Alchemy, Book Two of the Mercian Trilogy (6 page)

The metal’s heat radiated through his hand, reminding him of Eloise and her room. Will didn’t understand how it could be so, but it reassured him nevertheless because it suggested they had a sorcery of their own, and because right now he held within his hand the only piece of warmth in that vast icy landscape.

A
t the time of my mother’s collapse she had no way of knowing what this creature was that had reappeared in her life after so long an absence. Nor at the time could I fully understand the role she foresaw for me. Clearly she felt she had been haunted by a demon, and sensed in its return that it wished harm to her soul. What is more, for some unimaginable reason she saw in me, her youngest child, the one person who could save her from it
.

Only with hindsight can I see that William of Mercia had no designs on my mother’s soul. Indeed, given that he resisted his ample opportunities to feed on her, I still wonder to this day what interest he did have. I suspect further that he chanced upon her that night in 1742 quite by accident
.

But when a small child receives entreaties from his mother, asking him to act as her protector, to study hard that he might be equipped for the role, what is his response likely to be? I was an enthusiastic soldier in her
army against evil long before I even realised that it was evil we were fighting, or that she was training me not to be a foot soldier, but a general
.

My father encouraged me further, seeing the apparent happiness and strength that the scheme brought to Lady Bowcastle. It helped too that it was a whim which could be afforded, for unlike many a younger son, I would not be required to become a clergyman or follow a military career to earn my living
.

My mother was an only child and both families were equally wealthy. Most of my maternal grandfather’s fortune was settled on me, as was that of a childless maternal great-uncle. I would have no title, but my fortune would rival my brother’s
.

So it was decided. I would not go to boarding school. I would be kept close, all the better to offer my mother constant assurance of my progress, and carefully selected tutors would be brought to me. For though I studied many of the subjects familiar to my contemporaries, I studied them towards specific ends and saw them supplemented by lessons of a rather more exotic nature
.

I learned Latin and Greek, better to appreciate the classics, but also that I might understand the arcane and mysterious texts that were acquired for me. I learned science that I might understand the riddles of the world and be better equipped for the work that lay ahead. I
enjoyed sporting pursuits, though with much more emphasis on the combat skills my mother imagined I would sooner or later require
.

I studied the occult too, with a stream of scholars and priests brought to me from all over these islands, and from France, Germany, Italy and beyond. I devoured this part of my curriculum, but knew from the outset that it was the one subject I was not to discuss freely outside of the schoolroom. Even my mother never discussed it with me, all the better to encourage my discretion
.

Such was the liveliness of my intellect and the completeness of my general education that I hardly wanted for other subjects of polite conversation. Indeed, to the wider world, I was a bright but ordinary boy of my class, enjoying healthy outdoor pursuits and the society of my equals. And in that way, the eager child grew into an accomplished young man
.

In the final year or so I spent with my family I was considered a figure of note – handsome enough, more than wealthy enough, blessed with various talents. With some retrospective irony, it was openly speculated upon, in that last summer, that I might prove an ideal match for Lady Maria Dangrave, eldest daughter of the Earl of Mercia
.

She would have made a fine match too, pretty and
intelligent, with a wry humour, and I think we liked each other well enough. Of course, little could I have known then that she was of the same bloodstock as the demon that had unwittingly shaped me
.

Lady Maria Dangrave. I think back on her now, her curls of fair hair, her lively eyes, delicate lips, and I cannot help but think what a short, happy life I might have lived with her. I say this even as I know it is pointless to think on it, for it wasn’t to be
.

Within twelve months of each other, my great-uncle and my grandfather had died, and my mother decided the time had come to conclude my education abroad. I have sometimes wondered if she was driven by the alarm she felt at my growing attachment to Maria. Whatever her motive, the timing was fortuitous in one regard – after all, it’s the only reason I’m telling my story now, two hundred years after I should have died an old man
.

W
hen Will got to the house, he turned and walked across the east lawns instead of going inside. He reached the ruins and strolled among them. It was something he’d avoided until now because it filled him with sadness to see the remnants of these walls standing jagged like broken teeth.

So much of his world had survived in the city, and at times he would glance along streets or up at the walls or at the church itself and momentarily forget that he’d been cast adrift in the future. Yet Marland, the image of which was still so firmly fixed in his mind, the monks and their herb gardens and apiaries and their devotions, the quiet order and beauty of it all, had been reduced to these fallen walls.

He’d come now only because something had occurred to him, something that should have suggested itself earlier. Some of the walls had been so demolished as to leave something resembling a raised stone footpath in places, and he clambered about on it, and looked at the
views into all those lost rooms. He tried not to think of what had once been there, but of another memory.

And as he climbed up on to a small buttress of stones and looked across to an ornate window arch that appeared almost free-standing, the images slipped into place and he knew this was it. This was the place he’d been dreaming of since November, the ruins among which he’d walked constantly with Eloise on a summer’s day.

He stepped down on to the grass, which crunched beneath him, and he sat on the wall and looked across at the window arch and the other views across the ruins. He couldn’t begin to think why he was being tormented with dreams of something he could never see. Yes, he could see these ruins in front of him now, he could bring Eloise here, but he could never recreate those visions.

That sunlit afternoon was something that could never and would never be his, just as his relationship with Eloise could never be what it often seemed to be in those dreams. It was a uniquely cruel torture that his mind should show him glimpses again and again of things he wasn’t permitted to know.

He sat there for a while, his mind skipping back and forth between his memories of the dreams and the strange, conflicting thoughts brought on by being in Eloise’s room. He wished he could see meaning in it, but
there was none, only that she was a beautiful girl, that he wished she had lived and been of his class in 1256, that he had not fallen sick – too many wishes.

Will stood abruptly, a surge of energy coming on the back of all that frustration, and walked quickly back to the house. Wallowing in regret was all very well, but he had too much to do before dawn, and before he could bring Eloise here again. He had feared too much for her in those tunnels, and realised only now how foolish he had been to take her there unprepared. The attack by the crows had convinced him that he couldn’t let his guard drop. It had shown him that, despite what Eloise might have thought, he wasn’t always strong enough and couldn’t always protect her.

Something down there had also put fear into him, though he couldn’t think what he had to fear, except perhaps the truth of who he was. Whatever it was, he was determined he would face it alone before being so reckless as to expose Eloise to it again.

Will headed for the billiard room once he was inside the house. There was a display of three sabres on the wall above the table and he took one down, then another, testing their weight and feel. He selected one, put the other back in its place and headed for the library.

He’d have to replace the sabre before daybreak
because it seemed every day or so someone came and checked over the house and he wouldn’t want its absence to be noted. He looked at the clock in the hall as he passed through it, estimating he had six hours, maybe only five, if he wanted to be sure of being back in the cellars before dawn.

The cellars – that was the worst of it, spending the daylight hours in those cellars with almost nothing to distract him from the gnawing need for blood. It was even worse when he could hear someone in the house above, and if the caretaker or security guard, whoever it was looking after the house, had ventured into the cellars at any point, Will wasn’t sure he’d have been able to exercise the self-control that had kept him from notice all these centuries.

In the library he pressed the button to the side of the bookshelves that opened the secret panel, stepped inside and let the door close behind him. He slid the sabre through his belt and placed his hands on the wall. The mechanism ground into motion and the wall slid away to reveal the entrance to the steps.

Will stared, but didn’t move. When he did move, it was first to reach for his dark glasses, then to pull the sabre free. The lights were on in the tunnels, but he remembered clearly that they’d turned them off on leaving.

It reminded him too readily of the last time they’d found lights on unexpectedly, in the cathedral library, and he wondered if once again it was a sign that one of Wyndham’s apparently numerous disciples was also searching the tunnel complex.

He couldn’t pick up a scent, nothing at all, and could hear nothing either, but the labyrinth was so vast it was possible he wouldn’t be able to detect another visitor from here anyway. He reached out to the light switch, reasoning that he might as well turn his own superior night vision to his advantage if he was about to face an enemy. But he flicked the switch first one way, then the other, and the lights remained on.

Will laughed a little to himself, then louder, finally finding some admiration for this Wyndham, for his ingenuity and his determination, for his irritating ability to throw obstacles in Will’s way. It was even more amusing for the fact that Will didn’t even know where he was meant to be heading – Wyndham would have probably had just as much success in denying Will his destiny by simply leaving him alone, floundering in ignorance.

He took his glasses off and stared down into the lights, which were not as bright as those he regularly encountered in the city. The pain, which was still considerable, even helped take his mind off his hunger,
and slowly he adjusted until his vision was unimpaired. It was a small gesture, perhaps even petty, but it was his way of throwing the gauntlet back at the sorcerer, making clear that he would need more than electrical trickery to defeat William of Mercia.

He closed the wall behind him and descended the steps, listening, inhaling deeply, ready to strike first at whomever or whatever he encountered.

At the bottom of the steps he followed the connecting tunnel to the beginning of the labyrinth proper, then turned left instead of right, aiming to cover all of the remaining tunnels in Eloise’s absence. If there were hiding places or signs that others were also here, he wanted to find them.

The decoration was the same everywhere Will looked, the runic writing and other even more archaic scripts, the symbols, paintings of men and fantastic creatures. It had undoubtedly been a massive undertaking, and that made it seem all the more significant that the pentagonal chamber had walls that were almost bare.

Something else was the same throughout, that brooding sense of menace he’d experienced the first time. He walked in silence. The air carried only the smell of dust, but he was so certain he was heading towards something that he felt himself tensing with each corner or opening he approached.

Yet, as with the first visit, each turn revealed nothing, just the gloomy tunnel leading away to another corner, another junction. It didn’t matter how many times he failed to be confronted by someone, didn’t matter that he sensed nothing living, he still expected the next turn to bring him face to face with … he knew not what.

Finally Will reached the pentagonal chamber, coming to it from one of the other four lit entrances. There was the fifth tunnel too, still in darkness, and as Will moved about the chamber, he tried to keep it in his line of sight, never turning his back on it.

He looked at the bronze relief on the floor, the boar’s head medallion and the four swords, each leading out to a point on the walls where those runic names had been inscribed. He crouched down and touched the boar’s head, almost expecting it to be warm as the medallion had been warm around his neck – it wasn’t, and now when he reached up, he realised there was no longer any warmth coming from his own fragment of bronze.

He stood again, looking at the walls. Had those ancient artists left this room bare to highlight the four names, the four swordsmen? A thought sprang into his mind and he immediately wished he hadn’t left Jex’s notebook in the city – could these four names, these four swords, represent the four kings Jex had spoken of in his book? And if so, was it possible that one of these
inscriptions was an ancient form of the name Lorcan Labraid? He had read it in the notebook, he was sure – Lorcan Labraid was the Suspended King, one of the four. If Will was right, this chamber was the closest he had been to finding him.

He walked around the room, touching each of the names in turn, a token gesture, wanting to touch the name of the evil that had done this to him, wanting in some way to bring himself closer to the destiny that had been mapped out for him that night so long ago. And now that the thought had planted itself, he stared again at the relief in the floor, seeing a new meaning in it. The boar’s head represented Will and his family, the Mercian Earls who had been so cruelly treated, held prisoner by the swords of these four barbarian kings.