Blood

by K. J. Wignall

  Will looked at the long, low room stretching ahead of them, its two walls lined with books, the ancient oak beams arching across its vaulted ceiling. Seeing it from her point of view he could imagine this didn’t look like much, but it was only the start of what he had to show her, and although they had a serious purpose here, he found he was desperate for her to love this secret world.

  “So first we need to go to the map room.” He caught her looking around the apparently simple room, perhaps trying to see where the entrance to the map room might be. “But there’s one more thing to tell you before we go. Henry of Mercia was greatly fond of puzzles and riddles.”

  “Yes! Of course,” said Eloise, as if suddenly realizing who Will was talking about. “There’s a maze at Marland—it’s called Henry’s Maze.”

  “How astonishing,” said Will, because as much as he’d tried to keep up with the family history since it had left the city, he’d never heard of the maze. “Astonishing, not least because this library, simple as it looks from here, is a maze in three dimensions. So please try not to become separated, but if you do, stay in the same place and I’ll find you.”

  Eloise nodded, a hint of excitement in her face. He found it reassuring somehow, given what she’d seen in the last couple of days, that she could be excited by the prospect of exploring a library, even one as extraordinary as this.

  He led her halfway along the room to a point where the bookshelves gave way on either side to a door.

  “Left or right, the choice is yours.”

  “Left.”

  “Good.” Will led the way through the door, out on to a small wooden bridge, which spanned the darkness. There were lights here and there, but not quite enough to illuminate the complex and twisting shadows that spilled away below them.

  Eloise stopped and looked down, staring at another bridge she could see some distance below, running diagonally to the one they were on, and at small balconies and portions of open staircases that emerged in apparently random fashion. And even those balconies possessed their own bookshelves, as if not a single hidden spot was to be left without its treasury of knowledge.

  As if conscious of being in a library, Eloise whispered, “This. Is. Amazing. It’s like, you know those pictures by Escher?” Will shook his head. “He was this artist who drew all sorts of towers and things with stairs going in a big loop, but every staircase is going up, you know, optical illusions. This looks like an optical illusion.”

  “I think that was the intention. As you can see, the room we entered first is perched on top of …”

  “No, don’t tell me. I don’t ever want to know how this was built. I don’t ever want to know my way around—it would ruin it.”

  Will nodded, understanding her desire to hold on to the mystery of it. He’d seen it constructed, night by night over many years, and yet even he had been full of wonder upon first entering the finished library.

  On one of those early visits he’d become disorientated enough to lose his way and had been forced to spend the daylight hours hidden in its literary labyrinth, protected from the sun by the complete absence of windows. And in the course of that day he had encountered only one other person, the old man himself, Henry, his brother’s distant descendant, nearing the end of his rule.

  But now the library was so familiar, it was as if a three-dimensional map of it existed in his mind, and even if he had not read all the thousands of books hidden within, he was at least familiar with them. He knew where to find them and what to look for.

  “Follow me,” he said, but almost immediately stopped again. His nostrils flared, picking up a scent, and at the same time he took in what he should have noticed before, that the lights had already been on when they entered.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s someone else in here.”

  “You mean, like a demon or …”

  He shook his head. “Human.”

  Right now, a demon might have been easier to deal with, so familiar was he becoming with them.

  “But it’s the middle of the night. Why would anyone be in here now?”

  Those were Will’s thoughts, too. Who, apart from him, would be in the library in the middle of the night when the cathedral was closed? And, more importantly, what might they be doing here? Will couldn’t help thinking that this late-night intruder might be searching for the exact same thing as Will and Eloise.

  20

  They crossed a wooden bridge and descended a staircase, moving quickly through a series of small rooms and across another bridge before Will came to a stop. They could now hear the person inside another small room, leafing through a book and talking to himself. He sounded preoccupied enough that he almost certainly hadn’t heard their approach.

  The room their nocturnal visitor had chosen intrigued Will the most because it was the room that housed Henry’s private Doomsday Book, the record of all the parishes in the Earl’s lands. Will had suspected they probably weren’t the only ones searching for Asmund’s lair.

  He was relieved that this seemed to have nothing to do with Chris and Rachel. Even if he still couldn’t trust them as fully as Eloise would have liked, they’d only just found out about the church without a steeple. So could it be the sorcerer, Wyndham? He was the only other person Will imagined might be searching.

  Will turned and gestured for Eloise to stay behind him, then stepped forwards and through the doorway. A man was sitting at the table in the center of the small hexagonal room, and even though his back was almost turned to them, Will could see immediately that it was the huge Doomsday Book he was reading. Was this him? Was this Wyndham?

  As if sensing they were there, the man turned suddenly and jumped in fear to the other side of the table. Will was shocked, not by anything in his general appearance—he was a tall, fair-haired man, unremarkable—but because he was a vicar.

  The vicar pointed accusingly and said, “You scared the life out of me—what are you doing here?”

  Another person might have been thrown, thinking it quite normal for a vicar to be in the cathedral library, even at such a strange time of night. But he was going to great trouble to avoid looking into Will’s eyes—it suggested he knew exactly who Will was, and that he’d been told how to avoid becoming mesmerized.

  Will was about to respond, but Eloise stepped forwards now and said with incredulity, “Reverend Fairburn?”

  Will looked at her. “You know him?”

  “He’s our school chaplain.”

  Fairburn pointed a finger at Eloise and said, “So you must know how much trouble you’re in, young lady. You’re not allowed in here.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” said Will. He looked directly at Fairburn, even though the vicar still refused to meet his eyes, and spoke slowly to him, determined to draw him out and confirm Will’s suspicions. “You know full well that this library and this church belong to me as much as they belong to anybody. And I know full well what it is you search for in that book—the lair of the one who infected me.”

  “No, no, I …”

  “More important to me is the matter of who sent you. Who do you serve?”

  “You’re mistaken. I don’t serve anyone and I don’t know …”

  “Did Wyndham tell you what I could do to you if you lied to me?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything. He …” Fairburn stopped, realizing he’d fallen into Will’s simple trap. Without saying more, he ran out through one of the other two doors and up another flight of steps.

  Will ran after him. Eloise followed after Will, three sets of footsteps echoing across the complex spaces of the library. Then silence descended ahead of them and Will and Eloise stopped. Only Fairburn’s scent told Will he was still here.

  Will walked forwards, slowly, softly, and Fairburn panicked and started running again. Will stepped out on to a small bridge and saw the chaplain running up an exposed staircase to the right. Will could have leapt from there, but he didn’t want to leave Eloise. Anyway, he k
new this library too well, and darted across the bridge and up another flight of stairs.

  Fairburn, on the other hand, clearly didn’t know the library’s complexity as well as he thought because a minute later he had reached a dead end, a small balcony he’d mistaken for a bridge. Even as he realized his error, Will and Eloise burst into the small room behind him.

  Fairburn heard them and turned, his back pressed against the wooden railings. Will slowed his pace, too, and approached cautiously.

  “I mean you no harm—I merely wish for you to tell me about Wyndham.”

  The chaplain shook his head and said, “I don’t believe you. And it wouldn’t matter if I did. No, no, it wouldn’t— there’s only one thing left for me to do.” For the first time, he looked up, made eye contact with Will, and smiled with something like relief. Then, as gracefully as someone attempting a difficult high-dive, he tipped himself backwards over the railing.

  Eloise let out a small scream as Fairburn’s body dropped silently into the shadows. She ran forwards to the balcony, but got there just as Fairburn hit the stone floor far below with a soft thump. Will joined her and looked down at the dark, lifeless outline of the vicar’s body.

  She stared for a moment, not quite able to take in what she was looking at, then said, “We should check to see if he’s still alive.”

  “He isn’t,” said Will.

  She’d known it herself, and now she said, “Why would someone do that? Why would he kill himself rather than tell you anything about Wyndham?” Before Will could say anything, she answered herself. “Because he’s a sorcerer, I suppose. I mean, if he can summon up the dead, who knows what else he’s capable of.”

  Eloise was right, but Will said, “On the other hand, clearly he is no wiser as to Asmund’s location than we are, for now at least—all the more reason for us to move quickly. We need to look at the map first, then the Doomsday Book we found Fairburn reading.”

  At the mention of his name, Eloise couldn’t help looking back down into the shadows, and looked sad as she said, “He was a bit of a bore, but harmless enough—it’s just hard to believe he was talking to us a minute ago and now he’s dead.” She shrugged and added, “I suppose you don’t really understand that, with all the death you’ve seen.”

  “I understand it, but I don’t feel sorry for people like Fairburn.” He caught the flicker of an objection in her eyes and said, “Eloise, seven hundred years ago I was heartbroken when I realized my father was dead, my brother, my stepmother, so many more besides. That’s why I don’t feel sorrow for people like Fairburn because my sorrow was all used up. Almost everyone I’ve ever cared about died a very long time ago.”

  “Almost?”

  She’d understood his use of the word even though he hadn’t been conscious of it himself.

  “Almost,” he said.

  She smiled sadly at Will and took his hand in hers and kissed it, her lips soft and warm against his fingers.

  “Sorry,” she said, as if fearing even that sign of affection might be too much for him.

  Will smiled back. He took her hand in response and pressed it against his own lips, and didn’t let her see the pain that such a simple intimacy caused to tear through his head.

  “I wish …”

  Eloise hesitated, but he understood what she wished for and he said, “So do I.”

  She nodded and then put the thought away, saying brightly, “Okay, let’s go and look at maps.”

  He led the way, across bridges and through book-filled chambers and down spiral staircases, before taking one final bridge into the map room. There were no books here, and Eloise looked around at the shelves housing hundreds of rolled maps.

  “Don’t worry, ours is on the wall.”

  Will pointed across the room to the vellum map, protected behind glass and taking up most of one free wall. She walked across and stood close, taking in the detailed drawings of villages and hills, woods and rivers and roads, of the city itself, resplendent in the middle and topped by the cathedral spire.

  “Here’s Warrham Minor,” she said, pointing to a village on the right-hand edge of the map. “That’s one of the lost villages Rachel found.”

  Will looked at the simple but carefully rendered illustration of a church amid a huddle of houses and felt saddened by the knowledge that it had long since disappeared from the map and from the land upon which it had sat for centuries, the endeavors of its people all come to nothing. “So it was still thriving in the sixteenth century, perhaps too late for our village.”

  “Yeah, and anyway, Rachel said it’s a tourist attraction.”

  He nodded his understanding and went back to looking at the map.

  “What exactly are we looking for?”

  “We’re looking for gaps where once there might have been villages, or churches sitting alone.”

  Eloise took in his words in silence and pored over the map little by little. After a few minutes she said, “What about here? Look, three roads meet—surely that’s the kind of place you would have had a village.” He looked at it, realizing the hopelessness of their task, and then Eloise answered her own question, saying, “But that wouldn’t work, just being a lost village. We need a church.”

  “You’re right,” he said, and as he glanced across the expanse of the map, he couldn’t see an isolated church anywhere—all still had villages attached. He hated to think that the church they were looking for might lie beyond the boundaries of this map, for if it did, the danger to him of getting there would be so much greater.

  Then his eyes fell on Marland Abbey, the building illustrated on its own, without the additional buildings and cloisters that had surrounded it. One of the monks, perhaps as a bitter joke, had drawn a small guardian angel hovering above the abbey.

  Eloise saw him staring and said, “It’s a shame, isn’t it, that so many things have been lost?”

  “It is,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the abbey, equally unable to imagine what this whole world looked like now, a world he hadn’t seen by daylight for the better part of a millennium.

  Eloise went back to her close inspection of the map. Almost immediately, and with a touch of panic, as if she thought it might disappear or she might lose it, she said urgently, “Will, I think I’ve found something!”

  He tore himself away and looked to where she was pointing.

  “It’s a wood,” he said, puzzled. “A large wood, I’ll give you that, but a wood all the same.”

  She wagged her finger at him, beaming as she said, “Look closely. Part of that wood has been added afterwards! It’s covering something up, and if you ask me, it looks like a picture of a church.”

  Will saw instantly now, as if it should have been obvious at first glance, no less than one of the optical illusions Eloise had talked about. There appeared to be a church on a hill, but in a subsequent attempt to hide it, trees had been drawn over the top of it, incorporating it into an existing woodland.

  It was even possible to see that a different hand had painted the more recent trees, which were fussier, more detailed, all the better to conceal what lay beneath. She was right. Someone had tried to hide this church.

  “There can only be so many reasons why someone would want to make a church disappear from the records.”

  “Right now I can think of only one.” She got even closer to the glass and Will was just about to ask if she wanted him to open the case when she said, “The name’s written underneath it. I can’t quite make it all out, but it begins with P. Then maybe a U?”

  “Puckhurst!”

  “Yeah, it could say Puckhurst.”

  Eloise stood up straight, but Will was already scanning the names across the rest of the map, making sure that he hadn’t missed the name of Puckhurst anywhere else.

  “Do you know it?”

  “I never went there, but it was a wealthy village in our time. A fair proportion of my father’s revenues came from there. Yet clearly by Henry’s time, the church alone survive
d—we need to see if it’s mentioned in Henry’s Doomsday Book.”

  “Show the way.” He walked towards the door, but was struck by something else, something even more glaring. “What’s wrong?”

  “What is a puck?”

  “It’s used in ice hockey.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Er, no, it probably isn’t that kind of puck.” Eloise thought for a moment and said, “Oh, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—he’s a kind of elf or wood nymph, I suppose.”

  “That’s why Shakespeare called him Puck. A puck is, as you say, a mischievous elf or goblin or …”

  “A sprite,” said Eloise, the pieces falling into place. “Asmund waits with the sprites. Puckhurst!”

  Will nodded, but said, “I still want to check the book. I want to know what happened there.”

  “And about the steeple.”

  “Yes, the more we know, the better prepared we’ll be.”

  They found their way back to the small chamber that housed Henry’s Doomsday Book together with several hundred other illuminated manuscripts. Will looked first to see what page Fairburn had been looking at and saw that it was Warrham Minor—so Wyndham was on the right track, even if he hadn’t yet homed in on Puckhurst.

  The book itself was a beautiful creation, the vibrant colors and illustrations looking like something from another age even in Henry’s time—clearly his aim had been to produce something that looked ancient and spoke of his family’s rich history.

  But as beautiful as it was, Will turned the pages greedily until he found the small section on Puckhurst. Thankfully, the person who’d tried to remove the place from the map had never found his way to this volume.

  Will started to read and Eloise said, “So you do know Latin. You told Rachel and Chris you didn’t.”

  “That was before they knew my true identity.”

  “True. What does it say?”

  “It recounts the tragedy of Puckhurst. A steeple was being added to the church, but half-completed, it was struck by lightning and destroyed. A month later, the Black Death descended upon the village and the steeple was abandoned. The population was much reduced. But here’s the interesting part—in 1353, when the rest of the land was free of pestilence, Puckhurst alone was struck by a further plague, which lasted for several years until the remaining population fled to the city, abandoning their village to God.”