Chaos Quest (7 page)

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 turned 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.

“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.

Her heart skipped a beat, for there was Erda, stepping suddenly from behind a tree. She looked terrible, unkempt and dirty, her hair a tangled mess. She’d lost weight even in the few days since Kate had last seen her. At that moment she didn’t think at all about the fact that Erda was supposedly the Stardreamer, this powerful being. She was simply Erda: lost, lonely and scarcely capable of looking after herself.

“Erda!” she called.

Erda looked up and saw her and a strange expression passed across her face. She seemed undecided whether to come over or turn and walk away.

As she hesitated, Kate yelled, “Stay here!” to Ben and ran across the road, dodging cars, ignoring his cries of “Kate! Come back!” She had almost reached Erda when she saw the expression on her face change as she focused on something happening behind Kate.

The world seemed to slow down.

Kate heard a terrible sound, a screeching of brakes, then someone screamed and she turned, infinitely slowly and saw Ben lying on the road in front of a blue car, the ice cream smashed on the tarmac beside him.

“Ben!” she screamed and ran. By the time she had covered the fifty metres that separated them, the white-faced driver had climbed from the car and a small crowd had gathered. Someone was phoning for an ambulance.

She heard someone screaming, “Let me past, it’s my brother,” and realised it was her. Then she was sitting on the ground beside Ben. He lay quite still, his eyes shut.

“Ben, Ben wake up,” she said desperately over and over, but he didn’t.

Kate heard her parents before she saw them.

“Excuse me – we had a phone call. My son was brought in. He’s been knocked down by a car …” Mum’s
voice, breaking, trailing off, then Dad, “His name’s Ben Dalgliesh. His sister was with him when he was brought in.”

The nurse who had been sitting with her got up.

“I’ll just take them in to see him for a minute, then I’ll bring them in here, love.” Kate nodded dumbly.

Five minutes passed, then ten. It was almost fifteen before Mum and Dad come into the room where she sat alone, a doctor with them. They both looked as if they’d been crying.

“I thought I’d explain things to you all together,” said the doctor as she sat down. “Ben’s awake now and he’s going to be fine. He’s a very lucky boy: no broken bones, just cuts and bruises and mild concussion. The car must hardly have been moving when it hit him. We’ll keep him in overnight for observation just to make sure everything’s fine and he can go home in the morning.” She smiled at them sympathetically. “You’ve all had a shock, but really there’s no need to worry. Kids get worse knocks than this in the playground every day. I’ll leave you in peace for a while here, then get someone to bring you some tea.”

She went out, shutting the door behind her and Kate heard her mother draw a deep breath.

“What happened, Kate?” asked her dad gently. This was what she’d been dreading since she found out that Ben was okay.

“It was my fault,” she mumbled.

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” said Dad. ‘Just tell us what happened.’

“I saw someone I knew on the Links and ran across
the road to speak to them. I told Ben to stay where he was but he must have run after me and then …” Her voice trailed away.

“Oh, Kate, how could you?” Her mother’s voice was quiet. It would have been better if she’d shouted, Kate thought dully.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“He could have been killed. You were supposed to be looking after him.”

“Now, Ruth …” Robert put a hand on his wife’s arm. “You’re upset, we all are. Don’t …”

Kate couldn’t fight the tears back any more. “I know it’s my fault. I’m sorry. I wish the car had hit me instead,” she sobbed and ran out of the room, out of the hospital, away.

Alastair took the phone call just before nine that evening. “No, she’s not here … Oh my God, is he all right? I’ll check with David … yes, of course; I’ll let you know right away.”

David had looked up at the mention of his name and so he saw the look on Alastair’s face as he came into the room.

“What is it, Dad? What’s wrong?”

“Kate’s disappeared. She was looking after Ben this afternoon and he was knocked down by a car. He’s okay, but Kate got very upset at the hospital and ran away. They thought she might be here. You haven’t heard from her, have you?”

“No.” David was aghast. “Wait a minute and I’ll check my phone. I think I switched it off.”

He went to his bedroom and brought the phone back.

“She tried to call me just before three.”

“No. That’s before it happened, I think. Have you any idea where she might have gone? They’ve tried all her friends – they couldn’t get us before because I was on the computer.”

He had of course, but he could hardly say where. He shook his head. Alastair went out of the room to tell Christine what had happened.

David gave it five minutes, then went to speak to his dad.

“Can I go out and look around for her? I’ve had a couple of ideas.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No!” said David, too quickly. Alastair looked at him suspiciously. “Please, Dad, let me go on my own. I know what I’m doing. I’ll take my phone.”

“All right, but don’t do anything stupid, will you? And be back by ten whether you’ve found her or not.”

“I will. Thanks, Dad.”

He shut the front door behind him, walked to the corner and as soon as he was out of sight of the window from which he was sure his father would be watching, tore down the street as fast as he could.

It took him barely five minutes to reach the house, panting for breath. He’d seen no lights as he ran down the hill towards it. Now he fumbled for the key, dropped it, picked it up and opened the door to the dark hallway. He switched on the light and looked around for any
sign that Kate was here, but there was nothing.

“Kate!” he shouted. “Are you here?”

Nothing. The house seemed extra quiet, as though it was holding its breath. He moved through it, checking each room as he went. The house seemed quite empty. He poked his head round the door of the little bedroom which held the Door to Tisian’s house. What if she had run through there?

When he went up to the second floor he was trying to decide whether to try and go through the Door himself in case she was there. He pushed open the door to the study, saw the humped silhouettes of the furniture in the faint wash of moonlight from the window and switched on the light.

Kate was curled in the big old armchair, fast asleep. He could see from her face she must have cried herself to sleep.

For a moment, he couldn’t think what to do. Should he phone someone or wake her? The cold little part of his brain that watched things without becoming involved said,
Don’t phone. How will you explain the keys? You’ll never be able to come back
. It was right. Anyway, he’d be just as quick waking her and taking her home as phoning and waiting for someone to come.

He crouched down beside the chair.

“Kate?” There was no response. “Come on, Kate. Time to wake up.” He shook her gently by the shoulder and she stirred and stretched and opened her eyes and he saw in them the instant in which she remembered what had happened.

She stared at him. “You know what happened, don’t
you?”

He nodded. “Ben’s okay. Your parents are really worried about you. They’ve been phoning everyone, trying to find you.” He stood up and held out a hand to her. “Come on. I’ll walk home with you.”

She didn’t move. “It was my fault, you know. I saw Erda and I left Ben by the road and ran off to talk to her, and he ran after me. I shouldn’t have left him, it’s my fault.”

“You weren’t to know he’d run after you. You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“My mother does. She’s right. I’ve been thinking about that letter – what it said about the Darkness inside us – maybe that’s why I did it. Maybe I’m like
them
.”

David was taken aback. “Kate, that’s nuts! This was nothing to do with the Lords of Chaos; it was an accident.”

“Maybe I wanted it to happen, so it did.”

David tried to keep calm. “You’re upset, you’re tired. Come on, let’s go home. It’ll be better tomorrow.” He held out his hand and this time she took it and got slowly up.

He locked the front door behind them and they set off up the hill. Kate walked with her arms wrapped round her, sunk deep in misery. David wanted to put an arm round her to comfort her, but she was too remote, locked somewhere far away in her head.

They reached her house. David paused before ringing the bell at the bottom of the stairs, the cold little part of him in charge again.

“Kate, where are we going to say I found you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He thought. “Just say you were walking around all the time and I found you near the school. All right?”

She nodded and he rang the bell.

“Yes?”

“It’s David. I’ve got Kate with me.”

“Oh, thank God.” The buzzer sounded and he pushed the door open.

Kate’s mum was already halfway down the stairs. She engulfed Kate in a tight hug, tears running down her face.