Whitemantle (14 page)

‘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.’

T
he 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.’

‘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 of 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.