Chaos Quest (6 page)

Two days passed and there was still no sign of Erda. David and Kate couldn’t help but worry; she was almost like a child – how would she cope alone?

“It’s like knowing Ben’s out there on his own,” said Kate, shaking her head at the thought.

Morgan too had gone, leaving later the same morning that they had met him to search for her.

School swallowed them up. Kate had tests in maths and chemistry and did badly in both. Her mother decided she needed “A Talk.”

“You may not think what you do now matters …”

“But I …”

“But it does. You set habits now that will stay with you all the way through school, bad or good ones. You spend time shut up in your room and say you’re working, but you’ve got that music on and you can’t really be concentrating.”

“I
am
. It helps me concentrate.”

“Why aren’t you getting better marks then?”

“Because I don’t understand maths and there’s lots of maths in chemistry. I’m okay at English and biology and geography and things, but you never …”

“You’ve got to put effort into all your subjects you know, not just the ones you enjoy.”

Kate gave up. It was clear her mother wasn’t going to
listen to anything she said.

“From now on you can do your schoolwork in the kitchen like Ben, before you disappear off to your bedroom.”

“But I can’t concentrate with him wittering on. You’re
so
unfair! You’re making it worse.”

She stormed out of the sitting room and her bedroom door made the pictures jump on the walls as she slammed it shut.

“That went well, don’t you think?” said her dad.

“Oh, shut up!” snapped Ruth.

Ever since she’d been so understanding about his feelings for Tiger, things had been going better between David and Christine, partly because he now gave her the benefit of the doubt instead of leaping to the worst possible conclusion about her intentions all the time.

One evening a few days after the encounter with Morgan, David and Christine sat in the garden. Alastair was trying to light the barbecue while Christine and David enjoyed a cool drink in the shade. It was ridiculously hot for May.

They’d been talking amicably about school and what subjects David thought he might choose to study, when Christine asked, out of the blue, “How long has Claire looked after you now?”

“Four and a half years,” he said, though she must already know that. Why was she asking?

“She’s great, isn’t she? I know how fond you two are
of each other.” David made a sort of grunt which was meant to signal agreement without condoning the use of a word as wet as
fond
. “I was just wondering,” she went on. “You’re thirteen, you hardly need anyone to look after you any more, so there’s not much for Claire to do …”

David put his glass down so hard that it toppled over on the paving, a trail of sticky coke spreading from it.

“No! How could you?” He was looking at her in horror. “I thought you were okay, I thought you understood and all this time you’ve been planning to get rid of Claire.” He pushed himself to his feet, scarlet with anger, afraid he would burst into tears.

“No, David, you’re wrong – I didn’t mean …”

But he wasn’t listening. He turned and half ran into the house.

Alerted by the noise, Alastair left the smoking barbecue and came over.

Christine gave a sigh, a rueful expression on her face. “Well, I messed that up completely.”

“It’s not your fault. He just leapt to conclusions. Maybe I should have told him; I just thought it might work better coming from you.”

“I didn’t even get that far and now he hates me again. Are we ever going to sort things out?”

“It’ll come right.” He gave her a kiss. “You’ll see.”

One by one, the Great Ones stepped through into the Underworld, donning their physical bodies as they did so.

The Queen of Darkness was clad in a gown the colour of old blood and a crown of jet and garnets. She had been hunting and carried a small, deeply curved black bow.

The Lightning King was in his usual robes of tattered black, a few forgotten tendrils of lightning slithering across it like tiny snakes.

Tethys the Water Witch wore a dress of shifting iridescent rainbow, like oil on water. A pool of water grew about her feet as she stood waiting with the others.

“Where are the wolves?” asked the King.

The two wolves which often accompanied Tethys were absent.

“With the Hunt,” she replied.

A few minutes passed before the Hunter appeared among them. Unconsciously, they all drew back a little from him.

It was difficult to say what he wore: rags and tatters of cloth and skin that clothed him without being garments. His bare torso and arms were flecked with blood, as were his owl-eyed face and the horns, much like those of a roe deer, that grew among his chestnut hair.

“Is the hunt over?” asked the Queen.

“Yes.” He smiled a terrible smile. “A good hunt. The wolves will feed well.” He slid a black knife back into its sheath at his side.

“We must decide what to do now,” said the Queen. “We were close for a moment when she killed the man Thomas. I thought the power might overwhelm her then. But it did not. Now she knows she possesses it and begins to understand what it can do. She will be on her
guard and our task will be harder. Everything is at stake. Now that the Stardreamer has been called, there can be no going back.”

“She must be brought to the Heart of the Earth if we are to use her power to destroy it,” said the King.

“My son will bring her,” said the Hunter.

“Or if he fails,” mused the Queen, “perhaps we can use the children. It may prove to be very useful that she fell into their hands. Making them the instruments for the destruction of their world would be a fitting way to repay them for thwarting our plans before.”

“We must break into their world if we are to reach the Wildwood and the Heart of the Earth,” said a voice thin and chilly as a blade. When the Hunter spoke, everyone listened.

“We must be invited for that to happen,” said the Queen cautiously. “Those two know us for what we are. We cannot disguise ourselves from them.”

“We can influence others around them though: draw them to one of the places where the barriers have grown thin, trick them into saying the words … We grow stronger every day the Stardreamer is here,” mused the King.

“Most people are much easier to influence than those children,” said Tethys, smiling a scarlet smile. “We must watch for a little, decide who and where, then persuade them to the right place …”

They pretended to go to Badminton Club but went to the house instead. It was now four days since Erda had
disappeared and Morgan had gone after her and there had been no sign of either. They didn’t hold out much hope that anyone would be there now and the house felt very empty when they opened the front door.

There was a postcard from Gordon though.
Great weather and good golf courses but I’m playing rubbish! Getting brown (that’s a first!) Hope the plants are behaving
! He hadn’t put any names on, just the house number, but they knew it was for them.

They decided to go to Badminton Club after all; they would only be ten minutes late and if they went there would be no chance of their parents discovering what they were doing.

As they turned back to the front door, David noticed something odd.

“Look, the door’s open.” It was the door of the big, silent grandfather clock he was referring to. It stood slightly ajar. “Was it like that when we came in?”

“I don’t think so,” said Kate. “I’m sure we’d have noticed. It’s always shut.” She tried to push it closed but it wouldn’t stay and something prevented it from closing far enough to turn the key. “There’s something jamming it,” she said.

“Let’s see,” said David, reaching inside. “There’s a bit of paper stuck in the hinge. Wait a minute.” He peered inside and wiggled at something. “There we go.” He pulled it out.

Kate shut the door and turned the key.

“Kate,” said David from behind her in a strange voice. “Look.”

She turned. He was holding a small, cream-coloured
envelope. On it was written clearly in Mr Flowerdew’s writing:
For Kate and David.

They stared at the envelope, then at each other.

“Well, open it,” said Kate after a moment.

David tore open the envelope and unfolded the single sheet of paper it contained and they pored over it together.

The letter stunned them into silence for a long time. They read it over and over, sure at first that they must have misunderstood, but gradually finding themselves unable to disbelieve.

Children of Light and Darkness.

The Lords of Chaos had tried to destroy their world once and they had fought against them and helped defeat them, but they hadn’t known then that part of them was the same as the Lords.

“How could he not tell us?” Kate asked in a whisper. “How can we be like
them
?”

David’s hand trembled as he held the letter.

“What do we do? There’s no one to help us, Kate. We have to work it out for ourselves.”

Morgan hunted the Stardreamer across the Worlds.
She is here somewhere. I feel her presence
, he had said to Kate and David as he left them and it was as he had said it that he realised he had been aware of that presence when he took Thomas’s body back to the Wildwood to bury him and came back through Tisian’s Door. She had been with him all the time, unseen, and now her presence was like a background noise grown so
familiar
you didn’t notice it until it stopped. She was
moving
between worlds, slipping away from him again and again, and each time she moved out of the world he was in it seemed to lurch as though he had lost his sense of balance.

She watched him, getting as close as she could without him realising exactly where she was. She had listened to him talk to Tisian about her, trying to understand what was this thing – Stardreamer – that she was. The word made pictures in her head that she didn’t yet comprehend: a great void between the stars, a glittering cave, a little meadow of parched grass high on a hillside.

She knew she was dangerous.

The cuts on Morgan’s face and hands healed, though the hurt of Thomas’s death was as raw as ever. He pursued Erda with no idea of what he would do if he was faced with her. Try to kill her? Reason with her? Confess?

He knew that Thomas’s death had been an accident, but if he couldn’t blame her for it, he would have to take all the blame on himself. He was afraid of doing that.

Every few days he would pass through Tisian’s house and she would make him eat and sleep and talk to her. Otherwise, he seemed to have almost lost the use for speech. He saw no one he knew and avoided as much contact with people as was possible.

He felt as though he was the hunted, not the hunter.

They sat at the kitchen table in silence, Gordon’s postcard and the explosive letter laid in front of them.

“Final conflict?” said Kate in disgust. “I thought everything we went through last time was meant to keep time safe.”

“It was,” said David. “Read it again. This is
something
he thought would never happen, something he’d argued with the other Guardians about. If he’d really thought this was going to happen don’t you think he’d have told us himself about being Children of Light and Darkness, so he could have explained it properly and answered our questions? He never thought we’d need to read that letter. It was just …”

“Insurance?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“And why do we have to get involved? Wasn’t last time enough? Why not Gordon – he lives in the house after all,” Kate went on angrily.

“Yes, but he’s not here just now, is he?” said David gently, “and it seems to be now that this is happening.”

Kate put her head in her hands.

“I want a
normal
life, with
normal
worries, not this again – and we don’t even have Mr Flowerdew this time.” David said nothing. “Why aren’t you angry? And why are you so quiet? Are you just going to accept it?”

David sighed. “What choice do we have, Kate? We’re trapped in this; it doesn’t matter if we think it’s fair or not.”

They sat, not speaking, for a few moments.

“Stardreamer … Heart of the Earth …” muttered David. “No clue what any of it means.”

“Maybe he left other letters – clues – somewhere,” said Kate excitedly, pushing her chair back and standing up.

They ran to the grandfather clock and unlocked it to look inside, feeling around the dark corners, checking underneath and behind it.

Nothing.

“What about the study?” Kate said.

They hurried up the two flights of stairs to Mr Flowerdew’s study and opened the door.

It had lain largely undisturbed since his death, aside from a little light dusting on Gordon’s part. The telescope and binoculars still stood waiting by the window, the notebooks and watercolours stacked ready
on the shelves and the stuffed Tawny Owl keeping watch with cold yellow eyes.

Kate looked around at the organised clutter of belongings, wondering where to start.

“Desk drawers?” she suggested. David nodded and they began to carefully go through anything that might contain a clue about the information in the letter.

After almost an hour they had found nothing. Kate sat back on her heels, a smudge of dust on her nose and pushed her hair behind her ears, thinking.

“I’m an idiot,” she announced.

“I know,” said David, head in a cupboard, “but I haven’t told anyone else.”

“You are as well.” He pulled his head out of the cupboard and looked at her. “Erda. And Morgan. You don’t really believe it’s a coincidence that they turn up just before this letter shows itself?”

David hit his forehead with the heel of his hand.

“How could I not think of that?”

“Beats me,” said Kate absently, thinking again. “I know what I think. I think they’re both looking for this Stardreamer person … thing … and Erda found it and got hurt and lost her memory. Now Morgan’s looking for her to take her home and then he’ll go looking for the Stardreamer too.”

“Maybe …” David considered this. “Why didn’t he tell us though?”

“He’d only just met us, he doesn’t know anything about us. He probably thinks we’re just kids and we wouldn’t understand.”

They looked at each other. David shrugged.

“We have to help them.”

“I know,” said Kate with a sigh. “How can we help them though, if we don’t even know where they are?”

“Erda will come back here, surely?”

“Probably. Maybe. Oh, I don’t know. But what about Morgan? He talked about a Door in this house that led to somewhere else. Maybe we can find him.”

“We’ll have to find the Door first. Does he really mean a door? Maybe it’ll look like something else. Or maybe it won’t open for us.”

“Well, there’s no harm in looking anyway. He came down from upstairs when we met him, but he was in one of the rooms on the first floor, not up here. Come on.”

They went in and out of the bedrooms and bathrooms, opening and closing the doors to the rooms and to the big cupboards and the wardrobes.

Nothing.

They sat side by side on the single bed in the smallest bedroom.

“Well, we tried. It looks as though we’ll have to wait for one of them to come back,” David sighed. He looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven. “I suppose I’d better go home and see what Christine’s decided to do now. Maybe she’s sold the house since I went out.”

They got up and opened the door. In front of them hung a piece of cloth with blocks of patchwork colour. They took a step back, staring at each other, wide-eyed, silent.

Kate swallowed. “It looks as though we’ve found it.”

They crept forward and stood perfectly still behind the cloth, listening intently, but there was no sound.
They knelt and peered under the edge where it finished a few inches above the floor.

The room they were looking into was dim compared with the bedroom. They could see a beaten earth floor and an open fire with a black pot hanging over it. There was a smell of soup.

“D’you think that’s Morgan’s house?” whispered Kate.

“Maybe.”

They peeked round the edges of the patchwork and, seeing no one, stepped out into the other room. As their eyes adjusted to the change of light they saw colour everywhere: patchworks hung on the walls and spread over the bed in its alcove, the glowing fire with the soup bubbling over it, the stacked shelves with their carefully sorted flotsam. It reminded Kate immediately of Mr Flowerdew’s study.

The outside door scraped on a bump in the earth floor as someone pulled it open, making Kate and David jump. They drew closer together, unsure what to do or say. A tall woman was coming in, ducking under the lintel. She wore a dress patched with colour on colour, red and green and blue and brown. Her hair was
grey-brown
, twisted up on top of her head and seemingly held in place with a couple of twigs. There was a white clay pipe in her mouth.

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 …”