Nathan Ward dreamed of the city, as he had dreamed of other cities long before. Most people dream of other worlds, dreamworlds parallel to our own yet subtly different, where strange things are familiar and familiar things strange – the spin-off regions of the subconscious mind. But the worlds in Nathan’s dreams were real, or seemed real, depending on the nature of reality. He went to the kind of school where teachers talked about philosophy and quantum physics, so he knew the chair he was sitting on was provably nonexistent, and the entire cosmos was made up of particles too small to believe in, popping in and out of reality whenever scientists studied them too closely. (Sneaky things, particles.) Nonetheless, Nathan was a down-to-earth boy who had yet to find a magical country at the back of a wardrobe, so it was unnerving to find one in his own head. The previous summer he had almost got lost in such a dream, and had been unable to make his way back without help.

Sometimes on these journeys he was merely a disembodied thought; at others, as the dream grew more solid so did he, while his sleeping form would fade, even vanish altogether. He was a weekly boarder at Ffylde Abbey, sharing a dormitory with other boys, and a tendency to dematerialize in the night didn’t always pass unremarked. Particles can get away with such behaviour more easily than teenage boys. At home his mother, his best friend, and the man he called uncle all knew of the problem, so there was no need to try and explain the inexplicable, but there were moments when he still felt unsafe. As if there was a hole inside his head through which his life and his very self might slip away. Dreams can too easily become nightmares, and when your dreams are real, the nightmares have teeth …

The strange thing was, when he dreamed of the city, he knew it wasn’t the first time, though the earlier times were all but forgotten, immured in a locked cupboard at the back of his memory. The dream gave him a feel he couldn’t mistake, like when you return to a place visited in early childhood. There’s nothing you recognize, yet you know you’ve been there before.

There had been a city in his dreams many times in the past, the city of Arkatron on Eos – a city at the end of time, last stronghold of a high-tech, high-magic civilization in a universe that was dying. It had been a futuristic metropolis of soaring sky-towers and airborne vehicles that wheeled and dipped around them like giant birds, and a population mantled and masked and gloved against the poisonous sunlight – a science fiction city with a ruler called the Grandir – a ruler thousands of years old, whose face was never seen and whose true name was never spoken – a ruler who had once had a whole cosmos for his empire.

But this city was different. (In his mind, he called it a city, giving it the benefit of the doubt, though quite possibly it was only a town.) It sprawled over two hills, the higher rising into a bastion of rock with a grey-walled house perched on the top, built of the same stone and blending with it, so you couldn’t tell where the crag ended and the house began. The lower hill was a hump-backed ridge crested with pointy gables and spiked with chimney stacks, but only one or two emitted a thin spindrift of smoke, and as his vision drew nearer Nathan saw windows without panes, doors ajar on empty halls, new grass growing over untrodden roads. It was a ghost town – or ghost city – except there seemed to be no ghosts left, only endless vacancy. There weren’t even any birds.

In Arkatron, focus of a universe that was ending, the city thrived after a fashion, crawling with people and lights and life, yet here, though the universe showed no signs of imminent demise, the city was dead. A Marie-Celeste of a city, whose footsteps had barely faded and whose voices might have been stilled only a little while ago. It reminded Nathan of towns pictured in history books, the outer houses made of mud bricks and rickety timbers, with shaggy thatching on the roofs, the inner of stone and tile. The hilltop house was the largest, poised in the eye of the wind, weatherbeaten and grim, sprouting irrelevant battlements and tiny turrets as if it were trying to become a castle, though no one would be fooled. It had neither moat nor portcullis, and on one side a steep little garden sloped down to wall and road. As Nathan’s thought winged earthwards he saw four children were playing there.

They might have been the only children – perhaps the only people – in the whole city. Three boys and a girl. The boys were fighting with wooden swords, banging their weapons on toy shields, shouting incomprehensible war cries. The girl was making mud pies. She looked about seven or eight years old and wore an expression of extreme concentration half hidden under the tangle of her hair. She reminded him a little of Hazel, his best friend, who often hid behind her hair, but whereas Hazel’s was brown and straight this child’s was blonde, dark blonde like wheat, and the tangle was rippled and crinkled into untidy waves. One of the boys came over, evidently to check on her, and she looked up with a sudden sweet smile which made Nathan think that when she was older, though she might not be pretty or beautiful, her smile would always win her friends. As in other dreams he could understand what the children said, though he realized afterwards that the language they spoke wasn’t English.

‘Let me play with you,’ the girl said. ‘I can fight too.’

‘Swords aren’t for girls,’ the boy retorted. ‘You might get hurt.’

‘Have one of my pies, then.’ The smile disappeared; her face closed.

‘I don’t eat mud and sand,’ the boy said, half teasing, half scornful.

‘’Tisn’t mud and sand,’ said the girl. ‘It’s chocolate.’

‘’Tisn’t chocolate, stupid.’

‘’Tis so.’

The boy opened his mouth to go on arguing, and then was suddenly quiet. Nathan found his gaze fixed on the mud pie, which was round and carefully moulded, and thought it did indeed look a lot like chocolate. There were even little flakes around the rim, like decoration …

‘Chocolate,’ said the girl with satisfaction.

A shadow swept over the scene, the advancing edge of a stormcloud. The boys ceased their game, staring upwards. A door opened at the top of the garden and a woman in a linen headdress leaned out, calling to the children to come in. There was a note of urgency or fear in her voice. The boy who had been quarrelling with the girl seized her wrist and pulled her towards the shelter of the doorway, though she seemed reluctant to go with him. A winged darkness swooped low over the city, swift as a sudden squall; on the slope a stunted tree twisted with the wind. There was a noise which might have been thunder or the booming of immense pinions. Whether the shadow was cloud or creature Nathan couldn’t tell, but he felt the icy chill of its advent, and the wind that tried to tear the tree from its roots whirled his thought away, out of the city, out of the dream, into the gentle oblivion of sleep.

When he awoke he was in his own world, and the dream seemed very far away. Nonetheless, he thought about it, from time to time, all that day, and the next. It was the Easter holidays, and he was going to be fourteen, and he had to decide what he wanted, by way of a birthday treat. ‘I want things to happen,’ he said to himself, both hopeful and afraid, for things had happened to him the previous year, to him and to others – things both exciting and terrifying – and he knew that wishing for trouble is one way of inviting it in.

He said the same thing that evening, when his uncle (who wasn’t really his uncle) came to supper.

‘You sound like a child in a story,’ said his mother, ‘wishing for adventures. After last summer, you should know better. There may have been a kind of happy ending for you, but not for others. People died.’

‘Of course I don’t want anyone to die,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s only a little wish. For my birthday.’

‘When you’re older,’ Uncle Barty said, ‘you’ll learn that things happen without your wishing for them, all the time. You may even wish for peace and quiet one day. But you probably won’t get it.’

Nathan said no more, quelled by the phrase When you’re older, because he knew his uncle was older than anyone, and had seen more things happen than Nathan would ever dare to wish for. Bartlemy Goodman had the Gift, a strange legacy which gave him not only long life but other powers beyond the norm, powers which might have made him a sorcerer or a magus, though he appeared to use his abilities mostly for ordinary things, like cooking, and brewing home-made liquor, and herbal medicines. He didn’t look at all sorcerous: true wizards should be lean and cadaverous, hook-nosed and long-bearded, but Bartlemy was fat and placid and clean-shaven, with a broad pink face, fair hair turned white with age, and mild blue eyes gazing tolerantly at the world. But Nathan had seen beneath the surface, though only a little way, and he never doubted his uncle’s reliability, or his wisdom.

It was about a week later when he dreamed of the city again. It was just a brief glimpse of people piling bags and bundles into a cart, and the reins shaken, and the plodding hooves of a horse moving ponderously away. The girl was standing there – she was older now, almost his own age, but he knew her by her hair and the smile that gradually faded as she ceased waving and her hand fell to her side. The cart lumbered down the road and out of the city, heading along a sort of causeway across a low-lying country broken into many pools and water-channels which mirrored the grey pallor of the sky. Without her smile the girl’s face looked grave and somehow resigned, as if she had seen many such departures. She turned and began to walk back up the road, until it narrowed into a steep path coiling about the hill, and then eventually became steps that climbed the last ascent to the house on the crag.

‘This is her home,’ Nathan thought, suddenly sure. ‘Those boys were just visiting. She’s the daughter of the lord or king or whoever it is rules this place.’

Her dress was patched with darns and her long hair looked as if it hadn’t been brushed for a day or more but there was something about her, the gravity that touched a face which might have been merry, a hint of resolution or confidence, the assurance of a princess. A princess without crown or ermine, with no visible attendants and few remaining subjects, but a princess nonetheless.

When she reached the huge main door she opened it herself, without the aid of butler or footman. It must have been heavy since it took a strong thrust to move it. It creaked suitably, as such doors should, closing behind her with a reverberating thud as she went inside.

Nathan’s dream followed her – into a hall that seemed to be hung with shadows, up stairs that branched and zig-zagged, along passageways and galleries with cold echoing floors and walls where threadbare tapestries flapped like cobwebs. At last she entered a room that was thick with books – books close-packed on regular shelves or piled in winding stacks or slithering earthwards like rows of collapsed dominoes. Nathan was reminded a little of the second-hand bookshop which his mother managed and where they lived, though this room was larger than his whole house, with a vaulted ceiling from the centre of which depended an iron chandelier festooned with dribbles of old wax, above a desk where an elderly man was bent over an opened volume, trying to read it with a magnifying glass. A window squeezed between two banks of shelving admitted a shaft of daylight which stretched towards the desk, picking out more books, and dust, and the man’s hair which stood up around his head like a dandelion clock. Long strands of tallow trailed from the chandelier like stalagmites in a cave.

‘Frim,’ said the girl – the man looked up – ‘the Hollyhawks have gone today, and old Mother Sparrowgrass and her boys. They wouldn’t have told me, but I went to take them a cake, and there they were, all packed up and the cart rolling.’

‘Deserters!’ said the old man. ‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do? I wished them luck.’

‘They deserve no luck,’ said the old man. ‘Running away. Bumskittles! They are your people.’

‘They are their own people,’ said the girl. ‘What have I ever done for them?’

‘Your best.’ He reached out, squeezing her hand in his own thin, bony one, then patting it. He had a strange knobbly face with startled eyebrows, round inquiring eyes and a long nose that turned up at the tip. For all his age he had a quality of youthfulness which, Nathan reflected, few young people ever exhibited – he seemed vividly alive, curious, alert, exuding enough energy for a small mobile generator. ‘Never mind,’ he went on. ‘The loyal and the true-hearted remain.’

‘Only because they have no choice. Bandy Crow is a cripple; Granny Cleep passed a hundred and twenty last year. The Twymoors and the Yngleveres …’

‘They’ll not leave,’ the old man said. ‘They’ve always been faithful to your family. They won’t abandon your father.’

‘My father’s sick,’ said the girl, ‘and growing sicker. I sometimes think the kingdom’s been under a curse since my great-great-I-don’t-know-how-many-greats grandfather first lifted the Traitor’s Sword. And since I brought the Urdemons …’

‘Don’t be silly,’ her mentor admonished. ‘You didn’t bring them. They are drawn to acts of magic –’

‘My magic.’

‘You were a child, playing games of illusion. There’s always been a little magic in your family; as magic goes, it’s fairly harmless. You had no idea –’

‘It’s still my fault,’ the princess insisted, brooding into her hair. (Like Hazel.)

‘Babbletosh!’ the old man said briskly. ‘You take too much on yourself. Just because you’re the princess, you think you can claim responsibility for everything? I never heard of such presumption. You’re like a little girl who treads in a puddle, and then blames herself for a flood. Utter foolishness! Isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said with a furtive smile. ‘Sorry. It’s only … Prenders told me …’

‘That Woman,’ her mentor said with unmistakable capital letters, ‘talks a load of –’

‘Frim!’

‘Squiffle-piffle! That’s all I was going to say. Doesn’t know her coccyx from her humerus. Why, when everyone else leaves, she has to stay around …’

‘She loves me,’ the princess said gently. ‘And Papa.’

‘Overrated, love. People use it as an excuse for anything.’ Absently, he stroked her hand again. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find a cure for the king – and then, so they say, the kingdom will be healed. Somewhere there’ll be a formula – the recipe for a potion …’

‘Then light the lamp,’ said the girl, indicating an oil lamp on the desk, ‘or you’ll miss it.’ She removed the glass chimney, struck a match and held the flame to the wick. The sudden glow flushed her cheek and spun a shimmer of gold from her hair. As the dream faded Nathan tried to fix the image in his mind, wanting to remember exactly how she looked, but of course, when he awoke, he couldn’t.

It was deep night. He got out of bed and climbed up to the Den, his childhood retreat under the pitch of the roof. Through the skylight he saw a single star look down, watching him. But he knew it wasn’t a star: it was a spy-crystal through which, in an alternative universe, the faceless ruler of Eos could survey anything in its range. Sometimes, when the world was ordinary, that knowledge seemed like a brief glimpse into madness, but not now, not tonight.

‘Things are happening,’ he thought, with a complicated shiver, reaching back into the dream. Something had been said, something significant – something which struck a faint chord of familiarity – but he was too busy trying to re-create the face of the princess, and he couldn’t remember what it was.

ONE Parents and Children

Bartlemy Goodman was home the night the burglars came. He usually was at home. For a man who had seen so much, and done so much, he now led a very tranquil life, or so it appeared, visiting the village of Eade mainly to see Annie Ward, who was widely thought to be his niece, and rarely venturing beyond Crowford. He was known to own the bookshop where Annie and her son lodged, and believed to be a collector, though no one was quite sure of what. The villagers accepted his unspecified eccentricities, and respected him for no particular reason, except that he appeared worthy of respect. It was a part of his Gift that he could pass almost unremarked in the local community, giving rise to no gossip, awakening no curiosity, though he had lived at Thornyhill, the old house out in the woods, since the original Thorns had sold up and all but died out generations before. Without really thinking about it, people assumed that the house had been bought by Bartlemy’s grandfather, or some other elderly relative, and had passed on from Goodman to Goodman until it reached the present incumbent. They never wondered why each successive owner should look the same, or remain apparently the same age, around sixty; indeed, had anyone been asked, they would have sworn to little differences between the Bartlemys, to periods of absence following the death of one when another must have been growing up somewhere abroad. Nor did they ever wonder about the dog.

Every Goodman had had a dog, a large shaggy creature of mixed parentage and universal goodwill, with bright, intelligent eyes under whiskery eyebrows, and a lolling tongue. This one was called Hoover, because he devoured crumbs, and indeed anything else that came his way. The most wonderful cooking smells in the world would foregather in Bartlemy’s kitchen, and the generosity of the leftovers made it canine heaven. Hoover had no reputation for savagery, welcoming every visitor, even the postman, with amiable enthusiasm, yet perhaps because of him the house had never been burgled before, except for the strange incident the previous year, and in that case the stolen object (which had belonged to someone else) had eventually been returned by Bartlemy himself, though no one knew how he retrieved it. The house was isolated, unprotected by alarms or security, and with the vague rumours that Bartlemy ‘collected’ it should have been an obvious target, yet until that night in late April the criminal fraternity had left it alone.

The burglars were two youths, as the newspapers would have called them, an Asian boy from Crowford who was only seventeen, and his sixteen-year-old sidekick, who was big and ginger-haired and not very bright. Getting in was easy: they broke a window, which was stupid, because the back door wasn’t locked, and were just checking out the sitting room when the dog pounced. He didn’t bark: it would’ve meant wasting time. Bartlemy came downstairs, wrapped in an enormous dark-blue dressing-gown with stars on it, to find the ginger-haired sidekick shivering in a corner while the other boy lay on his back with Hoover standing over him. He wasn’t growling – he never growled – but the boy could see, behind the panting tongue and doggy grin, two rows of large yellow teeth which wouldn’t have looked out-of-place on a wolf. There was a knife lying on the rug a little way away. Bartlemy picked it up by the blade. Afterwards, the boy puzzled over how the house owner had known to come down, when neither the intruders nor the dog had made much noise.

‘This is – this is assault,’ the youth stammered, keeping his voice to a whisper. ‘I can sue.’

‘I haven’t assaulted you,’ Bartlemy pointed out in his placid way.

‘The dog –’

‘He hasn’t assaulted you either.’ Yet, said the ensuing pause.

‘We didn’t mean no harm,’ offered Ginger, between sullenness and fright.

‘I’m sure you didn’t. I’ll telephone the police, and then you can sit down with me, and have a biscuit, and while we wait you can tell me what you did mean.’

The call was made, and somehow the boys didn’t argue, perching nervously on the edge of Bartlemy’s sofa and nibbling home-made biscuits while Hoover stood by, watching them in a proprietary manner. Ginger was known for beating up older boys, and the little Asian made up in aggression what he lacked in size, but they sat as quiet as if they were at a vicarage tea-party, and God was waiting with a thunderbolt for one of them to burp.

‘Someone sent you here, didn’t they?’ said Bartlemy. ‘What were you looking for?’

Mouths opened and shut, and Ginger choked on a biscuit crumb, but this time it was Ram who looked most afraid.

‘No one sent us,’ he said at last.

‘It was your own idea?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. I’m the one with the ideas.’

‘Do you think it was a good idea?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure no one sent you?’ Bartlemy persisted.

Ram turned pale, and his mouth closed tight, and he looked almost relieved when the police arrived. He knew just how not to talk to the police. He’d sat through many interrogations, he was still underage, and insofar as it concerned himself he knew the law as well as any solicitor. But this man with his unruffled manner, and his alarming dog, and his calm blue gaze that seemed to see straight into your mind – this was something far more demoralizing than any bullying copper. Ram had a horrible feeling that given time – and a few more biscuits – he would have been telling Bartlemy things even his mother didn’t know. He was secretly thankful to settle for the more familiar option.

Watching them go with a sigh, Bartlemy surmised that if they had been sent, Ginger, at least, knew nothing of it. He returned to bed, and in the half-hour before sleep considered possible lines of inquiry. A few days later, he telephoned an acquaintance in the CID.

Some months had passed since their last meeting, and Inspector Pobjoy had become Chief Inspector, helped by his recent arrest of a serial killer when most of his colleagues hadn’t believed any murders had actually taken place. Bartlemy had been involved in that affair, which had been vaguely connected to the former theft at Thornyhill, and Pobjoy still darkly suspected that he knew many facts which had never emerged. There had been too many loopholes in the case, too many loose ends. Not that Bartlemy had ever been a suspect, though perhaps he should have been, caught as he was in the middle of things. However, Pobjoy was curiously glad to hear from him, and intrigued at the news of the attempted burglary, and he agreed instantly to come to Thornyhill for a cup of tea and an informal chat.

‘You should lock your back door,’ he suggested when they met.

‘But if I did that,’ Bartlemy said, ‘people wouldn’t be able to get in.’ It was unanswerable. ‘Anyway, they broke a window. That’s the kind they were: crude, not very clever. The sort who would always break a window, if there was a window to break. I was rather surprised to find them so unsubtle. Kids like that usually give this place a miss. I would’ve expected any burglar who came here to be more … sophisticated.’

‘Apart from that business last summer,’ Pobjoy said – carefully, since he felt the subject required care – ‘I notice you haven’t really had any trouble here.’ He added: ‘I checked our records.’

‘Naturally,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I assumed you would. No, we haven’t had much trouble at Thornyhill. I prefer to avoid it, if I can.’ He didn’t say how, but Pobjoy, who was not a fanciful man, found himself wondering if the house had some intangible form of protection. Apart from the dog. He noted Bartlemy said ‘we’, perhaps including Hoover in the personal pronoun.

The canine hero of the recent burglary attempt was currently sitting with his chin in Pobjoy’s lap and the classic please-feed-the-starving expression on his face.

‘Which is why,’ Bartlemy was saying, ‘I was a little … disturbed by what happened. I can’t help feeling there must have been something – someone – behind it. On the surface, there is nothing to steal here but books, some old but unremarkable furniture, and my collection of herbs for cooking.’

‘The paintings?’ Pobjoy asked, glancing up at a landscape in oils which seemed to consist mostly of gloom and a framed drawing so crowded with detail it was almost impossible to distinguish what it portrayed.

‘Generally done by friends or acquaintances,’ Bartlemy said blandly. ‘That drawing, for instance, is unsigned. Richard wasn’t satisfied with it. Later, he went mad. People have sometimes been curious about my pictures, but their curiosity always seems to fade in the end.’

‘You said “on the surface”,’ Pobjoy resumed, his narrow eyes narrowing still further, dark slits in the lean pallor of his face.

‘I have a certain article concealed here,’ Bartlemy explained after a pause. ‘It was entrusted to me.’ He didn’t say I am telling you this in confidence. Pobjoy already knew that.

‘The article which was stolen last year,’ the inspector surmised. ‘The so-called Grimthorn Grail.’

‘Of course, it was never authenticated,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Technically, it’s valueless. But I am concerned. I have lived here a long time, and no one has ever broken in until now.’

‘Is it secure?’

Bartlemy smiled. ‘No burglar would ever find it, I assure you,’ he said. ‘No ordinary burglar.’

Pobjoy let that pass. ‘You think those boys were put up to it,’ he summarized, ‘by someone interested in the Grail.’

‘It’s a possibility I would like to check. You would know if there were any likely collectors in the market for such items.’

‘Those kind of gentlemen don’t usually have a record,’ Pobjoy said with a trace of bitterness. ‘Too rich, too influential. But – yes, I should know. I might know. I’ll ask around.’

‘Thank you.’ He poured more tea. ‘By the way, how is our murderer?’

‘What? Oh – I don’t know.’ Pobjoy looked startled. For him, once a villain was convicted and imprisoned, that should be the end of the matter. ‘We never found any trace of his accomplice – the woman who masqueraded as his wife.’

‘I suspect,’ Bartlemy said, ‘she wasn’t the kind of person who would allow herself to be traced.’ He was remembering a malignant water-spirit who had poured herself into the shape of a dead actress – a spirit now returned to the element from whence she came.

Pobjoy, who hated loose ends and didn’t believe in phantoms, fretted at the recollection. ‘Do you think she could be involved in this latest affair?’

‘Hmm … I doubt it. Still, it is an idea.’

As he drank his tea, Pobjoy seemed to become abstracted. Once, he asked: ‘How is … Mrs Ward?’, hesitating over the inquiry as if it embarrassed him.

‘She’s very well,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You should go and see her.’

‘I don’t think … she wouldn’t want …’ Pobjoy’s excuses faltered and failed; he looked around for a change of subject, but didn’t find one.

‘It’s up to you,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Annie doesn’t bear grudges.’

At one time, Pobjoy had wanted to arrest Nathan.

The inspector retreated into silence and stayed there, until Bartlemy began to talk of something else.

Nathan and Hazel Bagot had been friends from infancy, closer than brother and sister; they used to tell each other everything, but now they were getting older they needed their own secrets. Nathan didn’t tell Hazel about the city and the princess (not yet, he said to himself, not till it becomes important), and Hazel didn’t tell Nathan about the boy she was keen on at school. When they got together at the weekends and during the holidays, they talked about music and television and lessons, and feuds or allegiances with their classmates, and how parents never understood what it was like to be a teenager, because it must have been different for them. Hazel’s bedroom had evolved into a kind of nest, lined with prints and posters, cushioned with discarded clothing, floored with crisp packets and CDs, where she and Nathan could curl up and listen to her latest musical discovery – usually something twangy and foreign-sounding and faintly bizarre – while she related how her father, who had left last year, wasn’t allowed to come home any more because he’d tried to hit her mother again, and how her mother had a new boyfriend who was rather old and a bit dull but nice.

‘They met through an ad in the paper,’ Hazel said. ‘Lots of people do that now. Has your mum tried it?’

12 След.

The Traitor’s Sword: The Sangreal Trilogy Two

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IITHE TRAITOR’S SWORD

CONTENTS

BATTLE

PROLOGUE The Dead City

ONE Parents and Children

II
THE TRAITOR’S SWORD