Кэтрин Фишер - Sapphique

So he held his hand out, and took hers. ‘Friends, Claudia is right to give you a choice. I owe everything to her. Without her I would be dead now, or worse, thrown back into the hell of Incarceron. I wish I could tell you what her support means. But to do that I would have to explain the Prison to you, and I won’t do that, because I dare not speak about it, it hurts me even to think of it.’ They were intent; the word Incarceron was like a charm.

Finn allowed his voice to tremble.

‘I was a child. I was snatched from a world of beauty and peace to a torment of pain and hunger, a hell where men murder each other without a care, where women and children sell themselves to stay alive. I know about death.

I’ve suffered the miseries of the poor. I know about loneliness, how wretched it is to be alone and terrified in a maze of echoing halls and dark dread. This is the knowledge Incarceron gave me. And when I am King, this is the knowledge I will use. There will be no more Protocol, no more fear. No more being locked in. I will do my best — I swear this to you my best to make this Realm a true paradise, and a free world for all its people. And Incarceron too. That’s all I can say to you. All I can promise you. Except that if we lose I will kill myself rather than go back there The silence was different. It was caught in their throats.

And when a soldier growled, ‘I’m with you, my lord: another answered at once, and then another, and suddenly the room was a hubbub of voices until Ralph’s reedy ‘God save Prince Giles’ had them roaring their approval.

Finn smiled, wan.

Claudia watched him, and when their eyes met she saw there was a triumph in him, quiet but proud.

Keiro had been right, she thought. Finn could talk his way to a crown.

She turned. A footman was pushing his way through to her, white and wide-eyed. She crouched, and his voice, thin and terrified, silenced the hubbub.

‘They’re here, my lady. The Queen’s army is here.’

The tunnel narrowed rapidly. Soon Keiro was on hands and knees in the shallow water, struggling to keep the new torch alight. Behind her Attia heard Rix gasp as he crawled, the pack slung under his belly, the roof bruising his back. And was it her imagination, or was the air warmer?

She said, ‘What if it gets too small?’

‘Stupid question,’ Keiro muttered. ‘We die. There’s no way back.’ It was hotter. And choked with dust. She left it on her lips and skin. Crawling was painful; her knees and palms sore and cut. The tunnel had shrunk to a tube now, a red pulsing heat that they had to force their way through.

Suddenly Rix stopped dead. ‘Volcano.’ Keiro twisted round. ‘What!’

‘Imagine. If the heart of the Prison is in fact a great magma chamber, sealed by terrible compression in the very centre of its being.’

‘Oh for god’s sake...’

‘And if we reach it, if it is pierced by even so much as a needle-point . . .’

‘Rix!’ Attia said fiercely. ‘This isn’t helping.’ She heard him breathing hard. ‘But it may be true. What do we know? And yet we could know. We could understand all things at once.’ She squirmed to look back. He was lying full length in the water. He had the Glove in his hand.

‘No!’ she hissed.

He looked up and his face was lit with that sly delight she had come to dread. And then he was shouting, his voice deafening in the confined space.

‘I WILL PUT ON THE GLOVE. I WILL BECOME ALL-KNOWING.’ Keiro was beside her, knife in hand. ‘I’ll finish him this time. I swear I will.’

‘LIKE THE MAN IN THE GARDEN...’

‘What garden, Rix?’ she asked quietly. “What garden?’

‘The one in the Prison, somewhere. You know.’

‘I don’t.’ She had her hand round Keiro’s wrist, forcing him still. ‘Tell me.’ Rix stroked the Glove. ‘There was a garden and a tree grew there with golden apples and if you ate one of them you knew everything. And then Sapphique climbed over the fence and killed the many-headed monster and picked the apple, because he wanted to know, you see, Attia. He wanted to know how to Escape.’

‘Right.’ She had wriggled back. She was close to his pocked face.

‘And a snake came out of the grass and it said, “Oh go on, eat the apple. I dare you.” And he stopped then with it to his mouth because he knew the snake was Incarceron.’ Keiro groaned. ‘Let me...’

‘Put the Glove away, Rix. Or give it to me.’ His fingers caressed its dark scales. ‘And because if he ate it he would know how small he was. How much of a nothing he was. He would see himself as a speck in the vastness of the Prison.’

‘So he didn’t eat it, right?’ Rix stared at her. ‘What?’

‘In the patchbook. He didn’t eat it.’ There was silence. Something seemed to pass over Rix’s face; then he frowned crossly at her and tucked the Glove away inside his coat. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Attia. What patchbook? Why aren’t we getting on?’ She watched him a moment, then shoved Keiro on with her foot. Muttering, he shuffled back. The moment was over, but it had been too close. Somehow, quickly, she had to get the Glove from Rix before he went too far.

But as she gripped the slimy filth and pulled herself after Keiro she felt his boots ahead and he wasn’t moving.

She looked up and saw the torchlight glowing on the end of the tunnel.

It was a rounded vault of corbelled stone, and a single gargoyle leered down at them with its tongue impudently out. The water was pouring from its mouth, a green slime down the walls.

‘That’s it? The end?’ She almost dropped her forehead down into the water. ‘We can’t even turn!’

‘End of the tunnel. Not quite the end of the line.’ Keiro had wriggled over on his back and was looking up, his hair dripping. ‘Look.’ In the roof immediately above him was a shaft. It was circular and around it were letters, strange sigils in some language Attia didn’t know.

‘Sapient letters.’ Keiro flinched as the sparks from the torch fell towards his face. ‘Gildas used to use them all the time.

And look at that.’ An eagle. Her heart leapt as she saw the sign that Finn wore on his wrist, its wings wide, a crown around its neck.

Down through the centre of the hole, its final links just drifting above Keiro’s hand, hung a chain ladder. As they watched, it shuddered gently, in the vibrations from above.

Rix’s voice was calm in the darkness behind her. ‘Well climb it, Apprentice.’ There was no stable.

Jared stood in the centre of the clearing and looked blearily around.

No stable, no feathers. Only, on the floor of the clearing, a scorched circle, that might once have been the blackened scar of a fire. He walked round it. The bracken was deep and curled in the dawn light; spiderwebs, looking like cradles of wool meshed with dew, filled every crack between stem and stalk.

He sucked his dry lips, then ran his hand over his forehead, behind his neck.

He must have been here one, perhaps two days, rolled in that blanket, delirious, the horse snuffling and cropping leaves and wandering aimlessly nearby.

His clothes were sodden with damp and sweat, his hair lank, his hands bitten by insects, and he still couldn’t stop shivering. But he felt as if some door had opened inside him, some bridge had been crossed.

Walking back to the horse, he took out his medication pouch and crouched, considering the dose. Then he injected the fine needle into his vein, feeling the sharp prick that always set his teeth on edge. He withdrew it, cleaned it and put it away. Then he took his own pulse, wiped a handkerchief in the dew and washed his face and smiled at a sudden memory of one of the maids at home asking him if dew was really good for her complexion.