The Scar-Crow Men soa-2

by Mark Chadbourn

  Grinning, Strangewayes bounded across the chamber. During the hot summer, there had been no need to light the fires in the palace and the grey ashes in the rusty iron grate were long undisturbed. Reaching one hand up the chimney, he felt around, wrinkling his nose at the shower of sticky black soot. His fingers closed on rough sackcloth blocking the flue.

  In jubilation, the spy tore down the sack, coughing at the black cloud he raised. Inside was a sheaf of papers with Marlowe’s scrawled signature clear on the front.

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my chamber?’

  Strangewayes started at the harsh voice. Spinning round, he saw that Cockayne had entered silently. In his black robe, the adviser was a pool of shadow by the door with only his ruddy face and shock of grey hair visible.

  Tobias reeled from the terrible consequences of being discovered in the chamber of an adviser to the Secretary of State. ‘I … I was just-’ he stuttered.

  ‘Thief!’ Cockayne called, turning to the door. ‘I am robbed!’

  The younger man threw himself across the room. Clamping one hand across Cockayne’s mouth, the spy wrestled his opponent into the door with a crash.

  ‘Hush, I mean you no harm,’ Strangewayes hissed. But suddenly he could see no way out of his predicament. His reputation, and Grace, had been lost.

  The struggling adviser clamped his teeth on the spy’s fingers. When the younger man snatched his hand away with a cry of pain, Cockayne called out, ‘Traitor!’ and in that instant Strangewayes realized he had lost his life too.

  ‘No!’ the spy barked, tears of desperation stinging his eyes. Furiously, he flung the older man across the room. Books and papers flew everywhere. The chair was upended, and Cockayne crashed into the wood panelling next to the fireplace. Strangewayes was on him in an instant.

  ‘Traitor!’ the adviser barked.

  Tobias was consumed with fear. He drove his fist into the older man’s face. The nose burst underneath his knuckles. ‘Be quiet,’ the spy hissed. ‘I have no wish to harm you. Be quiet.’

  Yet Cockayne continued to struggle. ‘Essex’s man,’ he muttered through split lips.

  Half sobbing, Strangewayes made a decision. He pulled out his dagger and thrust it into the adviser’s chest. Recoiling, he snorted through hot tears of angry frustration, ‘I never meant for this.’

  Sucking in a juddering gasp of air to calm himself, the red-headed man tried to think clearly. There was still a chance the adviser might have returned early and no one had overheard the struggle. Forcing aside the thought that he might have killed an innocent man, he plucked up the sooty sack and leapt to the door.

  The spy allowed himself one glance back at the body of his victim — and was rooted in horror.

  It was no longer Cockayne.

  In disbelief, Strangewayes stepped forward to see more clearly. His eyes widened, his wits whirled and he thought he would go mad.

  Gripping the dirty sack to his chest, the spy bolted from the chamber.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  ‘Where is Grace?’ Will roared.

  His throat was raw. He felt blood dripping from a gash on his forehead and a searing ache in his ribs from the beating dealt out by his Unseelie Court captors. Pulling himself up the damp stone wall, he stood in the corner of the low-ceilinged chamber and faced the pale figures who watched him dispassionately. Choking on the fumes from the brazier in the far corner, Will tried to see by the dull red glow of the coals. He sensed the brooding presence of more Enemies in the shadows.

  ‘Your friend is safe. For now.’ Dressed all in black, Fabian appeared to be floating in the greater darkness, his sad face bloodless.

  ‘Why is she here?’

  ‘Answering questions, providing information that will help us in the days to come. You are the spy, yes? Swyfte?’

  ‘And you are Fabian.’

  With a touch of surprise, the Fay nodded. ‘I am one of the High Family. In this place, I carry out my great and terrible responsibilities to my brothers and sisters, and thereby to my people.’ Stepping forward, he looked Will up and down.

  Will suppressed the concern for Grace that was gnawing in his chest. He had expected to see only contempt in his foe’s face. Instead, the looming, black-clad figure showed only a deep concern and, perhaps, pity. Unsettled by the revelation, Will reassessed his approach. ‘What is your business here?’ he asked.

  ‘Here I learn what it means to be human,’ Fabian replied in a quiet voice.

  From somewhere deep in that cavernous place, a man’s cry echoed and was cut short. The pale figure’s breath caught in his throat. Snapping his head around, he listened to the silence that followed the scream with a note of dismay. ‘You are an intriguing race. Inspiring in many ways. Your lives are so short, your suffering so great, and yet you find joy in the smallest things. You create beauty. You love. You care. Your bodies are tiny vessels, so fragile, seemingly too small to contain the vast oceans of emotion that shift within you. You are, all of you, miracles.’ He shook his head in awe.

  Will ignored the gentle words. With mounting revulsion, he was beginning to sense what truly transpired in the dark beneath the seminary. ‘What do you do here?’ he asked, each word a thrown stone.

  ‘I break wondrous things.’

  The bald statement was so at odds with the poetry of what his captor had been saying that Will at first thought he had misheard. But then he pieced together all the sounds, smells and sights he had experienced since his descent into the Unseelie Court’s realm and he recognized the truth. ‘Torture.’

  Fabian started as if he had been stung. ‘Nothing so crude. We know a myriad ways to extract information from your kind. Torture requires no skill. No, there is an artistry to what I achieve here. I have a unique ability, a talent perhaps, that also destroys me by degrees. But that is my curse. We must all live with the things that destroy us.’ Tapping one slender index finger on his lips, he prowled the dark in reflection. ‘We must know our enemy if we are truly to defeat them,’ he continued. ‘We must know the inner workings of your mind, and your body. What makes you, you. The very essence of what it is to be human. You are like us in many ways, and so different in others.’

  Will was sickened by the visions flashing through his mind. ‘You butcher us, then. Like cattle being prepared for table.’

  ‘No,’ the supernatural being cried. He bounded back to the spy and reached out a hand tenderly to frame Will’s face. ‘In my work, as I search for the secrets buried deep within you, I treat all of your kind with respect and tenderness.’

  ‘You dress it up in pretty words but you bring death, like all of your ilk,’ Will spat.

  ‘Death is not the end.’ Stepping back, Fabian looked askance, a curious gleam in his eye. ‘There are many secrets you have yet to discover.’ He turned away as if he had said too much and strode towards his fellows. ‘Over the years, I have worked tirelessly here. The mysteries always appeared elusive. But in recent years we have made a discovery.’ His breath caught with excitement. ‘It changed everything. All our plans, our very thoughts about what we should and could achieve.’

  ‘And what did you learn?’ the spy asked with contempt. ‘That we are more than the sum of our parts?’

  ‘That is understood.’ Fabian bowed. ‘The physical world can be altered by the great powers that surround us. Through ritual and potion, words of power, we can weave great things out of the lights of the world. The great and wise Deortha has been invaluable in these matters. You know him?’

  With a nod, Will recalled the mystic’s appearance on misty Dartmoor all those years earlier.

  ‘With Deortha’s help, and the discoveries made in these silent chambers, we learned how to shape your mortal clay, and imbue a spark of life within it, some semblance of being.’ He waved a hand towards something hidden in the dark.

  From the shadows stepped a lanky young man of perhaps twenty, a puzzled smile upon his smooth-cheeked face. Wearing a plain brown doublet, too la
rge for him, and worn black breeches, he looked too innocent to survive in that awful place. And so it proved.

  Whisking out his dagger, Fabian plunged it into the man’s heart.

  ‘No!’ When Will lunged, the Unseelie Court’s silent watchers hurled him back into the corner, drawing their rapiers to underscore their unspoken threat.

  Almost comically baffled, the young man looked down at the blood pumping from his chest and then fell to the flags, dead.

  ‘Some semblance,’ Fabian continued as if nothing untoward had happened, ‘but not perfection.’

  ‘Devil,’ the spy growled.

  ‘These are straw men. Scar-Crow Men. They look like you, and speak, and think to a degree, but they cannot truly feel.’ Fabian wiped his dagger on the young man’s doublet and returned it to its sheath. ‘They do not understand emotions. And so they are useless as complete replacements for your people. But they can keep up appearances for a while, enough to adopt a position of power, and shepherd, and twist, and urge, and in that way achieve our aims, not yours.’

  With a wave of his hand, the Fay directed his prisoner’s attention to the body. It was no longer the young man. Sprawled on the stone floor, leaking bodily fluids, was a rotting corpse, of the same size, shape and sex as the puzzled figure the spy had seen, but much older. Yet what caught Will’s eye were the blackened swellings on the grey body that revealed the presence of the plague.

  The spy’s thoughts spun as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Running one hand through his black hair, he gasped, ‘You build these Scar-Crow Men from the remains of the poor souls who die from the sickness.’

  Fabian nodded slowly.

  ‘They are dead … yet alive.’

  ‘They make a play of being alive, and give as good a performance as many of the players who walk your stages.’ The pale-skinned being waved his hand and two of his fellows grabbed the remains by the arms and dragged it away. A wet trail gleamed blackly in the ruddy half-light. ‘But their inability to comprehend emotions, that is what betrays them,’ he continued. ‘And that is proof that they are not truly human, for it is the acuity of feelings that makes a man.’

  Will felt sickened by what he had heard, but he was already beginning to grasp the plot the Unseelie Court were weaving out of this frightfulness. ‘And with the plague in London you have no shortage of the raw materials you need to build your Scar-Crow Men.’

  ‘We brought the plague to London.’

  The spy was stung by Fabian’s bald statement. In that moment all he could think of were the plague pits and the bodies discarded in them like so much cordwood. Innocents who had died needlessly. The blood throbbed in his temple.

  ‘But it is not a simple task to construct our agents. It takes time, and effort.’ Looming over him, Fabian studied Will with a note of curiosity, as if he had found a new breed of beast. ‘Slowly, though, we are replacing the ones who have influence at the heart of your government. Those who are close to power, but not so close that their failings will be revealed easily. The quiet people. The whisperers. Advisers, who stand in the shadows, ignored until their guidance is needed. Soon, though, we will replace more and more, until we rule your land completely without ever being seen by the common herd.’

  ‘And Grace. She too has been replaced?’

  ‘She holds a position close to your Queen, Elizabeth. We have influence there already, but one more is needed to achieve our aims.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to smite us all dead and burn the bodies. That was always the stated intent of the Unseelie Court.’

  ‘There will be some pain. There has to be vengeance for your grand betrayal, and the capture and imprisonment of our Queen,’ Fabian continued. ‘Once she is free … once our agent has destroyed the final defences that keep us from her … she will emerge from her prison like a tempest, furious and proud and terrible, blasting all that lies before her.’ A fleeting smile leapt to his lips. ‘But once her anger has abated, there is hope for your people. They will survive under the rule of our Scar-Crow Men … and our Scar-Crow Queen.’

  ‘While you make the puppets dance from behind the scenes.’

  ‘There can never be rebellion if a country does not know it has been conquered.’

  Will began to grasp the Unseelie Court’s plan, but there was one aspect he did not understand. ‘Why rule England from behind the veil? You have your own land, wherever it may lie, beneath hill or lake.’

  Absently, Fabian strode to the fuming brazier and began to prod the glowing coals with an iron poker. ‘My people have been as unchanging as the seasons since the beginning of the world, but in recent days our thoughts have shifted greatly. And you have played a part in that.’

  ‘I?’

  His face transformed into a grotesque mask by the ruddy light, the black-clad being looked at Will. ‘When you oversaw the murder of Cavillex of the High Family a vast shudder ran through the Unseelie Court,’ he said with a note of pity. ‘A mortal, killing one of our greatest! It was unheard of. And in that instant everything altered. We could no longer retreat to our home and pretend we were still the same.’

  The spy felt a weight upon him. Since the war with the Unseelie Court began, every action had unforeseen consequences, one atrocity leading to a greater monstrousness. Where would it end? With the destruction of both races? And now he was responsible for the amplification of the Fay’s ambitions, and for the misery they would heap on his own people. He began to understand that the School of Night — and Marlowe — were right. There had to be another way. ‘Then what do you plan once you have seized control of England?’ he asked.

  Fabian thrust the poker into the heart of the burning coals, sending up a shower of golden sparks. ‘We can no longer choose to ignore your world. We must engage with it. We must control it, and control you, mortals, who once were mere sport to us when we failed to understand your wondrous capabilities, and who now may well be a threat, not only to us but to all there is. Your capacity for destruction, betrayal, inflicting pain, slaughtering your own …’ He placed one hand on his forehead in disbelief. ‘You think you are the hero in this business, Master Swyfte. You are not. Humankind is a sickness, like the plague that rots your own bodies, and it must be cured.’

  ‘You wish to eradicate us, all of us, wherever we roam.’ Will saw the future unfold grimly before his mind’s eye. Once the Unseelie Court controlled England they would have a foothold upon the world, a fortress from which they could exert their influence, and yet no one would ever know they were there. The Scar-Crow Men would put the orders of their hidden masters into effect, and all England would obey, blindly.

  ‘Eradication, yes, if we have to. But for now we will be satisfied with containment.’ Fabian strode back across the chamber and stood before the spy, one hand resting on the hilt of his rapier. ‘I did not wish this path. I would celebrate you, not destroy you, and now I am forced to take actions that destroy me. But you brought it upon yourselves.’

  Will imagined Marlowe overcome by the horrors he witnessed in this place, and fleeing back to England to inform Sir Francis Walsingham. And the spymaster, in his usual way, would have taken note, and reflected, and filed away, not realizing that the seeds of his own death had already been planted.

  ‘And so you set out to cover your tracks,’ the spy said, ‘until you were ready to act. As the sacrificial victims required to enable the removal of our defences, you chose the spies who would know that you had unlocked the secret of creating life here in Reims, and who might piece together your great scheme. Two birds, one stone. Walsingham murdered first, then Clement, Makepiece, Gavell and the rest. And I was placed on your list because I met Kit Marlowe on his return to England, and you could not risk that he had told me of his nightmarish experience here beneath the seminary.’

  But Kit sought to spare me, as he always did.

  Fabian appeared truly sympathetic. ‘I would not have wished this pain upon you, but there it is. Now we have won. Our Scar-Crow Men
are in position, with only your Queen yet to be replaced. One single death yet remains, and then all your defences will crumble. And our force waits in Paris, ready to sail to your shores once our own Queen has been freed from her imprisonment. Your time has passed. England is gone. The dawn of the Unseelie Court in your world now rises.’

  Will ignored the Fay’s chilling words. Something had been troubling him, and now he thought he had it. ‘And yet I feel there is something missing from your words,’ he said. ‘Your decision to pursue our spies so ruthlessly tells me Kit Marlowe discovered more here than just the beginnings of your plot.’

  Fabian nodded. ‘That is true. The discovery of the plot alone would not have been enough to stop us. But when your friend witnessed the creation of our Scar-Crow Men, he also saw the means by which we may destroy them.’

  ‘Because, if events turned sour, the soulless things could be a threat even to the great Unseelie Court.’

  ‘Every weapon cuts both ways.’

  ‘And what is this means of destruction?’ the spy pressed. ‘I would imagine ’twould need to be something that could extinguish the spark of life in your creations in one fell swoop, like the snuffing out of a candle flame. What would that be?’

  The Corpus-Scythe, he thought. And I suspect that too lies in Paris.

  Will waited for his captor to respond, but Fabian appeared distracted. With furrowed brow, the Fay half turned, cocking his head to one side as if listening to something beyond the reach of human hearing.

  And then, echoing through the night-dark chambers, the spy heard the clamour of human voices drawing nearer.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  With his captors distracted by the cacophony of voices, Will rolled across the dusty stone flags to where he had seen his rapier and dagger tossed earlier. The spy felt around in the gloom until his fingers closed on cold steel. In the dim, ruddy light, he glimpsed three of the Fay turn towards him, drawing their own swords.