper. Mal cleared his throat. “Very well, I shall endeavour to be bold and grasp the nettle. Tonight.”

  “This will be easier if we share a bed,” Sandy said, leading the way through into his own chamber. “We don’t need your wife coming in and waking you.”

  “If you insist,” Mal replied.

  It was strange being back in his own room with Sandy, undressing for bed and arguing over who got to use the tooth-stick first, as if the past fifteen years had never happened. The last time… the last time had been the night they were initiated into the Huntsmen. After that, Sandy had to be locked in a room by himself. Mal climbed into bed and stared up at the shadowy canopy, trying to empty his mind of the day’s bustle and achieve the calmness that would allow him to step into the dreamlands without needing to fall asleep.

  “Why don’t I tell you a story,” Sandy said, propping himself up on one elbow, “like Mother used to?”

  “If you think it will help,” Mal replied, trying to get comfortable. The mattress was lumpier than he remembered, and sagged in the wrong places.

  Sandy began to tell his tale: something about an old man who lived alone in the woods, far from any clan or settlement, eating only berries and drinking water from the leaves of… Mal had a brief moment of clarity in which he realised his brother was not speaking English or any other Christian language, then all thought dissolved and darkness closed around him.

  Mal kept his senses sharp as he walked at Sandy’s side across the colourless ankle-deep grass. Hills rose around them, mimicking the landscape of the waking world. This early in the evening only a faint gleam here and there marked a sleeping child or an old man drowsing by his fire, which was why Mal had insisted on beginning so early. If there were guisers lurking after all, they would see them a mile off.

  “Over that way,” he said, pointing to a gap in the hills. Sandy broke into a run and leapt into the air, skimming effortlessly over the grass like thistledown on the wind. Mal cursed and tried to copy him, feeling his stomach lurch as his feet left the ground. Up he soared, so high he feared he would fall, but then Sandy was there holding his hand and they were flying side by side. Mal laughed. This was what he remembered from his childhood dreams, before the dark days when Sandy went away–

  “Stay with me!” Sandy shouted in his ear. Mal blinked away a fog of silvery light. “You have to stay focused on the here-and-now, or you’ll fall back into a dream or, worse still, wake up.”

  “Sorry.”

  They flew onward, over hills far taller than their counterparts in the waking world. The air should have been colder up here, but nothing in the dreamlands behaved quite as expected. The nacreous sky seemed a lot closer too, as if it were the ceiling of a gargantuan hall, not a crystalline sphere millions of miles across. Though if it were a ceiling, the painter had been drunk. Stars were meant to be twinkling pinpoints of light, not haphazard smears that swam in and out of focus when you tried to concentrate on them.

  “Not so high!”

  Mal turned his attention back to the land below them. There. A line of hills like a dog’s back tooth. He soared around the tallest peak and into the valley beyond.

  “Is this it?” Sandy gestured to a paler area of ground. “You were right. It is… most strange.”

  They touched down at the edge of the… whatever it was. At their feet the grass began to thin, revealing bare patches of what ought to have been earth but looked more like skin, riven by a thousand tiny creases that traced lines around the contours of the land. Some of the larger cracks emitted a faint golden light, as if dreaming minds lay just under the surface.

  “It’s like the thinness I saw at the skrayling camp,” Mal said, “and yet different somehow.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it before.” Sandy knelt and touched a finger to one of the glowing cracks.

  “Don’t!” Mal shouted, but it was too late.

  Sandy’s arm was sucked into the crack, slamming his head against the ground. Mal slid his arms round his brother’s chest and pulled. Sandy did not budge so much as a hair’s breadth; Mal might as well have tried to lift a mountain.

  “Wait! I can feel something. Hold on… now pull again!”

  Mal heaved, bracing his feet either side of his brother’s torso, and Sandy’s arm slid from the crack with a sound like a cork being pulled from a bottle. They both tumbled backwards–

  –and woke up in the curtained bed in their old room. Mal disentangled himself from Sandy and stumbled up from the bed in search of a candle. By the time he had it lit, Sandy was sitting up in bed, a puzzled look on his face, staring down at his cupped hands.

  “What in God’s name…? You brought something back with you?”

  Sandy held out his hands. In the soft glow of the candlelight Mal could just make out a dark shape about the size of a hen’s egg but flatter and more triangular, with a small circular depression near one end.

  “Isn’t that–?”

  “The hagstone I found in the beck? Aye.” Sandy grinned and held the stone up to the light. As Mal had guessed, the dent was a hole that went all the way through. “I thought it lost all these years.”

  “But what was it doing in the dreamlands? And how…?” Mal shrugged helplessly.

  “I think… You remember I had to reach a long way down into the water to get it, right up to my chin? And you were holding onto me so I didn’t fall in.”

  Mal nodded.

  “I was thinking about that moment,” Sandy went on. “When the crack pulled me in. And then I felt it.”

  “The stone.”

  “Yes. As soon as my fingers closed around it, the… whatever it was… let me go. As if it had done what it meant to do.”

  “Do what? Give you your old hagstone back?”

  “No. Complete the memory.”

  “How do you know all this? You said you’d never seen anything like it before.”

  “I haven’t. But it makes sense.”

  “A mad sort of dream sense, perhaps.” Mal took the stone from Sandy’s palm and peered through the hole.

  “Hoping to see fairies?”

  Mal laughed, but the words struck home. What if such stones were spyholes into the dreamlands?

  “Give it here.” Sandy held out his hand.

  Mal passed the stone back, and his brother produced a length of string from somewhere and hung the stone up from the bed canopy.

  “To keep away nightmares,” he said softly.

  “But what does it all mean?” Mal asked. “Have the dreamlands worn thin because the guisers were here so long?”

  “I don’t know. Something happened there, that’s for certain. Something big and dangerous. Perhaps that’s how the devourers got into the dale, back in Charles’s day. The dreamworld wore thin and they broke through…”

  “So why didn’t we notice it before?”

  “Perhaps it was there all along, half healed, only something made it worse again. Like when you scratch a scab off and make it bleed again.”

  “This thing,” Mal said, thinking back to their journey across the dark plains. “This… wound. It must have some corresponding spot in the waking world, yes? Somewhere not too far from here.”

  Sandy’s eyes widened. “Yes! Yes, that’s it. If we can find out where the dreamers broke through from, it might tell us who they were and what they were really up to.”

  Mal stared at his reflection in the darkened window, recalling the times he had been pulled bodily into the dreamworld by Sandy. Was that how the damage had happened? Had their own passage left similar wounds, places where the veil of sleep was thin enough for nightmares to seep through? There was so much he still did not know about the strange magics he and his brother were heir to, and the more he learned, the
less he wanted to know.

  CHAPTER VIII

  For the next three weeks they explored the surrounding Peaklands, heedless of the rain that continued to fall in grey sheets. Mal had thought their previous investigations thorough, but Sandy pressed on much further this time, pointing out that distances in the dreamlands could be deceptive. Soon they had exhausted every valley within a winter day’s ride and were having to stay overnight in unfamiliar villages, but still they found nothing.

  “We must have missed it,” Mal said, one freezing cold day as they circled north towards Matlock. “Surely the devourers would never have strayed so far as Rushdale if they’d escaped around here.”

  Sandy sighed, his breath clouding the air. “You’re probably right. Let’s have dinner at the next inn and then head for home.”

  They followed an icy, rutted path down the hillside into a small village, no more than a huddle of cottages about a grey stone church. An ale-stake outside one of the houses drew Mal’s eye, and he dismounted stiffly.

  “A drink will warm us up, even if there’s no food to be had,” he said, leading his horse towards the church gate since there was no stable or even a hitching-post to be seen.

  The alehouse was busy, there being little to do in the fields on these bitter winter days. The villagers fell silent as Mal entered, and exchanged glances and muttered curses as Sandy followed behind him. Mal ignored them; he was used to such receptions by now. Instead he bestowed his most charming smile upon the alewife, plied her with silver and soon took possession of two seats near the small fireplace, two jacks of very tolerable porter and a plate of bread and pickled onions.

  “You’re a long way from home, gentlemen,” their hostess said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Up from Derby, are yer?”

  “Yes,” Mal said quickly, before Sandy could betray their purpose. “Looking for an old friend who used to live in these parts, name of Frogmore.”

  It was the first name that came to mind, but that didn’t matter. It did the trick.

  “No Frogmores round here, sir. Only gentlemen of your station hereabouts were the Shawes, but they’ve been gone these twenty year or more.”

  “Shawe?” Where had he heard that name before? “Oh, so they didn’t sell their house to Frogmore after they left?”

  The alewife gave a short laugh. “Not likely, sir. Shawe House is cursed. That’s why they left. No one’s lived there since.”

  “Cursed?”

  “Haunted by vengeful spirits. Or demons. Old man Shawe was murdered in his bed; slashed to ribbons, they say.”

  “Could have been a wronged woman with a kitchen knife,” Mal said, forcing a laugh.

  No one else seemed to find his quip amusing. Mal turned his attention back to his dinner, and as soon as both their plates were empty they went back out into the cold.

  “Demons, eh?” Mal said as they rode away from the tavern. “Where have we heard that before? Still, sounds like we’re on the right track at last.”

  Mal stopped at the last house in the village and asked directions of a grubby-faced child of indeterminate sex, who ran indoors without a reply. A few moments later an old man came out.

  “Shawe House, yer say? Well, ye’re on the right road. Carry on about a mile and a half and yer’ll come to a pair o’ gates on yer left. Shawe House is at the end o’ the lane – or what’s left on it.”

  The directions were simple enough, and within half an hour they found themselves riding along an overgrown track between a double row of chestnut trees. After about a quarter of a mile the track opened out into what was probably once an entrance courtyard paved with brick, now turned to a copse of leafless sycamore undergrown with the frost-blackened remnants of last summer’s nettles. Beyond stood the house itself: all sagging roof timbers, crumbling brick and empty windows.

  They dismounted and tied their horses to one of the sturdier saplings. Mal drew his rapier; if Sandy was right, the devourers had come from here originally, and who knew but that more could have escaped through the reopened wound in the dreamlands? It should be safe enough in daylight, but the sun was sinking and they did not have much time. He waved Sandy behind him and approached the entrance to the manorhouse.

  The front door had fallen in and its remnants rotted in the damp upland climate. Within, broken bricks and roof-tiles covered the floor in a thick layer, and a damp, mushroomy smell filled the air. Mal cast about him, all senses alert, but saw no sign of devourers.

  They explored the rest of the manorhouse, but found only rot and destruction giving way to nature.

  “Shawe,” Mal muttered under his breath. “I know that name. John Shawe? Robert Shawe? Richard? William? Thomas?”

  He ran through all the names he could think of, until–

  “Matthew Shawe.” That was it. Northumberland’s protégé, friend of the astronomer Thomas Harriot. He beckoned Sandy over. “I know the son of the man who owned this house.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “He would have been but a child when the place was abandoned, but yes, I would wager good money on it. He is an alchemist; a pursuit he picked up from his father, perhaps?”

  “Our people have knowledge far beyond that of Christian scholars. Though how alchemy relates to what happened in the dreamlands…” Sandy looked thoughtful. “There should be traces here.”

  “Can you not feel them?”

  “I can try.”

  “Do it. I’ll keep watch, just in case.”

  Sandy crouched in the rubble with his back against one of the crumbling walls and closed his eyes. Long minutes passed, and eventually Sandy’s eyes began to move under their lids. He was dreaming. Mal waited impatiently, half an eye on the sun sinking behind the far wall. They had to leave soon, or–

  A sharp intake of breath made him whirl, blade at the ready. Sandy was staring up at him.

  “It’s close. I felt…” He pointed towards the rear of the building. “There.”

  Mal held out a hand and hauled his brother to his feet, and they made their way quickly through the ruins. At the far end of a group of outbuildings stood one that had remained surprisingly intact.

  “Of course,” Mal said. “They would have kept it away from the main house. Too much risk of fire.”

  He heaved open the damp-swollen door. The dank air smelt faintly of charcoal and something else, bitter and metallic, but nothing could be seen within. Mal took out his flint and tinder, and improvised a torch from a piece of scrap timber that was drier than the rest. Holding his rapier in a middle guard to defend against an attack from any quarter, he advanced slowly over the threshold.

  The building was a workshop of some kind, with thick walls and a hearth at the far end, and wooden shelving along each long wall. Most of the shelves had collapsed, leaving heaps of broken glass and earthenware at their feet, held together by a sticky mass that sprouted clumps of pale fungi. A table in the centre of the workshop had also collapsed in on itself. Mal crunched across the floor to the fireplace, and noted the oven-like structure to one side, its bronze door crusted with verdigris. Sandy stooped and picked something out of the rubble.

  “Look at this.” He held it out to Mal.

  Torchlight glinted on a glass rod with vivid blue crystals fused to one end.

  “Alchemy indeed,” Mal said softly.

  “But to what end?” Sandy replied. “Alchemy has many uses, but it cannot affect the dreamlands.”

  “Iron can. It cuts off our souls from that place, after all.”

  “You think they were searching for a way around that?”

  “Perhaps,” Mal said. “That could explain how the devourers got through. Though if the alchemist succeeded, why didn’t Selby use his magic to escape, or at least call upon his friends for aid?”

  “Maybe he did and they failed to get there in time. Or perhaps Shawe is still searching.”

  Mal wrapped the glass rod in his handkerchief and stowed it inside his doublet.

  “Whatever happened, I ne
ed to get back to London and find out more.”

  Before Mal could make preparations to leave Rushdale, snow fell again, sealing them in for the best part of a month. The delay irked him, but he forced himself to at least appear cheerful, for his wife’s sake as well as Kit’s. The boy was growing fast, and revelled in the combined attention of his father and uncle. He clearly preferred the latter, but so far that was the only sign that the soul within him was Kiiren’s. Mal had been worried that Kit might start babbling in Vinlandic or the ancient skrayling tongue before he learned English, and frighten the servants into thinking him a changeling, but Sandy assured him that it would be some years before Kiiren’s memories started to assert themselves.

  “It won’t take as long as it did with me, thank goodness,” Sandy said one afternoon, as they sat by the fire watching Kit and Susanna playing peekaboo over the back of a dining chair. “His soul is strong, and his death was less horrible than ours.”

  “It was horrible enough,” Mal said, trying to banish the image of Kiiren screaming as the devourer tore out his guts.

  “But we were there with him, at the end. That makes a big difference.”

  “If you say so.”

  It was hard to reconcile this merry child with the solemn ambassador he had known. There were times he almost forgot that Kit was not his own son, so natural did he seem with his adoptive mother. He wondered how deeply Coby would mourn – how they both would – when Kit grew up and left them, as he must do eventually. For all Grey’s congratulations, they did not truly have a son and heir, not yet. Mal only hoped he had managed to get her with child this winter. She had not said anything so far, but perhaps she would not want to tell him until she was certain herself, and such things took time. Or so he had been led to believe. That was women’s business, and he had only the haziest of ideas how things went once the man’s part was done.

  Thoughts of his wife sent him in search of her. With this break in the weather he had no more excuses to delay his journey south, and good reason to go. Food supplies were running low, and every ounce of flour and cheese and bacon had to be accounted for if they were not to starve before spring. The sooner he left, the sooner he would cease to be a burden on the household.