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  ‘But it looks as if Maskull may have found a way to take some magical weapons through the collision. He’s been making preparations to carry forward whatever he needs. Can you imagine a world without magic, except that wielded by Maskull?’

  She looked shocked. ‘So that’s how he plans to live forever and become master of us all…’

  ‘What Master Gwydion says about the other place is very puzzling.’ He paced, turned, paced some more. ‘In our world things become as most folk believe them to be, but not in that other world. There the world just is, and folk must find out its nature or remain in ignorance. Here there’s magic, but out there the redes don’t apply. In our world the ideas of “good” and “evil” are just that – ideas, and false ideas, lies dreamed up by the Sighdess Ones for their own twisted ends – but in their world they really exist. And they have something called…God.’

  Her eyes flickered. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s something to do with the Great Lie. But over there everyone is forced to believe in it. It’s a sort of invisible force that tortures their world horribly, yet must be praised and obeyed. But it’s also something they can blame their own shortcomings on. It’s as if the Great Lie were actually true. I don’t understand it fully, but I do know that thinking about it makes folk very sick in the head.’

  ‘Oh!’ She looked at her daughter, then up at him, and was as worried as he had ever seen her. ‘How terrible!’

  He looked out of the window and saw a line of Sightless Ones, hooded heads bowed, each with a red hand on the shoulder of the one in front, each turning this way and that. More of them had been seen about the palace in the past week, conducting their strange ceremonies. Will had thought the ritual observances were just an excuse to bring their agents closer to Duke Richard, the man at the very centre of power. But now Will began to see what the Fellowship was really about. They were the means by which the God-monster would enter the world. They were trying to make everyone believe, and so push the world closer to its day of reckoning. ‘Soon the Sightless Ones shall vomit up blood and ashes…’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘It’s just something Master Gwydion said when I found him last night.’ Will felt for the answer. ‘He told me I wasn’t being honest with him. I know why now. It was because I was going there to tell him something, but I still haven’t done it.’

  ‘But what is it, Will? You must tell me.’

  As always she had gone to the heart of his problem. ‘I’ve…I’ve made another stupid promise on Gwydion’s behalf. I wanted to explain myself, but for some reason I wasn’t able to tell him about it.’

  ‘A promise to whom?’

  He told her about Lotan, about the way the huge blind man had saved his life and had thereby set up an obligation. The admission felt like a tun being lifted off his shoulders. ‘What else could I do?’

  ‘Your promise was only to bring him hope – that there might be help for him?’

  ‘I went no further than that.’

  She considered. ‘I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time, to make friends with the Fellowship? Oh, Will, you’re forever telling me how dangerous they are.’

  ‘There’s almost a rede in that: every stupid action seems like a good idea at the time. Do you really think it’s a trap?’

  ‘It might be.’ She studied him. ‘But maybe you’re not being so stupid after all. Maybe it’s the wiser part of your mind telling that stubborn know-it-all part what you ought to be doing.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘But you’re not taking any notice of it. Gort says you’re resisting becoming King Arthur. Maybe that’s why you can’t tell Gwydion about Lotan.’

  He laughed in frustration. ‘Gort’s right about that. I don’t know how to become a king.’

  She reached up and touched him. ‘You’ve always been a king to me.’

  He pressed his lips to hers, then came and sat down beside her. For a long time he looked into the fire that burned in the hearth, wondering if there might not after all have been some unsuspected subtlety, some spell of procrastination, put upon him.

  He checked himself, turning inward as he knew he must to examine his perceptions. True, the fire seemed oddly unnatural to his eye. But that was because instead of wood it burned upon a kind of stone, black ‘wyrmstone’ sent down from the city of Toune by boats that plied the east coast. Merchants brought it in special ships, their holds steaming as they unloaded at the Dowe and the Queenhythe. Gwydion had told how all along the banks of the Black River in Umberland there were seams and outcrops of the filthy stuff. Men laboured in dark holes and pits to dig it out. Wyrmstone – shiny as obsidian but light as jet, easily crushed, yet imbued with the power of fire…

  He stirred and went to the table to find the piece of wyrmstone he had put aside that morning.

  He said to Willow, ‘Gort told me that whenever a great dragon was slain and slit to the gizzard, quantities of this would fall out of its gut. There were always ash heaps around their dens. I wonder how he explains this, though.’

  He showed her what he had discovered by chance when he had cracked open the wyrmstone.

  ‘That’s pretty,’ she said, looking at the perfect imprint of a fern in the black stone.

  ‘But, Willow, how did it get in there?’

  She scratched her chin, not quite seeing his point. ‘Magic, I suppose. What else could it be?’

  ‘Yes. What else could it be? And if it is magic, then what does it signify?’

  And that, Will thought, was the most difficult question, not least because the Age was drawing to a close and according to Gwydion all kinds of strangenesses appeared to plague the world at the end of an Age – signs and omens in plenty, gross rarities and now perhaps even the unseating of magical meaning.

  He hefted the rock thoughtfully. ‘I must show this to Gort.’

  ‘The Wortmaster’s not here.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He got a bee in his bonnet this morning – he dragged that big medicine chest out into the passage and started going on about not wanting to have it in his room. He said he was going to have the matter out with Master Gwydion.’

  Will decided not to mention where the chest had come from. ‘And where is Master Gwydion?’

  ‘He went down to Queenhythe to check on the ship rumours.’

  He looked blankly back at her. ‘Ship rumours?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard yet? It’s all over the palace. Everyone’s been talking about it this morning.’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to anyone.’

  ‘Then it’s just as well that I get out and about more than you do. It seems that a big Bristowe ship came in last night. The crew have been spreading stories around the City about having found Hy Brasil at last.’

  ‘Hy Brasil?’ He screwed up his face. ‘You mean the land that was meant to be out in the Western Deeps? But it doesn’t exist.’

  She seemed balked. ‘Isn’t that the land that King Sisil sailed to in the olden days? I’m sure it was.’

  ‘Who knows where King Sisil went? He was never seen again. Master Gwydion always told me there was nothing out there in the west. Nothing except a great waterfall at the Rim of the World.’

  ‘How does he know?’

  ‘Because he’s been there. He told me all about it. The sky roars past quicker than anything you ever saw or heard and the waters are clear and sugar sweet and pour out over a great lip of pale stone…’ He sat back in his chair, watching yellow-grey smoke escaping up the chimney. A quantity of it belched back into the room. Wyrmstone stank as it burned, and he suddenly thought the fireside was intolerably stuffy. Though rain was beating on the leaded panes he got up and flung open the window.

  ‘Oh, Willand, no!’ Willow said. ‘It’s freezing out there. Think of Bethe, would you?’

  He poked his head out. The ghastly quality of the light came not so much from the tint of the glass; the clouds themselves were leaden and yellow bellied. Instead of the tonic cold o
f rain on his face, the bite of fresh air in his lungs as he expected, there was only the smell of chimney smoke. But it was still the world he knew out there, and that was something.

  ‘Master Gwydion’s failing. I’m sure of it,’ he said, shutting the window again.

  ‘That’s not so.’ Willow turned, unwilling to believe. ‘His powers were cruelly damaged by those fetters, I’ll grant you, but they’re returning.’

  ‘Too slowly,’ he said. ‘Too slowly. And no one can foresee how far they’ll come back.’

  ‘He has a fine old staff to lean on.’

  ‘That relic of Maglin’s? Bringing it here was originally Gort’s idea. He wanted to set my mind at rest. They both did. You think I don’t know that?’

  ‘Master Gwydion’s as sharp in the mind as ever, and that’s what matters,’ Willow said, unflagging in her support. ‘This morning he pinned a parchment to the back of his door on which he’d written out the whole of the Delamprey stone’s inscription stroke by stroke all from memory. And when you thought it must be lost forever. Now what about that?’

  ‘All right, I was wrong to assume that,’ Will admitted, adding with heavy irony, ‘so, he has the words. Now all he has to do is work out the meaning. But it doesn’t matter if he works it out or not. We can’t actually do anything about it.’

  ‘Maybe things aren’t as bad as you suppose.’

  He breathed a heavy sigh. ‘I’m suffocating, Willow. We’ve got to get out of this stalemate. We’ve just got to!’

  She said nothing, but the knock on the door that came almost immediately made her jump. When Will opened it he saw a palace messenger who said nothing and would not meet his eye, but who handed him a letter. On it was a bright red seal that he could not fail to recognize. It was the king’s cipher.

  As Will emerged into the freezing passageway a white shape streaked by on the stair. Golden eyes looked at him with feline calculation. It was his friend, Pangur Ban, and the cat was smiling.

  Will carefully sat down on Maskull’s medicine chest, to see if the cat would come. He twisted around Will’s ankles before jumping up onto his lap where he began to knead and pluck.

  ‘Are you coming with me to see the king?’ Will asked, lifting the cat off. But a miaow in the tiniest of voices was the only response he got. Once put down, Pangur Ban would not be picked up again and he would not follow. Whatever his message was Will could not grasp it.

  A single servant showed Will to a guarded door. Hal sat in a shaft of light cast from a narrow window as he worked alone in his stone-cold cell. Yet he seemed content enough at his little desk, quill dipping and scratching, dipping and scratching. It was common knowledge that the king sat like this for hours at a time, seeing no one.

  Will waited until the figure, who was wrapped up in a long black coat and black cap, eventually looked to him.

  ‘Your grace asked to see me.’

  ‘Ah…’

  The quality of the king’s grace was unlike that of other men’s. Will was instantly aware of it, just as he had been on their only other meeting. Something inside him seemed to resonate with an aura of royalty, and Will suddenly knew why the common people loved Hal as a sacred figure. Despite his grandfather’s terrible crime, he had become their king. It was as the rede said: ‘It taketh three generations for great events to repair themselves.’ And now that time was up it was almost as if the usurpation had never been. Almost…

  ‘Approach us closely,’ the king said. ‘Ah, now we remember you.’

  ‘Your grace.’ Will stepped up to the desk and saw that it was strewn with ancient documents, dozens of cracking parchments all annotated in the king’s regular, formal hand.

  ‘We should apologize for the sparse surroundings in which we are obliged to receive you, but the Ebors are a large family and they are presently occupying the greater part of our palace.’ He gave a smile as pale as the winter sun. ‘They have asked poor Hal to make do with a small apartment, and he has consented, for he can do no other.’

  It was odd, in private, to hear a man refer to himself as if he was more than one person, and even odder to hear him speak as if he was someone else. Will had expected Hal to take easily to captivity, for he had been a prisoner of one kind or another all his life, yet somehow, despite it all, he still retained the personal dignity of a monarch.

  ‘Your grace,’ Will offered, ‘I can make it my business to speak with the duke, so that if you are uncomfortable…’

  Again there came that penetrating look from eyes that were as dark and liquid as an old dog’s. ‘You are kind. But we do not take our lodgings amiss. This is as much as we have ever been accustomed to. And if now we might enjoy a life of quiet study and the freedom of the palace cellars, then so much the better.’

  Will reminded himself that Hal’s best received acts of kingship had been the endowing of schools and other places of learning, and that the cellars that ran beneath the White Hall were where the record rolls were kept. These ancient documents were the king’s only delight.

  Will waited respectfully for the king to speak again, but saw Hal’s eyes flicker to the guard who waited at the door. Will turned suddenly and danced with a nimble step, so that even before the guard had shifted his weight from his halberd he had been struck on the forehead by the weight of Will’s spellcast.

  ‘Sleep!’

  The guard’s expression of surprise changed to one of bliss, and he slid slowly down to the floor.

  Will looked at the man mistrustfully and muttered to the king, ‘Your grace, I have a strong dislike of spies and eavesdroppers.’

  Hal took the magic in his stride. ‘So I see. But that was well done, perhaps, for we have asked you here to discuss our predicament.’

  Will’s fears grew. ‘Did you say predicament, your grace? Then would it not be more fitting for you to discuss it with Master Gwydion, whose skill in difficult matters is very much greater than my own?’

  ‘We think not. If we wished to speak with Master Gwydion we could have asked for him by name. This time we are minded to go another way, for we think that a lad such as you came to our aid once before and may do so again.’

  ‘Your grace speaks in riddles.’

  ‘Do you not recall what you once did for us? It was after the battle in our good town of Verlamion.’ The king’s inky hands began to knead one another, revealing something of the anxiety he had been keeping in. ‘Had Lord Warrewyk’s men found poor Hal’s hiding place, then he would not be speaking to you today. Will you help us in our plight?’

  Will knew he was being gently – but expertly – drawn into a position that would put him in conflict with Gwydion, and he wondered how to refuse without giving offence. ‘I’m no advisor of kings, your grace.’

  The king’s unblinking eyes looked through him. ‘Then you must advise us in a personal capacity, man to man.’

  Will felt a distracting pressure along his left side, a glow where the sleep spell had broken back against him too weakly. Something was amiss.

  He took the king’s quill knife and stepped over to the felled guard. ‘But first, what’s to be done with Sleeping Beauty here?’ He lifted the man up by the buckle straps of his jerkin, and felt a weight that seemed deliberately limp. ‘Now, if he was awake and listening then all I’d have to do would be to kick his behind and send him away for his impudence. But since I’ve laid him down with a spell, I’ll have to test that he’s truly asleep. Look away, your grace – I’m going to cut off one of his ears. If he wakes then I shall have to take his tongue also.’

  The moment Will took hold of the man’s head he opened his eyes and tried to struggle to his feet. ‘Get your bloody hands off of me!’

  ‘Fortunately for you, they’re not bloody yet.’ Will cuffed him down and tore open his shirt. ‘Oh! And what do we have here?’

  The soldier tried to grab the medallion back. ‘That’s mine!’

  But Will had the man by the throat and the medallion by its leather thong. He cut it away and then
examined it. It was a disc of pewter with a hole in it. It dripped with cheap magic, and not only cheap magic but a crude specific against his own sleep spell.

  ‘A nasty little amulet, this! And come very recently from the Spire if I’m not mistaken. Who gave it to you?’

  ‘It’s my own business where I got it!’

  ‘Oh, you’re a very bad spy.’ He cast a leonine look at the guard that burst off the remains of his bluster. ‘By the moon and stars, word gets around quickly in this warren! Is there nothing that happens here that the red hands don’t instantly get to hear about?’

  It was a monstrous question. The guard gasped and gritted his teeth in fear but still tried to give nothing away. A blue gleam grew on the tip of the knife in Will’s hand, grew into a pentacle, then burst. He let the man go, got up and hardened his eyes at him. ‘Does the duke know about you reporting to other masters? Well? Does he?’

  ‘I…’

  Will stepped dangerously, feigned indecision. ‘What will the duke order done with you when I tell him?’

  ‘No! Please…’

  ‘Perhaps it would be a mercy if I turned the air in these lungs—’ He splayed his fingers and stabbed them, serpent-like at the man’s chest’—to glass!’

  ‘Nnnng!’ The guard stiffened, his eyes bulged as he clawed at his throat, suddenly terrified that he could no longer draw breath.

  ‘There’s fresh air outside,’ Will told him. ‘Go and get it! Run for your life! Run, before you turn blue!’

  As the man fled, Will closed the door and reached up to bolt it. But then he laughed a despairing laugh that was soon replaced by a weary shake of the head – the door bolt was no longer there to be shot. It seemed a gross pettiness that it had been removed, and he pitied the king the loss of this little piece of privacy.

  He tossed the pewter token onto the desk, seeing that perhaps the king had read his laugh wrongly. ‘I apologize for frightening the man, your grace, but he deserved it. This palace is awash with intrigue, and if you have something to say to me it’ll be better said in privacy.’