Darkwitch Rising (57 page)

Oh, gods, he had not felt this way since Ariadne first offered herself to him. All these thousands of years, all the women he had taken, and raped, and forced, and squandered, and he had never kissed nor been kissed with this sweetness, until now. Until Noah…

“Dear heavens, Noah! What are you doing!”

Noah sprang back from Weyland’s mouth as he forced down a curse, sat back in his chair, and turned around.

Jane stood in the doorway, looking at Noah with such an expression of astonishment on her face that Weyland thought she looked like a little girl who had caught her parents in frenzied sexual congress.

“I had not thought that
you
…with
him
…!” Jane said. “No wonder he asked me to leave the room.”

“It was not what you think,” Noah said.

“Noah shall be spending her nights with me from now on,” said Weyland casually, enjoying the
renewed expression of astonishment, tempered with horror, on Jane’s face. “A platonic agreement, naturally. Noah agrees to this because it will please me so much that I will allow both you and she as much freedom as you need to teach and learn the ways of the labyrinth.”

If possible, Jane gaped all the more at Noah. “You told him—”

“I told Weyland that you had agreed to teach me the craft of Mistress of the Labyrinth,” Noah said quickly.

Jane managed to close her mouth. “Oh.”

“And I am most pleased,” Weyland said. “Most pleased.”

Jane shot him a dark look.

“He would know anyway,” said Noah, still looking hard at Jane. “Why
not
tell him?”

“Precisely,” said Weyland. “And now, I see that it is late, and I am tired. Noah, we should go to bed, I think.”

Weyland looked back to Noah.
Her
face had closed over, and Weyland knew that she wondered what lay ahead of her, in that unknown den above them.

“It shall not be as you fear,” he said softly.
Three

L
ouis walked down the hill. He was unsettled and nervous, more by the glimpse of the potency of the ancient power of this land as it emanated from the Lord of the Faerie than by what might happen to him this night.

The Holy Oak loomed before him, and Louis stopped beneath its ancient spreading branches and looked to the small pool formed by the spring that bubbled forth from the rocks at the foot of the tree.

The pool, the place where he’d rescued Cornelia from Loth and Erith and from where he’d carried her back to their home and conceived with her their daughter.

There was a movement in front of him, and Louis looked up. A fox had emerged from the undergrowth and was standing directly before him, staring into his eyes with his own unblinking yellow orbs.

Then the fox turned, and walked down a pathway which led from the pool into a small grove of trees.

The gravel and earthen floor of the path glowed with a faint luminescence.

The Ringwalk.

Louis took a deep breath, and stepped forward to follow the fox.

Everything changed.

The first thing Louis noticed was that his clothes and shoes had vanished, leaving him naked.

The second thing he noticed was that the forest had changed. The trees seemed different. Foreign.

Louis frowned, puzzling it over as he walked deeper into the forest.

The third thing he noticed was that it was now daylight rather than night.

And warm. Hot, even, as if this was a foreign land rather than—

“Oh, sweet gods!” he muttered, coming to a stop, staring almost frantically about him.

The fox had vanished, and there was only the forest, and the warm scented air, and the soft touch of a breeze across his naked and now goosebumped flesh.

Louis knew where he was, and that knowledge terrified him.

He was in the forests outside his Italian birthplace of Alba on the River Tiber.

Where he had hunted and killed his father, Silvius.

Louis circled around on the path, his heart pounding. What trickery this?

What meaning this
?

Louis felt the first stirrings of true fear, something he’d not felt since he’d been Brutus, and faced with a life of (as he’d thought then) mediocrity.

“And would I take that mediocrity now, in preference to what awaits me down this trail?” he asked himself, still circling slowly, his eyes wary.

No, he thought.
Never
.

Louis turned back to the path, and strode down the Ringwalk.

To either side of him reared huge trees, thick with leafy branches and trailing ivy, the way between their trunks obscured with shrubbery and nettles. Apart
from the sounds he made, there came little evidence of other inhabitants of the forest, whether bird or animal or other watching eyes.

It was very calm.

Very still.

Very…waiting.

It irritated Louis, this silence, this emptiness.

“Come, take me if you will,” he said, then repeated it louder, shouting it into the forest. “Come, take me if you will!”

“Is that what you wish?” came a soft, lilting voice, and Louis started, for that was the voice of his mother when he had lived as Brutus. She had died in his birth, and by rights Louis should not recognise it at all, but the instant he heard that voice, he
knew
.

Is that what you wish
?

“Yes,” he whispered. “That is what I wish.”

The instant the words had fallen from Louis’ mouth, there came from a far distance a sound that sent a chill down Louis’ spine.

The haunting call of the hunting horn, echoing through the trees.

The horn was so far remote, and so distorted by echoes, Louis had no means of knowing how far and in what direction it lay. But this he did know: that horn signalled the start of the hunt, and the quarry was himself.

Louis grimaced. Yes, he had said.
That is what I wish
.

He recommenced his progress down the Ringwalk.

For a time all seemed peaceful, although the forest almost literally quivered with tension.

And then, almost apologetically, came a sound from behind Louis.

A single footfall.

A single hunter.

Silvius.

H
e took me by the hand and led me up those damned stairs into the loft of the building.

Once we attained the top landing, we stood before a plain wooden door.

Weyland glanced at me with amused eyes, knowing full well my lack of enthusiasm, then he opened the door and, still holding my hand, pulled me inside.

The door closed softly behind us. For a moment there was blackness, and it disturbed me so much that I actually moved closer to Weyland, needing the reassurance of his warmth and presence.

“Light,” he said, very low, and within a heartbeat soft lights glowed in a score of places.

They did not flare suddenly into life, but gently pervaded the dark, as dawn lightens the land towards the end of night.

My first impression as the lights slowly intensified was one of space. We stood in a great sandstone-columned vestibule, with fan vaulting, and with a flooring of vivid blue, gold and scarlet tessellated tiles. The vestibule’s outer walls were pierced with graceful, arched open doorways leading to balconies, walkways, bridges and long elegant arcades and cloisters. Beyond the doorways and balconies I could
just make out a jungle of domed and spired buildings, their gilded tiles glinting under some enchanted sun.

It was a city in this tiny upstairs chamber of Weyland’s house in Idol Lane, and the vestibule its central hub.

My eyes were, I think, impossibly wide. I looked to Weyland, and he smiled very gently at the expression on my face.

“What did you expect? A stinking, dismal cave, full of the musk of Minotaur?”

My face flamed. It was precisely what I
had
expected.

He laughed, and squeezed my hand before letting it go and walking further into the vestibule.

“I call this,” he said, swinging back to look at me, “my Idyll. It is my retreat from everything that people expect of me, or fear from me, or consider me.”

What people feared of him, or considered him? For that, surely, he had no one to blame but himself. I stared at him, and he made a face.

“You think all of this is a trap, don’t you?”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know,” he replied.

No other answer could have unsettled me more.

I distracted myself by paying more attention to my surroundings. The air was strange—warm, slightly humid, and sweetly spiced.

It was not
English
air.

“Where is this?” I asked.

“The tiny chamber above the kitchen in—”

I made a noise of exasperation, and he smiled. “It is an amalgamation of the best of all that I have seen over the past three thousand years. I have taken the best and most beautiful from cities in Egypt and Persia and faraway China.”

“This is the heart of the labyrinth,” I said, indicating the central hub in which we stood (I experienced a moment of renewed unease as I said this, for as I turned about I could not see which door it was that led back into the house below). “You have merely recreated your own home, your
original
home, Weyland, if perhaps slightly more salubrious.”

“Ah, Noah,” he said, walking close now. “You
are
perceptive, are you not? Aye, this echoes the heart of the labyrinth, but with one crucial difference.”

“Yes?”

“I know the way out. And you don’t.” Paradoxically, at last I felt on firmer ground.
This
was the Minotaur I understood.

S
ilvius!

Louis stopped dead.

Who else but the father he’d murdered when he was but fifteen for the golden bands of Troy about Silvius’ limbs?

This is no way to found a Game
, Silvius had said to Brutus when he’d founded the Troy Game with Genvissa.
You cannot found a Game on the corruption of my murder
.

So what was this, then? Silvius come to exact retribution? Was this what the Stag God demanded?

Louis ran lightly forward. He was not scared so much as angry, and not running away so much as finding time and space in which to think. His father Silvius, trapped in the heart of the Game all these thousands of years, was coming to murder him, to set the Game to rights, to enable Louis, as Brutus-reborn, rebirth as the Stag God.

Why run from it, then?

Why this anger?

Louis’ footsteps slowed. Throughout his lives as Brutus and then William, the Troy Game had been steeped in murder. Asterion’s, to start with, and then Ariadne’s murder of so many in the name of revenge. Silvius’ murder, by his son’s hand. Genvissa’s death. The death of his and Cornelia’s daughter. Coel’s murder. Caela’s. Swanne’s. Harold’s.

Blangan.

Blangan. Gods, how many years was it since Louis had given her a single thought? She had been the reviled mother of Loth, elder sister of Genvissa, exiled from Llangarlia, brought back to the land by Brutus, only to have her heart torn out in the centre of Mag’s Dance by her son.

What was it about that death? Louis frowned, trying to remember what it was Genvissa had told him about it. She’d manipulated Loth into murdering Blangan, not so much to rid herself of Blangan (although that was a true bonus for Genvissa), but because she’d wrapped this murder within so much dark magic that Blangan’s murder effectively caused the Stag God Og’s murder.

When Loth tore out his mother’s heart, he also tore out Og’s heart.

Louis stopped dead on the pathway, breathing heavily, although more from inner turmoil than from any effort. He heard the footfalls further down the way—Silvius, hunting him—but for the moment he paid them no concern.

He knew what was going to happen, and why.

He knew what part both Silvius and James—Loth-reborn—had to play.

And it terrified Louis.

Why all this lack of courage to face your own death, Brutus, when it was but a simple matter to arrange my murder and to execute it
?

Louis straightened and spun about, all in one movement.

His father, Silvius, stood fifteen or sixteen paces behind him.

It was Silvius in his prime. He stood straight and tall, tightly muscled, skin bronzed with good health, crisply-curled black hair tied with a leather thong at the nape of his neck, and white waistcloth
beaded with scarlet and emerald and tasselled in gold.

Both
eyes stared at Louis, dark, liquid, intense.

About his limbs shimmered six bands of light—Silvius might no longer have the bands, but their legacy still gleamed about his arms and legs.

Silvius held a hunting bow in his hands, a single arrow strung and ready for flight. He had no other arrows.

Louis stared at that arrow, unable now to keep his fright contained, then looked at his father. “Silvius—”

Silvius bared his teeth.
Run! Run! I am the hunter, and you the hunted. I will not kill a standing prey, for there is no honour in that. Run! Run!

Louis looked at his father a single moment longer, his eyes wild, then he turned and ran.

Behind him Silvius grinned, and raised the bow to his shoulder.

Then, the bow still held to his shoulder, he also began to run, although he moved with a curious high-stepping gait, his back straight, his arms held almost at shoulder height in order to keep the bow in position, his head high and unmoving, his eyes sighted down the length of the arrow.

It was as if Silvius did not so much
run
down that forest pathway, but
dance
.

Ahead of him, panting now, Louis ran as desperately as he could. What if the true test was
escaping
his father’s justice?

There is no escape for you, murderer
.

Louis slid to a halt, staring wildly ahead. Just as that new voice had spoken inside his mind he’d run into the opening approaches to a wide and pleasantly shaded glade.