Кэтрин Фишер - Sapphique

It will be my last chance to contact you, I’m afraid.

Incarceron has become rather demanding in its ambition. It has drained almost all the power of the Keys, and awaits only Sapphique’s Glove.

‘The Glove,’ Finn muttered, and she said, ‘Father. . .‘ but the voice went on, calm and amused and recorded...

Your friend Keiro holds that. It will certainly be the final piece of the puzzle. I begin to feel that I have served my purpose, and that Incarceron has begun to realize it does not need a Warden any more. It’s really very ironic. Like the Sapienti of old, I have created a monster, and it has no loyalty.

He paused, and then the smile went, and he looked drawn. He said Guard the Portal, Claudia. The terrible cruelty of the Prison must not infect the Realm. If anything tries to come through, any person, any being, whoever it seems to be, you must destroy it. Incarceron is crafty, and I no longer know its plans.

He laughed a wintry laugh.

It seems you will be my successor after all.

His face froze.

She looked up at Finn. Far below, the viols and flutes and fiddles struck up the first merry dance of the Ball.

As they walked arm in arm along the terrace the crowding courtiers bowed and murmured. Fans fluttered. Eyes watched through the faces of demons, wolves, mermaids, storks.

‘Sapphique’s Glove,’ Finn muttered. ‘Keiro has Sapphique’s Glove.’ She could feel the charge of excitement through his arm. As if he had been shocked into some new hope.

Down the steps the flowerbeds were curves of twiit flowers. Beyond the formal gardens she could already see lit trails of lanterns over the lawns leading to the elaborate pinnacles of the Shell Grotto. Quickly she tugged him behind a vast urn noisily overflowing with water.

‘How could he have it?’

‘Who cares? If it’s real, it might do anything! Unless it’s some scam he’s playing.’

‘No.’ She watched the crowd, thronging under the lanterns.

‘Attia mentioned a glove. And then she stopped, very suddenly. As if Keiro wouldn’t let her say any more.’

‘Because it’s real!’ Finn paced the path, brushing phlox that released its sweet, clinging scent. ‘It really exists!’ Claudia said, ‘People are looking.’

‘I don’t care! Gildas would have been so horrified. He never trusted Keiro.’

‘But you do.’

‘I’ve told you. Always. How did he get hold of it? How is he going to use it?’ She gazed at the hundreds of courtiers, a mass of peacock dresses, gleaming satin coats, elaborate wigs of piled flaxen hair, They streamed into the pavilions and the grotto, their chatter loud and endless.

‘Perhaps this Glove was the power source Jared noticed.’

‘Yes!’ He leant against the urn, getting moss on his coat.

Behind the mask his eyes were bright with hope. Claudia felt only unease.

‘Finn. My father seems to think this Glove will complete Incarceron’s plan to Escape. That would be a disaster. Surely Keiro wouldn’t...’

‘You never know what Keiro will do.’

‘But would he do that? Would he give the Prison the means of destroying everyone in there, just so that he might Escape too?’ She had moved to stand right in front of him; he had to look at her.

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure His voice was low and furious. ‘I know Keiro.’

‘You just said …’

‘Well … he wouldn’t do that.’ She shook her head, suddenly losing patience with his stupid, blind loyalty. ‘I don’t believe you. I think you’re afraid he will do it. I’m certain that Attia’s terrified of it. And you heard what my father said. Nothing — no one — must come through the Portal.’

‘Your father! He’s no more your father than I am.’

‘Shut up!’

‘And since when did you do what he says?’ Hot with anger, they faced each other, darkmask to catface.

‘I do what I want!’

‘But you’d believe him before Keiro?’

‘Yes,’ she spat. ‘I would. And before you, too:.’ For a second there was a hurt shock in his eyes; then they were cold. ‘You’d kill Keiro?’

‘If the Prison was using him. If I had to.’ He was very still. Then he hissed, ‘I thought you were different, Claudia. But you’re just as false and cruel and stupid as the rest of them.’ He walked into the crowd, shoved two men aside and, ignoring their protests, barged into the grotto.

Claudia stared after him, every muscle scorched with wrath. How dare he talk to her like that! If he wasn’t Giles he was just some Scum of the Prison, and she, despite facts, was the Warden’s daughter.

She gripped her hands, controlling the rage. It took a deep breath to get her heartbeat down; she wanted to yell and smash things, but instead she had to plaster on the smile and wait here till midnight.

And what then?

After this, would Finn even come with her?

A ripple passed through the crowd, a flurry of elaborate courtesies, and she saw Sia pass, in a diaphanous gown of flimsy white, her wig a towering construction of woven hair in which an armada of tiny gilt ships tossed and drowned.

‘Claudia?’ The Pretender was beside her. ‘I see your brutish escort just stormed off.’ She took the fan from her sleeve and flicked it open. ‘We had a slight disagreement, that’s all.’ Giles’s mask was an eagle’s face, beautifully made with real feathers, its beak hooked and proud. As with everything he did, it was designed to reinforce his image as Prince-in-waiting. It gave him a strangeness, as masks always do. But his eyes were smiling.

‘A lovers’ tiff?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Then allow me to escort you in.’ He offered her his arm, and after a moment she took it. ‘And don’t worry about Finn, Claudia. Finn is history.’ Together, they walked across the lawns to the ball.

Attia fell.

She fell like Sapphique had fallen. A terrible, flapping, tumbling fall, arms splayed out, with no breath, no sight, no hearing. She fell through a roaring vortex, into a mouth, down a throat that swallowed her. Her clothes and hair, her very skin, rippled and seemed to be torn away so that she was nothing but a screaming soul plunging headlong into the abyss.

But then Attia knew that the world was impossible, that it was a creature that mocked her. Because the air thickened and nets of cloud formed under her — dense springy clouds that tumbled her from one to another — and somewhere there was laughter that might have been Keiro’s and might have been the Prison’s, as if she couldn’t tell them apart now.

In a flicker between gasps she saw the world re-form; the hall floor convulsed, split, rolled away. A river erupted under the viaduct, a black torrent that rose up to meet her so fast that she had hardly snatched a breath before she had plunged into it, deep, deep into a darkness of frothing bubbles.

A membrane of water webbed her wide mouth. And then her head burst out, gasping, and the torrent was slowing, drifting her under dark girders, into caves, into a dim underworld. Dead Beetles were washed along beside her; the stream was a conduit of rust, red as blood, channelled between steep metal sides, its surface greasy and bobbing with debris, stinking, the outfall of a world. As if it was the aorta of some great being, sick with bacteria, never to be healed.

The conduit tipped her over a weir and left her, sprawled, on a gritty shore, where Keiro was crouched on hands and knees, retching into the black sand.