‘Madam or Cluckett or whatever your name is,’ he said, ‘if you touch a single thing in this laboratory without my permission I will dismiss you instantly and without a reference!’
Her expression darkened, her cheeks and forehead turned red, she looked enraged.
‘Sir, if you—’
‘Cluckett,’ he responded at once, ‘if you continue like this I shall be forced to rid my home of you at once!’
‘You would deal roughly with my person?’
He thought about this for a moment and finally said, ‘I would and come to think of it – I shall!’
He loomed over her as if to carry through his threat.
Her response astonished him.
‘Oh sir,’ she said, backing off still further, her hands unclenching, a strange softness coming to her eyes and a flush to her cheeks, ‘are you being masterful with me?’
Stort, who had never been masterful with another in his life, supposed he was but felt it best to say nothing. She filled the silence herself.
‘Mister Cluckett was very masterful,’ she said with unexpected compliance, ‘and I do so miss that now he is gone!’
‘Cluckett, stop talking,’ said Stort, who felt suddenly tired, ‘and please make a brew that we may discuss how best we are to continue together in this humble now that I am getting better.’
‘I will, sir, at once! I like an employer who knows his own mind.’
‘And I, Cluckett . . .’
He still felt queasy so she took his arm and helped him to a seat at the kitchen table. She made the brew and poured them both a cup.
‘You were saying, sir?’
He looked around at the clean and tidy kitchen, the neat shelves, the breakfast things all ready.
‘I am grateful for the care you have shown me and . . . and I like such a home as you have made for me in so short a time!’
‘Oh sir!’ she said, turning from him with emotion and dabbing at her eyes with the crisp, new-ironed kerchief she pulled from her sleeve.
From that moment on Stort became master of his house once more and both he and Cluckett respectful of their different domains.
He permitted her to tidy his books, and his parlour too, though he insisted that the dresser, filled as it was with a clutter of plates, cups, a teapot with a broken spout and other mementoes of his past, was left just as he liked it.
‘As for my laboratory, if you place a waste bin by the door I shall endeavour to remember to put rubbish into it!’
‘Thank you, sir, that is kind of you. And, sir . . .’
‘Cluckett?’
‘Wet towels. May I ask that you hang them up rather than leave them in a heap upon the floor?’
‘You may and I shall do as you suggest.’
From that day Stort slept well again and his recovery was almost complete.
‘Cluckett,’ he said some days later, ‘if Brief and the others call I shall wish to see them.’
She smiled happily.
‘It is already arranged, sir. They are coming to tea tomorrow and it is not a social call.’
‘It is not?’
She shook her head.
‘Master Brief wishes to convene a summit conference in your parlour and I told him that I judged you well enough now for that. Does that have your approval, sir?’
‘It does,’ said Bedwyn Stort happily.
11
NIKLAS BLUT
It was several days before Emperor Slaeke Sinistral was ready once more to try to signal to the outer world that he was awake and needed rescuing. He had only to raise a finger and press a button to summon instant aid, but his reserves of energy were so low that each attempt robbed him of almost all he had left. He was also taking his time. He knew that the return to the real world was going to be painful, a rebirth, in body, mind and spirit.
Meanwhile the helpers who had tended him for eighteen years past, who were inhabitants of the vast complex of tunnels of which his Chamber was a small part, continued to do so. They came when he was asleep or nearly so and he knew neither their names nor faces. They did their best to slow down his foul decay, but since he had begun to wake and his mind and body grown more active the rate of his decline had speeded up and they could not keep up with it. It was not these creatures of the dark he needed now but the hydden of the day and light, and the stimulus and nourishment they could provide.
Yet though Sinistral knew well that when he woke from a period of deep sleep it was essential he returned to normal health and life as fast as possible, the Chamber held a continuing allure. This had to do with the beauty of its extraordinary acoustic as, from every crevice and crack, fault and fissure in the vast roof so high above, water dripped.
Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .
The ever-changing pattern of sound was a function of the fact that each drip of the thousands that continually fell down did so after a different lapse of time from all the others and the sounds they made varied in their pitches and tones, themselves changing with subtle shifts in the Earth’s own harmonies of tectonic movement, near and far; and the orographic patterns of rain on the surface above, the water filtering down in strengths and weaknesses that echoed the patterns of rainfall and surface flow, years, decades and sometimes centuries before.
A brief stay in the Chamber was not enough for the true nature of these sounds to be understood. They seemed chaotic until, after due time, their patterns emerged. Sinistral had come to understand that these patterns were recognized by him not only when awake but when asleep, perhaps even more so then.
In time, he believed, he had learned their language and that this communication was not one-way. He heard the sound, and it heard him and responded. It was a voice, an ancient and eternal one. The music of endless dripping made by the water was nothing less than the old voice of Earth and Universe. Like light from a star long dead that a mortal sees today, the Emperor heard all the ancient voices of the past through the echoes of this internal rain. In this he felt his times of extended sleep had given him something few mortals had ever had – direct communication with the divine.
He thought of what he heard as music – in fact he believed it to be that ethereal music which human and hydden philosophers alike described as musica universalis – the harmonic sound which rang out at frequencies beyond the mortal range, which was the energy which gave life and connection to all things.
He was sure, quite sure, that what had woken him after eighteen years was the Earth herself, speaking though tremors in her crust transmuted by the dripping into a musica that had told him that finally, after fifteen hundred years, the gem of Spring had been found.
Which mattered to him especially because, if he could find a way to possess it for himself, his youth and life would be extended even further. Spring was the genesis of life and he needed it.
So the days had drifted and now the time had come to call for help.
He knew that what he faced was nothing less than a pain beyond what most mortals ever know.
The pain of his whole body reclaiming life.
The pain of mortality itself.
The pain of being born: primal and terrible.
He listened to the musica a final time; he tried to hum, he tried to scream, and then, letting himself slip at last into mortal pain, he raised the cadaverous forefinger of his right hand in the dark from the decayed leather on which it rested. It quested blindly for the button, flexed what weak muscles it still had and held it down for those few seconds that were all his wasted strength allowed and then let go.
Nothing happened immediately yet he was satisfied it would soon enough. His rotted mouth exhaled another foul breath of long, vegetative sleep, through teeth not stronger nor more fragrant than the vilest cheese. Those eyelids, whose white, stubby lashes were caked with congealed rheum, still struggled to open into darkness and still failed.
A pale tongue flicked at thin dry lips.
Then Emperor Slaeke Sinistral’s head, its hair greasy and
thin, its ulcerous skin taut and weeping, turned slowly to one side, listening.
Still the eyes would not open.
The left side of the mouth bubbled and saliva broke forth, not quite clean, leaving a trail down the chin until it slipped, maggot-like, into his beard and nestled there.
Finally . . . a sound.
The turning of a well-oiled key, the metal on metal of one bolt and then another, a sliver of yellow light beneath an opening door, the moving shadows of feet and then, breaking the dark like a sharp and shining axe of gold cutting through the blackened hull of some great ship, a shaft of light raced right across the Chamber, right to where the Emperor lay, head turned towards it, eyes sensing light at last, eyelids straining to open.
Sinistral turned his head away lest he be blinded after so long in darkness. The door opened wider and more light flooded past him into the Chamber beyond. The door was quietly pulled to but not quite shut, so the light faded until all that was left was the thin line beneath the door. It was enough.
Lashes pulled apart and a single eye, dark and imperious, stared out. It slowly focused and finally saw the rain caught by the light from beneath the door. The Emperor saw a hundred thousand slowly falling golden pearls.
It was most beautiful.
The Emperor tried to speak but could not.
He heard the sound of footfalls coming across the Chamber towards his chair.
A hand touched his and a voice spoke.
It said, ‘Welcome back my Lord. You have been much missed.’
The Emperor tried to smile but could not; again he tried to say something, but could not.
All he could do was utter a hiss of joy.
‘I shall go now, Emperor, and summon your beloved. She will tend to you and see you safely back to health and life . . .’
The drumming of the rain instilled within the Emperor a calm that made him weep. He breathed, deep and slow.
His other eye was opening.
The subtle rain turned three-dimensional.
The Emperor’s head turned and he said, ‘Tell her . . .’
‘Yes, Lord?’
‘. . . that I . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘. . . have need of her.’
‘I shall my Lord.’
The hydden who had responded to the Emperor’s call, and for now the only person who knew he was awake, was an official named Niklas Blut.
His formal title was Commander of the Emperor’s Office.
He was, de facto, the second most important person in the Hyddenworld, though nobody, including Blut himself, saw it that way. Even so, at only forty, Blut was still remarkably young for such responsibility.
But then he was a very remarkable hydden. As a sixteen-year-old he had scored the highest marks of any entrant in the Imperial triennial examinations in logic, mathematics, science and literature and gained a well-paid post as a civil servant. At age seventeen his enemies proved that he had made unlawful access to human literature and other resources. When he was eighteen he was found guilty of possessing a printed article entitled: The truth about Emperor Slaeke Sinistral’s strange longevity: its history, cause and likely outcomes.
It had been sent unread, as such material always was, to the Emperor’s Office. For to be found in possession of such an article was treasonable. To read it was a capital offence.
Blut’s crime was much greater: he had written it.
He was put under sentence of death for which the Emperor’s signature was needed.
Slaeke Sinistral, intrigued to learn that the ultimate sanction was being applied to so young a hydden, stayed the execution to give himself time to read the article.
He did so with an astonishment that was soon replaced with growing alarm. If anyone else discovered the truths Niklas Blut had exposed, the Emperor’s position might be for ever undermined.
Niklas Blut’s crime was to dare try to answer a question that had been on everybody’s mind for decades: how did Slaeke Sinistral stay so young? Could he possibly hold the secret of eternal youth which had eluded the many who sought it in every age? If he did, what was it?
Blut began by stating the simple truth: the Emperor looked to be in his mid-thirties but the records very clearly showed that he had been alive for more than a century and a half and there was no one anywhere, however old, who remembered him as being anything other than the age he still appeared to be.
True, he grew tired and ill sometimes and disappeared from public view, but he always came back, revivified.
All sorts of rumours arose from this, including the possibility that it was not the same Sinistral who ‘reappeared’ as the one who had previously ‘disappeared’.
What Blut had done was to look at the records going back a century and a half, plot Sinistral’s periods of ill-health and his disappearances, and relate them to certain cosmic events and movements of the Earth. He had delved into the old historical records and found compelling evidence that certain individuals, human and hydden, appeared to have had powers beyond the ordinary and that some of these had lived to an extraordinarily old age.
Each had been secretive, each prone to periods of illness and retreat, and each had returned to their normal lives renewed, refreshed, and, in every respect, younger than their chronological age.
His conclusion was simple: since such powers and such cases of longevity had occurred only since the legendary creation of the gems of the seasons by Beornamund of Brum, they were probably directly related to the gems themselves. The fact that there were so many stories and rumours connecting particular gems with these individuals gave credence to Blut’s ideas, if not proof positive.
As for the case of Slaeke Sinistral, Blut postulated that he had in his possession the gem of Summer, and it was to his occasional exposure to this gem that he owed his continuing youthfulness.
All perfectly true, but never stated so clearly by one of his subjects before. That was not all.
Blut had worked out something else, and it worried the Emperor that others might learn of it.
The use of the gem to delay physical ageing, Blut argued, came at a cost. Each time the Emperor submitted his body to the gem’s fierce light, which he did strapped down in the dentist’s chair, because the experience caused so much pain and violence to his internal organs, his period of rejuvenation afterwards was shorter and the subsequent period of recuperative sleep longer. That explained why the Emperor’s absences grew ever more frequent and extended.
But Blut had even gone so far as to calculate the point at which the gem of Summer would become ineffective because the Emperor would enter a period of sleep so long that his physical body, even if carefully maintained, likely would not survive it. Even if it did, on waking his physical decay would be so rapid that, unless he had a system in place to get him back to health again, he would die before a new rejuvenation could take effect.
As the Emperor read this terrifyingly accurate assessment of his situation he knew he had to kill Blut to keep his secret, or employ him to help keep him alive.
There was much else in the young hydden’s paper that the Emperor wished to learn more about. Not least how it was that Blut had worked out the way in which the Emperor came to possess the gem. Again, his argument was spot on.
Everyone knew that one of the great hydden geniuses of the last two hundred years was the mysterious ã Faroün, lute player and architect, artist and mystic. Blut believed that he had been the possessor of the gem of Summer before Sinistral. Ã Faroün was Sinistral’s teacher. On his passing, which occurred when Sinistral was in his mid-thirties, the Emperor-to-be had taken possession of the gem and the rest, quite literally, was history . . .
Having read the article Sinistral had thought about it for several days before deciding on the action he must take.
He had summoned his three most senior staff, who stood in obedient silence before him.
He was used to such silence. Tall, blond, well built, with intelligent eyes that could glitte
r with dark intent as easily as his face could wrinkle in mirth, the Emperor was intimidating.
‘How many have read this document?’ he asked the then Commander of his Office.
Sweat broke on the Commander’s brow.
‘Myself alone, Lord, but I felt I had to,’ he said nervously. Sinistral looked around at his staff and nodded slightly and dismissed the other two.
Then he shrugged.
‘A pity,’ he said.
‘Lord,’ said the Commander desperately, ‘Blut’s paper is a fabrication, it is nonsense, and I have already forgotten what it said . . .’
‘Unfortunately it is not nonsense and I cannot believe you have forgotten what it said. Nor can I live in the knowledge of that fact.’
Sinistral summoned his Fyrd guard. He knew the official could not be allowed to remain alive. The secret he knew gave him a power he must not have.
When the guards came the Emperor nodded towards the hapless Commander and said, ‘Execute him.’
‘Yes, Lord.’
‘Here where I can see. I need to know he has not talked with anyone.’
‘Yes, Lord,’ said the senior guard, arming his crossbow. ‘Now?’
‘Now.’
The Emperor had stood up, turned his back, and stared at the view until he heard the click-bang of the crossbow bolt being fired.
‘A pity,’ he said again as the body was removed. ‘He was an intelligent administrator and effective servant to the Empire. Give him an honourable funeral. Now . . . I shall have to find another to replace him.’
He had already decided to interview Blut, not simply to answer certain questions but to see if he might be groomed to administer his Office.
The Emperor commanded that he be brought to the Imperial headquarters in Bochum, north-east Germany. The interview was private.
‘So . . . you’re Niklas Blut?’
‘Yes. One of them.’
‘There are more?’
‘My uncle. A butcher.’
‘Do you know why you’re here?’