Jan Siegel - The Poisoned Crown - The Sangreal Trilogy Three

‘I hear you saw merfolk,’ Ezroc persisted. ‘A raiding party, or – or scouts checking out the terrain. If that’s true, we have to do something.’

‘What will you do?’ For a swift moment, Nokosha lifted his gaze. His eyes, too, were different, not velvet-dark like other selkies but pale and cold as ice. ‘Fly off round the world to gather tales from the smallfish of the reefs? Ask the sharks to tell us what their masters are doing? That will be a big help.’

‘Were these sharkriders?’ Ezroc said, ignoring Nokosha’s scorn.

‘What if they were? No one listens to what they don’t want to hear. It’s easier to call me a liar than to face the truth. Soon or late, the fish-folk will come in numbers, and for war. The ice won’t protect us. We’re lazy and unprepared: we’ll die like mackerel in a dolphin-hunt.’

‘Did they really take a snowbear?’ Ezroc said, keeping to the point. After all, he was getting information – of a kind.

‘They dived under the ice and came up through the borehole to seize him. They had spears tipped with blood coral, and stone knives.’ The selkie also carried a knife, a short stabbing blade which he fingered as they spoke, jabbing it into the ice. ‘No doubt their leader now wears its skin. Impractical under water, but he was that type. More ego than sense.’

‘Could you describe him? There are twelve merkings. If we knew which one he served—’

‘You could do what? Fly off on a mission of complaint?’

‘I have friends,’ Ezroc said, ‘even among the merfolk. They are not all her creatures. I might be able to find out more.’

‘Friends!’ Nokosha mocked, and there was real hatred under the scorn: his voice shook with it. ‘Friends among the coldkin – the fish-eyed, the fish-hearted! Friends among the killers of the south! You’re a traitor to your race, to all the People of the Ice. You abandoned Keerye – you led him to the killing seas, and left him there to die. Come a little closer, birdling, and I will have you by the throat, and this will be your last flight.’

There was no doubt he meant it. The albatross was bigger, far bigger, but the selkie was all knotted muscle and knotted rage. If he got his hands around Ezroc’s neck, there would be no more to be said.

The bird kept his distance, paddling his feet in the water.

‘I didn’t abandon Keerye,’ he said. ‘He fell asleep on a Floater – I slept too, but on the sea. We didn’t know what it was. He thought … we’d found an island. When I awoke, he was gone.’ And suddenly there was a memory in his head, a memory that didn’t belong. A pale figure struggling against a web of tentacles, and a dozen mouths opening to feast … His thought reeled from the horror of it.

‘I would never have abandoned him,’ he went on, struggling to suppress the unwanted vision. ‘He was my best friend.’

‘Keerye was everyone’s best friend.’ This time, Nokosha seemed to be mocking himself. ‘He was handsome and careless and beloved – the handsome and careless always are. You lost him. It’s easy to plead innocence, when there are no witnesses to give you the lie.’

I’m a witness , Nathan thought. A witness to the truth …

‘I have a witness,’ Ezroc said, and then flinched from his own assertion, the sudden certainty in his mind.

‘Who?’ Nokosha caught his bewilderment, staring at him with those ice-bright eyes.

‘I … don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’ Ezroc shook his feathers, trying to pull his thoughts together. ‘Your hate … doesn’t matter. The important thing is to find out what the merfolk are doing. If you could remember more about the ones you saw …’

‘I remember everything.’ Nokosha was studying him, distracted by his lapse into strangeness.

‘They were sharkriders?’ Ezroc resumed.

‘Yes. A dozen or so on blue sharks, but their leader rode a Great White.’

‘Great Whites cannot be ridden,’ Ezroc said.

‘Do you doubt me? It was a Great White. I saw the fragments of its last meal still caught between its teeth. He rode it with a bit that was metal, not bone, and it bucked beneath him once or twice like a spring wave.’

‘How come they didn’t see you? You must have followed them for a while, and close.’

‘You should know better than to ask. I watched them from a berg – like this – and when I entered the water I used the drifting ice to screen my movements. They were wary of open attack but they weren’t expecting to be stalked; they didn’t look for me. I can dive without a ripple, or haven’t you heard? If I came after you in earnest, you wouldn’t know until it was too late.’

Ezroc ignored the renewed threat. ‘Was there anything else about the leader?’ he asked. ‘Insignia of any kind – something like that?’

‘A tattoo on his chest. They do it with squid ink and the poison of the spiny tryphid. They say the pain of it will keep a strong warrior in torment for a week. I’ve never felt the need to prove my strength in such a way.’

‘I’ve heard of the process,’ Ezroc said. ‘Did you get a chance to see what it was?’

‘A sea dragon.’

‘Rhadamu’s emblem,’ Ezroc responded, and fell into silence, thinking his own thoughts.

The selkie dived so swiftly Nathan was barely aware he had moved before the outstretched hands came rushing upward, grasping at Ezroc’s legs. Albatrosses are slow in takeoff but his long journeys had developed abnormal flight muscles, and close encounters with danger had accelerated his reflexes. His beak stabbed down – he rose in a flurry of wings, scudding across the water – the selkie sank back, bleeding red in the foam. Then the bird was airborne, already twenty yards away, veering into a turn to see Nokosha shaking the wet hair from his eyes, watching after him, apparently oblivious to his injured hand.

‘You are vicious, albatross,’ he called out. ‘I will remember it.’

Presently, he climbed back onto the berg and resumed his scrutiny of the depths, though Ezroc no longer thought he was looking for fish.

The brief northern daylight was already fading as the sun wrapped itself in a mantle of flame and slid back into the sea. The albatross headed for an eyrie on the top of a lonely crag and landed there, tucking his head beneath a folded wing. Only when Ezroc slept did Nathan, too, slip into unconsciousness, back to the slumberlands of his own world.

Hazel found Login awaiting her in the woods, close to the point where the path ran out.

‘Follow me,’ he said.

Hoover, some way behind, gave an admonitory bark, but Hazel did not respond. The dog trotted after her as she descended into the valley, his intelligent eyes anxious under the sprouting whiskers of his eyebrows. If he had been human, he might have heaved a sigh; being canine, he merely panted.

Hazel picked her way downhill in Login’s wake, moving slowly now she had left the path, having to concentrate on every step. Perhaps because the dwarf had chosen his route well they made little noise: dead leaves swished about her feet, and every so often she slithered on a hidden patch of mud, but although she had to duck under low branches and step over knobbled roots there was no twig-crackle at her passage, no tearing of cloth on briar. Frequently, she paused to look back, checking the way she would have to run, making sure the ascent was straightforward: she must not get lost before she found the path again, and a stumble could be fatal. She told herself she was being brave – brave and not foolhardy – but her heart shook within her, and her stomach, always the main part of the body to react to fear, seemed to have become one large collywobble. The recollection of DCI Pobjoy staggering into Thornyhill Manor, his pale face paler than ever and his eyes haunted, gave her courage or at least encouragement. He was only a stupid policeman who didn’t believe in ghosts; she knew better.