The Slanted Worlds

25

. . . And since that day, in every generation, the eldest male of the Venn family has faced the fearsome choice. Some have died in strange circumstances, others have fled the land, others have marched recklessly to war and been killed in the front line. As if each had a terror of what awaited him in Wintercombe Wood.

But one day, a Venn will re-enter that dark forest forever.

And its Queen will be waiting.

Chronicle of Wintercombe

PIERS RAN INTO them as they straggled back to the house; Venn striding ahead, Gideon at his heels, Wharton trailing behind with Sarah.

“Oh Excellency!” Breathless, he clasped his hands to his hips, doubled up. “So glad I’ve found you . . . message . . . Sarah . . . she’s after the coin . . . knows about it.”

“Message from who?” Venn stared at him. “Piers, who the hell have you left looking after the mirror?”

“The cats. And Maskelyne.”

“Are you insane!”

Piers looked uneasy. Venn swung on Sarah. “You promised to help me,” he said quietly. “Instead you went after the one thing that will destroy me. How can I ever trust you now, Sarah? If my own family betray me, how can I trust anyone?”

She was silent. She wanted to say something to ease his pain, but no words came.

“So where is the broken coin?” His voice was bleak. “Did you get it back? Did you let Summer know the one thing she should never know?”

She was all at once too tired and dismayed to care what he thought. “I tried to get it and failed. Summer kept it in a red box that seemed to hold the whole universe. And though I didn’t tell her what it could do, I think she’s beginning to guess.”

Venn snorted, looking straight ahead through the trees. “My greatest enemy owns half of the device that can destroy everything I’ve worked for. And you gave it to her.”

Sarah was silent. She felt Wharton’s hand squeeze hers, a reassuring warmth. He said, “Look, hadn’t we better get to the Abbey? If Maskelyne takes the mirror . . .”

Venn was already running. They raced after him, through the tangled undergrowth of the bare wood, along paths muddy with rain, leaping fallen branches. Ducking out onto the overgrown lawns, Venn stopped, amazed.

The hillside at the back of the house had moved. Now the wooded cliff and its overgrown graves hung at a new angle, the ancient chapel up there broken in strange formation, on the edge of the ravine.

He seemed struck by it; he whispered, “An avalanche of earth,” and Gideon raised an eyebrow at Sarah.

She said, “Like on Katra Simba?”

Venn turned his winter stare on her. “What do you know about that?”

“Nothing. Except that you survived, and the others didn’t.”

He nodded. “And how I wept for them, Sarah. Deep below the ground, buried in that terror of whiteness, digging my way out with my own hands, how I cried out for them. But the mountain was inexorable. The mountain spat me out and ordered me away. There was nothing I could do.”

He looked away, then said, “The rain has stopped.”

She nodded. Far away, up beyond the gray lid of cloud, the sky was lightening.

As they hurried through the cloister, she felt as if something around them, something in him, was dissolving, cracking, opening wide. It scared her.

At the Monk’s Walk all seven cats were sitting outside the lab.

“What’s this?” Piers ran among them in dismay; he opened the door of the lab and tumbled in.

Rebecca turned. “Thank God!” she said.

Venn hauled her roughly back from the mirror. “What on earth has he done to it?”

For the mirror was not black. It was clear as ice, and through it they saw Jake.

And David.

And Janus.

Janus gazed at the weapon. The he raised the blue discs of his spectacles to Maskelyne. “I am beginning to suspect you made that especially to kill me over and over. Because of course I am just a replicant. A copy of myself.”

Maskelyne nodded. “For now. But one day I’ll find my way back to you. You took my mirror and used it for such evil.”

“We.” Janus’s blue glasses caught the light. “We used it. You yourself experimented with darkness, my friend. You taught me everything I know. You were Blaize to my Merlin. I am simply the pupil who surpasses the master.”

Maskelyne’s aim did not flicker.

“Fire!” Jake growled.

“No need.” The scarred man jerked the weapon toward the mirror. “Leave now. Leave us alone. There’s nothing for you here.”

Janus shrugged, a piqued distaste in his face. He bowed sarcastically to Alicia, who drew herself up stiff with dislike.

“Are you just going to let this man go?” she demanded.

“He’s nothing.” Maskelyne stepped aside. “The original is a thing far in the future. Ask Sarah.”

Janus turned to David. “Tell Venn he will never succeed. Time is too much for any mortal. It will destroy him.”

He turned to the mirror, and to his astonishment, Jake saw that it was a window now, completely transparent, and that they were all in there, Piers, Sarah, Wharton, Venn. And Rebecca, her gaze on Maskelyne, dark and troubled.

Venn came close to the silver frame. “No, it won’t.”

“Oh, you think you’re so different, Venn.” Janus nodded. “And maybe you are. Maybe you can evade time. But that will have its price. And one day soon, you’ll really have to choose. Between being human, or being something other. Between bone or bramble, flesh or feather, love or liberty.” He smiled, coming close to the mirror. “Who knows. Maybe you’ll forget your beloved Leah. Maybe you’re forgetting her even now.”

Venn’s eyes narrowed. But before he could snap out an answer, Janus was gone, walking into the clarity of the mirror. For Jake it was if the man strode quickly down a long tunnel of square rooms, diminishing into the vanishing point like a figure in some optical illusion, but for Sarah, just behind Venn, it was as if Janus walked toward her, growing huger and huger, so that she wanted to step aside, out of his way, but he passed through her, through the room, widening over ceiling and walls, becoming a gray shadow, a cobweb, a smudge.

And, following at his heels, three small shadows of himself, three small grubby schoolboys, who grinned at Jake as they passed, the last one swinging a yo-yo like a pendulum from his outstretched finger.

“Bye, Jake.”

“See you, Jake.”

“Soon, Jake.”

Until they too walked into the shadows and were gone.

Jake’s face was set with that brittle, angry look he often had.

But Venn stayed staring into the mirror. He said, “David?”

Sarah saw Jake’s father. He looked exhausted, his eyes red-rimmed, his face dirty and ill-shaven. He said, “Yes its me, O. I’m coming back to you. It’s just . . .” He looked up quickly at something she couldn’t see. “There might be a tiny delay, that’s all. Is Lorenzo safe?”

“Who?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said, behind him. “We’re both safe.”

“What do you mean? What delay?” Venn gripped the silver frame. “David?”

Somewhere a deep boom sent a ripple through the mirror.

“What’s that? David! What’s happening there?”

Jake looked up, anxious. “We’re under . . .”

An explosion. It sent an enormous shockwave of red-hot air across the lab. Glassware shattered. The mirror went black. Venn was blown backward, Wharton sent staggering into Piers, all the cats’ fur flattened. The baby screamed, and even as she crashed against the bench, Sarah turned to stare at it in astonishment.

Piers picked himself up from the ruins of the workbench. “What was that?”

Wharton looked at Venn. “It sounded like a bomb,” he whispered.

The ceiling imploded, plaster smashing down. Glass from the windows sliced in like shards of light, one catching Jake on the cheek with a splinter of blood. Maskelyne ducked, muttered something and grabbed him. “Come, Jake. We have to go.”

“No!” He squirmed away. “Dad! Listen to me. We can’t leave Alicia here. She’ll die.” His mind was weary with fear and pain; he struggled to make sense of it. “When I come . . . when I arrive, in a few minutes, I speak to her, but then . . . later . . . nothing. I thought she was dead. But what if . . . what if she goes with you.”

Alicia, crouching by the broken sofa, looked up at him. For a moment their eyes met. She said, “You mean for me to journey? Through time? Oh, how absolutely marvelous!”

David caught her hand. “All right. But go! We’ll be right behind you.”

Maskelyne grabbed Jake. He looked at David and said, “First, listen to me now. We found Dee’s manuscript. What it says is important. He says Time is defeated only by love. You must remember that! And the snake’s eye on the bracelet. It opens. Use what you find inside.”

“I will. But go!”

Alicia looked flustered. “Wait! Jake, I have to give you the ticket to the left luggage office. Now, where did I put that? Ah yes, the tea caddy.”

Pressure in the air.

Jake gasped. He felt the scream of the bomb as it fell. He felt it hurtle down through smoke and tiles and rafters. Maskelyne was a darkness pulling him. The touch of the silver bracelet was spilled blood on his arm, the throbbing opening of the mirror his death. Terrible desolation fell on him. “No! Wait!” he yelled. “Wait!”

Too late.

He was dead, in the darkness, in the mirror.

It opened for him, he crossed the invisible threshold and fell out into Wharton’s arms.

“Dad!” he screamed.

But George held him too tight and there was no going back.

Hours later it might have been, he heard Sarah creep into his room.

He lay with his face to the wall, and she sat on the end of the bed for a long moment before he spoke. “He hasn’t come, has he?”

She said softly, “No. But . . .”

“They must have got away.” He didn’t turn; she wondered if it was her he was trying to convince or himself. “When I spoke to Alicia first in the rubble, she was still alive. They never found her body.” He rolled over and his eyes were wet and furious. “They must have journeyed, Sarah, mustn’t they? They must have got out?”

She had never seen him like this. “They had every chance.”

“But where? And it was my fault, that he stayed with her! I needn’t have told him. We could just have gone together.”

“You did the right thing, Jake. You saved her life. And . . . your father . . . he wasn’t . . . he’s not the sort of man to abandon anyone in trouble. You knew that.”

“You think he’s dead.”

She sat without looking at him, her bleak gaze on the scuffed carpet. At last she said, “I don’t know what I think, Jake, not anymore.”

“I found him, Sarah. Just for a few minutes . . . an hour. He was there, with me. And now he’s gone again.”

There was nothing she could say. How could she say that she knew that loss? Because for a few moments the golden crescent of the Zeus coin had been in her hands, and now it was gone, and maybe her parents’ lives and all hope of saving them were gone with it.

Maybe he guessed. He said, “You did what you thought was right. But Venn won’t forgive you.”

“I’m not asking him to.”

“We have to be able to trust you.”

Sidelong, she glanced at him, her blue eyes as cool as Venn’s. “Do you know who the enemy is here, Jake? Not me, not Summer. Not even Janus. The mirror is the enemy. The mirror, and what it offers. It has us all in its power; we already all but worship it.”

He was silent. Then, to her surprise he said, “We need to work together, you and me. Promise me we will. No more secrets.”

She laughed. Then she nodded.

Deep in the house a gong rang. Piers’s yell came up the stairs. “Supper!”

Jake rolled off the bed.

“I’m surprised you can eat,” she said.

“I’m not giving up.” He grimaced, feeling the strapping Wharton had put on the knife slash. “Not on my father. I know him. He’ll be back. Anytime.”

He went out and ran down the stairs. She wondered if the glint in his eyes had been tears, or sheer determination; either way, she envied him. Instead of following, she crossed to the window and opened it, leaning her elbows on the sill.

The night was calm. Over the dark branches of the Wood the moon was a thin crescent.

Below her the kitchen light spilled out across the lawns; she could see the shadow of Piers and then maybe Wharton cross the window.

She stood still, listening, as if the evening called her.

It was the last night of April.

And it was strangely warm.

Small yellow flowers were opening in the aisles of the wood. Cow-parsley stood ghostly, its white umbels wide. She could smell the may, and even as she watched, the undergrowth seemed to ripple into the soft greenery of spring, as if Summer had forgotten her anger, lost interest in her revenge.

Smoke from the Abbey chimneys rose straight in the calm evening air.

A bird chirruped, high above.

Sarah breathed in the sweetness, and despised herself. Jake had failed. She had failed too.

Whatever he said, it was over. Unless . . .

A cheep called her, a last lonely whistle in the twilight.

She looked up, alert.

It fell from high in the blue-and-purple sky. It dropped like a small crystal raindrop, a solitary snowflake, so small she could barely see it at first. And then it was a tiny blue-and-gold bird of wood and feathers, giddying down to land on the windowsill with a broken gold coin in its beak.

Sarah stared in disbelief.

The bird put the coin down carefully on the stone sill. “There.”

It had lost all its tail feathers. One eye had been pecked away. But the other, beady and black, fixed on her. “Of course, there’s no going back now. I’ll have to live in the Dwelling. You’ll have to swear to protect me till she forgets.”

Sarah reached out for the coin, her fingers trembling. She touched the face of Zeus and turned it around, the ancient god with his hooked nose and bold eye, gazing at her through the night.

The bird fluttered past her into the room. “I can stay anywhere. A cuckoo clock. Jewelry box. Anything like that, as long as They don’t find me. And if I were you, I’d hide the coin under a stream of running water, because Summer won’t be able to get it there.” It perched on Jake’s wardrobe.

Sarah held the gold piece tight.

“How did you get away?” she breathed.

The bird gave a puzzled whistle, and tilted its head on one side. “Not quite sure, really. She was on me, caught me, had me gripped in her talons, all ready to tear my head off. Then she just dropped me. As if something else caught her eye.”

Wharton gulped a spoonful of the hot garlic and tomato soup with relish. “Totally fabulous, Piers. One of your best. Home-baked bread?”

“Of course.” Piers wore a chef’s hat at a jaunty angle and new checkered trousers. Happy, he surveyed Horatio chewing a banana, the seven cats licking from identical named bowls, Rebecca and Wharton eating, Jake picking at his bread. “Lovely old food,” he said. “Nothing like it for cheering everyone up.”

Jake flashed a look at Gideon. The changeling sat in the inglenook bench, hugging his knees, brooding into the fire, his patchwork clothes steaming dry.

“What will you do?” Jake asked.

Gideon shrugged. “Stay here. Refugee from the Wood.” He was pale, as if the thought of Summer’s fury chilled him. “At least until she gets back in here.”

“Have some soup.” Wharton pushed a bowl across the table.

“I don’t need to eat.”

“Then maybe you should start. This is not the Summerland, after all. Maybe if you eat, you’ll feel more like a mortal and less like one of those unpleasant creatures.”

Gideon uncurled and came over. Curious, he looked down at the hot liquid, smelled the savory aroma cautiously. “It won’t bite you,” Wharton said. “Actually, you bite it.”

Gideon glared. He took the spoon, dipped it in, and tasted a tiny mouthful. His eyes widened. His whole body seemed to jerk.

Wharton grinned. “Well?”

“It tastes!”

“Tastes?”

“Of . . . things.” Gideon shook his head. How could he explain to them that he hadn’t known until now that everything in the Summerland was tasteless. That their food was like leaves and ashes. He sat and filled another spoonful, hastily, intent. Over his head Wharton raised both eyebrows at Piers.

Jake got up and wandered over to the fire. The cradle had been set up at a safe distance; the baby, changed and washed and full of warm milk, lay gurgling there in comfort, one chubby fist clutching the soft pink blanket.

Jake crouched. Quietly, so Wharton and the others couldn’t hear, he whispered, “Don’t worry. He’ll be back. Your dad. Mine. We’ll get him back, I swear.”

He touched the baby’s warm fingers.

His brother clutched him, tight.

In the lab, Maskelyne said, “You were right to rebuke me.”

“What did Janus mean? About you teaching him things? That you worked with him?”

He touched the green webbing. “One day I’ll tell you everything, Becky, I promise. About how I came to . . . find the mirror . . . and . . .”

“Find?” She came closer, a tall red-haired girl in jeans, so familiar to him, though sometimes it seemed only seconds since she had been a tiny child crying in the night. “I don’t think you found it. I think you created it.”

“Becky . . .”

She held his eye. “I think you were Mortimer Dee, and maybe many other people too, down the centuries. I think you and the mirror have been together a very long time.”

He put his finger lightly to her lips.

“Then keep my secret, Becky.”

They were silent a long moment. Until she said, “For now.”

Alone in his high tower room, Venn heard the spring arrive.

He heard the flowers open on the hawthorn bushes, the bees wake, the small furled buds of oak and ash and rowan rustle and uncurl. He felt the wind change and the breeze shiver, hedgehogs crisp through banks of leaves, tadpoles in the lake open their eyes and grow tails and swarm in the deep green water. Folding his arms, he watched the moon rise and the moths flutter.

He felt light and strange. As if the long dig out of the avalanche on Katra Simba had only ended now, and it was here that he burst out into the fierce blue air and breathed again.

He knew he had taken some step away from being human.

He waited until the hawk flew out of the night and landed on the head of a gargoyle on the sill.

Her bright yellow eye, black-slitted, unblinking, fixed on him.

Her talons gripped the stone.

Venn nodded. “Even you can only delay the spring. What is it you want from me, Summer? What’s your price for our survival?”

But he knew her answer, even as she turned and flew off, high into the purple twilight, and as he watched her, he allowed his eyes to widen to the hard blue of sapphire, let his glance shift, let his face become beaked, alert, fierce as a predator, let his whole body cast off the weight of the earth and the pain of loss.

And fly.

So when Piers slammed the door open moments later with the tea tray and said “Thought you might like some soup,” the room was empty, the window open, only a scatter of dark feathers drifting down on the sill.

Piers put the tray on the bed, came over, and leaned out into the twilight.

Two hawks were soaring high up over the trees. Far off, in the Wood, the strange rhythmic music of the Shee came to him, and he remembered that this night was Beltane, the eve of May Day, one of the magical cusps of the year, and that bonfires would be burning on the moor.

He closed the window and turned, looking up at the portrait of Leah.

Her face, pale in the moonlight, laughed down at him.

“He needs you,” he whispered. “He needs you now or he’s lost forever.”

But she was silent and he knew she could not hear him.

End of Book 2