Jan Siegel - The Poisoned Crown - The Sangreal Trilogy Three

‘What object?’ Pobjoy interrupted. He was a detective, and even on such unfamiliar territory, he could work out which questions to ask.

‘I imagine you can guess.’

There was a short pause. ‘The cup?’ Pobjoy said, as illumination dawned. ‘The Grimthorn Grail?’

‘Precisely,’ said Bartlemy, looking pleased, like a teacher with a pupil who, after a long struggle, has finally grasped the principles of calculus. ‘They appear to have been sent to guard it. There are also indications that their guardianship extended to Nathan and Annie—’

‘ Nathan and Annie? But – why? – how?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bartlemy admitted. ‘There is some connection between them and the Grail, too complicated to go into now. In any case, I am not yet sure exactly what it is, or how deep it goes.’

‘ Did Nathan steal it that time?’ Pobjoy asked sharply.

‘Dear me no. In fact, he got it back. It’s a long story, too long for now. To return to the gnomons, the problem seems to be that they are no longer – focused. There was no reason for them to pursue you, yet they did. And there have been other incidents lately. Evidently they are getting out of hand. The power that manipulated them may be losing its grip, or merely losing interest. There could be other factors. At this time, we have no way of finding out.’

‘Are you saying someone here – some sort of wizard —’ Pobjoy enunciated the word with hesitation and distaste ‘—is controlling these creatures? Some local bigwig with secret powers?’ He didn’t even try to keep the irony from his tone.

‘Of course not,’ Bartlemy said mildly. He was always at his mildest in the face of scorn, anger or threat. ‘Their controller is in the universe from which they came. That’s why we know so little about him.’

‘ If this is true,’ Pobjoy said, attempting to keep the world in its rightful place, ‘what’s his interest in the Grail?’

‘He placed it here,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Probably for safekeeping. A long time ago, I had a teacher who contended there were many otherworld artefacts secreted – or in some cases dumped – on this planet. He claimed they were responsible for almost all myths and legends, and several major religions. Apples of youth, rings of power, stone tablets falling out of the sky. That sort of thing. Of course, he may have exaggerated a little.’

He’s nuts, Pobjoy thought. Clever, yes – harmless – but nuts. I wonder if Annie knows?

Then he visualised the gnomons, waiting in the dark …

He spent the night in the guest room.

He was woken in the small hours by someone tapping on the window. It was only a gentle sound, barely louder than the rain, but it jerked him abruptly from sleep. Too abruptly. For a few seconds, he didn’t know where he was, or what he was doing there. His bleary gaze made out a shape through the panes, behind the raindrops. A face. A pale blurred face with midnight eyes and a floating mist of hair. A face he had seen somewhere before, the same and yet different, but he couldn’t quite catch hold of the memory. He got up and tried to make his way across the room, but he stumbled against the unfamiliar furniture and when he looked again the face was gone. Back in bed, he returned gratefully to the realm of sleep.

It was only in the morning that it struck Pobjoy that his room was on the first floor. He opened the window, surveying the crime scene, but there was no convenient tree nearby and the ivy on the wall would never support a climber. Downstairs, he slipped out into the garden, checking the earth for the imprint of a ladder, but there was none. Over the best breakfast he had ever eaten he called the AA for his car and the police station for a lift to work. For the moment, he wanted no further discussion with Bartlemy.

He needed some time to convince himself none of it had ever happened.

It was a long time since Hazel had walked through the woods without the comfort of the iron door-number in her pocket, and she was disturbed by how defenceless its loss made her feel. She had been in the habit of fingering the metal as she walked, fiddling with it like a worry-bead, and now her hand was stuck in her pocket with nothing to do, clenching involuntarily from time to time, relaxing again when she noticed her nails digging into her palm. She was some distance from the road, on a track that wound its way towards the valley of the Darkwood, where it petered out. All tracks failed in the Darkwood, a deep fold in the countryside with a stream running through it which would change course in a shower of rain, where the trees tangled into thickets and the undergrowth grew into overgrowth and any sunlight got lost on its way to the ground. Long ago Josevius Grimthorn, had performed bizarre rites in a chapel there – a chapel buried for centuries under the leafmould and the choking tree-roots. Nathan had stumbled into it once by accident, but there was a spell on the place which forbade him to speak of it, and it was long before he found it again. And Josevius’ house had been there too, burnt down in the Dark Ages, where Login the dwarf had been imprisoned in a hole beneath the ground.

Hazel was thinking of that as she walked, wondering if he was watching her from some hidden hollow in the leaves, or perched furtively among the branches. She glanced round every so often, watchful and wary, but there was only the great stillness of the trees, stretching in every direction. That’s the thing about woods, she thought: when you’re inside one it seems much bigger than it really is, as if it goes on forever. And they had their own special quiet, when they shut out the sounds of the free wind and the open sky, and you could hear a twig crack or an acorn drop a long way off. But that afternoon there was little to hear.

She knew this part of the wood well – she had come there as a child, when her father still lived at home and she wanted to be on her own. She would scramble up among the boughs and stay there for hours, watching mites creeping in the bark, or a caterpillar eating its way through a leaf, listening to the bird-chatter and the insect-murmur, and the great silence waiting behind it all. Later, when she was older, she had come to talk to the woodwose, Nathan’s strange friend, with his stick limbs and sideways stare, till he went back to his own place. She had always felt at ease here, on familiar territory – until now. Now, when she knew the gnomons were lurking somewhere, no longer bound to their purpose but aimless and astray, ready to turn on anything that crossed their path. Hoover was trailing her, some twenty yards back, which gave her a little security, but nonetheless she jumped when a squirrel’s tail whisked round a tree-bole, froze into alertness at the tiniest rustle in the leaf-mould.

But they did not come. There were a hundred small warnings, a hundred false alarms. And nothing. The path ran out, and the woodland floor dipped towards the valley. ‘Don’t go there,’ Bartlemy had said. ‘There’s no room to run, and you could easily get lost. If you reach the Darkwood, turn back.’

Hazel turned back. After a while, Hoover caught up with her, lolloping at her heel.

‘No luck,’ Hazel said. If luck was what she was looking for.

‘They inna there,’ said another voice close by – a voice with a brogue as old as the hills, and almost as incomprehensible.

‘Hello,’ Hazel said, politely. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘Nay,’ said the dwarf. ‘They’ll be in the auld capel, where the Magister used to consort wi’ the devil when he popped up from hell for a chat. I’ve seen them there o’ nights, a-heebying and a-jeebying, whispering thegither for hours, though I never heard they had aught to say.’

‘It’s not night,’ Hazel pointed out.