Slew named his teacher.
‘The best,’ said the Emperor. ‘Did he tell you that I taught him?’
The first flicker of an expression in Slew’s eyes: surprise, then respect.
‘Who else do you see, apart from an Emperor?’
Slew hesitated.
‘As I am Master of Shadows, so I see my Lord to whom I owe life and loyalty before all.’
‘Good. And as Master you shall follow the command I now give you which, whatever may happen to me on the morrow, you will see through to the end. Understood?’
Slew nodded.
‘So . . . my orders are simple enough. They are to be acted on at once. I want you out of Bochum and heading for the coast within the hour . . . time is precious. Blut here will give you the details.
‘I command you to journey to Englalond and bring back the one thing it has which I need. Blut will tell you what that is. Be speedy, be resolute, if you must kill to get that object, then kill, but do so sparingly.’
Slew nodded.
The interview seemed over.
The Emperor’s eyes were closing.
But as Blut led Slew out Sinistral called out, ‘Witold, you should know that I am pleased with you but . . . why is it your mother is . . . wary of you?’
‘She dislikes me, Lord.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged indifferently.
‘She told me once but I did not know what she meant.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That I have no compassion.’
‘She’s right. I can feel it like a cold breeze. You will need to find it one day.’
‘Why, my Lord Emperor?’
‘You’ll know why, just as I did, only in the moment that you find it; for your sake, I hope it will not be too late. You accept the command of your Emperor?’
‘I do. What is this thing that I must bring back to you?’
‘Nothing much, just a little stone, that is all. Blut will explain. He knows about such things. He has studied them . . . Trust him, as I do.’
As he left, Leetha came from where she had been eavesdropping.
‘I like him, my love.’
‘I do not.’
‘You will. Now, your other son, Leetha, the one due as I went into my latest sleep. How is he?’
‘Didn’t Blut tell you? I gave him up for his own good. He’s gone. You would not have liked him.’
‘Why not?’
‘You like perfection and he was a giant-born. The Fyrd chased us because you were not there to protect me and Blut had not then found his feet in power. They would have killed him.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘My love . . . what is it?’
She buried her head in his weak chest. His hand went slowly to her head and caressed her hair. He could bear his pain much better than he could hers.
‘What is it?’
She wept.
‘My beloved, whatever is it?’
‘I miss him, he was so beautiful. I gave up the thing I treasured most because I loved him too well.’
He sighed, weak from the effort of responding to her tears.
‘Witold knew it, hence his anger. But . . . what’s a mother to do? Be thankful you have only me to worry about, my Lord!’
‘Leetha, go away . . . If I am to hold the gem tomorrow I must sleep again today.’
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said before, looking down at him with love, she kissed him on his ruined head.
But he did not sleep and nor did she go away.
Leetha was so worried by the Emperor’s state of mind that she dozed on a palliasse in the cold, damp quarters of the office Blut had made his own, adjacent to the Chamber of Sleep. Blut himself slept in his own room nearby, the doors all open. That way they could hear the Emperor’s mutterings in the dark, his cries through the broken rain, his sobs, his pain.
‘Blut!’
She roused him from sleep.
‘My . . . my Lady?’
‘He wants something we cannot give him.’
She had been up and sat with him and he talked to her, asking for something.
Together they hurried to his side.
‘I am afraid I may have too little strength left to survive the gem’s scorching power, Blut, and I am afraid I will never see the world again. I have been too long in this dark in which there is not night or day.’
‘My Lord,’ Leetha whispered, ‘there are but a few hours to go until we can begin. The Remnants take things slowly, they will be ready then.’
He reached for her hand, he shook his head, he wept.
‘Is it night up there in the real world?’
‘It is, but—’
‘I want to see the stars.’
‘We cannot take you there, my Lord, it will kill you,’ said Blut.
‘If I cannot even see the stars when I wish to, what is it that I am the Emperor of? Eh? Eh!?’
The Emperor of the Hyddenworld moaned in his agony.
‘I . . . want . . . to . . .’
Leetha made a decision.
‘Fetch Kreche, Blut,’ said Leetha. ‘Now!’
‘Lord . . . my Lady!’
‘Help me, Blut. Tomorrow I may die, tonight . . . I . . . want . . .’
‘My beloved,’ said Leetha, stroking his gaunt cheek and wiping his dribbling mouth and eyes, ‘it is all right, we’ll take you where you need to go. It will give you strength for the morrow.’
Otta Kreche, once the Emperor’s Master of Shadows, still his friend, was brought into the Chamber by Blut.
He was a huge hydden, old now but strong, with arms and hands like the branches of an oak.
He had seen his Lord sick and ill many times, but never as he was now. He looked at him and wept.
‘My friend, I want to see the stars,’ said Sinistral.
Kreche, who was a father and grandfather and knew how to be gentle, bent down and eased his hands and arms under the skin and bones that were all his Lord Emperor was.
He picked him up like a sick child and cradled him.
Leetha put a blanket over him, Blut another.
They covered his head with a corner of the soft material.
Blut went ahead to the old lift shaft that was the only way to the surface from Level 18. The space was narrow but they all squeezed inside. As the lift jerked its way up, the Emperor’s head resting against Kreche’s chest, the movement was painful, his moans very pitiful.
But up they went, level by slow level, clanketing their way to the surface of the Earth, up into the cold night air.
‘Do not drop me, Kreche, do not let me fall . . .’
‘No, Lord.’
They moved outside.
The night sky, all stars and moon, stretched away for ever and for ever. My Lord Emperor reached a hand to touch it, laughing with joy, crying with pain.
‘It is so beautiful,’ he said. ‘Listen!’
‘What can you hear?’ asked Kreche.
‘The musica, my friend, I hear the musica, it is the starshine in my eyes, it is the cold air on my face, it is the strength of your arms and the touch of my beloved. And Blut . . . ?’
‘My Lord?’
‘The musica is you as well. Can you not hear it?’
They stood listening to the night beneath the stars of Bochum.
‘It is everything and everywhere,’ he said.
‘It is you as well,’ said Leetha.
They listened more until, at last, a shiver of cold ran among them.
‘I am ready to sleep now,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow . . .’
‘Tomorrow is already come,’ said Blut.
17
DANGEROUS MILESTONE
‘At three,’ shouted Arthur above the noise of the tantrum that Judith was having on the kitchen floor, ‘he or she, as they put it, is capable of holding a crayon and drawing a face, putting on a coat and taking it off again, using a spoon without spilling – very funn
y – and . . . of having a tantrum.’
Katherine picked Judith up with some difficulty as she continued to kick and scream loud enough that their eardrums felt the strain, and handed her back to Jack.
‘She can do all those things,’ she said. ‘She can also walk, talk, have imaginary friends and pedal the tricycle . . .’
‘And steer it . . . can’t you?’
Jack grinned up at Judith suspended in the air and she, red-faced, stared back furiously and tried to kick him.
Her appearance had improved. She still looked odd but now acceptably so. Her hair was dark like Jack’s. Her eyes were brown, her mouth quite full, her nose snubby, her skin darker than light, her chin firm and her face capable of all kinds of expressions including a smile, though that was a very rare event.
Her face also showed her suffering.
For she was still in constant pain, which was worse at night. So she did not sleep well and looked tired.
Her teeth, briefly uncomfortable for Katherine, were strong and white. She still breast-fed, which to Margaret seemed strange in so large a child, even distasteful, but so it was. Great big gurgling sucks, her legs kicking with pleasure as she took them, her strong hands pulling at Katherine’s nursing bra, heaving her blouses out of shape.
For her part, and they were a symbiotic pair when it came to feeding, Katherine ate like a horse: anything and everything, without discrimination. Shopping – which Margaret and Arthur had always done in a slow, bumbly sort of way, arguing over every item, toying with things organic, hesitating over cola, which Margaret liked, and pondering the lettuces since Margaret grew them better – shopping had become a nightmare.
At first she had bought too little.
Then she bought too little of what the rest of them wanted, because Katherine ate it.
Now – and this was in the space of less than a fortnight – they piled the junk food in that Katherine demanded, racing round the supermarket to get back home and help.
As Katherine wolfed things down it sometimes felt, as Judith reached out her hands for a hoist up and eagerly latched on, that she was sucking it right back out there and then. The two were inseparable in bed, Jack ousted to the nursery as once was, but not put out by the fact. He slept on the floor, a habit he had gained when he was in the Hyddenworld and to which he now happily returned.
Beds – ‘human’ beds as he thought of them – were too soft for him. For him, too, the Hyddenworld was still a place just over there, almost reachable. Not so for Katherine. She had returned home, had a child, and all that past seemed a distant thing, like an unimportant memory.
It was not that coming back through the broken henge at the Devil’s Quoits had wiped her mind clean of the Hyddenworld so much that it had shifted her perspective and priority. It no longer mattered. It was over and done. Had she been asked – which Jack was careful not to do – she would have said she had no wish to go back because she had no need to. She might have worried that she was even asked the question, thinking that Jack did want to go back.
Naturally he didn’t. His priority was Judith now, and Katherine, his family. But . . .
But sometimes he stared out of their bedroom window, down towards the henge, and felt the call of that place where he had been born, a world that felt richer to him and more real than the human one, even after what had now happened.
He knew where he needed and wanted to be, but the draw to return was there and the henge as well . . . a door of a kind that had been in his unconscious all his life but was only made real by journeying through it. The door remained open and he knew it would always be so, but it was impossible to imagine any circumstance that would make him want to return.
Jack placed Judith carefully back on the kitchen floor and said, ‘So, she’s effectively something more than three years old and we’re going to have to make some plans for her own safety . . .’
The demands Judith’s existence made on them were endless.
‘Do we assume she’s mentally three as well?’
‘Dada,’ said Judith, smashing her fists into his shins and thighs, ‘garden.’
Arthur looked at the sheet of information he had printed from the internet.
‘Let me see . . . “takes joy in family mealtimes” . . . hmmm . . . “takes joy in assisting you when tidying up” – what!? . . . “heads for friends when sees them” . . . she hasn’t got any . . . wait a minute, that’s under social development. “Can name three shapes”, yes; “can count up to ten”, sort of . . . yes, Jack, I think we can take it that Judith is developing mentally as well.’
‘Garden!’ said Judith, kicking him again, but harder.
‘And that she can communicate.’
‘Seriously, Arthur. She’s going to start roaming and we could lose her. In the house that’s manageable, outside it could be a disaster. She might get hurt.’
‘I’ll make a list of prevention and containment measures,’ said Katherine, who though still existing on very little sleep was already beginning to recover her strength and spirits.
It was agreed.
‘Come on!’ Jack said to Judith, ‘you can get to the garden yourself, but once you’re there we don’t want you getting lost.’
Judith followed Jack out, reverting to half crawling, half walking and banging and shouting, to show she wanted to be carried.
But Jack had said no and she was learning that his ‘no’ was final.
Then they were gone, leaving the kitchen in peace for a time.
18
SUMMER
It was time and the Emperor lay waiting in his chair as still as death.
The Remnants had set up candlelights, which hung like soft moons in the misty rain. They themselves were nowhere to be seen.
The forms of the lime-ridden engine and winding gear and the other shapes and voids in the Chamber were hard to make out, looming up here, falling away there, and adding to the feeling of uncertainty and fear in the air.
Blut saw that near to the chair, beyond the canopy, was a lime-covered mound about three feet high. It was not so obscured that its detail was entirely lost. It was mortal-made, a stand to hold something on, with three thick legs, also covered in lime. At its base, clean and shiny, lay some mining tools: two large hammers, a pickaxe, an axe and a huge pair of cast-iron tongs of the kind used in steel making to hold containers of red-hot boiling metal.
‘You can’t see the Remnants but they’re here,’ whispered Leetha, her hand on Blut’s shoulder to give reassurance.
‘My Lady, are you sure I—’
‘You should be here, he wants you to be. He trusts you as he trusts the Remnants and myself. The journey he is about to make is more painful even than the one he made when waking back to our world. He needs to know he has support.’
She went to the Emperor’s side and called to Blut at once.
‘Bring that candle, yes, no more light than that! Hurry.’
They could see that Sinistral was finally dying.
His eyes were closed, his head had fallen to one side, his mouth sagged horribly open and from his throat and nasal passages came the beginnings of a stentorian rattle, the last few breaths.
‘My Lord,’ she said, taking his right hand, ‘stay with us for a few moments longer . . . Stay . . .’
He stirred, the rattling slowed, the breathing stopped, he jerked awake, the candlelight flickering in eyes that overnight had turned white and blind.
‘My Lord, can you hear me?’
Blut took the other hand.
‘My Lord . . .’ Her voice was a sob.
The Emperor’s hand squeezed Blut’s, who nodded at Leetha.
The Emperor stirred and said in a whisper, ‘Do not leave me, I do not want to be alone. I am afraid of ã Faroün, that he will come and punish me, I am afraid.’
‘We will not leave you, my beloved, and he will not come,’ she said.
‘I fear him . . .’
‘He is dead, Lord, long-since dead . . .’
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To Blut this seemed a strange diversion at such a moment. The name they spoke had been the Emperor’s mentor when a boy. From him he had gained the gem. Why would he be frightened of his return? Such questions Blut always asked, for information was power and fear was a tool.
Leetha grasped his arm.
‘Listen and listen well, Niklas Blut,’ she said. ‘You must stay and you shall watch but try not to look too long into the gem’s light. Fortunately its greatest power for good and ill is transmitted only through touch, but even so, be cautious. It can change objects and artefacts but will only affect you if you touch it.’
‘Lady . . .’ he began again, doubtfully, not wanting to stay.
‘No, it is right that you bear witness to what he must suffer if he is to return to us.’
‘I have seen already, my Lady.’
‘You have not seen this.’
‘My Lady, why is he so fearful of ã Faroün?’
‘It is nothing, an old fancy, ignore it and forget it, do you hear? There are more important things than that!’
Her irritation made him more curious still. Blut’s mind was a filing cabinet. He would not forget.
She turned back to Sinistral and whispered, ‘Ready yourself for what must be, for the time is now and we who love you are close by your chair. When the gem is given to you, grasp it in one hand and then grasp that hand with the other. In that I will help you. You must not let it go.’
Together they turned his chair and raised it so that he was more upright, facing out into the Chamber and its glimmering moons. Blut guessed that the stand by which the implements lay, and which was no more than a few yards away, was what the gem would be placed upon.
‘Move the lantern . . . yes, to there,’ she said, pointing to the hammers by the lime-clad mound.
He went and did so.
‘Good. Now, help me bind him to the chair.’
‘My Lady—’
‘Do it, there is little time. It will be necessary.’
Blut pulled the leather straps over the Emperor’s arms and legs.
‘Tighter!’ she said.
He buckled them tight, though the Emperor protested with slight movements and terrible, tortured whines.
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