He had lost her again, his gaze turning inward, his thoughts only for himself.
“I don’t like the thought,” Jia said. “It sounds wiser to keep this gate of yours shut.”
He gave her a knowing look, understanding the depth of her judgement.
“You can see the danger, of course. Without the Fay around to stand guard, what could squeeze and wriggle through it, forcing their way in …” he said. “The Fay certainly could. Appalled as they were by human corruption, it’s clear that the High House of Avalon had no wish to see the earth devoured. When the Fay left this world, my noble race destroyed the gates, these magical portals, burning them all behind them.” Now his expression turned dark, his eyes shadowed, but no less watchful. “All except one.”
Jia swallowed. “Go on.”
“You remember the old tale, don’t you? The one I told you back in Xanadu?” His tone lightened, becoming lyrical again. And again, she had the feeling that he was getting at something, edging towards a conclusion she might not like. “I told you that in the days of the Yellow Emperor, the world of men and the world of mirrors were one. You heard how the humans and the mirror children failed to live in peace and how the mirror children became locked behind glass, forever forced to echo the movements of earthly men and women.”
“I do. But what’s that got to do with—”
“Well, that was not the end of it,” he said. “The Yellow Emperor may have imprisoned the children of the mirror, but no one said the spell would last forever. In time, little by little, some say that our reflections will begin to differ from us. A twitch there. A blink there. One day, humans will hear the clatter of weapons deep, deep in the mirror. The Ghost Emperor will stir, monstrous and pale, his mammoth limbs swimming through the darkness towards the tempting light of earth …”
In hundreds of years, Jia had never heard this part of the story before. For a reason that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, that troubled her.
“A fascinating tale. But you still haven’t answered my questions.”
“Oh, but I have. More or less.” Von Hart smoothed down his robe, slipping the fragment of the harp into his pocket, a signal that her audience was almost at an end. “Not far from here, on the southernmost tip of the Fan Lau peninsula, there stands an old temple. The place doesn’t have a name. It’s a ruin built upon a ruin, a finger of stone overlooking the Pearl River estuary. You would struggle to find a place any more remote.”
“Von Hart …” Her patience was wearing thin.
“Come with me,” he said. “Come with me now and I’ll show you. There is only so much one can say with words.”
“And why should I come with you?”
“To see the truth, Jia. It’s time for you to choose on which side of the mirror you stand.”
Her eyebrows raised at this, the bare-faced temerity of it. Had she heard him right? There was no way that he, this envoy of a lost and ancient race, a living founder of the Lore, could be asking her to question her oaths.
Could he?
“I know where I stand, Von Hart. I serve the—”
“But you miss them, don’t you?” He cut her off, rounding on a point she couldn’t quite see—or didn’t want to. “Ziyou and Ye?” He tipped his head, regarding her with a look that held no warmth whatsoever. “Please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten them. Of all the evils spoken here today, that would be the—”
“Fairy. Watch your tongue.”
“Oh come now. Are you saying that you don’t want to look into the Eight Hand Mirror again? Not even one last time?”
A flower of heat burst in her belly, spreading through her chest and neck and into her cheeks. Here he was with his own barb, striking at the heart of her. For a moment, the room seemed as vaporous as the shadows she had glimpsed in the walls, the ground under her feet less solid, less reliable than before. Oh, to see her parents! To make sure they were all right! Torn, Jia chewed her lip, bowing her head with the weight of the temptation. Focusing on the boom of cannons outside, she tried to summon up the Emperor’s face, a reminder of her mission here, but all she saw was a sequence of masks, each one as human, as fleeting as the last. She only noticed that her fists were clenched when her nails bit into her palms, hard enough to draw blood.
Through gritted teeth, she said, “Flowers in a mirror and the moon in water.” Pleasing but unattainable. “I know my duty. I heed the Lore. And looking into your mirror will not bring them back.”
“But—”
She looked up then, fixing him with flinty eyes. “You abandoned me, Von Hart. You left me to face the ages alone, the rise and fall of dynasties. I should hate you, yet all I feel is sadness, as though at the death of a friend. All the same, I must warn you. The things you’ve spoken of here today, strange as they are, carry a whiff of rebellion. I am youxia, sin-you, the Guardian of the East. If you give us cause to cross swords, then I will not spare you. I want you to know that.”
Silence sank between them like a stone, carrying their history down to a watery grave.
Then Von Hart laughed, as was his fashion.
“Suit yourself. Another time then.”
His grin pricked Jia’s patience and she answered between her teeth. “You’ll wait forever in your temple, fairy. I will never come.”
Von Hart sucked his pipe and exhaled again, the clouds of smoke wafting into the room.
Yes, smoke. It is all smoke. Smoke and mirrors. You can no longer trust the Fay …
“Oh yes, Jia,” the envoy said. “You will.”
When the smoke cleared, Jia was alone.
Alone.
FIFTEEN
Moggio Udinese, Italy
The Alps rose from the valley of the Fella River, a fanged border between Italy and Austria. The shield of the sky shimmered on the mountains, gilding their summits like the cloaks of elderly kings. Drifts covered the foothills. Ice webbed the rocks. All was silent and still.
When Mauntgraul alighted on the precipice, his claws sank up to his hocks, leaving car-sized prints in the snow. Shaking off a blizzard from his wings, he reared on his haunches to survey the scenery, tracing a ridge of pines, a frozen lake and a powdery road far below, sparse traffic snaking along it. The sight of the road made him snort. In his day, most had thought these mountains impassable, a raw and jagged maze.
In his day, he had missed out on his chance of revenge. And today, he would take it.
Oh, it was good to remember himself again. Good to remember the dragon. At his breast, the harp still jingled and chimed, the fragment lodged between his scales, only the tip of the harmonic curve showing. It did not matter. The threat, for the most part, had abated. Its magic weakened somehow, grown sour. The fragment was potent yet, but he had found that he could resist its call. Reduce the bells to a background annoyance.
For now.
He had his passenger to thank for that, not that he ever would. Back in London, du Sang had led him through the Soho streets to an abandoned car park where, under a guttering street light, he had spoken to Mauntgraul at length, his tone persuasive and calm, gradually bringing him back to himself. Wake up. Wake up and remember. At midnight, the tramp had returned to the idea of a man. The Wandering Moor. And the Moor had thrown off the conceit in serpentine shape, the greatest, most formidable beast of his kind. The white scourge of civilisation. Slave to no one. Rivalled by nothing. King of the wyrms.
Ah, if only that was the truth.
In his aching joints, the throbbing in his skull, Mauntgraul could feel every second of his extraordinary age. The world around him continued to confound him. Sanity, although regained, was but a foothold in a slow landslide. It took a conscious effort to remain focused, to let his thoughts override the tinkling of the bells, the ceaseless murmur of the harp. The truth was—and he would rather kill than admit it—he was afraid. He had found himself hurled into a world that held no place for him, that struggled to credit his existence, let alone submit to his fearsome reputation. If his st
ate of mind had teetered on the brink, enfeebled by centuries of slumber, the snatch of the lullaby had pushed him over the edge. His fear was not solely for the present, either; the future embodied the grist of it. Vengeance was all well and good, long overdue, fitting and deserved, but what then? He was old and he wouldn’t live forever. He had seen enough to realise that a world that could not accept his existence would also not suffer it.
Knights in armour were one thing. You may be no one’s slave, old wyrm, but you have been bested by the greatest foe of all. Time.
The Vicomte—du Sang honestly believed that he bore such a title—had shown him another way. A better way. In his heart, the flames of vengeance burned hotter than ever and he relished the thought of taking them to the descendants of the Curia Occultus. If nothing else, he would have recompense before the end.
Mauntgraul’s tail swished back and forth, the sting on the end of it splashing green splotches on the snow. His blood was up, for he was already winning. By now, Red Ben would have died a slow and horrible death, and Maunt’s mother, Rakegoyle, could rest in her watery grave. He’d had no love for the vicious old bitch, anyway. Truth be told, she’d been a wanton and selfish creature, given to violence before thought, which had probably damned them all. The last nail in the coffin of tolerance. Nevertheless, blood was blood. And Red Ben had a habit of getting in his way.
The Red and the White. Blood on snow. Old as dust.
Now the path to vengeance was clear. Du Sang had brought him back to himself. He had given him renewed purpose.
And the beauty of it is, the dragon thought with a sly grin, I merely owe him what I was hatched to give.
His unlikely saviour, sitting high up and straddling his withers, finally managed to speak.
“Voilà!” Du Sang spat chunks of ice from his mouth and shook frost from his hair. The upper atmosphere had frozen him stiff, a rigidity that even Mauntgraul’s inner heat had not been able to melt, but the curly-haired youth-who-was-far-from-young was well accustomed to the coldest of climes, namely that of unending death. He had no physical need to breathe and his eventual thawing found him ebullient. “This is the place. Didn’t I tell you? Who but I could show you the way?”
Du Sang must have thought he was dismounting a horse. With a crack of hardened limbs, he swung his leg over Mauntgraul’s neck and promptly fell twenty feet head-first into the snow. The White Dog watched, his long snout peeled back in a sneer, as the youth recovered himself, climbing to his feet and brushing flakes off his suit. Then, after snapping an icicle from the tip of his nose, he trudged up the rocky shelf under the canopy of Mauntgraul’s wing and leant against his foreleg as if it were a tree. Mauntgraul resisted the urge to shake the youth off, send him spinning over the precipice and down the mountainside, two hundred feet to the road below. But what was the point? Did the Vicomte even experience pain? Because …
“I see a high pass, boy. An ocean of snow. And my eyesight is somewhat keener than yours.”
In summer, this place would be a tapestry of meadows rippling with flowers, thick woodlands of ash and pine, all a hale green in the sun. In winter, it was a silent land, dead and buried. One peak looked much like another.
“Au contraire, my gargantuan friend.” Du Sang was obviously enjoying being useful. “Doesn’t your little trinket give you a clue?”
Mauntgraul, firmly set on ignoring the fragment lodged in his breast, cringed as he gave the relic a mental glance. A fierce silver light washed over his mind, as keen as a vulture sighting fresh meat. The harp, he noticed, was restless and warm, clearly agitated by the location. A cacophony flourished in the White Dog’s skull, and with a growl he pushed the noise away, back into his forgetting. To focus on the fragment too long, to allow the lullaby to slip through the cracks of his self-control, was to invite the pageant to start up again in all its demented glory.
His irritation was curdling into anger. He still couldn’t see anything but snow.
“The pieces of the harp call to each other,” du Sang said. “All lunewrought is one metal and the artefact longs to be whole. Even the splinters carry the Fay enchantment, able to trap and bind. Don’t you see? You could’ve searched the whole world looking for it, from Tasmania to Svalbard and back again. I have brought you straight to the doorstep. The Cardinal conspires within, awaiting your fiery judgement.”
Mauntgraul was glad that the boy pointed. He would’ve hated to have to ask. He followed du Sang’s bone-white finger up from the valley and into the peaks. Up to the highest summit, a shark’s tooth rising a mile or two away. At first he could see nothing except a spur of rock, jutting from the steep face of the mountain. Squinting, he picked out signs of habitation even as the Vicomte spoke.
“The Invisible Church,” he said. “Not so invisible now, yes? The monastery dates back to Roman times, a watchtower built to overlook this valley. In time, the watchtower became a temple for Benedictine monks, or so the history books would have us believe. We know better, do we not? Up there lies the secret headquarters of the Whispering Chapter.”
A draconic appetite brought the monastery sharply into focus. Mauntgraul spied the stretch of a boundary wall, a turret, a bell tower, a domed shrine hanging four thousand feet above the valley floor. From a distance, the place looked abandoned, a medieval ruin, the sheer slopes rendering it unreachable on foot.
That suited Mauntgraul fine. His fangs were showing again, revealing his pleasure.
“I can smell their devotion from here.”
His wings shivered, becoming taut, a small avalanche pouring off the ledge and into the gorge below. Claws digging for purchase, he prepared to launch himself into the blue. A furious heat blazed in his belly, spitting emerald sparks. Fresh poison brewed in his glands, rising into the barbed sac on the tip of his tail. His eyes flared, as black as his intentions.
Du Sang waved his arms. “Wait!”
Snow shifted, rock crunching as the White Dog stalled on the precipice. He snorted, the frosty air crackling in the ensuing heat haze. When his head swung around, a pale horror of steer-like horns, du Sang stiffened, frozen again, this time with anticipation.
Mauntgraul’s enquiry, soft as it was, came in a hiss of overstretched patience.
“Yesss?”
Du Sang, a porcelain doll under the dragon’s gaze, managed to find his voice.
“Forgive me, monsieur. Has something perhaps … slipped your mind? We had an arrangement. I believe I have upheld my end of it.”
Mauntgraul tipped his head, a boulder rolling to one side. The youth with the curly brown hair and the dandy clothes puzzled him somewhat, not least of all with his strange request. He looked hungry again, the dragon noticed, his cheeks sallow and drawn, his eyes dull. The creature under his skin was emerging, throwing off his murderous blush of health, much like du Sang might throw off a coffin lid in whichever pit he chose to sleep. Or perhaps he felt the touch of the sun, shrivelling his hard yet enervated flesh. Du Sang was a dead thing. Long, long dead. His request was beyond a mercy.
“Ah yes. And quite the bargain, too. I came to learn of the Chapter’s whereabouts—how do you people say?—bon marché?” And you brought me back to myself. But that was something he would not say. He peered down at the Vicomte. “You’re certain that this is what you want?”
Du Sang coughed behind his hand as if they were dickering over the matter of a bill in a Belleville restaurant.
“Monsieur, please.”
“Very well. Come here. Closer to the edge.”
A touch theatrically, Le Vicomte Lambert du Sang did as instructed, his spine straightening as he pulled down his jacket, his chin lifting to the sky. Thankfully, he refrained from launching into a speech. The boy took a moment, drinking in the frigid meander of the river, the road through the pass and the ridge of pines, as pretty as a Yuletide woodcut. Then he looked up and gave a small nod.
Who knows what goes through his cobwebbed mind? Who cares? A promise is a promise.
Wings s
pread, Mauntgraul reared back on the ledge, drew in a tremendous breath and spewed livid green flames down at the youth.
Du Sang screamed, but Mauntgraul fancied there was joy in the sound. Release. A prickle of envy caught him by surprise as he watched the Vicomte’s hair crisp and curl, his clothes blasting from his limbs in tatters, his skin bubbling before shrivelling to black. Echoes replaced his delighted anguish. A jumble of bones, charred and strung together by sinew, slumped off the precipice, spinning down to the pristine valley in a thin spiral of smoke.
De rien …
The White Dog gave the youth no further thought. Joy leapt in his own heart, tongues of emerald flame. At his breast, the fragment of the harp throbbed and glittered, chiming in the hope of reunion. Roaring to drown out the sickly-sweet song, a battle cry to shake the mountainside, Mauntgraul plunged off the ledge, his wings straddling the Alpine wind. Gaining altitude between the peaks, the dragon banked, his midnight eyes settling on the monastery.
Time to prey …
Five minutes later, at the foot of the mountain, a spindly black shape hauled itself out of the drifts. A scarecrow crawling out of a bonfire, it left a sooty furrow in the snow. Skeletal hands clutched weakly at the ground, fingernails snapping like twigs. Inch by inch, the thing dragged a broken cargo behind it into the blinding daylight, a tangled necklace of spine, ribcage and pelvis. A grinning, carbonised skull creaked wearily in the direction of the pass.
“Shit,” it said.
SIXTEEN
When will you learn?
Dawn squeezed through the arrow slit high in the wall, falling on the huddled form of Red Ben Garston. The cell, best described as a stone box, contained a basin, a bunk and a hole in the floor that served as a latrine. Ben, sitting with his head in his hands, took up most of the space. When he stood up to stretch, every hour or so, his shoulders only left a couple of feet to the walls on either side. And despite the swift healing of his cuts and bruises, he couldn’t wash the taste of blood from his mouth. Or the ache from his soul. For the last two days, True Names had come and dragged him to a larger cell, where they employed an inventive array of knives, irons, acid, drills and, worst of all, several versions of the same old question, repeated again and again.
Raising Fire Page 20
