The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three

‘And then you can tell me why you disobeyed my orders, and went into the Darkwood.’

The following morning Bartlemy went to check on the cage. He had used his influence to steer dogwalkers – and their dogs – away from the place, and he saw immediately that it had not been disturbed. But the occupants were gone. He walked long and far that day, watching and listening, but there was no feel of them anywhere in the wood.

At last he came to the chapel on the slopes of the valley, though he had never found it before. The dwarf was there waiting.

‘They’re gone,’ he said. ‘Would ye be wanting to look inside? I’m thinking you’re a mickle too broad to be crawling into ratholes.’

‘And I’m thinking,’ Bartlemy said, ‘you’re a mickle too bold, leading a young girl into danger. I’d permitted her to take a little risk; I hadn’t intended it to be a big one. Or was that your idea of help?’

‘I didna suggest it,’ Login said. ‘She was the one who were so set on it. I warned her you wouldna be any too keen, but she—’

‘Warnings like that seldom deter teenagers,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Between Josevius and me, you’ve spent too much time with very old men. The young are more reckless, and more – perishable. Rose-white youth, passionate, pale.’

‘That maidy o’ yourn,’ Login said, ‘isn’t the sort I’d be comparing to roses, white or red. Too many thorns.’

‘It depends on the rose,’ Bartlemy said.

Nathan spent Saturday with his friend George Fawn, playing games on his PS2 (George’s brother David, had Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas), talking about music and television and school, and hearing how Jason Wicks, the village tough guy, had stolen his cousin’s motorbike to go joy-riding over the fields, been charged by Farmer Dawson’s bull, and fallen off into a bog.

‘There aren’t any bogs,’ Nathan quibbled.

‘Well, it was like a bog,’ George said. ‘A big patch of mud. Very muddy mud. A bog sounds better, though.’

‘Mm. I bet he got filthy.’

‘He looked like the swamp-monster. It was wicked. Mike Rayburn saw him, he said he couldn’t stop laughing. Libby was there – Jace fancies her, so he couldn’t do anything, and he was, like, seriously embarrassed. It was the best thing ever.’

‘I wish I’d been there,’ Nathan said.

‘You must be as tall as him now,’ George remarked. ‘Maybe taller.’

Nathan grinned. ‘You make me sound like a freak.’

‘No way. Girls like tall.’ George was on the short side. ‘I bet you could have lots of girls.’

‘Not much chance of that at Ffylde.’

‘No, but – here. There’s Hazel – she likes you. She’s not the prettiest girl in town, exactly – her tits are too small, for one thing – but she’s a girl, isn’t she? And you like her …’

‘Hazel is Hazel,’ Nathan said sharply. ‘She’s my best friend – only that – and don’t you ever, ever sneer at her again.’

‘I wasn’t sn—’

‘EVER!’

George subsided, mumbling an apology, and they changed the subject for the rest of the afternoon.

That night, Nathan was back in the dream. Not the same dream – the wonder of flying with the albatross, sharing his feelings and his fears – but a dream of the dark. He was falling through a hole in the world – through the faint lights and faraway stars of another universe – falling into a narrowing chimney of blackness, far beyond the reach of sun or supernova. He remembered the prison pits of Arkatron where he had once met Kwanji Ley – but there was light there, the soft unchanging light of Deep Confinement. And then he struck the bottom, thrown into his own body with a jarring sensation like a blow, and he saw the darkness was less dark, and there was a door in front of him which he had seen before. A door marked Danger.

It wasn’t locked – it never had been – though surely such a door should have been secured with secret codes, retinal scans, digital palm-print readers. Nathan pushed it ajar – cautiously, he was always cautious in that place – and slipped through. Inside, there was a strange mixture of low lighting and high technology. There were the benches stacked with scientific paraphernalia, with snarls of tubing like glass intestines, and pulsating metallic sacks, and cylinders glowing eerily at top or base, and jars where deformed things floated in preserving fluid, hopefully dead, and hunks of ominous machinery, glistening in the dimness.

And let into the walls were the cages, the cages that made Nathan both frightened and sad, mostly empty, but not all. In one a snake reared up, striking at the glass; globules of pale mauve venom spattered the surface and ran down in snail-tracks which smoked wispily. In another, there were what appeared to be giant locusts, until Nathan looked more closely and saw they had human faces and forelimbs ending in tiny hands. And in a third there was the familiar cat, stiff and dead with its paws in the air, and yet, from a different angle, somehow alive, tail twitching, watching Nathan through slitted eyes.

It was the Grandir’s laboratory, deep underground, the laboratory where he had bred the gnomons to protect the Grail, and imprisoned a primitive elemental, potent and savage, in the Traitor’s Sword. And there he was, leaning over a separate cage at the far end, accompanied by a man wearing a purple cowl. Nathan recognised the cowl if not the man; it might have been a symbol of office.

He thought: Am I in the past – the past of Eos? Is the Grandir doing something to the Iron Crown – magicking some awful spirit into it, like he did with the Sword?

There was a noise in the background which hadn’t been there before, a sort of faint cacophony, remote but persistent, as if a group of people with acute laryngitis were screaming in agony. It seemed to Nathan to be a long way off yet at the same time inside his head. He didn’t like it at all – it was too familiar – but he ducked under a bench and crept nearer, bent double, trying to hear what the two men were saying. He might have shown himself to the Grandir but not in front of Purple Cowl; instinct told him that would be a mistake.

‘It must be a smell,’ the Grandir said. ‘Nothing else would cause so much pain. Iron repels but does not torture them.’

‘What will you do?’ asked the other. ‘They should be killed. Some things are too deadly to be allowed to live.’

‘They are what they are,’ said the Grandir, sounding, had Nathan but known it, a little like Bartlemy. ‘They have served their purpose. I will call them back.’

‘But can you—’

‘They are bound to my edict, to my very thought. I can call them, even across the worlds. They ozmose.’

He straightened, raising his head, speaking a few words in the universal language of magic – a language Nathan could recognise but not understand. Purple Cowl drew back, perhaps afraid of fallout, but the words, though commanding, were quiet, creating scarcely a ripple in the atmosphere. Nathan thought the summons was as insistent as a tug on a noose, as compelling as hypnosis, but almost gentle, almost kind. As if the Grandir were saying: ‘Come home. Come home to me.’

And they came. There was no lightning flash, no crackling rent in the dimensions. They were simply there