The Witch Queen (3 page)

And there it was, a being perhaps three feet high assembled at random from a collection of mismatched body parts. Overlong arms enwrapped it, the stumpy legs were crooked, mottled fragments of clothing hung like rags of skin from its sides. Slanting eyes, indigo-black from edge to edge, peered between sheltering fingers. A narrow crest of hair bristled on the top of its head and its ears were tufted like those of a lynx. It was a monster in miniature, an aberration, ludicrously out of place in the civilized interior.

Neither girl looked particularly shocked to see it.

“A goblin,” said Fern, “but not resident. And I didn’t ask anyone to advertise.”

“How could it come in uninvited?” asked Gaynor. “I thought that was against the Ultimate Laws.”

“Some creatures are too simple or too small for such laws. Like cockroaches, they go everywhere. Still . . . this is a witch’s flat. Even a cockroach should be more careful.” She addressed the intruder directly. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

The goblin mumbled inaudibly.

“Louder,” said Fern.
“Intona!”

“Not a
house-goblin
,” the creature said with evident contempt. “I’m a burglar.”

“What have you stolen?” asked Fern.

“Nothing,” the goblin admitted. “Yet.”

“You know who I am?”

Mumble.

“Good,” said Fern. “So you came here to steal something specific, from me. I expect you thought I would be out much later on Millennium New Year’s Eve. Who sent you?”

Warty lids flickered briefly over the watchful eyes. “No one.”

“Was it Az— Was it the Old Spirit?” said Gaynor.

“He wouldn’t use an ordinary goblin,” said Fern. “He thinks they’re beneath him.” She lifted her hand, pointing at the intruder with forked fingers, murmuring words too soft to be heard. A tiny gleam of light played about her fingertips, like the sparkle in a champagne glass.
“Who sent you?”

The goblin held its breath, flinched, squeezed its eyes tight shut, and then opened them very wide. “The queen!” it squeaked. “I steal for the queen! Not for gods or demons! I’m a
royal
burglar, I am! I—”

“Mabb,” said Fern, relaxing slowly. “I see. I suppose she . . . Of course, I know what she wants. Tell her it isn’t here, and it’s not mine anyway. It’s held in trust, tell her, a sacred trust. It’s not a thing to be stolen or bartered. Say I know she will understand this, because she is a true queen who appreciates the value of honor.”

“Who’s Mabb?” asked Gaynor
sotto voce
.

“The queen of the goblins,” whispered Fern. “Not much fairy in her, so I hear.”

“
Does
she appreciate the value of honor?”

“I doubt it, but I’m told she responds to flattery. We’ll see.” She raised her voice again. “What’s your name?”

The goblin pondered the question, evidently considering whether it was safe to answer. “Some call me Skuldunder,” he conceded eventually.

“Well, Skuldunder,” said Fern, “since you’re here, and it’s a special occasion, will you have some champagne?”

“Is it good?” The goblin scrambled down from the shelf and approached warily, radiating suspicion.

“Have you never stolen any?”

There was a shrug, as if Skuldunder was reluctant to admit to any shortfall in his criminal activities.

Fern took another glass from the cupboard and half filled it. “Try it,” she said.

The goblin sniffed, sipped, grimaced.

“We will drink to your queen,” Fern announced. “Queen Mabb!”

They drank solemnly. When Fern judged their visitor was sufficiently at ease she left him with Gaynor and went to her room, returning presently with a small quilted bag unzipped to show the contents. “These are gifts for your queen,” she told Skuldunder, “as a gesture of friendship and respect. I have heard she is a great beauty—“ Fern uttered the unaccustomed lie without a wince “—so I have chosen presents to adorn her loveliness. These colored powders can be daubed onto her eyelids; the gold liquid in this bottle, when applied to her fingernails, will set hard; in this tube is a special stick for tinting her lips. There is also a hand mirror and a brooch.” She indicated a piece of costume jewelry in the shape of a butterfly, set with blue and green brilliants. “Tell her I honor her, but the Sleer Bronaw, the Spear of Grief, is something I and my people hold in trust. It is not mine to give up.”

Skuldunder nodded with an air of doubtful comprehension, accepting the quilted bag gingerly, as if it were a thing of great price. Then he drained his glass, choked, bowed clumsily to the two women, and made an awkward exit through a window that Fern had hastily opened. “I don’t think it will dematerialize,” she said, referring to his burden. “I hope you can manage . . .” But the goblin had already disappeared into the shadows of the street.

“What was that all about?” Gaynor demanded as Fern closed the window.

“The Sleer Bronaw is the spear Bradachin brought with him from Scotland when he first came to Dale House,” Fern explained. “It’s still there, as far as I know. I believe it has some mythic significance; Ragginbone thinks so, at any rate.” Bradachin, the house-goblin who inhabited her family’s Yorkshire home, had migrated from a Scottish castle after the new owners converted it into a hotel. Ragginbone was an old friend, a tramp who might once have been a wizard and now led a footloose existence in search of troubles he could not prevent, accompanied by a faithful dog with the mien of a she-wolf. “It’s unusual for something like that to be left in the care of a goblin, but Bradachin knows what he’s doing. I think. You saw him use it once, remember?”

“I remember.” There was a short silence. Then Gaynor said: “Why would Mabb want it?”

“I’m not sure. Ragginbone told me someone had offered her a trade, but that was a long time ago. I suppose she must have latched on to the idea again; he says her mind leaps to and fro like a grasshopper on speed—or words to that effect. Anyhow, none of the werefolk are focused in Time the way humans are.”

“It was an interesting start to the New Year,” Gaynor volunteered. “A goblin burglar.” She gave a sudden little shiver of reaction, still unused to encounters with such beings.

“Maybe,” said Fern. “Maybe—it was a portent.”

When the bottle was empty, they went to bed, each to her own thoughts.

Gaynor lay awake a long time as two-year-old memories surfaced, memories of magic and danger—and of Will. Somehow, even in her darkest recollections, it was the image of Will that predominated. There were bats—she hated bats—flying out of a TV set, swarming around her, tangling in her hair, hooking on to her pajamas. And Will rushing to her rescue, holding her in his arms . . . She was waiting behind a locked door for the entrance of her jailer, clutching a heavy china bowl with which she hoped to stun him, only it was Will—Will!—who came, Will who had escaped and come back to find her. Will was beside her in the car when the engine wouldn’t start, and she switched on the light to see the morlochs crawling over the chassis, pressing their hungry mouths against the windshield. Will whom she had kissed only once, and left, because he had too much charm and no hang-ups, and he could never want someone like her for more than a brief encounter, a short fling ending in long regret. “He’s your brother,” she had said to Fern, as if that settled the matter, the implications unspoken. He’s your brother—if he breaks my heart it will damage our friendship, perhaps for good. But her heart, if not broken, was already bruised and tender, throbbing painfully at the mention of Will’s name, at the sound of his voice on a machine. Ulan Bator . . . what was he doing in Ulan Bator? She had been so busy trying to suppress her reaction, she had not even thought to ask. She knew he had turned from painting to photography and abandoned his thesis in midstream, ultimately taking up the video camera and joining with a kindred spirit to form their own production company. Whether they had any actual commissions or not was a moot point, but Fern had told her they were working on a series of films exploring little-known cultures, presumably in little-known parts of the world. Such as Ulan Bator, wherever that might be. (Mongolia?) And what the hell was a yurt? It sounded like a particularly vicious form of yogurt, probably made from the fermented mare’s milk to which Will had alluded.

Gaynor drifted eventually into a dream of bats and goblins, where she and Will were trapped in a car sinking slowly into a bog of blackberry-flavored yurt, but a morloch pulled Will out through the window, and she was left to drown on her own. Fortunately, by the next morning, she had forgotten all about it.

Fern stayed awake even longer, speculating about Mabb, and the goblin burglar, and the spear whose story she had never heard, the ill-omened Spear of Grief. She remembered it as something very old, rust spotted, the blade edge pitted as if Time had bitten into it with visible teeth. It had no aura of potency or enchantment, no spell runes engraved on shaft or head. It was just a hunk of metal, long neglected, with no more power than a garden rake. Yet she had seen it kill, and swiftly. She wondered whose tears had rusted the ancient blade, earning the weapon its name. And inevitably, like Gaynor, she slipped from speculation into recollection, losing control of her thought and letting it stray where it would. She roamed once more through the rootscape of the Eternal Tree, in a world of interlacing tubers, secret mosses, skulking fungi, until she found a single black fruit on a low bough, ripening into a head that opened ice-blue eyes at her and said: “You.” She remembered the smell of fire, and the dragon rising, and the one voice to which both she and the dragon had listened. The voice of the dragon charmer. But the head was burned and the voice stilled, for ever and ever. And her thought shrank, reaching farther back and farther, seeking the pain that was older and deeper, spear-deep in her spirit, though the wound, if not healed, was all but forgotten. Now she probed even there, needing the pain, the loss, the guilt, fearing to find herself heart-whole again for all time. And so at last she came to a beach at sunset and saw Rafarl Dévornine rising like a god from the golden waves.

But she had been so young then, only sixteen, in an age ten thousand years gone. And now I am different, she thought. In Atlantis, they thought I was a star fallen from the heavens. But now I am a witch—not a pagan witch from a dream of the past but a witch of today, a twenty-first-century witch. My skills may be ancient but my spirit is as modern as a microchip. As modern as a hamburger. Would I love him, if I met him now? When Someday comes, when in the dance of eternity our paths recross, will I even
know
him, or he me? And the tears started, not from the return of pain but from its loss. The lack of pain hurt more, and there was an ache inside her that was not her heart. Gaynor suffers, Fern thought, her Gift for friendship showing her what the other sought to hide. But at least Gaynor suffers because she loves. I have lost all the love I ever had, and it will not come again, because you love like that just once, and then it’s gone for good. I must be a fickle creature, to love so deeply and forget so fast.

And her tears dried, because she saw them as an indulgence, playing at grief, and she lay in the dark empty of all feeling, hollow and cold, until at last she slept.

It was one of those dreams where you don’t know you’re dreaming. She moved through it as if she were an onlooker behind her own eyes, with no control over her actions, traversing the city with the desperate certainty of someone who was utterly resolved on a dreadful errand. It was a winter evening, and the glare of the metropolis faded the stars. Many-windowed cliffs rose above her, glittering with lights; modern sculptures settled their steel coils on marble plinths; three-cornered courtyards flaunted fountains, polished plaques, automatic doors. Recent rain had left sprawling puddles at the roadside that reflected headlights and streetlamps in glancing flashes. In places the city looked familiar, but at other times it seemed to change its nature, showing glimpses of an underlying world, alien and sinister. Sudden alleyways opened between buildings, thick with shadows that were darker and older than the nightfall. Flights of steps zigzagged down into nether regions far below the Underground, where crowds of what might be people heaved like boiling soup. Faces passed by, picked out briefly in the lamplight, with unhuman features and tufted ears. It came to Fern that she was looking for something, something she did not want to find, driven by a compulsion that she could not control. She had always believed in the freedom to choose—between right and wrong, good and evil, character and anti-character, the choices that shape the soul. But she knew now that she had already chosen, made a choice that could not be unmade, and her feet were set on a deadly path.

Presently she came to the turning that she sought, a pedestrian walk that passed under an arch in a façade of opaque windows. When she emerged at the other end of the tunnel she was in an open square. It was large—far too large for the buildings that enclosed it on the outside, as if she had passed through a dimensional kink into some alternative space. Stones paving stretched away on either hand; distant groups moved to and fro, busy as ants in their unknown affairs. In front of her, broad steps spread out like low waves on an endless beach, and above them rose the tower. She had been expecting it, she knew—she had been seeking it—but nonetheless the sight gave her a sick jolt in her stomach, a horror of what she was about to do, her fearful necessary errand. The tower was taller than the surrounding buildings, taller than the whole city, a cubist edifice of blind glass and black steel climbing to an impossible height, terminating in a single spire that seemed to pierce the pallor of the clouds. Reflected lights gleamed like drowning stars in its crystal walls, but she could see nothing of what lay within. It was of the city and yet not of it, an architectural fungus: the urban maze nourished it as a hapless tree nourishes a parasitic growth that will ultimately devour its host. For this was the tower at the heart of all evil, the Dark Tower of legend and fairy tale, rebuilt in the modern world on foundations as old as pain. Fern looked up, and up, until her neck cricked, then dragged her gaze away and slowly mounted the steps to the main entrance.