They nodded again.
Pike knew that Master Brief could look after himself, and anyway no Fyrd would dare harm him, for things hadn’t got that bad in Englalond yet and his official position should be enough to deter them. As for the pedlar, she looked like she would know how to keep herself safe. He returned to where he had been standing before, and peered again into the darkness below.
For a human standing at the edge, the brick-built parapet on the bridge would have been much too low to conceal him. But for a hydden wishing to remain more or less unobserved, at two and a half feet it was just right.
Pike was the only one among the stavermen feeling absolute confidence that young Stort was not leading them on a wild-goose chase. He didn’t know why he felt like that or why, from the first moment he met the youngster nearly three years before, he had felt so strongly that his destiny had changed direction.
As he now leaned on the parapet, alert, uneasy, the rain seemed to trickle down inside his cloak as well as through it – cold and hungry again, but not wishing to be anywhere else.
For he sensed . . . something. It was Fyrd certainly . . . but something more.
Pike eyed the now nearly impenetrable darkness, his stubbly chin hard and purposeful. He was just able to make out a sharp bend turning off to the left further along when lightning glimmered in the sky and then again, striking closer to hand. The bend up ahead then became a brief crescent of streaming light.
‘Master Stort . . .’
He never called the youngster by his first name. He liked such formality of address and the fact that Stort called him Mister Pike in return.
The bag moved.
Water, which had collected over those parts of it where Stort’s hands and arms stuck out a bit, now spilled to the ground. His nose retreated and, unfolding himself vertically, he stood up, almost as tall as Pike himself, then removed his bag and came closer.
‘Mister Pike?’
‘I don’t like the feel of things,’ said Pike. ‘I swear, by the Mirror itself, there’s Fyrd about down there in the dark, but there’s something more than that.’
Stort sniffed at the rain and darkness, hair flattening almost immediately in the downpour, a shiny drop hanging on the end of his nose.
‘Hmm . . .’ he said noncommittally and then, ‘Odd. I smell something.’
‘Fyrd!’ snorted Pike, who together with his stavermen here, felt a match for anyone that night.
‘No, it’s more than just something in my imagination,’ said Stort. ‘Even in this wind I smell . . . oil.’
‘Oil?’
Even as he said it another flash of lightning lit the road below, which glistening with water as it was, looked like a stream except that two figures were there, both holding something in their hands.
‘Fyrd!’ snarled Pike.
‘Oil,’ said Stort. ‘They’re spilling it on the road . . . but why would they be doing that?’
16
VERY WYRD
The rest of the Shores’ journey was on the motorway. Car lights flashed by continually as Richard drove on steadily through the spray-filled murk, and Jack and Katherine soon fell asleep in the back of the car.
Sometime later, Clare turned on the traffic news. Freak storms were raging right across England, causing chaos and hold-ups and diversions everywhere, including further south on the motorway they were driving on.
‘We’ll just have to hope for the best,’ said Richard.
Meanwhile, total darkness had fallen, so the drive had now become a slog and an endurance test. A brief stop at a service station made them feel no better, but the children had woken up and they needed something to eat.
‘Do you want me to drive?’ said Clare, as they set off again.
Richard shook his head.
Behind them the children stayed awake for a time. But they were not talking, just staring out of the windows at passing cars and lights, darkness and lightning and rain, their eyes beginning to close again.
The lightning was intermittent right across the night sky ahead of them, and the traffic reports got steadily worse. They ran into squalls of heavier rain, sudden crosswinds, and lengthy periods when the traffic slowed right down to a standstill. But somehow they continued to make progress.
‘Tired?’ said Clare, reaching out a hand to him.
‘I was for a time, but I’m through it now. If we stop again, we could lose a lot of time. It’s all right, don’t worry, I’m safe to drive.’
A short time later he slowed the car again.
‘We could turn off at the next junction and go right back to Yorkshire now, if you’re really worried about the weather getting worse,’ said Richard, ‘or we could stop off in a roadside lodge and stay overnight.’
Clare considered this and finally murmured sleepily, ‘Let’s continue.’
Jack suddenly woke for a moment and mumbled something. Then he said, quite distinctly, ‘. . . All right.’
Clare turned in surprise and stared at him, but he was already drifting off to asleep again, his bag still clutched tightly in his lap.
The car was buffeted again by winds. The rain teemed down.
It had turned into a slog of a drive out of alien darkness and back into it, mile after mile.
A short while later, as they neared Birmingham, the traffic slowed and soon traffic police were illuminated in their headlights, signalling them over onto the hard shoulder.
Clare opened a window to ask what was going on.
‘Heading on south?’ said an officer. ‘OK, follow the diversion signs and they’ll take you back onto the motorway at the next junction.’
‘Has there been an accident?’
‘Something like that,’ he replied noncommittally. ‘Just follow the signs.’
Richard smiled as they drove on again and turned off the road. ‘A Brummie accent’s a lot different from a Yorkshire one,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Clare, absently, now concentrating on the road.
The diversion signs were easy to follow at first, until the rain came down heavily again, driving straight at them so as to reduce visibility. As the roads grew dark and narrow, they even lost sight of the car in front.
Ten minutes later, after seeing no further signs or any other traffic heading in either direction, Richard knew they were lost.
‘We must have missed one of the signs,’ he confessed.
‘Now what do we do?’ said Clare.
‘Go and buy a Satnav,’ said Richard ironically, ‘but meanwhile we do it the old-fashioned way and watch out for a road sign. We can’t have gone that far wrong.’
Clare looked back at the children. Both must have picked up on her own worry, for they were wide awake again, Katherine looking anxious, Jack wary.
The boy turned to Katherine. ‘It’s all right,’ he said again.
Clare smiled at this and turned to study the road ahead, watching out carefully for signs. But now there was just darkness and high hedges, and then lightning. Next there came a crash of thunder and they ran into truly torrential rain.
‘It will be all right,’ said Clare softly, as much for her own benefit as anyone else’s. The rain was thunderous and the wipers struggling so much to keep going that suddenly the road ahead was no more than a blur of rain.
She sat up straight and leaned forward to peer through the windscreen.
‘Richard, we’d better stop, we can’t see anything . . .’
The car lights made little impact on the raging darkness, but it was obvious the road ahead was too narrow to stop in.
‘I’ll pull over when I can and we’ll wait until this downpour passes,’ said Richard, his voice tight with concentration.
They topped a rise and the road ahead dropped steeply down so suddenly that it felt like a roller-coaster ride, but one in darkness, in rain caught by the headlights rushing wildly at them as the car speeded up.
‘Richard . . . ? Richard!’
‘Daddy!’
Kather
ine’s eyes were wide with fear as she saw the hedge to her right veer towards her and nearly hit the car.
Lightning struck somewhere so close that the thunder that followed was as good as simultaneous, a huge loud crack that sent a vibration right through the vehicle.
Clare had time to see by its sudden light that Richard’s face was tense and desperate as he struggled with the steering wheel to slow the car down
‘I can’t seem to control . . .’ he shouted.
Clare felt a sliding sensation under them, the hedge to her left swinging slowly away, as if the car was beginning to turn around.
‘Richard!!!’
For a moment the car straightened up, but then she saw the road ahead shift laterally again, twisting like a snake before them, first one way and then another, and then back too far again as the car slipped out of Richard’s control.
‘Clare, I . . . I . . .’
He struggled with the wheel, Clare half reached towards him and began to scream.
Jack shouted, ‘No!’ and twisted against his seat belt towards Katherine, his right hand trying to get to her, to hold her and protect her as the car’s wheels began to leave the ground.
17
CRASH
The moment Pike saw the Fyrd, he had sent two of the stavermen to investigate but not engage. Their report confirmed what Pike and Stort had seen, that oil had been spilt on the road.
‘There’s only one reason for doing that,’ Pike told Brief. ‘They mean to cause an accident.’
Brief shook his head in despair. There were rumours that the Fyrd’s patrols sometimes meddled in the human world, but this was the first time he had witnessed it. Time was when any such an intervention in human affairs was unthinkable, but a new generation of Sinistral were taking control of the empire and they were using the might of the Fyrd in ever more extreme ways.
Some hydden believed that what the Fyrd did was a matter of timely revenge on humans for the damage they had done to the world through their thoughtless exploitation of the environment, but others wondered if there was a more sinister agenda behind it. There had in recent months been a spate of deliberate accidents with no regard for life, so that certain elements of the Fyrd could raid the crashed cars for their contents.
‘We may be about to witness for ourselves what the Fyrd always deny their people do,’ said Brief, ‘in which case some good might come of this night’s work.’
Stort had begun humming loudly in an effort to work out a way to deal with the danger presenting itself on the road below.
‘We could try and wipe away the oil,’ he rattled off impulsively, ‘or leave warning signs of some kind, or we could . . . no, no, that won’t work in this kind of weather’.
‘What won’t?’ enquired one of the stavermen.
They knew that Master Stort was endlessly inventive, often to no great effect, but sometimes impressively so – occasionally with comical results which were all the funnier because he himself did not think them amusing. Whatever else, he was never less than interesting in all he attempted.
That evening he was being very serious indeed.
‘In dryer conditions we could burn it off,’ he said, ‘which would serve the twin purpose of clearing away the problem and warning anyone approaching, but tonight that is not possible because oil is not combustible without great heat, and there is no way of achieving that here and now.’
They discussed a little more until Brief decided, ‘All we can do is wait and watch. What we have already seen has confirmed Stort’s suspicions about this night. If the oil is on the road, we cannot remove it. Nor, if something else happens, should we intervene.
‘Mister Pike, let us continue to keep a watchful eye open!’
A short time later the Fyrd reappeared below, unaware that they were being watched. They examined the road, and seemed satisfied with their work.
Pike signalled silently to the others, moving closer to Stort and gripping his stave tighter. ‘You stay close to me, Mister Stort, and you’ll be all right.’
Stort half-smiled. ‘Usually, Mister Pike, it’s you who stays close by me!’
‘Well, whatever . . . just be . . . careful!’
The other stavermen crept nearer. ‘There’s another on the other side,’ whispered one of them, ‘but I don’t think any of them know we’re here.’
‘Mister Pike!’ a voice hissed urgently. It was Stort.
Pike went back and stood by his side, peeping over the parapet.
‘Did you hear that?’ The youngster had the ears of a roe deer.
Then Pike did hear it: the squeal of car tyres on a road.
‘See that?’ Stort had the eyes of an eagle.
Pike saw it just moments later – a glimmer of light low down near the bend in the road, and this time most definitely not lightning.
‘It’s a vehicle,’ he said, ‘and it’s coming at speed.’
‘It’s skidding,’ said one of the stavermen, staring in alarm at the swinging headlights, the red back lights occasionally visible as well.
‘By the good Earth herself,’ swore another, ‘it’s heading straight for the bridge we’re standing on.’
They watched in horror as the shafting glare of the headlights of the skidding vehicle arced horribly up the hedge, and above that into the leafless branches of an oak tree, as its wheels left the ground before thumping hard back onto the road in a shower of sparks, amid grinding and squealing, its engine racing as it shot out of the darkness straight into one of the piers of the bridge, colliding so hard that it shook everything about them.
They leaned right over and helplessly watched what happened next.
The back of the car swung right round into the arch beneath them as the front end of the car, too, now facing the wrong way, disappeared from their sight into the same arch in which they had been sheltering and in which, were they still there, they would all most certainly now have been killed.
All thought of the Fyrd momentarily fled their minds as they rushed across to the other side of the bridge to see what happened. The car emerged, sliding and rolling into view again, before crashing back down onto the road, glass splintering, the boot and a rear door shooting open. Then the door peeled away and cartwheeled ahead into the darkness, and they saw a human figure thrown clear through the sparks and wildly gyrating lights, briefly rising like a rag doll through the air before falling onto the grassy verge as the vehicle finally ground to a halt on the road below him.
The figure lay still.
Brief and the others stayed as they were because hydden tried not to intervene in human affairs.
The car below them was beginning to burn with a fire too strong even for the rain to put out. The flickering flames lit up the verge on either side, and the body of the person thrown clear. It moved and sat up. It was a boy who looked human.
‘The giant-born?’ said Brief, glancing at Imbolc.
‘But still a boy?’ said Stort, bewildered. They had always assumed that Beornamund’s legend meant it would be an adult giant who came with the maid.
Stort turned to Brief for an explanation.
But Brief was looking as thoughtful as he was and just as confused.
‘I thought it was the arrival of the Shield Maiden we were here to bear witness to,’ he muttered.
Seconds later, after a few light flames flickered out of the crushed front of the car, it exploded in a ball of flame shooting into the air. By its dying light they saw that the windscreen and the front end of the car’s roof had completely gone, exposing the seats, in which three figures still sat immobile, two in the front and one behind.
Brief turned to the Peace-Weaver. ‘Who’s inside that burning car?’ he asked her urgently. ‘Who exactly?’
She hesitated. This was not how it was meant to be. But then . . . she suddenly relaxed. She almost smiled.
Wyrd had its own way of working things for good and for ill; for worse as well as for better; for the least important person, and also for t
he entire Universe. And in the Mirror were reflected all things.
‘I think the Shield Maiden is in there,’ said Imbolc, sure now that her search was near its end – or at least at its proper beginning. She knew Beornamund’s prophecy too.
It was Stort who acted. Before Pike and the others could stop him Stort slipped behind them and along the bridge to where he could climb over the parapet and jump down onto the embankment on the same side where the boy had been thrown.
He was away into darkness before the others had even realized he’d gone, crashing his way down through the vegetation of the embankment – aiming to break the most ancient of the Hydden-world’s taboos.
While from out of the wreckage and flames came the strangest of sounds, pitched just so its insistent sound could be heard above everything, even the wind.
It was the sound of a mobile phone ringing.
Then it stopped.
18
WORRIED
Roger Lynas, the officer in charge of Jack’s case, stared at the phone he had just put down. Outside the weather was bad. The road reports were appalling. Now, worse still, the Shores weren’t picking up his calls.
This had always been a strange case and he felt, for reasons he could not work out, that he was not only out of his depth but the case itself was hurtling out of his control.
One good thing was that Dr Richard Shore and his family were known to him.
The other positive was that the police checks done on the mysterious Foales, whose number had been in Jack’s backpack, were as good as they get. No criminal record, no offences of any kind, good references all around. In fact it turned out that Arthur Foale was, or had been, a semi-public figure. Lynas thought he recalled seeing him on telly talking about the Dark Ages.
How he and his wife were connected to the boy Jack, Lynas had no idea, but intended to find out. Meanwhile they were the best option he had where Jack was concerned, and his primary concern was the lad’s welfare.