Druids Sword (3 page)

As he had in his dream, Jack paused once they stood on the pavement outside. There was a fair amount of traffic on the road—mostly lorries and taxicabs, all with their headlamps dimmed—but few pedestrians. Many buildings were darkened, and many streetlamps left unlit.

Most people would be home, glued to the wireless, waiting on news from Europe.

Or Downing Street.

And, as he had in his dream, Jack looked northwards. It was difficult from this angle, but he
thought he could make out the dome of St Paul’s across the Thames.

He shivered again, and silently cursed the fact he’d agreed to come home.

“The car’s this way, Jack,” said Silvius, nodding to a point further along the road.

“You’re driving?”

Silvius ginned. “Yes. Normally Harry would have given me a driver—he’s certainly surrounded with enough lackeys at Faerie Hill Manor—but I thought that for tonight we might like to talk. Catch you up on the news, so to speak.”

They’d been walking along the pavement towards Silvius’ car, but now Jack stopped again. “Harry?”

Silvius shifted the weight of Jack’s holdall into his other hand. “Brigadier—retired—Sir Harold Cole.” His grin spread a bit wider as he waited for his son’s reaction.

Jack suddenly realised who Silvius meant and gave a short nod of understanding. Coel, reborn as Harold, King of England, reborn as Charles II—the Lord of the Faerie. Harold Cole now, in this mortal world. Jack hadn’t realised, as the only times he’d met with the man was when he walked in his Faerie form.

“When he’s in this land of toil the Lord of the Faerie becomes Harry Cole,” Silvius said as they moved on. “He lives as a sort of…oh, a sort of a ‘boffin’ up at Faerie Hill Manor in Epping Forest. No one—beyond those of us who have known him for the past few thousand years, of course—really knows what he does, but he is trusted within the highest echelons of government and military and is consulted by both on matters of intelligence and defence. He’s a close friend of the king.” Silvius slid a look Jack’s way. “You know…”

“That John Thornton has been reborn as George VI? Yes, I knew that.” Jack gave a short laugh.

“We’ve been handing that pretty title about our group fairly evenly, I think.”

“Very democratically,” Silvius agreed. Then he stopped by a huge black saloon car. “Here we are.”

He stowed Jack’s holdall in the boot, nodding for Jack to get in the passenger side.

When he was behind the wheel, Silvius took a moment to draw on his leather gloves. “It’s been bad without you, Jack,” he said, looking ahead at the road rather than at his son. “None of us know what we can do against the Troy—”

“I don’t want to talk about that now,” Jack said quietly, his own eyes fixed ahead. His hand fumbled about in the pocket of his greatcoat and he drew out his cigarettes and matches. “Smoke?”

Silvius shook his head. “Jack—”

“Not now, Silvius, please,” Jack said, then struck a match and drew deeply on his cigarette. “Not yet.”

Silvius sighed, started up the car, and drove off.

Within moments they were on Blackfriars Bridge, and moments after that Silvius turned the car right, up Ludgate Hill.

“Silvius?” Jack straightened in his seat. “Where are we going?”

“To pick someone up,” Silvius said. “Another reason neither Harry or I wanted a civilian driver tonight.”

Jack tensed, his cigarette forgotten in his hand. They were driving directly towards St Paul’s Cathedral.

S
ilvius pulled the car to a stop half on the pavement, half on the road, just outside the quire at the eastern end of St Paul’s Cathedral. Jack didn’t believe this was quite legal, but the last thing he wanted to do right now was argue parking etiquette with his father. His heart was thumping and his breath felt tight in his chest.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to get this close, this quickly.

“What are we doing here, Silvius?” His cigarette suddenly burned at his fingers, and Jack gave a exclamation and stubbed it out in the car’s ashtray.

Silvius glanced at his son. “I told you. We’re here to pick someone up. Who do you think, Jack?”

Catling?
No, not her. Neither Silvius, nor anyone associated with him or the Lord of the Faerie, would want Catling. The land, as represented by the Faerie, loathed the Troy Game, believing it more likely to destroy the land than protect it.

Jack glared at his father, then wrenched open the car door and climbed out, slamming the door behind him.

Silvius had the sense to stay where he was.

Jack looked over the roof of the car in the direction of Cheapside as it branched off to run eastward towards the Tower. Traffic was heavy
around St Paul’s, both vehicular and pedestrian, and Jack wondered that no one complained about Silvius’ big saloon parked partway on the pavement.

But both people and vehicles flowed around the car without a second glance, and Jack supposed Silvius must be using a little of the Faerie to smooth out whatever blockage he caused to traffic.

Jack took a deep breath, and turned around.

St Paul’s loomed above him. Gods, it was massive. He’d seen photos of Wren’s masterpiece, but nothing prepared him for the sheer enormity of the structure.

Cornelia’s stone hall.
This was it. The last battlefield. Finally.

Jack thrust his hands inside the deep pockets of his greatcoat, then clenched them. He thought of all the times he had met Cornelia—and later, Caela, as she had been reborn, and now Noah—inside her visionary stone hall. All that rancour and bitterness and misunderstanding they had shared within it. The vision of her lying with Asterion. His murdering her.

Asterion had torn her to pieces, but he hadn’t quite
murdered
Noah, had he?
And she still loved him? After all the agony he’d put her through?

Jack fought down the anger which, after so many hundreds of years, still threatened to overwhelm him. Did
he
still love and want her? He didn’t know.

He was terrified of meeting her.

A movement caught his eye. There were a score of people moving through St Paul’s churchyard at that particular moment, all bustling into or from the cathedral, or taking a short cut through the gardens, but this one movement grabbed at Jack’s attention.

A man, disguised by the gloom. Coming slowly towards Jack and the car.

Moving slowly, dragging a leg.

Jack let his breath out on a ragged sigh.
Walter Herne.
Loth-reborn.

Walter had walked under the low light of a nearby lamp now, and Jack could see him clearly. A short and neat man, fair-haired with a chubby-cheeked face. He was in what Jack called “civvies”: a white shirt under a faded Fair Isle hand-knitted pullover, topped with a tweed jacket. Somewhat threadbare trousers. A dog collar. He was using a walking stick, putting his left foot gingerly to the ground.

“Not permanently crippled, Jack,” Walter said as he came close and held out a hand. “Fell off the damn bicycle on the weekend and sprained my ankle. Be right as rain in a couple of days.”

Jack hesitated, then took Walter’s hand. “You preach
here?
” He flicked a glance at the cathedral.

Walter stared at him a long moment, a small amused smile on his face. “I’m not that brave, Jack. I’ve just been spending the afternoon in the cathedral library. I don’t have a regular parish. Just fill in when and where needed. Now…well, at the moment I appear to be on sick leave. I’m sure I’ll find enough to keep me busy, what with the war and all.”

What war are you referring to, Walter?
“And are you sure you want to participate in
this
war?” Jack asked, nodding at the cathedral.

Three hundred years ago, as James Duke of York, Walter had done everything he could to deny his ancient past and heritage, including a fanatical devotion to Christianity—a total contradiction to his life as a powerful pagan priest when he’d lived as Loth. Jack didn’t hold out much hope Walter had improved in this life, not from the evidence of that dog collar, but why else would he be here tonight?

“I am sick to death of it, Jack,” Walter said, all humour draining from his face. “I want it to end so that I might be at peace.”

“Amen to that,” said Silvius, who had opened his door and was now standing looking over the roof of
the car towards Jack and Walter. “Unless you want to do some sightseeing, Jack, would you two like to get inside so that we can hasten with all possible speed towards the nice reception that I know awaits us?”

That last earned him yet another cynical glance from Jack, but both he and Walter moved towards the car. Walter opened the back door and got inside, stretching his bad leg along the bench seat, but just before Jack slid down into the front seat he stopped and looked skyward.

For a moment he thought he saw something hanging in the sky. A shadow…He frowned, trying to concentrate. Whatever it was, it made his Kingman blood tingle, as if he were being summoned. Without thinking, Jack half raised his hand to reach out…

And then it was gone. Jack thought it must just have been a shadow only of his nerves, and nothing more.

“Jack?” Silvius said, and Jack gave a tiny shake of his head and slid into the car seat, closing the door after him.

A moment later Silvius pulled out into Aldersgate and headed north, turning in a more easterly direction once he was past London’s wall.

As the car vanished around a corner, two dark figures stepped out from the shadow of St Paul’s southern face. Dressed almost identically in belted overcoats and with broad-brimmed felt hats pulled low over their foreheads, the men stared for a moment after the car, then both looked upwards.

One of the men hissed urgently, “D’you see? D’you see?”, one hand clutching at the other man’s shoulder.

“Aye,” said the other, softly, “it’s alive.”

“Our mistress has done well.”

“
He’s
back. She said it would appear when
he
came back. When
he
and
she
were together in London.”

His brother giggled. “It’s a pretty thing, isn’t it? A pretty dancing.”

“Shush!” the other hissed. “Careful what you say!”

They fell into silence, now looking furtively about the streets, their shoulders hunched, hands thrust into the deep pockets of their overcoats.

“It’ll want to feed, then,” said one, eventually.

The other took his time in replying, but when he did his voice was rigid with excitement. “It’ll want to feed
tonight!
”

Both men grinned, their teeth sharply white.

Then they were gone, and the streets of London were suddenly far more dangerous than a moment earlier.

They had been driving for more than fifteen minutes, slowly wending their way through the eastern and northern suburbs of London, when Silvius finally broke the silence.

“You know where we’re going?” he said quietly.

Jack took a moment to respond. “Yeah. Epping Forest.” He lit a cigarette, using it as an excuse to pause. “And Faerie Hill Manor. I’ve been dreaming of it for months now.”

And of who will be there to meet me.

“You’ll find the forest somewhat depleted since last you were there,” said Walter from the back seat.

Jack pulled heavily on the cigarette. “I know.” Epping Forest was one of the few remaining stands of what had once been woodlands stretching for hundreds of square miles above north-eastern London. When he had been Brutus, almost four thousand years ago, the great primeval woodlands
had connected with all the other forests of the island. Even when he’d walked under its branches as Louis de Silva (and then as Ringwalker), Epping Forest had still been extensive.

Now, most of the forest was gone, murdered by urban sprawl and hungry tractors, and all that was left of the dappled, moody shadows where the Stag God had once roamed was this pitiful remnant. Eight or nine minutes in a car—providing you didn’t stop for a beer at one of the quaint pubs secreted within the trees—was all you’d need to drive straight through it.

“How long has…Harry…been living in Faerie Hill Manor?” Jack said after a few more minutes of silence. They were well on their way now, traversing the A11 as it proceeded north, and Jack needed the solace of conversation to calm his nerves.

“Permanently, about eight years,” said Silvius. “But he’s been using the house for, oh, probably close to ninety years, off and on.”

“And no one comments on the fact that Sir Harry appears so long-lived?”

Silvius grinned. “Faerie Hill Manor and its master fade away into the Faerie from time to time, Jack. As do we all. Half of the doors in Faerie Hill Manor open directly into the Faerie, half into bedrooms and closets. It fades away and people forget about it, and then it is back again and it is as if both house and master are new. There are people alive today, their homes close by the forest, who have never noticed when Faerie Hill Manor has faded back into the Faerie, and then, thirty years later, when it reappears once more, they do not realise that they knew it previously. Faerie magic.”

Jack opened his window an inch and tossed out the stub of his cigarette. “You’re mighty acquainted with the Faerie, it seems.”

“It has been a good home to me, Jack.”
Better than the dark heart of the labyrinth.

Jack went very still for a moment, then swivelled about so he could look at Walter Herne in the back seat. “And you, Walter? Are you more comfortable with the Faerie than you were last life?”

“As I said earlier,” Walter said quietly, holding Jack’s steady gaze, “all I want is to see this through. We finish it this life, Jack. Once and for all.”

“And then…what? You can be Christ’s man, once and for all?”
Don’t forget who and what I am, Walter. I’m everything your damned Christ doesn’t want to know about.

They stared at each other a long moment, then Walter leaned forward a little and shifted his gaze to focus on something over Jack’s shoulder.

“Look,” said Walter. “Look.”

Jack turned forward, and his stomach clenched. Somehow they’d left suburbia behind and now approached a roundabout with a small congregation of cattle standing half asleep on the central grassy island. On the right side of the roundabout stood a somewhat ugly tavern, the Robin Hood Inn, and several cottages crowded in close to its whitewashed walls.

Beyond the roundabout and the inn, the A11 continued for perhaps fifty yards before it vanished into trees.

“We’re home,” whispered Jack, and Silvius glanced sharply at him.