The Sword of Straw Read online

  “Of course not. It was somebody else, somebody who paid them to try to steal the cup. That’s logical.” He added, with a creditable French accent: “A kind of éminence grise.”

  Annie smiled. “You’re a bit young to be turning into a conspiracy theorist.”

  “Uncle Barty thinks so, too,” Nathan pointed out. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have called the inspector.”

  Annie’s smile faded into a sigh. “You wanted something to happen,” she said, “and now it has. Can we just try not to let it grow into something worse? No more conspiracies, and specters, and horrors. Not this time.”

  “You talk as if it was my fault,” Nathan protested, referring to their adventures the previous year.

  “Just don’t wish for trouble,” his mother said without much hope. And: “You will tell us, won’t you, if you start having dreams again? Those dreams, I mean.”

  He looked at her very steadily, and she was disturbed to find his expression completely unreadable. “Yes, I will,” he said at last, adding, to himself, fingers crossed: When I’m ready.

  In her room that night Annie, too, took out a picture she never showed anyone. Daniel Ward, the man who was assumed to be Nathan’s father. She had assumed it herself, until the baby was born. The face in the photograph was pleasant rather than handsome, fair-skinned, brown-haired, unremarkable. The eyes were a little dreamy, and a secret smile lurked at the corners of his mouth. Even Nathan had never seen the picture; it would give rise to too many questions. Because there was nothing in genetics to enable two white Caucasian parents to produce a child so exotically dark…Annie herself had never really known what happened. In the instant of Daniel’s death she had reached out for him, and a Gate had opened, and in death she had found love, returning to the world of life pregnant, and it wasn’t until she saw the baby that she realized he couldn’t be Daniel’s child. He was the child of destiny, Bartlemy said, bridging the void between worlds; but it did not comfort her. One day, she would have to tell Nathan the truth—one day very soon—but she was still finding reasons to put it off. Keep him safe—keep him trusting—he doesn’t need to know…

  She put the picture away again, the looming dilemma clouding her mind, excluding any memories of distant happiness.

  In his own bed Nathan lay with his eyes closed roaming the landscape inside his head, looking for the way through. It was there, he knew: he had found it once before, in an emergency, taking the plunge into another universe not at random but by his own will—though the act had frightened him and he hadn’t attempted it again. But now curiosity—which kills even Schrödinger’s cat—impelled him on, stronger than fear. He wanted to see the princess again, to explore the abandoned city and find out more about Urdemons, and why the people left, and the curse on the king…

  He fell a long, long way, through a whirling dark pinpricked with stars. Then there was a jarring thud, and his mind was back in his body, but his body was somewhere else. Not the city on two hills with the Gothic house on top but another city, a huge metropolis with buildings like curving cliffs and a blood-red sunset reflected in endless windows and airborne skimmers and winged reptiles crisscrossing in the deadly light. He had landed on a rooftop platform in the shade of a wall, with a door close by. He scrambled to his feet, touched a panel—after a second the door opened and he slipped inside, escaping the lethal sun. He had forgotten the hazards of willing himself into another universe. Here was no misty realm of dreams and incorporeal being: he was almost solid, as visible as a ghost on a dark night, and this was Arkatron on Eos, the city at the end of the world, and there were many dangers both known and unknown here to menace him. Worst of all, or so he thought when he looked down, he had ignored the first rule of dream voyages—that you will find yourself wearing the clothes you slept in. It is difficult to feel brave and adventurous in pajamas. (The previous year, he had gotten into the habit of going to bed in tracksuit pants and a sweatshirt.) However, there was nothing he could do about it now.

  He found himself on a gallery overlooking a hollow shaft, too deep for him to estimate how far it was to the bottom. Transparent egg-shaped lifts traveled up and down it, supported by alarmingly slender cables. He had assumed he would be in government headquarters, since that was where his dreams usually placed him, but nothing here looked familiar. An elevator stopped close by, its door opening automatically even as a section of floor was extruded from the gallery to meet it. The elevator was empty. Nathan took the hint, and stepped inside. A panel offered a wide choice of buttons: he pressed the top one. Being only semi-solid he had to press twice, hard. The door closed and the lift shot upward.

  He emerged onto another gallery, but this time he had to walk all the way around to find an exit, and when he pushed the door, it didn’t move. He was too substantial to walk through it. He touched a square on the adjacent wall, but instead of the door opening there was a noise like a few bars of music—the kind of music Hazel would have liked, incorporating weird stringed instruments and very little rhythm. Of course, Nathan thought, light dawning, it’s a doorbell. This is a private apartment… He wondered if he should run, but there was no point. His dream had brought him here, and he had no real option but to go on.

  The door opened.

  A man was standing there, a very tall man—all Eosians were taller than the people of our world. He was wearing a long white robe with a wide hood much looser than the usual kind. Under the hanging sleeves his hands were ungloved and his mask covered only three-quarters of his face; where it ended, just above mouth and jaw, his beard began, a thick white beard unlike anything Nathan had ever seen outside the pages of a book, forked and braided almost to his waist. He stared at Nathan in silence. Nathan stared back, forgetting how shocking his appearance must be to his host. No children had been born here for perhaps a thousand years, and though Nathan was big for his age, in this universe he was shorter than the residents, slight of build, and obviously youthful. His pajamas were too small for him, stopping well above ankle and wrist—his body had a suggestion of transparency—his face was naked. On Eos, it was rare for anyone to show their face.

  When at last the man spoke, his words were strangely apposite. “Well, well,” he said. “What in the world are you? A holocast?—or not…”

  As always, Nathan understood the language. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not really in your world. At least, I am, but—”

  “But?”

  “I’m from another world,” Nathan explained. His voice didn’t sound quite right—eerily hollow and distant.

  “So it’s started, has it?” The man’s tone sharpened. “It’s been long in the coming. The walls between the worlds are breaking down. Still, I don’t quite understand…What would you want of me? Whoever you are.”

  “I don’t know,” Nathan admitted. “My dream brought me here.”

  “Your—dream? You mean, you are dreaming this? You are dreaming me?”

  “Yes.”

  “How very interesting. This couldn’t be part of a spell—some leakage through a portal?”

  “I don’t think so,” Nathan said. “If there’s a portal, it’s in my head.”

  “Hmm.” There was a pause.

  Then the man said: “I am forgetting my manners. Won’t you come in?”

  Nathan followed him inside. The apartment consisted of a cluster of irregularly shaped rooms connected with arched doorways and hung with diaphanous drapes. Furniture curved with the walls; a small fountain bubbled out of what looked like a crystal cakestand in the midst of the main room; the light was vague and sourceless. Stronger light was condensed into two or three pillars of clouded glass, and in the outer wall oval windows were covered with translucent screens, flushed red from the sunset beyond. “My name,” said the man, seating himself, “is Osskva Rodolfin Petanax. But perhaps you knew that already?”

  “No,” said Nathan. “I don’t know anything very much. Is this part of the Grandir’s palace?”

  “If you mean the seat of go
vernment and residence of our ruler and his bride-sister, then—no. We wouldn’t call it a palace. This is accommodation for his senior advisers and others in the higher echelons of authority. I am a first-level practor—if you understand what that means?”

  “I…think so. A kind of magician?”

  “So you do know something of this world. You have been here before.”

  Nathan didn’t comment. There was a niggle at the back of his mind, another of those elusive connections that he couldn’t quite place. Whenever he sought for it, it slipped away into his subconscious, tantalizingly out of reach. He knew he was here for a reason—there was always a reason behind his dream journeys—but he had no idea what it might be, and he felt like an actor dropped into the middle of an unfamiliar play, while the audience waited in vain for him to remember his lines. His host continued to study him with absorption but curiously little surprise.

  “Have you met the Grandir?” Osskva asked.

  “Not met, no. I’ve seen him.”

  “Whom have you met, apart from me?”

  Halmé, Nathan thought, but he didn’t say so. She had concealed him from the Grandir; he could not betray her. And Raymor, her former bodyguard. And the dissident Kwanji Ley, who had stolen the Grail in this world, and paid with her life…

  Now he remembered.

  Take it, she had said, giving him the cup, when she was dying of the sundeath in a cave in the desert. To…Osskva… Osskva!

  Who is he?

  My father…

  Nathan sat down abruptly, holding his head in his hands. When he looked up, the practor was standing over him. “What troubles you?” he said. “What do you know?” His hood fell back, showing hair to match the beard, long and white. Then—perhaps to observe Nathan more closely—he took off his mask. His face, like that of all Eosians, was disproportionately long, at least to Nathan’s eye, a structure all lean curving bones with a skin the color of tarnished brass, contrasting sharply with the hair and beard. Thick white brows swept low over his eyes, which shone with a glint of pure amethyst. The same shade as Kwanji’s, Nathan remembered. There might be many people on Eos called Osskva, but he knew his dream had not deceived him. This was the one he sought.

  Only he hadn’t been seeking him. He’d been looking for someone quite different. But the dreams, he now realized, couldn’t be controlled—or not by him…

  “I once…met someone called Kwanji Ley,” he said.

  “I see.” The man’s face changed, his eyes hooding, as if he did see.

  “She asked me to find you.”

  “Kwanjira. My daughter. Kwanjira the rebel.” Suddenly, he looked up. “Did you know she was my daughter?”

  Nathan nodded, feeling uncomfortable, even though this was a dream—or at least, a dream of sorts—waiting for the question he knew would come.

  “Is she dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve known it, I suppose—I’ve felt it—for months past. We didn’t keep in touch, but this time there was a differentness to her silence. There is a point when you sense no word will come again. But…you are the word. A word that has come to me. Can you tell me how she died?”

  “She was in Deep Confinement,” Nathan said, remembering the pale emptiness of the prison pits. “She begged me to help her, to dream her out, and I tried, but you can’t really manipulate the dreams. I messed it up. I left her in the desert—in the sun. She made it to the cave, but not in time. When I got back—when I found her—it was too late.” He didn’t tell Kwanji’s father what the sundeath had done to her. The guilt returned, like a sickness in his stomach, but Osskva made no move to apportion blame.

  “She always wanted to change things,” he said with a curious smile. “The government—the magics—the fate of the world. In the cave…what was she looking for?”

  “The Sangreal,” Nathan said, picturing the greenstone cup, held in Kwanji’s ruined hand. “She asked me to bring it to you. She thought you could perform the Great Spell.”

  “Did she find it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then she died happy. I couldn’t do a Great Spell; I haven’t the power. Even the Grandir may not have the strength for it, or our world would have been saved long since. Besides, the Cup alone is no use. It needs also the Sword, and the Crown. Once they were said to be in the cave, guarded by a monster of ancient days, but there are other rumors. I’d heard they were scattered throughout the worlds for safekeeping, so they could not be brought together too soon, or by the wrong agency, lest the Spell of Spells should go awry…Yet you say the Sangreal was in the cave.”

  “It was a mistake,” Nathan explained. “It had been kept in my world, but someone stole it. After…after Kwanji died, I wasn’t sure what to do, but I thought it was best to take it back.”

  “You did right,” Osskva said, “I expect. Time will tell. If we have enough of it left. What about the sword? Was that stolen, too?”

  The sword. In Nathan’s head, something else clicked into place. The princess had mentioned a sword, the Traitor’s Sword…

  With that question, that connection, the dream jolted. Tell me about the sword, Nathan wanted to ask, but the words wouldn’t come out. It was like in an ordinary dream, when you try to speak but your vocal cords don’t work, and everything slows down, and the person you want to speak to is receding, fading inexorably from your thought. He had felt insubstantial, a pajama-clad teenage ghost, but now he was growing solid, and the world around him thinned, the world of Arkatron on Eos, becoming ghost-like while he alone was real. He heard the voice of Osskva, insect-small and faint with distance: “Don’t go. We have things…to discuss…Questions…answers…”

  But he couldn’t respond, and sleep swallowed him, plunging him back into the dark.

  A FEW weeks after the attempted burglary, Chief Inspector Pobjoy called at Thornyhill again. “Of course, they won’t get custodial sentences,” he said, referring to Ram and Ginger. “They’re underage. Ginger has a record already, petty theft, petty assault, petty everything. Ram’s been smarter: no previous, just a government health warning. The really interesting thing is their lawyer.”

  “Dear me,” Bartlemy said, replenishing his guest’s tea mug. “I had no idea lawyers were interesting.”

  Pobjoy didn’t grin—he wasn’t a natural grinner—but a sharp-edged smile flicked in and out, quick as a knife blade. “Boys like that—backstreet kids, no dosh—they usually get whoever’s on call that day. Legal aid, no frills. That’s what they had in the past. But this time they get a Bentley among lawyers, top of the line with power steering and champagne cooler. Hugh Purlieu-Smythe, legal adviser to the very, very rich. It would be a giveaway—if we knew who was footing the bill. Still, it is interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed. Do we know who else this Purlieu-Smythe has represented in the recent past?”

  “I’ve been finding out.” Pobjoy sipped his tea, nibbling the inevitable seductive cookie. Sometimes he fantasized about what lunch or dinner might be like at Thornyhill. He was a single man living alone on a diet of frozen meals, takeout, and the occasional omelet, and the mere thought of such home cooking must be put behind him, or it would seriously disrupt his professional detachment. “He’s done a few white-collar fraudsters—big-city types who’ve brought their cash and their bad habits into the area in search of rural peace and quiet. Then there was that local authority corruption case—he was for the developer, got him off, too. Grayling made donations to police charities—all the right people wined and dined—lent his Spanish villa to a lucky few. You get the picture.”

  “Are you suggesting some of your colleagues could be…swayed by such things?” Bartlemy inquired gently.

  “It wouldn’t be anything overt,” Pobjoy explained. “Just a general feeling that Grayling was a good bloke, one of the lads. One of the chaps, I should say. Wouldn’t have thought he’d be interested in this place, though. Or that cup of yours.”

  “It isn’t actually mine,” Bar
tlemy murmured, but the inspector held to his train of thought.

  “Grayling isn’t much of a one for history and culture,” he said. “We’re looking for the classic movie villain, right? Sinister type with very big bucks and an art collection no one ever gets to see. I have to say, most of the super-rich around here like to show off their paintings, at least to their chums; no point in having them otherwise. They collect for status, not pleasure. The Grail’s a little obscure for them.”

  Bartlemy made an affirmative noise.

  “Myself, I’ve only come up against Purlieu-Smythe once before,” Pobjoy resumed after a pause. “Another kid. Not quite like our Ram and Ginger, though. Poor little rich boy wanted for stealing a car, even though Daddy has four and Mummy two. Beat up a girl about a year ago, but someone talked her out of going to court. The boy’s a nasty little psycho in the making. Not yet eighteen.”

  “And the father?” Bartlemy queried. “I assume it was he who employed the lawyer.”

  “Respectable,” said Pobjoy. “Squeaky-clean businessman, plenty of good works, pillar-of-the-community image.”

  “Highly suspicious, in fact,” said Bartlemy with a faint smile.

  Pobjoy read few novels, but he took the point. “Real life isn’t much like thrillers,” he said. “Pillars of the community are usually stuffy, but…”

  “Upright?”

  “Yeah. Just one point: he’s a publisher. Educational books, art, that sort of thing. He might have heard of the Grail.”

  “His name?”

  “I shouldn’t be telling you that.”

  Bartlemy offered the policeman another cookie.

  “Hackforth. Giles Hackforth. The company’s called Pentacle Publishing.”

  “A long-established firm,” Bartlemy said. “Very reputable. So…we can infer that Hackforth is a cultured man who might well have an interest in local antiquities, and the folklore that accompanies them.”

  Pobjoy nodded. “I’d say you were imagining things,” he went on, “if it wasn’t for Purlieu-Smythe. But lawyers like him don’t do charity work. There has to be a connection with someone, and Hackforth seems to be your best bet. I don’t see what we can do about it, though. Suspicion isn’t evidence.”