The Devil's Looking-Glass soa-3

by Mark Chadbourn

  Easing open the door, he peered through the crack. Dee still sat in the same position, bowed in front of the hearth. Carpenter wondered if the old man had died, so still was he, but he drew his dagger none the less. With a man like Dee he would take no chances. Holding his breath, he eased towards the hunched figure. His head throbbed and his mouth felt dry. When he crooked his arm to slip it round the alchemist’s neck, he suddenly felt a fist grab the back of his shirt and drag him backwards.

  A breeze whisked past his face as an axe-blade swung from the shadows above and smashed into Dee’s side, throwing him to the flagstones. Carpenter gaped. One step further and it would have been his head rolling across the floor. Launceston knelt and picked up a thread that had been broken as Carpenter entered. Another of Dee’s traps, but with this one he had paid the price.

  Yet as Carpenter whirled back to the fallen figure, he saw the truth in the shapeless robes. Pulling them to one side, the spy revealed a frame of twisted saplings. ‘How could I ever have believed that was Dee?’ he muttered.

  ‘You were entranced by whatever spell the alchemist has woven here,’ Launceston said. His tone was flat, but he clearly did not want Carpenter to blame himself.

  Carpenter sighed. ‘So the old man still hides away. We must resume our search.’ He turned towards the door so that the aristocrat would not see the worry in his face. Deep inside, he could feel the Caraprix wriggling, and whispering its seductive words. Deep inside, he could feel himself dying by the moment.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE TORCH GUTTERED and hissed. Will watched its endless reflections in the glittering mirrors, deep in thought. No shadows could exist in that blazing world of light, and for the first time the spy thought he could see clearly. Outside, the Unseelie Court still climbed the tower, drawing closer by the moment. He pushed his anxiety to one side and remained calm, focused.

  When he had slammed the door and escaped back into the mirror maze, he realized the blast from the storm had cleared his head. The whispers from the carvings washed around him, but now he paid them attention. The dancing light of the torch flame was no more a mere distraction. He sucked in a deep breath, letting the sweet smell with its bitter undertones envelop him. All he needed had been there from the beginning, but as Dee had no doubt suspected, his attention had been elsewhere. The alchemist was a man of intellect, given to rigorous thought and reflection. He enjoyed his games of strategy, his chess, his nine men’s morris. Puzzles with solutions that could be extracted through reflection. Will nodded to himself, ignoring the call to urgency.

  Kneeling, he waved the torch close to one of the mirrors. Around the area where a hand would push the door open, a faint, sticky residue smeared the surface. Will smiled. Cunning Dee, who loved his concoctions, his herbs and clays and bubbling pots of lamb fat. In times past, the wise man had demonstrated the mysterious but effective potions he had brewed in his chambers. Some had been poisons with rapid lethal effect. Others sent a man to sleep, or made them foam at the mouth in a wild rage. And some turned wits to quicksilver and conjured visions out of thin air.

  The spy stripped off his sodden shirt and flicked it round his right hand. With his skin covered, the paste would not seep into him and he would have time to recover from earlier contact. He held the torch high and watched the flames whip away from the hollow mouths of the whispering carvings. The unsettling sound had been designed to add to the off-kilter effects of Dee’s paste, he realized, but they required a strong draught to work. The torch flame pointed away from the source. He lowered his eyes, refusing to look into the mirrors as he fought to overcome the subtle effects of the drug. Then, when he was ready, he pressed open the door with his covered hand and began to follow the trail back.

  Watching the torch as he progressed through the mirror chambers, he saw the draught grow stronger. When the whispering became the chattering of madmen in Bedlam, the dancing light revealed the edges of a trapdoor in the vaulted ceiling. The breeze blew through small holes on each of the four sides. Will reached up to a shallow indentation in the centre of the trap and pressed. With a click, the door swung down followed by a coiled rope ladder. He squinted into that dark square and thought he could see a distant glimmer of faint light.

  Determination burned through his foggy thoughts. The time of confusion had ended. Laying the torch on the cold flagstones, he set one foot on the ladder and began to climb into the dark.

  He found himself at the foot of a flight of narrow stone steps, leading up to a small arched door standing slightly ajar. Candlelight gleamed through the crack. The sweet fragrance of incense drifted on the draught, and he could hear faint mutterings of incantations in Latin. Drawing his dagger, he crept closer. Through the slit of open door, he could just discern a small circular room. On the wall hung a purple tapestry covered with magical symbols of crescent moons, stars, runes, circles and squares in gold. Open volumes with stained pages were scattered across the flagstones.

  Dee stalked past, his gown swishing across the floor. The animal skulls clinked on their silver chains at his chest. His wild mane of silver hair swung as he flung out his arms, gesticulating at invisible companions. Now he was near, the spy realized that what he had taken for Latin incantations was gibberish. The old man was lost to his world of madness.

  As soon as the alchemist’s back was turned, Will kicked open the door and barrelled inside. Dee let out a bestial howl of rage. His eyes glinted with insanity, his lips pulling away from clenched teeth. The spy crashed into the older man, knocking him across the carpet of mildewed tomes. Pinning him down, Will pressed the tip of his dagger beneath Dee’s eye and said, ‘I will not insult you by treating you like a frail old man.’

  Dee thrashed like a wildcat in a sack, but as the spy dug the steel deeper into his flesh he quietened. A trickle of blood ran down his ashen skin. Yet still his eyes ranged with madness and he snarled animal sounds.

  ‘What have you done to yourself, doctor? Where is that sharp wit that could cut a man half your age?’ Acutely aware of the Fay drawing nearer, Will searched the alchemist’s flickering gaze for any sign of comprehension and began to wonder if all their sacrifices had been for naught. ‘Let us talk, you and I,’ he said, ‘as we did so many times in the Black Gallery, and perhaps the echoes of those days will stir some sense within you.’

  In a calm voice that belied the urgency he felt, Will recounted how Dee had taken him under his wing when he had first arrived at the Palace of Whitehall from Cambridge within days of Jenny’s disappearance. Though as gruff and uncompromising as always, the doctor had shown him some kindness then, recognizing the scars that had been inflicted and the worse things that lay ahead. Patiently, he had instructed Will in the ways of the Unseelie Court, and the horrors they had perpetrated for generations, and their wiles and their magics, and over days he had led the freshly minted spy to an accommodation with his new life.

  ‘Remember, doctor, how you spun your fable of an English empire, stretching across the shining seas, a world lifted free from the yoke of the Unseelie Court?’ he continued, lulling the old man with his steady tone. ‘Remember how we stood side by side at the court of Stephen Bathory, when you conjured the ghost of the Polish King’s long-dead father? How he trembled.’ Will smiled at the memory, another of Dee’s tricks to bend the foreign royal to the will of the English. ‘And how you poured a flask of sack over the head of that preening popinjay, the Earl of Leicester. What a waste of good wine.’

  His soothing voice worked its spell and the old man calmed. Cautiously, Will removed the dagger and stood up, unsure if Dee would slip back into his madness. His heart pounding with awareness that time was slipping away, he looked around the small, windowless chamber until he found an ink-pot and a quill. Hastily, he sketched a few lines on a page torn from the front of a book. Once done, he dangled his work in front of Dee’s face. It showed a horned circle with a dot in the centre, a cross beneath and under that a wavy line, a representation of a devilish man.r />
  ‘Do you recognize your glyph, Dr Dee, the one you described at such length in your vast tome, the Monas Hieroglyphica? You see the astrological symbols? The power it represents? You laboured over this design for years, did you not? You told me how this glyph showed the true secret of all there is, how everything is connected at the smallest and highest levels, and that all we see around is illusion, a stage on which we are the players. Once this wisdom, this glyph, is understood true power comes, you said. Here is your great work, doctor. Here is you, in essence. Remember.’

  The alchemist’s eyes widened and the page was reflected in their depths. His madness was no natural loss of wits, Will felt sure, and if anything could breach his defences and reach the Dee that was, it was his true obsession, his life’s work; the source of all his beliefs, and, perhaps, his powers. The old man’s gaze swam, and for a moment Will felt sure he had failed. But then a mist appeared to rise in the depths of those eyes, and the brows drew together. Dee blinked once, twice, and his gaze drifted to Will. He scowled. ‘So, I am in Hell,’ he croaked.

  ‘As are we all, doctor,’ Will replied. But his smile faded as the lilting strains of pipe and fiddle floated through the smoky air like the waking echoes of a dream. The scent of honeysuckle wafted on the draught. When a drop of blood fell from the spy’s right nostril and spattered on the flags, Dee closed his eyes and mouthed a silent curse.

  The spy drew his rapier and backed against the wall. His gaze drifted up as he heard a clattering overhead. ‘Time to leave, doctor,’ he called.

  Amid the sound of rending, a hole appeared in the ceiling as tiles and wooden laths were torn away. Rain gusted into the dry atmosphere and the crack of thunder rolled all around.

  ‘Too late,’ Will said through gritted teeth. ‘If your wits have fully returned, now is the time to use them.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  THE CANDLE GUTTERED. Shadows flew across the chamber as the storm crashed against the tower like waves against a reef. In the flickering light, Will levelled his rapier and waited for the first of the Unseelie Court to crawl through the holes in the shattered ceiling. He could sense them, clinging to the rain-lashed roof as they waited for their moment. And then they would come like the storm, he knew, teeth and swords and talons, wild eyes and blood.

  Dee clambered to his feet and lurched to an iron lever protruding from a slot in the flagstones. Gripping it with both hands, he wrenched it back. A deep grinding reverberated through the walls. ‘There,’ he exclaimed. ‘The path through the maze is open.’

  ‘Go, then,’ Will replied. ‘The Tempest waits in the cove. I will hold them off.’ Though death was closer than it had ever been, he set aside fear and doubt. He breathed deeply, bringing the stillness inside him. The storm faded away. The flickering light troubled him not. He was ready.

  As Dee stumbled through the door, Will heard a distant shout, and another answering. Tapestries flapped in the gale. Rain pooled on the flags, soaking the age-old books. Still the Unseelie Court waited. Were they taunting him? Trying to frighten him? They knew what strategies worked from generations of torment at lonely farms and on paths through dark woods, but this time they would be disappointed.

  The door crashed open and Carpenter and Launceston burst in, blades drawn. Behind them, Strangewayes stumbled, delirious. ‘Ignore him; he is less than useless,’ Carpenter sneered with a nod. ‘He failed to discover Dee’s paste upon the mirrors.’

  ‘Ah, John, you are sharp as a knife, as always,’ Will said with a flourish of his left hand.

  The other man shrugged. ‘Only a fool would have failed to find it, sooner or later.’ Muttering to himself, Strangewayes stumbled back out of the door.

  Launceston eyed the holes in the roof. ‘So, they wait for their moment, like rats in a barn at night.’ He shook his head and called, ‘You waste our time. Come now and be done with it.’

  The candle guttered one final time and then winked out.

  As the dark swept across the chamber, Will braced himself. He had the door at his back, Carpenter to his left, Launceston to his right, but they were at a disadvantage. The Fay always wrapped themselves in the night.

  When the wind dropped for a moment, he heard the soft thud of someone dropping to the flagstones, then a second. He could sense the other presences in the room, like a yawning grave, but how many had entered he did not know. Gooseflesh prickled on his skin as the chamber grew colder.

  For too long a moment an unnatural silence hung and then Lansing’s icy voice floated through the void. ‘This is what awaits you, a mere taste of death. No heavenly reward, no soothing fields of green or long-lost loved ones. An endless nothing.’

  ‘Reassuring words from the masters of deceit,’ Will replied, one eyebrow arched. ‘Why, whatever I hear from your lips, I believe the opposite.’

  ‘We speak the truth when it suits us,’ Lansing replied. ‘What say you, Master Carpenter? Shall I tell a tale of weakness and betrayal? Or—’

  ‘Your lies are wasted on us,’ Launceston interrupted, unfamiliar passion edging his voice.

  Will swished his rapier from side to side. He was ready should the other Fay creep forward in the impenetrable dark. If he could keep Lansing engaged, at least he could pinpoint the Fay lord’s position in the chamber. ‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘In all the stories we are told, your form and nature change with the teller. Imps, sprites, spectres, bloodsuckers. Fallen angels and demons from the depths of Hell. Are you the devil’s children?’

  In the ringing silence that followed his question, Will thought he was being ignored, but then Lansing began, ‘You think this world belongs to man? We were here first.’ Bitterness swelled his voice. ‘No man could ever understand our pain, our grief, our loss. You call us devils, but in truth we are angels. Saviours—’

  Carpenter snorted with derision. ‘Our saviours?’

  ‘This world’s saviours. From our new homes under hill and lake and sea, we watched your slaughters and your brutality, the destruction you set in motion with barely a thought for consequence. When you put women and children to the spear, and burned others at the stake, and seared flesh with hot iron and put out eyes and lopped off limbs, we saw you were unworthy of this land that you inherited.’

  ‘All men are flawed. But we deserve the right to aspire to greater things,’ Will replied. Sensing a presence only a hair’s breadth from his cheek, he whipped his rapier around, but the steel met only thin air. He felt cold eyes upon him nearby, and flexing fingers keen to tear out his throat or turn his innards to straw or stone.

  ‘It is too late for that,’ the Fay lord replied. ‘Perhaps . . . once . . . before you stole our Queen and meted out your atrocities upon our kind. But now this world will be better without the infestation of man.’

  ‘A fight to the death, then,’ Will said.

  ‘’Twas always going to be that way,’ Launceston sighed. ‘Could you imagine our two races living side by side? Let us be done with it, though the world burn down in the process.’

  ‘And there is man in essence,’ Lansing whispered. ‘Let us be done with it.’

  Trusting his instincts, Will lashed his rapier downwards. The blade sliced into one of the Fay creeping towards him through the dark. A furious howl filled the chamber. Beside him, he could hear Launceston and Carpenter putting their blades to work, and cursing at their inability to see. As he swept his sword back and forth, a haunting song reached his ears from the stone steps beyond the door, the words growing clearer as the singer neared. A woman’s voice, it was, and it could only be Meg.

  ‘

  There were three ravens sat on a tree

  ,

  They were as black as they might be

  .

  With a down, derry, derry, derry, down, down

  .’

  Dee’s potion still gripped her, Will thought, and he called out to warn her away, but still she sang.

  ‘

  Then one of them said to his mate

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  Where shall we our breakfast take?

  Down in yonder green field

  ,

  There lies a knight slain under his shield

  . . .’

  Notes of sadness and regret drifted out through her lilting voice. Even the Unseelie Court seemed entranced, for Will sensed them pause in their attack. When the door swung open, candlelight glowed. Glancing back, he saw Meg framed in the archway. Bafflement filled him; he saw no trace of stupor in her face. But then he noticed her smile, darkly triumphant, and he recognized the Meg of old, when such a smile preceded a length of bloody steel. Yet her eyes were filled with the deepest sadness, and that puzzled him.

  ‘

  His hounds they lie down at his feet

  ,

  So well they can their master keep

  .

  His hawks they fly so eagerly

  ,

  There’s no fowl dare him come nigh

  . . .’

  . . . she sang, and then she raised her candle up so her red hair was all aglow, and beckoned behind her. The roar that echoed up the stairs would have chilled even the most hardened warrior. Will thrust Carpenter and Launceston to one side. On the other side of the chamber, the Fay crouched like cornered animals, mouths black slashes in their bone-white faces.

  Something thundered up the stone steps. Will glimpsed only a flash of oily black skin and fierce white eyes as the Mooncalf bounded past him with a full-throated roar that made his ears ring. No male could fail to be entranced by Meg, he laughed to himself, and even this wild beast danced to her tune.

  As a tumult of rending and tearing, howls and shrieks erupted, the three spies tumbled from the chamber. ‘Your surprises always come with a sting in the tail, Mistress O’Shee,’ Will murmured.