Prospero's Children (24 page)

“You were present?” queried Javier.

“I watched. I wanted to stop her, but I couldn’t break through. The circle was too strong.”

“So how did she drown? She
did
drown, didn’t she?”

“Oh yes.” Fern shivered, maybe at the recollection, maybe at the proximity of Javier. “The Door opened on the End, the fall of Atlantis. The sea came through and we were swept away.”

“Yet you survived . . .”

“Luck, I suppose.”

“In magic,” said Javier, “there is no such thing as luck. What became of the key?”

“Guess.”

She went to pour the coffee but he grasped her by the shoulder, swinging her round to face him. His gaze seemed to pass through her eyes, probing into her mind, seeking the weak spot, the pressure point, his mark. Riding on instinct, she thought: He mustn’t know it’s gone. Better to tell him the truth now, and then he won’t peer too close if you have to lie . . . She said: “They both had it. Zohrâne in the past, Alimond in the present. When the Door opened, the two keys were in one time zone, so they must have . . . fused. It was in Atlantis when the flood came. No one can get it now.”

He released her with what might have been a sigh, his face blurring as the spirit behind it shifted its concentration. There was something almost obscene about that slackening of expression, as if the flesh had momentarily loosed its hold on his bone structure. A wave of unreality hit Fern. She clutched thankfully at the coffeepot, pouring with unsteady hands, finding relief in an ordinary action. When she turned to Javier again, his features were back in place. Normal service was resumed; over coffee, he made desultory remarks, mainly about Alison. Uncomfortable silences intervened.

When he had finished he set down his cup with a curious deliberation, as if it were the tiny gesture that completed a ritual. Or initiated one. “By the way,” he said, “do you have my picture?” It might have been an afterthought, an extra detail of no particular significance. But it’s important, Fern concluded. He thinks it’s important, so it must be. All those questions about Alimond were just a preliminary, perhaps even a smokescreen.
This
is why he’s here. “You may remember it,” he went on. “I believe you admired it once.
Lost
City.
A colored etching by Bellkush, rather unusual. It’s— quite—valuable.”

He wants me to feel like a thief, she deduced. He thinks that will divert me from any dangerous speculation. But all he knows is that
Alimond
had the picture: he can’t be sure I have it . . . “I remember the one,” she said. “Why should it be here?”

“Alison had—borrowed it,” he said. Fern caught the faint hesitation. “It was not at her apartment. And she never went anywhere without pictures; it was an idiosyncrasy of hers.”

“I can’t recall seeing it,” Fern said, frowning as if in concentration.

“Are you sure?”

She didn’t see him move, but suddenly he was holding her wrist. The yellow pinpoints came and went in his eyes; his grip was like a manacle. This time, his gaze strove not to probe but to mesmerize, dulling her wits, draining her of self and certainty. His mouth curved into something that merely resembled a smile, devoid of all warmth. Thus he had smiled in the restaurant, when the walls had vanished, and the icy stars glittered above a barren heath . . .

The kitchen grew darker. The ceiling seemed to be low overhead, the windows narrow. Where the hob had been there was an empty firepit, choked with a mess of cold ashes. Straw blew across the floor . . .

And in the opposite corner, on a rumpled palliasse, two small shapes were huddled under a blanket. Shadows covered them. She did not want to look but she could not help it: she thought she could make out an arm—a child’s arm—crooked at an unnatural angle, the underside disfigured with what appeared to be black pustules. The shapes lay very still. The smell of death filled her lungs and turned to nausea in her stomach.

There was a movement outside, the flicker of torches in the twilight. She knew there should be shouts but she could not hear them, only the hiss of flame eating at walls of wattle-and-daub, and the sudden crackle of burning thatch, and the scurrying feet of mice running to and fro, to and fro, finding no way out. She remembered Pegwillen, his playmates lost to the plague, the cottage razed. Insects were dropping out of the roof; the air was dim with smoke. The child’s arm twitched in the heat with a brief illusion of life.

“Where is my painting?”

And now all she could see was the eyes—Javier’s eyes, Azmordis’s eyes—bright with reflected fire. In the tiny recess of her brain that was still cold and clear she thought: Not yet. Don’t say anything yet. This is the past, it was over long ago, it isn’t
real
. . .

He forced her wrist outward, thrusting her hand toward the flames.

“Where is my painting?”

“Rollo took it!” she gasped. “He took all Alison’s things. He must’ve taken it—”

Her eyes were watering from the smoke; she hoped they weren’t actual tears. The blur of moisture temporarily blinded her. She was able to wrench herself free of his hold, and something clattered, and when she could see the fire was gone, and the cottage, and coffee was dripping down the oven door, and the metal pot clanged across the stone flags.

“Dear me,” said Javier mildly. “You seem to have knocked over the coffeepot.”

They went upstairs so he could see Alison’s room, and on the way down, simulating indifference, she watched him opening doors and peering into cupboards. The search was cursory; he was evidently convinced of her ignorance. His thumb-mark was still in her mind, numbing her power of resistance; he did not need to push too hard or probe too deep. A part of her still belonged to him, or so he thought. She hoped he was wrong.

When Will got back, the white car was driving away.

He found his sister sitting at the kitchen table, her chin on her hands. She was trembling slightly from reaction but her voice was steady enough.

“Don’t worry, I’m all right. He wanted the painting. The one I kept.”

“Did you give it back to him?”

“No.”

“But it’s his, isn’t it?” Fern did not answer. “What on earth have you done to the bread? It’s burned black.”

“Is it?” she said. She felt suddenly weak. The loaf had been left next to the hob, close to the point where Javier had thrust her hand. It was a charred mass. “I—it was an accident—”

Will was beside her, looking anxiously into her face. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Just,” she whispered. “Only just.”

Lougarry arrived about half an hour later, nudging the back door open with her nose. She did not lie down in her accustomed place by the stove but stood in the midst of the floor, her tail on the twitch, fixing them with an insistent stare. Will was trying to describe some of the more improbable monsters he had encountered in Gus’s books, but he abandoned the subject, turning thankfully to the she-wolf. She did not respond to his welcome, merely waiting. The twitch of her tail might have indicated impatience.

“She wants us to go with her,” he said.

“About time,” said Fern.

Lougarry led them over the moors to the rocky height where they had met Ragginbone once before. They were very close before they could see him, the earth-and-stone colors of his coat melding him with his background. “Aren’t you warm?” Fern asked on impulse.

He laughed, pushing back a heavy sleeve to reveal an arm all bone and sinew, knotted and gnarled like the limb of a veteran oak, jutting veins twining muscles petrified rather than softened with age. “I rarely feel either heat or cold,” he said. “There’s little enough flesh left on me for that. The temperature has to get to extremes before I sweat or shiver. In any case I find, with longevity, that I’ve grown to disregard such things. I weather the seasons like a tree or a stone, drawing closer to nature’s more durable features, becoming that which I resemble. Fleshly vulnerability would be rather out-of-place in a man of my years.”

They sat down with their backs to the sun-warmed rock. As Will related recent events the Watcher’s face grew thin and hard with concentrated thought. “It’s Atlantis, isn’t it?” Will said. “It’s sort of leaking through into the present day. Because of what Alison did.”

“It’s the sea,” said Ragginbone. “The ocean is an entity with a spirit—a
mind
—of its own. Once it was untamed and free, its deeps uncharted, the breeding-place of mermaids and monsters, invariably hostile to the land-born mortals who sought to bestride it. But times changed. Men learned to ride out its tempests and harvest its wealth, and the sea grew accustomed to them, if still distrustful. With reason. We reaped where we did not sow, without gratitude or understanding. We probed into its inmost secrets, polluted its waters, devastated its creatures. And now . . . sea calls to sea. The boundaries of Time are broken: it can reach into the Forbidden Past and summon monsters to work its revenge.” He added, almost as an afterthought: “You are near the coast here. And rivers and streams, rainfall and dew, they are all part of the great Water which dominates the earth. It is a Mind which we alienate at our peril.”

“Are you sure?” said Fern. “Couldn’t the manifestations be—well, haphazard?”

“They could,” Ragginbone admitted. “But the sea lives. The planet feels. It is something we ignore too easily. Still, whatever is happening, it must be stopped. The crack in Time will widen the more the past forces a passage through, and what will follow we can only conjecture. Time is there for a purpose, to keep things in order. Once you change chronology you change history. The past could eat up the present, the crack could spread, fracturing the other dimensions, the very universe might collapse inward. Or the impact could remain localized. A dogwalker beside the river may be taken by a giant octopus, a leviathan may sink a fishing-boat near Whitby, a mermaid may be beached in Robin Hood’s Bay. None of the options are particularly healthy. We must do something.”

“What?” asked Will, baldly. “Our efforts at doing something haven’t been very successful so far. Whenever one problem is out of the way we find ourselves with another. Javier was there this morning, threatening Fern. She won’t say what happened, but I know he frightened her.”

“The Old Spirit is to be feared,” the Watcher said grimly.

“He was after that picture,” Will continued. “The one Fern liked. She told him Rollo had it—Alison’s camp friend in the leather gear. Does it matter?”

“It might,” he said. “Fernanda . . .”

But Fern was abstracted, wrestling with a puzzle of her own. “I thought you said it was feasible for the Gifted to travel into the past,” she interjected. “Without the Door, without all these ramifications. These dreams I’ve had . . .”

“That’s different,” said Ragginbone. “You can explore another person’s memory, and you can travel in spirit, as long as your body remains in the present, anchoring you in the right point in Time. The range of the spirit is limited only by imagination. It’s when you take your body with you that you’re in trouble. There are ways, without leaving the Door open, but they are perilous. Many have tried it, few returned. As I told you, if you meet yourself you are lost. And if you enter the past physically, it will absorb you, you lose track of the present: that is history’s defense mechanism. I did it once . . . only once. I thought the need was great enough. It was the coming back which drained me.” Briefly, lines they had not seen before netted his face, the handwriting of pain.

Fern said eventually: “All right, so . . . we know the Door is open. The Door into the Forbidden Past. It’s been washed away, but the opening is still there, and it isn’t just a standard flaw in Time, it’s a kind of rupture which could spread if it isn’t sealed. Could we make a new Door, the way Alimond did, using a
trompe l’oeil
and magic, and then close it?”

“Not without the key.” Ragginbone’s voice was faint, as if he were being slowly drawn back from some faraway place in his mind. “The power of the Lodestone unlocked it; the power of the Lodestone must lock it again. That’s why it’s so hard to close. And the key is in Atlantis. For good.”

“Couldn’t—someone—go there in spirit,” said Fern, “in a dream—and find it?”

“The spirit can only be a witness, never a participant,” said Ragginbone. “I thought I’d made that clear. To participate, you need to
be there
. In any case, Atlantis is Forbidden, even to dreamers. You would have to make the journey as your Self, your whole Self, going back through the Door that is not to the last days, back to the moment when the Door opened, stealing the key despite flood and tempest, rebuilding the Door in order to close it. The dangers are too obvious to enumerate. In any case, it’s probably impossible.”

“How could you go back through the Door to a point
before
it opened?” Will wondered, frowning.

“I told you it was impossible,” said Ragginbone. “However, the crack is widening. If your purpose was fixed, your heart brave—there are powers that respond to such things. So they say. And magic exists to break the rules.”

“Could
we
do it?” said Will. “Go back—to Atlantis?” Eagerness crept unawares into his voice, and his eyes grew bright.

“
You
couldn’t,” said Fern crushingly. “You’re too young— and you don’t have the Gift.” She had grown rather pale, like someone who sees an abyss opening in front of them, and fears to be sucked over the edge. “Even if you got the key, even if—somehow—you survived the tidal wave, you’d need power to reinvent the Door. And the Door is your only chance of getting back.”

“That is another difficulty,” Ragginbone sighed. “I fear— the Door must be locked
from the other side
. The key has to remain in the past. It was found on the bottom of the sea: remember? If you try to change history, you will surely perish. There is a natural flow in the progress of the universe, what the frivolous call a Current of Events. Go with the flow, and it will go with you. Try to redirect it, to alter what
has been
, and you will be overwhelmed. Magic breaks the rules of Science, but not the ultimate Laws of Being. If you went back to Atlantis, and by some elasticity in the zone of the probable you managed to obtain the key and lock the Door, you would have to stay on the wrong side of it. And there might be no way to return.”