The Faeman Quest

Thirty-Six

Henry opened his eyes. There was someone bending over him and as the face swam into focus, he realised it was Pyrgus. ‘Blue?’ Henry whispered. There was a young woman standing behind Pyrgus, but she wasn’t Blue.

‘She’s fine,’ Pyrgus said. ‘She’s going to be fine.’

‘Which is it?’ Henry croaked. The inside of his mouth was cold, his tongue felt twice its normal size and his throat was parched.

Pyrgus repeated, ‘She’s going to be fine.’

Henry struggled to sit up. ‘She was dead. Did someone do a resurrection?’ He felt suddenly chill. Resurrection spells were a very recent development and not always successful. Sometimes they left the person brain damaged.

‘She wasn’t dead,’ Pyrgus insisted.

‘Tell me the truth, Pyrgus,’ Henry said tiredly. ‘I know she died out there on the Broads. The prickleweed got her.’

But Pyrgus grinned at him. ‘Prickleweed toxin has an effect almost identical to a stasis spell. Everything stops, including your personal time field. If the weed doesn’t eat you, you’re usually fine once it wears off. She’s still in bed recovering, but her death was strictly temporary. Had us worried for a while, though.’

The young woman – Henry suddenly realised it was Madame Cardui with her head peeled – said, ‘She’s had treatment, deeah. The healers tell me she’s now sleeping normally.’

‘I want to see her,’ Henry said.

‘Yes, of course: as soon as she wakes up. But the healers haven’t given us clearance on you yet.’

‘I’m fine,’ Henry told him stolidly. ‘I’m in rude good health.’ Then curiosity got the better of him and he added, ‘What happened to me?’

‘Border Redcap attack. The spores produce a state of temporary insanity.’ Pyrgus grinned at him. ‘I’m surprised anybody noticed.’

This was the old, jokey Pyrgus. For the first time, it struck Henry that everything actually was fine. ‘Is Blue really all right?’

‘She just needs rest; and so, apparently, do you. There may be some minor flashbacks, but they’ve flushed most of the spores out of your system. Although…’ He hesitated, then went on, ‘… if you’re feeling up to it, there’s something we need to discuss with you.’

‘I’m feeling up to it.’ Henry started to climb out of bed, but Pyrgus placed a hand on his shoulder to restrain him.

‘We should really be talking to Blue,’ Pyrgus said, ‘but the healers say it’s best not to wake her yet, and there’s a certain urgency about the situation…’

‘Is it Mella?’ Henry asked, suddenly remembering.

‘Mella’s part of it, deeah.’ Madame Cardui pulled a chair to his bedside and sat down. ‘But not the only part.’

‘Is she still missing?’

‘I’m afraid so, deeah, but at least now we know where she is.’

‘Where?’ Henry demanded. When she got back, she’d be grounded for a month. Six months, if he had anything to do with it.

Pyrgus said, ‘She’s in Haleklind.’

Henry stared at him blankly. ‘What’s she doing in Haleklind?’

‘Being held by the Table of Seven, apparently,’ Pyrgus said.

‘Being held by the Table of -?’ Henry made another attempt to get out of bed and this time Pyrgus let him. Madame Cardui handed him a dressing gown. As he pulled it on, Henry said, ‘The last thing Blue and I knew for sure was that she was in the Analogue World. She had a mad notion to visit my mother, then somehow managed to blow up her house. We thought she’d probably come back to the Realm, but why Haleklind? And what do you mean, being held by the Table of Seven? She’s their guest?’

‘Or their prisoner,’ Madame Cardui said quietly.

Henry looked from one to the other. ‘Back up a little. What did she do in Haleklind that made them throw her into prison?’ His daughter was nearly as wild as her mother, but this was way beyond anything he’d have expected.

‘That’s the whole point, Henry,’ Madame Cardui said. ‘So far as we can gather, she did nothing. The motivation appears to be political.’

‘Political? How political? Why political? Haleklind’s a friendly country. Bit paranoid, but we’re not at war with them or anything.’

‘Yet,’ Pyrgus said.

Henry ignored him. ‘OK, why do they say they’re holding her? You must have had our ambassador ask them.’

‘They’re claiming no knowledge of her whatsoever, denying the whole thing.’

‘So we think they have her and they say they haven’t?’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘We’ll soon know the truth of it,’ Madame Cardui chipped in. ‘There’s a sleeper in the ruling council. I’m expecting clarification from him soon.’

‘There’s something else,’ said Pyrgus.

His tone seized Henry’s attention. ‘Go on.’

‘We think Haleklind may be preparing for war.’

Henry frowned. ‘Who with?’

‘I’m afraid it’s with us, deeah,’ Madame Cardui told him.

Henry looked from one to the other with the expression of one who wonders if he’s missed a joke. ‘They can’t go to war with us,’ he said at last. ‘They don’t have the manpower.’ Haleklind was an important country – and a wealthy one – because of its age-old speciality in magic. But while it had an extensive geographical spread, it was grossly under-populated. It had a well-trained standing army, but nothing to match the Empire forces. A thought suddenly occurred to him. ‘They haven’t developed a magical super-weapon, have they?’ He was thinking of something like an H-bomb. The Faerie Realm was mercifully free from atomic weapons, but the wizards were quite capable of coming up with something just as nasty. Next to consumer magic, Haleklind’s second largest source of national income was its weapons industry. So far the wizards had concentrated on improving traditional armaments – bows that fired themselves, heat-seeking spears, clubs that struck with giant strength – but sooner or later they were bound to start thinking of weapons of mass destruction.

‘They have in a manner of speaking,’ Pyrgus told him soberly. ‘They’re breeding manticores.’

‘Manticores?’ Henry echoed.

Pyrgus nodded. ‘Yes.’

Henry said, ‘They’ve been messing about with manticores for years now, haven’t they? I keep reading news reports that they’ve built another one in their laboratories. Actually, I don’t keep reading them: I suppose I’ve seen a couple in the past five years. That’s the trouble, isn’t it? Manticores are very scary creatures, but it takes you a couple of years to build one, so they’re hardly a threat to national security.’

‘I didn’t say build, I said breed. ’

‘But that’s impossible. Breeding manticores is impossible.’

‘Apparently not,’ Pyrgus said. ‘They have herds of them now.’

‘ Herds? ’ Henry looked at Madame Cardui. ‘Did we know about this?’

For the first time since he’d known her, Madame Cardui flushed a little. ‘We did not.’

‘Why not?’

‘Partly because this has been a very recent development, but frankly also because Haleklind has never been a priority for our security services. Nor have manticores, come to that. The bottom line is we never considered them a serious threat.’

‘So what’s the Haleklind plan? Do we know?’

‘Not in any detail yet. But we can speculate about the broad outline.’

‘So speculate,’ Henry told her.

But it was Pyrgus who butted in. ‘Do you know much about manticores, Henry?’

‘Big, scary, magical animals. Body of a lion, tail of a scorpion, head of a man, three rows of teeth, like a shark. In my world they’re considered mythical. Actually they’re considered impossible. In my world unicorns are considered mythical, but you could imagine breeding one out of a horse. Nobody could imagine breeding a manticore.’

‘The wizards imagined it,’ said Pyrgus sourly. ‘Actually, I like manticores. They’re intelligent, but they don’t think the way we do. The tail makes them poisonous: if they sting you, you’re dead. The lion body and shark’s teeth make them fearsome fighters – hand-to-hand combat with a manticore hardly bears thinking about. They can kill a horse with one blow, behead an armoured man much the same way. The one I had ate its way through a solid wall. The -’

‘You had a manticore?’ Henry interrupted.

‘Used to,’ Pyrgus said enthusiastically. ‘I called her Henry after you. But she broke out and made her way back to Haleklind. Actually, that was how we discovered what the wizards were up to. I followed her to Halek-’

‘You called a manticore after me?’ Henry asked, appalled. ‘A female manticore?’

‘She had a human head,’ Pyrgus said.

‘Now, deeahs,’ Madame Cardui put in, ‘perhaps we should stick to the point at hand.’

‘Yes, stick to the point at hand, Pyrgus,’ Henry growled.

‘The point is,’ Pyrgus said, ‘the Haleklind wizards have created manticores and now they’re breeding them. My contacts in the Haleklind Society for the Preservation and Protection of Animals tell me they’re modified manticores -’

‘What’s a modified manticore?’ Henry demanded.

‘Changed from what they are in the wild.’

Henry stared at him. ‘There aren’t any manticores in the wild. The wizards had to create them in the laboratory – you just told me.’

‘All right,’ Pyrgus said impatiently, ‘modified when you compare them to the legends and myths about manticores in the wild, if you want to be pedantic. And I think there actually are some in the wild, if we could only find them. Nymph says -’

‘We are in a crisis situation,’ Madame Cardui interrupted firmly. ‘Please let us stick to the point.’

Pyrgus glared at Henry. ‘The point is the Haleklinders have manticores that are spell protected – terribly difficult to kill. They have manticores that fight like demons – better than demons; far better than demons. They have manticores that are spell-bound to obey orders and have no fear of anything. They have manticores who are just as smart as you and I are in a fight: smarter in some respects because they think differently to the way we do and that makes them creative. They have thousands of them and they’re breeding more all the time. Can you imagine what sort of army that makes?’

Henry could imagine it all too easily. ‘We need to wake up Blue,’ he said.

‘No need – I’m awake now,’ said Blue’s voice from the doorway.