The Sword of Straw (11 page)

“It’s all right, Rosh,” Nell said, eyeing the stick dubiously. “I think…I’d be better alone.”

He ignored this, and they set off up the road together with Nathan following, keeping to the shadows and trusting they would hide him. His progress was complicated by the fact that Rosh in particular looked around frequently and once grabbed Nell’s arm, telling her, in an urgent voice: “There’s something there!” When questioned, however, he couldn’t say what, or who, and Nathan, ducked into the slot between two houses, took care not to show himself. After that he was more cautious, staying well back from the pair, though it meant he couldn’t hear what they were saying. But he didn’t think they said much. The empty silence of the city was overpowering, swallowing some sounds, magnifying others, the kind of silence where you felt you were living in an echo chamber, and if you burped, or breathed too loud, or thought too loud, the silence would hear you.

They stopped a few yards from the palace gate. It was much darker now, a deep blue evening like a Dulac painting, with a single lantern burning outside the wall; its yellow glimmer might have been the only light in the city. The countless vacant houses changed with the growing night, becoming mysterious, crowded with shadows and potential. Nathan felt uneasy at the idea of those dark spaces waiting and watching behind him. But close to the light, the two he followed seemed relieved. He heard a murmur of words and saw Rosh, apparently on impulse, seize the princess in a clumsy embrace, still clutching his stick, pressed against her back. Nell gave a yelp of surprise, and then Rosh bent his head and kissed her.

He was flung back so violently, and with such force, he seemed to fly through the air, ending on the ground some yards away. A glitter of sparks in his wake betrayed the magic in Nell’s thrust. “Roshan Ynglevere!” she cried, panting slightly. “How dare you! I mean, how—how
could
you? We’re supposed to be
friends
—I’ve known you all my life—”

He was trying to stand up, hampered by his cloak, which appeared to have become twisted in his fall. “Friends grow up,” he said, with a huff in his voice. “Things change. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

“Imbecile!” said the princess. “Not between us. Have I ever said anything’s changed?”

“You’re a girl—you’re quite pretty—well, not bad—and…”

“So you kissed me because suddenly you’ve noticed I’m a girl and I’m
quite pretty
?”

“Um…no…er, sort of…”

Wrong answer,
thought Nathan, with a certain malicious satisfaction.
All the wrong answers.

The princess was well away into a savage denunciation of Roshan’s manners (lack of) and intelligence (ditto) when Nathan became aware of something else. A soft, slithery noise from farther down the street—a noise with undertones of squelch and a suggestion of weightiness—a thickening in the darkness there—the impression of something large and bulky heaving itself slowly toward them. The watchful silence of the city altered, focusing on the unseen approach. Rosh and the princess were still arguing, oblivious to what was coming.
You used magic,
Nathan was thinking.
The Urdemons come when you use magic—

He wanted to shout a warning but somehow his voice stuck in his throat.

Then they saw. It drew nearer to the light, humping itself awkwardly across the ground, a dim slug-shape with a head—or where a head should be—rearing up to six feet or more, dragging behind the dark gelatinous mass of its body. It had no face or eyes, but a mouth hole gaped suddenly, jagged with teeth, and the light shone down the endless tunnel of its gorge. Rosh picked up his fallen staff and pointed the spiked end, perhaps unaware that he was backing away. The princess stood stiffly in its path. She didn’t move—perhaps she couldn’t. Nathan looked around for a weapon, but there was nothing at hand, and he was probably too insubstantial to hold one. Briefly he noticed that he was glowing faintly in the presence of magic as he had done in Frimbolus’s workroom. He thought:
I’m dreaming. I’m not solid. If the worst happens, I’ll wake up.

Then he ran out in front of the princess.

He heard a gasp that might have come from Nell, but he wasn’t looking at her. The Urdemon towered above him like a giant bloated worm, its ragged maw stretching wider, wider…A sound came from it like the roar of a hurricane, like the shrieking of a hundred banshees—the Urulation. Nathan clapped his hands over his ears. The mouth came swooping down toward him, jaws distended to swallow him whole. This was a moment when you needed an elvish starglass, and words like
Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
—but the only such words he knew were those he had heard his uncle utter, long before, to dismiss a spirit from the magic circle. He took his hands from his ears and reached out as though pushing the monster away: they shone pale and transparent against the blackness of its gape.
“Vardé!”
he cried, in the language of spellpower. “
Envarré!
By the Cup and the Sword and the Crown, begone!” His voice sounded different from usual, clear and strange, like a voice from another plane, another world.

There was a horrible moment when he thought nothing would happen.

Then the Urdemon flinched as if from a sudden cold, its body arched backward—shuddered—and the whole towering mass began to collapse like a blancmange in an earthquake, quivering, flailing blindly from side to side, dissolving inward with a series of hideous glooping, gurgling noises, until there was nothing left but a viscous black puddle that shrank and shrank to the size of a droplet. A bubble heaved, burst with a tiny
plop!
—and was gone.

Nathan, turning, saw the princess staring at him as if he were a ghost—which of course he was. She was obviously frightened, but she managed a smile, her lips moving on a phrase—probably
thank you
. But just when he wanted it most the dream was leaving him, slipping away, and all the princess would see was a phantom in pajamas too small for him who faded into the gloom without a word, leaving her alone in the dark with Rosh…

Nathan was flung back into his own world so rapidly he woke with a jerk, starting up in bed and looking wildly around as though he expected the princess—or the Urdemon—to be there still. But the dormitory was dark, and everyone slept, and he lay down again with his heart pounding and his head in a tailspin.

It was some time before he could sleep again.

B
artlemy spent much of that week reflecting on the dietary habits of dwarfs. They were meat eaters by repute; in fact, it was said they would eat animals no other intelligent life-form would touch, including weasel, rat, water vole, badger—the whole cast of
Wind in the Willows,
Bartlemy thought—lizard, and toad. The rarity of certain types of newt in the British Isles was attributable to the number of indigenous true dwarfs who survived here until the late Middle Ages, according to some Gifted historians. They didn’t enjoy fish or greens, but ate root vegetables like potato, rutabaga, and carrot (all dwarfs have good darksight, which may be the origin of the popular myth about carrots) and used wild herbs for flavoring. They were not fond of fruit but liked nuts and honey, and—rumor again—made various kinds of bread remarkable more for toughness and durability than appetizing breadness.

In between periods of reflection, Bartlemy cooked. He cooked with the window open, and the kitchen door, sending delicious smells wafting across the garden toward the woods—smells of potatoes roasting, or baking in their jackets, and onions softening in butter, and venison stewing in wine, and wood pigeons in honey, and wild rabbit with prunes, and various more unusual ingredients that had not found themselves on a menu since the days of ancient Rome. Sometimes he glimpsed eyes watching from the bushes, dark strange eyes with no whites—the eyes of the werepeople—but he never tried to ensnare the watcher, merely waiting for him to emerge, whenever he was ready. Hoover (and Annie) dined on exotic leftovers, but the dwarf did not come.

On Saturday, Nathan and Annie came to supper—what they ate they weren’t sure and didn’t like to ask, but it tasted wonderful—and Nathan told his mother and uncle about the Urdemon.

“Do you have to be so reckless?” Annie demanded, feeling proud and terrified in equal measure.

“Interesting,” Bartlemy commented, as always. “Clearly, the creature—like you—wasn’t fully substantial. The two of you met on the same plane—and words of power seem to work anywhere. The language of magic is multiversal. Even so, you aren’t Gifted in that way, so…Someone or something looks after you, as I’ve said before.” Nathan looked a little crestfallen, but Bartlemy concluded: “That doesn’t diminish your courage in confronting the thing, you know.”

“Just don’t
rely
on supernatural protection, for God’s sake,” Annie said. “It may not be there next time.”

“The Urdemons turn up when the princess does bits of magic,” Nathan went on, “but I can’t believe she’s summoning them. I thought it might have something to do with the sword. Supposing they guard it, like the gnomons guarded the Grail?”

“I should have thought that was unlikely,” Bartlemy said. “These Urdemons appear to be native to…Wilderslee, did you call it? The sword—if it is the one we want—comes from Eos. And it has its own inhabitant, remember, or so they say. Of course, if whatever dwells in the sword is a spirit of similar type, then the Urdemons might well be drawn to it. But it would have to have a very potent aura indeed to wield such a powerful attraction.”

“Eric said the thing in the sword was an elemental, primitive but very powerful. The Grandir imprisoned it there by magic, a long time ago.”

Bartlemy considered this. “The Urdemons, too, would appear to be elementals, chaos-spirits who have no real form of their own but borrow the attributes of beasts, birds, weather, even humans, depending on their mood. However, even if they
are
drawn to the demon of the sword, you said they only appeared in the princess’s lifetime, which makes them fairly recent arrivals. A summons is indicated, and for a summons, there must be a summoner.”

“The princess would never—”

“I didn’t say it
was
the princess. She could be an unwitting catalyst. Whoever called them might have bound them to her without her knowledge.”

“That’s
wicked,
” Nathan said, using the word in its literal sense. “She feels so guilty…”

“You know how she feels, do you?” Bartlemy’s innocent blue gaze held the suspicion of a twinkle.

“I—yes.” Nathan missed it. “Who would do that? Could it—could it be the Grandir?”

“Difficult. A spell of that kind would require something belonging to the princess—a shoe, a glove, best of all, a lock of hair—and that would be hard for him to obtain. Besides, what motive could he have? The sword already has a guardian. The object of this seems to be to empty the city and isolate the king—possibly to obtain the sword. After all, many people were after the Grail—and the sword, too, is a thing of great power.”

“First we have an entanglement of clues,” Nathan said. “Now it’s a—what’s the collective noun for villains?”

“Think of one,” said Bartlemy.

“A congregation,” Annie suggested, her mind running on clerical matters since her encounter with Father Crowley.

“Cynical,” Bartlemy murmured.

“A slugfest,” Nathan said. “How do you like that? A slugfest of villains.”

“What’s a slugfest?” Annie asked. “A feast of slugs?”

“I suppose so. It’s a good word for villains, anyway.”

Annie turned back to Bartlemy. “Have we come to any conclusions?” she said.

“One or two,” Bartlemy said. “A smatter of conclusions, if we’re collecting collectives.” He was looking very pensive.

When Annie and Nathan had left he found a bowl, filled it with beer, and put it out in the garden. A couple of bits of plank made a gangway up to the rim. The following day he collected the contents, marinated them for a further twenty-four hours in a concoction including some of his rarer herbs, and on the next evening he was ready. He fried them in a light batter, spiced and seasoned according to a recipe long forgotten, and left the results in a bowl on the kitchen table, covered with a cloth. Then he went into the living room and sat for a while, sipping a glass of his favorite dark red liquor. No noise came from the kitchen that a human might hear, even a Gifted human, but when Hoover cocked his ears Bartlemy got up. For all his size he could move as quietly as a cat. He went to the kitchen door and looked in.

The dwarf was there. He was eating, not greedily, as might have been expected, after long incarceration and subsequently living wild, but slowly, savoring the delicacy. He had seated himself on a convenient stool that put him at the right height for the kitchen table; Bartlemy had left it there deliberately. He was very hairy, with barely a sliver of forehead squeezed in above his eyebrows and a beard that sprouted, like whiskers, on either side of his nose, spreading across his cheeks and bristling out from his jaw. It was a black beard, streaked gray with age and green from his outdoor existence. The hair on his head stuck up in spikes, gelled with mud or sweat or a combination of both. His clothing was so patched and repatched, so mossed and grimed, it was hardly recognizable as clothing at all. He smelled something like a fox, and something like a badger, and a lot like a dwarf who hadn’t taken a bath for several centuries.

Bartlemy smiled at him, but his visitor looked as if he didn’t remember what smiles were for. “Would you like a beer?”

There were two tankards on the table, a bottle placed nearby. Bartlemy poured, and drank from one of the tankards. Presently the dwarf pounced on the other and drank, too.

“You are welcome to my house,” Bartlemy said formally.

The dwarf gave an abrupt nod. After a minute or two, he seemed to recall the right response. “Thank ’ee.” His voice was a guttural croak, rusted from lack of use, his accent ancient and strange.

Bartlemy waited, drinking his beer, while the other continued to eat. Eventually the dwarf spoke again. “It’s an age and an age since I ha’ tasted that dishy. Comes good, to taste it agin. A mem’ry of home.”

“Where was home?” Bartlemy asked.

“Long gone. My people—long gone. How long? How long since the old spellcracker shut me up?”

“About fourteen hundred years.”

The dwarf stopped eating and sat for a while in a sort of frozen stillness. “Evil,” he said. “He was evil, and all his works. He would talk to me like a friend—he didna ha’ too many o’ those—but he bound me like a slave. I was ne’er free to leave, and when I told him…He wa’ messing in other worlds, d’ye ken? No the magic places here but
other worlds,
beyond the Gate, beyond the Margin o’ Being. D’ye ken?”

“Aye,” said Bartlemy, slipping absentmindedly into the lingo of the past.

“May the Dark have him!”

“It has. He died in a fire, when his house burned to the ground. It must have been about the time he imprisoned you.”

The dwarf cackled suddenly. “I set the fire!” he declared. “I took the cup, d’ye see? It was a cursed thing, full o’ blood though none had done the bleeding, and I took it to be done with it, but he caught me and buried me in the ground, buried me alive wi’ locks and bars and cantrips to keep me there. He’d put out the fire wi’ a Command, but water’s better nor magic for that, and fire’s a creepy, sneaky creature. Ye think it’s dead but it’s still breathing. Wants only a draft and a spark. I hope he died screaming.”

“Probably,” said Bartlemy.

The dwarf returned to his dinner. “O’ course,” he remarked, “if the magister had lived, he might ha’ let me out. He wasna pity-full, but he needed me. Or he might ha’ left me there. The spells rotted, but iron held me. I couldna dig. It was a long dark while just for sleeping and thinking…That boy, what does he want wi’ the cup? What do they all want wi’ it? It’s accursed, evil. You tell them.”

“Why is it cursed? Did the magister tell you about it?”

“Listen…The Gate is for mortal men, not for the likes o’ me. Ye ha’ the Gift, I ken, so ye know. Werefolk don’t die like men, we sleep, we wither, but we canna pass through, and men shouldna, until their time. Then there’s no returning, or none that we wot of. But the magister, he got the cup from someone on the
other side,
d’ye see? That’s power, deadly power, and when I saw it first, it were blood to the brim, and we all know the meaning of that.”

“The strongest spells use blood…”

“Aye, and it were a spell—a spell to open the Gate, to bring two worlds thegither. I wouldna be part of it. There are barriers ne’er meant to be broken: it’s a forbidden thing. We ha’ world enough here to keep us all. But now…I’m fourteen centuries out o’ my time. No folk left, no magister…” He shivered, half missing the master who had subjugated him. Even slavery can be a safe, familiar thing.

“I meant what I said,” Bartlemy reiterated. “You are welcome to my house. My name is Bartlemy Goodman. Will you tell me yours?”

“Thank ’ee, Magister Goodman. I am Login Nambrok. I must go, I’m thinking, but…this is a rare kitchen ye keep here. I ha’ forgot how good food noses, when it’s cooked right well.”

“Come again,” Bartlemy said. “The door is always open.”

The dwarf got to his feet, leaving an empty dish. “One sma’ thing,” he said. “Wi’ those fatworms—”

“Yes?”

“A wee tippit more salt?”

N
ATHAN WAS
more eager than ever to see the princess again, hoping that this time—despite the risks—he would find himself rather more solid, existing on her plane instead of the Urdemon’s. But he didn’t dream on Friday or Saturday, and by Sunday night he was growing desperate. Though his dream journey at school that week had had no awkward consequences, midnight dematerialization in the dormitory was always hazardous, and he had been hoping to dream at home. He didn’t like consciously reaching for the portal—it never worked out the way he wanted—but he felt he had no choice. In bed he closed his eyes and turned his mindsight inward, roaming the dim canyons inside his head until he found the place where everything blurred, a patch of wrongness on the walls of his very self. He focused his thought there, pushing his way into a barrier of nothingness—and then there was the tunnel through space, the planetscapes wheeling away from him, the distant swirl of stars. He arrived—unusually—with no sense of impact, but almost immediately he realized why. He wasn’t solid or even ghost-like, merely an awareness moving through the gloom of an unfamiliar place. It didn’t look like Arkatron or Carboneck, or anywhere he had been before. It was just darkness, with the dim curves of walls, hollows, and openings gaping and closing around him.
I’m underground,
he guessed,
but not in a building, nor in the desert cave on Eos where the Grail was concealed. Man-made caves, perhaps. A troglodyte colony…
Then there was light ahead of him and he emerged into what seemed to be a vast natural cavern.

The vault of the roof soared far above, dripping with stalactites, pale green and faintly luminous, pointing downward like a thousand spears. They were mirrored in a wide pool that stretched down the center of the cavern; beyond, the walls were coved and ribbed, folded and fluted into fantastic sculptures, lit by pale lamps glowing through thin veils of stone. At one point the wall drew close to the pool, and there was an archway into a lesser chamber, through which Nathan could see a huge rock with a flattened top, like an anvil, and the orange smolder of a fire in a brazier. A man was working there, a giant of a man—Nathan had no standards of comparison, but somehow the man’s giantness was obvious—wearing the sort of clothing that might have been protective or merely ornamental, all layered leather and rippling mesh. He had the lean curving features of an Eosian, with a jutting hook of a nose, jagged cheekbones, and eyes glittering darkly under hooded lid and craggy brow. The man was honing a piece of the same greenish stone as the stalactites, shaping and polishing it using some sort of automatic chisel. The tool glowed blue at the tip and emitted a faint humming noise; sparks trailed from it as it traveled over the stone.
It’s the Grail,
Nathan thought.
This is the first Grandir, and he’s making the Grimthorn Grail.
Nathan’s dreams had often jumped about in time, but he had never been carried so far into the past.
But it isn’t
my
past,
he reflected;
it’s theirs. Now it’s my present.
A teacher at his school had said Time was like a vast level plain, and we were moving across it, on a road with no turnings to right or left, no going back. But when you blundered into an alternative universe you could wind up anywhere on the plain, anywhere on the road. This wasn’t what Nathan had hoped to find, but he forgot other considerations in fascination at the Grandir’s task.