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  Will’s unimpressed tone prickled the wizard. ‘What do you suggest? That I back away, when this is our only path forward? Whatever Maskull has left here will furnish us our best clue as to where he has gone and what he might be doing.’

  ‘That sounds like your pride talking to me.’

  ‘Oh, indeed…’ Gwydion took the point wearily, condescendingly, as if Will could know nothing about a wizard’s pride. It was a card he often played.

  ‘Don’t patronize me.’

  ‘Willand, I have a job of work to do here. I would that you had not come, but since you have…’

  ‘Why do you say that? What do you think is in there?’ Will’s doubts crowded in on him. ‘You wouldn’t be trying to use Maskull’s own weapons against him, would you?’

  For a moment the wizard’s outline showed stark against a flare of magelight. His voice was thin and barely audible. ‘Willand, Willand, Willand. Could you think that of me? Even in this desperate strait?’

  He felt ashamed. He had gone too far. ‘No. Of course not. Forgive me, Master Gwydion. I shouldn’t have said that. Neither of us is quite himself at the moment, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘I know very well what has happened to me. And I know what is happening to you. That is why I continue to counsel patience.’

  ‘You always counsel patience.’

  ‘Then why not expect it of me and be easy in your mind? O, that I could be as easy in my own. Perhaps I should show you my problem and burden you like a beast.’

  Will rubbed at his arms. ‘I wish you would. Standing here bandying words is doing neither of us any good.’

  As the wizard wafted his magelight higher, Will looked up at the stout door. It was clad in bands of iron and held together by a hundred rivets. And it seemed as impenetrably sealed against magic as it was against the striking of brute strength.

  Will felt an intense jag of frustration. ‘Master Gwydion, I beg you to forget about this door! You are playing with trifles while our real difficulties go unaddressed.’

  ‘Am I? Am I so?’ the wizard cried. ‘And perhaps you are the wizard and I the fool?’

  His own attitude hardened. ‘Fool? Is that what I’m called for my loyalty?’

  Gwydion looked at him long and with penetrating eyes. ‘Hmmm.’ Then he raised his staff and drew back the solid door with no more effort than if it had been a curtain.

  Will shrank back. ‘By the moon and stars! How did you do that?’

  ‘You see, despite what you may have decided, there is life in the old dog yet. I have had the way in here for three days. It is that which lies inside that has me in a quandary. Now tell me what you really came here for and we shall speak more amicably.’

  Will showed weary innocence. ‘It was as I said: I came to look for you.’

  ‘Are you sure it was not for any other reason?’

  ‘Do you think so? If you do, then you really are losing your edge.’

  ‘The magic that closed this room against me for so long was not an ordinary spell. There was a meticulous record written through it of breaches made past, present and future. When I interrogated the spell I read of no breach before my own, but it implied there would be another entering here after me. Someone entering to steal. That is why I chose to lie in wait.’

  Will put his hands on his hips. ‘And so you thought I had come to steal?’

  ‘You came. I know not why.’

  ‘I’ve told you why!’

  ‘But you are not being perfectly honest with me.’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘You’re keeping something from me. I know that too.’ The wizard tutted, then twisted away and danced briefly, showered blue sparks around, after which he gestured peremptorily. ‘Well, don’t just stand there with your mouth agape. Come into my parlour, as the spider said to the fly.’

  As Will walked into the sorcerer’s lair he felt a drenching cold fall over him from head to foot. The chamber was lit only by shafts of light that came from slits high above. Dark shapes were trussed up in the rafters, hanging still or slowly twisting. The place stank of sorcery. Charts and writings in an unreadable script adorned the walls. There was a mortar and pestle, with powders of green, yellow and red scattered about. Lines were deeply graven in the stones of the floor with letters incised at numerous points. There were cages in which small animals and birds had died, their water pots dry, their small bones mouldering among their own droppings.

  ‘What a nasty little den this is,’ Will said.

  ‘But be assured there is beauty here too,’ replied Gwydion, leavening his disgust. He pointed to a single black rose turning round and round endlessly in a ghostly silver vase. Suspended jewels seemed to communicate as they twisted and turned, sending back and forth scintillas of light in red and green. ‘There are wonders here. Great wonders.’

  He picked up a wand and watched with detached interest as it changed into a green-eyed serpent and back again. ‘He has tampered with harm and kindness both. It seems the fetters he put on me were not his only triumph.’

  ‘Are these things all of his making?’ Will looked around and his eyes lighted on another fetter. This one was crude, black and heavy but not so unlike those that had been clapped on Gwydion’s wrists. Beside it lay an iron bracket from which the lamplight glinted dully. He hefted it and found, as he expected, that it too was heavy. But beyond his expectations he also felt a curious sense of empowerment simply by lifting it up. It was a mechanism attached to a handle made for a man’s hand to grip. ‘Is it a weapon, do you think?’

  The wizard took it from him and laid it aside. ‘Maybe. Do you feel harm in it? Some kind of arquebus, it seems to me. Many of the things Maskull has fashioned are weapons, but not all. See here – this is a medicine chest in which he has bottled a hundred flavours of kindness. Each of them is able to ease a specific illness or wound. I can guess what Gort will say when he sees these vials – that such cures are null and void, for Maskull created them in pursuit of a selfish end. But when damaged flesh is knit up again, who but Gort these days will bother to consider the spiritual ailments that come of using corrupt magic?’

  Will opened the chest and looked at the little bottles. Marvelling, he shook his head. ‘The magic in these vials heals, yet no one should dare to use it…now there’s a paradox, and a dilemma. Is there such a thing as tainted knowledge?’

  ‘It is the same as dirty silver – coin is coin, some say, while others will not stoop to the spending of money made by crime. Everyone must decide for himself what he will and will not employ in magic…’ Gwydion’s voice tailed off. ‘You will see all manner of half-stable mixtures of kindness and harm here, things that are by turns a wonderful delight and unspeakably foul. Give me your hand, and I’ll have my revenge of you.’

  A gobbet of fear invaded Will’s belly when the wizard took his fingers and thrust them into a sparkling jar. But he need not have worried, for his heart was filled with a sudden blast of joy.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘A jar of…happiness?’ Will said in wonderment as Gwydion pulled his hand out again. ‘Who would have thought Maskull would make such a thing as this?’

  ‘I would not.’ The wizard grunted and nodded his head towards another, similar jar. ‘However, I will not ask you to put your hand into that one.’

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘Try it and see.’

  He savoured the last, fading rays of pure joy and his eyes slid back to the first jar. ‘I’d much rather try this one again.’

  But this time the wizard caught him firmly by the wrist. ‘Oh, I think not, Willand.’

  He felt an almost overwhelming urge to shrug off the wizard’s grip and gratify himself once again. But then the urge slowly withdrew and the truth stood revealed.

  ‘Ah…’

  Gwydion nodded. ‘Ah, indeed. A second time and you would have been lost. Now you see that the jar is not one of pure kindness, but a kind of trap.’

  Will thought of the ked then, and understood
how Maskull’s slave-creature must have felt after it had been ensnared. ‘I see.’

  ‘I think you begin to.’ The wizard’s smile was flat. ‘But, regarding Maskull – what are we to do about him? How are we to make progress?’

  Will bent his mind to the problem. ‘Well…we knew he was keen to find the battlestone at Delamprey and help it into action. We knew he was tapping harm from it. And now we know what he was making. That’s a kind of progress I suppose.’

  ‘But it does not solve our problem, which is that we have all along been playing into Maskull’s hands. For the past three days I have been here, searching out a remedy, a solution to the biggest question: why, despite all our best efforts, is the world still tending towards that dreadful condition that we have been fighting to prevent?’

  Will drew a deep breath. ‘But I thought all that was down to the harm released from the stones. You said we’d been draining them, thinking we were doing ever so well, but if there’s no battle then the evil we release isn’t used up. If it’s dispersed it works to the detriment of the world in another way.’

  ‘Despite all that I have said to you about “good” and “evil”, Willand, still you have no difficulty in treating Maskull as if evil was his aim. Why do you suppose he does what he does?’

  Will took the remark sturdily. ‘He does it because he’s weak. He’s selfish and he’s greedy. He has his ambitions for the world just like you do, Master Gwydion, but the difference is that he wants to fit the world to his vision, instead of letting it be the other way around. And he doesn’t have much patience with anyone who opposes him.’

  ‘But Maskull does believe that he is doing right by the world,’ the wizard said. ‘We must never forget that. And we must expect him to fight to his last breath to bring about what he considers to be the correct end. Now tell me: what is that end that he’s steering the world towards?’

  Will could not grasp the meaning of the wizard’s question and he floundered. ‘You once told me it would lead to five hundred years of war and untold suffering. Is that what you mean? A future wholly without magic? Centuries of strife and terror? The crushing down of people until everyone is yoked to one great vision – Maskull’s vision?’

  ‘But did I not tell you that Maskull wanted another world? A place not unlike our own, yet quite separate from it?’

  ‘You might have said that, but if you did I had no clear understanding of what you meant. I just thought you were talking about his vision of the future.’

  ‘Then look at this!’ The wizard gestured at the wall where a painted chart hung. ‘I can now show you exactly what is in Maskull’s mind, for he is not planning to invent the world that he wishes to bring us to – it already exists.’

  Will looked at the chart, and saw that it contained a picture he had seen many times, a picture he had been shown by Tutor Aspall in his youth. It showed the scheme of the world in its three parts – the known world, round and flat, with many lands to the east and a great sea to the west from which the waters endlessly fell. In the centre of the world where sea and land met, were the isles of Albion and the Blessed Isle, and on Albion’s three parts were written ‘Albanay’, ‘Cambray’, and ‘The Realm’. Above it all was painted the great perforated dome of the sky, complete with sun and moon and a suggestion of the brightness that lay beyond, while underneath was the Realm Below where the fae had taken refuge, and below that the stilly waters of the abyssal ocean…

  ‘Yes, but I don’t see how this—’

  ‘You will!’

  The wizard peeled the chart away from a wooden board on which it had been held, seemingly by magic. Daylight filtered around the board’s edges and through the cracks, as if it was a window shutter. He heard the soughing of air, but felt nothing because no air was coming into the room. It was leaving it.

  Ah, he thought, suction was holding the chart up.

  Now that the cracks were unobstructed, he saw a thread of smoke rising up from one of the oil lamps. It was being sucked towards the window like water in a mill race. When Gwydion undid the catch, the shutters threw themselves open and light streamed in. Will saw that behind the shutters was a strange little window not much further across than his shoulders.

  The wizard opened his palm at the scene. ‘Behold!’

  A significant draught had started to blow through the room. It pulled at Will’s hair as he approached and peered out. There was a faint red-yellow halo just beyond the window, as if the air that was leaving the room was feeding some kind of magical flame. But if it was a flame it was transparent enough to see through.

  The palace yards were down below. But they were not quite as Will remembered them. Great white buttresses rose up all around and there was in the air a cacophony of bells. And over there was the river, and many people loping along, horses gliding and provision carts in great number all moving with a strange and unaccustomed slowness. But beyond Albanay Yard there was no Thomas Quad, and all was rosetinged grey as if the light of early dawn was upon them.

  He craned his head, put his face right out, then looked back at Gwydion in astonishment as the rushing air ceased to tug at his hair. ‘But…it’s daylight out there,’ he said. ‘And all the trees are in leaf!’

  Gwydion’s face was intense. ‘That’s because it’s a summer’s day. Out there even time itself elapses at a different rate; it runs slower. Do you see how slowly the birds are flying? How the clouds seem to hang motionless? And look at the people. Do you recall what once I told you in the Blessed Isle? Change place and you must also change time.’

  ‘There are no colours there!’

  ‘None. All is in shades of grey.’

  ‘But where is it?’ Will’s heart beat faster. He could not take in all the strangeness. ‘That’s not another place. It’s here. I can see a spire in the distance and the City walls. And that’s the Iesis – no other river curves just like that.’ He stared again, shaded his eyes. ‘What kind of sorcery is this, Master Gwydion?’

  The wizard grew suddenly grim. ‘What you are seeing is Maskull’s great hope. This is what lies at the end of his long collision course. You are looking out upon his other world.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PROMISES AND PIECRUSTS

  The next day Will could not prevent a dark cloud descending over him as he recalled the view from that window and thought over what Gwydion had told him. If that really was Maskull’s other world, then everything had arrived at a new level of urgency.

  Willow was watching their daughter as she played near the hearth. The infant was chewing wooden animals that Gort had made for her, and Will’s heart squeezed as he looked on mother and daughter together. He knew the day was fast approaching when he would have to leave them again, but this time it felt as if it would be forever.

  ‘I have something I want to tell you,’ he said. ‘Something important.’

  He told her about what he had seen in the tower, and what Gwydion had said. He was hoping, by talking it out, to make better sense of it himself, but although he could see all the parts there was no clear pattern to the whole.

  Willow shook her head uncertainly. ‘Another world? I can’t imagine that.’

  ‘Gwydion explained it to me. He says we’re like two vessels making our way across the sea at night, each unaware of the other. We’re just a tiny boat, but they’re a great big ship. All the time we’re sailing along, turning a little bit this way and a little bit that way just as the winds and waves allow, but all the time—’

  ‘—we’re getting ever closer to being run down by the big ship. Is that it?’

  He nodded. ‘And one day we’ll get so close that it hits us.’

  ‘Is that what Maskull’s trying for? He wants to steer us into collision with this other world?’ She tried to puzzle her way through the idea. ‘So the more harm Maskull can release into this world, the closer we get to that other, grey world?’

  ‘That’s it. And because of the stones, it’s happening faster and faster.’
/>   She looked sourly at the prospect. ‘And what happens when we collide?’

  ‘Master Gwydion says the big, grey world will just suck us in and gobble us up. It will hardly notice us in its path, and after we’ve become a part of it, it’ll just carry on more or less as before. But we’ll notice it all right, because the closer we approach it the more we’ll have to become like it. It’s so much bigger than us that we’re the ones who’ll have to do all the changing.’

  ‘I don’t much like the sound of that.’ Bethe began to cry, and Willow picked her up. ‘There, there, poppet. Take that out of your mouth. Can’t we stop it happening? Steer ourselves away?’

  ‘I don’t know if we can.’ Will saw that he had swum way out of his depth. He also realized that he had succeeded in sinking Willow in his gloom.

  ‘Just think of Maskull sitting at his window, spying on that other world. What do you suppose he was looking for?’ She shivered and after a while when she received no answer, she said, ‘What’s it like out there?’

  He told her what he had seen through the strange window. ‘It looked like an odd sort of a place. Master Gwydion says the other world has no magic of its own, so that whatever magic’s left in ours will vanish away as we get closer to the collision. He says that’s why the Ages are getting shorter. It’s the fundamental reason that magic has been leaving our world, though he has not seen that reason clearly until now.’

  He thought of a piece of Gwydion’s wisdom, which he had heard after the battle at Delamprey. ‘Men’s memories fade, Willand, and memories of magical things fade the fastest. Already men have forgotten the beams of blue and purple fire that played over the skies of Verlamion. Eventually they will forget that they ever saw a wyvern in flight above Delamprey. What will be recorded in the chronicles of later times will be little more than a dull roll of horses and men, and only noble men at that.’

  Willow looked up at him. ‘I think I see what Maskull wants. It’s to rule in that other world as well as this. He’s bound to think that a bigger world is a more fitting target for his ambitions.’