David Gilman - Ice Claw

“He wouldn’t abandon or betray us, Comtesse, I’m certain of it.”

She stopped dicing and indicated with the knife the chair next to her. Max sat down obediently. She swallowed a mouthful of wine and pointed the remote control at the television set, muting the sound.

“Let me tell you about my grandson. He is frightened of failure. His father expects great things from him. He is frightened of his father. He hides in his sport. Perhaps he thought you were involved in something that was too big for him.” She covered his hand with her own. “It is not the first time he has run away. And now he has this Peaches with him. He’s a boy with his girl. Life is easier that way.”

Max nodded. He couldn’t blame Bobby for leaving them in the lurch.

“Sophie asked me where you were. I did not tell her. She was emotional. Though she did not show it. But I saw it. You young people. My God, it’s wonderful to have youth, but the emotions! You can keep them!” She smiled at his blank expression. “You don’t know what I mean?”

“No,” he said.

“You will. But Max, let me tell you, this matter is not finished. Be careful of everyone around you. Especially the girl.”

Was the comtesse confirming Max’s own doubts about Sophie?

“Remember my warning,” the Comtesse said. “I saw it in the cards.”

Yeah. It was a great pity the cards hadn’t told her where Bobby was, or who it was attacking them, and where they might be now. Second-guessing pretty pictures wasn’t exactly an exact science.

Max took the piece of paper with the triangles enclosed by a circle from his pocket. This jigsaw puzzle of a mystery that he had stumbled upon needed all the pieces to make sense, fit neatly and give him the complete picture. The comtesse seemed the only one around who had any inkling about all this weird stuff. Weird but important. But then she would be involved-and at risk. Enormous risk, given what had happened to Max so far.

She seemed to read his thoughts. “I’m an old lady. I get very forgetful. I don’t even know what day of the week it is sometimes. In a way it’s quite nice. Time stops. What is it Bobby says about me? ‘One sandwich short of a picnic’?” She smiled. “I have forgotten more than I ever knew.” She looked at the piece of paper he held. She raised her eyebrows. “More secrets?”

Max unfolded it to reveal the triangles, circle and signs. “Do you know what this is?” He turned it towards her and waited as she gave it barely a glance.

“It’s a birth chart,” she said almost dismissively.

“Which means what?” Max asked.

“Somebody is born at a particular time. Someone who knows how to interpret these things looks to the heavens and the stars and planets, and draws a birth chart.”

Max thought for a moment. “Like a compass? They point to the stars and planets.”

“That is one way of thinking of it, yes. It used to require great skill to do such things. It shows someone’s life, their destiny. It shows events. It shows me nothing. I don’t understand them. I don’t do them. What do I know? I will tell you a secret, Max. It’s too difficult. Like mathematics. I hated it at school. I am intuitive, not scientific. Besides, these days, things like this can be done on computers. Not for me, I think.”

She drained the bottle into the glass and dropped it into a bin full of other empty bottles.

“But this was done years ago. Maybe twenty or thirty years ago. And you can see it’s hand-drawn,” Max said.

“Then the man who did it had the old skills,” she said.

Max gave that a moment’s thought. “Old? You mean, special?”

“I mean whoever did it was skilled in ancient wisdom,” she said as she adjusted the gas flame beneath a pan of simmering water.

“I found something else,” he said hesitantly.

She waited.

“It was a painting and it had two Latin words on it,” he said.

“No one speaks Latin anymore. Not even lawyers, damn them,” she muttered.

“But you’ve got books on Latin on your shelves. I saw them.”

“You were nosing around?”

“I was looking for an atlas.”

“You found one?”

“No.”

“So? You’re going somewhere?”

He’d probably said too much already. Better not to ask anything more. He nodded, put the paper back in his pocket and got up from the table. “I’m going back to England. I think I need my dad’s help with this.”

She lit another cigarette, found another half bottle of red wine and topped up her glass. She swallowed a mouthful and turned the television’s sound up. “That is the most sensible thing you have said since you have been here. You need an atlas to find your way home?”

“No, course not.”

“Then you’re looking for something else. What Latin words don’t you understand?”

“Lux Ferre . I mean, I think I know what they mean but I don’t understand why I saw them.”

“At the chateau?”

He nodded. The strong smell of the rough wine and her smoldering cigarette was mingling unpleasantly with the smell of the boiling vegetables. He wanted to get some air but he had to find the answer to this last question.

“So? They mean what?”

“Something to do with light.”

She nodded. “Lux Ferre was used by ancient Roman astrologers. It means ‘Light Bringer.’ But the words were corrupted, they were joined together-Luxferre. You understand now? It became the word that now represents ominous darkness and evil. It means Lucifer.”

Max was silent. His mind whirled. Lucifer. The last word Zabala had screamed at him. Traces of the name in the chateau teased him, those words etched on the bookshelf and their meaning something about morning light, and now Lux Ferre -Lucifer.

He wasn’t sure whether it was the steam in the kitchen making him sweat.

“I think you should go home, Max. I do,” she said carefully.

He nodded. He had already decided not to show her the numbers they had found or the other diagram he had drawn quickly from the pendant seen through the telescope. She had identified the man, or the entity, Max didn’t know which, that Zabala feared.

How come Lucifer brought light? He was a force of evil. Or both.

“There is an old atlas in the library,” the Countess said nonchalantly as she peeled another potato.

If a birth chart was like a compass to the stars, then it might also hold a clue to where Max should go next. The comtesse’s library, stuffed with generations of old books, yielded an atlas, its musty pages still etched sharply with names of countries that no longer existed. Everything changes, Max. Empires are gained and lost, the climate falters, our fate is uncertain. So make plans but don’t expect them always to work out. That way you’ll get through .

His dad’s words comforted him as Max fingered the piece of paper in his hands. The drawing he had made from the crystal pendant was a long-sided triangle that reminded him of when he did orienteering. To find where he was on the ground he would take a compass reading of two other visible objects and join the lines up, then this triangulation would give him his location. Max knew it could never be to scale, but he had a good eye and he had drawn the lines accurately. He laid it on the page showing France and some of its old colonies in North Africa. He turned the drawing around, like orienting a compass, but it made no sense, especially not the letters E, S and Q . Then he placed one corner of the triangle on the foothills of the Pyrenees, just about where he was now. The shorter baseline seemed to point in the direction of the French Alps and Switzerland, but it was the longer line of the triangle that held his attention. It pointed towards North Africa. He grabbed a ruler from the table, laid it on the line. Come on! Think! Could this line be a direction? The scale of the atlas wasn’t big enough for him to be that accurate, but there seemed no doubt in his mind that the line went straight into the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. And that was too much of a coincidence to ignore. Sophie lived there. The area on the map looked barren; a world away from the comfort of Europe. How to get there, and what would be waiting for him when he did?