The Poisoned Crown (13 page)

At last he came to the chapel on the slopes of the valley, though he had never found it before. The dwarf was there waiting.

“They’re gone,” he said. “Would ye be wanting to look inside? I’m thinking you’re a mickle too broad to be crawling into rat holes.”

“And I’m thinking,” Bartlemy said, “you’re a mickle too bold, leading a young girl into danger. I’d permitted her to take a little risk; I hadn’t intended it to be a big one. Or was that your idea of help?”

“I didna suggest it,” Login said. “She was the one who was so set on it. I warned her you wouldna be any too keen, but she—”

“Warnings like that seldom deter teenagers,” Bartlemy said. “Between Josevius and me, you’ve spent too much time with very old men. The young are more reckless, and more—perishable.
Rose-white youth, passionate, pale.
”

“That maidy o’ yourn,” Login said, “isn’t the sort I’d be comparing to roses, white or red. Too many thorns.”

“It depends on the rose,” Bartlemy said.

N
ATHAN SPENT
Saturday with his friend George Fawn, playing games on the computer—George’s brother David had Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas—talking about music and television and school, and hearing how Jason Wicks, the village tough guy, had stolen his cousin’s motorbike to go joyriding over the fields, been charged by Farmer Dawson’s bull, and fallen off into a bog.

“There aren’t any bogs,” Nathan quibbled.

“Well, it was
like
a bog,” George said. “A big patch of mud. Very muddy mud. A bog sounds better, though.”

“Mm. I bet he got filthy.”

“He looked like the swamp monster. It was
wicked.
Mike Rayburn saw him, he said he couldn’t stop laughing. Libby was there—Jace fancies her, so he couldn’t do anything, and he was, like,
seriously
embarrassed. It was the best thing ever.”

“I wish I’d been there,” Nathan said.

“You must be as tall as him now,” George remarked. “Maybe taller.”

Nathan grinned. “You make me sound like a freak.”

“No way. Girls like tall.” George was on the short side. “I bet you could have lots of girls.”

“Not much chance of that at Ffylde.”

“No, but—here. There’s Hazel—she likes you. She’s not the prettiest girl in town, exactly—her tits are too small, for one thing—but she’s
a girl
, isn’t she? And you like her …”

“Hazel is Hazel,” Nathan said sharply. “She’s my best friend— only that—and don’t you ever sneer at her again.”

“I wasn’t sn—”

“Ever!”

George subsided, mumbling an apology, and they changed the subject for the rest of the afternoon.

The night Nathan was back in the dream. Not the same dream— the wonder of flying with the albatross, sharing his feelings and his fears—but one of the dark. He was falling through a hole in the world— through the faint lights and faraway stars of another universe—falling into a narrowing chimney of blackness, far beyond the reach of sun or supernova. He remembered the prison pits of Arkatron where he had once met Kwanji Ley—but there had been light there, the soft unchanging light of Deep Confinement. And then he struck the bottom, thrown into his own body with a jarring sensation like a blow, and he saw the darkness was less dark, and there was a door in front of him that he had seen before. A door marked danger.

It wasn’t locked—it never had been—though surely such a door should have been secured with secret codes, retinal scans, digital palm-print readers. Nathan pushed it ajar—cautiously, he was always cautious in that place—and slipped through. Inside, there was a strange mixture of low lighting and high technology. There were the benches stacked with scientific paraphernalia, with snarls of tubing like glass intestines, and pulsating metallic sacs, and cylinders glowing eerily at top or base, and jars where deformed
things
floated in preserving fluid, hopefully dead, and hunks of ominous machinery glistening in the dimness. And let into the walls were the cages, the cages that made Nathan both frightened and sad, mostly empty, but not all. In one a snake reared up, striking at the glass; globules of pale mauve venom spattered the surface and ran down in snail tracks that smoked wispily In another, there were what appeared to be giant locusts, until Nathan
looked more closely and saw they had human faces and forelimbs ending in tiny hands. And in a third was the familiar cat, stiff and dead with its paws in the air, and yet, from a different angle, somehow alive, tail twitching, watching Nathan through slitted eyes.

It was the Grandir’s laboratory, deep underground, the laboratory where he had bred the gnomons to protect the Grail and imprisoned a primitive elemental, potent and savage, in the Traitor’s Sword. And there he was, leaning over a separate cage at the far end, accompanied by a man in a purple cowl. Nathan recognized the cowl if not the man; it might have been a symbol of office.

He thought:
Am I in the past
—
the past of Eos? Is the Grandir doing something to the Iron Crown
—
magicking some awful spirit into it, like he did with the Sword?

There was a noise in the background that hadn’t been there before, a sort of faint cacophony, remote but persistent, as if a group of people with acute laryngitis were screaming in agony. It seemed to Nathan to be a long way off yet at the same time inside his head. He didn’t like it at all—it was too familiar—but he ducked under a bench and crept nearer, bent double, trying to hear what the two men were saying. He might have shown himself to the Grandir but not in front of Purple Cowl; instinct told him that would be a mistake.

“It must be a spell,” the Grandir said. “Nothing else would cause so much pain. Iron repels but does not torture them.”

“What will you do?” asked the other. “They should be killed. Some things are too deadly to be allowed to live.”

“They are what they are,” said the Grandir, sounding, had Nathan but known it, a little like Bartlemy. “They have served their purpose. I will call them back.”

“But can you—”

“They are bound to my edict, to my very thought. I can call them, even across the worlds. They ozmose.”

He straightened, raising his head, speaking a few words in the universal language of magic—a language Nathan could recognize but not understand. Purple Cowl drew back, perhaps afraid of fallout, but the words, though commanding, were quiet, creating scarcely a ripple in
the atmosphere. Nathan thought the summons was as insistent as a tug on a noose, as compelling as hypnosis, but almost gentle, almost kind. As if the Grandir were saying:
Come home. Come home to me.

And they came. There was no lightning flash, no crackling rent in the dimensions. They were simply
there
, in the cage at the end; Nathan could see them through the glass sides, though not in detail—for which he was grateful. They were visible in this world, their fluid bodies quaking in the aftermath of pain—homunculi about a foot high, with triangular faces all eyes and ears, hardly any mouth, bat-like wing growths stretched between arm and torso, skin dull as shadow. Their substance was unstable, blurring and solidifying at random as they climbed over one another and scuttered up the sides of the cage.

“You cannot keep them here!” Purple Cowl exclaimed, forgetting the deference due to his leader. “If they should escape—”

“They will not escape.” The Grandir’s tone was repressive. “But you are right, there is no sense in prolonging their captivity. I have no more use for them, after all.” He went to a cupboard in the wall, stamped with symbols in red. It opened at a finger touch, and he lifted something from inside. It looked like a box, oval in shape and about the size of a fist.

The Grandir pressed a button to release the lid.

“What’s that?” asked Purple Cowl, echoing the question in Nathan’s mind.

“Photokromaton,” the Grandir replied. “Also called the Eye of God. You would do well not to look when I open it.”

Nathan almost thought the warning was addressed to him. He crouched right down, shutting his eyes tight, covering them with his hands…

The light, when it came, seared through hand and eyelid, filling his head with a white dazzle brighter than a hundred suns. The scream returned, no longer remote, soaring to a crescendo in a fraction of a second—and in a fraction of a second it was gone. Nathan felt a sort of twist in his gut, a tug of nausea that he could not explain. The Grandir’s voice fell softly on his ears, like a spool of darkness against the fading of that terrible light.

“There is a bond among all living things, from the greatest to the smallest. The same subatomic motes—the same specks of infinity and eternity—make up us all. Death always touches us, even the death of such as these. If we are strong we can go beyond that, but we must not lose the ability to feel, nor forget the common source from which we spring.”

He spoke as if to Purple Cowl, but this time Nathan was sure the words were for him. The Grandir knew he was there, recognizing his presence with senses far beyond those of the gnomons, acknowledging him while telling him to remain hidden. Those words of reassurance— of insight—were for Nathan and Nathan alone. He dropped his hands, opened his eyes.

The Grandir and his companion were standing side by side, their backs silhouetted against the leftover light. Behind them, the cage was empty.

“Thank the Powers,” said Purple Cowl. “I could not have slept easily, knowing those things were around.”

“Be careful,” the Grandir said, very gently. “They were my creatures, to use or destroy, but all my creatures are dear to me, after a fashion. You would do well to keep that in mind.”

The other man appeared to quail, his silhouette shrinking, but Nathan’s dream was growing dim, subsiding into sleep, and a cold little voice at the back of his thought, on the edge of the dream, was telling him:
That was important. What the Grandir said was important. Remember it…
And then the dream was gone, receding down the chimney of the dark, and all the stars of the universe glittered past him into oblivion.

O
N
S
UNDAY
, Hazel told Nathan about catching the gnomons, and he told her about his dream.

“You could hear them screaming?” Hazel said, hoping he’d noticed how brave she’d been—brave enough to be told off by Bartlemy— though he didn’t seem to have considered it. “All I could hear was that
hideous whispering noise while they were coming after me. And then, when they were trapped—nothing.”

“They screamed in a different world,” Nathan said. “They seem to be more audible there—and more visible. I must say, you did really well luring them out like that, but I think Uncle Barty could have asked me. I mean …”
You’re a girl.
But he didn’t say it.

“I do dangerous stuff, too,” Hazel said. She could have done with more appreciation, but at least she had made her point. “So what’s this important thing the Grandir said?”

“I can’t recall the exact words. He was sorry for the gnomons …”

“So was Uncle Barty.”

“He said … they were his creatures, to use or destroy, but he still cared about them. He felt their death—
I
felt it—a sort of sick sensation inside, like I’d witnessed a massacre. They were
gnomons …
they were mindless and evil… but he had compassion for them. That must be the important thing. Compassion …”

“Uncle Barty had compassion,” Hazel reiterated. “Anyone can. Compassion’s cheap. It’s what you
do
that counts, not what you feel. I think the Grandir’s a supervillain, the sort you always get running a whole universe. A coldhearted, ruthless megalomaniac, just like in all the movies.”

“He’s ruthless,” Nathan conceded, “but not coldhearted. He only kills when he has to. He’s trying to save his whole world—or what’s left of it. Life isn’t like the movies. Even in this world, rulers have to make decisions that get people killed, if the survival of their country is at stake.”

“Like George Bush and the Americans invading Iraq?” Hazel said with heavy sarcasm.

Annie, who had just walked in, listened with the warm glow of an adult eavesdropping on Concerned Youth.

“I was thinking more of England resisting Hitler in the Second World War,” Nathan said. “Hitler was a supervillain, if you like—a much more successful one than Saddam Hussein. He was a real megalomaniac.”

“Yes,” Annie said, “but did you know he loved dogs?”

“See!” Hazel said triumphantly. “The compassion thing again. Anyone can do it. It doesn’t mean squat. Saddam Hussein’s probably kind to … camels, or something. Your Grandir—”

“He isn’t my Grandir,” Nathan said. “But he isn’t a supervillain. I’m sure of it. You’re making snap judgments the way you always do. I’m trying to be fair.”

Annie asked, with difficulty: “What about the Grandir?”

And once again, Nathan saw that look of
Nevermore
on her face.

nnie was stock taking when Chief Inspector Pobjoy came around, standing on a stool cataloging the higher shelves. It was her private theory that the books up there had a secret life of their own, reshuffling themselves unobtrusively during the night and hatching new titles that she had never acquired, things like
Dandelion Walks of Southern England, A Collector’s Guide to Bedsteads
, and children’s fiction from a duller past—
Helens Midnight Pony, Alice Pulls It Off.
She really must scale the heights more often and see what the books were up to. She was talking to them in an exasperated tone when Pobjoy entered the shop, and because she had never bothered to have a bell installed and he closed the door very quietly, she didn’t immediately hear him.