Darkwells

by R. A Humphry

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be disgusted soon,” he promised. Seeing all the lavishness of the ball below brought out the malcontent in him and he started to ramble. “The plutocracy that has emerged from the ruins of the post-empire aristocracy are a national disgrace. We at least were mostly occupied with other pursuits that were not purely mercantile and greed driven. A good many of us took the idea of stewardship, of social responsibility seriously. Oh sure, we only existed due to having dubious and murderous ancestors but for a while we occupied a sweet spot where privilege allowed us a measure of freedom to improve and invent. This lot however, they have no limits, no rules or standards. Just lascivious consumption and destructive accumulation. Just the hedonistic nihilism that is the mirror of the vomit covered drunks punching each other’s lights out at closing time.”

  “Henry?” Heather’s voice asked, sounding concerned. “Are you alright?”

  Henry shook himself. “Yes, sorry. I’m fine.”

  #

  They were ushered straight into the heart of the party from the helicopter by very professional and obliging staff. The ball was just warming up. The orchestra were playing a lively number and couples were gliding around the wide marble floor in splashes of colour. Waiters and waitresses wove in-between the milling crowds with trays full of champagne flutes and small, artfully crafted snacks. Gorgeous women stood looking bored next to balding, fat men. Henry felt a rush of pride. Super-models or no, none of them looked anything close to as beautiful as Heather.

  He concentrated on the job at hand. The totem was up the main stair-case and in a display cabinet in the end room. He had manoeuvred Heather to start in that direction when the whole plan almost fell apart. Coming in the other direction was none other than Max Bolton, laughing too loud at something his plastic doll of a date had said. Max looked up and saw Heather and was visibly taken aback. He saw Henry and started to move towards the pair with malice and mischief in his sly smile. Manu cut him off, putting a meaty hand on Max’s shoulder and whispering in his ear. A moment passed and Max looked at Manu with pure hatred but moved off and Henry let out a breath. He noticed that Heather looked pale and petrified and so he shuffled up to her and took her hand. She seemed to come back to herself and they set off again, weaving between strangers.

  #

  Sneaking up the stairs proved remarkably simple. As did getting down the corridor. Henry suspected that a certain amount of mischief was par for the course at events like these. He had heard rumours about what went on when it got late. Getting into the room they required was another matter. It took Henry ten nervous minutes of casting discovery spell after discovery spell before he found the hair-trigger curse that awaited the unwary thief who charmed the door. He spent more nerve wracking moments unpicking it.

  They hurried into the dark room with thumping hearts. Manu barred the door with a stool and Henry limped over to the display case. The totem was inside. To his mundane eyes it was nothing more than a stick with ostrich feathers attached but he could feel the thrumming power of the curse that was anchored to it. So far so easy. He reached into the cabinet and picked the totem up – thereby triggering an alarm.

  He felt the response instantly. His senses felt four practitioners hurtle towards the blocked door as the alarm spell blared out to their senses. Henry rushed at the door and pulled out his spell-binder and cast a series of lock-out and deflection spells, as quick as he was able. He was just about finished when the battering started. It was clear that the quorum where far too strong to be kept out by his rushed spell. He concentrated hard and poured more power into the door, using his staff as a focus.

  “Heather!” he shouted. “Blow the front off! We need another exit! Now!”

  Heather nodded and made the repel sign with her hand and a side of the building exploded outwards in a spray of glass and brick. Henry looked over and saw that Manu was starting to glow. The door reverberated and Henry was thrown backwards by the force of the impact.

  “Go,” Manu said, picking Henry up. “I will delay them here. Climb down with Heather.” He strode towards the door.

  Henry scrambled to his feet and grabbed the totem, shoving it into his jacket. He followed Heather down through the wreckage she had wrought and was in awe at how agile and nimble she was in that dress and wearing heels. Quite how she had managed to climb down a drain-pipe and keep her hair perfect escaped Henry as he painfully slid down and crumpled at the bottom. Heather helped him up and they stumbled on.

  Two burly security guards rounded the corner and Henry dropped them into a sleep trance before they could reach for their radios. “We need to clear the grounds so I can create a portal,” Henry said. Heather was about to respond but was cut off as Manu was blown clear of the building and landed in the grass to their right. He rolled to his feet and was instantly beset by four figures that looked like giant hyenas. The hideous creatures were swarming over Manu who managed to kick one clear and slash one down the side with one of his daggers before he had to retreat under assault from the other two.

  “Shapeshifters,” Henry commented, “holy shit.” They rushed for the high wall of the compound. Manu was in trouble. One of the hyenas had managed to bite his ankle and was worrying at it as the others came at him. Henry was about to intervene when he felt a surge of power come from the now muttering Heather.

  “What are you doing?” he asked in alarm.

  “Helping,” she said as she let the spell go.

  Henry felt a surge of panic. He didn’t recognise the spell. What the hell had she been reading in the Grimoires? What the hell had he been thinking to give her access to it? His worry was interrupted by small arms fire directed at the hyenas by heavily armed men who were moving behind riot shields with the word SWAT painted on them. The hyenas turned tail and fled and Manu stumbled to his feet and dove for cover from the rain of bullets, wriggling on his belly towards Henry and Heather.

  “Very good Heather,” Henry said as he helped Manu up and stumbled towards the wall again. “But you do realise that we don’t have SWAT teams in England, right?”

  “Always a critic,” she said through heavy breaths. “Sean made us watch Die Hard a few nights ago.”

  “I thought I saw Bruce Willis,” Henry observed.

  “I had very little time, it’s a complicated illusion.”

  “But why did I see Brad Pitt?”

  “I just like Brad Pitt,” Heather said as they reached the wall.

  Henry gestured to Heather and she obliged by blowing a hole into it and they slipped through. They heard howls of frustration and concluded that the quorum had discovered their mistake. Henry built a portal and shoved his two friends through, just as four shapes bounded through the ruined wall.

  #

  They emerged into a frozen wasteland of howling wind and bone-snapping temperatures. Henry cast an environment spell around them to keep them from freezing to death and they staggered forward in the snow. Moments later the hyenas burst through the portal. Manu was waiting for them. The first one through was pinned into the ground by Manu’s daggers. The next was kicked high into the air and he wrapped a muscled arm around the neck of the third, trying to strangle it.

  Henry stood and gathered himself, clearing his mind and then assembling the precise, intricate geometric patterns in his head. He felt a twinge of dread. Once he crossed this line… A Hyena leapt for Heather and he let the spell go. It was his first ever killing spell and it hit the creature square in the side. It went limp mid air and fell to the earth where, horribly, it reverted into its man shape.

  Henry stared at the black face of the man he had killed. He had been a bad man; there was no doubt about it, an evil man. A man who betrayed his people and used his gift for repression, for the pursuit of wealth and prestige. How many of his own had this man killed so he could drive around in a Mercedes? Did that give Henry the right?

  Manu snapped the neck of the Hyena he was wrestling with. The last one, who had been kicked in the air, went for Ma
nu’s neck and Henry set it ablaze. It howled and whimpered and tried to roll in the snow to put out the flames before Manu picked up his daggers and put it down with a clinical stab.

  The three friends stared at each other. Henry removed the totem and handed it to Heather. She nodded, understanding that her superior power was needed. He showed her the spell from his binder and she started the chant. She looked so eerily beautiful and terrible as she cast, stood against the bleak backdrop of endless plains of snow in her elegant dress. As she neared the end of the cycle Henry levitated the totem to get it clear. Heather blasted it and it vaporised in a cloud of purple and blue.

  Heather looked up to Henry with her green eyes. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “I was aiming for the highlands of Scotland,” Henry said rubbing at his neck. “But I appear to have brought us to the North Pole. Merry Christmas.”

  Chapter Twenty One: The Seal

  Christmas day saw the miracle of Ewitan’s recovery. Manu watched as the withered old man's fierce vitality roared back and, replacing the scarecrow who had staggered through the door, was a proud, strong warrior with an almost kingly bearing. Henry was most embarrassed when Ewitan embraced him and thanked him over and over, tears falling free down his ebony cheeks. He watched as his friend waved away the deed with nonchalance and asked Watkins to bring through the gift of clothes and shoes they had prepared.

  It made the hairs on the back of Manu’s neck stand up with pride, to see his friend helping this penniless, proud tribesman. It stirred the embers in the depths of his gut and he felt it deep in his soul that they had done something right, something good. Watkins dropped Ewitan at the train station with a first class ticket to London and the boys were left to themselves. Henry said nothing but poured out a couple of glasses of port and handed one to Manu.

  “It suits you,” Manu commented, “being a hero.”

  “Rubbish,” Henry countered as the clinked glasses. “I’m not the one who leaps about brandishing knives. Cripples can’t be heroes. It’s a well known fact.”

  “It felt good, didn’t it?”

  “It felt bloody exhausting. Thank god it’s over with. I think I’ve done my share of good karma for this decade. With any luck we can have some peace before school starts again.”

  #

  The first of them arrived a week later. They came in much the same manner as Ewitan had, walking the long cold miles from the coach station and pressing the buzzer on the gate. Henry was very put out. “This is what happens when you help people,” he complained. “They never leave you alone.”

  “They don’t know what else to do Henry,” Manu watched him pace back and forth in the drawing room, trying to ignore the group that Watkins had corralled into the antechamber and out of the cold.

  “Why is this my problem?” Henry whined. “What do they want with me?”

  #

  ‘They’ were a group of five young black men, just older than Henry and Manu. They were dressed in urban clothes and had the look about them that Manu had observed made other people cross the street and hold tight to their handbags. Ewitan had sent them. Watkins explained that their leader had told him that the group were apprentice witch-doctors and had been trying to call to Akuj for help. They explained to him that the old men who were supposed to be teaching them didn’t know the chants and had no power. They were asking if the powerful wizard Grenville would teach them their old magic.

  “Please, Henry,” Manu asked.

  “No, no and no again! I was out of my mind when I took Heather on as,” he laughed with more than a tinge of bitterness, “an ‘apprentice’. Did you see what she did during that raid? I have no idea how she did it. None whatsoever. What sort of teacher does that make me? What I did was beyond irresponsible and frankly I am astonished that one of the Order hasn’t blasted their way through the front door to bring me to book. Says a lot about the Order. They don’t seem to take any notice of anything these days. But that’s beside the point. I pushed my luck hard teaching Heather and I’ll excuse myself by saying that she batted her eyelids prettily at me so she is as to blame as I am. Now you want me to train a bunch of strangers? Strangers who look like they are scoping out my house to rob?”

  “Come on Henry, they are not asking you to let them into the Grimoires, they just want some of their heritage back.”

  “No. I won’t do it. I won’t create more of those hyena monsters,” Henry said, flopping into a chair.

  Manu sighed and sat opposite him. “My father,” he started, staring at the door to the antechamber where the boys waited, “was a paratrooper in the British army when he was young. He liked to tell me this story about how they did a survival course in the middle of the Amazon. They were taught how to build a shelter, start a fire, hunt and fish using nothing but the environment. You know, rubbing sticks together. So when they finished the course they were dropped deep in the jungle and were expected to survive and evade their instructors for weeks with nothing. Most of the trainees surrendered after a few days and fired off their rescue flares but my father and a friend of his persisted.

  “They made their way downriver using a canoe they made and started to come across some local tribes. These tribesmen used outboard motors on their canoes and tried to buy cigarettes off the two white men. They wore western clothes and, despite being deep in the forest, used Zippo lighters for everything. When my father started a fire using nothing but sticks these people were amazed, shocked even. You see, they had used lighters and matches for so long that they had forgotten how it was done. They begged him to teach them and so he spent the rest of his time before his instructors found him spreading the knowledge of fire amongst the primitive people who would have discovered it first. He was very proud of that.”

  Henry nodded, “So you want me to do the same? To bring the fire back to Prometheus?”

  “Isn’t that a worthwhile goal? Isn’t that the very point of civilisation?”

  After a long moment Henry sighed. “Alright. But only very basic things. Only their heritage.” He drained his glass. “Is that how you see my purpose?” Manu nodded. “Then I’ll tell you how I see yours. You are doing the journey in reverse, you see. You are the savage who has come back to the old country to teach us how to read.”

  #

  Henry was occupied with lessons until they were due back at Darkwells. Manu gathered that he was pleased with the progress of his pupils who, after an awkward start, proved much more enthusiastic and much less threatening than Henry had imagined. Manu couldn’t help but feel like they were at the beginning of something momentous and the sense left him giddy.

  Darkwells took the wind out of his sails. His little threat to Max during the ball was not forgotten and the vendetta was pursued with a vengeance. It was all Manu could do to keep his temper and stop himself from confronting Max in violence. Henry warned him that Max was hoping for this very thing to happen so that he could get Manu expelled. So Manu endured.

  Henry still pottered about the grounds trying to decipher the spells in the walls that so confounded him. He would tell Manu how all the practical casting he had done in their little adventures and in teaching Heather and the boys had opened up vast new tracts of theory to him, which he hoped would shed light on some of the wards. “I might not need a faerie adviser after all,” he mumbled as he poked at a strange rune-like symbol at the wall.

  “So that’s what you were trying to do,” Manu said, giving Henry a reproachful glare.

  “Of course not. It was a fiendish ploy of mine to reveal your true Warden nature.”

  “What a genius you are.”

  #

  Henry had led Manu up to the battlements on the top of the inner tower of Lingua looking for ‘the lines to the inner hexagram’ when they spotted the strange lightening storm that was engulfing the Tor. Henry stared out with intensity and a churning unease built in Manu. It was mid-afternoon and the weather was fine. “Skies are clear,” he observed to Henry.

  “S
omething is very wrong.” Henry turned and hurried down the spiralling stairs and back to his room in Princes with Manu following behind. Henry grabbed a few items and went to his window, which faced the Tor, and peered out using a long bronze eye glass.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “It looks like… it looks like a battle. Powerful elemental spells and counters. Crazy stuff, especially on the Tor. I think it is getting closer.” Henry stayed at his station observing and making notes as the storm raged on and the light faded. Manu could also sense something approaching. He could feel the whisper of the electric tingle that signified his Warden state approaching. He had decided that it meant bad things.

  Hours later, in full dark, Henry cried out, waking Manu from his light, bored, sleep. “There is someone coming! And he is under attack! Look!” Henry shoved the eye glass at Manu and he peered down the long lens to make out a dark figure running in a zigzag manner across the open space coming towards Princes. The figure was illuminated by a bright flash of blue fire that coiled around and through him and Manu watched him stagger and fall and then pick itself up again. The figure then turned and ghostly shapes of animals sprinted out from an outstretched hand like hunting hounds. Manu pulled his eye back and glanced at Henry, who anticipated him.

  “Yes, yes, we are going to help,” he said, feeling under his bed for the battered staff. Manu reached behind Henry’s bed-head and retrieved his daggers and the two boys rushed out of the building and down the road.

  The mysterious visitor was in deep trouble by the time they rounded the building. They could see that it was a man in a torn and ragged deerstalker who was leaning heavily on an oaken staff. The man had long scruffy hair and his face was bloodied and had rough stubble and the tight look of someone being hunted. The flash of recognition hit Manu just as the five masked magicians coalesced out of darkness around the struggling fugitive. “Harrington!” Manu cried as the group burst into action.