Mark Chadbourn - The Silver Skull

"No. I ..." His shoulders sagged, and he could barely force out the words. "I help the Enemy. The ... the Unseelie Court."

Don Alanzo glared at him with contempt. "You sold your soul for what easy gain?"

It was a question he could not easily answer. "If only you knew," he said, his voice breaking.

Don Alanzo eyed Grace askance, who was watching Mayhew with disdain. "She does not need to hear these things."

Mayhew nodded. "Agreed."

"Then there is some humanity in you after all," Don Alanzo sniffed. He turned his attention to the view from the window as if Mayhew was beneath his notice.

And the Spaniard was right, Mayhew accepted. He was a traitor, and a despicable human being. He deserved the loathing that would be inflicted upon him. He closed his eyes to hide the tears and sat back in the seat, pretending to sleep.

After a while, his head began to nod, and all the horrible images rose like spectres from his unconscious mind where he had locked them away for so long.

His father's funeral on a cold November day at their parish church in the village outside Hastings, the bitter air salty with the scent of the sea, stark trees black against the grey clouds, filled with crows, cawing their desolate chorus. At the graveside, he slipped his arm around his mother, whispering that he would look after her, provide her with a regular stipend from his new work under Lord Walsingham at the Palace of Whitehall. It was after he had privately agreed to work for the secret service, and three days before his induction into the true mysteries of existence, when he had still thought there was hope in the world ...

Eight weeks later, and the snow was heavy on the roofs of the village, and the ground as hard as his heart had grown. The crows were still thick in the trees, but now he viewed them in a different light. A visit home after his assignment to the guard at the Tower, what at the time had appeared to be a short-term posting, filled with long hours of tedium. As he stepped through the door, he thought how thin and pale his mother looked, her skin slightly jaundiced, and when he hugged her he could feel her bones like hoes and trowels. "You are working too hard. You must rest more," he told her. She smiled weakly, wiser than he was ...

Two months later, and he had missed three visits home because of the demands of his work. When he arrived at the cottage after dark, the parson waited, like one of the crows that never appeared to leave the surrounding trees. His mother was very ill, the parson said. He feared her time was short. She lay in her bed, delirious, calling out for his father, her own father and mother. She looked barely more than bones with skin draped over them. The rapid decline in such a short period shocked him, and he cursed himself, and the world, and wished for more and made deals with God. But she did not improve.

Under special petition from Lord Walsingham, he was given time away from his post to care for her in her final days. They were long, the nights longer, filled with tears, and anger, and her anguished cries as the pain gripped her. But she did not die within the week, as the parson had forecast, nor within two weeks, and by the end she was screaming in agony around the clock, and he clutched his ears, and then buried his head, and wept nonstop, until he was sure he was being driven mad by her unending suffering.

The desire to help her drove him on, but he could do nothing to relieve her agony, and finally his failure consumed him. He could bear to see her in pain no more. And then, after praying for her to live for so long, he prayed for her to die, soon, that moment, so her torment would be ended along with her awful cries, and that destroyed him even more; he had asked God for the death of his own mother.

But she did not die. And for a while he did go mad. He never left the house, and he did not eat for days, roaming from room to room cursing and yelling.

Then one night, when the moon was full, he saw from the window that the field beside the house was filled with statues, grey and wrapped in shadow. They watched, as the crows had appeared to watch. He ran to his mother, and prayed over her, but he was drawn back to the window time and again, and though the statues had disappeared, the shadows remained, flitting back and forth across the field in the moonlight.

The knock at the door came soon after. In the days following he could never remember the face, although at the time it burned into his mind, and he knew he would feel its eyes upon him for the rest of his days. But he recalled what passed between them. His mother would never die. She would remain in that purgatory of agony, and he would be with her for the rest of his days, never escaping her screams, cursed to watch her unending suffering.

He could not bear it, and he threw himself to the floor, and tore at his flesh, and for a while knew nothing.

When he had recovered a little, the honeyed voice told him there was hope; and he pleaded to know what it was, anything, he would do anything, and the voice said that was good. He would work for them, just for a while, and do the little things they asked, inconsequential things, and in the meantime they would give his mother balm, and when his time of service was done, they would ease her suffering into death.

For a while the requests were inconsequential; gradually they became greater, but he had already set off along the road, and so each new thing was just one tiny step further. When he discovered knowledge of the Palace of Whitehall and what was there, and then passed it on, it was nothing; there were no consequences. And when he revealed what he knew of the Tower, it was worse, but not much. But then he was helping them to overcome the Tower's defences that Dee had put in place, and released the chain of misery and death that still had not come to an end.

The carriage jolted over a rut and he stirred sharply from his reverie. As his eyes opened, he was shocked to see Don Alanzo looming in front of him, the Silver Skull open and gleaming.

"What-?" he began, but his question was cut short as Don Alanzo pressed the mask against his face and closed it with a clang. Instantly, his head swam with frightening images, things he had never seen and could never possibly have known. The sensation of movement all across his head unsettled him, until he felt a thousand points of agony as if insects were burrowing into him, through skin, and bone, and into his brain, and he wanted to scream, but could not utter a sound.

Dimly, he heard Don Alanzo saying, "Do as you are ordered and the mask will be removed. Resist us and be damned forever."

And he wondered if he was cursed to be a slave to others for all time, and if his suffering would never end.

CHAPTER 44

Crashing on horseback through the dense forest encroaching upon Lisbon on three sides, Will crested a ridge to look down on a scene that was at once breathtaking and chilling. In the bay on the estuary, edged with the silvery light of the moon amid pools of stark shadows, were around one hundred and thirty ships. The formidable fleet was so dense it was like another city floating alongside Lisbon, candlelight glimmering here and there aboard each ship, banners fluttering gently in the warm night breeze.

The Armada.

Somewhere in the teeming city, lion Alanzo would be meeting with the Armada's commander, the duke of Medina Sidonia, to secure a place for him and Grace on one of the ships about to depart. Will had to find him before the fleet sailed.

Weariness sapped him of any response beyond a dull relief that he had finally reached his destination after constant riding along dusty, deserted back roads, stealing a new horse whenever his mount tired.