The Eighth Court

by Mike Shevdon

  Ha! The way I felt at that moment, I might as well have wished to fly.

  I pulled myself forward on my forearms, edging towards where the torch lay. My sword was in the light, just beyond it. As the torch came almost into reach, I felt my ankle snag and I began sliding backwards away from the torch. As I did, a pair of boots walked into my limited view and stopped.

  She stood in the torchlight where she could be seen and spoke. “OK, Gramawl, how do you want to do this?”

  “Amber,” I said. “Kareesh has gone. Don’t hurt him.”

  “Don’t hurt him? Have you seen yourself?”

  “We don’t need any more violence. It won’t help anyone – least of all Kareesh.”

  “No, wait,” she grinned. “Your plan was to lull him into a false sense of security and then… what? Tickle him to death?”

  “Gramawl?” I gasped. “I need to talk to you. This isn’t helping. It won’t bring her back.”

  The air filled with shivering subsonics which bypassed my ears and made my teeth ache. I took a breath. If he was going to kill me he could have done it already. There was clearly something wrong, and I had to find out what. “Gramawl, I need to know what happened.”

  My leg was released and I collapsed back onto the cold floor. Rolling over, I could see a pair of pale golden orbs watching me from beyond the light.

  “Amber?”

  “I’m here,” she said from behind me.

  “Would you wait for me upstairs?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “I need Gramawl to understand that I haven’t come to hurt anyone. I came to see Kareesh, but she’s not here. I want to know what happened, but he’s not going to tell me while you’re standing there with a sword.”

  “And what do I tell Blackbird if he tears your arms and legs off?” she asked.

  I watched the eye watching me. “He’s not going to hurt me,” I said, “but if by some chance he does, you can tell her that she should ask Gramawl for an explanation. He can explain it to her himself.”

  “You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked.

  “No, but I don’t know how to do anything else. I’ll join you upstairs in a few minutes.”

  The torch skittered across the tiles to where I was kneeling. My hands closed around it and pulled it near, setting it on end on the floor so it shone up the tiled wall, illuminating without dazzling. The golden orbs flicked to the light and back to me. “Can we talk?” I asked.

  The sound reverberating through the tunnels faded to a low hum.

  “Is Kareesh…?” I let the question hang. The figure in the dark blinked and then edged further into the torch-lit area where I could see him more clearly. I was struck again by the silence of his movement. I could not guess his mood from his face, but from his posture I would say miserable, angry; frustrated. He shook his head slowly, an obvious no.

  “She’s not dead?” I asked. He shook his head again.

  “That’s good news isn’t it? Where is she then?” He shrugged his massive shoulders, opening his gnarled hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “You don’t know? She can’t have gone far. Where could she…?” His paw slammed into the floor, making the entire passage reverberate with the impact. “OK, OK. I’m sorry. I was only trying to help. I guess you’ve already looked for her and didn’t find her.”

  He nodded slowly. I watched his face, noting how his nose twitched. “You’re very good at finding people, aren’t you?” I said, hazarding a guess. He nodded again. “But you didn’t find her, so…” I suddenly understood the problem, “she didn’t want to be found. She’s hidden herself from you. But why?”

  Gramawl let out a long, mournful sound. It echoed down the passages, and faded slowly from the tunnels. It was the sound of loss and heartache.

  “She must have used magic to hide herself,” I said, speaking out loud, “but she’s not left these tunnels in years, Blackbird told me that. When did she last go outside?” I asked him.

  Gramawl shook his head and his fingers flickered in complex sign language.

  “I’m sorry Gramawl, I never learned to sign. Blackbird knows, but she never taught me.”

  He clenched his fists in frustration and tried again. Pointing to the stairs, he made a sign like someone walking with his fingers.

  “Kareesh is leaving? Has left?” I suggested.

  He nodded, then made a sign holding his hands together under his cheek and tilting his head, closing his eyes to indicate sleep.

  “She’s sleeping somewhere?” I guessed.

  He waved his hand to indicate not, but then mimed waking and sleeping, waking and sleeping…

  “A day?” I suggested.

  He nodded enthusiastically, then motioned that he meant bigger.

  “A week?” I asked. He did it again. “A month? A year?” With this last he clapped his hand together. “A year.” I said.

  He held up his paw, counting along his fingers. He counted five, then closed his hand and raised one finger on the other hand. “Six years?” I asked. Then he did it again, only this time he raised two fingers.

  He was counting, but in base six instead of base ten. As soon as he realised I’d got it he held up all his fingers.

  “That’s…” I struggled with the calculation, “Thirty-five years?”

  He nodded, and then flashed his open hands at me, time after time.

  “That’s… no wait, that’s too many. That’s hundreds.”

  He clapped his hands together.

  “Hundreds of years. She hasn’t been outside on her own for hundreds of years? That’s what you’re trying to tell me?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Then why leave now?” I asked.

  Again, the anguished moan filled the tunnels.

  “You don’t know, do you?” I asked him. “She didn’t tell you?”

  He shook his head, the moan trailing off mournfully.

  “She waited until you weren’t here, and then left. She must have been planning this for some time. Where would she go without you? Is there somewhere only she could go? Somewhere she couldn’t take you?”

  Gramawl’s massive shoulders sagged, as if under a great weight.

  “Or she’s gone to do something that she has to do alone?”

  Again the mournful wail, haunted the tunnels. I looked at Gramawl and understood him at last. He thought she’d taken herself somewhere else to die. It was a journey on which he could not accompany her, and it was the only thing he could not protect her from. She’d waited for him to go outside and then left him behind because she didn’t want him following her. I already knew Gramawl was much younger than she was. It was obvious in the way he moved and in the lustre of his fur, the pale whiteness of his tusk-like teeth. She must have known that she would not survive him, as must he. I reached out my hand to him, offering comfort.

  Sensing that I had finally understood him, he took my hand and squeezed it gently in his. I had expected it to be rough and course, but it was warm and soft, like old leather. “I’m sorry Gramawl.” I said. “What will you do now?”

  He shook his head and sat back, his eyes glowing in the dark. He folded his hands into his lap and settled himself.

  “You’ll wait?” I asked. “What if she doesn’t return?” He shrugged.

  “How long will you wait?” I asked. Again, the shrug.

  I stood up, testing where I was bruised. I was sore, and the wound in my side ached, but I was whole. “Do you want me to tell Blackbird?” I asked.

  He hesitated, then nodded slowly. “Then I’ll tell her.” I said. “She will want to see you.”

  He simply raised his hand and pressed the tip of his finger to the floor. He would be here.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said, picking up my sword and collecting the torch.

  I backed away and then walked to the bend in the tunnel and looked back into the dark. There were the faint glimmers from two golden eyes in the dark. There was a question
I hadn’t asked – one that I’d intended for Kareesh, but maybe Gramawl could help me with it.

  “Gramawl? I was here before wasn’t I?” My voice echoed strangely in the darkened corridor, illuminated only by the ring of torchlight around my feet. The eyes blinked at me from the dark. “Before all of this, before Blackbird introduced me to you and Kareesh, before I even knew the Feyre existed, I was here, with you and Kareesh, wasn’t I?”

  The eyes blinked again, but this time they did not re-open. I went back, shining the torch down the corridor. He had vanished silently into the dark. There were only the cold tiles and the empty stairway leading upwards.

  Amber was waiting in the dark at the head of the stairway. We went through the door into the access tunnels below Covent Garden station and she looked me up and down.

  “I’m OK,” I said. “A little bruised, but…”

  She shrugged, and led the way out of station and back to the Way-node in silence. It gave me time to think about Gramawl, Kareesh and what they were doing. This was Kareesh’s doing, I knew that now, but what was it she had planned? In order to discover that, I needed to find her, but if Gramawl couldn’t find her, then what chance did I have? She’d vanished, after all those years sequestered in the tunnels below the Underground Station. I was not looking forward to telling Blackbird that Kareesh had disappeared.

  Arriving back at the courts, I left Amber to her duties and went up into the house. With Kareesh unavailable, there was one other person who could help me figure out what this was all about. I went to see if Angela was back.

  THIRTEEN

  “Altair?”

  “I have warned you not to use that name,” said the whisperer.

  “It has to be now. He’s fading. If we don’t reach him soon, it will be too late.”

  “After the solstice.”

  “Now. He needs you now. You promised. After all I’ve done for you.”

  “Done? Anything you’ve done has been for your own reasons.”

  “Help him, or I’ll tell them everything.” Her voice was a low threat.

  “By all means, tell them. Your part in it will be obvious. You’ll be executed on the spot. It won’t help him.”

  “You have to help him. You promised me.”

  “I said I would help Fellstamp, and I am helping him. He’s about to embrace the void that claimed him.”

  “You said you would bring him back.”

  “No, I said I would help him return. We all come from the void, and we all return to it. It’s inevitable,” said Altair.

  “That’s not true – only the wraithkin return to the void,” she said.

  “Ultimately we all come from the void, and we will all return to it,” he said. “Everything else is transitory illusion. It’s simply a matter of time.”

  “You lying wraithkin bastard! You lied to me! You’ve betrayed me and Fellstamp!”

  “You’re the one who’s been doing the betraying, Fionh, and if I were you I’d keep very quiet about it. Fellstamp must find his own peace with the void. I can’t bring him back, but I can give you revenge on the ones that placed him there. In a few days they will be at your mercy.”

  “I don’t need you to deliver revenge,” she said. “I can do that for myself.” She walked away, no longer caring whether anyone saw her.

  “Shall I follow her?” said a low voice.

  “Only as far as the edge of the wardings,” said the whisperer.

  “What if she tells Garvin?”

  “She won’t. She’s too proud.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  When I reached Angela’s door it was closed and I wondered if she was still out with Blackbird, but when I tapped lightly on the door there was a noise from within, and Angela opened the door.

  “Blackbird’s downstairs somewhere,” she said. “She went to speak to Mullbrook.”

  “I wasn’t looking for Blackbird. I came to see you,” I told her.

  She opened the door a little wider as if she were wondering who was with me, and seeing I was alone, opened the door further. “You’d better come in then.”

  I couldn’t recall being in Angela’s room before, but I could see that she’d made it her own. She must have been being bringing items from her house, since there were trinkets that were nothing to do with the courts, and she had an ancient mechanical typewriter set up on the bureau. The rest of the space was covered in typewritten drafts and documents that she’d been working on. I looked around for somewhere to sit.

  “There isn’t much room,” she said, clearing a space on the bed. “I don’t get many visitors.” I sat in the space she cleared, and she sat on the chair at the bureau. She waited until I got the hint.

  “I came to see you because I dreamed again,” I said.

  “That’s hardly a surprise.”

  “I have a lot of the pieces now, and I know how some of it came to be. I just don’t know how to fit them together. I wanted to ask if you would help me.”

  “Help you how?” she asked.

  I paused for a moment to think how to put this to her. “I think you were right, this is important. Whatever this is that I’ve become involved in has an impact on all of us – it’s affected us all along. This isn’t new, it’s been going on for years. There are clues… some of this has been planned.”

  “I don’t see what I can do,” she said.

  “You can help me piece it together,” I said. “You’re the only other person that knows all this stuff. You gave me these memories – help me make sense of them.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You must.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head. “I gave you the memories I had, but none of it made any sense to me. You say that you have pieces, and that’s good. I never had more than a jumble of tattered fragments with no order or sequence. You saw what I had; it was all over the walls of my office.”

  “But you have the rest,” I said. “You have the missing pieces. Between the two of us we could put it all together.”

  “You’re wrong. I don’t have anything. I only got any of this when I touched you in the cells under Porton Down.” She sounded angry now, and I couldn’t really understand why. “You infected me in a second with images I didn’t recognise, messages I couldn’t decipher, and memories that weren’t mine. None of this came from me, Niall. It came from you. Before I touched you I was fine. Afterwards… I couldn’t get any relief from it.”

  “That’s how I feel,” I told her. “There must be more. Maybe if you stirred something into a drink?”

  “I gave you everything. Your brain… it’s making the connections, do you see? All of this is related, and it comes back to you as a dream or a memory. You have all you need; you just need to tease it out.”

  “No. There are things missing, I’m sure of it.”

  “Then maybe those things were meant to be missing, or maybe they were never there in the first place. I don’t have anything else for you. You took it all.”

  “So you won’t even try.”

  “I can’t help you, Niall.” Her mouth was set in a determined line.

  I stood up, disappointed by her reaction. “You did this to me,” I reminded her. “You share some of the responsibility.”

  “You did it to yourself,” she said. “And to me.”

  On an instinct, I reached out and grabbed her. The contact should have been shocking – an instant flash of mind-crushing recollection and foreign memories. Instead I felt my hand, tight around her arm. The muscle was warm under my hand, where I held her firmly. She looked at my hand, surprised by my sudden rush to touch her and then resentful at the liberty I’d taken.

  “It would have served you right if you’d been a gibbering wreck on the floor,” she said.

  “I’m not, though, am I?”

  She plucked at my grip with her free hand and I released her. “What happened?” I asked her.

  “Nothing,” she
said. “Nothing happened. You have everything I can give you, there’s nothing else to take. I’d like you to leave now.”

  “You know more than you’re letting on,” I accused her.

  “What I know and what I feel are separate things,” she said. “You know what I know, but what I feel I’ll keep to myself. It can’t be taken from me, not even by you.”

  I went to the door. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had to try. You should understand that, at least.”

  She stared at me for a long while. “It is by our choices that we know ourselves,” she said. “You could have asked.”

  “You would have said no,” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t give you the right to take that choice from me.”

  I left her then, feeling that I’d made a mistake. I felt like I was being backed into a corner and that the choices that remained to me were limited and none of them were ideal. I went back towards the suite that Blackbird and I shared, wondering if there was some way I could make amends. Angela was right, I’d taken a liberty that was not mine to take, and it had got me nowhere.

  As I emerged into the head of the stairs, Alex was coming the other way. “Dad! I’ve been looking for you everywhere. She’s going to kill him!”

  “Who is? Kill who?” I asked.

  “Fionh!” said Alex, as if I were stupid. “She’s going to kill Sparky.” She turned and headed through the door and down the corridor. Running after Alex, slowed down by the healing wound in my side, I followed Alex as she raced ahead. Sure now that I would follow, she guided me up through the house until we reached the room where Fellstamp lay.

  Alex stepped into the room warily. “You’d better let him go now. Dad’s here.”

  I moved into the doorway, unsure of what to expect. Fellstamp was as I’d left him, draped up to his shoulders with a white sheet. Towards the back of the room, the big French doors had been thrown open. Fionh stood, her back to the sky, outlined against the light. Beside her, Sparky was held by the hair, throat exposed while Fionh held a wickedly sharp blade under his chin. They were both standing on the balustrade over the three storey drop to the paving below.