The Faerie Lord (23 page)

‘What’s the matter with him?’ Blue whispered.

‘We think a cloud dancer may have got to him,’ said the Abbot.

‘You located him?’ Hairstreak asked the cloud dancer.

‘Yes.’

‘You reached him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where was he?’

‘Near the Mountains of Madness.’

Hairstreak frowned. He’d never heard of the Mountains of Madness. ‘Where’s that?’

‘The Kingdom of Buthner.’

Buthner? That godsforsaken hole? What did Brimstone think he was doing in Buthner? Then, like a thunderbolt, an answer occurred to him. Hiding something. Brimstone had to be hiding something. Except it couldn’t be the one thing that interested Hairstreak: he’d never have managed to smuggle
that
out of the country. So it had to be something else. Unless he
wasn’t
hiding something. Unless he’d gone to Buthner
for
something. Hairstreak felt his mind go into a whirl of indecision. This was why he’d hired the cloud dancer, dammit. ‘What was he doing there?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ the cloud dancer said.

Hairstreak glared at it. ‘You don’t know?’ he repeated. ‘Didn’t you bother to
ask
him?’

The cloud dancer said, ‘Yes.’

When it became obvious the creature wasn’t going to elaborate, Hairstreak said, ‘And …?’

‘He refused to tell me.’

‘Of course he refused to tell you!’ Lord Hairstreak exploded. ‘What did you expect? If the old goat was prepared to tell people, I’d have asked him myself. That was the whole point of hiring you, you insubstantial cretin. So you could force it out of him. Didn’t you try to force it out of him?’

The cloud dancer said, ‘Yes.’

When it became obvious for the second time the creature wasn’t going to elaborate, Hairstreak repeated, ‘And …?’

‘I think I may have overdone it.’

This was turning into a minuet. Hairstreak controlled his fury with an effort. ‘Why do you think you may have overdone it?’

‘Because he is now insane.’

‘You sent him mad?’ Hairstreak screamed. ‘So he can no longer answer questions?’

The cloud dancer said, ‘Yes.’

Hairstreak thumped the table with such force that the surface cracked. ‘And what are you going to do about it?’ he demanded.

A portion of the cloud dancer’s arm disappeared as it reached into its own dimension, then reappeared with a wide-necked jug, which it placed on the table before Hairstreak. Then it pushed two fingers down its throat, retched violently and vomited a quantity of curdled blood into the jug.

It stared triumphantly at Hairstreak. ‘Return your fee,’ it said.

‘Where did you find him?’ Blue asked. Thankfully, they’d left the former dungeons and were now sitting together in the garden, shaded from the merciless sun by an enormous spreading tree of a type she’d never seen before.

‘Wandering in the desert,’ the Abbot said. ‘One of our monks happened on him, otherwise he would have been dead within a few hours. As it was, he was
nearly
dead.’

‘And was he in that state -‘ even talking about Brimstone, she shied from using the word
mad
‘- when you found him? I mean, was he - ?’

The Abbot nodded. ‘Yes. He is very old. We thought he might die. We tended to his body – we have healers in the monastery – and he recovered. But we could do nothing for his mind.’

‘Forgive me,’ the Purlisa put in. He was seated beside her on the bench and she noticed his sandaled feet didn’t quite reach the ground. ‘But you know who he is?’

‘He is one of my subjects,’ Blue said. ‘His name is Silas Brimstone. He is a Faerie of the Night who once ran a manufacturing business in the capital.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘He is not a good man.’

‘That would accord with my visions,’ said the Purlisa.

There was something about him that made her feel they had been friends throughout her entire life. Blue said quietly, ‘I think you’d better tell me about your visions.’

‘Since I was little,’ the Purlisa said (and Blue somehow refrained from smiling), ‘there have been times when God granted me revelations of certain matters past and present, sometimes, although not often, future. I fear what you say is correct. This Silas Brimstone is not a good man. He has raised the Midgard Serpent.’

Blue looked at him blankly. ‘What’s the Midgard Serpent?’

‘This is where it gets hard to believe,’ the Abbot muttered.

The Purlisa glanced at him crossly, then turned back to smile at Blue. ‘Do you know of the Old Gods, Queen Blue?’

‘Oh yes,’ Blue said without elaboration. It wasn’t so long ago since she’d been face to face with one of the Old Gods herself.

‘Before the dawn of our history, one of them - his name was Loki - married a giant and fathered three children by her. The middle one was a sea serpent -‘

The Abbot snorted derisively.

‘It’s a whole other reality!’ the Purlisa snapped. ‘I’ve told you that before, Jamides.’

‘You’ve told me, but I don’t believe you.’

‘Please don’t quarrel,’ Blue said. ‘I’d really like to hear this story.’

‘Yes, stop quarrelling, Jamides.’

‘I wasn’t quarrelling.’

‘Well, stop snorting then.’ The Purlisa turned back to Blue. ‘I don’t suppose for a minute it was a natural birth. The father was very tricky and may have used magic to

transform the poor little mite. But in any case the Emperor of the Old Gods got to hear about the business and decided that the birth was an abomination -‘

‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’ put in the Abbot.

The Purlisa ignored him. ‘- and threw the serpent into the great ocean that encircles Midgard.’

‘Where luckily it discovered it was a
sea
serpent,’ the Abbot said, casting his eyes heavenwards.

‘Where it began to grow and grow until it was so large it was able to surround the whole of Midgard.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Blue. ‘You saw all this in a vision?’

The Purlisa shook his head. ‘No, no, I saw none of this in a vision. It’s recorded in the Annals of the Old Gods.’

‘Which some of us don’t take literally,’ the Abbot said.

The Purlisa closed his eyes. ‘Which Jamides is too
modern
to take literally.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘But we won’t worry too much what Jamides thinks, will we, Queen Blue?’ While Blue was searching for a diplomatic response, he went on. ‘The creature began to squeeze the boundaries of Midgard, causing earthquakes and tidal waves and hurricanes and the like, and eventually it became obvious that if something wasn’t done the whole of Midgard would be destroyed. All life would be wiped out.’ He shivered. ‘Dreadful thought. So the Emperor appointed a series of heroes to tackle the problem. The serpent ate most of them, but one discovered the only effective weapon against it was a hammer – swords or projectiles or anything of that sort simply wouldn’t work. So he used his war hammer and the serpent shrank to manageable proportions. It ceased to give trouble and things settled down in Midgard for several thousand years.’

‘Where exactly is Midgard, Purlisa?’ Blue asked.

‘It’s our present reality,’ the Purlisa said. ‘The whole of the Faerie Realm and the Analogue World – all of it. It takes in Hael as well, I believe. It’s all the dimensions of reality we can experience.’

‘Oh,’ Blue said.

‘Now the Purlisa thinks the trouble will be starting up again.’ The Abbot smiled.

‘I
know
it will be starting up again,’ the Purlisa said soberly. ‘Your friend Brimstone -‘

‘No friend of mine,’ Blue murmured.

‘- has called up the Serpent. Called it into our reality: into Midgard, that is. I saw it clearly in my vision. This will start the cycle again. The beast can only grow and grow. Unless we find a hero to stop it, our reality will eventually be destroyed.’

There was a long moment’s silence. Eventually Blue said hesitantly, ‘But, Purlisa, surely the story of the Midgard Serpent is a myth?’

‘Of course it is!’ the Abbot snorted.

‘Perhaps
it is,’ the Purlisa told her calmly, ‘but my vision shows that Mr Brimstone called up a serpent of some sort before he went insane.’ He blinked benignly. ‘And the earthquakes have already started.’

Blue glanced at the Abbot, who nodded reluctantly, then said, ‘But, of course, Buthner has always had earthquakes from time to time.’

‘So far,’ the Purlisa said briskly, ‘the quakes have been confined to the deep desert. But they will get worse until a hero slays the serpent.’ He smiled with great warmth at Blue. ‘Which is where you come in.’

Blue stared at him without speaking. She liked the Purlisa hugely, but that didn’t mean she necessarily believed him. The Midgard story
did
sound like a myth -even the Abbot thought so. Perhaps Brimstone really
had
called up some sort of serpent – he’d called up enough demons before she put a stop to that nonsense, and he might well have discovered some other source of nasty creatures. Perhaps what he’d been doing caused an earthquake. But that hardly mattered. Because none of this was her affair. She wasn’t the hero they needed. She wasn’t even the heroine they needed. And she had other things to do. Henry could be dying somewhere while the Purlisa had her off chasing serpents. She opened her mouth to speak, but the Purlisa beat her to it.

‘Your love Henry will perish if you do not do this thing,’ he said.

Although she would have died rather than admit it, Madame Cardui felt old. There was so much to do and, for the first time in her life, she had started to doubt her ability to do it. She was back in her office at the Palace with a full support staff now – a written order from Blue had sorted out that silly misunderstanding about her imprisonment – but even so she felt her grip on things slipping and slipping and slipping.

Part of it was the plague. There were constant reports of its spread now, and not just the panic that followed the outbreak of any major illness. These were genuine cases, striking indiscriminately at young and old. Two of her staff were plotting its spread using maps from the Situation Room beneath the Palace and the grip the disease now had throughout the Empire was worrying. Or to face facts, frightening. It was crossing borders too, as plagues did, into neighbouring countries. Which meant it was only a matter of time before those borders began to close, with a devastating affect on trade.

Worse still, there were more and more deaths being reported. Most worrying of all, many of them were now occurring among the young, who in theory should have had a large reserve of their future to draw upon. The plague seemed to be growing more virulent. Or possibly – and this was something she dreaded to contemplate – it meant that no one, young or old, had very much future left. It was possible the entire Realm was facing a disaster of unparalleled magnitude.

Dear Gods, she wished Alan were still here. He would have known what to do. If there was anything still left to do …

It felt as though her Intelligence network were crumbling too. Perhaps an exaggeration, but it really did not seem to be functioning as efficiently as it once had. She appeared to have lost Chalkhill, for example. A dreadful man and quite possibly a double agent, but even as a double agent he could be useful. Clearly there was something going on with the Brotherhood, and her instinct told her there might even be a connection with the plague. Was it possible the imbeciles were experimenting with germ warfare? She found the idea hard to accept, but Lord Hairstreak was using the Brotherhood as a power base now and she would put nothing past him.

When the knock came to her door, she assumed it was a secretary and murmured, ‘Come in’, then looked up to find Nymph standing over her. ‘My deeah, what a pleasant surprise. I thought you were still in the Analogue World with Pyrgus. How is the poor -?’ She caught Nymph’s expression and stopped. ‘What’s wrong?’

Nymph said, ‘Pyrgus has caught an Analogue disease.’

Henry thought his hands were turning blue.

He stared at them, frowning. They weren’t
actually
blue, not cobalt or azure or navy or anything like that, but they definitely had a bluish
tinge.
At first he’d thought it was his imagination and then he’d thought it was a trick of the light, but now he was certain something physical was happening. Maybe the desert did that to you. There might be something in the sand, or something in the spectrum of the sun, the way a desert sun at home would give you a deep tan.

The interesting thing was Henry was toughening up and drying out, a bit like an old boot. (An old
blue
boot.) Neither his arm nor leg hurt much any more. His thirst was a constant low-key background he could generally ignore and he needed far less of the liquid Lorquin produced from time to time. He could also keep going for longer before he had to stop and rest. He was even developing that peculiar loping gait Lorquin had. It was a half-conscious imitation, but the new way of walking ate up the miles with minimum effort.

Henry was less successful in his attempts to find his way around. Lorquin made valiant efforts to teach him. The secret was, apparently, to study the angle of the sun along with patterns the wind made in the sand. Henry

could follow the bit about the sun easily enough - it moved across the sky much the same way it did at home -but try as he might, he couldn’t see the patterns Lorquin saw in the sand. And the deep desert was as featureless of landmarks as it had always been.

For some reason Henry had assumed Lorquin’s people would be fairly close to the place where Lorquin killed his draugr. And maybe they had been when Lorquin set out on his quest. But they were nomads and they were certainly not close by now. After two days of walking, there was no sign of them. But then he still couldn’t see anything when Lorquin announced they’d arrived.

Henry looked around. He’d half expected a rock face with caves, or inhabited ruins, or a community of crude tents. But all around him was a plain of flat, featureless sand. Even the rolling dunes had disappeared.