Strangeness and Charm cotf-3

by Mike Shevdon

  "You're not supposed to bring visitors, Dogstar."

  Angela was looking around wildly, disorientated by the unexpected landing.

  "She's not a visitor. Garvin told me to bring them in, well here's one of them. Angela, this is Amber. You can trust her. She'll protect you."

  Angela glanced warily at Amber, who raised an eyebrow minutely.

  Angela looked around. "Where are we?"

  "Somewhere safe. I need you to stay with Amber for a moment while I make arrangements. Will you do that? Just don't touch her or anything."

  "I won't touch her," said Angela. "She wears death like a shroud."

  "Great," said Amber. "One of those."

  I led Angela away from the centre of the floor in case anyone else tried to use the Way. Collisions were unlikely, but it wasn't a good place to stand. I led her so she could lean against the wall and I watched her take in her surroundings.

  "How do you feel?" I asked her.

  "I'm fine — that's quite a ride."

  "It's exhilarating to start with, but you'll tire quite quickly. It takes it out of you."

  "I went hill walking once, in the Lake District. We came down a scree slope and everything started sliding. Travelling on the Way — it was like that, only more so."

  "Sit down here, against the wall. I'll only be a few moments. I just need to let people know that you're here and get you somewhere to stay.

  "I'm not staying."

  "We'll see. It'll be OK."

  She slid down the wall, crossing her legs and watched Amber warily. Amber made a point of not watching her, leaning against the wall, closing in on herself. I had seen her stand like that for hours without moving, but with the potential to strike at any moment. No wonder Angela watched her.

  I left them and went up into the house, searching for Garvin. I found him in the hall talking to Fellstamp.

  "Dogstar. I was just coming to see you."

  "You were? I only just got back."

  "Yes, and you brought someone with you. Fellstamp, go and give Amber a hand, would you? I need a brief word with Niall."

  Fellstamp grinned at me as he passed. There was no sign in his movements of where I had run his shoulder through with a sword during my initiation as a Warder. The old swagger was back and his dark curly hair fell across his eyes, which sparkled under his fringe with amusement. To me his nose was too broad, his lips too full, but I also knew that among the female Stewards he was considered very attractive. It was rumoured that he'd slept with most of them.

  "I'll go keep our guest company, then, shall I?" He executed a neat half turn that kept him facing me as he passed, and as I came between him and Garvin, he winked. He spun back neatly and walked the way I had come.

  "What's up with him?" I asked Garvin.

  "Hard to say," said Garvin, "Our visitor wouldn't be female, would she?"

  "How did you know that?"

  "You know how Fellstamp loves to flirt."

  "I don't think Angela's his type."

  "I didn't know Fellstamp had a type. So she's called Angela. What's her affinity?"

  "I didn't ask. She's like Kareesh, though, she can see the future, or possible futures."

  "Earth and Fire then. I'll arrange for an audience with Teoth for her. Is she house-trained?"

  "What does that mean?"

  "Is she dangerous? Do we need to lock her up?"

  "No, she's fine. I need to do something, though. She's had a vision and I think it's about me. She wants to touch me, but I didn't want to do it alone."

  "You're going to let an untrained seer touch you?"

  "The sun will rise, and they shall fall."

  Garvin gazed steadily at my eyes. "She said that?"

  "Not just said it. She has diagrams of it and poems of it. She draws it and dreams it. It's all over the walls of her office. She's been able to write nothing else since she encountered me in the cells under Porton Down."

  "OK. I'll have her brought up to the drawing room."

  "That was too easy. You've heard that phrase before."

  "Perhaps."

  "There's no perhaps about it, Garvin. Blackbird told me that Deefnir used exactly that phrase when he cornered her at Highsmith's Farm."

  "Then you are well-informed, Dogstar." His use of my Warder nickname was intended to remind me of my position as newest and most junior of the Warders.

  "It's not just there, though is it? You already knew about it."

  "You're guessing, Dogstar." He led off towards the drawing room.

  "It's a good guess, though, isn't it?"

  "Perhaps. Let's see what your seer has to say."

  "You'd better sit on the floor. You can't fall off that," said Garvin.

  Angela stood in the doorway, watching Fellstamp move the dust-sheeted armchairs back and create some space in the middle of the disused room. Amber drew back the drapes and let the sun back-light the lace curtains. It should have made the room warm and inviting, so why did I feel cold?

  Perhaps it was the memory of when Kareesh had held my hands in the tunnels beneath Covent Garden Underground Station, gifting me with a vision of my future, or at least my probable future. It had set me on a path that saved me from a gruesome death at the hands of the Seventh Court, but left me wondering how much was preordained and how much was down to chance, or fate, or decisions that I or the people around me made.

  Blackbird said that the future was uncertain, that even seers could not predict — they could only show you the points on your path that were most likely to occur. My last attempt at this with Kareesh had worked out for me — I had escaped the Untainted and found a place in the courts — maybe that's why I was willing to give Angela a chance. There was a risk, but by doing it here in the presence of the other Warders that risk was limited.

  Garvin's reaction bothered me. He had been all about business as usual until I mentioned what Angela had said, and then he had become interested. If I had proposed letting Angela touch me in normal circumstances then the answer would have been no, I was sure. I was expecting to have to persuade him, to argue my case. Instead he had agreed almost without discussion and made immediate arrangements. He caught me watching him across the room and I looked away. I never had any doubt that Garvin was trustworthy, that he had the best interests of the Courts and the Warders at the centre of everything he did. I just wondered how much of that included me.

  "Sit here," Garvin said to Angela.

  A clear path had been created for her to take a seat in the middle of the rug. The other Warders kept a wary distance from her. No weapons were displayed, but after her words about my stance and posture I noticed that the other Warders moved in a similar way. It wasn't that they danced, but that they looked like they could dance, or they were ready to dance. Perhaps that's what training as a Warder did to you. I smiled to myself for a moment, wondering whether I should actually learn to dance and whether Blackbird would like that. Would she dance with me, I wondered?

  Garvin must have caught my smile. "Looking forward to this?"

  "Not especially. Too late to back out now, though, eh?"

  "You don't have to do it if you don't want to. It was your idea."

  "So it was."

  "Gain as much knowledge and insight into your enemy before you make contact," said Garvin. "It's a sound approach."

  "What enemy, Garvin? What am I looking for?"

  "That's what we're trying to find out." He squeezed my shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.

  Once again I thought that there was more that he was avoiding telling me. It would do no good to ask, though. He would tell me when he thought I needed to know.

  I sat cross-legged opposite Angela, about a hand-width apart. She smiled reassuringly, but I could see she was nervous. She kept glancing at the Warders around the room, assessing distance, looking back at me, seeking reassurance herself.

  "Do you still want to do this?" I asked her.

  "I don't have any choice."

  "Th
ere's always a choice." I found myself echoing Blackbird's words and smiled at the irony.

  Angela smiled back, taking it as a positive sign. She reached out to touch my cheek, but I shook my head. I held out my hands, palms upward and open, forearms resting on my knees. "Trust me, this is how it's done."

  She looked at my hands and then positioned hers above them. "Ready?"

  "No one ever is," I told her.

  Her hands clasped mine.

  Cold rushes down my arms — I thought I remembered the cold from last time, but my memory was blunted. It sears and burns through my veins, running like rivers of quicksilver, killing sensation. My eyes blur with tears and my teeth grind together until my jaw aches. Humming vibrates through me, a note so low I can feel it in my bones.

  There is Angela behind the glass screen, reinforced with iron wire, her face illuminated in the pale nimbus-glow surrounding me. Blood slashes across the glass, running down in black rivulets, and the door is open. Her hand touches my cheek and her eyes fill with light.

  "The sun will rise and they shall fall." This is not the future, it's the past.

  The world spins and I fall, plummeting into a funnel which narrows so that I am rushing down a tunnel, twisting and buffeting, this way and that, until I stop, suddenly and immediately, standing in the room below Covent Garden Underground Station in the dim orange glow from the lamps with the smell of new turned earth and recent rain. Kareesh sits in her nest of cushions, reaching for me, grinning with pointed teeth.

  I looked around for Blackbird, but she isn't here. Gramawl looms in the background at the edge of the lights from the filigree lanterns hung from the ceiling. Blackbird was here when this happened and Gramawl wasn't, why isn't she here now?

  Kareesh speaks in her crackly voice, "Here you are at last, gauntlet runner, witness and suspect, evader of traps, bringer of hope. Rabbit will be your name, but not for always. Another name will be yours, Dogstar, when you have earned it." She reaches forward and touches my face. "The sun will rise and they shall fall. So say I."

  "So say I." My eyes are glazed as I hear my voice acknowledge hers, but that's not what happened. She never called me Dogstar — that happened later when Raffmir named me at the anvil under the Strand. Are we changing the past?

  There's a cawing sound behind me and I turn to look. I am outside, a path leads up through a graveyard to an ornate archway with a wooden door of grey bleached wood. The arch over the door is carved with impossible creatures, serpents, griffins and manticores, the carved face of a man with ivy growing from his mouth stares down at me. The door swings open and two men stand before the door speaking in low tones.

  "The work is completed?" The first is tall, dressed as a priest.

  "It is done, though why you need such protection on God's house is beyond me, Father." The second looks worried. He has the tan of a man who works outside. His hands are rough and criss-crossed with old scars.

  The priest clasps the man's wrist. "Never speak of it. Understand?"

  "I still say, it ain't right," says the man.

  "He moves in mysterious ways, and we are His servants. This will stand well for you in the life to come," says the priest.

  "I hope so, vicar. I surely hope so."

  As the door closes, everything is inside out and I am in a tall room lined with books. Shelves vanish into the dimness on all sides. A dark-haired man sits at a desk, a lamp at either side. Open in front of him is a book, its pages brown at the edges, the paper as thin as tissue. Each facing page has three intricate symbols aligned down each page and between them is a central design which spans the join. The symbols shiver and squirm on the page but the central design is clear, a circle containing four symmetrical shields arranged in a cross. The symbols have text beside them in the tiniest writing. I squint to see what they say, but my eyes blur and the text runs into grey.

  The grey resolved into mist. I begin to see that there are people around me. There is a noise I recognise, the distant squeal of brakes and hum of an electric train. The mist pulls back revealing a London Underground platform crowded with people.

  I have been here before.

  The train is getting close, I can hear the clack and rumble as it approaches. I am standing in the same spot as on the morning I first learned about my fey heritage, on the same platform with the same people. On that morning, the man beside me fell deliberately onto the tracks as the train reached the platform. He committed suicide by tube train.

  I look at the person next to me, but it's not the same man. It's a skinny boy with spiky hair. He glances at me with knowing eyes and then at the approaching train. He looks calm, relaxed. I look back to where the train is clattering onto the platform. Aware of what is going to happen I turned back to the figure next to me to find him wreathed in fire. Long curling yellow flames ripple up his arms, his clothes smoke, his face shimmers in the haze. No one else notices, no one steps back from the heat that radiates from him.

  He steps around and stands on the edge with his back to the track, looking at me, his eyes filled with orange fire. He extended his burning hand to me. I lift my hand to take his, but the heat from his hand is incredible.

  "It's too hot!" I tell him. My hand blisters as it nears his. I can't take his hand.

  "How can you save me," he asks calmly, falling slowly backwards into the path of the train, "when you can't even save yourself?"

  FOUR

  Angela's hands release me and I topple sideways. Cramp sends shooting pains up my leg and I kick out trying to release the pain.

  "Nnnngh." My tongue is welded dry to the roof of my mouth.

  "I think he's having some sort of fit," said Fellstamp, grinning down at me.

  "Give him a moment," said Garvin. "Well, Angela? Did you see anything?"

  She pushed out her legs, stretching her calves and rotating her feet. "It's not for me to say." She rubbed her hands together, encouraging the circulation. The afternoon sunlight had disappeared, leaving the room in twilight, but having done this before it was not such a shock that so much time had passed.

  I managed to unstick my tongue. "Water," I croaked. Fellstamp knelt down beside me and offered me water from a glass. The glass felt oddly warm in my hands and my teeth chattered against the edge as I sipped from it. I swished the liquid around my mouth to ease the dryness.

  "Did you get what you needed? Did you find out what it means?" Garvin asked Angela.

  She looked up at him, suspicion in her eyes. "You know enough about me, I think, to know that your Warder will know the meaning when the time is right. It's not for me to interpret for him, or to explain what he's seen. I did see one thing, though."

  "And what was that?" asked Garvin.

  "This isn't about me, is it? It's about him." She gestured to where I was sitting half-upright on the floor. "This started long ago and I am only the latest link in the chain of events. I'm not the first to speak of a rising sun, am I?"

  "Nor the last, probably. How about you Dogstar, what did you see?"

  I looked up at Garvin and wondered what he wasn't telling me. "To me it seemed to be more about the past than the future. Maybe whatever it is has already happened and we're just not seeing it?"

  "Seeing what?" asked Garvin.

  "Perhaps if you told me what you were looking for, I could help you find it," I said.

  "If we knew what we were looking for, I'd be able to find it myself," said Garvin. "Fellstamp, give Dogstar a hand, will you? He'll need to sleep it off. I'll ask Mullbrook to find room for Angela."

  "I'm not staying," she said.

  "On the contrary," Garvin said. "I insist."

  "You did what?" Blackbird was incredulous.

  "It was a calculated risk."

  My head was thumping and my vision had acquired a strange heat-haze effect. Maybe that was causing the nausea.

  "After our conversation this morning, when I specifically mentioned the dangers of letting her touch you, you let her do it again? What were you thinki
ng of Niall?"

  "We need to know what this is about."

  "Who is this 'we', that needs to know?" she demanded. "Why don't you let Garvin dirty his own hands?"

  "It wasn't Garvin's idea, it was mine."

  "Then why, Niall? For goodness sake why?"

  I sighed. "You didn't see her room. It's covered in images and clippings and scraps of paper, and as far as I can tell they all link back to me. It's like she's been following my progress without even knowing who I am. How can she do that?"

  "She's fey, and a seer to boot. Who knows what her motives are?"

  "You took me to see Kareesh. She's a seer."

  "Yes, and I had doubts about that. Kareesh has cared for me since I was a girl but I don't just let her lay her hands on me any time she likes!"

  "I had Garvin there to help. He could have stopped it if it was needed."

  "What's he going to do, chop her head off? You had no idea what she was capable of — she was imprisoned the same as Alex. Do you think they were treating her any more gently than they did your daughter? She could be insane for all you know."

  "She didn't seem insane."

  "Your daughter didn't seem insane until she… no, sorry Niall, I didn't mean that. Alex isn't insane, she's just…"

  "What?" My expression had darkened at the mention of my daughter's mental state.

  There was a sound like a mewling cat from the next room which quickly changed to a more persistent cry.

  "Now you've woken the baby," said Blackbird, an edge of irritation creeping into her tone.

  "Me? I wasn't the one making all the noise."

  Blackbird bustled into the nursery, and in a moment the curtains were drawn back and she reappeared carrying a flushed and rather cross baby.

  "Don't you worry, Daddy's going to stop yelling at you now." She rocked him in her arms, though he continued screaming.

  "I wasn't yelling…" but it was useless to argue since he didn't understand the discussion anyway and Blackbird was just making a point.

  "Here," she said, handing me the screaming bundle. It never failed to amaze me how someone so small could make so much noise.

  "There, there," I said, trying to make my voice soothing and still be heard over the din, "there's no need for all that, now, is there?"