The old woman was laughing again.
“Oh Ben. Stop this nonsense. Where are you going to go?”
Tottering on the brink of the helipad, he glanced over his shoulder. At once the source of her amusement became clear. A hundred feet below, the sea swirled, a raging mass of white and grey. If he jumped, he could probably survive the fall. But stuck in human form? It was a long way to swim back to shore. His kind might have a primal connection with water, but he didn’t like it that much. He wasn’t betting on his chances; there was no way in hell he’d make it.
The Sister was edging closer, one hand fumbling behind her back. He realised she was reaching for a weapon, maybe a knife, maybe a tranquilliser gun. In his foggy state, he didn’t want to take his chances with her either, and that left only one option.
Between a rock and a hard place. As usual.
The old woman stopped laughing when he dropped to his knees. The assassin halted, surprised. He took a second to flash them both a grin and then raised the sickle over his shoulder. Closing one eye—the other needed for aim—he brought the blade down as hard as he could, slicing down on his wrist.
“Stop him!”
Ben howled. The oil rig wheeled around him, fire shooting up his arm and into his brain. In a second of exquisite, drawn-out pain, he saw the sky above him grow dark and the bristling black shapes cutting through the clouds, two or three choppers approaching the helipad. When he heard the faint clank of metal, the lunewrought manacle rolling away from his severed hand, his howl became a roar, shaming the thunder.
A blink, a push, and his red-scaled bulk was eclipsing the helipad. His tail uncoiled, a bladed chain swinging over the edge of the platform, the ballast of its tip pulling him into the air. He fell, tumbling towards the waves, grimacing as his pinions snapped out, letting the wind catch him. Wings spread, he rose over the helipad, a shiver of satisfaction in his breast as he watched the Sister and the old woman blasted back across the concrete surface, sheltering their heads from the stirred-up squall. The soundboard of the harp slipped from the old woman’s hands, the metal fragment skittering away in the wind and spinning over the edge of the helipad, clanking through the latticework down to the lower decks. That would buy him some time.
Too weak to muster fire, he hauled himself upward, flapping awkwardly clear of the rig. Blood showered down from his foreleg, the wound left by his missing claw splattering the helipad, drenching the old woman and the Sister in a brighter kind of rain.
Fury whirled in his mind, stoked by pain. The wound would heal, he knew, and fast, his fabulous flesh mending and forming a fresh, albeit scarred, appendage. Growling, he swallowed his rage, understanding that the injury, the drugs in his veins and the fragment of the harp made this no time for battle. Against all the odds, he had lived to fight another day. He took advantage of the fact while he still could.
“Amen, fuckers.”
He thrust himself up into the clouds, a great red arrow loosed into the storm.
Down on the rig, the Sister climbed to her feet. Turning her face to the sky, the wind howling around her cross-shaved skull, she watched the abomination vanish into the rain. The downpour sluiced down her neck, soaking her military fatigues a darker shade of grey. Shoulders slumped, she bore the weather without so much as a shrug; she had endured flails, from both herself and others, with far more righteous bite.
She turned as she heard footsteps, finding her mistress, the old woman who went by the name of Evangelista, approaching through the squall.
“Console yourself, Sister,” Evangelista said, her blood-streaked features attempting a smile. “He won’t get far. We must take the utmost care with the harp, but lunewrought answers to lunewrought, remember? Ben Garston has been touched by the stuff, one of the shackles in our keeping. It should make tracking him so much easier. But you had better get going.”
Evangelista lifted the shackle in question and handed it to the assassin. Just like the broken soundboard, the metal glowed like moonlight in the gloom, throbbing with an alien power.
To show her allegiance, the Sister tugged her scars into a grimace and raised her sickle, recovered from the bloody ground, the curved blade sharp and deadly in the haze.
“Remember you are a Sword of God,” the old woman told her. “You bear the Arimathean Shield, one of our holiest treasures.”
The Sister bowed her head in benediction. All in the Chapter knew the tale, how long ago, St. Joseph himself had gifted the shield to Sir Percival, the legendary knight of the Round Table. With it, the knight was said to have defeated a terrible dragon—a typically cherished story of the Chapter and one that couldn’t fail to excite the assassin who heard it.
“May your pursuit be just as glorious,” Evangelista said. Her smile was gone, replaced by a coldness in her eyes, the deep chill of devotion. “You have your orders. Find that misbegotten spawn of serpents. Bring him to our temple in the mountains. Bring him to the Invisible Church.”
The Sister, all seven foot of her, offered a grin of her own.
“There we will pluck the truth from his tongue, extract the envoy’s whereabouts. Ben Garston will answer for his crimes. And your Cardinal will take his head.”
THREE
It’s the harp. The Chapter want the harp.
Nursing his bloody stump, his nerve endings screaming louder than the wind, Ben burst through the cloud layer, chased by the worst of his fears. The clouds were inside his mind as well, his prodigious system fighting to throw off the tranqs, but even through his lingering stupor, the reason for the ambush seemed clear. Why would the Whispering Chapter postpone killing him when its agents had the chance? The old woman, whoever she was, was looking for Von Hart. There could only be one reason for that, surely.
Like the Chapter, the envoy extraordinary guarded a fragment of the harp. Indeed, dredging up his memories, it was the envoy who had brought the Cwyth to the great council on Thorney Island in the first place, wasn’t it? As the last of the Fay, present at the Battle of Camlann, which had seen the fall of King Arthur, the Fay quit the earth and the Old Lands surrender to history, Von Hart must have kept the shattered instrument for centuries. In 1215, he had stood before King John to re-forge the damn thing, serving the royal edict of the Pact to bring about the Sleep. Yes, it had been a simple matter. Such power, if Ben credited the tales, conjured by the effortless act of fitting the broken pieces back together. Lunewrought melding to lunewrought. At the foot of the throne in Westminster Palace, the harp had blazed and sung in Von Hart’s hands as he mustered his people’s alien science, singing the names of the chosen Remnant leaders into the music. And of course, the lullaby had worked like a charm. The spell was more powerful than the King, the Curia Occultus and all the Remnants put together could have imagined. Kings had died and other kings had taken their place, but the Lore remained, the Sleep advancing. In the space of a hundred years, the lullaby had circled the globe …
Ben soared higher. The touch of the manacle added to the healing sting of his wounds, the lunewrought leaving a frosty residue to remind him of the power of the artefact to which it had once belonged. Nor did he feel safe up here, even at this altitude. He didn’t think for one second that the Sister and the other agents wouldn’t pursue him. He had seen the approaching choppers himself, all of them loaded with weapons, machine guns and rockets to shoot him from the sky. That was the least of his worries. It was only a matter of time before the Chapter recovered its fragment of the harp from the oil rig’s lower decks and used its magic to summon him again, drawing him into the line of fire. Next time, he might not be so lucky. He had to get out of range of the song as fast as possible. The greater the range, the greater his chances of resisting its lure.
And then there was the matter of Von Hart himself.
You know where I am if you need me.
That was what the envoy had said last year, his exact words. Last year, the pale fairy had prevented Ben from becoming dragon steak on two separate occasions, once i
n London and once in Cairo. Five thousand feet up, with ice crystals forming on his snout, his inner gases keeping him warm, the memory of the Lurkers, the Walkers Between the Worlds, still prompted an unbidden shiver. He had never been a fan of magic. Less so of Von Hart’s help. Hell, the envoy was probably watching him now, his strange violet eyes peering into whatever shiny ball he used for scrying.
Prying.
Alongside his unease, caution snickered. He wanted answers. Who better to provide them than the envoy? But things weren’t that simple. He couldn’t be sure how the cards lay, whether the envoy was in hiding or not. On the one hand, he wanted to warn him, even though he doubted that the fairy was blind to the threat.
We all live under the Lore, Ben. He’d said that too, standing on the desert dunes in Cairo as they’d watched the refinery burn. This changes everything.
He had already tried to warn Ben. About a council. A possible trial. As a creature who loved a gamble, would the envoy risk the Chapter catching him napping? Unlikely. Ben settled on the feeling that it probably wasn’t wise to lead his pursuers straight to Berlin. Von Hart, presiding over his secret neon realm of Club Zauber, would hardly thank him for it.
Like it or not, Ben was in over his head. This wasn’t a matter of a resurrected goddess and an undead priest, an old rivalry threatening to plunge the world into darkness. This stabbed at the very heart of the Pact: the Long Sleep. The enchantment upon which the Lore rested. If the Whispering Chapter was after the harp, then the new Cardinal might already have his grubby hands on the Guild’s fragment, confiscating the artefact from the collapsed brotherhood of knights. And if the Chapter succeeded in reforging the blasted instrument, then—
A burst of silver in Ben’s skull disintegrated the ominous thought. The song? The lullaby? Already? The smarting at his wrist, cold and brief, told him otherwise. It was the residue of the lunewrought, he thought, his fangs grinding, the ancient Fay magic responding to something below. It must be below. At this altitude, there was nothing around him but acres of sky, a clear blue prairie emerging from the tattered fringes of the storm. The odd seagull. He couldn’t see a plane or hear the choppers, but he knew they’d come after him the minute the gale subsided, exhausting its wrath over the sea.
The faint blue glow drew his eyes towards the earth, the distant skerries of Denmark or the Netherlands appearing from the stratospheric sheen. He traced the luminous curve of an arc sweeping out to sea—an arc that he knew with a dragon’s eye had nothing to do with the horizon. Huge it was, perhaps a mile or so across, much like a rainbow sweeping into the distance, albeit one that had been pushed over flat and comprised one colour, that depthless cerulean gleam. Twinkling. Fizzling with energy. Magical. As he flew lower and drew closer to the shore, it struck Ben, with a familiar cramping in his guts, that the arc was inside the land. Buried somehow. Rather than being superimposed, it ran like a stratum in stone, a visible quartz made up of light.
There were symbols down there too, he noticed, vast sigils and glyphs bound by the edges of the curve, each one the size of a village or a small town. What the symbols meant, he couldn’t tell, the gigantic alien alphabet marching off into the land, over forests and hills and rivers and roads, into the rounded haze, the limit where the earth met the sky. In the other direction, out to the ocean, the arc continued, perhaps reaching the tip of Scotland or Iceland further to the north-west.
What the hell am I seeing? Some kind of terrestrial brand or tattoo that one could only discern from thousands of feet up, and even then, Ben guessed, probably only when recently touched by lunewrought. Or spiked by tranquilliser darts. Something told him that the latter wasn’t the case, but before he had a chance to investigate further, he noticed that the arc—what looked to him like the segment of a much wider circle, marching off to God knows where—was fading. Growing indistinct. It was decaying before his eyes, dark ragged holes growing in the landscape, the odd symbol winking out as though unseen flames were gradually eating through the fabric of the earth.
He blinked in the wind, and when he looked again, all he saw was the sea below, the coastline of Europe coming up fast. Whether magical vision or drug fugue, he couldn’t be sure, but as though glimpsed unawares and evading his sight, the arc through the earth was gone.
Strange days indeed.
Ben flew onward, deciding on a course of action. There was no point wasting time on the unknown when the known was all around him and pressing—the mystery of the mnemonic harp and the Chapter’s quest to recover it, if his detective skills were up to scratch. Danger threatened again, gushing into the smoking chasm left by the breach in the Lore. This time, he would do his best to stay ahead of the game. He needed information and, much as it galled him to admit it, help. He had to find Von Hart or at least make contact in some way, get a message to him. If the Whispering Chapter found the envoy before he did, well … his gut told him that it wouldn’t end well.
Despite all this, suspicion mingled with his intent, stoked by the reappearance of the Cwyth. All the shit that had happened last year. He recalled his unplanned visit to Club Zauber last summer. Hadn’t Von Hart quoted a verse from that old poem shortly after his arrival?
Foggily, Ben dredged up the words.
The King’s harp shattered in three
re-forged then unmade a silver key
a severed song the watcher’s keep
locking the door of endless sleep
Yeah. He had. At the time, Ben had dismissed the verse as a subtle taunt, Von Hart reminding him that most Remnants hadn’t chosen to go into the Sleep. That in many cases, the harp, the key, fitted the padlock to what amounted to an enchanted prison. Now he wondered. Secrets and lies, unseen plans and events, lay like scattered cards on the table of his past actions, some in the suit hiding a darker underside.
Damn you, fairy. What were you trying to tell me?
Above all else, the envoy loved riddles. Cryptic was his middle name. There was a point to all this, a game even. Ben had suspected as much in Egypt, and here it was again, that unshakeable feeling that the fairy was testing him, preparing him for something—something he might not like.
The history of the harp goes way back, back into legend and myth. And you were there at the start, weren’t you? Bringing the harp to the Curia Occultus. Travelling to distant lands to ensure the progress of the Sleep. Who the hell knows what you got up to? Who the hell knows what you started … ?
Ben cut off that particular line of thought. Distrust wouldn’t help him here. He had a day, two days at best. And he owed the fairy a favour; it was a matter of honour that he couldn’t ignore. The Chapter had managed to track him down, after all. It might take longer to track the envoy, but like the Guild, he imagined that its reach was long.
Into the south then, across Holland and down into France. It was hardly as out of range of the harp as he would’ve liked, but for now, he had limited choices. The envoy extraordinary was out of reach. But there were other keepers of secrets. And certain ways to extract them.
Even if he was too late, there were some, he knew, who had an ear for the dead.
Xanadu, 1275
At first, the Great Kublai Khan had resisted the idea of the Tiaoyue, the English Pact and the coming of the Sleep. He had sat, straight-backed and clutching the elephant-shaped arms of his throne, as his sorcerers, mandarins, emissaries, warriors, concubines, mystics and monks descended on the chamber in a restless flock, the vast white pillars resounding with the news from the west.
Jia Jing, a small green-and-gold shape crouched on a cushion at the Khan’s feet, had struggled to pick out anything meaningful from the babble. Mention of some lullaby or other kept resurfacing from the milling audience below the dais, the shaven heads shaking this way and that, the raised hands and the snapping fans waving as though to swat points of the debate out of the air, dismissing the rumours as hearsay. No, as tonghua, as fairy tale.
And, as it happened, tonghua wasn’t that far from the truth. Scowl
ing at his subjects, the Great Khan had risen to his feet, a hand raised for silence. Jia, observing custom, rose along with him, awkwardly shuffling her hooves on the dais, her foal-like form flowing into the shape of a little girl, her long dark braid coiled atop her head in the customary fashion. To all intents and purposes, she looked as human as any nine-year-old girl, but she kept forgetting about her hooves, and once she had made the transformation—a matter of shimmering seconds—it always felt too late to change them into silk-bound feet, a concession to embarrassment that would not go unnoticed. She was painfully aware of the stares darting from the Khan to where she stood beside him, her cloven hooves, both a glimmering gold, prompting whispers and pointed fingers from the throng. Why should she feel so uncomfortable, so out of place? Was she not one of the wonders of Xanadu? The Mongol invasion had not seen the Middle Kingdom shake off its faith in myths, clinging to gods both old and new with the same timeless reverence, a soul-deep devotion that Jia could not imagine the people renouncing. Magic endured in the soil here, in this, the most sacred, the most central of realms. Who among the noble houses and palace servants was unaware of the fact that the Khan enjoyed the counsel of ancient beasts, remnants of an older, wiser world? Long had the children of the Xian attended the Dragon Throne.
Oh yes, people speak of you, the Khan had assured her, even in the lands beyond the Yellow River …
That day at court, Jia had detected envy in many of the gazes and—oddly—she had noticed derision too, the reason for the latter soon becoming clear.
The Khan’s new guest, the dusty Italian merchant with his sage-cum-guide standing at his shoulder, stepped forward and cleared his throat, thankfully stealing the attention of the court. After begging the Khan for patience, the merchant spoke at some length (pausing now and then for the sage to translate) about the infamous song that, over the course of sixty years, had wound its slow but inevitable way from England.
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