The Purple Emperor

CHAPTER TWENTY

Fogarty held his right hand out in front of him, palm downwards, and noted it was trembling. What a pain that was! Even when his arthritic fingers were playing hell he'd always prided himself that he could hold it steady as a rock. It was ridiculous to start shaking at his age when it wasn't even his age that had caused the shake.

He didn't know what had caused the shake.

Except he did know what had caused the shake. It was just that what had caused the shake was impossible at his age.

He hadn't felt this confused since he was an adolescent.

Which was how he felt generally – like an adolescent. He wanted to hum a little tune and go out and pick flowers and all that sort of damn-fool nonsense. A thought struck him. Maybe it was the start of senile dementia. They used to call that 'second childhood'. You ended up drooling like a baby and wetting yourself, but maybe you went through an adolescent phase first. At eighty-seven, he was certainly old enough for senile dementia.

He wondered if the healing wizards might have a cure.

The trouble was he didn't want a cure. Apart from the shaking hand, he felt wonderful. He felt excited and strong and confident and full of energy. He felt like going to a concert and ripping up the seats. He'd never heard dementia made you feel like this. Nobody ever told him senility made you want to see Led Zeppelin.

It couldn't be senile dementia.

But if it wasn't senile dementia, it had to be… Fogarty shook his head. It couldn't be that either!

He walked from the master bedroom of his Gatekeeper's lodge into the bathroom, where there was a full-length mirror. His reflection didn't look like him at all. It looked like his grandfather. The odd thing was he didn't feel old. He'd never felt old, not even when the arthritis burned in his hands and he discovered he couldn't run any more without his chest paining and his lungs heaving. But he'd never felt this young either. Most of the time he thought of himself, inside, as somewhere around thirty-five – maybe forty on a bad day. That was a long way from feeling seventeen, which was the way he felt just now.

The weird thing was the way it had happened. One minute he was worrying about Pyrgus, listening to Blue, trying to figure what might be going on. The next, there was a claw gripping his guts, his heart was pounding and his brain had turned to mush. All because. Madame Cardui walked in.

He'd heard about Madame Cardui, of course – she was one of Blue's agents – but nothing had prepared him for the reality. She was the most exotic creature he'd ever seen – tall for a woman, nearly as tall as he was, in fact. She dressed in shudderingly flamboyant gear – a matching gown and headdress in bright, ever-changing colours with jewelled floaters on her feet that held her an inch or more above the floor and made her even taller.

They called her the Painted Lady, he seemed to recall, and he could see why. She was heavily, almost theatrically, made-up: had she once been on stage? He thought he'd heard that about her too. She was accompanied by an orange dwarf, who carried a fat, translucent Persian cat asleep in a gilded cage. But for all the trappings, the most striking thing about her was her eyes – dark, liquid and penetrating.

Those eyes transfixed him like javelins as Blue made the introductions. Madame Cardui reached out a slim hand writhing with serpent rings, smiled to show fine scarlet teeth, gripped his hand firmly and said, 'It is such a pleasure to meet you, Gatekeeper Fogarty. Deeah Princess Blue has told me much about you. May I present my servant Kitterick?' She nodded benignly towards the orange dwarf.

Fogarty, thunderstruck, said nothing. And continued to say nothing as she repeated the story she'd told Blue about the threat of assassination facing someone in the royal household. In fact, the only thing he did say before she swept out of the room at the end of the audience was, 'Madame Cardui, what is your given name?'

She had fixed him again with those wonderful eyes and said in that wonderful voice, 'Cynthia, Gatekeeper Fogarty. My given name is Cynthia.'

Then she was gone and Fogarty stood trembling in her wake. Thank God he'd hidden that from Blue and Pyrgus.

It was ludicrous to have that sort of reaction to a woman at his age. It was ludicrous to have that sort of reaction to a woman at any age. He didn't recall having had it before. Not when he was a kid mooning over some pimply first love he couldn't even remember now. He didn't have it when he met Miriam, the woman he married in his twenties. Admittedly Miriam had been a bit of a moo, but still…

The question was what was he going to do about it?

He knew what he'd have done about it when he was really the age he felt right now. He'd have climbed on the hog and rode out after her like the Lone Bloody Ranger. He'd have grabbed her and kissed her till her ears dropped off. And if she was seeing someone else he'd have beaten him to a pulp.

Wouldn't do now, of course. He was Gatekeeper now, the most respectable, responsible job he'd ever held. Couldn't just take off chasing skirt. More to the point, he was eighty-seven and his days of beating rivals to a pulp were long gone. Unless, of course, he used a cricket bat. Idly he wondered if she had anything going with the dwarf.

He was coming out of the bathroom when somebody started hammering on his front door. Fogarty froze. Nobody was supposed to get anywhere near his home without triggering the security system. There were guards as well – Pyrgus had insisted on that – but even if somebody managed to slip past them, the devices he'd set up would have alerted him long ago. But somebody had got past his guards and his security and was at his door now, in the middle of the night.

Fogarty walked to the bank of view screens he'd installed in his living quarters. The remote periphery looked clear, except for his cloaked guards who showed up as reassuring green shapes. The middle ground was clear as well – a few foxes and rabbits (or what passed for foxes and rabbits in the Realm) but nothing to worry about – so it wasn't any sort of mass attack.

His eyes flickered to the screens that showed his front porch. A tall, hooded figure was reaching out a gloved hand to knock again. There was no obvious sign of weaponry (although the cloak could have hidden anything) but at least the figure was alone. All the same, not even a lone visitor should have passed the guards unnoticed. And nobody, but nobody, should have beaten his security devices. The expected assassination attempt? Blue thought the target must be Pyrgus, but word was the victim would be someone in the royal household. That could still be Pyrgus, but it could also be Blue herself or any one of a dozen senior servants and advisors, including himself.

Would an assassin knock on your front door?

Fogarty's eyes narrowed as he tried to think it through. Everybody knew assassins didn't just come calling at your door: they snuck in the back or through your window or down your chimney. Or they used a transformation spell to disguise their appearance, make them look like a friend or somebody harmless. The clown outside didn't look like a friend, he looked like an assassin. The hood hid the face, the cloak hid the weapons. But why would an assassin want to look like an assassin and walk right up to your front door? Unless he was an extremely cunning assassin who knew that nobody would believe somebody who looked like an assassin and came knocking at your door could possibly really be an assassin. Except that -

Fogarty gave up the attempt and took a cricket bat from the cupboard beside the front door. He'd have preferred his old shotgun, but since he'd used it to kill the Purple Emperor, he thought it was undiplomatic to keep carrying it. What was he going to do – keep explaining he'd been possessed by a demon at the time? Besides, a cricket bat didn't often kill people if you knew what you were doing; and you could use it to break their fingers during the interrogation afterwards. The interrogation afterwards was important. You could find out who sent them and if there was anybody else after you. He hefted the bat and opened the door. 'Good evening, Alan,' said Madame Cardui. 'I thought at our age it might be best to dispense with the preliminaries.' She glanced at the bat as she swept past him. 'Oh, good – shall we be playing games?'

Blue awoke sleepily to find someone was shaking her. Blearily she focused beyond the lamp he was carrying. 'Pyrgus, what are you doing?'

'Hairstreak's sent the Duke of Burgundy to see me,' Pyrgus hissed urgently. 'I need you to tell me what to do.'