The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three. Jan Siegel

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СКАЧАТЬ off under a drizzling sky with the she-wolf at his heels, and Bartlemy returned to the sanctum of his living room, looking more troubled than he had done in a long, long while.

      Another visitor came to Thornyhill Manor that week, but he came to the back door and would have been seen by no one, unless they had weresight. He was barely four feet high and bristled with tufts of hair and beard, sprouting in all directions as if the designer of his physiognomy had never quite sorted out which was which. His clothing was equally haphazard, rags of leather, Hessian, oilcloth tacked together more or less at random, covering his anatomy but unable to produce a recognisable garment. But the most noticeable thing about him was his smell – the stale, indescribable smell of someone who has slept in a foxhole for a hundred years and thinks bathing is bad for your health.

      Bartlemy seemed oblivious to it. He made food for his guest, rather strange food, with ingredients from a jar that sat on an obscure little shelf in the corner of the kitchen all by itself. His cooking gave off the usual aroma of herbs and spices and general deliciousness, but Hoover sniffed suspiciously at a morsel that fell to the floor, and let it lie. While his guest was eating Bartlemy poured two tankards of something home-brewed and flavoured with honey and sat back, waiting with his customary patience.

      The dwarf made appreciative noises as he cleared his plate.

      ‘Ye can chafe up a mean dishy o’ fatworms,’ he remarked in an accent whose origins were lost in the mists of time, ‘e’en though they were no fresh. Howsomedever …’

      ‘You didn’t come to talk of cooking, I imagine,’ Bartlemy supplied.

      ‘Nay. Nay, I didna, but there’s no saying I wouldna rather talk o’ food and drink and the guid things in life, instead o’ the dark time to come. Ye’ll be knowing it, I daresay. Ye’re one who would read the signs and listen to the whisperings. The Magister, he used to say to me: There’ll be one day, one hour – one hour o’ magic and destiny – one hour to change the world. I didna care for that, ye ken. The world changes, all the time, but slow, slow. What kind o’ change can ye be having in a wee hour? It canna be anything guid, not to be coming that quick. Aye, and the Magister’s face would light when he spoke of it, wi’ the light o’ greed and madness, though he were niver mad. He didna have that excuse.’

      Some time in the Dark Ages the dwarf had worked for Josevius Grimthorn, scion of the ancient Thorn family – once owners of Thornyhill – and a sorcerer rumoured to have sold his soul to the devil. What he had gained from the transaction no one knew, but he was said to have lived nearly seven hundred years and died in a fire in his own satanic chapel, leaving the Grimthorn Grail to the guardianship of his descendants. That guardianship, like the manor, had passed to Bartlemy. The dwarf had fallen out with his master and been imprisoned for centuries in a subterranean chamber in the Darkwood, until Nathan and Hazel inadvertently released him. The lingering dread of his old master’s activities still remained with him.

      His name, when he remembered it, was Login Nambrok.

      ‘Did he tell you exactly when this hour is due?’ Bartlemy asked.

      The dwarf heaved his shoulders in a shrug bigger than his whole body. ‘He said I would feel it,’ he offered, ‘i’ the marrow o’ my bones. I’m no siccar there’s much marrow left – my bones are auld and dry – but there’s an ache in me like a warning o’ foul weather to come. And there are other signs than my auld bones. The sma’ creatures i’ the wood, they’re leaving – aye, or scurrying round and round like they dinna ken where to go. And there’s birds flying south wi’ tidings o’ darkness in the north, and birds flying north wi’ rumours o’ trouble in the south, and so it goes on. There’s times I think the wind itself has a voice, and it’s whispering among the leaves, but mebbe that’s a’ fancy. And there’s them – the invisible ones – they’d gather down by the chapel ruin, under the leaves, muttering together in the auld tongue, though I doot they understood the words – muttering and muttering the charms that magicked them. But lately …’ He broke off with something like a shudder.

      Bartlemy looked a question.

      ‘There was a hare I’d been following,’ Nambrok said. ‘I’d fancied him for my dinner, and I’d been stalking him a while, quiet as a tree spider, and he went that way. They saw him. Time was, they wouldn’t have troubled any beast, but they saw him and chased him, down the valley and up the valley, chased him till he couldna run further, and then they were on him and crowding in his head, and now the puir creature is madder ‘n March, and bites his own kind, and snarls like a dog when ye come near him. That’s no honest end for a beastie. And ye canna eat a creature that’s been so enspelled. There’ve been others, too … and one day it’ll be man, not beast. It’ll be some chiel walking in the woods, or a dog that sets on his master. There’s no reason to it – nothing to guard – no threat – but …’

      ‘They’re out of control,’ Bartlemy concluded. And he repeated, more to himself than his companion: ‘The old spells are unravelling. Things are beginning to fall apart …’

      ‘Aye,’ said the dwarf, ‘and there’s little ye can be doing aboot it, or so I’m thinking.’

      ‘Maybe,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But we can try.’

      Above Nathan’s house a single star shone. The night was misty and the sky obscured, but that one star shone brightly, a steady pinpoint of light looking down on the bookshop, while Nathan sat on the edge of the rooflight, looking up. When the dreams were most intense – when half his life seemed to happen in worlds whose reality was still unproven – he would climb up to the roof and gaze at the star, and that kept him sane. Winter and summer, its position never altered. It had been there now for two years and more, a star that did not twinkle or move along the set pathways of the heavens – a star that could not be seen beyond the borders of Ede – fixed in its place like a lamp to guide him home. His star.

      He went to bed, reaching in his mind for the portal that would once more let him through, and dreamed of the star.

      It hung in a chamber of darkness at the top of a tower a mile high. Light streamed outwards from its heart but seemed to go nowhere and illuminate nothing, absorbed into the gloom around it. Other stars were suspended round the periphery of the room, pale globes emitting a similar radiance, but it was his star at the centre, turning slowly on its own axis, a crystalline eye of intercosmic space. A lens on another world. Here, his world was the otherworld, the alien country. This was Arkatron on Eos, a city at the end of Time. In this room with no visible walls or floor a ruler thousands of years old – a ruler who had held a whole universe under his sway – gazed beyond the Gate to find a refuge for the last of his people, a way of escape from the Contamination that had eaten the numberless galaxies of his realm. By day, his subjects went robed and masked against the poisonous sun; by night, they slept uneasily, anticipating the End. But in this chamber it was always night. Nathan’s thought floated in the darkness, waiting. Presently, the Grandir came.

      If he had a name, no one knew it. Other Grandirs had come and gone, leaving their names behind them, but he was last, and nameless. In a universe with a high level of magic, to know someone’s name is to have power over him: the power of summons, even of Command, if the summoner is strong enough. Like knowing the Prime Minister’s mobile number, Nathan reflected, smiling to himself in thought. I bet he doesn’t give that to just anybody. But the Grandir didn’t tell his name even to his nearest and dearest – if he had them – not even to his bridesister Halmé, Halmé the childless, whose beauty was a legend among her people, though few had ever looked on her face. She went unmasked only in private chambers, for the eyes of a privileged few. As for the Grandir, Nathan had seen his face naked just once, in a dream that plucked him from danger, and the memory of it still made him shiver, though СКАЧАТЬ