Son of the Morning (52 page)

‘Osbert of London, a pardoner, at your service, my lords,’ he said. ‘My devils have freed you.’

15

The pardoner’s escape from prison had been remarkable. He’d sat moping in a dingy cell in Le Châtelet. It was hardly big enough to lie down in, bare and damp with piss, though it had the small convenience of a tiny slit window that, though it admitted a draught, also let in some light.

Osbert had had his fill of confinement in London and been determined to be speedily free of this terrible place. Consequently, he studied the scars on his belly with great attention. Only representations of the names of God and those of the devils he required were there, but Despenser had beaten their names into memory. Caym, Abigor, Adramelech, Alastor, Amduscias and Eurynome. Nothing ensures instant recall like a boot on the throat, Despenser had said and, in that, he had proved right. The magic circle was constructed around his bellybutton and he did wonder if – when he drew it up – he should include a representation of a bellybutton in it. He decided he should not. He needed, however, to get some chalk if he was to begin.

‘Hey! Hey!’ he shouted down the corridor to the guard, ‘I am licensed to remit sins. For a piece of chalk I can gain you forgiveness for anything up to murder. Two pieces and I’ll throw in fornication and taking the Lord’s name in vain too.’

No one responded. Oh, when would he be fed? He guessed never. He had no means to pay for his food because all his money had been stolen the second he arrived by the brute of a guard who had rummaged inside his trousers to find it.

How to conjure a devil? Hmm. From his time in the cellar he’d seen enough attempts at conjuring by Edwin and at least one successful opening of the gate of Hell by the boy. But this was something different. There were devils on the earth, Despenser had said, who whispered through the gates of Hell, receiving instructions from their brothers, reporting on the world. It was these earthly devils that Osbert sought to call.

But how?

There was movement in the corridor that led to the cell. A voice shouted, ‘A pardon for all! The king has had a great victory and all the prisoners are to be let go!’

Osbert leapt to his feet.
Yes
!

‘Just my little joke,’ said the voice. ‘He’s still in the field and you’re all still in here. Oh, I’m a funny man!’

A scrape and sliding. Someone was opening his cell!

Osbert primed himself to make a run for it. He felt sure he was going to receive a beating whatever he did, so he may as well try to rush the guards and break out of the place.

‘Important visitor!’ shouted the guard.

The door opened and the pardoner gave a shriek. There, in front of him, was the cardinal he’d seen in the priest’s house. Or rather, not the cardinal. The face was subtly different but the clothes were the same, as was the lantern he bore with him.

Osbert cowered at the back of the cell.

‘Leave us,’ said the cardinal dismissing the gaoler.

The man just stood there whistling. The cardinal put his hand into his pocket and withdrew a coin, dropping it into the gaoler’s hand.

Now it was the gaoler’s turn to shriek. ‘That’s red hot!’ He dropped the coin to the flagstones.

‘I’m a funny man,’ said the cardinal.

The gaoler gave him an odd look, stood on the coin and went off down the corridor, dragging the coin under his foot.

‘Not you!’ said Osbert. ‘I’m not going back in any magic circle!’

‘That’s rather for me to decide, isn’t it?’ said the cardinal.

‘I’d rather die.’

‘You’ve seen where you’ll end up if you do.’

‘I can’t think dealing with you is likely to get me out of Hell.’

‘No, but it might get you a more comfortable time there. Less severely uncomfortable, anyway.’

‘Why did you lock me in that circle?’

‘The priest had annoyed me. I thought to kill him but I decided his quest for knowledge might go a little more frustratingly if it was you, rather than me, in there. Intellectual frustration to him was more annoying than death. You are the embodiment of intellectual frustration.’

‘You had helped him before I got there.’

‘I came to answer his call, to get him to move against the boy. But he trapped me there and compelled me to answer endless questions on subjects unknown to me. I saw he was as trapped as I was in that cellar, so I used you to keep him there.’

The pardoner had a strong urge to plant his fist on the end of the cardinal’s nose but sensed that such action was unlikely to end well for him. The cell was already uncomfortably hot in the devil’s presence and Osbert wondered if he’d burn himself if he touched him.

‘I have messages from Hell,’ said the pardoner.

‘I know,’ said the devil. ‘I have been told to expect you. You have a summoning circle for me to study. We must be quick. Already they have taken the fallen angel to the Sainte-Chapelle.’

The pardoner pulled up his tunic.

‘Fascinating,’ said the devil, bending forward to look at it. ‘Well, let’s not delay – the boy is here and we must set upon him as soon as we can. He is due to confront the angel but we must be ready for him as soon as he kills it.’

‘He’s going to kill an angel? What makes you think your devils can take him?’

‘The angel will be distracted. Both angels will be distracted.’

‘The second being Sariel?’

‘The one who travelled with you. I saw her from my window.’

‘Sariel.’

‘Then Sariel.’

‘Is he to kill her too?’

‘No,’ said the devil, ‘but she will very likely go mad with grief – that was what happened before. Frankly, I’m surprised she’s recovered her wits.’

‘I’m not sure I would want that; she’s a nice girl.’

‘Well, if you don’t, I can always rip you to bits and eat you.’

‘It’s more of a theoretical disagreement than anything that will cause us any problems. I’m a compassionate man, but only as far as it doesn’t cause me the slightest inconvenience. Well. Hmmm. Shall we get on with it? I want to pay my debts and be gone. Did you bring chalk?’

‘What for?’

‘To draw the circle.’

‘I can’t draw this circle and neither can you. It is a circle of higher summoning and thus its construction is forbidden to devils and impossible for fools.’

‘You trapped me in a circle.’

‘I simply completed a binding circle that was already drawn, and a simple affair it was. This will summon creatures stronger than me.’

‘So why can’t I summon them, then?’

‘You have not the knowledge or the art.’

‘Then what are we going to do?’

‘The circle is already drawn,’ said the devil extending a long finger towards the pardoner’s belly. ‘Lie down and we can begin.’

‘It’s too small, you can’t. I …’ For once, Osbert was at a loss for words.

‘I can always tear the skin off your belly and complete the summoning somewhere else,’ suggested the devil.

Osbert looked at the creature’s nails. They were a dirty grey, long and strong, like the claws of a gigantic rat. They looked suitable for the task suggested.

‘Here, on the floor?’

‘That will suffice. Expose your belly and say the words you have been taught.’

The pardoner began mumbling out the names of the devils.

The devil put something into the pardoner’s hand. It was a vial of some sort, stoppered with a wooden bung.

‘Open it.’

The pardoner did so. It was blood.

‘Describe the outline of the circle with the blood.’

‘What blood is this?’

‘Angel’s blood, fresh from the Despenser cache. Use it well. I had to swim to get it and I hate to swim.’

‘I will not touch it.’

‘Suddenly so sensitive about the use of relics?’

‘It’s …’ Osbert wanted to say ‘sacrilegious’ but somehow the words ‘potentially dangerous to me’ emerged.

The face of the cardinal loomed above Osbert. He opened his mouth – it was a little furnace, burning with flame.

‘I repeat, I can cook you and cut you and still have my summoning. There are a hundred men of the town whom I can command to daub on that blood.’

‘All right, all right! Why don’t you do it?’

‘It’ll burn my fingers.’

He thought to fling the angel’s blood at the devil but feared it might not permanently disable it. Even if it did, it would not pay his debt to Despenser, who would be waiting for him in Hell. More immediately, it wouldn’t get him out of the prison.

He dipped his finger in the blood. A delicious tingle shot through him – the feeling of stepping into a crystal cold morning having spent the night in a muggy inn full of fart and fleas – and her traced the circle and markings with it. Then he waited, restoppering and trousering the vial in case he should ever have a future need to sell it to get drunk and forget this entire episode.

‘Nothing’s happening.’

‘Look!’ said Nergal.

‘Oh, God’s cullions!’

The scars were transforming, each mark, each circle, each name, replaced by white, burning light. The light shone up from his belly and, as it did so, it seemed to turn like a whirlpool in a river, swirling up from his tummy to the ceiling of the room. And, like a whirlpool, it was pulling things in.

Shapes appeared in the whirling light above his belly – smoke monsters at first, huge mouths, great claws. A high bell sounded and there was a noise like a dog worrying at a bone. Someone was drumming, a skittle-skattle beat like the running of a rat in the rafters; the smell of shit and incense was in his nostrils and his thoughts were slow and heavy as if waking from a drunken sleep.

The devils spoke their names. ‘Caym, Abigor, Adramelech, Alastor, Amduscias and Eurynome.’ They were like whispers on the wind at first, like the rustle of leaves in an autumn forest but quickly the names grew in strength to a shrieking chorus. Above him in the tiny cell, figures were taking shape in the mist: a giant blackbird, a sword belt around its waist and a big thick knife in the clawy hands that extended from the end of its wings; a hook-nosed devil carrying a lance and riding on a bat-winged horse; a vastly muscled donkey-headed man with a plume of smoky grey peacock’s feathers at his tail; a skinny, spindly man with a rotting dog’s head skull, who grasped cruel barbed daggers in his fists; a man with the head of a demented unicorn – its eyes bulging as if they were boils about to burst, its horn monstrously large; a twisted devil with a gargoyle’s face. Osbert heard a cracked chant issuing from somewhere very close by.

‘These are the devils of death,

The takers of heartbeats, the robbers of breath.

These are the devils of death.’

Osbert felt terribly sick. The smoke that spewed from his navel was like a rope wound around his intestines.

‘Say the words! Say the words Despenser told you!’ commanded the cardinal.

‘Devils and servants of Satan, know that it is the command of the great gaoler and his favourite, the kingly Despenser, that you accompany this wretched pardoner to assassinate and thereby remove the boy called Dowzabel. This is the requirement of your release, otherwise, should you fail to respect his servant Satan’s command, you will be ever bound here in this circle, to await the judgement of God on the final day. Will you swear?’

A cacophony from within the swirling smoke. Osbert felt a terrible weight on his belly.

‘We swear!’ The voices were those of men, of birds, of dogs and horses.

‘Open the circle!’ said the cardinal.

‘How?’

Osbert felt a knife pressed into his hand. ‘Cut!’ instructed the demon.

The pardoner had no choice – the weight on his belly was so great, his terror of the beasts that spiralled above him so overwhelming that he must end it. He sliced a small nick into his flesh where the light poured out. Immediately a tiny sliver of darkness appeared in the wall of light and the devils seeped forth in a hiss of noxious smoke, the smell of burning hair filling up the cell. The room could not accommodate all the devils and the door burst from its hinges, spilling them out into the corridor.

‘What’s going on in there?’ The chief gaoler’s voice came loud and strong from outside and then, ‘Sweet mother of God!’ perhaps louder but nowhere near as strong.

The skinny, spindly devil with the rotting dog’s head on his shoulders was in the corridor. ‘My name is Alastor, and that means death!’ he shrilled springing forward down the passage, his daggers slashing at the air.

‘Get to the Sainte-Chapelle!’ shouted the cardinal to the devils. ‘The boy you seek is going there!’ Osbert looked at his belly. The magic circle of scars was still there, but no light – only a small cut just below the navel.

The blackbird demon stepped over the pardoner, as did the mad unicorn man and the gargoyle devil, joining others already running out of the prison.

Osbert got to his feet and pursued them, hoping that this day would be his last in the company of such abominations.

He was checked by words in English, clear in the babble.

‘Who’s there?’

Osbert stopped by a cell door with a big hole in the bottom. He had recognised the voice. He poked his head through. ‘Osbert of London, a pardoner, at your service, my lords. My devils have freed you.’

‘William Montagu, Earl of Salisbury and Marschall of England, and Robert Ufford, Earl of Suffolk! You are clearly an Englishman. It’s your duty to give your life to help us escape!’

Osbert wanted to respond that he couldn’t think of what the punishment would be that would be worse than the death that would be his due for performing his duty. But he had care of his immortal soul and was in no hurry to return to Hell. Marschalls knew kings and kings knew God. Could Montagu get him absolution? In addition, whatever the immortal torments awaiting him, the habit of a lifetime meant Osbert could not turn down the chance of earning a few quid.

‘The way is clear!’ said Osbert.

Montagu was through the door in a breath, stripping the sword from the gaoler’s side. ‘Arondight!’ he said. ‘The sword returns to its rightful owner!’ He held up the blade.

Osbert could not help but be impressed – it was slender as a wand, brilliant silver, so bright it was almost difficult to look at. If that was his sword, how much was this man worth?