Madame nodded. She fished a small key from her reticule. “My room is the last in the attic corridor. Lock the door behind you. I’ll come and find you at exactly nine.”
The château was vast, and sumptuous. Sarah walked down the corridor, jostled and passed by footmen and valets, butlers and chambermaids, all carrying plates and dishes, the air a babble of French. She kept her eyes down and walked fast, once bumping into a maid carrying a box of oranges so that they all fell on the floor and she had to hastily help gather them up, nodding and raising her hand against the stream of foreign curses.
Breathless, she reached one of the tall windows, slipped behind the curtain, and sat on the white sill, breathing the summer twilight with relief, because the kitchens had been unbearably steamy.
She thought about what she should do.
Wait until the ball. Jake and Moll would come, but why would Jake get himself into something like this. Precious stones meant nothing to him. Unless . . . his father was involved.
She was sure, suddenly, that was what it was.
The window was wide; a soft breeze drifted in heavy with scents of rose and gardenia. As she sat there, she closed her eyes, and then felt the tiniest touch on her fingers.
A butterfly was perched there, its wings all metallic green and blue. For a moment she smiled, thinking it beautiful. There were no butterflies left in the end days.
Then she snatched her hand back and scrambled up, staring down at the green lawns.
The vicomte was walking there. An entourage of courtiers and dogs and ladies followed, but he was talking only with one man.
A small, neat man, his uniform a Hussar’s green, with black fastenings and boots, a short sword at his side.
As his face turned toward Sarah, she breathed, “No! No.” But there he was—the familiar small tidy beard, the blue round spectacles. She shrank back in astonished fear. Janus? Here?
She made herself take a second look.
It was him. The knowledge felt like a blow.
She watched the vicomte bow and move away with his group until Janus stood alone on the graveled path. At once, two of the Time Wolves came out of nowhere and paced at his heels, not icy now, but russet and flame red as if they were made of fire, their eyes black as coals, their shadows long in the twilight.
She could not have dreamed of a more terrible guest.
For a moment the very thought of it paralyzed her; then she jumped up and ran down the corridor, searching desperately for a door to the gardens, not even caring if she met anyone, slipping past vases and statues like a ghost. Her heart thudded. There was something going on here that Jake knew nothing of, a trap for him, maybe for Venn too.
Finding an open door, she fled through it, jumped down the steps, and raced around the corner of the house.
The path was empty.
With a hiss of fury she ran down the gravel. In the heart of the formal garden, a fountain played, its spray drifting over her face like rainbow glints of warm rain.
Flickers of light dazzled her. And before she could stop she had burst through a gap in the hedge and there he was, the tyrant from the world’s end, sitting calm and alone on a wooden bench. He looked up, saw her, and stood.
With the quickest of snaps, he clicked his fingers.
On each side, the wolves rose out of the grass.
“Oh my dear Sarah,” he said, and she saw with surprise that he had expected to find her. “Do we meet again? At last?”
The King doth keep his revels here tonight.Take heed the Queen come not within his sight.
11
The Abbot stood stout and bold before the faery creatures. “Wilt thou release my brother?” he demanded. The Queen of the Wood had eyes like shadows. Her laugh was as a ripple of rain.
“Not before Domesday,” she said. “For where he is, that day is already come.”
Chronicle of Wintercombe
VENN STRUGGLED INTO the dark suit. It was black satin, and Rebecca thought it looked fabulous on him. Under it he wore a white shirt, the lacy sleeves covering the bracelet.
“Sword,” he snapped.
Piers buckled it on him. “Toledo steel. Sharp as a razor.”
“Boots?”
“Period leather. Take this too.”
A small pistol. Venn shoved it into his belt. “Are you sure about the dates?”
“Absolutely.” Rebecca looked up from the computer screen. “Paris was in a ferment. The Revolution was supposed to liberate the people, but it quickly degenerated into factions—anyone could be denounced to the Council and hundreds were guillotined.”
“David among them?”
She shrugged. “There’s no way of telling. His name is on no list that I’ve been able to find, but he could have given a false name, or just not been recorded. But this château—it was definitely attacked during the night. Midnight. You have to be in and out by then.”
“Understood.”
Piers stood back. “You’re ready, Excellency.”
Venn wore the flamboyant clothes with his usual easy flair. He looked as though he had been born to wear them, tall and elegant, his blond hair tied back in a black queue.
“How’s your French?” Rebecca asked, amused.
“Adequate.” He turned. “Now, Piers. The changeling too.”
Gideon stood pale and anxious by the bench. “This is impossible. How can I go? If I even leave the Estate—”
“We’re going back before you were born, presumably. Anyway, technically you won’t be leaving the Estate.”
“You have no idea what’s going to happen! I might just shiver into dust and you don’t even care.”
Venn made two urgent steps toward him. “Listen, Gideon. I can’t do this alone. Do you want to stay cooped up here forever, afraid of Summer? I thought you said even death was better than that.”
“I did.”
“Then now’s your chance to find out.” Venn glanced at Piers. “Sort him.”
“Oh, he’s easy.” Piers came and stood before Gideon. The boy was tall and thin. “All that Shee-stuff he’s wearing can look like anything.”
Piers put his hand out and touched the lapel of Gideon’s patchwork coat. A shriek made them all jump; Horatio had swung in and was hanging tail-down from the dusky vaults, watching.
Gideon’s clothes shivered into a dark green silk suit, knee breeches, boots, a waistcoat, a white shirt, a sword. He grinned, because being with the Shee had taught him to delight in textures, and the eerie shimmer of the watered silk was like sunlight on a stream. The clothes felt heavy and real; they swished and flowed.
He felt more human in them.
But Piers was grimacing, snatching his hand away as if stung. “What have you got there?”
“What?” Venn said, alert.
“Something on him. Magic.”
Gideon stepped back. “No, there’s nothing—”
But Piers was too quick, his small hand darted into the pocket of the coat, and fast as a pickpocket he had the small flower in his fingers; he held it up and they all looked at it.
It had not faded or crumbled or even creased.
Horatio screeched again. He fled to Rebecca and hid in her lap. She said, “It’s a flower.”
“No.” Venn was staring at it with a strange attention. “No, it’s not. Not at all.”
He came and took it from Piers’s fingers, and it lay in his palm, a little purple bloom, with four petals, fragile and yet eerily alive.
Venn smiled. It was a cruel smile. It made Rebecca uneasy. He said, “This is a very powerful piece of kit. It’s steeped in magic; I can feel it radiating out. More powerful than anything even the Shee have.” He looked up. “Where did you get this?”
Gideon flashed a look at Maskelyne, but the scarred man lay safely deep in coma, unmoving. So he shrugg
ed. “I found it in one of the books in the library. Slipped inside the pages.”
“No way!” Piers said, adamant. “I would have known.”
“Maybe you don’t know everything in this house, little man.”
“Maybe I know more than some lost boy on the run from the Shee.”
Gideon took a step forward, his hand on his sword, but Venn said, “Shut up, the pair of you. We have it and we’ll use it. Or rather . . .” He turned, and handed the flower to Piers. “You will use it.”
“Me!”
“Gideon and I are going after Jake. Rebecca has to stay and guard the house. You’re all that’s left.”
Piers’s face was as white as his coat. “But I should guard the house!”
“She can’t go into the Summerland.”
“I can’t go into the Summerland!”
Ignoring his panic, Venn checked the bracelet. “You can, and you will. You take the flower, you go into the Wood. You find Wharton. Give it to him. If it’s what I think it is, she’ll give him anything he wants if he owns it. Then just get him back here.”
Piers was roaming the room, wringing his hands in anguish. “King of Shadows, listen! There is absolutely no way I can do this . . . Those creatures of hers, they terrify me. They’ll eat me up and spit me out. It’ll take me centuries to piece myself back together. Or they’ll spin me in a whirlwind down under the sea, then they’ll—”
“Don’t let them find you. Be fast, be silent. But you’re going, Piers. That’s an order.”
Piers groaned.
Rebecca felt sorry for him, but then the worry of having to hold the house alone against the Shee swept over her. Not to mention the marmoset, the baby, seven cats, a sleeping man, and the mirror.
If only Maskelyne would wake!
But what if he got worse?
What if he died?
“Do you hear?” Venn said, iron hard.
Piers blew out his cheeks, looked around helplessly, and nodded. “I’ll be there and back in forty minutes,” he said in the smallest of voices.
“Good. Now get us on our way.”
Venn beckoned to Gideon. He came and the two of them stood side by side before the obsidian glass. In its frame the amber stone shone with a strange gleam; as Piers came to the controls Gideon felt that the power of the mirror was enhanced, that there was a new focus in its silence, a new awareness in its slanting lean.
Piers adjusted the controls. He said, “Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Then—”
But before Piers could finish, the mirror opened. The vacuum of its blackness came out to enfold them. Gideon gasped as he felt a terrible cold, a darkness that seemed to fill his eyes and mouth and throat, that swallowed him whole, that he knew in an instant must be death.
He cried out with the terror and delight of it.
When the mirror was silent and empty, Rebecca stared at Piers. “That was different.”
“Yes. Indeed.”
The roar of the vortex had been stronger. Even held tight in its fixtures, the mirror had jerked; one of the bolts that had held it was sheared, another half torn out of the wall. The malachite webbing was shredded to pieces.
“The stone has made a difference, not just in accuracy, but in power.” Piers shoved the flower in his pocket, swiveled on his heels, and turned and faced the door. “But there’s nothing more we can do for them now. So. Right. Let’s do this. Come on.”
She gave one glance at Maskelyne’s still-unconscious form and followed him. They hurried along the dim corridor of the Monk’s Walk, along the gallery, and down the main stairs.
Wintercombe Abbey was a house invaded.
Every window was open, every door wide. White moths fluttered, ivy crawled everywhere. The very walls seemed to be splitting at the seams, cracked by saplings and sprouting seeds, and as Rebecca looked out from the main door, she took a breath, because the night was sweet and close with the heavy scent of roses, and the Wood crowded like a sinister shadow under the silver disc of the moon.
Piers straightened his back and raised his chin. “It is a far, far better thing I do,” he muttered sarcastically, “than I have ever done.”
“Don’t be scared. Just find Wharton.”
“You have no idea. It’s a big place, the Summerland. Goes on forever and ever.”
She patted his back. “Yes, but you’re Piers! You’re too quick and tricksy even for the Shee.”
“Am I?”
“I’ve always thought so. What would Venn do without you?”
“That’s true,” he said, doubtful.
“And brave, Piers.”
“Not—”
“Brave.”
“Really?”
“Really. Just think, what we’ll all think of you if you get Wharton out of there. If you outwit Summer. What a hero you’ll be.”
He puffed up like a robin in the cold. “You’re right, Becky. Quite right. I can do it. No trouble. You take care of the mirror and Maskelyne. I’ll be there and back in a flash.”
And then he was gone and she saw only a small brown insignificant bird, drab in its summer plumage. A flick of brief wings and it had flown. A leaf shivered. A beetle buzzed in the moonlight.
Rebecca stood there alone, in the peace of the summer night.
But gradually, with a crawling of her skin, she realized that every leaf held green eyes and the eyes were watching her. Every moth glittered with strange metallic colors. Every bat flitting over the Abbey roof swooped too close and was too dark, too interested.
She stepped back inside quickly and tried to force the door shut.
But it wouldn’t close, and from far in the house the baby cried, as if woken by spiteful fingers.
Sarah felt like screaming. It welled up inside her, a sob of rage and terror and she had to choke it down and clench her fists and say, “Janus. What are you doing here?”
He smiled. The two wolves padded toward her, slinking through the rosebushes.
“What makes you think I am here?”
She already knew it was a Replicant. It was older than the others she had seen of him, nearer the age he really was, there in that far future time when the world was dying and the black hole of the mirror was roaring with imminent explosion.
She shook her head. “How could you know . . .”
“If a man sits at the end of the world, Sarah, with all the records of past times under his hands, what doesn’t he know? Of course I realized you would be here.”
Her heart pulsed. She said, “Are you going to try and take me back with you?”
“Not try. I will take you back.” He shook his head, a little sad. “I have all the others, you know, Max and Cara and all your rebellious foolish friends from ZEUS. Those that escaped through the mirror with you and were scattered over the centuries of time. Patiently I have collected them all up, like a man who has spilled a purse of coins on the floor. All my shining children. Safely back in my Lab.”
She didn’t believe him. “Liar.”
“Not so, I assure you. You are the last, Sarah. So I have come to take you home.”
“To kill me.”
“Well, all the world will die. The black mirror will consume you all.”
“Not you?”
He shook his lank hair, the lantern light catching the discs of his glasses. “Of course not. I will enter the mirror first. I have prepared my escape route.” He held out a hand. “Come on, Sarah. You must be tired of all this. Of Venn’s coldness and Jake’s arrogance. Of the loneliness of your life. You want to destroy time, but we all know that time is a mirror that can never ever be broken. Come home, Sarah. Come home like the wild geese at the end of the day.”
Maybe she almost wanted to, then. Until he added, “Your parents will be so pleased to see you.”
“Not before I’ve destroyed you.”
He grabbed at her, but she was running, hard and swift over the smooth lawns, and behind her she heard the wolves howl, unleashed in the joy of the chase. Up the garden steps she pelted, and saw from the corner of her eyes that the wolves had swung away in a wide arc on each side, driving her away from the door, away from the safe path to the kitchens. She glanced left; the nearest TimeWolf snarled, its eyes like embers.
No way out. No right or left.
Only, straight in front of her a blank wall smothered in thick ivy and some purple creeper.
They wanted to trap her against it.
Tear her to pieces.
Breathless, she summoned a final dash of speed. She ran full tilt at the wall, threw herself up and leaped, grabbing at the branches. Her feet scrabbled against stone, wedged in a foothold. She hauled herself up.
Somewhere behind, Janus yelled an urgent command. The wolves arrowed in, flame-fast they hurtled at her—she had to get higher!
Sobbing and screaming she dragged herself, hand over hand among the leaves against her face, the cascades of long lilac flowers. Pollen in clouds made her eyes water, pigeons flapped out in terror, the buzz of angry bees wove about her head. Desperately her fingers tore foliage, petals, sepals.
Something hot seared her leg. She screamed, kicked, jerked upward.
Below her the wolf leaped again.
Its teeth snapped at her heels.
“Sarah.” Janus’s voice was near. She twisted a look down, saw he was below her, at the foot of the wall. “Come down.”
“No.”
“You’ll gain nothing.”
“I’ll gain time.” Her voice was hard, and she felt as if nothing could touch her now, as if her determination was as hard as the wall. She climbed, quick and light, rustling her way upward, but he reached out and touched the ivy, and the leaves nearest his fingers turned brown.
The Door in the Moon Page 10
