Chase the Morning

Chapter Eight

The dark green walls loomed above us, brooding, impenetrable, seething beneath a thunderous sky. Emerald fire flashed from the swords as they rang together. Mine was swatted aside like an annoying fly; the broadsword sizzled by an inch from my left armpit. Somehow I parried, jumped back, lifted my guard again, gasping. Several cuts had opened, and I winced as the sweat ran into them. We circled each other, feinting. Mall grinned; it wasn’t the most reassuring sight. She was swaying hypnotically, like a cobra, picking her time and place to strike.

It’d been like that all the way from New Orleans, and I had the scars to prove it. Our frantic departure seemed to be paying off, at first. We fairly flew down that great river on the wings of the morning. Le Stryge claimed credit for the unexpectedly fresh wind in our sails, which went a long way to nullify the advantage of the Wolves’ steam tow; but I was more inclined to credit Jyp’s unfailing pilotage. I had the odd idea, watching him at the wheel, that that calm gaze of his was seeing through the veils of time and space, choosing some invisible thread of destiny and steering a straight course between its tortuous coils, sliding from one to another. I made the mistake of mentioning it to Mall as we snatched a bite of breakfast together on the foredeck.

‘Not so odd a fancy, indeed,’ was her reply. ‘Each one has his inborn qualities, ’tis thought; yet few live long enough to bring them to their fullest flower. Fast within the Hub, men like him are but clever navigators; yet out upon the Wheel they’ll soon learn to sight you on a star through every twist and turn of shifting time. Only here does the true power blossom from within the skill and the learning that are its swaddlings. You, my friend, you might be a mighty trader in time, perhaps; though you would needs first fill that void in you, feed your starved spirit that it may grow. ’Tis more than passion you lack. Men need a cause in living, lest others find it for them.’ She dunked the last crust of bread in her coffee – bowl and drained it to the grounds. ‘And, since we’re turned the idle philosopher, Stephen my lad, high time I kept my word and opened to you something of my own peculiar mystery. My lectures are curt, but my reasonings cut deep! Up, then, and a’guard!’

So my lessons began, in swordsmanship and in other things also, perhaps. Right from the start, from the stance, they were severely practical; we fenced with naked edge and unbarred point, which soon teaches you respect for what you’re messing with. At first, on our way downriver, Mall only marked each touch by landing light playful taps with the flat of her blade. It was almost a compliment when she began to deal out real stinging slaps.

By then we were at sea. We’d made such a quick passage I’d begun to hope we might find the black ship’s sails still in sight when we left the delta, or get her last heading from the tug as it returned. Instead we passed its smoking remains on a sandbank.

‘What do we do now?’ repeated Jyp disgustedly, when I told him there was nobody left alive in the wreck. ‘We’ll set a good swift course for Hispaniola, that’s what. But not the swiftest. We’ve got to overhaul the Wolves before they get there, if we can. There’ll be some help awaiting them, you can depend on that; help we may not like. So, all along the way we search. We search like hell!’

And so by day and night we beat back and forth along the course, sweeping as wide as we dared; by day, over an ocean of dazzling blue, a vast sphere of sapphire, it seemed, upon which nothing stirred save schools of dolphin racing to play in our bow-wave, and great sleeting shoals of flying fish. By night –

But what lay beneath our hull by night was a question I only asked once. Jyp gazed out into infinity, and smiled. ‘The seas east of the sun, west of the moon,’ he said quietly. ‘Between the Straits of the Night and the Sound of Morning they lie, beyond the Gates of Noon. The waves that break beneath charmed casements, beneath cloud – castle towers. There’s others might give you plainer answers, but I tell it you straight, you wouldn’t thank ’em. Some things’re best seen for yourself – and one day, maybe, if you’re in luck, you will.’

Which effectively silenced me. I never plucked up the nerve to ask anyone else. I was more than a little afraid what might happen if I couldn’t believe the answer. But I kept being reminded of what I’d seen once, on a lonely night-flight back from some joyless business in France. Then, our small plane climbed between two layers of cloud, the one beneath level and rolling like a steel – blue sea, the one above heavier, craggier, foreboding as grey granite; one lone slash of pallid orange defined a horizon that would otherwise have been lost in trackless infinity. If I’d looked down, looked longer, would I have glimpsed tall masts above those cloudcrests, broad sails gliding towards that last distant light?

East-southeast that course led us, towards the Dry Tortugas and from there southeast again, between Great Bahama Bank and the haunted Havanaise coast to Windward Passage. In all that time we sighted few other sails, and none were black; nor, when we hailed them, had they sighted any. It didn’t take us long to guess the Wolves were taking an eccentric course to avoid us – flattering, after a fashion. But it left Le Stryge as our main hope, and nobody liked that. He kept to his cabin, from which strange sounds and even stranger odours seeped, and emerged from time to time only to confirm that our quarry was ahead of us somewhere on more or less this bearing. Each time he seemed greyer and more exhausted. ‘They grow harder to follow,’ he growled, more than once. ‘Something new reaches out to them, something that seeks to shield them from my sight. But it is not strong enough. Not yet.’

Meanwhile Mall systematically beat me black and blue. Did I land any back? Don’t ask. At the end of a long day’s swordplay I felt almost too stiff to walk. Not that I was complaining. If she was taking the time to give me a crash course in staying alive it was because she was afraid I’d need it. And I knew how lucky I was to have such a exciting hellion of a teacher, able to make the air crackle yet never forgetting what it was like to be an awkward beginner. I remembered reading once that was a mark of true greatness in almost any field. When in our third day’s lessons she suddenly started leaving delicate slices like paper cuts, that itched rather than hurt – at least till the sweat got at them – I began to feel like some kind of fighting man.

Also like some kind of masochist. But at least she knew where to stop. Just.

One bright noon – it might have been the fourth – the mastheads hailed their warnings, and we dropped everything and ran to the railings. But it was not black sails that lifted above the horizon. It was the jagged green fangs of a mountainous island, and for us they were emblems of failure. If Hispaniola was in sight, the chances were that we’d missed our foes, and that they were already there.

‘And Clare –’ I couldn’t finish.

Jyp shook his head. ‘Easy, man. Whatever they mean with her, it’s some kind of … of ritual; and they have their appointed places and times, all. Chances are it’s not yet, they could hardly time their arrival so close – not after their little brush with us. And if they hadn’t harmed her already, chances are they won’t till then.’

‘If the whole bloody business hasn’t frightened her out of her mind already!’

‘I doubt that,’ said Mall, draping an amiable arm about my shoulder. ‘We’re harder than you’d gauge us, Stephen, our sex. She’ll think herself snared in a nightmare, sure; but she’s had a glimpse of hope. Not to lose heart, and fulfil it – that’s your part. Play it to the hilts!’

On the last long tack south into Port-au-Prince the atmosphere aboard was electric. An unpleasant surprise could very well be waiting. Soon after sunrise we came sweeping into the mountain-ringed bay under full sail, guns primed and crews crouched ready behind closed ports, eyeing with deep suspicion every little isle and inlet big enough to mask a ship. But as the island’s main port rose – or rather sprawled – ahead of us at bay’s end, it was immediately obvious that no ship remotely large enough to be our Wolfish quarry was docked there.

In a spirit of glum anticlimax we brought the Defiance alongside a rickety wooden dock by a decrepit timber yard at the far end of the town. Le Stryge, complaining bitterly of exhaustion, was cajoled into trying his divination again. Meanwhile we sent parties ashore to poke about discreetly after any news. After the last little incident I, of course, wasn’t allowed to go. They left me sitting on the rail, nursing my bruises, chewing my nails and glaring out at this city that was supposed to be too dangerous for me.

It didn’t look it. It was nothing like approaching New Orleans up the dark Mississippi, night-bound and mysterious. The air was clear, cool, transparent, the freshening light striking every detail with stinging clarity. Not dangerous, or sinister – lazy, if anything, stretched out like a drowsy slut all across the flat shoreline, straggling back up the forested mountain slopes behind. Even along the seafront patches of untamed trees appeared between walls of white stone and sun – bleached planking, warped and salt – whitened, between elegant old villas in French or Spanish styles and dilapidated docks. In places the trees thinned out into patches of scrubby wasteland where yellowish oxen browsed, shaking their heads at the first flies. On the higher slopes clumps of the same thick greenery mingled randomly among clutches of sun – bleached buildings. Which was encroaching on which, the houses or the jungle? I couldn’t say for sure. The twentieth century hadn’t touched this place. There was no hum of motor traffic to be heard. Belated cockcrows drifted out to us, among the screams of flocking parrots; otherwise it was very quiet nearby. I couldn’t even hear children’s voices, about the most universal sound there is. All I could make out now and again was a constant dull pulsing, and chanting, perhaps, or wailing. It was the only unsettling note in the whole placid scene. Nothing dangerous about it; and yet the longer I watched and listened, the more the feeling grew on me that there was something wrong, something hellishly wrong.

The twentieth century …

Wait a minute. I’d read a lot about Port-au-Prince, hadn’t I? A year or so back, when I’d been briefing one of Barry’s pet clients on Caribbean trade conditions. All that stuff in the Department of Trade reports about how up-to-date the place was compared with most thirds-world capitals. Almost offensively so, given the state the rest of the country was in. Offices, hotels, neoned nightclubs, glaring casinos; docks that could take small cruise liners – where were they? Broad boulevards, tall towers of concrete and glass, a skyline that should have taken the sun like a forest of mirrors – where the hell were they hiding? Not a sign, however carefully I scanned the scene. Once or twice there seemed to be a glassy glitter in the air at the edge of sight. But always when I looked again, shading my eyes, it resolved into a tall white church spire, a row of white thatches on the hill, or just some fleeting trick of the light. There was nothing more.

And these forested hills … The island had a terrible deforestation problem. I’d read that too. It didn’t look like it from here; still less like it from the sea.

For a moment I had the panicky idea that it was some trick of the Wolves, some disguise of the kind they’d used to spirit Clare away. They could even be moored near us now, hidden by it. But Le Stryge would surely have sussed that out.

The true explanation crept over me by slow degrees, like a chill coming on. And with about the same feeling.

Shadows. I was seeing shadows. Shadows in broad daylight, shadows at high noon. Shadows of the city, of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, maybe, or a blend of both; the same shadows that lay behind Canal Street in New Orleans, behind Danube Street back home. Long images of their past, their spirit, cast deep into the timeless world beyond the Core. But these shadows were strong, not images in darkness but stronger than the daylight. The whole island must be haunted by them, not lurking at the edges of the night but right beneath the living day, ready to show through. Strong enough even at high noon to swamp what had taken their place – at least for those who moved in shadows already. Even for those who didn’t, they must be a tangible, almost oppressive presence – a ghost forever at their heels, behind every step they took. Their bright modern world must seem like nothing more than a shimmer of light upon dark waters. From the right angle you could look straight through, into the fathomless deeps below.

As I’d done; as I was doing even now. I shivered. It was noon now; but night would fall. If they were so strong even in the light, those shadows, what dominion must darkness bring them?

Suddenly I was very damn glad I hadn’t gone ashore.

When the others came trooping back on board, dusty and footsore, they agreed; they had good reason to. They’d found a spell of fear upon the whole dockside quarter, and few willing to answer aloud what they asked; for the Chorazin had indeed come in, only hours before the dawn, riding before a storm that seemed to crack the heavens, only to set sail again before light. And it was whispered that strange shapes had come stalking through the streets to meet it, and that those who crossed their paths had not returned.

‘Half of the folk still squatting in their shacks shaking!’ said Jyp grimly, sipping gratefully at the goblet of cool sherry Pierce’s steward handed him. ‘Or rushing to their houngansfor exorcisms and traitements. But the houngans are just as jumpy; hell, you can hear the drums from here!’

‘Aye, and the singing!’ Mall had added, no less sombre. ‘But it’s whispered that there’s some of the heathen priests – those they think are secret bocors, that they guess serve with both hands, as t’were, the bright powers and the dark – that went a’purpose to meet the black ship. That all their gear’s gone from their shrines, all, as if packed for some great festival elsewhere –’

Even she jumped; we all did. Pierce’s crystal goblet shattered in his great paw. The door of the great cabin flew open with a crash and Le Stryge in all his squalor came storming in, more or less dragging the girl-creature along by her wrist.

‘Mists!’ snarled the old man. ‘Vapours! Think they’ll pull those over my eyes, do they? Tien, they may think again!’

‘What?’ roared Pierce, licking sherry off his fingers. ‘You have them, sirrah? Upon which heading?’

‘South – east – they follow the coast – you have but to do likewise! Go, follow while you can! That veil grows thicker as they near its source! I had to resort to desperate measures.’ He wheezed exhaustedly and sank down among Pierce’s silken cushions. ‘Or would you stand about arguing while they pick the bones of the precious, the expensive Clare?’

Pierce and Jyp were already out of their chairs, pushing past Stryge’s companion without a glance. But I saw with a shudder that though her face remained blank and unmoved, from below her left eye a thin straight thread of blood ran down, like a tear. Overhead the big brass bell jangled the crew from their rest, and the cabin floor quivered as men thumped from their hammocks below. Le Stryge sagged like a disjointed doll.

‘Nearer its source?’ I demanded. ‘What source, then?’

‘Idiot boy – how should I tell? But unless the Stryge is a fool, which he is not, they are heading for some secret anchorage. Leave me now, I am exhausted! If you want to know any more you can look with your own damned sheeps’ eyes!’

And so I’d been doing, intently scanning sea and land in the few short minutes Mall would spare me from her savage exercise. She seemed more determined than ever to drive some skill into me, and more and more often I found myself facing the point as well as the edge of that unforgiving sword. I might have to face the real thing soon enough, of course; but I suspected that she was really trying to keep me too busy to worry. I found myself thinking lightheadedly what a squash partner Mall would have made, whirling around me, lunging, feinting, cutting with fluid grace while I clumped heavily after her across the heaving deck. It was evening now, and my legs felt like lead, and ready to melt at that.

A swift ripple ran through the forested coast above. A land breeze like a long slow sigh played about us – not cool but hot, languorous, heavy with strange scents of musk and spice and smoke, and an eerie babble of birdcalls. I was distracted – and Mall lunged. With a wild effort I managed to parry, bind and swing the swords about. I meant to drive hers back against her as she’d taught me. Somehow, though, the swords kept on swinging, right up to the vertical. Mine was the one pushed back. We met, hissing fiercely, forehead to forehead. Sweat ran down our faces. Mine; Mall was hardly even warm. At least I’d held her –

Then somehow her blade rolled lazily over, and steel sizzled wickedly as it shot right past mine. Something licked at the side of my neck with cold catlike delicacy. It left the faintest icy tickle. Then a hot welling wetness brought a sharper pain – right over my jugular.

I yelped and shied like a fly-stung horse. Of course she’d set the whole move up with scalpel accuracy, damn her! The ship heaved gently at a sudden sultry gust. The bind collapsed, our swords clattered to the deck and I overbalanced against her; we clutched at each other to steady ourselves –

One sting after another. Suddenly I was acutely aware of her bare arms against mine, the touch of smooth suntanned skin, the cool silky flow of her hair on my throat – so intensely female, so close. She tried to jerk back, but faltered, and only ground her hips more heavily against me. The strength of my reaction startled me; I pulled her sharply closer and kissed her. And, wonder of wonders, she responded. Her hips shifted against me. Her lips pressed hard against mine. Then for one luxurious moment her teeth parted on salty warmth and a langorous, twining tongue.

One moment. Till the silence crashed around us, and the needling awareness that every eye in the whole damn ship was goggling at the pair of us. Mall’s pale eyes blazed open. She snaked irresistibly out of my grip and recoiled explosively, panting, spitting, rubbing her forearm across her lips. A wave of laughter rocked the ship, and I had the uncomfortable feeling I wasn’t going to live this one down in a hurry. Assuming I lived at all. Mall was standing, staring down at her sword. Hastily I ducked and scooped up mine. I had a definite case of the shakes – and so, by God, did she. You’d think that things had gone a whole lot further than one quick squeeze.

Peacemaking? It seemed like the natural thing to try, till I saw the way her fists were clenching and unclenching. The last natural thing I’d tried hadn’t turned out too well. I glanced around quickly. On the quarterdeck Jyp was grinning sardonically and Pierce was tactfully doubled up, his face as purple as his port-stained waistcoat. No use taking refuge in respectable company, there wasn’t any. The shadow of the foremast shrouds fell over me, and it occurred to me that I’d never been up the rigging yet, and there was – after all – no time like the present.

Easily, without undue haste, I slid my sword into my belt, reached up as I’d seen the sailors do and swung myself over the rail. I felt a lot more at home on shipboard now, or so I told myself. And as far as risks went, the one I’d just run looked a lot bigger. I looked down at Mall, and she looked back at me, her face expressionless but flaming. I dug my feet into the ratlines and began to climb.

I even quite enjoyed the challenge, at first. Rock-climbing had quelled any great fear of heights; and I needn’t go all the way, after all, just up to the top platform. The taut shrouds weren’t much harder to climb than a ladder, but the step-like ratlines flexed slightly under my hands at every movement of the ship, strangely alive. I’d never felt so keenly aware of the Defiance as a living thing before, the sailors’ sense; it was like scaling the mane of some immense sea-beast. Almost as frightening, too. This wasn’t like a rockface; it swayed, casually, unpredictably, as if it had a mind of its own. And the higher you got, the wider the swing. The first time I looked down the deck seemed miles distant already, Mall not more than a speck staring up at me, blonde fluff blowing. She couldn’t be thinking of coming after me, could she? I found myself hurrying to reach the top; but when I got there, it was almost scarier to sit on that bare platform in the whistling wind with no rail or anything else to hold onto. Only the masthead, with its crow’s-nest for the look-out, offered any kind of security. I didn’t want to go slinking down again so soon, even if Mall had cooled off a bit in the meantime. I stepped into the topmast shrouds and began to climb.

This time I carefully didn’t look down, and it seemed to help. I reached the foretop quite quickly, though the ropes raised blisters and the sweat was stinging my cuts. The crow’s-nest was nothing like those nice secure tubs you see in films – just another bare platform, but with iron loops set at waist height on either side of the mast, and a low rail to slip your toes under. The look-out, a picklefaced she-pirate with the build of a Russian trawler captain, showed me how to fasten my belt to the loops, cackling all the while.

‘You and Mistress Mall, heh-heh! Saw you from atop here! A fine disarmin’ stroke you have on you. Go try’t on a Wolf! But ware the return thrust, heh-heh-heh!’ Busy finding my footing, I ignored all that till she thrust her leathery face into mine, more serious now. ‘Twas a fell time in these parts to be tryin’ such jinks, young sir! Best not, when the souffle Erzulie’s a-blowin’! Or there’s no tellin’ what the end might be!’

‘The what?’

The landwind – did you not feel’t? Aye, well, that’s what they calls the sigh of Erzulie down this-a-way, the warm airs blowin’ from the land at even. Aye, and a wicked hot wench she is, to be sure! Sets fire in the blood without reck’nin’ how it’ll burn, or who.’

I grinned. ‘She doesn’t sound so bad. I could use a little fire in mine, maybe.’

‘There’s fire that warms and fire that burns, hah? And when she’s Erzulie Blood-i’the-Eye, Gé-Rouge, then ’ware all that’s young and open; for she’ll run madness in their reins! Might’ve brought you a sword in the heart, she might, that riggish mistress! For is not seven such the sign of her – heh? It’s not for nothin’ they’ve another name for that wind, down Jamaicey way – the Undertaker, so they call it. Sweeps the last breath of the dyin’ away!’ And with a final cackle she plunged over the edge of the platform.

‘Hey!’ I protested, or something equally sensible – and looked down after her.

That really was a mistake.

Emptiness roared up into my face. It was like looking off a cliff – and having it whipped out from under you. There was nothing directly beneath me. No deck, no ship – nothing but the churning ocean an impossible distance below, and the waves heaving greedily up towards me, dropping away with sickening suddenness. My fingers clamped tight to the loop, but the sweat made them slip. My toes were dug in under the rail, but my legs were shaking. I had to turn my head to see the Defiance, almost hidden behind the bulging sails; she looked like a toy boat at the end of a supple stick, bounced and buffeted this way and that by the sea she rode on. And at this height every little movement of that heeling deck became a lurch, a wild whipping sway …

After eternity or thereabouts I managed to force my eyes away, to those inscrutable hills. Against their softly tossing treetops the sway was less noticeable, and I began to ride with the rhythm of it. After a while I was able to turn my mind to the job I seemed to have got stuck with, and risk a careful scan around the darkening horizon. I saw no more than we’d seen since we left the Mississippi; the sun, angry at its fall, and nothing new under it. No other ship; no turn in our luck.

I shifted uneasily on my windblown perch. Look with your own damned sheep’s eyes, Le Stryge had said; and I’d ended up doing exactly that. Just coincidence, of course. It had damn well better be coincidence. But then you couldn’t be sure of anything around here.

Such as exactly what I was supposed to be looking for. Anything capable of defeating Le Stryge’s unpleasant ways of seeing ought to be able to play hob with my plain two eyes. Unless, of course, it only had power over sorcery. But it wouldn’t take much magic to hide things among these lushly overgrown hills. For long hours we’d seen no sign of life bigger than birds and giant butterflies, flutters of flashy colour against the green, and the occasional white thread of smoke rising from a distant clearing, or a patch of leafy thatches. We’d put in at several of these little settlements along the shore. We’d hove to and questioned fishermen in their boats, we’d sent ashore to ask villagers, always the same question – un grand navire noir aux trois mats, orne aux lanternes comme des cranes grotesques, on I’a vu, hein? Its viennent d’enlever une fillette –

And always a veil fell between us. They were plain, lean peasant people for the most part, very simply dressed, looking more African than the West Indians I knew. All but the youngest had that look of premature age that goes with gruelling work and poor food. Their faces, old and young, ran to high bones and hard lines, well made to be inscrutable; their downcast eyes gave nothing away. Even the children, meant to be happy and laughing, would fall silent and scuff their toes in the dust when we spoke to them, and all the cajoling in the world would not move them. You couldn’t blame them; the word that something was brewing must have spread, and they’d no more reason to trust us than the Wolves. In one or two places the very sight of us landing sent villagers bolting screaming into the jungle; in another somebody even shot at us, winging a crewman. Not badly; it was crude bird-shot, fired more in fright than in malice. It wasn’t even worth trying to find whoever fired it among that shadowy tangle. We left them in peace, and went back to using our own eyes.

Mine, now; sweeping this way and that over land and sea and sky, bleak and empty all.

We rounded a promontory, crossed yet another empty bay; no village, no smoke, nothing but trees to the water’s rim. Out ahead, beyond the far headland, the sun was a blazing copper dome sinking into the sea, the clouds like plumes of exploding steam. I thought of Atlantis; was it, too, out here somewhere? In the shadows were all things, it seemed. This ship itself was part of shadow, a lingerer beyond the Core – and I? I had ridden on it, east of the sunrise; for better or worse I was part of it. I had begun to see with different eyes. So where, now, did I belong? The sunset burned the headland ahead into stark silhouette, its fringe of trees bending and tossing in that mocking, stifling breeze.

Except that some weren’t bending or tossing. Only swaying a little, stiffly, leafless. One – two – three –

We were not far off the point. I gathered my nerve and my breath together, leant over and shouted, but it was no use. I hadn’t the knack of hailing; the wind whipped away my words. Any louder, too, and it might be heard elsewhere, give someone the extra minute to run out those enormous guns. Quickly, trying not to fumble, I unclipped my belt and swung down through the open trap – called the ‘lubber’s hole’, suitably enough – and into the shrouds again. It was just like rock-climbing – getting down was the hard part. In one piece, anyhow. My legs were shaking; I was going too slowly. Desperately I looked around, and saw, just below me, one of the back-stays meet the mast – a heavy cable taut as a piano-wire, angling steeply away towards the rail. With abseil gear – but I didn’t have any. Too bad.

Slinging my sword well back, I reached out, wrapped an arm, then a leg, monkey-fashion, about the cable and swung myself across. Hand over hand, that was how to slide down – only I didn’t get the chance. I was sliding already, too fast, the cable skidding through my sweaty hands. I clung like the original monkey on a stick, whimpering, and dug my shoe soles into the rope like brake pads. They juddered across the ridged coils so hard they almost jolted me right off; then they bit. I arrived at the deck green and gasping, my arm streaked with scarlet rope-burns – but in time to wheeze out my message.

It flung the ship into a flurry of action, but noiselessly. Pierce’s one hissed order, as eloquent as his usual bellow, was enough to send the hands scampering to the braces. The slap of their feet on the deck was about the loudest man-made sound. With the embroidered gloves he persisted in clutching, even in this heat, Pierce sketched a sharp line in the air, right to left. The mate lifted his cane in answer; there was one loud creak and rumble as the larboard ports flew open and the guns ran out, and that was all. We were as ready as we could be. In breathless silence, we bucked and dipped through the turbulent seas around the point.

Gradually the lee flank of the headland came into view, as steep and tree-clad as the other, wrapped in deeper twilight. From here the sun was hidden; the only light came from the sunset sky, reflected in the waters of the sheltered bay. And there, in towards the shore, riding easily above the clouds mirrored in that glass-calm pool, was the unmistakeable silhouette of the Chorazin.

The linstocks stopped whirling. The gun-captains held them poised above the touch-holes, ready to rake the Wolves’ ship with yet another terrible barrage. If Clare had escaped our last broadsides, could she still survive this? The mate looked anxiously up to the quarterdeck; we were still sweeping by, across the bay. Already the ideal moment to fire was past. But Pierce stood still, fingering his chin, while Jyp whistled softly between his teeth. There lay our formidable quarry, ports closed, sails furled tight, moored peacefully by bow and stern and showing no light anywhere, nor any other sign of life. And just how likely was that?

‘Head and stern, d’you see?’ whispered Pierce suddenly. Why was he asking me? ‘She’s moored head and stern. Head only, why, she might swing around on a spring, might she not? Bring her guns to bear thus. But now she can’t. God’s wounds! It’s worth the candle! We’ll in and look her over!’ He gestured again, Jyp spun the helm and in the same uncanny silence the deck hands flung themselves on the falls and hauled, taking the strain with a single hissing breath. Even the bosun and his mates dimmed their ritual abuse to a few hoarse whispers, and the mate stood cracking his cane into his palm to set the hauling pace. The sails shifted, the deck dipped; in a fierce, tense hush Defiance swung her nose around and stood in towards the land.

Pierce never took his eyes from the black ship. His brief nod to the mate sent the topmen streaming up the shrouds and along the yardarms with a nonchalance that made me feel slightly sick. Their control was daunting; with hardly a word spoken or a movement wasted the sails were taken in, and Defiance slowed to a stately glide. It brought home to me, with a slight shiver, how old the people I was watching really were. These complex, dangerous evolutions came to them as easily, as automatically as breathing now. They could almost have gone about and shortened sail in their sleep; and why not? They’d been doing it, some of them, for three or four lifetimes. Or more.

Suddenly Pierce flipped up his gloves again, held them high for a second, another – and then brought them sharply down to his side. With its capstan pawl thrown the anchor was trailed down with scarcely a splash to disturb the still waters, and in a second or so Defiance strained gently to a halt. I goggled. With just those two seconds of calculation Pierce had managed to position us neatly at an ideal angle to the black merchantman. Few of her guns could reach us here, but our broadside could rake the stern off her if need be. He’d taken this for granted; the moment the anchor touched water he’d turned away and whispered a barrage of orders. Jyp was already down on the maindeck pulling together a boarding party. I was on my way to muscle in when Mall appeared, hustling along a sick-looking Stryge. She didn’t even glance at me.

‘Well, sorcerer?’ rumbled Pierce.

Stryge scowled at him. The old man really did look exhausted. He coughed raspingly, spat copiously on Pierce’s clean deck and traced a complex figure in the phlegm with his toe. He watched it settle, and sighed. ‘There is little I can tell you. The cloud still hangs about the ship. But if she is not aboard …’ He nodded to the island. ‘Try there.’

‘Some guess!’ I snapped. ‘You’re supposed to be such a powerful sorcerer, and that’s all you can tell me?’

‘I’m spent!’ muttered Stryge. Disdainfully he sniffed the rich, dank odours from the land. ‘And how should I achieve more in this place? I belong to the North. Give me a frosty night air that smells of resin and sharp wood-smoke. Take me back to the pines on the Brocken, where the dark powers meet –’

‘You can’t have been there lately,’ I told him. ‘There aren’t any. The East Germans cut down all the forest and stuck up a damn great concrete blockhouse, like the Berlin Wall –’

Stryge leered. ‘Where the dark powers meet, as I said. Such a stage of human folly suits the sabbats just as well. Or better.’ He seemed to cheer up, and stared again at the shapeless smear of mucus. ‘High up, maybe. Up hills. That’s the best I can do. Now tell this bitch to let me sleep!’

From near sea level the Chorazin looked ten times the size, looming over the longboats as we rowed nearer. It was hard to remember I’d scaled those bulging flanks only days before, and under fire. The two musketeers in our bows kept nervously sweeping their weapons along the high rail; Jyp didn’t stop them. We reached the side without being challenged. Boarding axes hooked quietly on to the blackened planks, and under the watchful eyes of the musketeers in Mall’s longboat the sailors swarmed up the wooden steps as easily as a broad staircase. As for me, I was so much dreading what I’d find that I was at the deck before I knew it, and swinging myself over the rail.

The deck boomed deafeningly under my feet; but there was no watch to be alerted. No sign of anyone, in fact. The high-pitched creak that made everyone jump was just a door swinging in the breeze. As we spread out to search the ship I made for the aft companionway, and with Jyp at my heels hissing caution I swung myself down onto the gloomy stairs.

He could have saved himself the trouble. The moment my head went below the hatchway I knew there was nobody there. I didn’t need to be a warlock or anything. I just knew. It may have been the stillness of the foul air, or something in the way the sounds echoed, our footfalls, the slap and swirl of the water in the bilges; but that ship felt empty. All the way down, deck to deck, it was the same; dark, stinking, still. I tried not to think what it must have been like for Clare, days of it down here among these sewer stenches. But if only she could still be there … Somehow. The lazarette door was locked. I looked at Jyp, shrugged, and blew the lock out with a shot. But as Jyp ripped it open my heart sank; the inner door stood ajar. I knew there’d be nobody inside, but I looked all the same. On the heap of rags meant for a bed lay something dark; I picked it up – and horrified myself by bursting into tears.

‘Her skirt?’ said Jyp. ‘Hey, look, it’s got torn, that’s why she couldn’t keep it on, it’d just fall down. Doesn’t mean she’s not still okay –’

I didn’t explain. It wasn’t just that. It was everything I’d left behind, my ordered office world, my carefully structured little normality, my scrupulously sexless intimacy – or was it our world, our intimacy? The sight of that once-trim skirt brought it all rushing back to me in a flood of emotion I couldn’t even recognize, let alone control. I wanted to hide my head and howl. But I had that much control left, at least; instead I think I said just about every swearword I knew. Even then I spoke four languages, so it must have been quite a lot. Then I rolled the skirt up and thrust it into my belt.

Jyp nodded in judicious agreement. ‘Let’s amscray. See if anyone else’s turned up anything yet.’

But, as we both expected, nobody had. The ship looked bare – not stripped, ready for sea, but bare. And all her boats were gone. That had one obvious answer. Jyp’s sharp order sent our boat’s crew streaming back over the side. ‘Might as well have your boys finish the search,’ he told Mall as we clambered onto the ladder. ‘Follow on in when you’re done. But signal the ship, will you, and have ’em cover us?’

‘Aye, at once!’ she said. ‘But have a care of yourselves!’

She wasted no time. As we pulled away from the shot-scarred flank the Defiance, drawn by her spring cables, was already swinging ponderously at her mooring. It was under the comforting cover of her guns that we rowed for the long crescent of beach. The curtain of jungle-like forest overhanging the dunes was unnerving. It could have hidden an army of snipers, and I expected it to erupt any moment. The moment our keel crunched in the pale sand we flung ourselves into the shallows and streamed up the beach, dropping down behind sandhills, rocks, palm roots, any cover that offered. But nothing came from beneath the ominous darkness of the trees except an amazing chatter of bird-calls.

Jyp lifted his head and peered anxiously up and down the beach. ‘Course, there’s no guaranteeing they did come ashore here; might’ve rowed round to the next bay, or the last. But Stryge, he – hey! See there!’

All I could make out was an odd fan-shaped patch in the dampish sand just above the tideline.

‘Yeah, that’s what I meant! They landed here, okay – then tried to brush out their tracks and keelmarks; nearly always leave a trace if you try that in a hurry. They’ll have stowed the boats somewhere near. Okay, boys!’ he snapped. ‘Up, and get looking! Their boats, their tracks, anything! Before we lose the light!’

We found the boats quickly enough, sunk in the wide pool of a creek at the forest’s edge, with stones and sand providing both weight and camouflage. From there our trackers followed faint traces to an impenetrable-looking thicket of wild maguey and aloes. Trouble had been taken not to disturb it, but close to the ground bent twigs and bruised leaves still bled sap, enough to show that a whole party had passed through only a few hours since. And beyond it you could see the beginnings of a narrow trail, leading away uphill.

Jyp looked at me. ‘Uphill, eh? Never does to ignore that old bastard.’ He plucked out his pocket telescope, and we scanned the slopes above. From here they looked immense, and full of folds and convolutions. High on the hills sunlight still lingered, but it was faint and uncertain.

‘I can’t see a damn thing except treetops,’ I complained.

‘Me neither,’ admitted Jyp. ‘Unless – what d’you make of that?’ He passed me the telescope. ‘Not on this slope, the one beyond, just on this side of the hill. Wouldn’t see it from the ship. Where there’s a sort of shelf before the crest.’

Tropical twilights are short. It took me almost too long to spot it. But a gust of wind ruffled the trees apart just long enough to show a flash of white, and after that the outlines were clear. ‘Got it!’

‘Yeah. Quite something, ain’t it?’

It was a castle. Or rather it was a mansion in unmistakeably Spanish style, a huge relic of the old colonial days; but the elegant white-walled terraces around it were topped with crenellations and embrasures for cannon. ‘Somebody must’ve been afraid of something.’

‘You bet! Way they treated the blacks, those Spaniards, they were always scared crazy ’bout revolt. Wasn’t a wall high enough to save ’em when it came, though.’

‘What d’you make of it?’

‘A day and a night’s march is what I make of it.’

‘That much? It’s not so far.’

‘On foot? Up this hill, down into the next valley or two, then up that slope – and through heavy forest, near as dammit jungle. Far enough, huh? We’ll need supplies. Look, you better hotfoot it back to the beach and meet Mall and her boys. Have ’em fetch up all the boat rations.’

‘How about reinforcements? They’ve emptied their ship. Our sixty against their three hundred or more?’

‘Better odds than we had in the boarding. Even if we stripped Defiance – which we don’t dare do – we still couldn’t match them man for man.’

‘Stryge, then! No, he’s half-dead. But his creatures –’

‘No! We’ve better Wolfbane along. You haven’t seen Mall in action yet, not really. She’s … an experience. But it’s not a thing she can summon up to order, not often.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Yet. A moment back there, I thought you’d maybe found the trick. Anyhow, there isn’t time to fetch more men. Our main hope’s surprise – and speed. Remember, it was only hours back they passed that bush. They may be heading for the castle, sure – but they’re not there yet!’

Night fell, and most of the wind with it; the air hung hot and breathless. The surf’s soft roar grew muted. In the rippling sky the stars danced around an angry moon. Mall’s boat was heading in; I strolled along the shore to meet it, enjoying the darting antics of the fiddler crabs that scuttled around the tideline. I noticed a disturbance in the sand, and squatted down beside the sagging crater of a turtle’s nest, now mostly hatched. Looking around, I saw only one of the tiny hatchlings, coated in sand, struggling gamely almost down to the water. I stood up and went to help him, but a crab dashed in ahead of me, snapped up the little creature in its oversized claw and bore him off flapping to a burrow. I kicked sand into it, feeling futile, but stopped myself; all part of the process of nature, wasn’t it? Great. Tell that to the turtle.

The incoming boat left a wake of cool fire in the still waters; phosphoresence dripped from the oars, swirled around our ankles as we pulled it in. Mall sprang out, and I touched her arm as she stalked past me. ‘Listen – I’m sorry if I offended you! Really sorry! But … Let people think that was just horseplay, Mall. It meant something to me. To you, too.’

She smouldered and walked quickly away from the others. ‘Then let something stand for all, for there’ll be no more! Go, follow me not, go brag of your manhood among your fellow-men! None will doubt it now! But I pray you, pick some other to practise ’t on!’

It was my turn to be stung. ‘That’s bloody unfair! Just what in hell gives you the right to assume I’d show off like that? Any more than you would! I like you! I admire you – I owe you my life! Can’t I even love you a little?’

She sat down in the sand with a bump. ‘Five centuries!’ she said hoarsely, and laughed a little. It sent shivers down my spine; it didn’t sound like human laughter at all. ‘And still I drag the chains! Ah, a nice irony – loved by one I daren’t rebuff, lest I kill what shreds of feeling he’s left himself.’ I was about to reach out; I didn’t realize it, but she did. ‘Nay, never paw me! I’ve scant use for stallions!’ Then, relenting a little, she rubbed her hand awkwardly on my knee. ‘Even ones of some mettle. Come, sirrah!’ she said softly. ‘I’ll not lie with you; but an I live another thousand year I’ll not forget you.’ Her finger and thumb tweaked the sensitive leg nerves with a force that shot me yelping to my feet. ‘Not altogether. Will thus much serve?’

‘It’s a hell of a lot,’ I said humbly.

‘Not Hell!’ she exclaimed, very seriously. ‘Heaven, man! Heaven!’

Under the shadow of the branches, the jungle seemed an eerie, claustrophobic place. The air hung hotter, heavier, incredibly humid, like one vast exhaled breath – bad breath, because it stank. It throbbed with the metallic chir of cicadas and the morbid croaking of tree-frogs. Our few lanterns did little except attract assorted blundering nightlife. My pack seemed to snag in every twig I passed. I was beginning to see Le Stryge’s point about the south, and we weren’t even through the thicket yet.

Cutlasses slashed at the spiny mass, their short weighty blades more use here than broadswords. We didn’t mind leaving a track behind us; quite the opposite. Small birds flew up in a startled twittering as we hacked our way through. ‘Bananaquits, maybe,’ grinned Jyp. ‘Bright little fellers. Only I wish they weren’t so loud.’

I knew what he meant. No point in letting the Wolves hear us coming. Or see us; once we were through the thicket, one by one the lanterns were blown out. The trail was narrow, and the Wolves deliberately hadn’t cleared it much. Between tall ferns it led us, under looping vines invisible in the dark and only too eager to hang us, into the gloomy shadow of royal palms and mango trees, the ground squishy with their overripe fruit. The chatter of small streams surrounded us. Every so often one would cross the path, and we would slip and splash and curse across the mud, sending small frogs scattering. When the moon rose high enough to slip its light between the trees it seemed to help; but also it threw strange shadows, dappled, ambiguous, half alive, into which we couldn’t help poking our swords as we passed.

Time went by, and with it we toiled upward, sweating and sore. The air grew purer, full of sweet heady smells. A grateful breeze freshened the forest’s dank whispers with the rush of surf. Owl cries, more like the hooting whit-tu-whui than any I’d heard back home, bounced back and forth. Some of the other noises that came floating out were scary in the extreme, shrill shrieks and demented gibbering laughter. It was silent things, though, impossible to avoid, that worried me more. The trail was steep; I found myself envying a Wolf’s clawed feet when the soft loam crumbled and slithered away beneath me. The brush on the upper slopes was thinner but tougher, mostly sisal and other spiky-leaved horrors. The sailors marched on like ageless automatons, but me, I was getting tired, very tired. At last Jyp ordered a halt, and I bumped into him before I understood. The reddening, swollen moon hung level with us beyond the nodding palm fronds ahead. We had topped the first slope. Leaving the others for a drink and a bite – biscuit and lukewarm water – we inched forward on our bellies to peer over the edge. ‘Quite a view, huh?’ breathed Jyp softly.

‘Ace,’ I agreed, squirming, wondering what was slithering about under me and did they have snakes here, or scorpions maybe? ‘See anything?’

‘No. Doesn’t mean they’re not out there, though.’ It was certainly quite a sight. The valley yawned wide beneath us, lined with trees whose tops trailed faint ghost-banners of mist beneath the moon. In gaps I glimpsed a snaking band of silver, and a rush of water roared louder than the surf. From the far wall it came; from a steep false summit water skipped down a twisting stair of rocks, to fall at last as a cascading curtain into a shadowed pool. Shining vapours boiled out of it, and a deep insistent voice, and flirting among them the ragged shadows of hunting bats. Above the falls the hill rose straight and steep and thickly wooded to almost twice the height, till it touched the outermost terrace of the castle. You could see it more clearly from here, like a pale ship foundering in a dark sea, yet still dominating the hillside with stony arrogance.

Jyp glanced back. ‘Not long till dawn.’ The sea glimmered through the trees, our mastheads skeletal silhouettes against it, still surprisingly close. We’d mostly been travelling upwards, not away. ‘Better be shifting. Eat up!’

The biscuit wasn’t that sustaining, but as we filed cautiously over the summit Jyp plucked dark fruits from a tree we passed and handed me one. I saw others doing the same, dug my thumbnail in and sniffed cautiously, and got something of a shock. It was a little avocado, far more fragrant than those leathery banes of business lunches back home. The pulp was so juicy and green I hardly missed the vinaigrette. Further on there was an orange tree, and though the fruits were sour they were good to suck for thirst. An hour or so later the moon, mad and burning, set beyond the castle. The air grew cooler, and in the warm damp dark beneath the fading stars the jungle began to stretch and stir expectantly. Chirrups and titters rose among the undergrowth, and an eared dove began cooing in a weird little minor tone, awakening relations and neighbours along the way. By the time an orange sunrise touched the paling sky the air rang with a real dawn chorus, every call imaginable from the chipping of wren and kiskadee to the manic whoops and cackles of things Jyp called Corny-birds – I found out later the name was corneille. As we came downhill the trees changed; we passed through a long grove of calabash trees, and down towards the river whole thickets of mangoes, their fruit dangling disturbingly from long green cords.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Jyp. ‘Thought so. Been cultivated, way back – plantation for the castle up there. Pity they’re not ripe yet.’ He shook his head. ‘Though maybe they’d stick in my gullet. Any plantations here they watered with blood.’

Small parrots or parakeets popped up among the branches like live flowers, or swung upside-down to peer at us, screeching mockingly. Then they took fright at something and flew up with a rush and a flutter, and the rising sun struck flame from their plumage as they wheeled. The air swiftly grew very warm, and the cool rush of the stream drew us like a magnet; we stumbled towards it, hardly noticing the soggy half-marsh that plucked at our boots. Until, that is, the legions of flies descended in a discordantly droning cloud, and sent us bolting and slipping through the stony-bedded stream, beating ineffectually, and up onto the far slopes, steeper and drier, where they didn’t follow. We flung ourselves down to rest, a miserable, muddy and bitten crew; only Mall, who’d brought up the rear, seemed completely untouched.

‘Knew we should’ve brought Stryge!’ I sighed. ‘One whiff of him and they’d have forgotten the rest of us!’

One of the foretopmen grunted. ‘Aye, an’ dropped darn dead t’moment they bit ’un!’

‘Or his little friends –’

‘Like hell!’ said Jyp with soft savagery. ‘Don’t even wish it!’

I was nettled. ‘Okay, okay! They give me the creeps, too – but they saved some necks in the boarding, didn’t they? Mine included. So what’s the matter with them.’

‘You don’t want to know,’ he said bluntly.

‘Hey, come on – I’ve seen a few things too now, remember? The girl – I can’t imagine; but Fynn’s – I don’t know, some kind of werewolf, isn’t he?’

‘No,’ said Mall softly. ‘He is a dog. A yellow cur of the gutters, vicious and strong, deformed by warlockery into the shape of men. Held so by the power of Stryge’s will – as habitation for another mind.’

Even in the sun I shivered. ‘Whose mind?’

‘One dead – or one who has never lived. Either way, a force from outside. From the further regions of the Rim. A spirit.’

‘And the girl? Some animal, too?’

‘No. Peg Powler is an old country name, from my day, for the spirit of a river.’

‘A river?’

Jyp growled. ‘A devouring, drowning spirit. That the old fiend trapped somehow, in the body of one of its victims – a suicide, maybe, or just plain accident. Hope so. But from what little I know, he’d have had to be real close by at the exact moment she died. And well prepared.’

‘Oh Christ,’ I said, wishing I’d never asked. ‘That slime she spouts …’

‘A polluted river,’ spat Jyp, with an irritated glance at Mall. ‘Like the one runs down to those docks of yours, maybe. C’mon, let’s move!’

He drove us on uphill. The trees grew taller on this side of the valley, but on the slope they gave less shade. Many of them were towering trompettes, whose broad fronds like giant fig-leaves spread only from the summit. They let the sun through as it climbed towards the zenith, and it hammered down upon our sweating backs. Incessant metallic chimes rasped across the valley like its maddening voice, but they were only the calls of bellbirds. My mouth was parched, my head aching, but I knew to the last drop how little there was left in my canteen, and cursed the flies that had driven us from the river. The thick ferny mould tore down underfoot, baring the red soil like a raw wound. That was moist enough, and you could hear other streams along the hill, no doubt leading to the falls. But they were too far off our trail. It was early afternoon before we crested the false summit, more or less sliding down into the dip beyond, and sank down gratefully by the muddy little streamlet at its foot.

Something more than tiredness weighed me down; a sick inner emptiness, a chill all that heat could not disperse. Jyp had been right. I wished I’d never asked about Stryge’s creatures. The idea had a special kind of horror that gripped me and shook me and wouldn’t let me go – of possession, of something lurking within a body like a shell, of some other, alien, mind peering out from behind eyes that didn’t belong to it, like painted shutters on an empty, crumbling house. A haunted house. A ghost in a machine; but the wrong ghost, the wrong hands on the controls …

‘Aye,’ said Mall, when I let slip something of what I felt. She splashed the brownish streamlet water on her glowing cheeks. ‘That’s so. Possession’s a thing most potent in any magic, for good or ill. Be it in spellsong of Finnmark or Bermoothes obeah or plain homebred warlockry, a spirit in a body doesn’t belong to it, that’s a terrible thing, an unnatural mingling that unleashes great powers. And if some malign spell fix it there, why then, ‘tis free to walk abroad among men unhindered and turn those powers to all manner of ill. Those creatures, the Stryge hardly dares let them from his sight. Yet they are most imperfect, one an animal, the other a living corpse; neither could go undetected for long among men. And once detected, the remedy’s swift and sure. So fear them, aye, but don’t dwell on them; they’re no harm to you.’

How could I explain it wasn’t them I was afraid of, at all? It was the bare idea – the way some people are scared of spiders or cats or knives scraping plates, sheer abstract terrors. It frightened me whether it had anything to do with me or not, a horrible sense of total vulnerability. And the idea that it might – or with Clare … Almost more than I could stand. Did phobias take living shape, too, outside the Core? I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t explain. I just thanked her; and when Jyp gave the word I went on.

Up here above the falls the trees were changing, growing taller still and thicker; scrubby pines of some kind at first, aromatic eucalyptus, and then tall ormes – Haiitian elms – and fragrant cedars. In their shade the going was easier, but the gloom made me apprehensive.

Jyp seemed to feel it, too. ‘Can’t be far to the castle now,’ he muttered, avoiding my eye.

‘Right! And they’ll be there by now, won’t they? And what’ll they be doing with –’

‘Hell, Steve, I don’t know. Look, whatever they do, these ceremonies of theirs, they’re always at night, right? And we’ll get there before then.’

Just. He didn’t say it; but the word hung in the air, like the dustmotes in the sunbeams that slanted between the trunks. They were slanting low now, though, and dark clouds were rolling in from the west. We hadn’t much time, and I couldn’t even see the bloody castle yet.

That’s what I thought, anyhow. It turned out I’d been looking at it for a while. On this steep slope the mansion itself was hidden by the outermost terrace wall, so thoroughly overgrown that, seen from below, it blended into the tossing greenery behind. So we pushed through a really nasty thicket of spiky-leaved sisal, and it pounced. There were the terrace walls, there was the towering façade of the castle right in front of us, louring over us so suddenly we stopped dead and collided with each other like guilty children. The hands pressed close in a babble of half-voiced oaths. A cool breeze trailed across our faces. The silence that fell was devastating. If ever a place lay in ambush, that one did.

We could see it clearly now, high and stark under the dark clouds rolling swiftly in. That wasn’t the least bit reassuring; it looked as if it could see us. There was an eyeless, gaping quality about those tall windows with their upswept architraves like devilish eyebrows, as if the darkness behind them wasn’t just emptiness but in constant oily motion. But it didn’t look any the less deserted. The tropics aren’t kind to the works of men. Its stucco was stained and crumbling, its stonework root-cracked and rain-worn, the sinister crenellations decaying and the cruel cheveaux-de-frise on the inner walls half toothless with rust. Wrought-iron balconies sagged like withered tendrils; fragments of shutters drooped from half-torn hinges, and the roof gaped tileless in a dozen places. There wasn’t a sign or sound of life.

Until, that is, something rattled. A slow, tormented creak split the air, and faded into a swift, juddering tattoo. In that place, beneath the black clouds rolling in, it was a ghastly sound. It made me think of some ghostly galleon, riding at anchor over the rippling treetops; or of dry bones dancing on a wind-whipped gibbet.

Mall, coming up from the rear, broke the spell. ‘Fools! Asses! What is’t but cane?’ And so it was, a great green and yellow canebrake waving stiffly in the wind at the top of the wall, its stems colliding musically. But the nervous laughter died in our throats, for beyond the brake, at the apex of the terrace, stood a sinister vision. One I, at least, had seen before – the same scarecrow shape from the Vieux Carre graveyard, but far taller, black and stark as a withered tree against the onrushing storm. Its high-collared greatcoat trailed from crossed-stick shoulders the height of my head, its tattered hat tilted forward as if sunk in thought, brooding amidst the dry clattering cane.

‘The Baron’s watching his boneyard!’ said Jyp acidly. But as he spoke the wind seemed to take the hat, for it turned, rolled on the shoulder and lifted as if to look out seaward. As one man we ducked down and crept by like mice beneath a watchful owl. Call us crazy if you like.

At the wall’s foot we found a gateway, flanked by massive pillars; the gates that once blocked it were gone, the hinge pins rusted to stumps. The lintel, ornately carved with a religious subject – St Peter, it looked like, before cockcrow – lay shattered and half buried to one side. Beyond it a long narrow stair climbed to the terrace; its balustrade was ruinous and overgrown, its steps cracked and tilting, but it seemed to be the only way up. Quickly, keeping low, we scurried through and climbed, looking up nervously; we could hardly be more vulnerable here. At the top Jyp beckoned me forward, and together we peered cautiously over the edge. The cracked terrace flagstones stretched out before us to the inner wall, empty except for clumps of bushes and rattling cane; the largest of them hid the sinister stick figure from us – or was it the other way round? Beyond an imposing inner gate, one of whose doors still hung rotting from the hinge, stood another figure like it, but no longer clothed; minus its hat and coat the outstretched scarecrow arms looked more pathetic than sinister.

‘Featherman! Taupo! Come with us!’ hissed Jyp to the two sailors behind us, a big white-haired thug and a grizzled little ferret. ‘No pistols, cold steel only. The rest follow when we pass the word it’s safe. Mall, if we’re jumped, you take command. C’mon, Steve!’

Half crouching, the four of us sped and stumbled across the uneven flags, ducking down behind every convenient bush till we reached the inner gate and hunched down behind the gatepost. We were just peering through the gap between post and sagging gate when a sudden flicker made us whirl around. A pale light spattered the mounting cloudheads above, and a soft crackle echoed between the valley walls. We looked at each other uneasily, then turned back to the gate. Between it and the looming façade of the mansion – palace, almost – lay what must once have been an elegant courtyard, flagged with decorative stones and planted here and there with shady trees in stone tubs. Now they had burst their tubs and grown tall, fastening their roots through the flags with savage vigour. Some had fallen, blown over in a hurricane perhaps, and torn up great stretches of paving in their agonies. Piles of rubble and dirt littered the rest of the court, and the empty windows and gaping door of the great house grinned mockingly down over the wreckage. As far as we could see it was completely empty. But the wide double stairs leading up to it were noticeably clear of rubbish in the middle, as if people had used them lately – a lot of people. We risked putting our heads around the gate, then stepped out swiftly, with ready swords. Except for that one stick-figure the courtyard was empty; there was no sign of any watchers at window or rooftop. Jyp and I turned to wave the others forward – and were hurled off our feet.

Flat on my back, half-winded, I saw Jyp flung back against the gatepost; little Taupo fell on top of him, his neck lolling brokenly. The Featherman was on top of me and kicking furiously at my stomach. I struggled to get out from under, but the kicking rose to a paroxysm and he fell aside, gurgling. I heaved myself up – and faced the dark fingers an instant before they clamped home on my throat. That gave me a split second to do two things – tuck in my chin and thrust up my sword, hard. I felt it sink home with a horrible meaty impact – but the spindly ironhard hands about my neck didn’t so much as twitch, only closed home their appalling grip. I stabbed again, again, twisting the blade as it came out – and then a mighty flash of lightning ripped the air, and showed me my attacker’s face. The exploding thunderclap drowned my scream. It wasn’t monstrous, not in itself, that face. I’d seen its twin in half the little villages, high-boned, leather-hard, dusty-skinned. But not sagging, staring, a glaze-eyed skull under stretched skin. My jawbone creaked as that chill grip tightened, my throat convulsed. It was killing me, this thing, and it wasn’t even looking at me –

Then came a sudden swish like the wind, and the face flew up into the darkness. The grip convulsed, but held till blades thudded into the thin stick-insect arms. No blood spurted, but they relaxed, sagged. In a flare of lightning the headless body rolled aside. Mall jabbed it with her sword, stained tarry black. Flat raindrops pattered on the flagstones.

‘Jyp,’ I croaked as he helped me up, ‘Why’re the zombies in the movies always slow?’

He grinned, fingering a scraped brow. ‘Ever see Frankenstein? Karloff got it about right. Anyhow, they call’em corps-cadavres here; zombi’s what’s got into them.’

‘Will you stand blethering while the heavens fall?’ demanded Mall, and a mighty thunderclap burst the air to punctuate her. ‘Surely we’ve woken the watchdog! Into the castle, and quick!’

Lightnings crossed above the rooftree, thunder battered at us and the rain came sleeting around us as we bolted up the steps. But there was no way we’d rush blindly between those yawning double doors. Those of us with pistols drew and cocked them; I hoped the rain hadn’t got into the priming. Then the lightning flashed again, and in its lurid glare we saw a great hall before us, high-roofed, nobly proportioned, with a dais at one end on which stood the dilapidated remains of high seats, richly carved and canopied – thrones, almost, crumbling and cobweb-shrouded now. It had been a palace, once, this place, for some wealthy noble; but it was horribly empty now. Cautiously we crowded into the doorway.

‘Lanterns!’ order Jyp, whispering despite the storm. ‘Light ’em up, and quick!’

But either the rain had got into them, or the wind was blowing out the tinder, or there was some other cause, because there was a tremendous bother over lighting them. Mall pushed through impatiently, and managed to coax one into feeble life. Then she held it up; and we all shrank together in the middle of the floor. For by its swinging light shadows moved across those wide white walls – but there was nothing to throw them.

They were sharp, clear shadows, the shapes of men and women circling in pairs to a stately step, a minuet, maybe, or a sarabande. You could see every detail of their dress, the women’s immense hoopskirts and high-piled wigs billowing out as they danced, their fans fluttering as they curtsied to the men, whose flared sleeves and ribboned queues stuck out stiffly as they bowed in return. There was no sound of their music, nothing but the sudden rush and splashing of rain. Around us they circled, their shadows swelling and blurring as they neared a light which was not ours, diminishing as the dance swept them away again. It was a dance such as this hall must once have known; but for all that it was peculiarly terrible to see. Then I heard gasps; but I’d already seen it, the darker, solitary silhouette that passed among the dancers like a cloud, dressed like the men but holding a slender cane at an elegant angle. It bowed to them as it passed, elegant as a major-domo or dancing master; and they bowed back, but didn’t rise. The men, faltered, folded, collapsed; the women swayed in their courtesies and sank down. The dance swept round them oblivious; but it was a dance of death, for couple after couple dropped as they turned, hands clutching desperately at each other, at the air, futile. They sank and were gone. But behind the darker shadow another pair would fall in line, heads bent, hands fallen limp, dancing no more.

Only Mall had the nerve to speak. The worst in these things are but shadows!’ she laughed. ‘They’ve no power to harm us! Come!’ She plunged on into the hall, broadsword at the ready, towards the high arch at the rear; its great tapestry curtain had gone grey with the dust that pooled in its sagging folds. As her swordpoint touched it a good half tore and dropped with a thump in a cloud of dust and fat insect larvae. Through the archway we plunged, into a separate hall made less deep by the curving stairways at either end. To the left one of the great pictures, at least twelve feet tall, that hung above the stair had come away. Its gilded frame stood shattered across the ruined middle steps, and spiders were using it for their own delicate works. On the other side the frame still hung, but what it held had been eaten away, leaving only an obscene fungus stain on the wall behind. One look showed nobody had passed either way for centuries – at least no body material; both stairs were curtained thick with dust-caked webs. But between those stairs in the far wall were other doors. They were mostly warped shut, but the central one hung ajar from one hinge, and the splintered wood was recent.

When Mall and I peered in, we found it was a stair, wide but functional; and the darkness it led down into seemed to well up at us. We looked at each, shrugged, and waved the others after us. They obeyed, but not too eagerly – and that was the first time I’d noticed any real hesitation on this whole crazy voyage. Well, I couldn’t blame them. I’d no choice, and Mall and Jyp had made theirs for their own reasons. But even someone who loves gold and hates Wolves can be forgiven for not wanting to walk into such an obvious trap.

Yet walk they did, all the same, as cautiously as us, shuffling down with backs to the walls, pistols at the ready, never sure what the next step would bring, or whether it would be there at all. The air was still, but the lantern-flame cowered and trembled as if a slow breath played upon it; I somehow felt that if anyone but Mall carried it, it wouldn’t have stayed alight. Not that it was much help; but it made more difference than you could imagine. The atmosphere of the place was like a physical weight pressing down on our shoulders, and even when the light caught the edge of a tall vaulted stone arch and we felt the stairwell open out into a wider ambience, the claustrophobia didn’t let up. The storm was no more than a distant rumble. It was quiet as the grave – most graves, anyway; but no way were we alone.

Then, just at the edge of the lamplight there came a sudden flurry and rush of motion. Jyp’s pistol and mine went off together. There was a dazzling flash, and a single high-pitched scream that chilled my heart. That was no Wolf’s cry – who had my panicky shot hit? Then, as my sight cleared, I sagged with relief. On the steps below lay the gory remains of two fat black rats, one cut completely in two, the other, a foreleg blown away, kicking into death. Jyp and I exchanged shamefaced grins.

‘Nice shootin’, pal!’ he said.

‘Some shooting! There must have been a hundred there!’

‘That few?’

Mall held up the lantern, and as they caught the light her long curls flared golden and seemed to redouble it; her pale eyes flashed. Overhead a roughly vaulted ceiling appeared, and to left and right dim outlined alcoves, and the sense of oppression eased a little.

‘Where they stored their wines, maybe!’ whispered Jyp, when it became clear nothing was going to leap out at us just immediately. ‘Sure looks like –’

Something crunched softly under his foot, and he looked down. ‘Maize flour? Well, vittles too, maybe –’

Then the light touched the back of an alcoye. ‘Uh,’ he remarked. ‘Not a wine cellar, then.’

‘Not unless they kept a cask of amontillado,’ I whispered back, looking at the row of dangling chains and fetters, and he smiled wryly.

Mall tossed her curls angrily, and the flames leaped as the lantern swung. Along the wall the row of alcoves stood out, and the rusting remains of iron cages swinging from the roof, that a man might crouch in, but neither sit nor stand. In the centre of the floor opened a brick-built hearth, like a blacksmith’s; but the long-handled irons still standing in its ashen charcoal I knew were not for working metal.

Mall spat like a cat. ‘Those damned dog-Dagoes! May the Devil fry ’em in’s warming-pan! A dungeon! A dungeon for helpless slaves! And a place of torment! Stir you, hell, and swallow it whole to set its bitch-gotten masters in!’

She wasn’t whispering. Her curse shivered the air with its force, and the steel of her voice set pins and needles in my skin. The shadows leaped in panic as she brandished the lantern, and the light flared high and clear. Even the rusty cages creaked and swung, and I shuddered as I saw dangling from one the yellowed bones of a handless arm. Rats had gnawed them, by the look of it. They seemed almost to be pointing, down at the floor. And the new light did indeed show up something there, tracks and swirls and spirals traced out in mounds of yellowish dust. Shapes that reminded me of something, something definitely unpleasant; but all I could think of was how odd it was that they hadn’t gone mouldy, that the rats hadn’t eaten them …

Jyp snapped his fingers. ‘Vevers! In maize flour, of course!’

I remembered then. ‘Jyp, what – these – these are the shapes they smeared all over my office!’

I’ll just bet they are! Crests, signs of the loa! There’ve been rites held here, and not by the Spaniards neither! Sort of heraldry – you make the sign, you invoke ’em – see there, like a ship with a sail, that’s the sea-god Agwé! And just in front of us here, like the compass-rose, that –’ His voice faltered a moment. ‘That’s a friend of yours, that’s Papa Legba – and there, that heart with the swirls around it? They’re swords piercing it –’

‘For is not seven such the sign of her!’ I repeated, astonished.

‘What?’

‘What the look-out said – I’d forgotten it – the dark woman with the leathery face – I thought she was just –’

‘May Henry,’ said Mall thoughtfully. ‘An old Bermoothes pirate, sailed these waters so long she’s crusted with their superstitions like barnacles. She’s strange in mind, aye, but not wandered. A shame she’d not come with us. What’d she say it of?’

‘Of me – after you and I – and the wind, she said the Undertaker’s wind –’

‘That bears off the dying, aye! And evil sendings! And by all that’s clean and holy, she was right! Erzulie, the pierced heart is her sign, the power of love! But this one, this vever, did you not see the shape of it, Jyp?’

‘It’s rough, sure. Sort of slanted; distorted, almost … Oh-oh. You mean this is Erzulie Ge-Rouge?’

‘Aye – Erzulie of the left-hand path, the love of pain and anger! The love that breeds destruction! Erzulie in the thrall of Petro! Don Petro, the loa who warps all the rest, who wrenches them to his own fell purpose! Who twists the good in them to savagery!’ Mall glared at me, panting. ‘Just as it twisted you, Stephen, and I – to set us against one another! A sending rode that wind, a sending of love twisted, love made into a snare and a tripwire …’ She paused, sweat trickling down between her heaving breasts. ‘I was meant to strike you down! Or at least quarrel, aid you no more! To leave you and yours at sorest need! I – I! See, see, they’re all twisted, all turned – all captive – all save his, that heads the rest!’ She stepped forward and swung the lantern high over the largest shape of all, stretching from wall to wall, a great scolloped circle around a cruelly-barbed cross. In sudden fury she kicked at it, savagely, and a choking flurry of dust exploded up into the light. Then, as it fell in thin plumes around her, she froze, and her sword levelled.

‘What was that?’

Out of the obscurity, clear but faint, it came, a haunting echo of a sound that must practically be graven into the very stones about us – a sudden clink of chain, and a short cry, half stifled sob, half scream.

After the shadow-dance, it was almost too much. The hands backed away hastily towards the stair, halfway to panic – and me? I was right there with them. I’d have felt more ashamed of that if Jyp hadn’t reacted the same way, sidestepping hastily over the vevers as he backed off. Only Mall stood her ground, straight and shining in the gloom, and cried aloud ‘Who speaks?’

The curtain of dust swirled before her with impossible energies, but no answer came. But the very ring of that voice, mellow and fearless, drove back the tide of fear that threatened to wash over our minds. And to me above all it brought a sudden realization of what that sound might be. ‘Clare!’ I yelled. ‘Clare! Is it you?’

And this time the answer came – just one word, but it sent me bounding back past Mall, snatching the lantern, and straight through the swirling dust. It was my name.

‘Steve!’

It came from the last alcove along the right-hand wall. So like the rest that we hadn’t even looked into it – and there in the dark, kneeling, her ash-blonde hair straggling and slick about her stained face, was Clare.

Her arms outflung, she was fighting to tear her wrists free of the rusty iron cuffs bolted about them, straining against the massive chain that ran between them through thick staples set in the stone. But at the sight of me she shrank back, then repeated my name slowly, disbelievingly.

‘Steve … Steve? I … Those shots … I couldn’t see … just that awful giant of a woman … and then I heard … I heard … Steve!’ But by then she was babbling, wavering on her knees – and I flung myself at her just in time to catch her as she flopped forward; she felt light and fragile as a bubble, after Mall.

Not quite a classic faint, but nearly. Her eyes were open, but wild, and she writhed in sudden panic as Mall strode up behind me. Small wonder; I was half-afraid she’d heard Clare call her a giant, which she certainly wasn’t. But she did look it then, looming over the lantern like a statue of Fury. The lamplight glittered on her face as it flushed first red then deadly white, anger itself coursing like a living light beneath her clear skin. She left no doubt why, though, when she snatched up the chain and tugged at it.

Clare’s eyes flew open, and widened in sudden horror; she shrank back. ‘Steve! Look out!’

Mall shook her head reassuringly, reaching for Clare’s hands. ‘Soft, soft, my mistress, I’m no Wolf. We’ll straightway pluck the gyves from off these white wrists of yours –’

A harsh, rasping laugh rang through the cellar. ‘But to fasten ’em about thine own, thou barren bitch! Leave the doxy be, or stay in her stead till thou starv’st!’

We swung around as one, and saw what only Clare had seen. Jyp’s voice filled the silence. ‘Ah – crap!’ And that about seemed to sum it up.

We weren’t total fools. Jyp had set a watch on door and stairs. And where the single huge Wolf who now stood on the middle steps had come from, I couldn’t imagine – short of walking through the wall. But there he was, queasily resplendent in a frock-coat of scarlet and filthy lace, with a bell-mouthed pistol levelled at us all. Evidently he was some sort of commander or captain. He stood taller and thinner than the usual run of them, and his hair was left lank and black about his shoulders, but powdered with what looked like gold-dust; his beard was trimmed to a Vandyke point, with sneering moustachios. And though he stood alone, he had an air of unshakeable confidence. Then I saw why, and why no watch at all could have done us any good – except possibly Stryge’s. Around his bare feet the rats were scampering, a whole flood of them pattering down the stairs. And as they gathered around him they sat up swiftly – and on up, rising and swelling as fast as blown flames to manheight and above, tall Wolves riffling their gaudy plumes and stretching with luxurious relief. There could have been a hundred and fifty or more, jostling there on the stairs.

For a long moment nobody said anything; and then Jyp shook his head sadly. ‘From rat to Wolf – piss-poor progress. I call it. Me, I liked you better as you were.’

Mall gave a slight cool chuckle. And it was the same laughter I had heard from her on the beach, the same strange sound; deep and dark and echoing, almost, before it left her throat. She hefted her sword lightly, still chuckling. The Wolf stiffened in alarm, and levelled his gun. She shrugged, opened her hand and let it fall; and the Wolf relaxed. But even as the blade clanged once on the stones she whirled about, turning her back on the Wolves, seized Clare’s chain in both hands – and in a shower of sparks, with one sharp wrench, she shattered chain and staples together. Bits of metal pattered across the flagstones, and smoke curled from the cracked stone around their roots.

She scooped up her sword then and turned back to us, left staring, with a deep satisfied breath and a slow unearthly smile; and it came to me with a slight shiver that somehow she did look taller. Then she looked at the stunned Wolves, threw back her head and laughed again, more loudly, a sound that rang as ordinary laughter might in a bronze bell, or a whole chime of bells, striking strange resonances and harmonies off each other. It was a daunting sound to me, and to the Wolf more terrible still; for he threw up his hands like a man attacked, and fired. Mall’s sword flashed at a speed I couldn’t believe, there was a bang louder than the shot, and the Wolves crowding the stairs ducked away in panic from the spitting sing of a ricochet. She had turned the shot in mid-flight.

The lantern toppled unheeded at her feet, but the light did not falter, it grew, it swelled, for it really was coming from her, shining in radiance from her clear skin, glinting among her hair as it streamed out in some immortal wind. And I, kneeling at her feet with Claire, felt that light blaze through me as if I were a bubble of thin glass, understood at last what had so strongly drawn me to her. Then she cried aloud, once, and stretched out her sword. Light flashed from it, clear and fierce as her gaze, merciless to the shadows it chased. The sword hissed through the air, the Wolves bayed and blinked – and with one laughing shout of ‘At them, Defiants!’ she sprang towards them. We could no more have resisted a whirlwind; dazed and dazzled, we were snatched up, borne along in a comet’s train. Even Clare at my side was shouting with her, and laughing wildly at the flash and bang of my pistols as I fired them into the mass on the stairs, and flung them after. Then with an almost solid crash we were on them, and the killing began.

The mêlée was terrible, swirling this way and that; for the Wolves, though daunted by the sight of Mall transfigured, did not turn tail as they might have – as I would have, or any normal man. They were huge, and had more than twice our numbers; and without Mall we would have been lost. Something drove them as she led us, something dark that devoured light even as she radiated it. We saw it in their maddened eyes as they threw themselves at us, tearing at us with their terrifying strength even as we cut them down, forcing their way down the weapons that thrust through them to reach the wielders. But where she came they could not stand, and she leaped to the aid of men borne down, straddling them like a tower of flame. I clung to Clare and hewed out where I could, and in a sudden swirl of men Jyp caught hold of us both and thrust us towards the stairs where the fight was clearest. A Wolf leaped in my way. I hacked at him as Mall had shown me, he went down and I lunged at the last one in my way. But even as my sword ran through his throat I was bowled aside in a flash of scarlet, and slammed winded against the wall. I heard Clare shriek once, and reeling away, struggling not to fall back into the mass, I saw the scarlet-clad Wolf captain, menacing me with his cutlass, dragging her off up the stair. I swung at him, we crossed blades, but another Wolf brandishing a great Spanish poniard sprang in my way and aimed a stab I couldn’t parry. A flash and a bang scorched my ear, the Wolf’s face convulsed, and he doubled over; looking around, dazed, I saw Jyp below, gesticulating with his pistol. ‘Hey, don’t just stand there!’ he screamed. ‘Get after her!’

Bouncing off the walls like a drunkard, I staggered to the top and out, gulping the cold air in to clear my head. The hall was empty, but a muffled cry and a crash came from the stairs to one side; lightning flared, and the Wolf captain was hobbling along the landing above, lugging a cobwebbed and struggling Clare after him. I ran to the rickety stair and up through the track they’d left, leaping from step to step, hearing many collapse behind me. The boards of the landing were rotten, too, and more than once both the Wolf captain and I were sunk to our ankles in powdering wood, cursing ourselves free. At the landings’ end there was another stair, and though Clare kicked and thrashed at him as he dragged her up it, she delayed him not in the least; and he was fast. He reached the top long before me, and made straight for a wide door; but by a great mercy it was stuck, and he had to hammer at it and finally, as I reached the top, hurl his great weight bodily against it. And with that, as the doors flew open, I was on him.

He rounded on me, pistol in hand, and I ducked frantically. The shot whizzed wide, and I aimed a slash that should have opened him from chest to crotch. It was parried so strongly I was hurled back out onto the landing. I charged back at him. He parried again and skipped aside. I skidded on the rain-soaked floor, collided with a railing behind him, felt it shatter – and go flying out into empty space. I barely stopped myself at the edge, seeing the broken wood dwindle away into the dark below me – then rolled aside just in time as the cutlass crashed into the floor beside me. If I hadn’t been up that mast the black abyss would have held me one moment longer, and my head would have followed the railing. As it was I jabbed viciously, and he sprang back with a growl and a curse, blood welling from his side. That gave me time to scramble up, and I saw where we were: on a gallery running just below the roof, which was mostly open, with little waterfalls of rain pouring down. That emptiness beneath us must be the great hall. Almost certainly he was trying to get to the far side of the house, to some back stair and escape.

But he wasn’t going anywhere now. He was coming for me, letting Clare lie where he’d dropped her, confident he could clear me out of his way first; it showed. Breathing hard, wishing I had just a little more puff left, I levelled my sword.

He sneered – and lunged so quickly I yelped in panic and hopped away. But that overextended him, and he had to drop and duck aside from my own wide slash, right to the fragile rail. There he parried, twisted his blade and slashed at my ankles; I skipped and chopped at him, he caught it and rose to one knee, sending me staggering. I hacked two-handed at his head, he flicked up his cutlass and turned my blow against the rail, smashing it through. Then while my sword was entangled he sprang up and swung a cut. I got free and met it with another and we chopped at each in a flurry of fast blows, back and forth, high and low, with the lightning flickering overhead. I held him off; but three days, even of Mall’s training, doesn’t make a master swordsman – only one who can see the end coming. In this straight slogging match he was bound to win. He had height and strength and reach over me, and whatever nasty experience could make him captain of the Chorazin –

Agony spiked up my leg, and I yelled. His huge foot had stamped down on my shoe – and his clawed toenails pinned it to the spot. His heavy blade sang down on my head. I flung up my own, two-handed, and stopped it – just. But my head only came up to his chest, and he was stronger than me anyway. He leaned, and slowly but inexorably he forced my sword back down onto me. Effort twisted his face into a snarling grin, and threads of slaver dripped from his yellowed tusks.

Then I saw Clare stir and look up, her eyes wide; and suddenly I was back in the office, reading – reading the Chorazin’s database entry …

I caught his eye and winked, though my arms were creaking and it hurt to breathe. ‘Hey, captain – recognize anything?’

He started, stared, his cat-eyes glinting. ‘That sword! So ’twas thou slew Diego my first mate!’ There was laughter in the appalling voice. ‘Vaunt thyself not o’ermuch! Serviceable he was, a most valiant rogue, a lovely bully – but no match for me!’

‘Nor me – was he? And are you so sure you are? Your warehouse raid cocked up – what about that? Your lousy green light put out – the wind knocked out of your sails – how’s about that, Rooke? Or should I call you Azazael?’

That caught him! With a sudden deafening roar he forced me down on my knees, and loomed over me, spitting. ‘How cam’st thou by that name, swine’s stale?’

I’d remembered it from the database entry. ‘Oh – that’s my magic – don’t you remember?’ It’s hard to sound sarcastic when you’re fighting for breath. ‘You traced it back – sent your goons after me – all they got their paws on – a helpless girl! Too stupid – whole pack of you – too frigging thick to catch up with me – me!’

I hadn’t expected that to have the effect it did, the flicker of alarm in the yellow eyes, the sudden relaxing of the pressure. But it did the trick. There was a sudden, sickeningly meaty thump, and he jerked upright, rigid. Any man would have doubled up in helpless agony, but though his slatey face writhed and his cat-eyes bulged he held me still and hewed at me – too late. I’d seen what was coming, and he hadn’t; I ducked under the stroke, and clamping both hands on the hilt I thrust upward. I needn’t have. He gave a horrible gargling yell as the point took him just under the breastbone, but it was the rush of his own blow that drove him onto it and lifted him, impaled, kicking, over my shoulder. A gush of stinking blood burned my arm as he slid off the blade, toppled onto the railing in a shower of splinters – and over, out into emptiness. A terrible dwindling wail ended, abruptly in a splintering crash. Thunder detonated overhead, shaking the roof and showering us with rattling fragments of tile.

I didn’t look after him. I turned to Clare, hopping on one leg clutching the bare foot she’d applied where it mattered, and plunged for the landing. Rotten wood popped and crackled under us; I was afraid we’d fall right through any minute. We ran for the other stairs; there wasn’t enough left of the ones we’d come up. From the inner hall below a sudden uproar arose, and men spilled out across the floor; the crew had fought free of the cellar. Through the fighting Mall streamed like a comet, and where she passed the Wolves hid their eyes and bolted, or died.

‘Grand, Steve, grand!’ she shouted as she saw us. ‘Out, out, away and a’haste! Some other sending comes!’

In an avalanche of disintegrating wood we more or less fell the last flight. As we dashed out into the outer hall after the others the floor shook beneath us, and by the lightning that sizzled around the windows I saw the Wolf captain’s corpse sprawled on the shattered remains of the high thrones. Tremors ran through the ceiling; plaster fell, and the stone walls seemed to quiver and blur with the vibration. In the doorway stood Jyp, frantically waving the men out past him, his other arm hanging limp and darkened. Beside him Mall burned like a white-hot casting, her eyes too bright to look at, her hair rising in wreaths like smoke. Her outstretched sword-arm seemed to fence with the plunging shadows, and keep the tremors at bay. As we passed, last of all, she danced in behind us, backing away, swinging her sword in great hissing sweeps. On the floor a few wounded Wolves writhed or crawled; what others remained were spilling out of the windows in screaming panic, with no heed to us. Out we staggered onto the terrace, Jyp gasping as each step jarred his wounded arm; the rain came flailing down on us and he slipped and fell. I stooped to help, still supporting Claire – and stared in sheer horror.

The lightning was flashing almost constantly now, like a gigantic strobelight; and in its pulsing glare a strange change had come over the frontage of the mansion, some shifting overlay of shadows that formed a sinister image. The tall windows above the door seemed to change shape, to merge into two great dark ovals. It was as if a face had settled on the house, or became visible through it, a face with heavy sunshades resting above cheekbones undershot and fleshless, the door its stretched, screaming gape of a mouth – a mocking deathshead of a face. And even as we stared that face contorted; the whole housefront seemed to soften and swell, the mouth to work, the heavy stone lintel and pillars of the doorway flexing like lips, the rain-slickened stair a curling, glistening tongue reaching out hungrily towards us as we struggled in the rain. Suddenly Mall stood over us, aglow no more, her face grey and drawn, her hair plastered limp about her cheeks by the rain. But she stooped and seized Jyp as if he weighed nothing at all, drew his good arm up over her shoulder and dragged him away across the flags, out of the baleful shadow of the door.

‘Come!’ she panted. ‘I cannot face Ghede now, and he may have others to rally, Wolves or worse –’

Even as she spoke, I saw the wind catch the stickimage at the terrace’s end and strip the clothes from it. The stick-frame toppled forward with a crash; the hat went bowling skyward, but the coat swooped down on us like a vast flapping raven, arms outstretched. Mall’s sword and mine lashed out in the same second and slashed into it; it swirled up and flapped away over the brink of the terrace, riding the blast. The crewmen rallied around us then, taking Jyp from Mall; but I held tight to Clare.

‘Not down the steps!’ she ordered. ‘The way we came is marked! Fly, all! By the back of the terrace – into the jungle! Fly for your lives – and souls!’