by Garth Nix
There was a flurry of gunshots below them.
“Shame Merrihew hasn’t got anything better than a popgun on her,” said Holly. Susan noticed that his left eye was unfocused, presumably because that one was seeing through the dead eyes of his servant below. “I’d put ten quid on her dealing with one Cauldron-Born, but not two. Not without an axe or the like.”
Susan didn’t speak. She watched him, and let her right hand fall on the opening of the ruler pocket. With the left, she made a fist and raised it to her mouth as she looked down, ostensibly to cover a cough but actually to tear the end of the salt packet open with her teeth.
“I’ll give it to you straight, Ms. Susan Arkshaw,” said Holly. He stepped closer, flexing his powerful hands. “I bound your dad and took his power when he was carrying on with your mum and stupid with it, not paying attention and weak as piss in mortal flesh. Though I admit I had help from Merrihew to lure him onto my patch. But he found a loophole, didn’t he? He could give up the power I took to his heir when she came of age, bypassing my strictures!”
Holly pounded a massive fist into his palm, the sound almost like another gunshot.
“So it’s all leaking away to you, and the oaths I’ve had witnessed by Coniston are coming undone, which is fucking inconvenient! We got to get them done again. So here’s the deal. You freely give up your dad’s power to me, and you get to live. Oh, and your mum gets to stay alive, too.”
There was nothing in his face or words to give away that the men he’d sent to take care of Jassmine had fallen foul of guardians from the brook, the sky, and the earth. But Susan knew he lied. Here, even only in the beginning of her power, she could see the shape of his words and when they came straight or twisted from his mouth.
“What about my father?” she asked. She put her hands behind her back and emptied the packet into her fingers, hoping they would catch enough salt to smear upon the knife.
“He’s made his choice,” said Holly. “He’s given up everything to you. He’s fading, soon to be gone. Forget about him.”
Something about that was not true, but some of it was.
“What happens to his power if it doesn’t come to me?” asked Susan. “If you kill me first.”
Holly grunted angrily.
“Gone. Wasted. Which will make me very, very unhappy. It’s your choice. Your dad’s had it, but you can live.”
“You used Dad’s power to make oaths binding,” said Susan. She felt the rightness of that. This was a great part of her . . . her father’s . . . power. To witness oaths and make them concrete, not to be broken. He was an Oath-Maker, binding together those who asked him to witness their oaths and make them concrete. Her father was one of the benign Ancient Sovereigns.
And Holly was exactly the opposite. One of the malign Old Ones.
The big man grunted again, then flinched, and his unfocused eye filled with tears, a single drop escaping to run down his ruddy cheek.
“That’s finished Merrihew,” he said. “Costly, but worth it.”
“What about the rest of the booksellers?” asked Susan. She edged forward a step. “Even if I give up Dad’s power, let you have it, they’ll kill us both, won’t they?”
Holly snorted.
“Why do you think I’ve gone to all this effort to extend my rule over the Old World and the New, to gather under my hand such creatures as Shucks and goblins, Nikker and Boggart, Yetuns and Yallery, and all the rest, not to mention stooping to master the dreary hired killers and gangland thugs of mortal England? I was always going to deal with the booksellers. That’s the whole point. Merrihew will only be the first to die. As befits a dupe.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
A blood tide they called it
For even the sea could not wash clean
So many killed in so narrow a span
As between the low water and the high
MERRIHEW BROUGHT A GREAT STONE DOWN UPON THE SECOND Cauldron-Born, but it was too swift. It caught her and dragged her back even as the boulder rolled across. Her legs were crushed to the knee and blood already pooled about her thighs. So much blood . . .
The other Cauldron-Born scrabbled and growled six or seven feet away, pinned through the elbows by the two seventh-century seaxes Merrihew always wore hidden across her back under her fishing vest. But even the ancient, many times bespelled iron would not prevent the Cauldron-Born from eventually tearing its own flesh and bone to pieces in order to get free.
Merlin came through the fog, the old sword in his hand, with Vivien close behind.
“Good,” rasped Merrihew. She pointed, weakly. “Cut that one to pieces before it breaks out.”
Merlin stepped past, and the ancient sword rose and fell, rose and fell. Vivien knelt by Merrihew’s side, and looked at her smashed legs, at the blood swirling its way downhill. She took a vial of Sipper blood from her inside jacket pocket, then slowly put it back.
“Yes, yes, I know,” snapped Merrihew. “Too late, too late. Never mind. I go to join the Grandmother.”
“No,” said a soft, calm voice, but there was steel in that single word. All three booksellers looked up, and there sitting on the stone Merrihew had rolled in desperation to kill a Cauldron-Born and, inadvertently, herself, was the oldest Grandmother. The strawberry blonde in the toga-like garment. The chestnut-brown wolfhound sat on his haunches next to her, growled, and showed his teeth.
Both of them looked entirely corporeal, not like ghosts or Shades at all.
“You will not join us,” continued the Grandmother. “You have betrayed the clan. You will die unlamented, your name struck from the rolls.”
“I did what I did for the good of the St. Jacques!” said Merrihew. “I didn’t know about the cauldron, or the . . . other matters.”
“You mean Mother?” asked Merlin.
He had left the Cauldron-Born in pieces under slabs of shale and came to stand over Merrihew. He held the heavy sword negligently, point down, six inches above the older bookseller’s right eye. It looked like he might let it fall at any moment.
“It was simply bad luck!” protested Merrihew. “She’d met Coniston and his woman in London, early on, and then she saw the woman again, with a child, and was going to make inquiries. She would have found out what happened to Coniston. We couldn’t have that, but I didn’t want her dead, I didn’t know about it. Not until afterwards—”
The sword point dropped an inch, cold fury on Merlin’s face.
“Southaw arranged it! He was concerned Antigone would release Coniston—”
“Southaw?” asked Vivien. “The London Southaw?”
“Yes, the London Southaw!” retorted Merrihew. “Is there any other one?”
Southaw was a most inimical and troublesome Ancient Sovereign, which had three entire pages to itself in the Index. One of the principal Old Ones of London, always in a struggle to extend his domain with his rivals, That Beneath the Tower, the Beast of Camden, the Primrose Lady, London Stone, and Oriel.
“Southaw promised peace and he delivered,” said Merrihew emphatically. “We’ve never had such a quiet time.”
“So you could go fishing,” said Vivien, her voice heavy with scorn and disappointment.
“No, not that . . . you young ones don’t understand, the constant pressure,” whispered Merrihew. She had lost so much blood her face had sunken in, her skin almost translucent. “Besides, I could have fixed things. You should have told me who Susan was . . . if that last shot had killed her . . . but now Southaw’s got her—”
“Southaw’s here?”
Merrihew pointed with one shaking finger up the hill.
“But it can’t be; we would feel the presence of an Old—” said Vivien.
“He wears a charm,” said Merrihew. Her eyes lost their focus on the outer world. For the first time in many years she looked within herself. “Maybe, maybe I did make a mistake. . . .”
Vivien half expected to see Merlin drop the sword to pierce Merrihew’s eye and brain. But he
didn’t. He lifted the blade and was gone in a swirl of fog, leaping up the mountainside. Vivien hesitated for a second, bowed to the Grandmother, and sprinted away after him.
“What about Billie?” whispered Merrihew, looking up to the Grandmother, though she could not see anything now but fog, nothing but white. Billie was her spaniel, waiting patiently at Wooten for his mistress to return.
“We’ll take Billie, when her time comes,” said the Grandmother. “But for her own sake, not yours. It is never the dogs who break faith.”
She whistled, and the wolfhound at her side jumped down from the stone. It stalked over to Merrihew, who turned her head away as the dog’s jaws closed about her throat and ripped the last spark of life away.
“So what’s it to be?” asked Holly. He stood close now, a menacing presence, not simply from his bulk and height.
“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” stammered Susan, and she lunged forward, drawing the knife and wiping it flat across the palm of her left hand to pick up the salt in one swift motion before tilting it to slash the sharpened edge across Holly’s chest.
The knife barely cut the anorak he wore, and did not penetrate the pullover beneath. He laughed and Susan cut again, at his hand, this time slicing flesh. But no blood flowed.
“Oh, Susan, Susan, you’ve got guts, I’ll give you that,” said Holly, gripping her wrist and twisting it savagely, so she had to drop the knife. He kept hold of her and continued to speak, in a calm but bullying tone. “You’ve been badly taught. You forgot to say the words, for one thing, but you can’t bind me this way. I’m not some limp lesser legend, some pathetic myth born of a piss-trickling spring or some sheep-fucked standing stone. I’m an Old One, you understand? Old and mean and very bloody unforgiving.”
He threw her down, shale slicing her hands when she put them out to break the fall.
“I’d hoped you would be sensible,” he said. “But I see I have to do what I did to your dad and take your power. Which means digging him up first, I suppose. Lucky your mum had such long hair. I can use the same rope.”
He turned aside and raised his hand at the cairn, as if to summon a waiter in one of the more obnoxious restaurants of the old style, where the patrons paid a premium for subservience. Susan felt power flow from the mountain through him. Her power, her father’s power, usurped by Holly. She didn’t know how to stop it, but she tried, willing the magic to dry up, to flow back, to return to the mountain and come to her instead.
Holly took a step aside and kicked her in the ribs.
“Stop that!”
Susan rolled away, but she’d lost concentration. Whatever Holly wanted the power for, he had enough now.
He flicked his fingers dismissively.
The cairn shifted, rocks rolling off into the fog. The platform beneath split open, the stones pushed away as if by some internal eruption.
“Come see your dad,” said Holly. He walked over, supremely confident that Susan would follow.
She got up slowly, hunched over and holding her ribs, pretending to be hurt much more than she was. Slowly, she picked her way through the tumbled stones to where the cairn and platform had been.
“Leave the knife,” said Holly as she bent down to pick it up. “Let’s get this over with. They do a good pint and a bacon sandwich down in the village. Which you could still have if you decide to be sensible.”
Susan shook her head, and concentrated on drawing more of the magic from the mountain into herself. She could feel Holly trying to take it back, but his grip was weakening. She had the right, and he didn’t.
“Here he is,” said Holly. “That’s your dad.”
Susan looked down into what was basically a rough-carved grave in the stony mountaintop, and saw her father, three feet below.
The Old Man of Coniston looked no more than forty, not old at all. His gray-streaked copper hair had grown to his waist, almost a garment in itself, and he had a beard to do the Edward Lear character proud, bushy enough to hold a dozen owls and larks and wrens. His fingernails had grown so long they curled back on themselves. His purple flared trousers were rotting at the hems, his Nehru jacket was moldy at the cuffs, and the side zips on his boots were rusted.
His eyes were partly open, enough to see a slice of slate-gray pupils. His mouth was hidden behind the whiskers. He was tied at the wrists and ankles by narrow ropes fastened to iron eye-bolts screwed into the rock.
Ropes woven from many strands of . . . raven-black hair.
Her mother’s hair. Ropes of love to bind an Old One and take his power, far more stringent than any mere binding with blood and iron and salt to make a servant.
Ropes that would serve as well to bind the Old One’s half-mortal heir, who loved her mother.
“Touching, isn’t it,” said Holly. “Like that old story. She sold her hair to buy him a present, not knowing what I wanted it for, and he risked visiting London to be with her, and they both lost out.”
“That is a completely stupid misreading of ‘The Gift of the Magi,’” said Vivien, coming out of the fog to stand next to Susan.
Holly started towards them, raising his fist. Susan felt him draw in power from the mountain, despite her efforts to resist. And she felt other powers, too, Holly calling on magic from far away. It was lessened here, but there was so much of it. . . .
“You bloody booksellers don’t know when—”
Merlin came up behind him and swung the ancient sword in a decapitating blow, two-handed. There was a deafening, horrendous ring of metal upon metal as Holly’s head flew off and bounced away down the mountainside, to be lost in the fog.
There was no blood. The body stood there for a moment, before slowly sinking to its knees. But it did not fall any farther.
Booming laughter came out of the fog, followed by Holly’s voice, loud and horrible.
“Now you’ve really pissed me off!”
Vivien took a deep breath and held up her right hand, the luminescence growing brighter, reflecting off the swirling whiteness of the fog. Merlin stepped up next to her.
“Send him away,” snapped Merlin to Susan. “Forbid him your demesne. His real name is Southaw. Use it!”
“He’s still got most of Father’s power!”
Vivien made a choking sound, still holding her breath. Merlin pushed Susan down and slapped the sword blade flat on the neck of the headless body as something flew in from the fog. It hit the sword, rebounded from it with another metallic clang, loud as a church bell at two paces, and would have smacked into Merlin if he hadn’t dodged, so fast Susan saw him as a blur. As the thing flew past, Vivien slapped it and exhaled, her breath coming out as silver as her hand. The breath caught the object and hurled it through the air, reaming out a corridor in the fog, which closed behind its passage.
It took Susan a moment to realize the flying object was Holly’s head.
“It’ll be back in a few minutes,” gasped Vivien, taking in a deep breath. “We won’t be able to keep holding it off.”
“Susan . . .”
Susan shut her eyes. She could feel the power of the mountain flowing into her, she could sense every small detail within the bounds of her father’s domain, feel every living thing, the men and women and children and wildlife, the birds in the air and in the trees and on the ground, the hares and the foxes and the sheep, squirrels and red deer, natterjack toads and adders, and there were other mythic beings, too, water-fay in the lake and tarns, knocker goblins in the old copper and shale workings, the Fenris over on the western shore of Windermere . . . and halfway down the mountain on the southwestern side near Goat’s Water, the awful wrongness that was Southaw, centered in the cut-off head of its mortal form.
She knelt down on the shale and spread her hands flat, calling the power into herself. She felt Southaw resisting her, but she had the right, and she reached deep inside herself for the will to use it. She was her father’s daughter, and he had bequeathed his power to her. Southaw had stolen it. Now she would get it back.
Susan felt the head returning. She could sense it now as the mere tip of an iceberg of terrible power. The dismembered head was the visible presence for an unseen entity that drew upon the strength of its many, many vassals, lesser entities spread throughout the land. And it also drew strength from the Bronze Cauldron, as great a power again as all those vassals combined.
Southaw no longer engaged in a contest of will over her father’s magic; he was simply coming to kill her. The head was rising higher and higher, climbing through fog and cloud. It would fall like a falcon upon its prey, swift and terrible, too fast even for Merlin or Vivien to avoid.
“The head’s going up high—it’ll come straight down!” she warned, but did not open her eyes or stand up. Instead she lowered herself flat, reaching out with her arms, trying to become one with the great mass of stone beneath her. Magic rose up from the depths below, like water welling up from a deep spring. It came surely, but too slowly, and as it filled her, Susan became aware of two vital things.
The first was that the meager vessel of her body could not take in the power any faster, and the second was that she could not contain all of an Ancient Sovereign’s majesty anyway. To fully take on the magic, she would have to give up her mortal form. Her body would sink into the shale; she would become a thing of myth and legend. She might take another mortal body one day, but it would be the end of Susan Arkshaw.
She would be the Old Man of Coniston. If she survived the next thirty seconds.
The head rose still higher. She felt it in the sky above, for that was also her domain, two leagues north and south and west and east, and all the air above and stone below. The magic filled her; she could feel it working through blood and bone, almost at the point of unraveling her, making her undone. . . .
She felt the head, still climbing, above the cloud now, under bright blue sky. But the magic inside her was still not enough to resist all that Southaw could bring to bear. She could not contain it. She was not enough and couldn’t be, not in the time allowed.
