Jake folded his arms about himself, tight. His eyes gleamed wet. “So do I, Dad,” he breathed.
“The third jump brought me here. It’s Florence, the year is 1347-ish. I can’t tell you what . . . how it is here. Fascinating, yes, but the heat, the squalor, the casual violence! Life is so short, so . . . hard.
“I thought . . . I decided . . . not to journey again. There’s no point flitting through time—you’ll never find me. The plan was to stay here, to wait for you. To find a way of contacting you. I’ve got the mirror—at least I have access to it. It’s in the palazzo of the warlord I’ve had to pledge myself to serve.”
He grinned. “I’m his doctor. He’s vicious and dangerous, but while he lives, I’m safe. I even pull his teeth. I’ll bet you find that funny, Jake.”
No one laughed.
“I’ve been here three years, local time. Tried over and over to contact you. Spells and scrying and anything I can think of, but I have to be so careful! They burn witches here.” He looked away, then back. “All that time I saw nothing in the Chronoptika but my own warped reflection—and then, God knows how, a woman. Alicia. She’s Symmes’s daughter. She’s recording this and that’s crazy . . .”
“It’s brilliant,” Venn breathed.
“. . . but it’s all I can think of to do. You have to find this tape! You have to find me!”
He came close to the glass again, and the whisper of his words jarred against the hurried movement of his lips. “It’s plague, Venn! The Black Death. I’ve been waiting for it; now I’ve seen two cases and I know the signs. This is the year it swept over Europe like fire. Two in every three people died. Realistically my chances are zero. If you don’t find me I’ll have to j . . .”
The film juddered and stopped, the screen startlingly black. The reel flapped and rattled.
Piers switched it off into an appalled silence.
For a moment only the rain pattered. Then Jake turned on Sarah, his face white as paper.
“So what happens? Does he die there? Because you’re from the future, you should know!”
Wharton murmured, “Jake . . .”
“But she should! She should know the answers to this nightmare.” He stepped close to her. “Does my father ever come back?”
“I don’t know.” Sarah kept her voice calm. They were all looking at her, Maskelyne curious, Venn’s eyes blue as ice. “If I did, I would tell you, Jake, I swear . . . But I’d never heard of David Wilde before I came here. Please believe me.”
He turned on Venn. “We have to go for him! Right now!”
“No.” Venn’s voice was low. “Not until Maskelyne is sure . . .”
“Give me the bracelet. Let me try! If—”
“Jake.” Wharton came up to him. “Think. We can’t risk it. As soon as we’re ready . . .”
“You too?” He stared around at them all. “Look at you! All of you! Paralyzed by fear! And my father might be dying back there. But you don’t care about him, do you, you just care about Leah, who’s dead, and you, Sarah, about a future that hasn’t even happened yet! I loathe and detest the lot of you! And if I have to, I’ll get him on my own!”
He slammed out of the door.
Wharton sighed. “Sorry, everyone. Sorry, Sarah. He’s just . . .”
“I know.” She went and stood in front of the dark and silent mirror. “I’d be just the same if it was my father. But believe me, I don’t have the answers.”
Piers cleared his throat. “Well. Do you want me to run it again?”
“Once was enough.” Venn went to the fire and thrust another log on, gazing down at the resin bubbling and crackling through the gray ashes.
He stood there, thinking for a moment, then said, “At least we know exactly where David is. If we could be certain of configuring the mirror accurately, of being as exact as we were with the Blitz, we could get in there and pick him up as easily as we did Jake.”
He turned on Maskelyne. “You’re the expert. What do you think?”
The scarred man had turned and was standing silently by the window, his dark eyes fixed intently on the rain-beaten lawns and the dark tossing trees of the Wood. Now he said quietly, “It’s not that easy. Accuracy decreases exponentially as you go back. 1940 was recent enough to be sure we would arrive within days, at least, of Jake’s whereabouts. A date seven hundred years before, that is almost impossible to hit. A journeyman might arrive years later or before, and the difficulty of retrieval is . . .”
“I don’t want the problems,” Venn growled, “I want the solutions.”
Maskelyne gazed out at the rain through the reflection of the lit room. Then he turned and faced them. “These are my conditions. I have completely free access to the mirror. I have a room here in the house, and I work without any hindrance or interference from anyone.”
Venn’s eyes narrowed. “Not the bracelet. That stays with me.”
“Agreed, for now. Piers gets me what I need. And when I succeed, and we get David Wilde back, and your wife, I take both of the bracelets and the mirror as my reward. I take them, I go, and you never see me or them again. That is my price.”
Wharton pulled a face. Sarah scowled.
It was Rebecca who said: “Sounds fair to me.”
Venn snorted. “Does it.” He tipped his head and gazed at Maskelyne with cold curiosity. “You think the mirror will respond to you, more than anyone else? That it recognizes you?”
The scarred man laughed, a light, soft sound in the dim room. “I know it does.”
“Then you’d better get on with it.” Venn turned.
“My conditions . . .”
Venn spun back and glared at him with cold fury “If you can get David and Leah back alive, then as far as I’m concerned, you can have the whole damned estate and the souls of everyone in it! But if you’re lying to me . . .” He stepped forward. “If you’re wasting my time for your own selfish—”
An enormous clang made them all jump.
Piers had dropped the film reel onto the floorboards. “Oops,” he said, deadpan.
Venn gave him a venomous glare. “Have you got something to say?”
“Just . . . well, let’s not get hasty. Remember the Dee page, Excellency. I’ve been working on it and I think there may be things to help us there. Mortimer Dee may not have invented the Chronoptika, but he knew many strange things about it.”
Maskelyne’s whole body seemed to be shocked into sudden movement; he came straight from the window in two steps. “Dee? You’ve found his papers?”
“Sarah found them,” Wharton said, thinking that would please her.
It didn’t seem to; she glared at him. Then she said, “One page of unreadable mess. Scribbles and drawings.”
“That might be just what I need! Where is it?”
Piers raised an eyebrow at Venn. “In the safe. But . . .”
“Give him a copy.” Venn watched as Maskelyne made eagerly for the door. And as the scarred man reached it, Venn said icily, “But the bracelet stays with me, and if you fail, I’ll throw you to the Shee and let them torment you for all eternity.”
Maskelyne paused. Then he went out.
“Oh goody,” said Piers, picking up one of the cats. “And now lunch, I think?”
Wharton went to find Jake.
He was in the cloister, the monkey clutching around his neck. It was chattering right into his face, but he was taking no notice of it at all.
Wharton took one look, then flung him his coat. “Forget Piers’s cottage pie. We’re going to the pub.”
Jake didn’t move. “The Black Death,” he said.
He was white and still with fear.
Wharton, his arm halfway down a sleeve, paused. Then he pulled the duffel coat roughly on and did the toggles up, concentrating on them too carefully. “Don’t give up, Jake.”<
br />
“I’m scared. Is that so strange?”
“No. Not strange at all. But you’re Jake Wilde. You’re the crazy kid who stabbed Patten in the wrist just to get out of the school. You don’t give up. That’s why you’re such a pain. And that’s why you’ll succeed. We’ve got Maskelyne on our side now. He’s a strange man—I don’t know what to make of him. But he knows about the mirror. Let me tell you about the deal he’s made with Venn.”
Jake nodded, barely listening. Then he stood, and Horatio screeched and swung upside down in relief. “All right. Let’s get out of here. I need to think.”
Sarah watched the car start and judder into gear and slur down the flooded avenue. She sat knees up on the broad sill of the study window, until the bare black branches of the elms hid it from sight. For a moment a flicker of pain went through her. They hadn’t even asked her to come.
Jake’s outburst had hurt. He was such a spoiled kid! He had no idea of what she had seen, of what lay in the dark future, and she couldn’t even tell him, not about Janus’s terrible experiments, or the secrets of the ZEUS organization. He only thought about his own problems. And Venn was just as bad.
She shook her head, finished tying the laces of the walking boots Piers had given her, and pulled on the red raincoat, a little too big, that he had found. Forget them. The coin. That’s what she should concentrate on. Getting the coin.
She slipped out of the house by the side door to the sunken garden, closing it carefully so that the row of metal shears and bars hanging from it clinked only softly. Piers had a camera here, but she knew he was too busy cooking to be checking it now, and she ran quickly along the gravel path, around to the back of the house.
Wintercombe Abbey led into a tangle of courtyards and outbuildings. In her time, most of them were ruined, but now they still had roofs and odd oriel windows. One, which Piers called the Abbot’s kitchen, was an octagonal gothic structure with a vast central chimney, where the long-dead cooks of the medieval abbots had no doubt concocted great feasts at Christmas and Easter.
It stood deep in nettles, its walls smothered in ivy, thick twisted bines loaded with glossy leaves.
She ducked under them, hands feeling for the wall. The stone was wet and crumbling, rain cascading off the leaves onto her hair, down her neck.
She shivered, groped farther, found emptiness, and slipped under a pointed arch, crawling through the leaves, breathing hard.
Then she stood up, in a shower of drops.
The interior was a damp green space, gloomy with filtered light. Her breath smoked, she glanced around and then up into the cavernous hollow of the roof, where a pigeon fluttered.
“Where are you?”
He didn’t answer, but she could hear his breathing.
She took out the flashlight, switched it on, and flashed it around.
Gideon was a dark shape under the hanging ivy that infested the ancient stone chimney. He crouched, sullen in the ruined hearth, and as she stepped closer, he looked up. She gasped.
His face was streaked with blood, his eyes red-rimmed.
The sleeves of his green coat were in rags.
And his fingers were raw.
“What the hell happened to you?” she whispered.
He glared at her as if he hated her. “I was the wren,” he said. “They hunted me.”
14
When he came forth from the Wood, Oisin Venn was changed. He dressed in fine clothes, laughed a cold laugh. Horses filled his stables, his sheep flocks increased, jewels studded his fingers. At diverse strange hours his house was lit with lights and music and the sound of revelry and merriment rang across the moor.
But the village folk locked their doors and brooded over their fires. For to have congress with unearthly spirits leads only to damnation and the gates of Hell. And they feared for their souls.
Chronicle of Wintercombe
THE SEVEN CATS slept and snoozed along the upstairs corridor.
The one on the window seat was the first to wake. It raised its head and opened its eyes, slits of green in the black fur. Around its neck on a silver collar, a small disc read Primo.
Dusk was falling; beyond the gloomy wood the sky was fading. Already the corridor had shadows moving down the walls, rain-patterns on the ornamental coving, the cobwebbed picture rail.
The cat listened.
A raindrop plopped into a bucket.
The cat’s fur bristled. It sat up, alert, and at the same time the other six woke too, and each turned a dark head to stare down the corridor toward the stairs at the end.
Footsteps.
They were as soft as a ghost’s; they walked up the wooden treads with barely a creak of the boards.
The cat jumped down; it sat with the others on the floor, a row of wide watching eyes, twitching tails.
The footsteps reached the top of the stairs; they paused, and then began to approach down the corridor, soft as dust falling in a disused chimney.
The cats spat.
In sudden panic they scattered, some behind the curtain, one flattened under the bookcase, another skidding to the dusty alcove behind a table.
The footsteps passed them, bare feet tiptoeing down the hessian matting, past the rows of bedroom doors to the locked room at the end.
Without pausing, they passed through the wall.
The seven replicant cats slid out and stared at one another. One turned and ran fast toward the kitchen. The others, very softly, tails held high, paced in a solemn line down the corridor and sat outside the door in a row.
As if whoever had gotten in should be kept there.
Venn was lying, fully dressed, on the bed.
It was an old four-poster, the curtains removed years ago. His eyes were closed, but he knew exactly when she came through the walls of the room.
He sat up slowly.
Summer was sitting at the dressing table.
The mirror had been removed, but he could still see her reflected, as in some magic looking glass. She smiled at him. “Tired, Venn?”
“Why are you here?”
“I can enter the house now, remember? I thought it would be nice to . . . visit.”
“I don’t want you here.” His voice was a low anxiety. “The Wood is your place. The Summerland. Not here.”
She ignored him. Reaching out, she took up the black-and-silver brush, and began to brush her shiny dark hair. “These things are Leah’s, aren’t they. She had lovely taste.”
“Get your filthy hands off them.”
“Oh. Not nice, Venn.” She put the brush down and opened a drawer. Taking out a jewelry box, she flipped it open. Her fingers danced over brooches and rings.
He came over quickly and shut it. “Get out.”
“You’ve kept her room exactly as it was. How quaint that is! You know, we sometimes wonder about mortals. We laugh and puzzle about them. How it must be to know . . . know all your life, that one day you’ll die.” She smiled up at him. “The strange thing is, most mortals seem to accept it. Except you, Venn. You won’t.”
He stepped back. “You know nothing about death. Or love.”
“True, but I know about you. And you can’t fool me with your talk of love, Venn. You don’t want Leah back because you love her. You want her because you will not be denied. You won’t be beaten. Not by death, not by time. You won’t give in. You’ve never learned how to lose. You think wanting her back makes you more human. In fact, it proves you are Shee.”
She stood close to him.
“That’s the choice you face, Oberon. The Wood, or the World. To be human, and die. Or to be with us and free of it all. Yet, you know, you’ll never be quite at home in either place. How difficult that must be!”
She raised her hand to his face. He stepped back. “You have no idea how I feel.”
“Yes I
do. Once you were mine. I know everything about you.”
She stepped closer. His eyes moved away from her, obsessively, as if by long habit, to the painting where it hung on the wall, Leah’s face dark and intent, her eyes watching him as if she saw.
“There she is!” Summer twirled, glanced up. “My enemy.” Then her eyes widened, as if with a sudden brilliant idea. “Do you want me to be her, Venn? Is that it?”
Her hair grew longer, lustrous. Suddenly she was taller, her lips paler. The bones of her skull shifted. Her eyes darkened. “Is this better, Venn?”
“Stop it.”
“I can be her. Exactly the same. You need never know the difference.”
“Stop!” He backed off, then paused, fascinated. Because, before his eyes, Summer was transforming, and glance by glance, gesture by gesture, the turn of the head, the laughter in her eyes became Leah’s, and despite himself his heart gave a great leap of fear and joy.
“Is this better, Venn?” she said.
Even her voice was perfect.
He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. She came and took his head, and her fingers were soft on his skin. Leah’s fingers. Leah’s lips lifted to his. Touched.
An explosion of knocking rattled the door.
“Excellency! Is anything wrong?”
Venn blinked. He stepped back.
“Excellency! There’s an intruder in the house! Are you safe, sir?”
With a convulsive movement Venn pushed the creature away and stalked to the window, dragging both hands up over his face and through his tangled hair. Then he turned, with a howl of fury. The room was empty.
Only a soft perfume and a softer laugh hung in the air.
“Excellency?” The door was flung open; Piers stood there with all the cats behind him like a row of guards.
His small sharp eyes darted around the room. “Is everything okay?”
Venn glanced up to the painting. For a moment he was silent with misery, but when he spoke, his voice was as cold as ever. “Nothing’s changed, Piers. Nothing is okay.”