The Scar-Crow Men soa-2

by Mark Chadbourn

  Grace had seen a man in the grip of loneliness and confusion. Her heart had gone out to him, and for the next hour they had spoken deeply and personally. She still did not know how she truly felt about the red-headed man, but she accepted that she no longer had contempt or scorn for him.

  Beaming when he saw her, Strangewayes stepped over. ‘Will you walk with me a while?’ he asked. ‘In the gardens?’ His eyes darted around and his smile faded. ‘There is something I must tell you.’

  Puzzled, Grace followed him into the warm, lilac-scented garden.

  ‘I feel in my heart I can trust you. Is that true?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. What troubles you?’

  Tobias ran a hand through his red hair. ‘Sometimes I feel I am bound to be one of Bedlam’s Abraham Men. My master employs a keeper of records, one Barnaby Goodrington, a clever fellow with a sharp wit. Whenever we discussed business, we got on well. But in recent days, he …’ His words dried up.

  ‘Has seemed like another man?’ Grace continued. ‘Acted oddly, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes! Yesterday he began to cry when I told him a joke. And he is not the only one. Fulke Best, Christopher Norwood, Agnes Swetenham in the kitchens. They all seem like … echoes of the people I knew. Always distracted, sometimes addled even.’ He paused, fighting against himself, and then said, ‘I am loath to say it, but I wonder if Swyfte was right.’

  ‘Help me,’ Grace urged.

  ‘Help you?’

  ‘There is a plot here, I know it.’ She steeled herself and decided to speak out. ‘And I have been charged to uncover it. Before he was murdered, Kit Marlowe hid a cipher in one of his plays. It tells of the conspiracy. I need your help, Tobias. Master Cockayne is a part of this conspiracy and he has hidden the play in his chamber. If we are to stop the tragedy that will ensue, we must steal it back.’

  Grace saw her companion look at her in a new, unsettled light. ‘You are a woman. These are not matters for you.’

  Grace flushed with anger. ‘We have a queen who has proved herself the equal of any man-’

  Strangewayes shook his head furiously. ‘What you are talking about would be considered treason. Steal from an adviser to Sir Robert Cecil? How do I know you are not one of these plotters, trying to entice me into your web?’

  The young woman watched the red-headed man’s face harden and she knew she had lost him. ‘Forget what I said, Tobias. I spoke out of turn.’ As she stepped to the garden door, she could feel the spy’s eyes heavy upon her back.

  Had she made a terrible mistake?

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The crimson cross etched on the door seemed to glow in the suffocating dark of the mud-baked street. Carpenter shuddered. It spoke to him of the transience of life, of those now mouldering in the earth and of the cold and bloody deaths yet to come. As he approached the cramped, timber-framed house in the shadow of the Tower, he wished he had a God who would offer him respite from the horrors of that life.

  ‘Hrrm,’ Launceston muttered as he glanced along the row of silent homes, ‘the plague has taken its toll here.’

  ‘And it will take another two victims if we do not hurry, you beef-witted foot-licker.’ Carpenter tied the cloth tighter across his mouth and nose, but the apple-sweet stink of bodily rot still choked him.

  Every door along the street had been marked with the sign of the plague. No candles glowed in any of the windows. No voices drifted out into the night, no husbands and wives arguing, or mothers singing their babies to sleep, or drunken apprentices winding their way home. There was only the warm July wind moaning under the eaves.

  Now, Carpenter paused, resting his fingertips on the rough wood but not finding the courage to push it open. Each passing day, he wanted to be out of this morbid business a little more, to start afresh with Alice. He refused to accept that he was ruined for the mundane world, as the Earl insisted. He could still escape the shadows and the lies and the insidious threat of the things that came at midnight.

  What you fight holds you in an embrace, Launceston had once said.

  ‘Let us be done with this so we can all move on with our lives,’ the scar-faced man growled, thrusting open the door.

  Inside, the reek of rot was even stronger. Carpenter pressed his hand to his mouth to stop himself gagging. ‘When we find Shipwash I will gut him myself for putting us through this,’ he muttered.

  ‘What better place to hide?’ the Earl whispered, adding without a hint of irony, ‘No one in their right mind would dare venture into a plague-house.’

  ‘We left our own wits behind the moment we agreed to spy.’ But Launceston was right. If one of the doxies from the Cross Keys had not seen Shipwash entering the house with bread, they would never have found him.

  In the faint moonlight breaking through the dusty windows, Carpenter looked around the small room. It was a meagre place with a hard-packed mud floor and three stools before the empty grate. A bunch of dried lavender hung from the beams.

  With a twirl of his finger, the scarred spy directed Launceston towards the stairs. As they crept across the room, a door at the rear of the house banged. Carpenter jumped, half drawing his rapier. The door banged again, and again.

  Just the wind.

  Careful not to wake the sleeping Shipwash, Launceston tested each step for creaks as he climbed the stairs. The scarred spy could only think how terrified of the Unseelie Court their fellow spy must be that he would risk a gruesome death among the victims of the sickness.

  Crossing the room, Carpenter felt moisture fall on to the back of his hand. A droplet gleamed darkly in the moonlight on his pale flesh. Following its trail upwards, he saw a black stain spreading across the plaster between two beams, and more drips waiting to fall.

  ‘God’s wounds!’ the spy cursed. ‘Get up there, quickly.’

  The Earl bounded up the wooden steps with the scarred man clattering at his heels. In the bedroom, they found a hellish scene. Shipwash, flayed to the waist, his eyes missing, lay in a pool of spreading crimson. Runic symbols had been drawn on the walls in some of the poor soul’s blood.

  Carpenter slumped against the door jamb. ‘Damn him. If only he had stayed with us.’ His heart sinking, he bowed his head.

  Only two more victims.

  And then the Unseelie Court would rule over all. England would burn, and the deaths from the plague would seem like nothing compared to the carnage that would follow.

  Only two more victims.

  And his dreams of a new life with Alice would be destroyed. Somehow, he felt that more acutely.

  ‘We have to find Pennebrygg, whatever it takes,’ he urged his companion. ‘This must end here.’

  Launceston appeared not to be listening. ‘This is a fresh kill.’ His whispery voice was tinged with a queasy glee.

  After a moment’s dislocation, the meaning of the Earl’s words became clear. Of course it was fresh. The blood, still dripping.

  Carpenter threw himself down the stairs and out through the back of the house into the hot night. The door banging. It had been the devil-masked killer, fleeing the scene of slaughter. He silently cursed himself at the thought of how close they had come to apprehending their prey.

  An alley ran along the rear of the houses, filled with piles of rotting debris. The scar-faced man peered into the gloom one way, then the other, but as he had feared, nothing moved.

  Returning to the bedroom, a morose Carpenter found the Earl kneeling in the blood next to the flayed corpse, hands dripping. His eyes gleamed with an inner light. ‘There is a mark ’pon his back, as we saw with Gavell in the deadhouse.’

  ‘Is that not what we expected?’

  ‘It is. But consider: Marlowe was not slain in this manner. No skin removed, no eyes taken. He died from a simple stab wound to the brain.’ Launceston gave a faint smile of satisfaction. ‘’Twas not the same killer.’

  ‘You say the playwright’s death was meaningless, as the inquest decided? But his name was upon the list in his lodgin
gs.’

  The Earl shook his head slowly. ‘Marlowe is tied too closely to these matters for his passing to be an unhappy accident. But he was not a sacrifice to break down Dee’s magical defences. He died for another reason.’

  Carpenter waved a dismissive hand. ‘Why should that trouble us now? We are sipping from the cup of failure, and all is turning dark around us.’

  ‘Not so.’ Launceston stood, casting one last loving glance at the sticky corpse. ‘In Bedlam, Griffin Devereux told Will that through the nature of the killer we could divine the identity of the man. What is his nature?’ His shoes made a sucking sound as he stepped out of the congealing pool. ‘This night is not wasted, for we have learned something of the man we hunt which may help us in the future. See here.’ He indicated black smudges on the glistening muscle. ‘These same marks lay upon Gavell. They are important in some way I have not yet discovered. But that … that is the killer’s nature.’

  The Earl pointed to a bloody cross etched on the cracked plaster of one wall.

  ‘At the Rose Theatre, he wore the mask of a devil but he took angel’s wings to wear,’ the Earl continued. ‘He is a religious man at heart, perhaps a Catholic hiding among enemies, who feels he has been driven to do the devil’s work for the sake of a greater good. A conflicted man, who does not want to lose sight of his God amid all the slaughter.’

  ‘How do you know these things?’ Carpenter looked at his companion suspiciously, as if, perhaps, Shipwash had spoken from beyond the vale.

  Launceston raised a pale finger to his temple. ‘I understand his mind,’ he whispered, casting another warm look at the bloody remains. ‘This is not the work of a butcher. He treats each victim with love and attention, as a man who understands that he deals with God’s plan.’ Waving one supple arm towards the dripping runic symbols, he added, ‘From those artfully crafted signs we know that he is no yeoman, but a gentleman. One of us.’

  ‘One of you,’ Carpenter snapped, horrified at the assertion that there was anything linking himself with his tainted colleague. He stared at the symbols for a moment and decided that he could find no argument with what the Earl was saying. ‘When the mask slipped at the Rose, Will said he thought he recognized the face he glimpsed behind it. Could … could our killer be a member of the court?’

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  ‘Ride! Ride as if the devil was at your back!’ Dee yelled above the raging storm.

  ‘He is,’ Will called through gritted teeth. As he leaned low along the neck of his mount, the wind tore at the spy’s hair and rain whipped his face. His black cloak thrashed the air behind him. Amid the inky darkness of the narrow track winding through the storm-torn forest, he feared his steed would slip in the churning mud or trip on the snaking roots, that it would all be over for him, for England, and all the days and nights of fleeing south, the constant threat from the resurgent Unseelie Court, the hiding, the creeping along byways and splashing across rivers, all would be for naught.

  Gripping the reins tighter, he glanced back to where Meg was riding just behind. In a lightning flash that turned the night-world pure white, he saw her pale face was grimly determined, her red hair flying behind her like flames.

  But then Will glimpsed the terrors that lay at their backs.

  Fires burned in the preternatural dark, high up in the swaying branches, close to the ground, moving faster than the horses, flickering and insubstantial, dream-like. Keeping pace, a white cloud billowed with a life of its own, stars sparkling in the folds as if something was forming within it. And glowing as though with an inner light, pale forms bounded among the sodden fern, as lithe and sinuous as foxes, but larger.

  Xanthus the Hunter was no longer alone. His fury exacerbated by his failure in the encounter at Lud’s Church, he had drawn to him the Unseelie Court’s dark forces at loose in the wild countryside, the numbers growing the further south they progressed, until now it appeared there was an army of night at their backs.

  ‘A plan would be good, doctor,’ the spy yelled. But the thunder of hooves and the roar of the storm took his words away, and there was no response.

  Wiping the stinging rain from his eyes, Will saw ahead a faint lightening of the forest’s gloom. Within a moment the three riders burst out of the trees into the full force of the storm. Immediately they were galloping over rolling grassland with nowhere to hide and nothing to slow the relentless pursuit of the wild horde.

  Dee waved frantically, slowing his horse to ride at the spy’s side. ‘Call upon it,’ the alchemist yelled. ‘Call upon your devil.’

  Will was baffled.

  ‘Your mortal soul is already lost. Your life is near over — but not this night! The devil torments you, but it is yours. It must bend to your will. That is why Marlowe sent it to you — protection and damnation in equal measure, but for now, in this world, protection.’ The magician’s voice cracked and broke from the strain of shouting. ‘But take care — it will try to resist you at every turn. It wants misery and suffering and despair to sweeten your final agonies. Do it now!’ Another lightning flash made the magician’s eyes glow with white fire.

  Will knew he had no choice. Whatever the price demanded of him, it would be worth paying.

  The spy gave himself to the rhythm of the hooves and the bluster of the gale, his thoughts settling within him. ‘Come to me now,’ he whispered, ‘come to me, my Mephistophilis, and let us see what sport we can have.’

  Thunder cracked over the dark countryside, and another thunder echoed within him.

  Will felt a weight pressing at his back and invisible talons digging into his shoulders. He smelled damp loam, reminding him of the plague pit, and of Marlowe’s newly dug grave, and then a face slid next to his cheek, the smooth flesh as cold as snow. From the corner of his eye, he could just discern Jenny, the other Jenny, the lost, dead, soul-destroyed Jenny. The lank-haired, black-eyed thing kept its cheek pressed tight against Will’s and threw its mottled arms around his chest in a mockery of an embrace.

  ‘My love,’ it sneered in his ear.

  ‘Dee tells me you are my pet, to order as I please.’

  The devil’s arms grew tighter around him.

  ‘But you do not deny it,’ Will said. ‘You speak just enough truth to flavour the greatest lie, you spin me round in circles so I cannot tell which is up or down, you do all you can to keep me from thinking clearly. Now you must obey me.’

  ‘Take care,’ the Jenny-thing breathed in his ear, ‘for it would be best not to anger me. I can inflict much pain before the time comes when I take that smallest but most valuable part of you.’

  ‘Do what I say!’ the spy snapped.

  ‘Of course, my love.’ The mocking words were punctuated by a quiet laugh. ‘But I would ask something of you. In return for my aid, you will give me something, and only for five minutes, no more, then I shall return it.’

  ‘We have agreement,’ Will shouted, his needs and those of his companions too pressing for argument. ‘Do what you can to prevent those things reaching us.’

  Another tinkling laugh was caught in the gale, and then the Jenny-thing unfurled her arms and slipped back, her cheek sliding past him, and back farther until she was gone. The spy had a vision of her laughing in the face of the storm as she flew backwards like a leaf in the wind, twisting and turning until she faced the Enemy. And what then? Would her face light up with the brightness of the moon, and her hair roil around her head like snakes, and would she raise her hands high, her expression filling with dark glee at the mischief she was about to unleash?

  The storm whipped into a frenzy, screaming in Will’s ears, the wind tearing him like knives, the rain blasting horizontally. His struggling horse half stumbled. The barrage of thunder ended with lightning striking so close behind them that the ground shook, and the horses reared up in terror, and the whole world turned white. One strike, then another, and another, blasting the earth and filling the air with the stink of scorched vegetation.

  The three
companions struggled on until it felt as if they had burst through the skin of a bubble. The wind fell, the rain stopped, and an unsettling peace lay across the countryside.

  Will looked back to see the entire meadow was obscured in a fog of smoke and driving rain, and rhythmic blinding flashes. His devil had bought them a little time, no more.

  ‘Ride on,’ he shouted, ‘and stop for no man.’

  When the sun came up, the three companions dismounted and led their horses along the puddled, muddy tracks. Will deflected all Meg’s questions; she didn’t need to know about his devil. It was 24 July. The spy knew from the villages they had passed through that they must be somewhere in Sussex, with London away to the east. They were close to their destination.

  He could not criticize Dee. The alchemist had done everything in his power to hide them from the Unseelie Court on their long journey south from Manchester: charms carefully constructed from bones and pelts of animals that the magician had killed with his own hands, potions brewed from plants, herbs plucked from the wayside and mingled with salt stolen from inns along the way, were scattered around them every night to protect them while they slept, in rituals of chanting and gestures and processional paths that sometimes lasted for an hour.

  To a degree, it had worked. One night Will had woken to glimpse the moonlit silhouette of something large with steaming breath roaming around them in the undergrowth. But despite its proximity, they had not been discovered. And on other occasions, he had seen figures in the distance picking over their trail, but roaming far and wide as if unable to identify the true direction.

  But the Corvata, the things that Meg had named that evening by the Lombard Street plague pit, had been everywhere, silhouetted high on church steeples with the bats flapping all around them, or in the upper branches of towering beech trees, or on barn roofs. Their heads were always turning slowly, scanning the woods and meadows. Even Dee’s magic could not hide the three fugitives completely from those endlessly searching eyes.