The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  He drew back, closing the door. Against the night, against Them.

  Back in the living room he said, trying to keep his voice even: “What are they?” And: “What do I do?”

  “For the moment,” said Bartlemy, “you stay. I think you need another drink.”

  artlemy sent Hazel home in a taxi that he paid for, even though she insisted she could perfectly well walk. “I have iron,” she pointed out. “I’m not afraid.” She was determined to put Pobjoy in his place, to show him that in a world of dark magic—a world where being a policeman counted for nothing—she was the one who could handle herself. But Bartlemy overruled her and Pobjoy barely noticed. He had more than enough to think about.

  “What are those creatures?” he repeated when the two men were alone.

  And in the subsequent silence: “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “They are not ghosts,” Bartlemy said. “Here, they might be called magical, but you must realize magic is merely a name for a force we don’t understand. Once we can analyze it and see how it works, it becomes science.”

  “That’s an old argument,” Pobjoy said. “Television is magical unless you’re a TV engineer. The things out there—how do they work?”

  “They come from another universe,” Bartlemy explained matter-of-factly. “They are made of fluid energy, with little or no solid form; partly because of this, some can migrate between worlds. The species has the generic name of gnomons, but those able to cross the barrier are called Ozmosees. I heard about them—read about them—once, but these are the first I have ever seen, since although they did exist in this universe, they died out here long ago. They are hypersensitive to sound, smell, light, but they have no intelligence and must be controlled. I am not sure how that is done; possibly by the dominion of a very powerful mind.”

  “What are you saying?” Pobjoy demanded, resolutely skeptical. “They got here through the back of a wardrobe?” He had read few of the right books but had once inadvertently watched a documentary on the making of Narnia.

  “I doubt it.” Bartlemy smiled. “Unfortunately, I know very little about them, and their behavior—as you must realize—is hard to study, though I have tried. The process may be assisted by attaching them to a person or object in this world, thus drawing them out of their place of origin. We cannot know for certain. However—”

  “What object?” Pobjoy interrupted. He was a detective, and even on such unfamiliar territory he could work out which questions to ask.

  “I imagine you can guess.”

  There was a short pause. “The cup?” Pobjoy said, as illumination dawned. “The Grimthorn Grail?”

  “Precisely,” Bartlemy replied, looking pleased, like a teacher with a pupil who, after a long struggle, has finally grasped the principles of calculus. “They appear to have been sent to guard it. There are also indications that their guardianship extended to Nathan and Annie—”

  “Nathan and Annie? But—why?—how?”

  “I don’t know,” Bartlemy admitted. “There is some connection between them and the Grail, too complicated to go into now. In any case, I am not yet sure exactly what it is, or how deep it goes.”

  “Did Nathan steal it that time?” Pobjoy asked sharply.

  “Dear me, no. In fact, he got it back. It’s a long story, too long for now. To return to the gnomons, the problem seems to be that they are no longer—focused. There was no reason for them to pursue you, yet they did. And there have been other incidents lately. Evidently they are getting out of hand. The power that manipulated them may be losing its grip, or merely losing interest. There could be other factors. At this time, we have no way of finding out.”

  “Are you saying someone here—some sort of wizard”—Pobjoy enunciated the word with hesitation and distaste—“is controlling these creatures? Some local bigwig with secret powers?” He didn’t even try to keep the irony from his tone.

  “Of course not,” Bartlemy said mildly. He was always at his mildest in the face of scorn, anger, or threat. “Their controller is in the universe from which they came. That’s why we know so little about him.”

  “If this is true,” Pobjoy said, attempting to keep the world in its rightful place, “what’s his interest in the Grail?”

  “He placed it here,” Bartlemy said. “Probably for safekeeping. A long time ago I had a teacher who contended there were many other-world artifacts secreted—or in some cases dumped—on this planet. He claimed they were responsible for almost all myths and legends, and several major religions. Apples of youth, rings of power, stone tablets falling out of the sky. That sort of thing. Of course, he may have exaggerated a little.”

  He’s nuts, Pobjoy thought. Clever, yes—harmless—but nuts. I wonder if Annie knows?

  Then he visualized the gnomons, waiting in the dark …

  He spent the night in the guest room.

  HE WAS woken in the small hours by someone tapping on the window. It was a gentle sound, barely louder than the rain, but it jerked him abruptly from sleep. Too abruptly. For a few seconds he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing there. His bleary gaze made out a shape through the panes, behind the raindrops. A face. A pale blurred face with midnight eyes and a floating mist of hair. A face he had seen somewhere before, the same and yet different, but he couldn’t quite catch hold of the memory. He got up and tried to make his way across the room, but he stumbled against the unfamiliar furniture and when he looked again the face was gone. Back in bed he returned gratefully to the realm of sleep.

  It was only in the morning that it struck Pobjoy that his room was on the second floor. He opened the window, surveying the crime scene, but there was no convenient tree nearby, and the ivy on the wall would never support a climber. Downstairs, he slipped out into the garden, checking the earth for the imprint of a ladder, but there was none. Over the best breakfast he had ever eaten he called the AA for his car and the police station for a lift to work. For the moment, he wanted no further discussion with Bartlemy.

  He needed some time to convince himself none of it had ever happened.

  IT WAS a long time since Hazel had walked through the woods without the comfort of the iron door number in her pocket, and she was disturbed by how defenseless its loss made her feel. She had been in the habit of fingering the metal as she walked, fiddling with it like a worry bead, and now her hand was stuck in her pocket with nothing to do, clenching involuntarily from time to time, relaxing again when she noticed her nails digging into her palm. She was some distance from the road, on a track that wound its way toward the valley of the Dark-wood, where it petered out. All tracks failed in the Darkwood, a deep fold in the countryside with a stream running through it that would change course in a shower of rain, where the trees tangled into thickets and the undergrowth grew into overgrowth and any sunlight got lost on its way to the ground. Long ago Josevius Grimthorn, first guardian of the Grail, had performed bizarre rites in a chapel there—a chapel buried for centuries under the leafmold and the choking tree roots. Nathan had stumbled into it once by accident, but there was a spell on the place that forbade him to speak of it, and it was long before he found it again. And Josevius’s house had been there, too, burned down in the Dark Ages, where Login the dwarf had been imprisoned in a hole beneath the earth.

  Hazel was thinking of that as she walked, wondering if he was watching her from some hidden hollow in the leaves, or perched furtively among the branches. She glanced around every so often, watchful and wary, but there was only the great stillness of the trees stretching in every direction. That’s the thing about woods, she thought: when you’re inside one it seems much bigger than it really is, as if it goes on forever. And they had their own special quiet, when they shut out the sounds of the free wind and the open sky, and you could hear a twig crack or an acorn drop a long way off. But that afternoon there was little to hear.

  She knew this part of the wood well—she had come there as a child, when her father still lived at home and she w
anted to be on her own. She would scramble up among the boughs and stay there for hours, watching mites creeping in the bark, or a caterpillar eating its way through a leaf, listening to the bird chatter and the insect murmur, and the great silence waiting behind it all. Later, when she was older, she had come to talk to the woodwose, Nathan’s strange friend, with his stick limbs and sideways stare, till he went back to his own place. She had always felt at ease here, on familiar territory—until now. Now, when she knew the gnomons were lurking somewhere, no longer bound to their purpose but aimless and astray, ready to turn on anything that crossed their path. Hoover was trailing her, some twenty yards back, which gave her a little security, but nonetheless she jumped when a squirrel’s tail whisked around a tree bole, froze into alertness at the tiniest rustle in the leafmold.

  But they did not come. There were a hundred small warnings, a hundred false alarms. And nothing. The path ran out, and the woodland floor dipped toward the valley. Don’t go there, Bartlemy had said. There’s no room to run, and you could easily get lost. If you reach the Dark-wood, turn back.

  Hazel turned back. After a while, Hoover caught up with her, lolloping at her heel.

  “No luck,” Hazel said. If luck was what she was looking for.

  “They inna there,” said another voice close by—a voice with a brogue as old as the hills, and almost as incomprehensible.

  “Hello,” Hazel said, politely. “Have you seen them?”

  “Nay,” said the dwarf. “They’ll be in the auld chapel, where the magister used to consort wi’ the Devil when he popped up from hell for a chat. I’ve seen them there o’ nights, a-heebying and a-jeebying, whispering thegither for hours, though I never heard they had aught to say.”

  “It’s not night,” Hazel pointed out.

  “Night—day—at the runt end of the year, there’s no muckle difference.”

  “Could you show me the place?” Hazel asked. “Not now—it’s a bit late—but another day?”

  “Aye,” the dwarf said slowly. “But I’m thinking the goodman would not be wanting ye to go there.”

  “Then we won’t tell him,” Hazel said, doing her best to sound resolute. “We have to trap the gnomons. If they won’t come to me, then I have to go to them.”

  “Ye’re a bold lass,” said the dwarf, but whether in approval or criticism she couldn’t tell. “I’ll be seeing ye.”

  He was gone, and ahead she saw Bartlemy emerging from the gloom of the fading daylight.

  “They didn’t come,” Hazel said.

  “So I gather. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  But on Sunday it rained too heavily for hunting phantoms, and during the week Hazel had school.

  “I could skive off one afternoon,” she offered, nobly.

  “No,” said Bartlemy. “We’ll wait for the weekend.”

  “The weekend,” Hazel echoed, thinking of the Darkwood and the chapel under the tree roots, and her stomach tightened in anticipation of terrors ahead.

  NATHAN WENT back to school on Monday, still taking the painkillers each night, less to make him sleep than to keep him in his bed. It was always awkward wandering between worlds in the dormitory, since the more solid he appeared in his dreams, the more insubstantial his sleeping form would become. It was only when he was back home for the weekend, and assuring his mother he was restored to fitness, that he stopped taking the drugs.

  That night, he lay for a while unsleeping, his body rigid at the thought of the planet undersea. The Grandir was right: he knew what he had to do. Find the third relic—the relic removed from Eos countless years ago by the Grandir himself, to shield it from the greedy and the misguided. The Iron Crown. The Crown of spikes forged originally by Romandos, first of the Grandirs, to form a part of the Great Spell to save their people—a plan laid over millennia, woven into the legends of a thousand worlds, hidden in a web of folklore and lies. Nathan still had no idea what the spell itself involved, or how it could engender salvation—he knew only that it had more power than a galaxy imploding and would shake the very multiverse to its core. Even the Grandir, he suspected, had yet to fill in all the gaps in his vision of destiny. The Grandir who thought he was a true-born descendant of Romandos and his bride-sister, Imagen, though Nathan had seen in his naked face the ghost of Imagen’s lover Lugair.

  Nathan lingered between sleep and waking, thoughts floating free in his mind. Lugair had betrayed Romandos—Romandos his friend— slaying him with the Traitor’s Sword, to be slain in his turn … the Sword had been held in Carboneck for generations, a curse on the kings of Wilderslee and on their people … the Grail had been guarded by Josevius and the Thorns, the so-called luck of the family, its burden and its bane … and the Iron Crown must be in Widewater, somewhere in the deeps of the sea. The masculine principle, the feminine principle, and the circle that binds. Three elements that together might change a world, or all worlds … But Osskva the mage had told him it needed a sacrifice—it needed blood. Blood had begun it, Romandos’s blood, and blood must finish it—the blood of his descendant. It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people … who had said that? Suddenly Nathan was sure the Grandir was ready for that, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Not out of love perhaps—it was hard to imagine him loving his people; he seemed above such sentiment—but from a supreme sense of duty, from pride, from his absolute commitment to his heritage and his world. And for Halmé, whom he loved indeed, Halmé the beautiful for whom he had said that world was made …

  There must be another way, Nathan thought, knowing the thought was futile. He had no power to change things. He was caught up in this like a snowflake in a storm, a tiny component in a huge machine, and all he could do was whatever he had to do. Only this, and nothing more. Why did he keep thinking of that poem, and Annie’s face when he talked of the Grandir, so pale and still? He had to find the Crown.

  And then he remembered Keerye, talking of the Goddess, and how she had an iron crown that never rusted, kept in a cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef.

  How could he have failed to pick up the clue? But he had been inside Ezroc’s head, sharing his thoughts and feelings, no longer a boy but an albatross riding on the wind. Oh to fly again …

  His mind turned to dragons—it would be dragons—great fire-breathing monsters, far more deadly than Urdemons or giant lizards. But no dragon could breathe fire underwater. He visualized a vast serpentine creature, winged and clawed and fanged, rising in a storm of bubbles, the sea boiling against its flanks. Its mouth opened on a gullet of flame, its red-hot tongue crackled like a lava flow in the alien element … The ocean erupted into steam as the dragon ascended, dripping wings driving it into the sky …

  Somehow, in the midst of such visions, he fell asleep.

  And now he was flying again, not the dragon but the bird. Soaring on the high air into a deep blue night. Southward and eastward there was a faint pallor along the horizon; light leaked into the sky. The sun’s disk lifted above the rim of the globe and the light washed over the ocean, turning the waves to glitter. Ahead, Nathan saw a broken shoreline of crags and peaks and towers, rough-faceted, glimmering here and there with a glimpse of crystal. The Ice Cliffs. As he drew nearer he made out a vast colony of seabirds stretching along the escarpment: gannets, puffins, auks, gulls, terns—the squawking of their competing chatter was like the din of a whole city. On the highest part of the ridge there was a group of albatrosses, twenty or thirty pairs, far bigger than the other birds—bigger than the albatrosses Nathan had seen in nature shows—some, at a guess, nearly as tall as he was, or would have been if he had been solid. Ezroc, he realized, had grown, too: his wingspan seemed to reach halfway across the world. He gazed down at the mating pairs—Nathan remembered that albatrosses mate for life—and felt the sorrow in Ezroc’s heart because he was alone, he had chosen loneliness to pursue his long voyages in search of Keerye who was dead and the islands that were no more.

  In Ezroc’s mind he heard a memory replaying, t
he voice of an older bird, a relative or mentor: The islands are lost, young Stormrider, if they ever existed. You have journeyed many miles farther than your namesake— you have followed the great currents to the south—merfolk have hunted you, boiling spouts have singed your feathers, sea monsters have chased your shadow across the waves. You know the truth. The seas are empty. Stay here; settle down withy our own kind. Until the Ice Cliffs melt, the northfolk will have a place to be.

  And Ezroc’s reply: It is not enough. The words of a maverick, stubborn beyond reason, holding on to a vision no one else could see.

  He passed over the colony, ignoring the birds that raised their heads to watch him, speeding along the floating shoreline. Below, Nathan glimpsed other creatures, refugees from the lost lands of long ago, surviving on the Great Ice. A troop of penguins waddling along a promontory, plopping into the sea—clumsy and comic on the ice, arrow-smooth in the water. A huddle of sea lions and trueseals, nursing their newborn pups. A great snowbear waiting at a borehole till its dinner came up for air. And an enormous walrus, tusked and bristled, heaving himself up onto a floe, who raised a flipper in greeting.

  Ezroc wheeled and swooped down to land on the ice beside him.

  “Greetings, Burgoss. May your mustache never grow less! I’ve been away awhile—what is the word along the Ice Cliffs?”

  “Greetings, young’un,” the walrus grunted. “What makes you think I have time for the jabber of chicks and pups? I don’t listen to children’s gossip, and when they’re grown their talk is all of food and sex. Enough to deafen you with boredom. If that’s the word you seek, ask elsewhere.”

  “You are the oldest and wisest creature in all the seas,” Ezroc said, flattering shamelessly. “Except for the whales. If there is any news worth knowing, you will know it.”