Mike Shevdon: Strangeness and Charm

"What enemy, Garvin? What am I looking for?"

"That's what we're trying to find out." He squeezed my shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.

Once again I thought that there was more that he was avoiding telling me. It would do no good to ask, though. He would tell me when he thought I needed to know.

I sat cross-legged opposite Angela, about a hand-width apart. She smiled reassuringly, but I could see she was nervous. She kept glancing at the Warders around the room, assessing distance, looking back at me, seeking reassurance herself.

"Do you still want to do this?" I asked her.

"I don't have any choice."

"There's always a choice." I found myself echoing Blackbird's words and smiled at the irony.

Angela smiled back, taking it as a positive sign. She reached out to touch my cheek, but I shook my head. I held out my hands, palms upward and open, forearms resting on my knees. "Trust me, this is how it's done."

She looked at my hands and then positioned hers above them. "Ready?"

"No one ever is," I told her.

Her hands clasped mine.

Cold rushes down my arms — I thought I remembered the cold from last time, but my memory was blunted. It sears and burns through my veins, running like rivers of quicksilver, killing sensation. My eyes blur with tears and my teeth grind together until my jaw aches. Humming vibrates through me, a note so low I can feel it in my bones.

There is Angela behind the glass screen, reinforced with iron wire, her face illuminated in the pale nimbus-glow surrounding me. Blood slashes across the glass, running down in black rivulets, and the door is open. Her hand touches my cheek and her eyes fill with light.

"The sun will rise and they shall fall." This is not the future, it's the past.

The world spins and I fall, plummeting into a funnel which narrows so that I am rushing down a tunnel, twisting and buffeting, this way and that, until I stop, suddenly and immediately, standing in the room below Covent Garden Underground Station in the dim orange glow from the lamps with the smell of new turned earth and recent rain. Kareesh sits in her nest of cushions, reaching for me, grinning with pointed teeth.

I looked around for Blackbird, but she isn't here. Gramawl looms in the background at the edge of the lights from the filigree lanterns hung from the ceiling. Blackbird was here when this happened and Gramawl wasn't, why isn't she here now?

Kareesh speaks in her crackly voice, "Here you are at last, gauntlet runner, witness and suspect, evader of traps, bringer of hope. Rabbit will be your name, but not for always. Another name will be yours, Dogstar, when you have earned it." She reaches forward and touches my face. "The sun will rise and they shall fall. So say I."

"So say I." My eyes are glazed as I hear my voice acknowledge hers, but that's not what happened. She never called me Dogstar — that happened later when Raffmir named me at the anvil under the Strand. Are we changing the past?

There's a cawing sound behind me and I turn to look. I am outside, a path leads up through a graveyard to an ornate archway with a wooden door of grey bleached wood. The arch over the door is carved with impossible creatures, serpents, griffins and manticores, the carved face of a man with ivy growing from his mouth stares down at me. The door swings open and two men stand before the door speaking in low tones.

"The work is completed?" The first is tall, dressed as a priest.

"It is done, though why you need such protection on God's house is beyond me, Father." The second looks worried. He has the tan of a man who works outside. His hands are rough and criss-crossed with old scars.

The priest clasps the man's wrist. "Never speak of it. Understand?"

"I still say, it ain't right," says the man.

"He moves in mysterious ways, and we are His servants. This will stand well for you in the life to come," says the priest.

"I hope so, vicar. I surely hope so."

As the door closes, everything is inside out and I am in a tall room lined with books. Shelves vanish into the dimness on all sides. A dark-haired man sits at a desk, a lamp at either side. Open in front of him is a book, its pages brown at the edges, the paper as thin as tissue. Each facing page has three intricate symbols aligned down each page and between them is a central design which spans the join. The symbols shiver and squirm on the page but the central design is clear, a circle containing four symmetrical shields arranged in a cross. The symbols have text beside them in the tiniest writing. I squint to see what they say, but my eyes blur and the text runs into grey.

The grey resolved into mist. I begin to see that there are people around me. There is a noise I recognise, the distant squeal of brakes and hum of an electric train. The mist pulls back revealing a London Underground platform crowded with people.

I have been here before.

The train is getting close, I can hear the clack and rumble as it approaches. I am standing in the same spot as on the morning I first learned about my fey heritage, on the same platform with the same people. On that morning, the man beside me fell deliberately onto the tracks as the train reached the platform. He committed suicide by tube train.

I look at the person next to me, but it's not the same man. It's a skinny boy with spiky hair. He glances at me with knowing eyes and then at the approaching train. He looks calm, relaxed. I look back to where the train is clattering onto the platform. Aware of what is going to happen I turned back to the figure next to me to find him wreathed in fire. Long curling yellow flames ripple up his arms, his clothes smoke, his face shimmers in the haze. No one else notices, no one steps back from the heat that radiates from him.

He steps around and stands on the edge with his back to the track, looking at me, his eyes filled with orange fire. He extended his burning hand to me. I lift my hand to take his, but the heat from his hand is incredible.

"It's too hot!" I tell him. My hand blisters as it nears his. I can't take his hand.

"How can you save me," he asks calmly, falling slowly backwards into the path of the train, "when you can't even save yourself?"

Angela's hands release me and I topple sideways. Cramp sends shooting pains up my leg and I kick out trying to release the pain.

"Nnnngh." My tongue is welded dry to the roof of my mouth.

"I think he's having some sort of fit," said Fellstamp, grinning down at me.

"Give him a moment," said Garvin. "Well, Angela? Did you see anything?"

She pushed out her legs, stretching her calves and rotating her feet. "It's not for me to say." She rubbed her hands together, encouraging the circulation. The afternoon sunlight had disappeared, leaving the room in twilight, but having done this before it was not such a shock that so much time had passed.

I managed to unstick my tongue. "Water," I croaked. Fellstamp knelt down beside me and offered me water from a glass. The glass felt oddly warm in my hands and my teeth chattered against the edge as I sipped from it. I swished the liquid around my mouth to ease the dryness.

"Did you get what you needed? Did you find out what it means?" Garvin asked Angela.

She looked up at him, suspicion in her eyes. "You know enough about me, I think, to know that your Warder will know the meaning when the time is right. It's not for me to interpret for him, or to explain what he's seen. I did see one thing, though."

"And what was that?" asked Garvin.

"This isn't about me, is it? It's about him." She gestured to where I was sitting half-upright on the floor. "This started long ago and I am only the latest link in the chain of events. I'm not the first to speak of a rising sun, am I?"