Awakening (41 page)

They did. Across the Frisian heath, skylarks trilling overhead, pilgrims making their way to the ports to cross to Englalond, they took possession of a ruined place and stayed there for some days.

Slew remained grey-faced, hunched, unable to hold his food down.

Harald and Bjarne spent those days preying on defenceless passers-by for food and money and favours in lieu of both. When three monks came by they succumbed to the Norseners’ wiles enough to go off the road with them.

The brothers, as Slew put it, a mordant humour not entirely deserting him, killed the brothers and took their black robes for uniforms. Thus was formed the Order of the Sphere, with the sick Slew as its head and themselves as its first Brethren. It was meant as a jest, but when Slew recovered and they continued, the joke became worth taking seriously.

‘What do you stand for?’ they were asked. ‘In what do you believe?’

Slew did the answering.

‘Stav,’ he said, ‘the ancient art of fighting for what is right and true, whose symbol, friends, is the CraftLord’s Sphere.’

‘Stav? Never heard of it. Is it a holy thing?’

‘Very,’ said Slew.

His two followers suggested to any who stopped that a contribution of food and money would bring enlightenment to those who gave with a free heart and win them a better reflection in the Mirror. Pilgrims give generously to monks bigger than themselves who hold their staves as if about to use them.

Meanwhile Slew stumbled along the road, a shadow of the Master he had been.

He blamed the gem, believing that it sucked the life from him. He wanted rid of it and the return of the peace of mind that he hoped that parting with it in Bochum would bring. He wanted to forget its blinding green light and the memories of Springs in his childhood in the Thuringian forest where he was raised.

When he reached Bochum at last, after a long and fatiguing journey, he was surprised to find that news of his supposedly secret mission, and the success of it, had got there before he did. The gem’s arrival at the very heart of the Empire, following so swiftly on the heels of the Emperor’s waking, was almost more excitement than anyone could bear. People hopped about at the thought of it and could not stop talking of the hows and the whys and the wherefores and the
everything
to do with the discovered gem of Spring.

As in Brum, people immediately wanted to see it. Failing that, they wanted to clutch the hand of the hydden who had brought it home, as they thought of Bochum.

‘It’s only right it’s here! Look . . . there’s no place else in the Empire so fit to have that gem . . . On display of course, that’s how it will be. The Emperor will command that to be done very soon, you’ll see . . .’

If people could not shake Slew’s hand then touching the hem of his black cloak – or the robe of the Order of the Sphere that he affected to wear sometimes – was the next-best thing.

Failing that, well, there were the Norseners who returned with him, big strong hydden, twins, though they didn’t look like it. Harald and Bjarne had believed that following Slew would lead them to something better. They were right. Females knocked on their doors every night. Food was provided free by the Court every day. Life was good.

As for Slew, he kept his door locked and in any case did not sleep where people thought he did. He was sick of sensuality and food, sick to his heart.

‘Master,’ said one of his servants, ‘is there anything we can do?’

He stared, his mind elsewhere.

‘Master . . . ?’

‘Tell my fellow brothers to come to me.’

Harald and Bjarne came.

‘A task,’ he said, ‘to cure me.’

He sent them to the city where Machtild lived and to where by now she should have returned.

‘Tell her I am sick. Bring her to Bochum.’

‘We will.’

Slew knew very well what the gem of Spring was and what, by giving it to Sinistral, he might be giving up.

He knew Beornamund’s story and how and why the gems had come to be. Like other boys he too had dreamed of what it would be like to find the gems and, bringing them together, see remade the crystal sphere that the great CraftLord had made.

But that dream died when he found himself in the Library of Brum, wending his way through an embroidered story of seasons whose shadows gnawed at his own and made them worse.

Before, they had been just stories, legends and myths. Now they had been made real and it was his own hand that had stolen a gem from someone who needed it. A girl, a woman, an old lady, a crone . . . her unhappy life had for a time become his own, her arid seasons his as well, her bleak spirit his own. In cheating her he cheated himself.

When he vomited over the side of Borkum Riff’s craft into the dark racing sea he had been trying, he knew, to puke out of himself the bile of her sadness, if sadness was all it was. The bitter juice and bits that shot from his mouth and poured down into the racing water were meant to be an end of it.

Back in Bochum, people eyeing him greedily, wanting to touch his hand and hem, wanting to devour him, which only made him feel alone and that he had failed. The sickness was now gone, but that black sadness he had felt in her was inside him still, the memory of her memory churning, his mind struggling, his anger mounting.

Nothing felt the same, all looked bitter; there was no light in what he saw.

Even so, Slew, like the Emperor Slaeke Sinistral, had a dark presence.

When he entered a room, heads turned. When he rose to leave it, conversation hushed and slowed, eyes following him curiously and sometimes hungrily. As if in hope that something of his charisma would become attached to themselves by the mere act of looking.

He was more than just tall and well made; he carried himself as the Emperor did, with natural grace. But he did not have the Emperor’s wit, and with that the ability to mask menace with charm.

Instead Slew had a feral menace that Slaeke Sinistral no longer had.

So heads turned when he had his summons to the Hall and the Emperor’s presence.

‘Come near, Slew,’ said Sinistral.

Slew came near.

‘Give it to me.’

Slew gave him the pouch.

‘It is inside, Lord, but . . . beware, it is heavy on the spirit.’

‘Come nearer still.’

Sinistral examined him.

‘You look worn, somewhat hollowed out. I take it then that you disobeyed me and looked at the gem?’

‘In taking it I could do nothing else . . .’

‘Tell me what happened. We can go to a lower level for privacy.’

Panic crossed Slew’s eye.

‘I prefer to have the Summer sun on my face. I knew too much darkness, Lord, in recovering the gem for you. I prefer the light up here.’

‘Then tell me here and now . . . speak low for I do not wish to have to clear the Court. And hold, your mother Leetha will want to hear.’

Another shadow in Slew’s face.

‘Lord, let me tell you the story by yourself.’

Sinistral grasped his arm and said with quiet anger, ‘You dawdled coming back, you kept me waiting, Leetha was sick with worry . . .’

‘And I was sick with the gem, Lord. Please, I do not wish to see my mother.’

‘The Master of Shadows fears his own mother?’

‘Were you never sick at heart, my Lord? Does sickness not make us stronger who survive it? My Mastership will be enhanced by this. But . . . I do not wish to see my mother.’

Sinistral saw the sense in that and yes he had been sick, deep down sick, when he first took possession of the gem of Summer from his mentor ã Faroün.

He saw in Slew an echo of himself and that the gems might be a bond between them.

‘Emperor . . . did you ever hear of a lutenist called ã Faroün?’

Sinistral sat back in his throne content. The question was a clever one, or showed luck of a kind worth investing in. He relented.

‘I shall see you without your mother. She has her flaws; mine was no better. Did the gem find you or you it?’

When Slew began to answer him Sinistral shook his head.

‘Later, outside, underneath the stars, we’ll sit and talk.’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘And these Brethren of yours, the Order of the Sphere. Is that some kind of joke?’

‘It is. Yet people take us seriously. We are listened to, we are followed, people wish to be our followers, my words of unwisdom are written down, and females offer favours to delightfully corrupt us, seeing as we are celibate. Well, my fellow brothers are not, but I am for now.’

Sinistral laughed.

‘They’ll get tired of it; I did. By the way, Slew, did you manage to raise your gaze high enough on your journey back to notice anything odd about our Mother Earth?’

‘In Englalond there were earthquakes that we barely escaped. Humans died more than hydden did. Borkum Riff – he sends his compliments – fears what will happen when the tremors break the seabed open. In Frisia, where I was sick and lay abed and my companions took their pleasures, I had time to listen to the Earth. She is angry and getting more so. And here, in Bochum, in the tunnels, has She expressed Herself?’

Sinistral shook his head: ‘Not yet.’

‘Do you think she will?’

‘She must.’

Later, when he had gone, and the Hall was clear and there was nothing but the echoing fall of dust lit by the dying evening light, Sinistral said, ‘You can come out now.’

She slid out from the curtain behind the throne.

‘You heard?’

‘I did. So he is sick.’

‘Why so, Leetha? You understand such things.’

‘He knows I did not favour him when young but preferred his brother and mourned his loss. Like someone else I know, a longing unfulfilled makes him ill, which the gem’s light exacerbates. He gave it to you without a moment’s demur, Lord.’

‘He did, my beloved. Let us go and play with it a little.’

‘The Remnants will not like us doing so.’

‘They can go to hell,’ he said with sudden savagery. ‘I do not need them any more.’

She looked at him sideways-on, concerned. Such sudden displays of petulance and selfishness were one side-effect of misusing the gem’s power.

He looked well, healthy, but like the Earth, he trembled too. His head shook a little and occasionally his ‘s’s were hesitant and, for moments only, he lost the power of his right hand, until, grabbing it with the other, he brought it back to position and life.

His thoughts though were acute, his mind even more able to reach into hers.

‘I needed Spring and now I have it. Come, I have a rendezvous with your son and the stars but first . . . beloved . . . help me play.’

‘Blut won’t like it, Lord.’

Sinistral laughed.

‘Blut is already there, waiting, notebook in hand, a natural historian. He’ll like it very much.’

They went down to Level 18, where Blut was waiting, having arranged that the seals into the Chamber be undone.

Close-to, the gem of Spring looked at first like that of Summer but darker, duller. For a moment it did nothing, but then whoosh! The light came from it. They let it shine for seconds as it seemed.

‘That was fourteen minutes, Lord,’ said Blut, ‘by my chronometer.’

‘And I feel good,’ said Sinistral, ‘very, very good. Now—’

‘Time distorts itself around the gems,’ said Blut.

‘So does memory.’

That evening the Emperor sat with Slew toppermost, in the lee of a refuse tip over and through which rats scurried squeaking in the dark, on top of which gulls roosted. The feral dogs that roamed these parts might have been a danger but the area around them had been cleared and Fyrd stood discreet guard out of sight.

Above them, all the stars.

‘I have the cure for your sickness, Slew. Right here. In this pouch.’

‘Spring? I think not.’

‘No, no . . . Summer. Take it, hold it, open it, let it shine on you a second or two and it will give back what Spring took.’

There in the dark among the rats, Witold Slew let Summer briefly shine into his eyes.

Sinistral watched the stars and saw them shift, whoosh! Now here, now over there, splaying apart, the moon sliding off to the side.

Two seconds were nearly two hours, in which Slew, bathed in the gem’s alluring light, seemed now to find recovery.

‘Thank you, my Lord, your Master of Shadows is in good health once more. Tomorrow again perhaps?’

‘We’ll see,’ said his cruel Lord.

They sat, the stars above their heads, the Earth and the Universe very beautiful, all things bright, all things beautiful, laughing together by the tip, rats running riot.

‘Again, Slew?’

Again.

The stars slid, the moon shifted and Slew, sniffing at the pouch which held fires beyond imagining, said, ‘In Englalond I met a girl, who became a woman, who turned into an old lady who decayed into a crone. She made me sad.’