The Scar-Crow Men (35 page)

Only two more victims
.

And his dreams of a new life with Alice would be destroyed. Somehow, he felt that more acutely.

‘We have to find Pennebrygg, whatever it takes,’ he urged his companion. ‘This must end here.’

Launceston appeared not to be listening. ‘This is a fresh kill.’ His whispery voice was tinged with a queasy glee.

After a moment’s dislocation, the meaning of the Earl’s words became clear. Of course it was fresh. The blood, still dripping.

Carpenter threw himself down the stairs and out through the back of the house into the hot night. The door banging. It had been the devil-masked killer, fleeing the scene of slaughter. He silently cursed himself at the thought of how close they had come to apprehending their prey.

An alley ran along the rear of the houses, filled with piles of rotting debris. The scar-faced man peered into the gloom one way, then the other, but as he had feared, nothing moved.

Returning to the bedroom, a morose Carpenter found the Earl kneeling in the blood next to the flayed corpse, hands dripping. His eyes gleamed with an inner light. ‘There is a mark ’pon his back, as we saw with Gavell in the deadhouse.’

‘Is that not what we expected?’

‘It is. But consider: Marlowe was not slain in this manner. No skin removed, no eyes taken. He died from a simple stab wound to the brain.’ Launceston gave a faint smile of satisfaction. ‘’Twas not the same killer.’

‘You say the playwright’s death was meaningless, as the inquest decided? But his name was upon the list in his lodgings.’

The Earl shook his head slowly. ‘Marlowe is tied too closely to these matters for his passing to be an unhappy accident. But he was not a sacrifice to break down Dee’s magical defences. He died for another reason.’

Carpenter waved a dismissive hand. ‘Why should that trouble us now? We are sipping from the cup of failure, and all is turning dark around us.’

‘Not so.’ Launceston stood, casting one last loving glance at the sticky corpse. ‘In Bedlam, Griffin Devereux told Will that through the nature of the killer we could divine the identity of the man. What is his nature?’ His shoes made a sucking sound as he stepped out of the congealing pool. ‘This night is not wasted, for we have learned something of the man we hunt which may help us in the future. See here.’ He indicated black smudges on the glistening muscle. ‘These same marks lay upon Gavell. They are important in some way I have not yet discovered. But that … that is the killer’s nature.’

The Earl pointed to a bloody cross etched on the cracked plaster of one wall.

‘At the Rose Theatre, he wore the mask of a devil but he took angel’s wings to wear,’ the Earl continued. ‘He is a religious man at heart, perhaps a Catholic hiding among enemies, who feels he has been driven to do the devil’s work for the sake of a greater good. A conflicted man, who does not want to lose sight of his God amid all the slaughter.’

‘How do you know these things?’ Carpenter looked at his companion suspiciously, as if, perhaps, Shipwash had spoken from beyond the vale.

Launceston raised a pale finger to his temple. ‘I understand his mind,’ he whispered, casting another warm look at the bloody remains. ‘This is not the work of a butcher. He treats each victim with love and attention, as a man who understands that he deals with God’s plan.’ Waving one supple arm towards the dripping runic symbols, he added, ‘From those artfully crafted signs we know that he is no yeoman, but a gentleman. One of us.’

‘One of you,’ Carpenter snapped, horrified at the assertion that there was anything linking himself with his tainted colleague. He stared at the symbols for a moment and decided that he could find no argument with what the Earl was saying. ‘When the mask slipped at the Rose, Will said he thought he recognized the face he glimpsed behind it. Could … could our killer be a member of the court?’

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

‘RIDE! RIDE AS IF THE DEVIL WAS AT YOUR BACK!’ DEE YELLED
above the raging storm.

‘He is,’ Will called through gritted teeth. As he leaned low along the neck of his mount, the wind tore at the spy’s hair and rain whipped his face. His black cloak thrashed the air behind him. Amid the inky darkness of the narrow track winding through the storm-torn forest, he feared his steed would slip in the churning mud or trip on the snaking roots, that it would all be over for him, for England, and all the days and nights of fleeing south, the constant threat from the resurgent Unseelie Court, the hiding, the creeping along byways and splashing across rivers, all would be for naught.

Gripping the reins tighter, he glanced back to where Meg was riding just behind. In a lightning flash that turned the night-world pure white, he saw her pale face was grimly determined, her red hair flying behind her like flames.

But then Will glimpsed the terrors that lay at their backs.

Fires burned in the preternatural dark, high up in the swaying branches, close to the ground, moving faster than the horses, flickering and insubstantial, dream-like. Keeping pace, a white cloud billowed with a life of its own, stars sparkling in the folds as if something was forming within it. And glowing as though with an inner light, pale forms bounded among the sodden fern, as lithe and sinuous as foxes, but larger.

Xanthus the Hunter was no longer alone. His fury exacerbated by his failure in the
encounter at Lud’s Church, he had drawn to him the Unseelie Court’s dark forces at loose in the wild countryside, the numbers growing the further south they progressed, until now it appeared there was an army of night at their backs.

‘A plan would be good, doctor,’ the spy yelled. But the thunder of hooves and the roar of the storm took his words away, and there was no response.

Wiping the stinging rain from his eyes, Will saw ahead a faint lightening of the forest’s gloom. Within a moment the three riders burst out of the trees into the full force of the storm. Immediately they were galloping over rolling grassland with nowhere to hide and nothing to slow the relentless pursuit of the wild horde.

Dee waved frantically, slowing his horse to ride at the spy’s side. ‘Call upon it,’ the alchemist yelled. ‘Call upon your devil.’

Will was baffled.

‘Your mortal soul is already lost. Your life is near over – but not this night! The devil torments you, but it is
yours
. It must bend to your will. That is why Marlowe sent it to you – protection and damnation in equal measure, but for now, in this world, protection.’ The magician’s voice cracked and broke from the strain of shouting. ‘But take care – it will try to resist you at every turn. It wants misery and suffering and despair to sweeten your final agonies. Do it now!’ Another lightning flash made the magician’s eyes glow with white fire.

Will knew he had no choice. Whatever the price demanded of him, it would be worth paying.

The spy gave himself to the rhythm of the hooves and the bluster of the gale, his thoughts settling within him. ‘Come to me now,’ he whispered, ‘come to me, my Mephistophilis, and let us see what sport we can have.’

Thunder cracked over the dark countryside, and another thunder echoed within him.

Will felt a weight pressing at his back and invisible talons digging into his shoulders. He smelled damp loam, reminding him of the plague pit, and of Marlowe’s newly dug grave, and then a face slid next to his cheek, the smooth flesh as cold as snow. From the corner of his eye, he could just discern Jenny, the other Jenny, the lost, dead, soul-destroyed Jenny. The lank-haired, black-eyed thing kept its cheek pressed tight against Will’s and threw its mottled arms around his chest in a mockery of an embrace.

‘My love,’ it sneered in his ear.

‘Dee tells me you are my pet, to order as I please.’

The devil’s arms grew tighter around him.

‘But you do not deny it,’ Will said. ‘You speak just enough truth to flavour the greatest lie, you spin me round in circles so I cannot tell which is up or down, you do all you can to keep me from thinking clearly. Now you must obey me.’

‘Take care,’ the Jenny-thing breathed in his ear, ‘for it would be best not to anger me. I can inflict much pain before the time comes when I take that smallest but most valuable part of you.’

‘Do what I say!’ the spy snapped.

‘Of course, my love.’ The mocking words were punctuated by a quiet laugh. ‘But I would ask something of you. In return for my aid, you will give me something, and only
for five minutes, no more, then I shall return it.’

‘We have agreement,’ Will shouted, his needs and those of his companions too pressing for argument. ‘Do what you can to prevent those things reaching us.’

Another tinkling laugh was caught in the gale, and then the Jenny-thing unfurled her arms and slipped back, her cheek sliding past him, and back farther until she was gone. The spy had a vision of her laughing in the face of the storm as she flew backwards like a leaf in the wind, twisting and turning until she faced the Enemy. And what then? Would her face light up with the brightness of the moon, and her hair roil around her head like snakes, and would she raise her hands high, her expression filling with dark glee at the mischief she was about to unleash?

The storm whipped into a frenzy, screaming in Will’s ears, the wind tearing him like knives, the rain blasting horizontally. His struggling horse half stumbled. The barrage of thunder ended with lightning striking so close behind them that the ground shook, and the horses reared up in terror, and the whole world turned white. One strike, then another, and another, blasting the earth and filling the air with the stink of scorched vegetation.

The three companions struggled on until it felt as if they had burst through the skin of a bubble. The wind fell, the rain stopped, and an unsettling peace lay across the countryside.

Will looked back to see the entire meadow was obscured in a fog of smoke and driving rain, and rhythmic blinding flashes. His devil had bought them a little time, no more.

‘Ride on,’ he shouted, ‘and stop for no man.’

When the sun came up, the three companions dismounted and led their horses along the puddled, muddy tracks. Will deflected all Meg’s questions; she didn’t need to know about his devil. It was 24 July. The spy knew from the villages they had passed through that they must be somewhere in Sussex, with London away to the east. They were close to their destination.

He could not criticize Dee. The alchemist had done everything in his power to hide them from the Unseelie Court on their long journey south from Manchester: charms carefully constructed from bones and pelts of animals that the magician had killed with his own hands, potions brewed from plants, herbs plucked from the wayside and mingled with salt stolen from inns along the way, were scattered around them every night to protect them while they slept, in rituals of chanting and gestures and processional paths that sometimes lasted for an hour.

To a degree, it had worked. One night Will had woken to glimpse the moonlit silhouette of something large with steaming breath roaming around them in the undergrowth. But despite its proximity, they had not been discovered. And on other occasions, he had seen figures in the distance picking over their trail, but roaming far and wide as if unable to identify the true direction.

But the Corvata, the things that Meg had named that evening by the Lombard Street plague pit, had been everywhere, silhouetted high on church steeples with the bats flapping all around them, or in the upper branches of towering beech trees, or on barn roofs. Their heads were always turning slowly, scanning the woods and meadows. Even Dee’s magic could not hide the three fugitives completely from those endlessly searching
eyes.

As they trudged onward wearily in the first light of a new day, the spy whispered to the alchemist, ‘If there is more you know about my devil, I would appreciate no more surprises in the midst of a fight. Speak up now, and save my poor constitution any future shocks.’

‘I was protecting you, you fool,’ Dee growled. ‘The more you make use of that thing, the more you speed your end. Leave it alone and let your life run its course.’

‘But if I can use it—’

The magician rounded on Will, eyes blazing. ‘You told me about Marlowe’s new play. Did his words pass through your eyes and out of your arse? Men are consumed by arrogance – myself included. We always think we can bind these powers to our will. But the truth is, they corrupt by degrees. Their black disease infects the heart and the mind and soon you find yourself becoming the thing you fight. What then? A William Swyfte with a devil at his beck and call causing more suffering than the Enemy? A black-hearted rogue who sets himself above queens and kings? And God, too? Leave well alone, or you will bring about what you seek to prevent.’

Keeping away from the much-travelled tracks, they pushed through the centres of barleyfields and fought their way through dense woods. When night fell, distant thunder encouraged them to pick up their leaden legs and they were soon hurrying down a grassy slope to a grand stone house with two wings where candles burned in many windows.

‘Who lives in this place,’ Meg enquired, ‘and why should we trust them?’

‘It is Petworth House, currently the residence of Henry, Earl of Northumberland,’ Dee said, striding ahead with the vitality of a man half his age, ‘and you trust him because I say so.’

As they neared the house, they were confronted by a line of sticks on which were mounted the skulls of cows, sheep, badgers and deer. In front of each one, stones had been carefully placed in what appeared to be the letters of an unknown language. The grisly display disappeared into the dark on either side, but the spy had the impression that it continued around the entire house.

Pausing in front of the nearest skull, the alchemist bowed his head and muttered a few words. With a deep sigh of relief, he beckoned Will and Meg across the threshold.

‘Henry Percy, the Wizard Earl, has strange tastes,’ Will said, eyeing the alchemist. ‘Most prefer quaint hedges of box and lines of perfumed lavender.’

Dee chuckled to himself.

At the door, the alchemist was greeted by a servant who appeared aware of the elderly man’s identity. The three travelling companions were admitted into the stone-flagged hall while the servant hurried away to find his master.