The Sword of Straw (3 page)

“Have you talked to him much?” Nathan queried.

“Not really. He asked me about my homework once, but when I showed it to him he couldn’t do it.”

“If you haven’t talked to him,” Nathan said, “you don’t really know if he’s boring or not.”

“You’re being reasonable,” Hazel said sharply. “You know I can’t stand it when you do that. He—he gives off boring, like a smell. BO. Boring Odor. He walks around in a little cloud of boringness. Please,
please
don’t start being open-minded and tolerant about things. It’s revolting.”

“When you shut your mind,” Nathan retorted, “you shut yourself inside it. That’s silly. Besides, I just said, give him a chance. You think he’s nice, don’t you? So he might surprise you. He might be fun after all.”

“Mum doesn’t need fun,” Hazel said obstinately. “She’s my mum, for God’s sake. I like him, okay? He’ll do. I don’t have to be thrilled by him.”

“Okay.” Nathan grinned, a little mischievously. Sometimes he enjoyed provoking her. She was always too quick and too careless in judging people, and slow to alter her opinions, and he liked being the only person who could ruffle her certainties.

When he had gone she took out the picture she never showed anyone, cut off from the end of a group shot taken at the school disco. It was a picture of a boy with a fair childish face, wavy hair worn rather long—hobbit hair, said his detractors—blue eyes crinkled against the flashbulb. He smiled less than his classmates and Hazel believed he nursed a secret sorrow, though she could only speculate what it might be. (Of course, he could have been merely sullen.) He rarely spoke to her, hardly seemed to notice her, but somehow that only made him more fascinating. He didn’t have Boring Odor, she reflected—beneath their lack of communication she sensed the wells of his soul were fathoms deep. She stared at the photo for what felt like an age, racked with the pain of impossible longing, with anger at the hopelessness of it all, with shame because she would never be pretty enough to fascinate him in return. Her girlfriends all expected her to be in love with Nathan—Nathan with his dark alien beauty, his lithe athletic body, his indefinable uniqueness, charms she had known all her life and regarded with the indifference of familiarity—but she would only shrug at the suggestion, and smile, and hug the secret of her true affection to herself. She liked to be contrary, to keep Nathan as a friend—only a friend—and give her heart to someone nobody would suspect. Until the moment she dreamed of—the distant, elusive moment when they came together at last. The moment that would never happen…

Presently she dived underneath the bed, groping behind the schoolbooks and sweaters and CD cases, and pulled out a carrier bag that chinked as it moved. The bag of things that had belonged to her great-grandmother Effie Carlow, who was supposed to be a witch—the bag she had always meant to throw away, only somehow she hadn’t gotten around to it. Hazel hadn’t wanted to believe in witchcraft but she had seen too much of Effie not to know what she could do—at least, until she drowned.
You, too, have the power,
the old woman had told her.
It’s in your blood.
The Carlows were offshoots of the Thorn family on the wrong side of the blanket: there was said to be a strain of the Gift in their genes, dating back to Josevius Grimthorn, a magister of the Dark Ages who had reputedly sold his soul to the Devil. When Effie spoke of such things Hazel was frightened—frightened and skeptical both at once. (Skepticism was her protection from the fear, though it didn’t work.) She had no intention of taking up her great-grandmother’s legacy, of dabbling in spells and charms and other stupidities. But now there was Jonas Tyler, who wouldn’t look at her, and the moment that would never happen, and maybe…maybe…among the sealed bottles with their handwritten labels was a love-philter, or in Effie’s notebook there was an incantation, something to make her irresistible, just to him.

One by one she took the bottles out of the bag and peered at the faded writing, trying to make it out.

B
ACK AT
the bookshop, Nathan sat down to supper with his mother. In the summer months she tended to favor salads, but the weather was still vacillating and he noted with satisfaction that it was cauliflower cheese. “You should have brought Hazel back,” Annie said. “There’s plenty.”

“I wasn’t sure,” he explained. “Have you met her mum’s new boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“She says he’s nice, but boring.”

“He seems very nice, certainly,” Annie said. “I don’t know about boring. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to him.”

There was a brief interlude of cauliflower cheese, then Nathan resumed: “Has Uncle Barty said any more about the burglary?”

“Apparently he called the inspector. You remember: the one from last year.”

“The one with the funny name?” Nathan said, with his mouth full.

“Pobjoy.” There was a shade of constraint in her manner. She hadn’t completely forgiven the absent policeman for his suspicions.

But Nathan had forgotten them. “He was clever,” he said judiciously, “even if he did get lots of things wrong. I bet he guessed those burglars were after the Grail.”

“We don’t know that. Anyway, Rowena Thorn has it, not your uncle.”

“She gave it to Uncle Barty to look after. The traditional hiding place is at Thornyhill: they once discussed it in front of me.”

“How do you know she—”

“I just know.”

Annie didn’t argue anymore. Even after fourteen years there were times when she found her son’s alert intelligence disconcerting.

“The thing is,” he went on, “they were just ordinary burglars, right? Not like the dwarf last time.”

“Mm.”

“So they wouldn’t know about the Grail unless someone told them. It couldn’t have been any of us, so they must have found out by magic.”

“They’re just kids,” Annie said. “I don’t think they’re the sort to use magic.”

“Of course not. It was somebody else, somebody who paid them to try to steal the cup. That’s logical.” He added, with a creditable French accent: “A kind of
éminence grise.
”

Annie smiled. “You’re a bit young to be turning into a conspiracy theorist.”

“Uncle Barty thinks so, too,” Nathan pointed out. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have called the inspector.”

Annie’s smile faded into a sigh. “You wanted something to happen,” she said, “and now it has. Can we just
try
not to let it grow into something worse? No more conspiracies, and specters, and horrors. Not this time.”

“You talk as if it was my fault,” Nathan protested, referring to their adventures the previous year.

“Just don’t
wish
for trouble,” his mother said without much hope. And: “You will tell us, won’t you, if you start having dreams again?
Those
dreams, I mean.”

He looked at her very steadily, and she was disturbed to find his expression completely unreadable. “Yes, I will,” he said at last, adding, to himself, fingers crossed:
When I’m ready.

In her room that night Annie, too, took out a picture she never showed anyone. Daniel Ward, the man who was assumed to be Nathan’s father. She had assumed it herself, until the baby was born. The face in the photograph was pleasant rather than handsome, fair-skinned, brown-haired, unremarkable. The eyes were a little dreamy, and a secret smile lurked at the corners of his mouth. Even Nathan had never seen the picture; it would give rise to too many questions. Because there was nothing in genetics to enable two white Caucasian parents to produce a child so exotically dark…Annie herself had never really known what happened. In the instant of Daniel’s death she had reached out for him, and a Gate had opened, and in death she had found love, returning to the world of life pregnant, and it wasn’t until she saw the baby that she realized he couldn’t be Daniel’s child. He was the child of destiny, Bartlemy said, bridging the void between worlds; but it did not comfort her. One day, she would have to tell Nathan the truth—one day very soon—but she was still finding reasons to put it off.
Keep him safe—keep him trusting—he doesn’t need to know…

She put the picture away again, the looming dilemma clouding her mind, excluding any memories of distant happiness.

In his own bed Nathan lay with his eyes closed roaming the landscape inside his head, looking for the way through. It was there, he knew: he had found it once before, in an emergency, taking the plunge into another universe not at random but by his own will—though the act had frightened him and he hadn’t attempted it again. But now curiosity—which kills even Schrödinger’s cat—impelled him on, stronger than fear. He wanted to see the princess again, to explore the abandoned city and find out more about Urdemons, and why the people left, and the curse on the king…

He fell a long, long way, through a whirling dark pinpricked with stars. Then there was a jarring thud, and his mind was back in his body, but his body was somewhere else. Not the city on two hills with the Gothic house on top but another city, a huge metropolis with buildings like curving cliffs and a blood-red sunset reflected in endless windows and airborne skimmers and winged reptiles crisscrossing in the deadly light. He had landed on a rooftop platform in the shade of a wall, with a door close by. He scrambled to his feet, touched a panel—after a second the door opened and he slipped inside, escaping the lethal sun. He had forgotten the hazards of
willing
himself into another universe. Here was no misty realm of dreams and incorporeal being: he was almost solid, as visible as a ghost on a dark night, and this was Arkatron on Eos, the city at the end of the world, and there were many dangers both known and unknown here to menace him. Worst of all, or so he thought when he looked down, he had ignored the first rule of dream voyages—that you will find yourself wearing the clothes you slept in. It is difficult to feel brave and adventurous in pajamas. (The previous year, he had gotten into the habit of going to bed in tracksuit pants and a sweatshirt.) However, there was nothing he could do about it now.

He found himself on a gallery overlooking a hollow shaft, too deep for him to estimate how far it was to the bottom. Transparent egg-shaped lifts traveled up and down it, supported by alarmingly slender cables. He had assumed he would be in government headquarters, since that was where his dreams usually placed him, but nothing here looked familiar. An elevator stopped close by, its door opening automatically even as a section of floor was extruded from the gallery to meet it. The elevator was empty. Nathan took the hint, and stepped inside. A panel offered a wide choice of buttons: he pressed the top one. Being only semi-solid he had to press twice, hard. The door closed and the lift shot upward.

He emerged onto another gallery, but this time he had to walk all the way around to find an exit, and when he pushed the door, it didn’t move. He was too substantial to walk through it. He touched a square on the adjacent wall, but instead of the door opening there was a noise like a few bars of music—the kind of music Hazel would have liked, incorporating weird stringed instruments and very little rhythm.
Of course,
Nathan thought, light dawning,
it’s a doorbell. This is a private apartment…
He wondered if he should run, but there was no point. His dream had brought him here, and he had no real option but to go on.

The door opened.

A man was standing there, a very tall man—all Eosians were taller than the people of our world. He was wearing a long white robe with a wide hood much looser than the usual kind. Under the hanging sleeves his hands were ungloved and his mask covered only three-quarters of his face; where it ended, just above mouth and jaw, his beard began, a thick white beard unlike anything Nathan had ever seen outside the pages of a book, forked and braided almost to his waist. He stared at Nathan in silence. Nathan stared back, forgetting how shocking his appearance must be to his host. No children had been born here for perhaps a thousand years, and though Nathan was big for his age, in this universe he was shorter than the residents, slight of build, and obviously youthful. His pajamas were too small for him, stopping well above ankle and wrist—his body had a suggestion of transparency—his face was naked. On Eos, it was rare for anyone to show their face.

When at last the man spoke, his words were strangely apposite. “Well, well,” he said. “What in the world are you? A holocast?—or not…”

As always, Nathan understood the language. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not really
in
your world. At least, I am, but—”

“But?”

“I’m
from
another world,” Nathan explained. His voice didn’t sound quite right—eerily hollow and distant.

“So it’s started, has it?” The man’s tone sharpened. “It’s been long in the coming. The walls between the worlds are breaking down. Still, I don’t quite understand…What would you want of me? Whoever you are.”

“I don’t know,” Nathan admitted. “My dream brought me here.”

“Your—dream? You mean, you are dreaming this? You are dreaming
me
?”

“Yes.”

“How very interesting. This couldn’t be part of a spell—some leakage through a portal?”

“I don’t think so,” Nathan said. “If there’s a portal, it’s in my head.”

“Hmm.” There was a pause.

Then the man said: “I am forgetting my manners. Won’t you come in?”

Nathan followed him inside. The apartment consisted of a cluster of irregularly shaped rooms connected with arched doorways and hung with diaphanous drapes. Furniture curved with the walls; a small fountain bubbled out of what looked like a crystal cakestand in the midst of the main room; the light was vague and sourceless. Stronger light was condensed into two or three pillars of clouded glass, and in the outer wall oval windows were covered with translucent screens, flushed red from the sunset beyond. “My name,” said the man, seating himself, “is Osskva Rodolfin Petanax. But perhaps you knew that already?”

“No,” said Nathan. “I don’t know anything very much. Is this part of the Grandir’s palace?”

“If you mean the seat of government and residence of our ruler and his bride-sister, then—no. We wouldn’t call it a palace. This is accommodation for his senior advisers and others in the higher echelons of authority. I am a first-level practor—if you understand what that means?”