Chaos Quest

by Gill Arbuthnott

  She looked at them quietly for a few seconds then took the pipe from her mouth, moving slowly as though they were wild animals that might take fright and run at any moment.

  “Hello,” she said, moving towards the hearth. “Soup’s ready if you’d like some.”

  They nodded dumbly. She pointed them towards a couple of chairs at the table and they sat silently as she ladled soup into bowls and set it down in front of them.

  “Here,” she said, handing each of them a spoon. “Eat it while it’s hot.”

  David hesitated, remembering stories where it was important not to eat in Fairyland or you wouldn’t be able to return home. Don’t be stupid, he told himself, wherever you are it’s not Fairyland. Anyway, Kate’s eating it. He swallowed a few spoonfuls.

  Whatever else the soup was going to do it seemed to have given them back the power of speech.

  “You probably want to know what we’re doing in your house,” began Kate.

  The woman shook her head. “Not really. I suppose you came through the Door – from the other place that is, not the front door.”

  “Yes. We were looking for some people – friends of ours.”

  “Oh yes,” said Tisian, “and what would their names be?”

  They were silent again. How much should they tell her? Trust your instincts, thought Kate. That’s what the letter said. She looked pointedly at David, who gave a tiny nod.

  “There’s a girl called Erda and a man called Morgan.”

  She nodded. “Then you’ll be David and Kate. My name is Tisian.”

  They gasped. “How do you know that?” breathed David.

  “Morgan told me.”

  “Then you know him! Where is he? Has he found Erda?” he went on, the questions tumbling out.

  “He is searching for the Stardreamer.”

  “Yes,” Kate brushed the comment aside. “We know about the Stardreamer, but has he found Erda?”

  Tisian looked at them blankly.

  “You do not know,” she whispered.

  “What?” they both asked.

  Tisian looked from Kate to David and back before she answered.

  “Your friend Erda … she is the Stardreamer.”

  “What?” said David, unable to believe his ears.

  “That’s impossible,” said Kate. “The Stardreamer is some sort of awesome, powerful being. Erda is … just Erda. She’s just a girl.”

  “That’s exactly what Morgan thought when he met her. Oh dear, there’s a lot he hasn’t told you, isn’t there?”

  So she told them slowly, taking her time, picking her words carefully so the children had a chance to take it in slowly, bit by bit. Finally she told them about Thomas and how he had died and watched in sympathy as they tried to deal with that; that Erda, who they thought they knew, had that much power and had killed, albeit by accident.

  There was silence in the room for a long time after she stopped talking. After a while David stirred and looked up.

  “I knew too.”

  “What?” asked Kate, puzzled.

  “When the Stardreamer arrived. I remember it now. I was having this dream about Mum. We were in Princes Street Gardens and she was listening, then she said, ‘She’s coming. You must go.’ and I woke up. It was the night after Gordon went away on holiday.”

  Kate gasped. “And I dreamed about Tethys’ wolves that night, over and over. It was horrible, I hadn’t dreamed about them in ages.”

  David suddenly realised how long they’d sat in the patchworked room. “Kate, we’ll have to go. Our parents will be going spare.”

  “Yes, all right. Tisian, what should we do?”

  “I do not know, my dear. You must do what your heart tells you.”

  “Can we come back?”

  “If the Door will open for you. It is unpredictable.”

  “Tell Morgan … tell him you told us and ask him to come back through to our world. Perhaps we can help him.”

  Tisian nodded.

  “Kate, come on!”

  Tisian lifted the cloth aside to reveal the pale door. David lifted the iron latch and opened it as the hanging fell back in place behind them and …

  … they were back in the smallest bedroom of Mr Flowerdew’s house.

  They looked at the familiar white-painted door and opened it half expecting to find themselves in Tisian’s house again, but instead there were the landing and stairs, where they should be.

  “Come on, let’s go,” said David, glancing at his watch. He looked again. According to his watch it was exactly eleven. He held it to his ear, heard the familiar tick. “Wait. What time is it?”

  “Dunno. I forgot my watch. We can look at the kitchen clock.”

  It said eleven as well. They looked at each other.

  “How long were we there?” asked David, although he already knew.

  “An hour? An hour and a half? Definitely not less than an hour.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither. At least we’re not in trouble for being late now though …”

  IN THE UNDERWORLD

  Morgan walked the Underworld. He had only been here a few times before and was always glad to leave. Parts of it reminded him of the Wildwood, but as though seen in a subtly distorting mirror. It was difficult to say what made it so unsettling a place: the rivers seemed like ordinary rivers (if there were such things), the trees like normal trees and yet …

  The closest he could come when he’d once tried to describe it to Thomas, was that things seemed to have settled into the form they held just before he looked at them, as though they changed to fit his expectations, and gave him the queasy impression that they drifted into being something quite different when his attention strayed from them. He supposed it wasn’t surprising that, in a World where the Lords of Chaos could come and go at will, things should seem so loosely anchored in reality.

  He moved cautiously through the not-quite-shifting landscape, waiting for a glimpse of Erda. He could tell she was close by. The thread of power that bound them seemed to grow stronger by the day. Now he knew that she often shifted from her human shape and would sometimes creep close in the guise of a bird or insect, although he couldn’t yet pick her out in those forms.

  But I will, he thought, soon.

  He stopped for a while at what passed here for midday, eating and drinking sparingly from the supplies he had brought with him. He never ate or drank anything that came from the Underworld, lest he find himself trapped there.

  He closed his eyes for a few minutes after he had eaten. He was always tired now – he didn’t know why – and fell asleep almost at once dreaming of Thomas, as he often did. But today Thomas wouldn’t talk to him. Instead he walked away from Morgan with a brown-haired woman in boots and trousers and a red top.

  He walked on through the afternoon in woodland patched with light and shade until he came to a thickly wooded ravine. After walking along the edge for a while he realised he would have to climb down and up again. He found a place where traces of a path cut down through the trees, and looked across the gorge before starting down.

  She was there! She stood at the other edge of the ravine directly opposite him, less than a stone’s throw away. On level ground he could have covered the distance in a dozen strides. He found his bow was in his hands half-drawn, an arrow strung, before he even realised he had moved.

  She stood quite still. He drew the bow further, aiming at her heart, his breath coming painfully.

  “You killed my brother!” he shouted at her.

  I know, she said without speaking. The words were simply there in his head. I did not know what I was. No one told me. I did not mean to hurt either of you.

  “I know,” he said and let the bow go slack.

  He looked at her properly. She was more dishevelled than he remembered and her face was thinner. Her hair was tangled and snagged with leaves and twigs and her clothes were muddy.

  Somewhere nearby a wolf howled suddenly and Erda turn
ed and walked away slowly.

  “Stop!” yelled Morgan. “Wait! Come back! You can’t leave like this.” He plunged down the slope, heedless of the brambles that caught his clothes and the branches that whipped at his face, but by the time he fought his way up the far side of the ravine, Erda was nowhere to be seen.

  The wolf howled again, somewhere off to the right. Morgan forced himself to stop and find exactly where she had been standing, looking for any signs to show which way she had gone, but despite sensing that she still held human shape, there was no trail to follow.

  He searched for her until darkness threatened to overtake him and he realised he was too far away from the Doors he knew of to get back before nightfall. He had never spent a night in the Underworld and did not relish the prospect as he stood on the straggling edges of a wood with open moorland beyond.

  He gathered as much dead wood as he could find – having decided to cut nothing living – and kindled a fire, with every intention of trying to keep it burning through the night. He was so tired. Tomorrow he would go back to Tisian’s house to eat and sleep properly or he would be no good to anyone. He settled himself as comfortably as he could against a fallen pine trunk and took a mouthful of his fast-dwindling supply of water, and forced himself to eat a handful of dried fruit although he wasn’t hungry.

  He meant to stay awake, but he couldn’t and was soon walking in the Wildwood with Thomas, both of them half-grown boys again. He woke with a start to find the night half gone and the fire reduced to embers. A full moon hung low in the purple-black sky, yellow as a wolf’s eye.

  Cursing, he got to his feet and put small sticks onto what was left of his fire, blowing on the embers until they caught light. He added larger branches and as it suddenly flared up he saw Erda sitting with her legs curled under her on the far side of the fire. He leaped back with an oath, hands scrabbling for a weapon, then subsided to the ground and stared across at her in silence.

  She leaned forward and stirred the fire with her fingers and he watched in wonder as she withdrew her hand unharmed from the flames.

  “What am I?” she asked him. “You know, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “You are the Stardreamer.”

  The fire roared up between them, blocking his view of her for a few seconds. She was still there when it subsided.

  “What does that mean?” she said. “The words in my head don’t make sense.”

  “Don’t you remember who you are?” he countered.

  “I am Erda. I am the Stardreamer. But I do not know what that means.”

  It occurred to him as he groped for what to tell her that she was speaking normally to him. Perhaps he had imagined it, back at the ravine.

  “I know I come from out there,” she pointed up at the night sky, where different stars burned from those that were visible from the Wildwood, “but none of it makes sense to me.”

  “I only know a little,” he began. “The Stardreamers sail in the void until one of them is called down to a World by those who live there. The Stardreamer has power … It can be used by the World.”

  She’ll see into me; see how much I’m not saying, he thought. Maybe she can read my thoughts. But if she could, she gave no sign of it.

  “I still don’t understand,” she sighed. “Perhaps the words don’t want me to.” She stood up and walked a little way off so that he had half risen to his feet, words rising unbidden in his throat.

  “Don’t go.”

  She came back, dropping to a crouch by the fire, holding her hands up to the flames to warm them. Suddenly she looked him directly in the eye and spoke.

  “I am sorry. For what happened to your brother. If I could undo it I would. But I do not have that power. I don’t know what to do.”

  He was about to speak when a sound drew his attention. It came from beyond Erda, just outside the circle of light cast by the fire. He scrambled for his bow, saw her flinch from the corner of his eye.

  “Erda! Get over here. There’s something out there.”

  She rose slowly to her feet but made no move to put the fire between her and what moved in the darkness.

  Two wolves slipped into the flickering yellow light. For a moment they were all caught in a silent tableau, utterly still, then one of the wolves stretched its neck back and howled and the other sprang at Erda.

  Morgan’s first shot took it in the flank and his second in the throat. The second wolf sprang and Morgan brought it down with a single shot through the heart.

  Erda hadn’t moved. She looked now from one silver-furred body to another. Morgan’s hands were shaking. He dropped the bow.

  “They are coming for you,” he said.

  She looked at him, smiled and was gone in a swirl of ash.

  RESPONSIBILITY

  “Kate, what are you doing? It’s lunchtime.”

  “Just coming, mum. I’m on the phone to Sarah.”

  Kate shut her bedroom door again and carried on the conversation from where it had been interrupted. She and Sarah were trying to arrange a shopping trip to buy something to wear to Jamie Grieve’s party the next weekend.

  “No, Saturday morning’s no good. I told you, I’ve got football. What about the afternoon?” She listened to Sarah explain why that wasn’t possible. “Friday afternoon?” Nope. “It’ll have to be today then. Two thirty? Okay. I’ll check with the parents and call you back. Bye.”

  She went into the kitchen. Her parents sat at either end of the table, reading bits of the Sunday paper and eating soup. Ben grinned at her as she sat down opposite him. She reached for a slice of bread.

  “What are you so happy about?” she asked, scowling at him.

  “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? Mum, she’s forgotten. I told you she had.” Ben started to moan.

  Oh no, what now?

  “Forgotten what?”

  Ruth was engrossed in the review section, filtering out the noise of the children’s voices as much as possible.

  “Mum!” Ben banged his spoon on the table to get her attention.

  “Don’t do that, Ben,” she said, emerging from the paper. “What is it?”

  “Kate’s forgotten about this afternoon.”

  “What are you on about? I haven’t forgotten anything.”

  Ruth looked exasperated. “So you’re remembering that you’ll be looking after Ben this afternoon while your dad and I look at kitchens?”

  “What? You never said anything about that. I’ve just arranged to go shopping with Sarah.”

  “Well you’d better just un-arrange it then. I told you about this on Wednesday.”

  “You did not!”

  “Of course I did.” Ruth held up her hands. “Not another word. That’s what’s happening.”

  “That’s so unfair.”

  “Do you know that’s practically all you say these days?”

  “No wonder!” She stomped out of the kitchen, seething.

  She wouldn’t mind – well, not so much – if she’d heard anything about this before, but she was sure she hadn’t. Fairly sure. She called Sarah to cancel and listened to predictions of the ridicule they would face when they didn’t have the right stuff for the party. She stayed mutinously in her room until she heard her parents getting ready to go out, then emerged so that she could stand around looking glum.

  Ruth steadfastly ignored her expression, instead giving her a list of instructions of what to do and when they would be back. As they went out the front door her dad handed her some money.

  “Thanks, love. That’s to buy the pair of you an ice cream. I’ll try and make it quick. Maybe you can meet Sarah after we come back.”

  “I don’t think so, but thanks, Dad.”

  As soon as the door had shut, Ben said, “Is that ice cream money?”

  “Yes, maggot, and you don’t deserve any.”

  “That’s not fair. I’ll tell.”

  She gave a theatrical sigh. “Believe me, I know. Don’t worry you little rat, you’ll get your
ice cream, though you don’t deserve it.”

  “Can we go and play football on the Links first?”

  “I suppose so. Go on then, find a ball.”

  Actually, once they were out it wasn’t too bad. It was warm and sunny again and some of Ben’s friends were there already so they soon got a game going. She ran rings around them for a bit then got bored and went to sit on a bench and watch. A couple of her own friends wandered past, en route to town to mooch around Princes Street Gardens, and they stopped to chat for a while. When they’d gone she tried calling David, but his phone was switched off. She left a message anyway, in case he looked at it soon.

  The football game was breaking up, small boys heading off in various directions.

  “Come on, Ben,” she called. “Ice cream time.”

  He gave a whoop, retrieved his ball and ran across to the bench where she sat.

  “Can we go to Luca’s? Please? I know Dad gave you enough money.”

  “Oh, all right.” She tried to look long-suffering, though in fact she had been about to suggest it herself. Luca’s was a legendary Italian ice cream shop. When she was little the family had made pilgrimages by car all the way to neighbouring Musselburgh to wait in long queues for Strawberry 99s, but now they had a shop barely ten minutes walk from home, and they’d discovered that the ice cream tasted just as good even if you hadn’t sat sweltering in a traffic jam to get to it.

  When they got there they ignored the new-fangled delights of the Irn Bru Sorbet and other exotic flavours and opted for classic Strawberry in the largest size their money would buy.

  They dawdled back in silence, savouring the flavour of the summer yet to come, licking drips off their hands, intent on consuming every morsel.

  By the time they got back to the Links, Kate had finished hers and a fair proportion of Ben’s was spread around his mouth. As they waited to cross the road Kate looked idly at the people walking over the grass; no footballers at the moment, in fact, no one she knew.