Le Gris only laughed. As the two men danced around each other, thrusting and parrying in the downpour, Strangewayes glimpsed a figure bearing down upon him. Spinning, he swung up his rapier just as a dead pirate hacked with its own blade. A dull ache burned in his shoulder from the force of the walking corpse’s blow. Choking on the stink of decaying flash, he easily sidestepped the next thrust. Yet what the thing lacked in expertise it made up for with untiring force. The unblinking face loomed closer, ragged lips hanging off clenched teeth, fat white maggots at play on exposed cheek flesh. When the spy pierced the heart for a second time, he grasped the futility of his strategy. Before he could find another approach, he saw Carpenter slip to one knee on the wet stone. Defenceless, the other man could only look up as a leering le Gris levelled his rapier for the killing stroke.
Without a second thought, Strangewayes dropped his own defence and parried le Gris’s thrust. He sensed the dead pirate swing for his neck, and screwed his eyes shut in the certain knowledge that his life was over. When the blow failed to strike, he looked round to see Meg whisking her dagger back as the pirate’s entrails splashed into the puddles. Sweeping an arm out, the Irish woman gave Strangewayes a theatrical bow.
Carpenter recovered and thrust his blade into le Gris’s thigh. The pirate howled in agony and staggered away, blood seeping between his fingers as he clutched his leg. Brushing back his wet hair from his pink scars, Carpenter turned to Strangewayes and gasped, ‘I owe you my life.’
‘And I owe mine to . . . her,’ Strangewayes replied, masking his irritation that the woman he loathed had saved him. ‘We keep no score here.’
‘Very well,’ Carpenter replied, looking round. Two other bodies lay writhing in black pools. Launceston loomed over them, his sword dripping gore and a hungry gleam in his eyes as he examined each man in turn.
‘You have done your work there, Robert,’ Carpenter called with a weary shake of his head. ‘Let it be.’
The four spies backed against the wet stone of the tower. One by one, the cries of the dying seamen ebbed away beneath the howl of the storm until no human voice remained. Strangewayes squinted, trying to pierce the night. He saw misshapen heaps that had once been human, innards turned to straw or faces twisted into twirls of blackthorn, all the monstrous work of the Fay. He felt sickened by the atrocities committed by their Enemy. Beyond the bodies, grey shapes flitted like moon-shadows. The Unseelie Court began to creep forward.
‘Stand firm, lads,’ Meg called, twirling her dagger. ‘We’ll show them some cold steel before we take our bows.’
Strangewayes gritted his teeth and thought of Grace, until the rattle of a bolt at his back distracted him. A door that he could have sworn was not there before swung open at the base of the tower. A torch flared in the dark interior.
‘Better late than never,’ Swyfte said with a grin. ‘Step lively now. This door will not hold them off for long.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
SHADOWS SWARMED AWAY from the hissing torch flame as Will bounded up the worn steps two at a time. At bay beyond the thick walls, the storm was barely more than a susurration. The other spies followed, their breath rasping. ‘They will keep coming,’ Strangewayes wheezed, his gaze downcast. ‘They always do. Always. Nothing can hold them back.’
‘Let us hear no signs of weakness.’ Launceston had an edge in his voice.
Will felt relieved to see they had all survived, though from their drawn faces he could tell they had all fought hard. He would have liked to know the fate of the sailors who had accompanied them, but decided that question could wait. Constantly glancing back in case Dee’s twisted creation, the Mooncalf, attacked, he had taken what seemed like an eternity to navigate the tower’s vertiginous and winding steps and he had feared the worst. ‘Yes, like the tides they come and they come, but they have not overwhelmed us,’ he said with determination. ‘We must use our wits and our guile to stay one step ahead, and soon the time will come when the tide will be turned.’ After travelling half the world, he could scarce believe they were so close to their goal. He would not allow the Fay to stop him laying claim to Dee at this late stage.
‘Such fine swordsmen have nothing to fear from any Enemy. Why, your prowess melts a woman’s heart,’ Meg teased, but her next words were edged with caution. ‘But the alchemist will have protected himself. If he hides in the highest room in the tower, he will be unreachable. In his madness and fear of attack, his mind has turned in these past years to fiendish traps which he has secreted on the approach to his chamber.’
‘Dee’s inventions were mad even when he professed to sanity,’ Carpenter muttered. ‘How can we outwit such a man?’ He paused, then added, ‘Strangewayes, you should lead the way.’
The younger spy glowered, but said nothing.
Will threw up his left arm to halt the others, cocking his head as he listened. Whispers floated all around, sounding like the voices of the dead piercing the thin veil between their world and his own. When he realized the eerie voices came and went with the strength of the draught whistling down the steps, he raised the torch to reveal carvings of grotesque faces following the curve of the wall just above their heads. Small holes had been fashioned in them. As they caught the air currents, they produced the unsettling whispers.
‘In our first years here, Dee spent some time attempting to discover who built this place.’ Meg’s deep, sing-song voice drowned out the ghosts. ‘Gods or Fay or men, he never found his answers, but they left many wonders behind.’
Will began to climb once more, torn between caution towards what lay ahead and haste from what was behind them. ‘Watch our backs, Robert,’ he said to Launceston. ‘If you have even the slightest suspicion the Enemy are coming up, sing out.’
As they climbed, the bare walls became covered with faded tapestries or shelves of mouldering tomes, muffling the echoes of their tread. They passed bolted doors hiding silent chambers. Strange scents drifted on the dry air, some sweet and spicy, others with a bitter tang, but Will could smell no hint of any man. Just as he was beginning to wonder if Dee had hidden himself away somewhere else, he was confronted by a flare of light and a dark figure. It was his own reflection in a gilt-edged mirror that filled the width of the passage.
‘The way is barred?’ Strangewayes asked. ‘Have we wasted our time?’ He turned his narrowing eyes on Meg.
Her brow creased. ‘No. Dee told me another chamber lay at the top of the tower.’
Will traced his fingertips across the smooth, cold surface of the glass and after a moment gently applied pressure. A click echoed and the mirror pivoted to reveal a space a sword’s length square bounded by three more mirrors. On the low, vaulted ceiling, more twisted faces whispered their unsettling entreaties. ‘It seems,’ he said with a hint of a smile, ‘we are now playing Dr Dee’s game.’
As the five spies pressed into the tight space, the mirror pivoted shut behind them. Launceston pressed his shoulder against it, but it held fast.
‘Trapped,’ Carpenter grumbled.
‘Or not,’ Will said. ‘That would be too simple for a man like Dee. Tricks and puzzles and games are what fire him, and in them he finds his own kind of torture.’ He peered into each of the three facing mirrors in turn, then said, ‘I would wager we are in a maze.’
Meg nodded, understanding. ‘Each mirror opens on to another space like this one. We lose hours, if not days . . . if not our wits or our lives . . . finding a way through.’
When Carpenter reached out to press one of the mirrors, Will caught his wrist. ‘We should choose carefully, John. If I know Dee’s cunning, he will have arranged it that once a choice has been made, neither of the other two ways can be opened. Otherwise, it would be a matter of simply searching all possible paths.’
‘And no going back,’ Launceston mused, studying his reflection. He smoothed one eyebrow with his index finger.
‘We have no time to dawdle. Let us make our choice and move on,’ Strangewayes snapped. ‘They are all
the same. How can we know which way to go?’
The younger spy was correct, Will accepted. They could not afford to tarry. He selected the mirror to his left and swung it open. As he had expected, another square of mirrors confronted him. Once the others had squeezed in, he heard the mirror at their backs close with an echoing click.
‘This is madness,’ Carpenter exclaimed. ‘We will be lost in this hell until Judgement Day.’
For long moments, they passed through an endless procession of themselves, their faces seeming more haunted in each new space they entered. Will found his head swimming with flashes of reflected torchlight, sparkling eyes and the constant whispers from the carvings overhead. He shook his head, trying to dispel visions of other shadowy figures looking over their shoulders. He could see that the others also struggled with the assault upon their senses in the confined spaces.
‘There is more at play here than mirrors,’ he said as he stepped through another opening. The words had barely left his lips when the door jerked from his grip and slammed with surprising force, separating him from the rest. He hammered on the glass, but it seemed unbreakable. Through the barrier, he could hear Carpenter’s muffled curses, but after a moment they died away. Only silence remained. Perhaps this too was part of Dee’s trap. Divide, and conquer.
With grim determination, he turned to move forward alone.
Time seemed to stretch out in a constant parade of mirrors and doors. In every space, images of himself reached out for ever, an unending but insubstantial pageant of Will Swyftes ineffectually fighting a battle that would never end. He began to notice that the incomprehensible droning whispers were starting to make a kind of sense, urging him on towards despair. The mirrors themselves pricked his unease. The Unseelie Court communicated through them, lived within them, for all he knew. Were they now watching his every move? Laughing at his failures, luring him on to his doom?
Barely had the thought crossed his mind before he saw his reflection melt away. In its place loomed up the yellowing and hideous skull beneath the skin. Death is waiting for you, it told him, and it is closer than you think. His heart began to pound and a sheen of sweat glistened on his brow.
Reeling, he tore open another mirror and stepped through to the next small chamber, and the one after that. He felt hours pass; days; years. His reflection aged, the skin hanging from his face in loose folds, until it crumbled to dust, then became young and vital once more.
Wrenching open one mirror, he was greeted by an image of Dee. The old man sat in a high-backed wooden chair that resembled the Confessor’s throne in Westminster Abbey. His eyes were black pebbles in a frozen face. Brooding, he was, plotting death; not the Dee that Will knew at all. The vision vanished in the blink of an eye, but not before Will felt it sear itself upon his mind.
More mirrors glittered, endless Will Swyftes.
As he stumbled into another chamber, the glass showed no reflection, nor a hint of what might be, but a memory. It was night, and he stood by the well in Arden on the day and night that had changed the course of his life for ever. It was the day Jenny was stolen from him, but that had not been the only assault upon his life. He was there, washing his hands over and over again, desperately trying to rid them of the blood that now turned the water brown. And he heard the soft tread of small feet at his back, and knew that it was Grace. He could not let her see his crime, his failure. And so he turned to her and smiled and spoke as sweetly as he could. But that was the moment he knew he was not a good man, and could never be again. Redemption would never come for him. All that remained in life was saving Jenny. If he could do that, at least he could achieve something good in his miserable existence.
And then, in his befuddled mind, a single clear thought surfaced. It felt like a revelation, a burning truth. The Unseelie Court steal our innocence, he thought. That is their greatest crime. They corrupt our highest aspirations and force us to be base and grubby.
With shaking hands, he ripped open the mirror and teetered on the brink of a pure black abyss. Buffeting wind lashed rain into his face. Somehow his fingers clutched on to the jamb. The door had opened in the wall of the tower and he half hung over a vertiginous drop into the night. The blast of air and the wet cleared some of the delirium from his mind, and he understood what a trap Dee had set. Only reactions honed by a lifetime of battle had prevented him from plunging to his doom; others would not have been so fortunate.
As he dragged himself back, he glimpsed movement below him. Even in his feverish state, his senses jangled. Gripping on to the jamb, he leaned out into the storm once more and peered down. Squinting, he could just make out shapes shifting on the sheer wall. Like fat grey spiders, the Enemy scaled the tower, clinging on to the gale-lashed stone with supernatural skill.
Bypassing the mirror maze, they would be upon Dee in no time at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE MIRROR SWUNG open without a sound. Blinking in the glare of candlelight after so long stumbling through the dark, Carpenter looked round a small antechamber lined with leather-bound books. On a trestle in a corner stood rolls of yellowing charts, a human skull with a fragment of pate missing, an ivory-handled knife with a curved blade and a small silver casket. He could still smell the sweet aroma which had hung in the air since they had entered the mirror maze. But over the top of it now drifted the reek of human sweat.
His head swam from the visions that had floated across his mind’s eye since he had become separated from the others. His love, Alice Dalingridge, calling to him, still as beautiful as when she had been alive. His father, now so long in the grave, showing him how to chop wood behind the thatched cottage in the forest clearing. And that thing tearing at his face in the frozen Muscovy woods, when Swyfte had left him for dead and he had felt all hope desert him. Time no longer meant anything to him. He might have been in that black, glass world for years.
With a shaking hand, he wiped the sweat from his brow and steadied himself. At least that damnable whispering had left him in peace. Creeping forward, he listened at the door to the next chamber. When no sound reached his ears, he opened it a crack and peered inside. Amid shelves of books, Dee sat on a stool in front of the cold hearth, his back to Carpenter. The old man had his head in his hands, deep in thought.
The spy drew his dagger in case he had to prick the alchemist to urge him to obey. As he prepared to step into the chamber, a hand fell on his shoulder. He almost cried out and lashed out with his knife. The steel whipped a hair’s breadth from Launceston’s throat. Pulling the door shut, Carpenter pushed the Earl to the other side of the antechamber and whispered, ‘You fool. I could have killed you.’
He flinched at the other man’s penetrating gaze. ‘What was your intention?’ the Earl asked in his blank, emotionless voice.
‘To capture Dee, of course.’ Carpenter’s gaze flickered away from the other man’s probing eyes.
After a moment, the Earl spoke, his tone measured. ‘I have had little comfort in my life, despite the land my family has owned, and the wealth we have amassed – or perhaps because of it. My father was not a man given to sentiment. Ledgers and balance sheets prescribed the limits of his life; the cold stone of our castle, rarely heated even in winter, was the womb of his existence. He sought to teach me harsh lessons, feeling, mayhap, that it would best prepare me for the kind of life he lived. Cellars and drains and holes were my billet. Days spent in dark and damp, with only rats and beetles for friends. Blood and bruises and broken bones. No traitor in the Tower fared worse. I wonder sometimes if God made me the monster I am, or if it was my father.’ He wrinkled his nose and shrugged. ‘It matters little. We are what we are.’
Carpenter glanced towards the door, half expecting Dee to come out and cast some vile spell on them. ‘Why are you telling me these things?’ he asked in irritation.
‘I killed him. My father. He was my first. At the time I thought it would ease the ache that reached deep inside me.’ Launceston cocked his head, narrowing his
eyes as he stared into the middle distance. ‘It only increased my appetite. When something has been taken away, we try to replenish the space left behind with other things, but that is like filling the sea with sand.’
‘You are a madman. Why speak like this, now, here?’
‘You have lost the woman you loved, seen your face scarred and the very foundations of your life shaken. You are trying to fill the sea with sand,’ the Earl said.
Carpenter furrowed his brow, trying to tease out the meaning in his companion’s words. He sensed a weight there and it puzzled him. Launceston rarely spoke, and never expressed his innermost thoughts or feelings. Indeed, Carpenter had come to believe the Earl had none.
‘I know not what Lansing offered you when you were his prisoner, but it was a deal with the devil,’ the aristocrat said, his voice now a whisper. And then Carpenter understood: no one saw into the Earl, but Launceston had seen into him. ‘Your belief that you can achieve your heart’s desire has blinded you to the truth.’
‘The bastard offered me nothing,’ Carpenter lied, with a derisive laugh. ‘I resisted all his attempts to torture me.’
‘The Unseelie Court rarely have need to torture. And I know you better than you know yourself,’ the other man replied, turning his gaze towards the candle flame. Carpenter thought he appeared to be trying to dredge up the remnants of whatever human emotion had survived from his earliest days; a monk trying to comprehend the ways of a Bankside doxy might have looked equally baffled. ‘The decision you make this day will define the course of the rest of your life,’ Launceston continued. ‘I will not stand in your way, whatever you choose. You have stood by me when most other men would have walked away in disgust – that is something I have never known in my life, and I value it more than you could understand. For the first time in my dismal existence, I have found a place where I am at ease, here among men who deal in false faces and deceit yet hold themselves to a higher standard than most honest men—’
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