The Fatal Child Read online

  For Amanda

  Contents

  PART I: THE LANTERN

  I Sack!

  II Chess Pieces

  III The Woman of Develin

  IV The Haunted Knight

  V Tears

  VI On the Knoll

  VII Over Wine

  VIII The New Servant

  IX The Abyss

  PART II: THE LEAF

  X Night Talk

  XI Mountain Home

  XII Firewood

  XIII Iron on the Wind

  XIV Moonlight in Tarceny

  XV Oak Wreath

  XVI Wulfram’s Crime

  XVII The Scholar

  XVIII Out of the Sea

  XIX The Demon

  XX The Heir of Tuscolo

  XXI In His Cell

  XXII The Wall and the Water

  XXIII The Forbidden Door

  XXIV Love’s Last Stand

  XXV Padry’s Quest

  XXVI The Fall of the Leaf

  PART III: THE DRAGON

  XXVII The Raising of the Sun

  XXVIII Weapons of Paper

  XXIX Signs at Bay

  XXX Dreams and Tidings

  XXXI Campfires

  XXXII The Son-eating

  XXXIII The Last Command

  XXXIV Lakeshore

  PART I

  THE LANTERN

  I

  Sack!

  he wall was down, the breach taken. Buildings were on fire. In the courtyards the men had turned to murder. They peered through armoured eye-slits at the figures who ran before them. They bellowed in their visors with the lust of the chase. Screams hung like the smoke in the air.

  Among the sheds near the palace gardens some fugitives were cornered. They were servants – unarmed scullions and barrow-boys. But the attackers in their madness saw only living flesh. They hunted after them through the little rooms, overturning the pots and barrows and flinging aside the stacks of hoes to catch the squirming, rag-clad bodies that hid there, and to hack and hack and hack and stand grunting, even laughing, over the bloody figures at their feet.

  One of the sheds had been barricaded. An armoured man, covered in dirt and blood, was flinging himself at the door. It shuddered at each rush but inside there were bodies pressed against it. It did not give way. The attacker roared like a drunk, ‘Here, here!’ and threw himself at the door again. Others were beginning to gather, clutching weapons that dribbled with fresh blood.

  ‘Fire it!’ cried one.

  ‘An axe, an axe!’ bellowed the madman at the door. Another yelled and lunged at a little window where a pale face had shown itself fleetingly from within. His blade prised the shutter open. He reached through to flail at the people inside. They must have recoiled, for suddenly the door was giving and the men battering at it were tumbling forward in a clatter of arms and swearing.

  More cries, from behind them now! Another group ran up, yelling ‘Quarter!’ in voices already hoarse from shouting. They were armoured, too, with mail and open helmets, but carried only staffs. Frenziedly they seized on the knights in the doorway and pulled them back.

  ‘Quarter!’ screamed one, kneeling on the chest of the fallen madman with his nose an inch from the man’s helm. ‘In the King’s name!’

  The madman thrashed and bellowed but his sword was gone and he was pinned. The newcomers clustered around their leader, blocking the doorway. One looked within.

  ‘They’re alive still,’ he said.

  ‘Quarter!’ cried the man on the fallen knight’s chest. He was a fat, red-faced fellow with greying brows who glared at the murderous men before him. ‘In the name of the King.’

  ‘King?’ groaned the knight on the ground. ‘Who calls on the King?’

  ‘Thomas Padry, King’s chancellor,’ said the fat man, sweating in his helmet and coat of iron. ‘The King promised me every man, woman or child over whom I laid my staff.’

  The knight was silent for a moment, as if the things that made him human were reassembling slowly in his brain.

  ‘He did,’ he muttered. ‘He did. Let me up.’

  Slowly they picked themselves off the ground together and looked at one another. The bloody knight towered over the fat chancellor. His face, enclosed in his helm, could not be seen. His surplice was gone, torn from him in the fight, or perhaps he had never worn one. His shield was gone, too. There was no device on him but the streaks of blood on his mail.

  The chancellor stood his ground and held his staff. All around them the air drifted with smoke and the sounds of screams.

  The knight bowed his head and turned. ‘Come,’ he said to his fellow murderers. ‘There is more to do.’ With a slow clatter of arms and the faceless glances of helms they followed him away.

  Thomas Padry stood at the door to the shed. He could see, above the line of the rooftops, the battlements of the great round keep. Up there, tiny but clear, the dark heads of the defenders moved quickly in and out of the cover while the delicate flick, flick of arrows flew around them. Down below there were shouts and the sound of running. Beside him someone was giggling – a high, hysterical sound that broke into sobs. Some of his companions had begun to coax the survivors out of their refuge and into the dreadful sunlight. Others were checking the remaining sheds, pausing cautiously in the doorways and calling within – into the seeping, responseless dark where murder had been done.

  He leaned against the doorpost, shaking with exhaustion. His throat was hoarse and his skin was soaked. He felt the weight of his armour settling heavily on him. Armour! By the Angels, he hated it almost as much as the things it was supposed to protect him from! The padded leather coat rucked and heaved with every move he made, rubbing his skin sore in a dozen places. And the shirt of iron rings he wore over that dragged him down so that his shoulders and knees sagged. He could not run so much as waddle, and he could not see so much as peer through the frame of his helmet like a poor carthorse trying to look past its blinkers. He was sweating like a roast in an oven. He could have drunk a bottle – no, a butt – of water without stopping for breath. Come to that, he was short of breath as well. But there was no time to rest or think or drink. There was more to do.

  One of his men hurried white-faced from a shed, propelled by something he had seen there. He dropped to his knees. A second later he began to vomit.

  Padry heaved himself from the doorpost and lumbered over to the kneeling man. He knew he should have told them. He had told them, but he should have told them better, the things that really happened when men had iron in their hands. These boys were not warriors. They were clerks and priests who spent their days copying his documents. They had volunteered when he had appealed to them, but they had had no idea what it would be like. And it was too late to tell them now. Now they knew, and they would never forget. They had seen men pinned to doors by arrows through the ear or tongue or testicles. They had seen a babe still mewing bloodily on the point of a pike. They would carry the images in their heads for ever, as he did.

  All he could do for them was …

  ‘Be glad if your stomach turns, Master Ricard,’ he said, patting the clerk’s shoulder and speaking in what he hoped was a kindly, jovial voice. ‘For it is a sure sign that you are still with us.’

  The man climbed slowly to his feet, pointing into the shed. He could not speak. Padry, who had no wish to look on this particular horror himself, took him gently by the arm and steered him away.

  ‘The one in there has no need of us, I take it,’ he said.

  ‘No, master,’ grunted the young man. ‘No.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Padry, as cheerfully as he could, ‘let us busy ourselves with those who have. And if your heart is the heavier, why, your belly is the lighter now. So you may make the same s
peed as before!’

  ‘Yes, master,’ said the clerk, still shaking his head.

  Yes, master, thought Padry. And tonight, my boy, you will tell your fellows it was not the blood that made you gag but your master’s wordplay. And they will all say, Oh aye! and together you will repeat all the other things I’ve said to you while these things embraced you. And you will roll your eyes and mock me, imitate my voice and my walk, and laugh until you are sick once more. And I forgive you for it. I forgive all of you, for you have followed me out of love and I know it.

  Besides, if a man could not laugh today, he would surely scream.

  ‘Well done,’ he said, patting the man’s shoulder again. ‘Now— What? What?’

  Someone was pulling at his other arm. It was a woman, one of the survivors from the hut. She was dressed like a high-standing servant. Her face was narrow and bird-like. Her accent was so thick that he could not understand what she was saying to him. But she was speaking the same words, again and again, and pulling at him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, as soothingly as he could. ‘We won’t harm you.’

  Still she was pulling at his arm and saying the same thing, urgently. Still he could not understand her. She must be one of the hill people, he thought – the heathen, wretched folk who lived in the mountains and the march west of Derewater. What was she doing here? What fate had brought…?

  Again she pulled at him, almost shrieking now. And she pointed away behind her.

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ he grumbled. ‘I’m coming. Lex!’

  ‘Yes, Chancellor?’ said one of the young priests with him.

  ‘I’m going with this one. You’ll have to get the rest of them out of here. And spare some to keep looking, will you? Find every one we can.’

  ‘Yes, Chancellor.’

  He followed the hillwoman in a daze of exhaustion, out behind the sheds and down a short mews. There was a wall ahead of him. Beyond it was the keep. Angels send that she did not want him to go in there! The mines below it had been fired hours ago. The props would be down to ashy nothing by now. It should have fallen already. Looking up, he wondered if the stonework was indeed beginning to sag as its foundations were eaten away.

  The woman led him on, down the mews, straight towards the keep. At the far end he could see a flight of steps leading up to a little postern door. His nerve failed him. ‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘We can’t go in there!’

  They would shoot him from the roof even if he tried! Whoever was still in there was going down to the bitter end.

  But she screamed at him and pulled at his hand. He followed, feet stumbling. There was a body lying face down near the foot of the steps …

  In the left wall of the mews was a little iron-grille door. The woman ran to it, looked through and called. Then she turned to Padry and beckoned urgently.

  Padry glanced fearfully upwards. They were within easy shot of the keep. Dark slits looked down on him. Anyone behind them with a crossbow …

  Hurry!

  He came to the door and peered through. He blinked.

  For a moment it seemed to him that he must be looking through a window in time to another place. It was a place he knew well. It was the small walled garden in Tuscolo, where he would walk when he needed to clear his mind, and where no murder had ever come. There were colonnades about it and pavements lined with pots of sweet-smelling plants – all the things the fevered brain needed to calm it and set it on the path of contemplation. And in the middle of the court there was the same old fountain with the same wide stone bowl, like a great cup belonging to some giant of legend.

  By the fountain, looking away from him, was a child. She wore a dress of rich blue. Her hair was long and dark. She was standing quite still.

  Padry gripped the bars. This was no vision. The garden was like the one in Tuscolo, very like. It was bright and calm in the sunshine. But it was here in Velis, and beyond its walls the plumes of smoke drifted and screams still tortured the air. This little pocket of Heaven was surrounded by a hell that would consume it in minutes.

  Beside him the hillwoman bent and called urgently through the bars of the door. The word sounded like ‘Atti!’ The child must have heard her but she did not look. She stood with her dark plaits falling over her dress and ignored them. She ignored everything that was happening around her.

  Padry cursed and tried the door. It was bolted from within. He tried to force his hand through the bars but the fine iron tracery would not let him. This is Heaven, it seemed to say. It is not for you.

  He shook the bars again. Useless. He must not panic. The just man should not panic. Nor should the philosopher weep at the pity of the world.

  ‘Atti! Come!’ called the woman beside him.

  He bent and called, too. ‘You must come,’ he hooted. ‘It is not safe!’

  The child did not look at them.

  ‘Atti!’ wailed the hillwoman.

  ‘Atti!’ he echoed, assuming this was the child’s name.

  She did turn, then. And it seemed to him that it was at his voice that she turned – perhaps simply to see this stranger who presumed to call her so. He beckoned urgently.

  ‘Come. Come, dear.’

  For a moment she turned away once more. She stood in the sunlight by the fountain with all the war and fury around separated from her only by the thinness of a garden wall. But then she seemed to change her mind. She faced them, and came walking slowly down the flowered paths towards the door.

  And Angels! There were arrows falling in the garden, dropping from the tops of their arcs near the keep roof! They fell like single spots of rain. The sunlight flashed on them as they tumbled from the sky. But still the child walked towards him, keeping her eyes on his face.

  ‘Can you open it?’ he said, and shook the gate again.

  She looked at him with dark brown eyes. She might have been no more than eleven years old. She was fine-boned, small and solemn. Her skin was pale, her brows beautiful and dark, her nose finishing delightfully in a curve that was not quite snub. He saw that in a very few years she would be enchanting indeed – if she lived. And he knew who she must be.

  ‘You have to open it,’ he said. ‘Quickly!’

  She put out her hand and drew the bolt. The door to the little Heaven opened. Scarcely believing the grace that had been granted to them, Padry reached and took her hand. It doesn’t matter who she is, he thought. She is a soul like any other, and more innocent than most. Angels, only let me get her out of this!

  She was ignoring the hillwoman, who must have been her maid. She was ignoring her with the childish determination of a girl who had quarrelled and had not yet forgiven. Of course the maid would have been trying to hide her, but the girl, frightened, must have run away to lock herself in the fountain garden while the King’s warriors stormed through the stronghold and murdered everyone they could.

  ‘Come!’ he said, glancing upwards at the keep. (Umbriel! Was it about to fall?) Still keeping hold of the child’s hand, he hurried back down the mews with the hillwoman at his heels. Lex and a couple of his fellows were waiting at the sheds.

  ‘I’ve another one!’ said Padry. ‘Lex, I’ve another one!’

  ‘Another wordplay, master? Or a soul?’

  Padry looked down at the girl, who still held his hand. ‘Oh, it is a soul, I think.’

  ‘Angels! Isn’t that the Baldwin child?’

  ‘I think so. Can you take her to the breach?’

  ‘We should take her to the King.’

  ‘To the breach first,’ said Padry, panting. ‘There will be time to find and tell the King later. Also …’ He hesitated. ‘Also,’ he went on, ‘I think it would be wise to let Gueronius forget that I sat on his chest, before I see him again.’

  Lex’s jaw dropped. ‘That bloody knight? That was the King?’

  ‘None other.’

  Lex shook his head in disbelief. He said something. But his words were lost in the long roar of the keep falling.

  II />
  Chess Pieces

  t sunset King Gueronius was in his tent in the dunes above the sea. He had put off his armour, bathed and then oiled his young beard with scents. He wore blue silks with the great yellow sun of his house gleaming on them. He had a cup of wine in his hand and had himself poured another for his chief ally, the marshal Orcrim, who captained the troops of the Lady of Develin.

  The marshal was a white-haired giant of a man whose age had robbed him of the use of his legs. He lay propped on cushions on his litter, frowning over a chessboard on which black and white pieces stood locked in silent combat. But the King (who was losing) appeared to have forgotten the game. He paced to and fro, laughing, talking, pausing now and then to gaze out at the glowing horizon.

  ‘Do you see?’ he cried, pointing across the bay. ‘Do you see all the jewels of Velis that they would have kept from us? Now they shall belong to us – and not only to us, but to all men! The sea is ours again, as it should be. So Wulfram came from the sea, with three ships, four Angels, seven sons and one thing!’ His finger swept the wavetops. In the long light of the summer evening they glittered like jewels indeed.

  ‘A salty prize,’ said Orcrim drily. He jerked his chin. ‘I should have said the city itself was a greater reward for this day’s work.’

  Across the bay rose Velis, the second city of the Kingdom, on its pair of round hills. Its walls glowed in the low sun. Heavy smoke still trailed from the castle, blown southward by the sea breeze. Where the keep had ruled the skyline there was now only an absence. Without it the city looked unbalanced. Its spires and towers clustered awkwardly like witnesses at the death of a friend.

  ‘Velis is a prize, yes,’ said the King. ‘But where does her wealth come from? From the sea. Orcrim, in my city of Tuscolo I have found treaties drawn in secret by past kings, with Velis – with Velis, as if she were an equal power and not a subject of the Crown! To Velis alone was granted the right to trade with merchants from other lands, provided that they met in secret places, neither their land nor ours, and that no Outlander should set foot in the Kingdom itself. Orcrim, did you know there were other lands beyond the sea?’