Awakening (34 page)

Slew, too, was a Master, and to his strength was added that of the gem he carried.

Perhaps if Brief had been able to strike Slew then, while he was still saddened and bewildered by his journey in the embroidered cloth to retrieve the gem, he might have been able to defeat him.

Perhaps if Pike had been able to reach the Library sooner, then, well, the wyrd of things would have been different.

The one who came closest to stopping Slew was Thwart.

The light of Spring had shone into his dying eyes, it had reached to his spirit, fleeing as it had been from life, and whispered it back home again. Thwart awoke to life terrified.

He saw his Master trying his best to fight.

He saw a darker Master raising his stave with one hand, holding the embroidery with another. Of the gem he knew nothing at all.

Thwart might have stayed as he was, he might have feigned death and not risked his life again.

But he saw chaos where only order should be and he saw the greatest and most loved scholar of his age bravely fighting a younger, stronger hydden than himself.

So Thwart stood up and, weak though he was, and frightened too, he found his courage to challenge the Master of Shadows.

Slew turned, saw him, was amazed and moved to kill him where he stood.

No one knew then or after, least of all Thwart himself, why he did not do so. Perhaps in passing from Spring to Winter and feeling the sadness of she who had the gem, he had no will to hurt Thwart more. Maybe in himself he saw, somewhere deep in his dark, hurt heart, the better thing.

Maybe it was Brief who saved his life when he roared out, ‘Take me but do not hurt him, he has a whole life left to live, take me.’

Slew turned back to Brief, saw he was in his way, needed to escape the terrors of that place and his own self, raised his dark stave and moved as shadows do, one way and another. His thrust at Brief then was deep and powerful; there was no defence against such a thing.

His second thrust was something worse, a killing blow to Brief ’s old head.

His third and last was into the Master Scrivener’s chest, into his heart.

As Brief fell amongst the tomes he loved, Slew stepped over him, passed through to the stairs, took them like the shadow of a hydden he truly was, and passed right through the Library and out of its doors.

Pike did not see him.

No one saw him.

He was gone down the lanes and ginnels of fabled Brum, his robes left behind, his dark stave going before.

Thwart survived.

Pike found him in the shadows the murderer left behind, cradling his dying Master’s broken head and body.

Pike did the same, distraught to know that he had not been there to protect the hydden he respected and loved most in all the world.

‘He saved my life,’ said Thwart.

Brief stirred and with his last breath said, ‘No, no . . . you saved your own and found the true direction in which your wyrd will lead you. Trust and follow it as I did mine. Live your life, Thwart, make every second count, it is the only way.’

‘I will try, Master Brief.’

‘I know you will . . .’

Then he turned to Pike and said, ‘Old friend, I saw the gem of Spring, think of it, I saw it with my own eyes . . .’

They say that as Brief died there was a roar of anguish from the Library that he cherished all his life.

They say that it rocked and shook with grief . . .

Such that its doors would not properly close, so that his great spirit, free for ever now, could come and go just as it pleased.

All, in a way, quite true.

For as Brief died, the earthquake presaged by the tremors of the weeks before, ever since Stort had found the gem, finally hit Brum hard. Many buildings seemed to roar and rock and shake. Many collapsed and in their awful ruins humans and hydden died alike.

As for the Library doors of Brum, they never did hang true again.

29

Q
UAKE

T
he earthquake that devastated Brum in the dark hour of Brief’s passing was one of many felt across Englalond and all Europe then and in the days following.

Taken together these events left no doubt in any hydden mind that Mother Earth was angry and taking revenge for mortal kind’s disrespect towards her nature and being. What anyone could do about it no one knew, and long-held feelings among Brum’s citizenry of impotent foreboding for their city and the world deepened still more.

That Brief himself had such worries was well known to many who had known him.

‘I was there myself, Lord Festoon,’ Pike told the High Ealdor in the days after, and before the funeral, when folk like to recount their memories of one who has died and who they loved, ‘when Imbolc the Peace-Weaver told him, not for the first time, that the world was coming to an end and the bad weather we’d been having was a foretaste of worse things to come. She said something to the effect that the world was not a larder to raid or a well to let run dry and that we need to tend it and honour it.

‘If we did not, she said, Mother Earth would wreak havoc upon us.

‘Of course Brief wasn’t going to agree outright to that, for he took a more positive view of things, but I know for a fact that since the gem was found and we began to experience tremors he had begun to fear the worst.

‘“Pike,” he said to me not a week ago, “the Earth’s building Herself up to something very nasty, very nasty indeed!”

‘Of course,’ continued Pike, ‘I don’t say the Earth’s directly responsible for his death, but whoever said wyrd worked directly?! Not Brief, that’s certain. He taught me that all things are connected and when one bit goes wrong, another goes awry. Who’s to say there’s not a link, however strange this may seem, between an angry word spoken at one end of Deritend and a slap in the face by someone completely different in Digbeth? Well, maybe the wider world’s like that too. Spill the Earth’s guts by mining for gold in Cornwall and a blizzard wipes out a hydden village in the Pennines! Brief’s thoughts not mine, may the Mirror guard his spirit!

‘No, there’s not a hydden in Brum doesn’t think that his death and the quakes we’re having are connected. But Mirror knows that neither he nor I ever thought it would come to this!’

Lord Festoon considered this and said, ‘There are certainly connections there, though whether it’s with us mortals that the Earth is angry, or with the fact that a great one like Brief has been killed, or that the gem’s discovery is upsetting Her, I haven’t yet made up my mind. Then there’s the humans and what they do which, by comparison with the hydden, is monstrous and terrible.

‘Perhaps once Bedwyn Stort comes back and my friend Igor Brunte, who is now in the North with Feld establishing what support Brum might hope for up there in the event of us being attacked by the Fyrd, we may together and separately see these things in a better perspective. Then, too, we must have Brief’s funeral and a proper period of mourning. But for now, Pike, I’m more worried for Brum than I ever have been since I became its High Ealdor. Never in my lifetime have we needed more than we do now the vigour and energy of thought and deed for which Brum has always been famed throughout the Hydddenworld.’

Pike nodded.

‘Stort’s no leader, that’s for sure, but Mirror knows there’s never been a hydden in whom the future has shone so bright. Brief himself believed that.’

Lord Festoon rose up and went to the window of his parlour, where the two were talking, and looked out on ruined buildings nearby.

‘I trust that his mission to persuade Jack to return to Brum is successful, but I have my doubts it will be. If it be true that he and Katherine have had a babe, what is there in the world could possibly persuade Jack to leave them and return to us, especially if she is the Shield Maiden? That said, I always thought the lad had destiny written in his bold face! But in which world? Ours or his?’

After some thought Pike replied, ‘That’s the crux of it, High Ealdor: which world does he belong to? That’s his decision to make. A giant-born does not cross our path every day and I trust he’ll come back. You should have seen him fight the shadows of the Fyrd as I did in the henge in Woolstone. No more than a lad he was then, with no weapon to hand until Brief threw him his stave, and yet he held them off.’

Festoon nodded and said, ‘He did the same in the Chamber of Seasons in that dark hour when Brunte tried to arraign me. How that has turned about! See how the young like Stort and Jack have it in their power to do what we so often failed to do. Yes, we need those two and we need them soon if Brunte’s right and the Empire is soon to take its revenge on us in Brum.’

‘Bad times,’ murmured Pike.

‘Times in which I’d feel a lot happier if I knew that Stort had got through these days of quakes and tremors and was on his way home to us.’

Pike laughed.

‘Forces of nature do not perturb Stort as they do the rest of us. Trust me, if anyone can survive the Earth’s anger it’s Bedwyn Stort. Unwittingly of course . . .’

‘Be that as it may, Pike, I’d like to see him get back in time for the funeral of Brief, for he’ll be upset indeed if he returns too late for it.’

Even as Pike and Lord Festoon in Brum were talking of future dangers, Stort and his friends were dealing with a present one.

Arnold Mallarkhi had taken Stort’s urgent desire to get back to Brum, for fear that something horrible had happened there, to heart. He was helming them at speed up the Thames, using sail to cut through the river’s flow. It was against them but fortunately, it being Summer, the flow was slight.

They had not too far to go before they reached Oxenford, which Barklice judged to be the best point of disembarkation for the onward journey by foot to Brum. The possibility of returning undermost a train they had given up, the recent tremors having disrupted the human world – and worse.

‘Aye, it be bad indeed, my goodlies,’ the normally cheerful Arnold had been forced to concede in the last few hours.

Human bodies had floated past them down the river, swollen and discoloured.

‘There be male and female and childer and all sorts,’ Arnold said, shaking his head. ‘Mayhap it be best your lad see none o’ this, Mister Barklice.’

But Barklice took a different view.

‘If he’s going to learn about the Earth, and he must, he’d better see Her as she is. I denied too much too long and I’ll not ever let him do the same. Eh, Bratfire?’

‘No, Pa, ’tis best. Look!’

It was a human village near the river, burning.

‘Look!’

A human church had collapsed.

‘Look!’

A car had rolled off the edge of an embankment where the bridge went over the river. No one had come for the dead.

Arnold noted other things.

The Summer birds among the riverbank, the swans, the mallard and the coot, ought to have been tired from the rearing of their near-fledged young and content to take things easy.

But time and again they were restive, strange, some flying about nervously, not tending their young as they should.

‘It’s like they want to be done with Summer and those that must be off on their migration to their Winter roosting grounds early,’ said Arnold.

‘The fish ain’t no better,’ added Bratfire, whose bilgesnipe blood and upbringing had made him something of an expert in matters of rivercraft and nature. ‘They’re easier to catch than I’ve ever known, like their noddles have been frazzled.’

Yet, for all this, their journey had its good points. Arnold’s energy never seemed to flag and Bratfire was a willing and excellent pupil at the stern, as he was on all other fronts. His turn of phrase might be bilgesnipe but his mind was sharp and his skills great.

Barklice was especially gratified that his hyddening skills were so well honed, his own being legendary.

‘I think, one and all,’ observed Stort cheerfully, at about that same moment when his friends Pike and Festoon in Brum were telling each other that they were hoping for his safe return – which to be precise was at twenty-seven minutes past midday by the clock on the tower of Northmoor church – ‘that now we’re almost within sight of Oxenford, about which if you wish it I shall be glad to give you a lecture, so to say . . . no?’

No one said ‘Yes!’

‘Not quite now?’ he continued judiciously. ‘Well then . . . I think I can at least say that the journey . . . has been . . . a . . . well . . . I was going to say a safe one . . . but I think . . . I shall now . . . revise that a little . . . and – gentlemen, what is
that
!?’

They turned as one to look in the direction in which he was pointing, which was upstream of the wide, meandering river, across some fields where they could see, at a bend in the river, a dark and brooding wall of water bearing down.

‘It’s a . . .’ began Barklice, his voice trembling.

‘It’s a . . .’ continued Stort.

‘That,’ declared Arnold, his eyes popping out of his head, ‘that be a . . .’

‘It’s a wave, a big one,’ said Bratfire.

A dark wall of water tore at the river bank, uprooting shrubs and holding in its curling maw two dead swans and their young, a wrecked boat, various spars and a whole tree whose branches threshed white in the water.