Claude felt queasy threads of panic squirming beneath his skin. Because he had made the elementary mistake of all young wizards: he had thought he was in control of the magic, but he was himself entrained in the spell he had set in motion. They both were, the story and all its characters were. The Tyrant was already waiting for them in his place of power, and as terrible as the consequences would be if they attacked him and failed, Claude literally could not imagine the consequences of not attacking him at all. Because he, Claude, had made the Tyrant real. The Tyrant was real, and awake, and waiting.
So the story had to end. It had to end. And yet . . .
The panic did not diminish, but it began to wind itself through other strands, a briar patch of anger.
Because if the story didn’t end, and the Tyrant survived in all his fury, then maybe that would serve Paul right. Even if Claude had to share in the consequences. Maybe that was no more than Paul the traitor deserved.
At least, that was one way the story might go.
The Lady of Fountains had her place in the valley, as the Cellarer had his. The spring that provided drinking water to the farmhouse was one of the imaginary keep’s anchor-points, one of the places where the game had something tangible to latch on to. Like the mine shaft, it was a forbidden place, but unlike the mine it was not forbidden because it was dangerous. No, it was forbidden because the water must not be sullied; the spring must be kept pure. And so, as the Cellarer was a dangerous man full of dark secrets, the Lady was vulnerable and aloof. She was one of the wild powers that needed protecting from the Tyrant’s wicked greed as much as she was one of the powers that did the protecting. And so even her Laundress guise was delicate and wary.
In fact, the Laundress was one of the elements of the story Paul was most fond of, not least because he had made her up himself. She was a girl, half human, half wild, who let her magic mingle with the wash-water so that it could protect the dreams of those who slept between her sheets. When Paul was visited by nightmares or couldn’t sleep for thoughts of his fights with Claude, he took clean sheets from the linen closet and pretended they came from the Laundress’s cauldrons, and such was the magic of the game that it always worked. The Laundress was imaginary, yet somehow her spells were real.
Would it still work, Paul wondered, when the game was done?
The Lady’s pool coiled like a sleeping cat in the elbow of the western hill. The water was shallow and very clear, shaded by rocks and trees and the gently thumping pump house that squatted on the bank. On that cold autumn morning the pool was fringed with ice, crystals more delicate than communion wafers. Paul knelt on the flat Summoning Stone and broke off a piece of ice to slip onto his tongue. It gave a taste much wilder than the water that came from the tap at home, the essence of ice formed in a hollow of stone and flavored by the weeping of trees, and he realized it was too late in the year to summon the Laundress from her clouds of steam. This cold, clear silence was the Lady’s signature and her rightful realm.
“Lady,” he whispered, his breath a cloud, and although he did not really listen for her answer, he felt a strangely adult pang of longing for the days, the very recent days, when he would listen with all his soul. What would become of the Lady without the game? Would she . . . die? A crazy thought, but it went with that moment of sadness. Goodbye, Paul thought. Goodbye.
“Lady,” said Claude, kneeling beside him, “we beseech your blessing. Please. Give us a sign. Is this the right thing to do?”
Paul gave him a sidelong look. Was what the right thing to do? Ending the game? The run through the cold morning had stung color into Claude’s cheeks, but it looked like rouge painted over his pallor. His face was tight with strain; sweat dewed his temples and his downy lip. For the first time it occurred to Paul that his brother was actually sick, fighting a fever of the body as well as the mind. God knew, he probably hadn’t slept all night, gearing himself up for the final play. Compassion twinged in Paul’s chest. Let’s get this done, he thought, for both their sakes.
“The Cellarer has given us our task,” he said in the best game voice he could summon. “We do not seek to be released from our duty, only to be confirmed in it. Lady, give us your blessing.”
“Lady,” Claude whispered, the words barely more than breath smoking on the air, “give us a sign.”
“Lady, give me a sign.”
Claude knelt in the chill purity of the Wellhouse, watching the reflection of the sky upheld by pillars that were immense even in their ruination. They had fulfilled their task in the laundry, hiding in the steam from the Tyrant’s spies, and the Laundress had beckoned them inwards, through all the concealing bustle to the hidden door to the ancient holy place, the door she in her Laundress guise was there to protect. Now they were within (and he blessed Paul for finding the way through) and his heart ached for the Lady’s recognition of his dilemma, for a touch of the Lady’s gentle grace. A sign. He held the fate of the Tyrant, the fate of the keep, in his hands. What should he do?
“The price,” he whispered, though there was no echo to pick up the words and speak them anew. “The price of freedom.”
He could hear Paul breathing beside him, and in the far distance, no louder than his heartbeat, the rhythmic thumping of the laundry’s mangles. Even here they were within the keep. Here, they were within the keep as it should have been if the Tyrant had never come—as it might be again once the Tyrant was gone. Was that Claude’s sign? Was that the only answer he was going to get?
No. The sun was still rising above the eastern ramparts, and now a long shaft of autumnal sunlight slipped through the pillars to brush the Lady’s pool with gold. Her benison. And then, with a whisper of wings, a black bird followed the sunlight down to the water’s edge. It was a crow, one of the birds of war, drinking from the Lady’s own water. There was Claude’s answer, as clear as if she had spoken in words, and he was glad—oh, most bitterly glad!—or perhaps he was only bitter. But there was no arguing, the Lady was an oracle in this place. There would be war. They would take the Cellarer’s martial spells to the Tyrant’s stronghold, they would strike, and they would bear the consequences together, win or lose.
They bowed to the Lady’s invisible presence and rose. The crow started up and flew ahead of them through the trees.
Paul was itching to run again. It was obvious Claude was leading him to the Tyrant’s tower, what they had called the castle rock in the days before the game had expanded to fill the whole valley with the keep. Back then, when the farm had encompassed their world, the farmhouse had been the witch’s forest cottage and the castle rock the place where they had been sent on their fairytale quests. Sometimes their mother had played the role of the witch, sending them off to gather ingredients for her magical spells—getting the boys out of the house and out of her hair, Paul had come to realize. But it was those games that had given rise to the game, and it was the castle rock, a steep-sided lump of granite like an island in the upper field, that had formed the nucleus of the keep.
I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal!
He remembered that from when they were so small the castle rock was a mountain they could not explore in a day. He could remember shouting until the noise shook the birds from the trees, and he felt some of the same rambunctious energy bubbling up from inside. He would have laughed if Claude had not been so intent; would have run if Claude had not been holding them to a cautious jog. The valley’s magpies had gathered at the sunlit margin of the field, flashing peacock-green from their tails even through the mist rising off the frosty grass. And Paul had to admit to himself, the mist drifting about the foot of the rock was a beautiful touch. Like the Cellarer’s echo, like the Lady’s still pool. Like a goodbye. It drew a bittersweet thread through his ebullience, a lick of nostalgia for something that was almost, but not quite, gone.
So he tried hard, and he could almost see the Tyrant’s tower rearing up in its ruinous magnificence; he could almost see the Tyrant’s guards gatheri
ng up their weapons, preparing to question what business they had with the Master of the Keep. And when Claude yelled at him to run, he ran with all his heart.
The tower was as overgrown as the outer walls and they had to fight their way through more than the baffled guard. Hawthorn and ash were still bright with berries, as was the prickly oregon grape clinging in the cracks of the stone. Claude hauled himself up by the thin, tough trunks of the stunted trees, his hands growing sticky with sap, his heart pounding madly with exertion and fierceness and fear. He could hear the cries of the Tyrant’s spies alerting their master to the assault, but there was no help for it, it was impossible to take the Tyrant unawares. Claude could only put his faith in the Cellarer’s magic and the Lady’s blessing, in the weight of stones in his pockets and the whisper of crow wings in his ears. You are not alone, he told himself, you are the champion of the keep, you have allies and protections the Tyrant knows nothing of. So he told himself, though fear crowded the air from his straining lungs. And then he remembered that this was his spell, that even the Tyrant himself was bound up in his, Claude’s, spell, and he grew confused.
The castle rock did not have a proper peak, rather, a saucer-like declivity ringed in a low, rough battlement very like a lookout tower’s roof. The hollow had accumulated a mulch of drifted leaves and a clump of shallow-rooted birches had grown and died there, leaving black-and-white trunks to stand like so many gravestones. It had always felt like a place to Paul, not just a part of the sprawling landscape like the woods or the wider hills, but a place, singular and alive. It had its own silence, its own moods, its own relationship with the sun and rain and moon. It was a place to claim and be claimed by, and it was a shock, a real fist-in-the-guts shock to see that it had been claimed by someone other than the twins. It was a trespass that trembled on the verge of sacrilege.
The figure stood among the grave-trees, sneering down at the valley, too arrogant even to turn and acknowledge the twins’ approach. It should not have been impressive, slouching and dressed like a tramp as it was, but therein lay the proof of its power. Arrogant, yes, and mad, outside the rules even of the story that had created it, a story that would have dressed it in robes of velvet and chains of gold. But it scorned the story, you could see that in its white and misshapen face. It scorned everything, all the rules, and in contempt imposed its own rules on whatever part of the world that did not fight back. That was the Tyrant.
That was the Tyrant, Paul thought, and he shook with the urgency to get his fist out of his crowded pocket.
“In the Lady’s name,” he bellowed, and threw the first stone.
Claude threw a stone; he had to, with Paul firing one missile after another. Paul was finally consumed by the game, screaming war cries and taunts as he threw stone after stone, and it was as if the game had suddenly chosen him over Claude. There was a sickening disjuncture in Claude’s head. He threw stones with all the strength in his arm—and how had he carried so many in his pockets? There seemed no end to them—he pelted that arrogant figure with its coarse and sneering face—that white plaster face that was his face inside—and some part of the world came adrift. If the castle rock had come unmoored and scudded off above the hills he would not have been surprised; if it had revealed itself to be the tower he called it, tall as a skyscraper and black as hell, he would not have been surprised. The surprise, the horror, was that it did neither. It was just a battered island of granite left behind by a glacier some thousands of years ago, its feet in the hay meadow and its head not even as high as the tops of the cedars that grew at the edge of the field. It was just the castle rock where they had used to play when they were little boys.
But if that was true, then what was that thing?
Who was that thing?
That man?
Staggering under the blows of the ensorcelled—no, the mine-rubble stones. Flinching under the diving attacks of the excited crows. Throwing up an arm to shield his head, falling back against the dead trees, bleeding horribly from his head, his face, his mouth a gaping shattered ruin.
Paul was a machine, throwing stone after stone. Claude was a machine too, a puppet played upon by his terrible spell. He threw another stone, feeling his own face stretched into a mask of horror, and another stone that fell short, and the next one he managed somehow to throw far out over the field, and then, with the last stone still in his hand, he had torn himself free.
“Stop it! You’re killing him! You’re killing him! STOP!”
Paul couldn’t stop. He saw the blood, but knew it was impossible—some trick of Claude’s, red paint, his own fevered imagination—and the air was in constant motion, confusing him, as if the wheeling of the crows had got inside his head, filling his skull with random motion, shuffled fragments of darkness and light. His own movements, the wind-up and the throw, joggled his eyes. It was a weird, claustrophobic kind of blindness, and he was deafened by his own panting breaths, the shouts in his throat that had no more meaning to him than the barks of a dog. And he couldn’t stop. He was weeping and he couldn’t stop. And then Claude screamed.
The birds flew up into the sunlight.
The crows. A woodpecker in the trees. The magpies in the grass.
They flew up high.
You could see their shadows moving across the ground.
Paul, wiping the sweat and tears from his face, was the first to move forward. He was shaking, but the world had expanded again beyond the reaches of his skull. It was so quiet suddenly, just the birds calling from high above the hills. He felt that something horrible had stopped, like a car crash, a car crash that was him. He stepped toward the figure, Claude’s scarecrow, that was hung up among the trunks of the dead birch trees.
That was blood, there.
That was an eye exposed by a torn lid, as if the lid had opened from the top down.
That was a tooth emerging like a giant maggot from the torn cheek and shattered jaw.
That was a bubble of blood swelling from the nostril of the broken nose. That was a bubble of air, that swelled, slowly, like a bubble-gum bubble carefully blown, until it popped and there was no more. No more air, no more blood.
That was a man, and they had killed him.
“I did this.” It was a whisper. Claude didn’t even know that he was speaking out loud. “I did this. I did this.”
He kept saying it, over and over, like a chant. I did this. I did this. I did this. I did this. Paul heard him at the far distant edges of his mind, and then suddenly there was nothing but Claude’s voice drilling a hole in his skull. Paul spun around and yelled, “What did you do? Shut up! What did you do?”
Claude was as white as a cold marble statue of himself, and his eyes showed white all around the rims of the iris. He did not look away from the dead man when he spoke.
“He wasn’t real. He was just a mask. Some clothes, a book. I made him real.” Claude started to tremble, and then he was crying. “He was the Tyrant, and I made him real.”
And then we killed him.
But that thought was intolerable. Paul had never had an intolerable thought before and he did not know what to do with this one. He had to get rid of it. Get rid of it. His hands made an involuntary gesture, as if he could throw it away, but his arms ached from throwing all those stones, throwing them so hard, killing the Tyrant, killing the game.
“I made him real.”
“Shut up,” Paul said—he had no room to shout with that thought inside him. He staggered away, thinking he could throw it up if he couldn’t throw it away. He had stones in his guts. He was going to shit himself, wet his pants. He was going to come apart at the seams, there was going to be nothing left of him, nothing left but a book, some clothes, a mask. The birds were circling down, the crows and the magpies, curious and drawn to blood. Paul staggered to the rough edge of the castle rock’s top, sure he was going to puke, but when he got to the edge he just . . . went down. He ran right into the flocking magpies, put up his arms against the accidental scratches of t
heir claws and went on running. He hurtled down the steep side of the rock, skidded on his heels, fell flat on his back and leapt up, not even caring if he could breathe. He heard the birds calling. Over the noise of his running, the uneven whimper of his breath, he could hear his brother calling for him to wait.
“Come on, Claude,” Paul said, but it was only a whimper, and he did not dare to stop, to turn back and call and wave until Claude caught up with him. “Come on, Claude, come on,” he said, and he thought Claude must be coming down behind him, he had to be coming down behind him, because Paul knew there were only two choices: run, or come apart like an exploding grenade.
He jumped the last meter down to the level field, stretched out his stride, and with his brother close behind him ran for home.
“Paul, wait.” Claude had no breath to shout and his cry was lost in the muttering of the troubled birds.
The birds, he thought. The war birds, the Tyrant’s orphaned spies. The gore crows that grew fat on the battlefield’s dead.
“We can’t just leave him here. Paul, wait.”
But Paul ran, a small figure and strangely slow—strangely, because he was so quickly gone.
Claude turned back to face his dead.
The mask was ruined, the face shattered to show the flesh beneath. Had they really thrown that hard? How could they have thrown that hard? They were just boys.
You are in the service of the keep, said the Cellarer, do you think you would have been chosen if you were not man enough?
Alexander the Great was leading armies when he was your age, the Cooks said in their gossipy way.
And the Lady’s gentle voice murmured, You have done nothing but what we laid upon you to do.
But that wasn’t true. It had been Claude’s spell. It was all right that Paul had run—no it wasn’t! Fucking Paul, how could you?—but it was just that Claude should deal with the consequences alone. It had been his spell. His was the responsibility, and—
At the Edge of Waking Page 26
