by R. A Humphry
Henry decamped to Hawksworth when Manu was not around to watch the corridors for Killynghall. He had moved from obsessing about the door to trying to decrypt the runes with obsessive fervour. “It’s the runes, Manu. The runes. They control the door. I can feel it. I can sense it. Once I understand them, then it should be easy!” Manu had nodded and smiled, as you are supposed to do when confronted with wild eyed ranting people.
#
It was a clear crisp mid-winter spring day when Heather decided that it was time they took a picnic up to the Tor. Manu carried the basket as Henry and Heather chatted on the pleasant walk through empty fields up from Darkwells to the base of the hill. Henry waved away the suggestion that he might struggle on the path up to St Michael’s tower and they made slow but steady progress. Heather was in good spirits and Manu felt none of the wound up tension he had sensed before. Perhaps it had just been his own fears, he reasoned, that he projected onto Heather. He knew he had enough of them.
St Michael’s was built in the same style as Darkwells. It looked as if it had been removed from one of the Darkwells buildings and shifted onto the hill by some giant hand. Manu spent a few minutes walking around the hollowed out church and running his hands on the rough, darkened stone. The view was spectacular. The flat lands spread out around them for miles and miles. He could see the cluster of stone that was Darkwells to one side. He could see Glastonbury spread out behind him and other towns further in the distance. The sky was cloudless and the visibility was superb. Being on the hill reminded Manu of being on the edge of the escapement, back home. He took a deep breath of the country air and then sauntered back to Henry and Heather who were sat on a picnic blanket and eating from the basket Manu had carried up.
A couple of other tourists were poking about the Tor and Manu noticed that Heather was watching them with veiled annoyance, all but throwing things at them in her wish for them to depart. She handed Manu a heel of bread and some cheese and then sighed with relief as the interlopers moved off down the hill. “Thank god. Bloody Yanks, they are like rats around here. So, I wanted to bring you both here to show you something,” she said grinning. Henry sat up straighter on the blanket. Heather winked at him and closed her eyes and raised her hands up, muttering a spell.
“Heather!” Henry hissed in near panic, “Heather, not here!”
She ignored him and continued with her chant. Manu noticed that the light changed. The sun began to move in the sky and the wind veered from north to west. The grass under their blanket withered and knee high bushes pushed up all around them. St Michaels vanished behind them. Heather’s eyes fluttered open.
Henry was on her in a second. “What are you doing? Are you crazy? We are on The Tor.”
“Oh hush,” Heather said, annoyed. “I’m not that stupid. I wouldn’t try an evocation here, you are right. I am very clumsy doing that, unlike you. But doing things like this,” she said spreading her hands to encompass the horizon, “I find I am very deft.”
The boys looked up to see what she meant. As far as the eye could see the earth was azure sky with fleecy clouds drifting above and below them on their lonely hilltop. It looked as though they floated on an island in the midst of the very heavens. Heather beamed at their expressions. “Welcome to Ynys Gutrin,” she said. “The isle of glass.”
Manu’s mind caught up with what he was seeing. It was water. The flat plains had been replaced with still water that was reflecting the sky like a mirror for miles. Heather explained. “I’ve conjured an image of what the Tor was like, before they drained all the fens. I’ve been reading up about it. It’s amazing isn’t it? I wasn’t sure it would work.”
“Heather,” Henry asked, finding his voice. “What is this?”
“An illusion Henry, what do you think? You are such a rubbish teacher.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean,” Henry cleared his throat before continuing, “I’ve never seen this spell before. Nor even heard it described. Where did you learn it?”
There was a pause before Heather turned in annoyance with a whip of her hair. Manu jerked back. Was that a whisper on the wind he had heard as she stalked past?
“Can’t you just be impressed for once?” she shot back at him as she packed up the picnic.
“Heather, come on. You know I am gob-smacked. You know that. I just have to be a little concerned when…”
“It’s one of your mother’s spells,” Heather said, cutting him off. “It’s from her own Grimoires. The ones you never open.”
Henry stared at her for a second, and then dropped his head. “I’m sorry. I just… the problem is that you are frighteningly good sometimes and I don’t know how to handle it. You’re right, I am a terrible teacher.”
#
The walk down the Tor was quieter. Gone was the playful teasing by Heather or the pretentious stanzas of recited poetry by Henry. Manu was caught up in his own thoughts as well and a new comer might not have recognised them as friends at all. The atmosphere got worse when they came to the main road and were confronted by the presence of Max Bolton who was sat in the visitors’ car park in his brand new Porsche, talking on his phone. Manu’s shoulders tensed as Max spotted them and a hung up his phone with an amused chuckle.
“Well, well. Looks like Lord Grenville likes a bit of outdoor action. Can’t blame you mate. She is a stunner. I would. All the way up the Tor and down again. Bet she would to.”
Manu winced, expecting Heather to engulf the car in flames. He was surprised when she just flinched and hurried past. Max watched her go. “Very nice,” he said, staring at her retreating form. He looked up at Manu. “As for you, Tonga. We’ll be coming for you again tonight. I love to hear it when you whimper.”
“Maybe I’ll be waiting,” Manu responded. He was gratified, in a childish way, by the flash of uncertainty that danced across Max’s face. He looked young then, when he was unsure of himself. Max took the bully's way out and switched victims.
“You know she’s just a hooker, right hop-a-long? I know her, you see. We’re from the same muck round here. Girls like her? They are only after the money. Twice as true when it comes to cripples like you. That’s why she pretends to hate me, you see. I’m the kind of guy she would have spread her legs for without any money and now that I’ve got some she knows I won’t bother with her kind. Or maybe I will, eh?”
Manu saw Henry’s knuckles go white on his cane. He felt deep alarm as he saw Henry start muttering to himself and then all four of Max’s tyres exploded and his windscreen cracked and splintered into a thousand spider-web pattern. “Well,” Henry said, eyes wide with bafflement, “that’s extraordinary!” Max was trying to fight his way clear of the deployed airbag. “Manu, have you ever seen anything like that happen before?” Manu shook his head, grinning. “I hope you have the RAC number. Good luck explaining that one, mate.”
#
A couple of weeks passed when Manu came into Henry’s room to find him dancing about in triumph. Manu looked at his friend for answers but Henry didn’t explain and instead he grabbed Manu and marched him around the room as his partner in a terrible Waltz.
“Henry?” Manu asked laughing. “Are you drunk?”
“Better! I’ve cracked them. Bloody runes thought they were better than me. Ha! Ha ha ha!” Henry, at length, sat down although his excitement level did not dim at all. “It was so simple! I was just distracted by bloody Merlin. I feel so stupid. It’s a classic thing to happen, to get confused by Merlin. So many Practitioners lose their sanity trying to just prove or disprove his existence and yet I was stupid enough to fall into the same trap.”
“Henry, what are you babbling about?”
“It’s Gerald Fitzgerald! Not Merlin. Don’t you see? The founder of Darkwells made the door and made the riddle. He was supposed to be utterly mad. Irish you know. Would disappear and re-appear all over the place. Lived in a cave by Lough Gur composing poetry. But he built the door and wrote the runes. So once you know it is him, you can translate i
t! Am I not a genius?”
“What does it say?” Manu asked. Henry looked a little wild around the edges.
“It’s a riddle! To open the door! How magical is that? We just solve the riddle and we are in. Then we grab the Seal. I spend months and months figuring out how to use it, we break into the Tower, give the seal to Harrington and then retire to Hawksworth and Heather will have to bow down to me forever and call me her king.”
“Er, Henry? What was the Riddle?”
“Oh, yes. It is a little obscure. The translation is not perfect so I’ve had to change it a little. But in good old Riddle-poem fashion, it goes like this:
“The foretold key holds fang and bone
The lock needs fire from air
And frost brought forth from tile and stone
Then enter the dragon’s lair
Be sure the words are all your own.”
Manu cleared his throat. “And you know what the this means?”
“Sure. I think it is clear. Old magical text are full of this sort of rubbish. Bone and fire and frost and air. Elements. Conductors of some sort. Dragons. A test. It is all quite standard. We’ll go and unlock it tomorrow. Don’t worry old chap, the hard part is done.”
#
They wound their way down the long narrow tunnels. Henry had insisted that Heather come along to witness his moment of glory and she had, despite her obvious reluctance, agreed. The hidden entrance to the tunnels was behind a faded mural in the Latin wing of Lingua. Whatever image it had once shown was lost to time and neglect. It was dank and dark and the ethereal floating orbs the Henry conjured to follow them just made it more otherworldly.
As they walked they could see images from a painted frieze running down the length of the tunnel. It was a battle scene full of fluttering pennants and armoured combatants. The same figures would assert themselves again and again as they walked down the tunnel following Henry’s stead tap tap. A Knight in green armour would rise from the darkness into the glow of Henry’s light and Manu would see him frozen in battle against a demon fighting with a mighty war-axe. Another figure in shining robes appeared. Here he was smiting a wolf-man; there he was defending a stairwell. Manu wondered at who these figures were supposed to represent and what cataclysms the paintings were trying to capture.
The door was set in a little hollowed-out cave. It was large, at least twelve feet wide and a good nine feet tall and was a dull bronze. There was a drip that measured out the seconds as it landed in a never widening puddle. Heather peered at the door without much enthusiasm. She ran her hands over the carved runes that had caused Henry so much trouble and sighed in what sounded like boredom. Henry didn’t notice but hurried over to one of the runes. He muttered a spell and a bright flame danced midair casting a warm, flickering light.
Heather looked at Henry in surprise and confusion. “Mathers?” she asked uncertainly.
“Grenville,” Henry replied, not quite managing to keep the smug look on his face. “Henry Grenville to be precise. The stupid riddle rune was quite clear that the words should be my own, so I concocted a little flame spell. The door seems to be a sort of entrance exam for practitioners.” Henry walked across the little chamber and mumbled another spell. A bizarre stalagmite rose up from the floor in front of the other set of runes. “Right, just fang and bone to go.” He drew out an invisible circle with his walking stick and then sprinkled out some salt. He lit a candle and burnt a lock of his hair and then sat back and waited.
A good five minutes passed before a glowing ball of light appeared in the middle of his salt circle. The ball grew and grew and then resolved itself into the shape of a large Siberian tiger. Manu took a step back as the Tiger paced around the circle and growled. Heather retreated to the wall looking very unhappy.
Henry, though, looked delighted. “Well, that’s a surprise! The distinction between ‘Lion’ and ‘Tiger’ is quite subtle in Spellwork, it turns out. But it should still work. Alright. Here goes.” Henry hobbled past the tiger and tapped confidently against the brass door with his staff.
The door did not open. What did happen, though, was that the door pulsed with a dull ring and flung Henry back across the chamber like an ant flicked from a table. As he cannoned past, Henry’s leg dragged in the earth and broke the circle containing the tiger and unleashed chaos. The tiger roared free and went for Manu, whose blazing gold aura was the only light left in the chamber. Henry lay slumped in a corner. Manu battled with the tiger, which was all together too fast and too strong. In mere seconds the beast had him pinned on his back and it was all he could manage to hold open its massive jaws as it sought his throat. He had enough time to think of his father’s Arabian knife tucked up under Henry’s bed and how useful it would have been.
Just as he thought the beast had put an end to him he heard what sounded like an urgent whisper and a cackling laugh and then the tiger shattered into dust in his hands. He scrambled up to his feet and stared at Heather, who stood with a shocked expression on her face and with her hands raised. “Heather? Heather, what did you just do?”
“I… I’m not sure.”
Manu looked down at his hands and was surprised to see that he was still glowing. Perhaps he was glowing more. “Thank you, I think it would have got me.”
“She said it would have. That’s why I tried. I never usually listen…”
Manu stared at her and she turned away. “Heather, who are you talking about?”
She didn’t reply and instead went to the unconscious Henry. She whispered a word in his ear and his eyes flicked open, a shock of blue in the golden light. Henry took one look at Manu’s battered state and scrambled up.
“Right. So that was a miserable failure. That’s it. I give up. I am at least smart enough to know when I am beaten. Well played Gerald Fitzgerald you mad Irish bastard.”
Chapter Twenty Six: Whispers
Heather’s life had changed forever. It was a fact she repeated to herself every night as she went to bed, lulled into sleep by the gentle rocking of The Black Swan in the canal. Henry treated the reality rending fact of magic with careless acceptance. He treated it with the ambivalence of one who had grown up with its impossibility as a given. But then Henry had grown up in Hawksworth Hall and thought that it was normal to have dinner served by a staff of five every night. The disbelief that outsiders had at his privileged lifestyle and his complete ease with it mirrored the situation regarding magic. His was from a famed practitioner family after all and, like his lavish lifestyle, he’d never known anything else.
Heather had known otherwise. From the moment she had cast her first spell she realised that everything had changed forever. At a stroke, crushing weights were lifted from her shoulders. The fears that she let go of were startling in that she had never admitted to herself that she had them at all. She would never go hungry, or thirsty. She would never be cast out into the streets and forced to live on the margins or rely on the state. She would never have to stand with her mother in the queue outside the Job-Centre to pick up her allowance. Fears of loan-sharks and bailiffs receded away as her repertoire of spells increased. It was like winning the lottery and her life would never be the same. She told herself this every night so she would remember. Henry, stupid and careless Henry, had made it all possible and she would never forget it.
Magic had brought about a profound change in her life ambitions as well. The Black Swan was proof of the change. Gone was the mad clutter of her costume-making art, which had spread into every nook and cranny before her moment of revelation. It was not that she had lost interest in the hobby that had been her life’s passion, but she found that her old dreams felt small and girlish. It was Henry’s gift to her that took pride of place in The Black Swan now.
The jade bracelet was, by far, her most treasured possession. She used it almost every day. She would pop into Hawksworth and spend her hours studying the Grimoires. Watkins seemed fond of her and treated her as if she were a member of Henry’s family. He would bring her f
ood and tea and help her find obscure volumes. As a result of her new passions her old applications lay in limbo and her portfolio was frozen in time. Her attendance to the college dropped and her tutors even wrote concerned letters to her mother, who had asked Heather about it in a distracted sort of way.
“Oh, I’ve just been spending time with Henry, is all it is,” Heather had told her. This mollified her mother. Nothing in the world was as transparent as her mother’s desire that Heather immediately marry the wealthy, affable, Lord Grenville and move them all into Hawksworth Hall. Heather smiled to herself. Nothing but Henry’s own clumsy courtship, perhaps. It was something she tried not to think about too much. She was interested, sure - why shouldn’t she be? She was old enough and wise enough to see him as a woman would. He wasn’t the tall dark stranger who would whisk her off her feet on a wind-swept moor. He was the other guy, the kind-hearted one whose looks were more cute than sexy. He was the one who would be the good husband, the life partner, the one who would never abandon a woman or stray or tire of her. He was every mother’s dream catch: rich and polite and kind.
Heather saw all this and more. She loved his complete lack of pretention. He was who he showed himself to be, warts and all. His wealth meant nothing to him, other than in the things it allowed him to do. He was thoughtful and clever and braver than he gave himself credit for. Yet, despite all this, there was still enough of the girl in Heather to hold back. Later, she would tell herself, we can do it later. There was also something in her that rebelled against the obvious fit, the pre-ordained nature of their coming together. There was nothing she hated more than being predictable.
