Between Two Thorns (4 page)

He was onto his second coffee when footsteps approaching his chair made him twist round. It wasn’t Montgomery, but he suspected the man was another Arbiter; there was a total lack of emotion on his face and a slight bulge beneath his clothing where the soul chain would rest. Max didn’t recognise him and the stranger didn’t fit the description he’d been given of the suspected rat. He was dressed in a light jacket and jeans, much less formal than the suit and raincoat Max wore in Mundanus.

“Maximilian, of the Bath Chapter, Kingdom of Wessex?”

“Yes?”

“Good afternoon. I’m Faulkner, London Camden Chapter, Kingdom of Essex.”

He pulled the top of his jacket down just enough to reveal the chain and the Essex seal. Max nodded. “Thank you.”

“You’re a long way from home,” Faulkner said, sitting opposite him. “Waiting for Montgomery?”

Max nodded, uncertain how to play this. Faulkner had every right to tell him to leave, and to report his trespass to his Chapter if he felt Max was overstepping the mark. Which he had been, for the last seventy-two hours.

“He’s late,” he said.

“He’s in custody,” Faulkner replied, raising a hand to call the waiter. “Something’s gone horribly wrong with him; he’s been causing all kinds of problems lately and now we think he’s been kidnapping people and trying to pin it on a colleague.”

It was a pathetic attempt at a lie. Montgomery was as solid as Portland Stone. Max had heard that the really old Arbiters could get a little frayed around the edges but then they retired to the cloister to train the new recruits. Being closer to their soul again usually cleared up any problems. Montgomery was too young for it to be an issue anyway.

“Did he tell you I’d be here?”

Faulkner ordered tea and then nodded after the waiter left. “After he admitted he’d been struggling. It’s been tough in London lately; the Rosas are feuding again. He got caught in the crossfire one too many times. Smoke?”

Max shook his head. “Is my being here a problem?”

Faulkner drew in a lungful of smoke and let it drift from his nostrils. “Not if you leave on the next train and keep this under your hat.”

Max fingered the brim of his trilby, flicked a look down the street at the agency. The blonde was still in there. “Is this your beat?”

“Yes. Did Montgomery tell you there was a problem with the St Pancras Ward?” Max didn’t reply, choosing to wait to hear what Faulkner had to say. “There isn’t a problem any more. I’ve been assigned to clean up his mess. My ward borders St Pancras. There’s no need for you to stay.”

Max weighed up his choices. It didn’t take long; there were only two: stay and make a fuss, or pretend to leave and watch. The former would cross a line and push Faulkner into reporting him. He’d be forcibly ejected from the city and achieve nothing. The latter would risk the blonde; he’d be too far away to intervene, but his being thrown out of London wasn’t going to help her either.

He stood, resolving to gather more information. The paperwork involved in a dispute with another Chapter, especially one in a different Kingdom, wasn’t going to do anyone any good. He put on his hat and offered his hand to Faulkner who shook it.

“I hope everything gets sorted out with Montgomery,” Max said, for the sake of good manners.

“Have a safe journey home, Maximilian.” Faulkner attempted a smile but it always looked ugly on an Arbiter’s face.

 

5

 

Max headed towards the nearest tube station to make Faulkner believe he really was leaving. Whilst Max didn’t buy the brush-off, he did appreciate its delicacy. Faulkner had every right to throw the book at him and frogmarch him onto the first train out of Paddington. Even corrupted, the London Arbiters were still polite.

There was an outside chance Montgomery had lost his way as Faulkner had described, but if that were the case it made no sense to call a Wessex Arbiter from the Bath Chapter to investigate; Montgomery would try to hide it rather than invite attention. That blonde was still in danger. Max needed to find somewhere to watch the agency, and now Faulkner, but also a place where he could report back quickly, should something kick off. If he was to expose corruption in an institution flawless in its loyalty and integrity for almost a thousand years, he’d need damn good evidence.

He looked up and down the Euston Road, uncertain where to go and mindful that Faulkner might have another watching him. If some London Arbiter had been sniffing around in Bath Max would have done the same. So he headed towards a nearby local map attached to a lamppost, playing the part of a Wessex man in a foreign land, as he considered his options.

He needed two things: somewhere high with a clear view of Judd Street, and a contact host to report back to the Cloister. Even a grotesque would work, if a sculptured angel or gargoyle couldn’t be found. He looked across the road at the St Pancras Renaissance, the refurbished gothic hotel outside King’s Cross, letting his eyes roam over the building. It played into the disoriented tourist act, being an impressive landmark. The move paid off; up high on the clock tower he could see four gargoyles, and he’d be high enough to watch the Judd Street agency.

He made for King’s Cross St Pancras station, played a standard double-back trick at the underground station and crept out of one of the quieter exits to approach the hotel. He went towards the doors, keeping his hands in his pockets and mouth shut until he was inside. Removing his hat and moving with the purpose and confidence of a guest past the reception desk, he was up the stairs in less than a minute and hunting a way up into the clock tower.

Ten minutes later he was climbing out of a roof maintenance hatch over a hundred feet above St Pancras station. He’d stuffed his hat into his coat pocket, knowing the wind would take it, so high, and hoped the innocents of London would continue their usual behaviour of never looking up.

He climbed steadily, fearlessly, until he reached a ledge from which he could reach one of the gargoyles. When he got back to the cloister after this, he planned to raise the issue of contact in hostile territory. He’d never appreciated how inconvenient it was to find a contact host until he’d found himself in an unfamiliar city. But he knew what the response would be. Why would you need another way to make contact when you shouldn’t be in another Chapter’s city anyway?

The gargoyle was solid, ugly and recently sandblasted. It stretched out at least two metres from the wall, as if it had been turned to stone leaping from the building. It took a couple of minutes to climb on and straddle its back near where it jutted out of the clock tower. Max inched himself towards its head, carefully slid his chain onto the stone creature’s neck and braced himself.

“Oh, bloody hell, this is high up.” The gargoyle’s expression twisted into one of terror. “You better hold on tight.”

“I am,” Max muttered, getting his bearings and identifying Judd Street. He had a direct line of sight to the agency door, and hoped the blonde was still in there. “This is a report to the Chapter Master, his ears only.”

“Understood,” the gargoyle replied.

As he made his report, Max fiddled with one of the attachments he’d been given by the Sorcerer to improve the magnification of the experimental glasses. By the time he’d given the details and the gargoyle had added its own emotional commentary, his backside was numb and his ears were hurting from the cold wind.

As he waited for feedback and further instructions, the blonde emerged from the agency. She walked a few steps away, then burst into tears. He could see she was still clean. Perhaps she hadn’t been what they were looking for, and she was one lucky girl.

Faulkner was still at the café, drinking tea and watching the blonde too. So was the waiter; she was exactly the kind of person the Fae parasites would want. The glasses were giving him a headache and he didn’t want to stay up there much longer, but he had to see if she was safe. He lifted the frame to rub his eyes before resuming his vigil.

The discomfort was forgotten when he saw a man come down the street and notice the distressed woman. As he headed towards her, Max leaned forwards, studying the line of the man’s nose. He resembled someone he’d dealt with before… someone from the Rosa family line.

He was one of them, one of the Fae-touched, and he was homing in on the blonde.

Max checked on Faulkner who was watching them too. He sat still as the parasite spoke to her, making her look up in surprise, mascara dragged down her cheeks by the tears. Then, without even checking who was in the street, without looking the least bit nervous, the Fae-touched began to weave a Charm.

Through the glasses the Rosa looked brighter and more colourful. It looked as if the colours were bleeding out where his hand touched her shoulder, her dress becoming green again, the honey returning to her hair.

“Why isn’t he doing anything?” the gargoyle yelled with Max’s fury.

Flicking a glance at Faulkner, Max watched him sip tea as the Rosa worked a Fae Charm – in broad daylight on a public street in Mundanus! – less than ten metres away.

Even though he didn’t have the glasses, Faulkner’s training would be enough for him to know a crime was in progress. The way the Rosa would be murmuring, keeping physical contact, the way the innocent’s pupils would be dilating far too much and her body language changing, it would be obvious!

But that wasn’t all of it. The fact that the Rosa didn’t even check, didn’t care if he was seen, was proof enough that something was rotten in London. In fact, he was close enough to spot Faulkner was an Arbiter; they had just as much of an instinct for identifying their enemy as the Arbiters had for identifying them. Dislocation from one’s soul took its toll on them over the years; they were renowned for their ugliness and lack of expression. Usually a Fae-touched would leave the area as soon as they spotted one, finding Arbiters unpleasant to be around. The Fae fled them, terrified by humans without strings to pull.

The blonde was calm and pliant, allowing the stranger to slip an arm around her waist and steer her down the street, past the Arbiter who was pouring himself a second cup from the small teapot.

“That slimy, rotten piece of filth, I’d like to shove that teapot up Faulkner’s–”

“Shush,” Max hissed at the gargoyle.

He was at the top of a clock tower, unable to intervene, as he knew he would be. But now he was uncertain they’d take her to an intermediate location. Brazenly charming an innocent in the street didn’t suggest he’d feel the need for caution in slipping her away to Exilium.

The blonde was already lost, he realised. Charmed into compliance and with no Arbiter intervention, she’d be in the clutches of Lady Rose before the day was out. She was condemned to being a plaything until the foul creature became bored, and then she’d be a slave for eternity, trapped on the wrong side of the split worlds.

If there was any good to come out of this, it was getting the evidence to prevent any more being taken. “Tell the Chapter Master there’s an emergency,” he said, shuffling himself further along the back of the gargoyle towards its head.

He’d only made a deep connection once before, when his mentor had been there and protected him from outside interference. For the second time that day, the absence of fear was advantageous.

Max reached down, leaning forwards until his belly was resting on the gargoyle’s back, stretching his arms around its head until he could cup his hands over its stone eyes. “See what I see,” he said, consciously opening himself more to the connection with his soul.

He felt cold and his feet were going numb as his mind struggled to distinguish between him and the stone. Simultaneously, he had the feeling of witnessing the crime unfold as the blonde was steered towards the Euston Road, and also looking through his eyes as if they were binoculars, another presence watching from a step removed. Even though Max had no idea how he could feel it, he knew the Chapter Master was seeing the same as he did. Max focused on getting as much detail as he could.

He looked back at Faulkner, taking tea as if it were a Sunday afternoon in a world without the Fae-touched. He then focused back on the blonde, wondering where she’d be sent through.

The Fae’s puppets could access Exilium from the Nether, pockets of reality created between Mundanus and the Fae’s prison. For a moment he wondered if she was going to be taken into the Nether property anchored to the very hotel he was perched upon, but they crossed Euston Road and carried on, passing the station on their right, heading away from the busiest roads.

He craned his neck, waiting for a response from the Chapter Master. Even now he would be consulting the Sorcerer; there’d never been an incident like this in the history of the Bath Chapter.

It was getting harder to see them. Max struggled to make his legs cooperate as he tried to shift his position and keep them in sight.

Then the gargoyle moved.

He grabbed hold of it with his arms and legs as its body swung in the direction he wanted to go. He’d only seen eyes, mouths and, at a push, the head move on statues he’d used for a connection, never this much.

He quickly relocated the blonde and her kidnapper, heading towards an old church. But then a movement at the edge of his vision pulled his attention from the crime in progress.

Another Arbiter was balanced on the hotel roof, slightly below, about ten metres away. He fit the description Montgomery had given him: black hair, large nose, sallow skin and predictably unpleasant to look at.

The gun he was pointing at Max was even uglier.

“Have things got so bad here?” Max asked, knowing that the Chapter Master would be acting now if he wasn’t already. He’d be contacting the Essex Sorcerer and demanding aid or entry to the city directly, using the Nether. Whether it would be in time to help him was another matter.

“Only for you,” the man replied, and fired.

 

It was dark by the time Cathy got back to her flat in Manchester, hungry and exhausted by a train journey dominated by paranoia. After Lord Poppy’s dismissal she left the shop without even looking at the Shopkeeper and went straight into Mundanus, seeking anonymity in its crowds and reassurance in its normality. The storm had passed and the pavements glistened as she trudged to the underground station, still shivering in her damp clothes. There was no protection from her family now, it was just a matter of time before they hunted her down. She couldn’t bear the thought of dealing with that unhappy reunion at the same time as Lord Poppy’s challenge.

He’d called Manchester the “dark city” and implied her being there had made it harder for him to find her. It made it worth the risk to go home first. She needed to be somewhere that would make it hard for him to interfere; it was notoriously difficult to navigate through a challenge set by a Fae Lord without screwing up horribly at some point. She didn’t want that to happen within a ten-mile radius of polite society. She held onto the tissue-paper hope that going back to Manchester would also make it harder for her family to locate her with the Seeker Charm recently purchased at the Emporium.

She locked and bolted the door, feeling unsafe for the first time since she’d moved in, dumped her bag and allowed herself a moment of self-pity before shuffling into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Noodles and tea first, plans and panicking second. Breaking up with Josh… last.

Her bottom lip wobbled. “Stop it,” she whispered to herself. If she started to cry, she’d never stop and there wasn’t time for falling apart. If growing up in the Rhoeas-Papaver Family had taught her anything, it was that letting emotion get the better of one was the swiftest path to failure.

She was due to have lunch with Josh the next day but would her family find her before then? She pulled her mobile from her pocket but realised she didn’t know what to say to him. She abandoned the phone and filled the kettle instead. Dealing with the shakes from being too hungry and stressed and tea-deprived would be more constructive. She raised an eyebrow at the wartime poster on her fridge: Keep Calm and Carry On.

Teabag in the cup and she already felt marginally better. Just the ritual of tea-making was starting to tell a deep part of her brain that somehow it would be all right. She poured in the water, started swirling the bag, when a rattling at her door made her drop the spoon and hurry into the hallway.

The entire door was shaking, making old paint fly from the hinges. The chain jangled, the handle twitched and Cathy backed away nervously.

There was a loud pop, sounding like a giant soap bubble had just met its end on the other side of the door, and then a gilded letterbox appeared in the centre of the wood. The door finally became still.

“A bloody Letterboxer!” Cathy said, trembling. She’d imagined her wrath-filled father on the other side of the door, when it had been just a simple Charm. As she watched, the little flap in its centre flipped open and a letter shot through, followed by another and then one every second until a small pile rested on the doormat. The letterbox shimmered out of existence with a more gentle pop.

Those letters had probably been sent over a year ago when her family realised she’d run away. Now that Lord Poppy had removed the Shadow Charm, the Letterboxer could complete its task of delivering the letters when the addressee was at home. It was a bold move to use the Charm for someone known to be in Mundanus; if the Letterboxer had been witnessed by an Arbiter there would have been serious repercussions. Her mother had been desperate, and desperate mothers never wrote nice letters.