The Witch Queen (4 page)

Guards stood on either side, scarlet coated and braided across the shoulders. They might have been ordinary commissionaires were it not for the masks of dark metal covering their faces. Iron lids blinked once in the eye slits as Fern passed between them. The double doors opened by invisible means and she entered a vast lobby agleam with black marble. A dim figure slid from behind the reception desk. A voice without tone or gender said: “He is waiting for you. Follow me.” She followed.

Behind the reception area there was a cylindrical shaft rising out of a deep well that appeared to be surrounded by subterranean levels and ascending beyond the eye’s reach. Each story was connected to the shaft by a narrow bridge unprotected by rail or balustrade, open to the drop beneath. Transparent elevators traveled up and down, ovoid bubbles suspended around a central stem. Fern flinched inwardly from the bridge, but her legs carried her across uncaring. The elevator door closed behind them and they began to climb, gently for the first few seconds and then with accelerating speed, until the passing stories blurred and her stomach plunged and her brain seemed to be squashed against her skull. When they stopped her guide stepped out, unaffected, unassisting. An automaton. For a moment she clutched the door frame, pinching her nose and exhaling forcefully to pop her ears. She didn’t look down. She didn’t speculate how far it was to the bottom. Her legs were unsteady now and the bridge appeared much narrower, a slender gangplank over an abyss. Her guide had halted on the other side. She thought: It looks like a test, but it isn’t. It’s a lure, a taunt. A challenge.

But she could not turn back.

She crossed over, keeping her gaze ahead. They moved on. Now they were on an escalator that crawled around the tower against the outer wall. At the top, another door slid back, admitting them to an office.

The
office. The seat of darkness. Neither a sorcerer’s cell nor an unholy fane but an office suited to the most senior of executives. Spacious. Luxurious. Floor-to-ceiling windows, liquid sweeps of curtain, a carpet soft and deep as fur. In the middle of the room, a desk of polished ebony, and on it a file covered in red, an old-fashioned quill pen, and a dagger that might have been mistaken for a letter opener but wasn’t. There was a name stamped on the file but she did not read it: she knew it was hers. Her guide had retreated; if there were other people in the room she did not see them. Only
him
. Beyond the huge windows there were no city lights: just the slow-moving stars and the double-pronged horn of the moon, very big and close now, floating between two tiers of cloud. A scarlet-shaded lamp cast a rusty glow across the desktop.

He
sat outside the light. Neither moonbeam nor starfire reached his unseen features. She thought he wore a suit, but it did not matter. All she could see was the hint of a glimmer in narrowed eyes.

Perhaps he smiled.

“I knew you would come to me,” he said, “in the end.”

If she spoke—if she acknowledged him—she could not hear. The only voice she heard was his: a voice that was old, and cold, and infinitely familiar.

“You resisted longer than I expected,” he went on. “That is good. The strength of your resistance is the measure of my victory. But now the fight is over. Your Gift will be mine, uniting us, power with power, binding you to me. Serve me well, and I will set you among the highest in this world. Betray me, and retribution will come swiftly, but its duration will be long and slow. Do you understand?”

But she was in the grip of other fears. She felt the anxiety within her, sharp as a blade.

“The one you care for will be restored,” he said. “But it must be through me. Only through me. None other has the power.”

Though she heard no sound, she seemed to be pleading with him, torn between a loathing of such a bargain and the urgency of her need.

“Can you doubt me?” he demanded, and the savagery of eons was in his voice. “Do you know who I am? Have you forgotten?” He got to his feet, circling the desk in one smooth motion, seizing her arm. Struggle was futile: she was impelled toward the glass wall. His grasp was like a manacle; her muscles turned to water at his touch. She sensed him behind her as a crowding darkness, too solid for shadow, a faceless potency. “Look down,” he ordered. She saw a thin carpet of cloud, moon silvered, and then it parted, and far below there were lights—the lights not of one city but of many, distant and dim as the Milky Way, a glistening scatterdust spreading away without boundary or horizon, until it was lost in infinity. “Behold! There are all the nations of the world, all the men of wealth and influence, all the greed, ambition, desperation, all the evil deeds and good intentions—and in the end, it all comes to me. Everything comes to me. This tower is built on their dreams and paid for with their blood. Where they sow, I reap, and so it will always be, until the Pit that can never be filled overflows at the last.” His tone softened, becoming a whisper that insinuated itself into the very pith of her thought. “Without me, you will be nothing, mere flotsam swept away on the current of Time. With me—ah, with me, all this will be at your feet.”

She felt the sense of defeat lying heavy on her spirit. The vision was taken away; the clouds closed. She was led back to the desk. The red file was open now to reveal some sort of legal document with curling black calligraphy on cream-colored paper. She did not read it. She knew what it said.

“Hold out your arm.”

The knife nicked her vein, a tiny V-shaped cut from which the blood ran in a long scarlet trickle.

“You will keep the scar forever,” he said. “It is my mark.

“Now sign.”

She dipped the quill in her own blood. The nib made a thin scratching noise as she began to write.

Behind her eyes, behind her mind, the other Fern—the Fern who was dreaming—screamed her horror and defiance in the prison of her own head.
No! No . . .

She woke up.

The sweat was pouring off her, as if a moment earlier she had been raging with fever, but now she was cold. Unlike Gaynor, for Fern there was no merciful oblivion. The dream was real and terrible—a witch’s dream, a seeing-beyond-the-world, a chink into the future.
Azmordis
. Her mouth shaped the name, though no sound came out, and the darkness swallowed it. Azmordis, the Oldest Spirit, her ancient enemy who lusted for her power, the Gift of her kind, and schemed for her destruction. Azmordis who was both god and demon, feeding off men’s worship—and their fears. But she had stood alone against him, and defeated him, and held to the truth she knew.

Until now.

She got up, shivering, and went into the kitchen, and made herself cocoa with a generous measure of whiskey, and prepared a hot water bottle. It seemed a long way till daylight.

II

At Wrokeby, the house-goblin was no longer playing poltergeist. He lurked in corners and crannies, in the folds of curtains, in the spaces under shadows. The newcomer did not appear to notice him, but he sensed that sooner or later she would sweep through every nook and niche, scouring the house of unwanted inmates. He watched her when he dared, peering out of knotholes and plaster cracks. He was a strange, wizened creature, stick thin and undersized even for a goblin, with skin the color of aging newspaper and a long pointed face like a hairless rat. His name when he had last heard it was Dibbuck, though he had forgotten why. The piebald cat that prowled the corridors could either see him or scent him, and she hunted him like the rodent he resembled, but so far he had been too quick for her. He had known the terrain for centuries; the cat was an invader on unfamiliar ground. But the presence of Nehemet made him more nervous and furtive than ever. Still he crept and spied, half in fascination, half in terror, knowing in the murky recesses of his brain that the house in his care was being misused, its heritage defiled and its atmosphere contaminated for some purpose he could not guess.

The smaller sitting room now had black velvet curtains and no chairs, with signs and sigils painted on the bare floor where once there had been Persian rugs. A pale fire burned sometimes on a hearth long unused, but the goblin would avoid the room, fearing the cold hiss of its unseen flames and the flickering glow that probed under the door. Instead he ventured to the cellar, hiding in shadows as old as the house itself. The wine racks had been removed and shelves installed, stacked with bottles of unknown liquids and glass jars whose contents he did not want to examine too closely. One bottle stood on a table by itself, with a circle drawn around it and cabbalistic words written in red along the perimeter. It had a crystal stopper sealed in wax, as if the contents were of great value, yet it appeared empty: he could see the wall through it. But there came an evening when he saw it had clouded over, filled with what looked like mist, and in the mist was a shape that writhed against the sides, struggling to escape. He skittered out of the room, and did not return for many days.

On the upper floors he found those Fitzherberts who had stayed this side of Death, their shrunken spirits rooted in age-old patterns of behavior, clinging to passions and hatreds whose causes were long forgotten. They dwelt in the past, seeing little of the real world, animate memories endowed with just a glimmer of thought, an atom of being. Yet even they felt an unfamiliar chill spreading through every artery of the house. “What is this?” asked Sir William, in the church tower. “Who is she, to come here and disturb us—we who have been here so long? This is all that we have.”

“I do not know,” said the goblin, “but when she passes, I feel a draft blowing straight from eternity.”

The ghost faded from view, fearful or ineffectual, and the goblin skulked the passageways, alone with his dread. At last he went back to the cellar, drawn, as are all werefolk, by the imminence of strong magic, mesmerized and repelled.

She wore a green dress that appeared to have no seams, adhering to her body like a living growth, whispering when she moved. There were threads of dull red in the material like the veins in a leaf. Her shadow leaped from wall to wall as she lit the candles, and her hair lifted although the air was stifling and still. The cat followed her, its skin puckered into gooseflesh, arching its back against her legs. There was a smell in the cellar that did not belong there, a smell of roots and earth and uncurling fronds: the goblin was an indoor creature and it took him a while to identify it, although his elongated nose quivered with more-than-human sensitivity. He avoided looking at the woman directly, lest she feel his gaze. Instead he watched her sidelong, catching the flicker of white fingers as she touched flasks and pots, checking their contents, unscrewing the occasional lid, sniffing, replacing. And all the while she talked to her feline companion in a ripple of soft words. These herbs are running low . . . the slumbertop toadstools are too dry . . . these worm eggs will hatch if the air reaches them . . . At the end of one shelf he saw a jar he had not noticed before, containing what looked like a pair of eyeballs floating in some clear fluid. He could see the brown circle of iris and the black pupil, and broken fragments of blood vessel trailing around them. He knew they could not be alive, but they hung against the glass, fixed on
her
, moving when she moved . . .

He drew back, covering his face, afraid even to brush her thought with his crooked stare. When he looked again, she was standing by a long table. It was entirely taken up by an irregular object some six feet in length, bundled in cloth. Very carefully she uncovered it, crooning as if to a child, and Dibbuck smelled the odor more strongly—the smell of a hungry forest, where the trees claw at one another in their fight to reach the sun. Her back was turned toward him, screening much of the object from his view, but he could make out a few slender branches, a torn taproot, leaves that trembled at her caress. She moistened it with drops from various bottles, murmuring a singsong chant that might have been part spell, part lullaby. It had no tune, but its tunelessness invaded the goblin’s head, making him dizzy. When she had finished she covered the sapling again, taking care not to tear even the corner of a leaf.

He thought muzzily: It is evil. It should be destroyed. But his small store of courage and resource was almost exhausted.

“The workmen come tomorrow,” she told the cat. “They will repair the conservatory, making it proof against weather and watching eyes. Then my Tree may grow in safety once more.” The cat mewed, a thin, angry sound. The woman threw back her head as if harkening to some distant cry, and the candle flames streamed sideways, and a wind blew from another place, tasting of dankness and dew, and leaf shadows scurried across the floor. Then she laughed, and all was quiet.

The goblin waited some time after she had quit the cellar before he dared to follow.

He knew now that he must leave Wrokeby—leave or be destroyed—yet still he hung on. This was his place, his care, the purpose of his meager existence: a house-goblin stayed with the house until it crumbled. The era of technology and change had driven some from their old haunts, but such uprootings were rare, and few of goblinkind could survive the subsequent humiliation and exile. Only the strongest were able to move on, and Dibbuck was not strong. Yet deep in his scrawny body there was a fiber of toughness, a vestigial resolve. He did not think of seeking help: he knew of no help to seek. But he did not quite give up. Despite his fear of Nehemet, he stole down his native galleries in the woman’s swath, and eavesdropped on her communings with her pet, and listened to the muttering of schemes and spells he did not understand. Once, when she was absent for the day, he even sneaked into her bedroom, peering under the bed for discarded dreams, fingering the creams and lotions on the dressing table. Their packaging was glossy and up-to-date, but he could read a little and they seemed to have magical properties, erasing wrinkles and endowing the user with the radiance of permanent youth. He avoided the mirror lest it catch and hold his reflection, but, glancing up, he saw her face there, moon pale and glowing with an unearthly glamour. “It works,” she said. “On me, everything works. I was old, ages old, but now I am young forever.” He knew she spoke not to him but to herself, and the mirror was replaying the memory, responding to his curiosity. Panic overcame him, and he fled.

On the tower stair he found the head of Sir William. He tried to seize the hair, but it had less substance than a cobweb. “Go now,” said Dibbuck. “They say there is a Gate for mortals through which you can leave this place. Find it, before it is too late.”

“I rejected the Gate,” said the head haughtily. “I was not done with this world.”

“Be done with it now,” said the goblin. “Her power grows.”

“I was the power here,” said Sir William, “long ago . . .”

Despairing, Dibbuck left him, running through the house and uttering his warning unheeded to the ghosts too venerable to be visible anymore, the drafts that had once been passing feet, the water sprites who gurgled through the antique plumbing, the imp who liked to extinguish the fire in the oven. A house as old as Wrokeby has many tenants, phantom memories buried in the very stones. In the kitchen he saw the woman’s only servant, a hagling with the eyes of the werekind. She lunged at him with a rolling pin, moving with great swiftness for all her apparent age and rheumatics, but he dodged the blow and faded into the wall, though he had to wait an hour and more before he could slip past her up the stairs. He made his way to the conservatory, a Victorian addition that had been severely damaged fifty years earlier in a storm. Now three builders were there, working with unusual speed and very few cups of tea. The one in charge was a gypsy with a gray-streaked ponytail and a narrow, wary face. “We finish quickly and she’ll pay us well,” he told the others. “But don’t skimp on anything. She’ll know.”

“She’s a looker, isn’t she?” said the youngest, a youth barely seventeen. “That figure, and that hair, and all.”

“Don’t even think of it,” said the gypsy. “She can see you thinking.” He stared at the spot where the goblin stood, so that for a moment Dibbuck thought he was observed, though the man made no sign. But later, when they were gone, the goblin found a biscuit left there, something no one had done for him through years beyond count. He ate it slowly, savoring the chocolate coating, feeling braver for the gift, the small gesture of friendship and respect, revitalized by the impact of sugar on his system. Perhaps it was that which gave him the impetus to investigate the attics.

He did not like the top of the house. His sense of time was vague, and he recalled only too clearly a wayward daughter of the family who had been locked up there behind iron bars and padlocked doors, supposedly for the benefit of her soul. Amy Fitzherbert had had the misfortune to suffer from manic depression and what was probably Tourette’s syndrome in an age when a depression was a hole in the ground and sin had yet to evolve into syndrome. She had been fed through the bars like an animal, and like an animal she had reacted, ranting and screaming and bruising herself against the walls. Dibbuck had been too terrified to go near her. In death, her spirit had moved on, but the atmosphere there was still dark and disturbed from the Furies who had plagued her.

That evening he climbed the topmost stair and crept through the main attics, his ears strained for the slightest of sounds. There were no ghosts here, only a few spiders, a dead beetle, a scattering of mouse droppings by the wainscoting. But it seemed to Dibbuck that this was the quiet of waiting, a quiet that harkened to his listening, that saw his unseen presence. And in the dust there were footprints, well-defined and recent: the prints of a woman’s shoes. But the chocolate was strong in him and he went on until he reached the door to Amy’s prison, and saw the striped shadow of the bars beyond, and heard what might have been a moan from within. Amy had moaned in her sleep, tormented by many-headed dreams, and he thought she was back there, the woman had raised her spirit for some dreadful purpose; but still he took a step forward, the last step before the spell barrier hit him. The force of it flung him several yards, punching him into the physical world and tumbling him over and over. He picked himself up, twitching with shock. The half-open door was vibrating in the backlash of the spell, and behind it the shadow bars stretched across the floor, but another darkness loomed against them, growing nearer and larger, blotting them out. It had no recognizable shape, but it seemed to be huge and shaggy, and he thought it was thrusting itself against the bars like a caged beast. The plea that reached him was little more than a snarl, the voice of some creature close to the edge of madness.

Let me out . . .

Letmeout letmeout letmeout letmeout . . .

For the third time in recent weeks Dibbuck ran, fleeing a domain that had once been his.

Lucas Walgrim sat at his sister’s bedside in a private nursing home in Queen Square. Their father visited dutifully once a week, going into prearranged huddles with various doctors, signing checks whenever required. Dana was wired up to the latest technology, surrounded by bouquets she could not see, examined, analyzed, pampered. The nursing home sent grateful thanks for a generous donation. Nothing happened. Dana’s pulse remained steady but slow, so slow, and her face was waxen, as if she were already dead. Lucas would sit beside her through the lengthening afternoons, a neglected laptop on the cabinet by the bed, watching for a quiver of movement, a twinge, a change, waiting until he almost forgot what he was waiting for. She did not toss or turn; her breast barely heaved beneath the lace of her nightgown. They combed her thick dark hair twice a day, spreading it over the pillow: there was never a strand out of place. In oblivion her mouth lost its customary pout and slackened into an illusion of repose, but he saw no peace in her face, only absence. He tried talking to her, calling her, certain he could reach her wherever she had gone; but no answer came. As children they had been close, thrown in each other’s company by a workaholic father and an alcoholic mother. Eight years the elder, Lucas had alternately bullied and protected his little sister, fighting all her battles, allowing no one else to tease or taunt her. As an adult, he had been her final recourse when boyfriends abandoned her and girlfriends let her down. But in the last few years he had been busy at the City desk where his father had installed him, and she had turned to hard drugs and heavy drinking for the moral support that she lacked. He told himself that guilt was futile, and she had made her own decisions, but it did not lessen the pain. She was his sister whom he had always loved, the little rabbit he had mocked for her shyness and her fears, and she had gone, and he could not find her.

At his office in the City colleagues eyed his vacant chair and said he was losing his grip. The malicious claimed he had succeeded only by paternal favors, and he did not have a grip to lose. His latest girlfriend, finding him inattentive, dated another man. In the nursing home the staff watched him covertly, the women (and some of the men) with a slightly wistful degree of commiseration. Purists maintained that he was far from handsome, his bones too bony, his cheeks too sharply sunken, the brows too straight and somber above his shadowed eyes. But the ensemble of his face, with its bristling black hair and taut, tight mouth, exuded force if not vitality, compulsion if not charisma. Those who were not attracted still found themselves intrigued, noting his air of controlled tension, his apparent lack of humor or charm. In Queen Square they thought the better of him for his meaningless vigil, and offered him tea that he invariably refused, and ignored the occasional cigarette that he would smoke by the open window. He was not a habitual smoker, but it was something to do, a way of expressing frustration. The bouquets came via florists and had little scent, but their perfume filled his imagination, sweet as decay, and only the acrid tang of tobacco would eradicate it.