By the time he’d reached Holcombe’s only bed and breakfast, apologising for the lateness of the hour, his voice had already acquired the local accent. Asked who he was, he decided against both Sam and Luc, for fear that either would attract attention.
‘Mr Simon Lewiser.’
He paid for the night in cash, and was shown up to a bedroom with a sloping ceiling and one small window. It looked out across a little playing field with a Scouts’ hut at one end and, beyond, a landscape of hills and woods, lost in the darkness to all but his extraordinary eyes. No wonder Freya had loved this place. Even from a distance he could sense the pull of a Heaven Portal.
His room was the one you get in any bed and breakfast. A basin in the corner, a large bed neatly made with nylon sheets, woollen blankets and a heavy frilled bedspread. Flowery wallpaper, put up by people thinking not what they’d like, but what – improbably – others might prefer. A frayed carpet bore various stains, from coffee and tea to yellowed substances Sam didn’t care to contemplate. On the door with its sturdy lock was a no-smoking reminder and a notice about what to do in the event of fire. Sam didn’t bother with unpacking thoroughly, but dug around in his travel bag until he found a very small radio which he turned on at random. A concerned voice informed the world that more international forces were massing in central Asia and that the Israelis had again ‘retaliated’ against one of their numerous enemies.
To the sound of this stream of disaster, Sam padded round the room. At the door he pressed his hands on to the wood and stood motionless for five minutes, eyes closed. The same procedure was repeated with the window. Finally, turning to stand in the centre of the room for a few seconds, he raised his hands palm upwards.
If anyone had been there to see him ward the room, at each point they might have noticed a glow around his fingers, a silver tinge that faded almost as soon as it had sprung up.
As he went to sleep that night, he wondered what the police were making of his sudden absence. And who had sent the raven?
FIVE
Freya
T
he address he had was 9 Thomas Strepton Road. What Thomas Strepton had done to have a road named after him, Sam couldn’t guess. Actually it was more a deep lane between mechanically cut hedges where the village gave out on to open country.
Freya’s house looked just like he’d expected, even from the outside. It had a deep thatched roof, and a garden with nesting boxes and a birdbath. Ivy crawled up its reddish-coloured stone walls. Sam wasn’t surprised to see all the windows open. Sometimes that helped to blow away memories as well as the dust. He was more surprised to see absolutely no evidence of police activity.
It was a long time before anyone answered the door. The girl who eventually opened it had Freya’s same blonde hair and blue eyes. But she was unlike her, as Sam sensed, in possessing none of the power of a prime.
‘Yes?’ Her voice was subdued.
‘My name’s Luc Satise.’ Trying to guess at her relationship to Freya, he added, ‘Did your… mother mention me?’
‘Grandmother,’ she corrected. ‘No, she didn’t.’
‘Ah.’ A show of disappointment. ‘Thank you anyway. I’m really very sorry to hear of your loss, and if there’s anything I can do —’
‘Unless,’ she said, cutting him short, ‘you’re Luc Satise, as in the same man who fought with Firedancers in Paris.’
He smiled, recognising the test for what it was. ‘Berlin, not Paris.’
She stood aside. ‘Come in.’
The inside of the house was also as Sam had imagined. Polished wood, potted plants, light and space. Comfortable, quaint, yet reminiscent of the halls of Valhalla in the style in which everything was fashioned. He was led into the kitchen, and gratefully accepted a cup of tea.
Fran, as a second-generation child of Freya’s, was descended from a mortal grandfather of whom, she claimed, Freya had been extremely fond. They’d had a number of children, who’d scattered to the corners of the world and would probably die long after Fran herself. One of these, a son, had married another mortal, and she’d been their only child. Both had died in a car accident, and Fran had been returned to her immortal grandmother. It was then that Freya had begun to teach her what little Fran now knew of magic, Heaven and Hell.
She’d never seen another prime, she said, a first-generation Child of Time, and as she watched Sam her eyes were intense. Unlike her grandmother, she was keeping a closed mind about him – and he knew it. He could see the suspicion in her face, and noted with annoyance that she was careful to keep at all times near an opened drawer full of knives.
She had no idea who’d killed Freya, she said, and didn’t want to know. Hers was the attitude that, since there was war in Heaven, the best she could do was keep out of it. As a third, with mostly mortal blood, she would be an easy target – especially now she had no one to defend her. And as Sam heard those words he frowned, because there was a bitterness there that seemed to stem from more than just grief. Grow up, Sam, sighed a voice inside. She hasn’t had thousands of years on this planet to get used to the idea of death. She’s emotional.
It would have been somebody Freya was attached to, Sam pointed out. ‘Did she mention anyone?’
‘Everyone. Freya was attached to everyone,’ she said, with bitterness again.
Sam couldn’t help imagining what many might say about Fran. ‘Little weasel. Spoilt when young, forced to grow up, became bitter in the process.’ Sam himself took a more moderate view. It couldn’t have been pleasant, ageing slower than all your friends but fast enough to look older than your own grandmother. Nor to know that the family she’d been born into was engaged in an intense war, but that if any of them tried to kill her, she’d be defenceless. It must be only a hop and a jump from this to wondering exactly how her parents had died – surely it would have taken more than a car wreck to kill her father. It would have required the sort of premeditated violence that destroyed Freya. Thoughts like these had put shadows under her eyes, made her twenty-something face look old, and frozen all smiles into an empty expression behind which constant calculations were running. Of course you reason you’re maybe next in line.
In the clipped, shrill voice of nervousness, she was saying, ‘Freya spoke well of you. She said you were the only prime who hadn’t been twisted.’
‘Twisted by what?’
‘By power. The lure of Heaven and the promise of ruling it for ever.’
Sam said nothing. He knew what was being left unsaid. One reason I’m not twisted is that I never had the chance to sell my soul. There’s an irony. Of all people, I’m the one who hasn’t sold my soul – and I’m supposed to be the principal dealer in that currency.
‘Do you know why she wanted to talk to me?’
‘She told me she’d discovered something important, but that she also needed help. She said it concerned Earth, Hell and Heaven all at once, and for that reason you ought to be brought into it.’ A shade of resentment seemed to pass over her face. ‘She refused to tell me what it was, though.’
‘Might anyone else know what this urgent discovery was?’
‘Not that I can tell. She was hardly ever here.’
‘This is going to sound terrible,’ he ventured, ‘but may I have a look through her things?’
Fran looked ready to say no, but thought better of it. ‘She said I could trust you.’ She gave a harsh laugh. ‘“Trust darkness incarnate, he’s not such a bad sort.”’
In Freya’s bedroom her belongings had already been piled into cardboard boxes. Sam felt dismayed by the speed of it. There was still a stain on the carpet where she’d bled to death, though the family had been efficient at removing evidence where possible, as well as getting rid of the police. The place had been dusted for fingerprints and a forensic examination made, but Sam knew they wouldn’t find anything.
He sat down in the centre of the floor and began rummaging through the boxes, feeling more like a defiler with each one. Books, clothes,
tapes, a bit of stationery. Nothing of course as unnecessary to Freya as make-up. Old bundles of letters, already violated by the hands of police investigators. Her diary.
This was full to only a few days before her death. He flicked through it. Tenth of January and she had an appointment with someone called Gail. The name cropped up a lot, with the last encounter falling four days before the diary so abruptly terminated. There were also several meetings with someone described only as ‘Historian’.
As Sam was turning to the end of the diary, a shower of papers fell out. A card declaring that the services of the local Indian restaurant would give her a taste of heaven. Receipts for a thermal jumper and jacket, purchased late January. What was she doing buying thermal gear as winter drew to a close? An invitation to a christening, now never to be taken up. A postcard dated the fourteenth of February, with a picture of a Buddhist temple nestling amid high mountains. On the back someone had written in Cantonese. Sam deciphered the message easily: ‘Freya – having a wonderful time here, the food’s excellent. Made an exciting discovery yesterday, wish you were here.’ It was unsigned. Turning over the card a few more times, Sam checked the picture, then the mark on the back. It was stamped from Tibet.
There were two conclusions to be drawn from this. Firstly, the card was not just an idle missive from some dear friend, but contained an important message. Secondly, Freya had been ready to respond to the ‘wish you were here’ part of the card by going out to Tibet at a moment’s notice, hence her purchase of some pretty hard thermal gear.
Following fast came the realisation that, to discover what was so important, he’d have to go to Tibet – in good time, if he hoped to find whoever had sent the card. The afternoon would have to be spent in the local market town, buying appropriate gear for the mountain climate – and, as he went along, rehearsing phrases in every local dialect he could think of, to get back into practice.
‘Who’s Gail?’ he asked, before leaving.
‘I don’t know. She never told me anything.’ The girl spoke the words as though by rote.
‘Or “Historian”?’
‘Don’t know.’
He had a feeling she was lying.
He felt Fran’s gaze on his back as he crossed the threshold. For want of any better farewell he turned and said, ‘Look after yourself.’
‘Am I in danger?’
‘Everyone is always in danger. If you’re sensible, that danger is less.’
Her eyes were steady and her voice calm as she answered him. ‘I’m just a third-generation Daughter of Time,’ she said simply. ‘Trapped between worlds. Even if I got hit by a truck I’d survive, so there’s no need to be sensible in that respect, is there?’
Sam said nothing.
‘On the other hand,’ she continued, still holding him in her gaze, ‘if I do step to one side and forget how little on this planet there is that can harm me, and turn towards the world from where the rest of my blood stems, then what? I find I’m a weakling, a pathetic half-breed. The butt of bad jokes and an object of scorn. If there’s danger from this other world, I’m powerless against any of it.’ She smiled faintly.
‘That’s why there’s no point in being sensible. Nothing here can harm me, and if harm comes from there, nothing I do can prevent it. It’s the blood, isn’t it? The blood she gave me… So goodbye, then.’ She closed the door in his face, leaving him alone on the doorstep.
The nearby town was everything Holcombe had striven not to be. Chain stores dominated the main streets, and huge swathes of land were given over to car parks. Sam bought a guide covering the area of Tibet he needed to visit, and even found a picture of the Buddhist temple from the postcard. He also changed some currency – though not much, because, if he remembered, in Tibet no kind of money counted for much.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he got there, but he was determined to try something. Anything.
Unfortunately, Tibet meant travelling by Portal. Leaning against the weight from his bag full of newly purchased clothes, Sam tried not to think what difficulties that would involve.
And now it was late afternoon, and he was marching down the road out of Holcombe with the bag and a slim package slung over his back and a thickly lined box attached to his belt.
Sam was following his instincts. Sure enough a convoy of black cars soon overtook him. After five minutes he caught up with them again, parked in a lay-by. A path led away from the road into woods. It was cold and wet, typical West Country in February. Sam shivered, drew his coat more tightly around him, and began to trudge down the narrow track. His feet squelched in other, deeper footprints. Not a creature stirred.
A mist had come down, as if in respect for the sombre secrecy of Freya’s departure from this world. Soon it was so thick that Sam could hardly see his hands in front of his face. He could sense the magic in it. The family had brought down this mist, so that they might not be observed.
As he walked, Sam extended his senses, to touch the minds of the woodland animals. As always the owls and the badgers were first to respond. Through their knowledge and senses he was guided without mishap towards the clearing where a dozen silent figures stood bearing torches.
From just outside, hidden in dimness beneath the trees, Sam watched through the mist that was being burnt away by the twelve torches. Four dark figures lowered a coffin to the ground and stood back. One of the torchbearers stepped to its head. He had one eye and a face worn with scars. Odin himself. When he spoke, it was in an ancient language that even Sam struggled to translate fast enough.
‘She was the fairest child of us all,’ he was saying. ‘Daughter of Love and Time, Princess of Valhalla. Lady of Nature and Life.’ There was no emotion in his voice – it was a flat statement. She was the lady of Nature and Life. Statement. She was the Daughter of Love and Time. Statement.
As he stood back, the torchbearers drew their weapons. Some were swords, some axes, singled-handed or double. Cold moisture glistened off the blades, all faces were stony. Sam recognised Thor, the old hammer, caught a glimpse of blind Hector, of Signi and all the rest, faces from his past, memories returning in a rush.
All were crowned or helmeted. Thor had a headpiece that covered most of his face, creating the appearance of an armoured executioner. Hector wore a dark crown with black, withered leaves carved on it. Odin, head of Valhalla, with his one eye, was crowned with spiky iron. A man tormented, if Sam ever saw one. It was Odin’s responsibility to uphold the glory of his house, a duty in which he was failing wretchedly. He’d tried almost everything to restore its greatness: diplomacy, war, bribery – even, so rumour said, the odd murder attempt – yet increasingly Valhalla was giving place to the other houses of Heaven. The chance of a Valhallan ascending to the throne of Heaven was now one in a huge number.
The Children of Valhalla began to sing, very softly. A mourning song for the dead. Sam too mouthed the words, knowing every one from some part of his past that he’d long ago forgotten but which now rose in him and filled the world with shadows of things that had been. As he sang he took from the box the slim silver band that marked him too as a Prince of Heaven, one among these. Moisture clung to it, just as it gleamed on his face and hair. He put it on out of respect for the dead, as he joined his mourning with that of Odin, Thor, Hector, Fricka and the rest. Old school. Weak school. But, because of war in Heaven, the kind of people who at a word might kill Sam for the simple act of being who he was.
When the song ended, each in turn went up to Freya’s coffin and placed in it some gift, be it spell or treasured belonging. That done, four of them raised up the coffin and turned to face north. Odin and Thor, standing either side of nothing, together raised their hands and drew them apart. Where their hands trailed through the air, white fire followed, writhed like a snake in its captor’s grasp, and traced the outline of a doorway filled with thick, white mist. Through this the coffin went with its silent bearers. Then the rest of them followed, pairing one to the other to march in sil
ence through the Portal. Only Odin and Thor remained as the Portal snapped shut.
Thor spoke first. ‘Who did this? Why? I don’t understand!’
‘You will soon, I promise,’ said Odin quietly.
‘There was no need for her death!’
‘But you know who made it happen, and why. And it’s you who must be our means of revenge.’
Thor hung his head, still radiating anger. ‘For centuries I’ve served you, like all of Valhalla. Other deaths… in the end I’ve always understood why. But her… my Freya…’
Odin squeezed his shoulder in what was meant to be a fatherly way. ‘There is proof, of that I can assure you. The correspondence, the company she kept… And since you know as well as I who did this, we must strike while we can. You must strike.’
Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series Page 4