Neve was wearing the Gatemaker’s glove around her neck. She had threaded its thong through the plate armour of its fingers so that they sat against her throat like a throttling hand.
If Neve had the glove, that must mean they were being asked to go somewhere far away from Quarry House, far away from the bedroom and the bed.
Aeng and Neve spoke together briefly in their own tongue; he apparently proposing something she found offensive, she objecting, he standing his ground. Then Aeng looked at Jacob and said to Neve, in English, in a tone of mild censure, ‘But we must not exclude Jacob this way. After all, he’s been asked for too.’
Neve turned to Jacob. ‘If any of us is being monitored by demons, it’s Taryn Cornick. I have therefore been asked to go to the place she believes the Firestarter is hidden, to look for it, while she remains at some distance. Taryn has suggested you assist me, Jacob, because you will know how to speak appropriately to the locals.’
Jacob nodded.
‘If we find what we’re looking for, we will arrange a meeting with the demons and make a bargain. Exchange the Firestarter for what we want.’
‘Which is?’ Aeng said.
‘Better terms for the Tithe, of course. Fewer souls. More time between tributes.’
‘How strange to be considering a renegotiation of the Tithe when the full price has only just been paid,’ Aeng said. ‘Couldn’t you manage to be in time for the one just past? And, since you weren’t, why not wait longer to negotiate? We are a hundred years away from the next Tithe.’
‘It was poor timing,’ Neve said. ‘Only now do we have the opportunity to put our hands on the Firestarter. It’s an elusive object whose existence we only learned about while trying to discover why demons were trespassing in the Sidh. We need to act while the trail is fresh and find the thing before the demons do.’
Aeng seemed satisfied by this. Jacob thought Aeng might ask more questions. But of course Aeng must know as much as he knew—because they were inseparable.
Neve returned her dark-eyed gaze to Jacob. ‘Aeng is required to help us make a forcebeast.’
‘Neve and I have always had well-matched energies,’ Aeng said. ‘She is almost as alive as I am.’
Neve continued as if Aeng hadn’t spoken. Jacob’s ears got hot. He was offended on Aeng’s behalf by her blank rebuff of the warm teasing. Neve clearly hadn’t any sense of humour.
‘We need a forcebeast because it is wiser to have some protection when meeting with demons,’ Neve added. She was all business.
‘Have you not yet managed to parlay with the demons?’ Aeng asked, still teasing in tone.
‘I’ve tried,’ she said. ‘Twice.’
The plan seemed straightforward to Jacob, although it meant leaving his only refuge from pain. But if Aeng was going, Jacob must go with him. It was a simple decision. Why then did he feel there was some obscurity in the plan, a darker patch in the dazzling ice of a frozen river where the ice was thin?
Aeng popped a last slice of pawpaw in his mouth, licked his fingers, and shuffled around the low table to sit behind Jacob. He spread his palms on the small of Jacob’s back and began to conjure Hands. ‘These will be more preventative than remedial,’ he assured Jacob. Then, to Neve, ‘Jacob has virtually healed.’
‘I’m sure Taryn Cornick will be relieved to see her friend has taken no lasting harm,’ said Neve.
They passed through three gates in a relay. The final one did not disgorge them into the lake in the grounds of Agile Media, but onto a broad path in a forest. Jacob stepped out of the ankle-deep drift of beech mast he’d fetched up in. And Aeng climbed off the top of a stacked stone ramp. Aeng had had his hand wrapped around the back of Jacob’s neck but, for some reason, the final gate had separated them.
Jacob had no idea where he was, and no interest in asking.
Neve set off uphill ahead of them, her hair gleaming as she crossed patches of sunlight. After a time they reached a weathered sign. One arm pointed to Tintern—one kilometre below them, across the Wye. The other arms pointed along Offa’s Dyke Path in the direction they’d come from and the one they were headed.
In a further few minutes they reached a limestone outcrop overlooking the river and the ruined abbey. Taryn was waiting for them, sitting in the sun, her legs folded beneath her. ‘Jacob!’ she cried, and scrambled up.
Beside Jacob, Aeng said to Neve, ‘Please inform Taryn Cornick of my conditions.’
Neve nodded agreement.
Taryn picked her way across the canted rock. The Devil’s Pulpit. The name came to Jacob.
Taryn jumped onto the path and embraced him. She smelled of sweat and laundry soap—not strongly, but humanly. Her touch encountered the invisible Hands and her face clenched.
‘The Hands are just in case,’ Jacob said.
She didn’t seem reassured. Her eyes kept searching his face, then glancing away. It almost looked as if she were waiting for the nearest tree to offer its opinion on Jacob’s situation. She only gave up her strange miming when Neve took her arm, drew her aside and leaned in to confide—what?—Aeng’s conditions?
Jacob turned his attention to the view. He had never seen the abbey. It stood on the far side of the river below them. Its grass-floored broken rooms looked like livestock pens. Vaults and end walls rose above the green squares. It didn’t look like a remnant, but a planned thing, as if it had been built to be ruined.
‘No!’ Taryn burst out, loud and indignant.
Neve continued to speak, her words inaudible, her voice low and quelling.
Aeng came to stand beside Jacob. He said the village of Tintern Parva was a little further along the road. Could Jacob smell the diesel fumes from the tour buses?
‘Do you remember the abbey when it was still intact?’ Jacob asked.
‘Yes. I often sat here in the evening listening to the plainchant.’
Taryn joined them. Her face was tight with tension and repressed anger. She said, ‘We’ll accompany you downhill, Jacob, and leave you this side of the river. Remember there are two bookshops. One sells rare and out-of-print editions of children’s books. The one we want is a little further along, and smaller. My grandfather used to hurry me and Bea past Stella’s so we wouldn’t have time to spot a book we just had to have—and couldn’t, since it’d be a first edition. And past the other shop so “that shabby fellow Belkin” wouldn’t see Grandad and pop out to ask about books Grandad didn’t want to sell.’
Aeng and Jacob just looked at her.
She sighed. ‘But you don’t know any of this,’ she said.
‘You could fill me in,’ said Jacob.
‘No, I couldn’t, there’s too much I’d have to leave out.’ She glared at Aeng.
Aeng leaned close until his breath warmed Jacob’s ear. He said, caressingly, ‘Best, and most adored.’
Taryn made a strangled noise. The leaf shadows bent around the nearest tree as if the sun had twitched sideways in the sky. Jacob felt dizzy. He pressed against Aeng to remain upright and waited for everything to fall back into its natural and proper place.
Taryn said, ‘Google Maps tells me that the antiquarian bookshop closes at six in summer. Even so, you should get on.’
Jacob steadied himself and climbed back off the Devil’s Pulpit. He waited for Aeng and they walked on, hip to hip in perfect step, as they were always able to.
Neve took the lead. Taryn walked alone between Neve and them.
Taryn was using Google Maps, so she must have her phone. She’d know things that might help Jacob feel a little less disoriented. He called out, ‘What month is it, Taryn?’
‘September,’ she called back. ‘Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. And hurricanes, floods, and threats of annihilation.’
Jacob asked her what she meant.
‘Hurricane after hurricane in the Caribbean. People waving their nukes at each other.’
‘I don’t live here anymore,’ Jacob said.
‘Yes, I can see that,’ Taryn answe
red, and hurried to catch up with Neve.
Jacob was less disquieted by Taryn’s digest of news than by the fact she was angry with him. Angry or disappointed. It gave him the queasy feeling he got when he’d misplaced something and forgotten what the something was—an anxious urge to search, the anxiety threatening to blow away any system of searching. It reminded him of when he was four and lost his mother in a supermarket car park. She was wheeling a laden trolley and he had run ahead in the wrong direction, then he couldn’t see her between the cars. He had howled for her and she had appeared, out of breath, the trolley dragged clattering behind her.
Jacob felt like howling now. He had lost something. His human unease perhaps. But why should a failure to feel uneasy be distressing to him? Something else was missing. He looked around, peering past the eclipsing cloud of Aeng’s perfumed red curls.
Great trees, a flagstone-edged path, Neve and Taryn up ahead, and, behind, a sunlit green tunnel, which appeared somehow to be singing, like Aeng’s remembered plainchant. A green prayer was pouring down after them, on either side of the path, its light surrounding an obscurity that refused to be illuminated.
Jacob faced forward again.
‘Think of what you have to do, Jacob,’ Aeng said. ‘Shape your mind to it.’
‘I believe I’m just here to fill in any gaps in plausibility while Neve dazzles the antiquarian.’
‘Still,’ said Aeng. And Jacob began obediently to think of the task ahead of him rather than the puzzle behind.
Neve and Jacob left the others at the forest edge and walked to the road and over the bridge. The Wye was summer-shallow, and full of waving waterweed.
Neve didn’t speak to Jacob, not even to discuss what their strategy should be. He eventually asked, ‘Have we already decided how we do this?’
‘You are to provide the civilities. I’m to make sure he’s motivated to help us.’
‘Taryn is angry with me.’
‘That isn’t a thing we can discuss.’
‘Fine,’ said Jacob. ‘I don’t really care.’
‘“Really” is the only salient word in that sentence,’ Neve answered. Jacob couldn’t imagine what she was getting at.
‘Gwy,’ Neve said, ‘Gwy is the name of this river.’ She said it, then looked both sad and satisfied.
I’ll never understand the sidhe, Jacob thought, then realised that this wasn’t right since he understood Aeng, and was more in sympathy with him than he had ever been with anyone. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you and Aeng are going to make a forcebeast to protect us in a meeting with demons?’
‘It’s good to see you taking an interest, Jacob. However, two sidhe cannot make a forcebeast.’
Her look was cool, full of contempt it seemed he’d earned by being human.
‘All right. I misunderstood,’ he said. ‘Has no one thought to enlist the ravens?’
Neve turned left along the high street. The footpath was narrow beside the houses. The great wall of a bus glided by, so close Jacob imagined himself being flattened. Once the bus had gone Neve replied, ‘We’re hoping the sisters will turn up. We can’t summon them without maybe also summoning the god. Odin is best left out of this. We’re not sure what his intentions are. He’s not himself these days. His head has been turned by many new worshippers. Of the wrong kind.’
Jacob thought about that for a bit. The wrong worshippers for Odin. ‘You mean white supremacists with valknuts tattooed on their man boobs?’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Your wits seem intact in some matters.’
The high street was a channel. The stone walls across the road banked up steep gardens reached by steps beyond trellised arches covered in climbing roses. The shops commenced a little further along the road. Jacob spotted the one with big windows full of bright book covers. ‘I feel I need to further my education,’ he told Neve, ‘about how gods can be changed by the nature of their worshippers.’
‘You were enrolled in a good school. You dropped out. But we are not to speak of that.’
‘But you are speaking of it. And neither of us is carrying a cloned phone.’
‘I’m carrying every promise I ever made,’ Neve said. ‘And I can scarcely support the weight of those I broke.’
Taryn had been using her cloned phone. To look up the closing time of the bookshop and read about hurricanes. Taryn’s phone was a worry. She wouldn’t want Hemms turning up. And Jacob didn’t want Price to appear. He didn’t want his former life to. And then it did, like a blister on his thoughts. His ID left behind in the hospital. His unlovable apartment. His bank account. His parents. Rosemary. Not broken promises, but neglected duties.
Jacob swore and stopped walking. Neve came back, came close, and the hot air radiating off the stone houses got between their bodies and made some kind of bond. Neve gripped his chin with her bony fingertips and shook him. ‘Don’t let me down,’ she said.
Jacob saw she was no longer wearing the Gatemaker’s glove. ‘Where’s the glove?’ he asked, anxious.
‘You know where,’ she said, her eyes oil-bright and oil-hot. Then she said it again, ‘Don’t let me down.’ She released him, checked for traffic, and crossed the road.
He followed her.
A bell above the shop door announced their entry. The shop smelled of camphor wood and Morocco leather. The shelves were as high as the low ceiling permitted. The space between them was wide enough for one person, but not two. Anyone tall would have to squat with their legs at an angle to read the spines of the books on the bottom shelves. The only clear spaces were behind the narrow counter, and directly before it, where there was an Oriental rug, a small table with a round top, and a single chair.
A voice from the back said, ‘I’ll be with you in just a minute.’
‘What is this man’s name?’ Jacob whispered.
‘Ross Belkin.’
When he emerged from behind a curtain, Ross Belkin was younger than Jacob had anticipated. He’d imagined an old man, a near contemporary of Taryn’s grandfather. This man was fiftyish, a drinker, his cheeks and nose covered with a net of spore-like red veins. His eyes were blue, and bloodshot.
The man only glanced at Jacob, and then he couldn’t take his eyes off Neve. This was a little disconcerting, and Jacob realised that whenever Rosemary and he had gone together to ask questions most of the men they interviewed had directed their answers to him. All of the usual prejudices about whom to take seriously went out the window with Neve. Neve was royalty. She was a tiger—you watched her.
‘Ross Belkin?’ Jacob said.
‘No. Sorry. My uncle is off on his holidays. I’m Jason Battle.’
The name clearly meant nothing to Neve, who hadn’t been there when Taryn told that story. But this was James Northover’s secretary, the ‘local young man who had read history at Oxford’, the man who had come closer than any other to smoking out the Firestarter.
Jacob gripped Neve’s arm. He said something about browsing to Battle, and hauled Neve off between the shelves. It wasn’t easy to move her; she was slighter than Jacob but much stronger.
She planted her feet, her face almost against his, her eyes blazing. ‘How dare you manhandle me!’
‘That’s James Northover’s secretary,’ Jacob said. ‘He was possessed by a demon and set fire to Prince’s Gate’s library, trying to find the Firestarter. This was when Taryn was a ten-year-old.’
‘You don’t imagine he’s still possessed?’ Neve said. ‘Demoniacs die of their possessions.’
‘Repossessed?’ Jacob suggested, and glanced at Battle, who was still gazing at Neve. ‘Anyway, the Firestarter will have very bad associations for him.’
‘He might not remember anything,’ Neve said. ‘Humans seem terribly susceptible to forgetting some of their most important encounters. And he isn’t possessed. If he was, I’d be able to see it.’
Jacob accepted that. ‘I think we need Taryn. I think I should fetch her while you keep Battle occupied.’
‘Taryn might be di
stressing for him,’ Neve said. She put both her hands on Jacob to steady him. ‘We don’t need Taryn. We’ll just approach Battle in an honest fashion and hope he remembers nothing about his ordeal.’ She squeezed Jacob’s arms. ‘Follow my lead.’
Neve sauntered back to the counter, no doubt beaming. Battle’s expression as she approached was rapt and tremulous. Jacob followed Neve and peered at Battle for any sign of another entity. He had heard it described—two souls in one body. He’d seen it in Taryn when her demon fastened on to her again in Norfolk—a poisonous calculation in her eyes. He remembered the look but, for some reason, not the events around what he’d seen. Who else was there? Wasn’t someone else there? Not the entity inside Taryn, but someone else. His mind strained against forgetfulness as if forgetfulness were physical, and its mist a barrier to movement as well as visibility.
‘Good afternoon,’ Neve said to Battle. ‘My friend may be content to browse, but I’m here with something in mind.’
‘How can I help you, Ms—?’
‘Gatewatch,’ said Neve. ‘Neve Gatewatch.’
‘Ms Gatewatch—how may I be of assistance?’
‘I am looking for an antique box. The sort of thing in which one might store a scroll.’
‘A half-cylinder scroll case?’
‘Something a bit wider and deeper in its dimensions, but, yes, long enough to hold a manuscript on its spindle.’
‘I can but look. My uncle keeps some things below decks, as it were. But if I go downstairs I’m afraid I’ll have to lock the shop. You won’t mind?’
‘With us in or out?’ Jacob said.
‘That’s entirely your preference, sir.’
‘May I come with you to your uncle’s storeroom?’ Neve asked sweetly. ‘I do love an Aladdin’s Cave.’
Battle blushed, and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead, so large and so rapid in their appearance that Jacob expected them to be accompanied by some kind of sound effect.
‘If you like,’ Battle said. He lifted the hinged countertop and Neve slipped through. Battle did a little dance out of her way and came through the gap himself to lock the door. ‘I do apologise for appearing untrusting,’ he said to Jacob. ‘But my uncle has me under strict instructions.’
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