Harvest (15 page)

It was a question answered in an unexpected way.

They decided to leave in the dead of night, having rested up through the day.

All seemed well until they reached that part of the path that was within the light-fall of the M1 motorway, which ran parallel with the railway and the path they were taking to get further
north.

They were hurrying along, trying to escape the light above, when they heard a shout from the road’s parapet.

Fyrd!

‘Move!’ said Jack.

But they were plainly visible and there was no obvious way of getting out of sight quickly.

‘Stop and wait!’ the Fyrd called down.

‘Run!’ said Jack.

Next moment, a crossbow bolt whizzed past Katherine’s head.

‘
Faster!
’

A second came hissing down and hit Stort’s ’sac.

If they had been able to run under the motorway and out of the Fyrd’s line of sight they would have done so, but a hefty boarded fence topped by barbed wire stopped that.

Then a shadow appeared ahead and the bulky form of a hydden.

Jack ran forward with his stave raised, as did Terce, and they might have struck the hydden down had he not said, ‘This way, quick!’

He stood his ground, risking being fired upon by the Fyrd above before hurrying them through a gap in the fence into shadows.

When they were all safe, they turned to see who had intervened.

‘Greeting, Mister Jack and friends!’ he said.

‘Who . . . ?’

It was impossible to make out his face in the dark.

‘Dodd’s the name and it’s Dodd again. Been watching and saw you earlier coming off that embankment. Reckoned you’d eventually come back this way . . .’

‘But . . .’

‘No time for chat, not here. Them up above will come on down, but it’ll take them time. Follow me close, it be a windy sort of way, but it’s the best out of here now. There are
many Fyrd about in these parts.’

He led them away by a route that they could never have found by themselves, under the motorway and back again, on through the night, the Fyrd left behind.

At his first stop Dodd said, ‘I suppose you’re still wanting to get to Brum? Me too! There’s only one way from here that’s going to be safe, which I imagine you have
already worked out?’

‘Well,’ said Stort, ‘failing the rail, and the road not being easy for hydden unless you know the ropes, which we do not, I fear I am thinking that we’re in for a boat
trip.’

Katherine and Jack looked at each other. Stort was about to lead them into the unknown. Unfortunately it looked like he had an ally in Dodd, who was nodding vigorously at every word he said.

‘Try us,’ said Jack.

‘All we need is a light watercraft, a large outboard engine and some fuel, and a watercourse between here and Brum. Then . . .’

‘No,’ said Katherine.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack.

‘Be bold!’ cried Stort, ‘and the world is yours.’

He turned cheerfully to Dodd: ‘You can’t mean a river, there is none direct to Brum. You must mean a canal. The Stratford-upon-Avon perhaps?’

Dodd laughed conspiratorially.

‘You know it, Mister Stort? Tell ’em the treat we have in store for ’em is bold!’

‘I know it from the towpath only. And what I know is that it’s too problematic were we to attempt to take a boat. Too many bends, too many locks. No, if we are to be bold it must be
the Grand Union.’

‘Which is where from here, exactly?’ asked Jack reluctantly.

Stort turned to Dodd and raised a questioning brow.

‘Not far, one and all. Less than a mile from here and there’s an underpass for cows which will serve our needs should Fyrd be on the track overhead, which they were last time I
looked.’

‘Why haven’t you gone that way already?’

‘You can’t work the Union without a crew and that’s what we’re going to be. And with humans about at weekends a weekday is better.’

‘And who’s to be the skipper?’ asked Jack.

‘Dodd will step into that breach if Dodd must.’

Two hours and a stolen boat and an outboard engine later, Dodd did.

But just before they embarked on this new stage of their journey Katherine said, looking puzzled, ‘Did you say earlier that today’s a weekday? I thought it was a Sunday.’

‘Dodd did make that observation,’ said Dodd, ‘because a weekday it is. A Tuesday, in fact.’

‘Either I can’t count my days,’ said Katherine quietly, ‘or somewhere since we first arrived at Half Steeple on the Severn, we have lost two days.’

Stort frowned and thought a bit.

‘Of
that
,’ he finally said enigmatically, ‘we must talk more. I would venture to suggest on that evidence alone, that Half Steeple is a place we should be very cautious
about ever visiting again.’

‘All aboard!’ cried Dodd, cutting their talk short. ‘After what I heard today from a passing pedlar who dared to do some business with the Fyrd, we have a good reason to hasten
back to Brum.’

They fell silent as one and turned to him.

‘Good news or ill?’ asked Jack.

‘Hard to say,’ said Dodd. ‘It seems that the Hyddenworld has a new Emperor.’

‘What happened to Slaeke Sinistral, the old one?’

‘Dead. Deposed. Or “Disappeared”. Don’t ask me! Now, let’s be on our way.’

A
s emperors went, Niklas Blut was not an impressive figure, even when dressed in his robes of office and surrounded by the panoply of state and
court officials. Sitting upon his throne in the Great Chamber in the Imperial City of Bochum in north-west Germany, his courtiers in attendance, his official champion Witold Slew standing guard,
the senior Fyrd present and trumpets and suchlike blowing, he looked like the grey bureaucrat he had so recently been rather than the Imperial leader he now was, having been enthroned, crowned and
generally sanctified before the Mirror-of-All and his people on August 2nd of that same year. What a contrast the rough and ready world of Englalond was to the sedate, predictable and orderly life
of the Imperial Court. But it was in Englalond he now was, plucked by circumstance, political necessity and his own wyrd from all he knew into the light of day and finding himself where he had no
wish to be.

No wonder he was finding being Emperor a lot harder than he could ever have thought possible.

True, the position gave him power, but it was not, he was rapidly discovering, unlimited power. In fact it was remarkably circumscribed – by the civilian wing of his administration on one
side, represented by Chief Courtier Vayle, and on the military by the formidable and ruthless General Quatremayne.

Niklas Blut had not sought office.

For the previous twenty years he had been blissfully occupied behind the scenes of Court and Empire as Commander of the Emperor’s Private Office.

It was a role that suited him perfectly. He was highly intelligent, highly organized and highly motivated in the practice of the art and science of government and administration.

He was beyond loyal to his remarkable recent employer, the Emperor Slaeke Sinistral I, as he liked to be known. In fact, there was no II or III because Sinistral had been Emperor for more than a
century and alive for a good many decades more than that. He was, in Blut’s view, and that of many others, nothing less than a genius.

Certainly, the world that the former Emperor Slaeke Sinistral I had created in Bochum was unique. Unlike most hydden cities, which nestle on the surface in the deep secret interstices of their
human counterparts, it was largely subterranean. In only seventy years it had become the heart and administrative capital of the Hyddenworld,

It extended from the first to the eighteenth levels of the abandoned coal mines which lie under the human city of the same name in the Ruhr Valley in North Rhine-Westphalia, western Germany,
making it nearly half a mile deep.

A very few surface buildings were cleverly concealed from humans in an area of ruined and dangerous mine tips, factories and toxic wasteland to the west of the city. These were used as
residences by senior officials, or for occasional respite and vacation by a few lucky hydden workers who otherwise spent their lives below ground.

For the most part, Bochum’s life was conducted in the first few levels. Level 1 was a buffer to the human world above, consisting of tunnels used for communication laterally and by shafts
vertically to the levels below.

The Imperial Court – its officials, courtiers, officers and the many related institutions that served them – was on Level 2, the airiest and most pleasant part of the city.
Bochum’s commercial heart was on Level 3, where banks and counting houses and other institutions had been established. The Imperial army or Fyrd occupied Level 4, and from Level 5 downwards
much that was covert or required security was carried out. Access there was only by express permission. Here were the city archives, money vaults, penal institutions and the utilities.

These five levels were all serviced by vertical shafts which carried power lines, ventilation, fuel supplies and accommodated various lifts and chutes. The perimeters at each level were clearly
defined and it was a serious offence to go, or attempt to go, into the continuation of the tunnels beyond. Below Level 9 little happened until Levels 17 and 18, where the Emperor mainly dwelt.

The many tunnels at all levels beyond the confines of Bochum were degraded, collapsed, flooded, broken and defunct. But everyone in Bochum had a story about the hydden folk who lived there,
creatures of the dark and the night, of a lowly uncivilized kind who would kill and eat you if they could.

The only certain thing, because they were seen from time to time, was that whatever the dark history of these ‘Remnant tunnels’, a peculiar species of bilgesnipe lived there. Which
meant that down in the deep levels there must be water, for the chubby, greasy bilgesnipe were a water-folk, skilled in all matters maritime and fluvial. The Remnant bilgesnipe of Bochum were
unique for being albino and blind, doubtless caused by inbreeding and living too long without light.

The deepest levels of this great Imperial complex were 17 and 18, which were the Emperor’s private domain and the place from which the real work of running the Empire, as opposed to Bochum
itself, was done. Access was by way of a lift from the corridors behind the Throne on Level 2, to which only a few senior executives had access

These lower levels, despite the fact that the Emperor lived there, were much less well maintained than the busier ones above. They were ill-lit, unpainted and unswept. The detritus of human
mining operations was everywhere – rusting machines, narrow-gauge rail tracks, stacks of wooden pit props, piles of spare parts. Even the skeletons of lost souls, human or hydden, who had
found their way into that cold, dripping, eternally dark and draughty place and become disorientated were sometimes found.

The Great Chamber on Level 2 had a strange and mysterious vast counterpart at Level 18, which was why Slaeke Sinistral spent so much of his time down there.

This was the Chamber of Sleep, which was as wide and tall as the greatest human buildings. Its roof was unreachable and unexplored and from it fell endless drips of water, hundreds and thousands
of them, carrying dissolved lime. The lime was deposited on whatever lay on the floor beneath, turning wooden sleepers, rails, cog wheels, capstans, coiled hawsers, great metal tools and even a
steam engine into sickly pale, swollen versions of themselves, their form only vaguely discernible when light was carried into the terrible dark.

In addition to the endless rain there were constant draughts and contradictory winds from the innumerable fissures, cracks, faults and broken tunnels in the chamber walls and its roofs.

This combination of falling water and draughts, which sometimes whispered and occasionally raged, produced a miracle of sound, which Slaeke Sinistral recognized the moment he heard it as the
musica.
Endless, self-perpetuating patterns of harmonic sound produced in the great Chamber by what he called the four dimensions: falling rain, endless wind, an unfathomable space . . . and
time. By
musica
he meant
Musica Universalis
, which ancients called the Music of the Spheres, the harmony of all things, the sound of the Universe. Sinistral had found a place and a
new preoccupation for his later life.

The Empire he built from the base of a ruined business, of which the Fyrd were the warriors and enforcers of his power and the civilians in Bochum the executives, became to him no more than a
pastime. His real work lay in learning how to meld his spirit and body, his mind and soul, with the
musica
and through that with the Universe.

To sustain himself and his life beyond that normally allotted to mortals – he was born in the mid-nineteenth century in Brum – he had recourse to the power that lay in the gem of
Summer which he had secretly possessed for more than a century.

The energy from this gem kept him alive, but cruelly so.

At first its power sustained him for many decades, but gradually he needed more and more of its light and fire – which was nothing less than the Fires of the Universe – because each
period of recovery lasted for a shorter time.

Gradually his times of decline and recuperative sleep before another exposure to the gem lengthened.

The last, which was overseen by Blut, who started the period as a young hydden and ended it at the beginning of his middle age, lasted eighteen years.

Throughout these successive and ever-longer periods of sleep, the Emperor lay in the cocoon of a dentist’s chair in the Chamber of Sleep, bathed in the
musica
, learning all the
time, his body and spirit leaking into the ether as the
musica
fed into him.

His beauty, which was always great – tall, graceful, fair, well made, shot through with the light of intelligence, good humour and a growing compassion – grew greater, yet more
fragile as the decades passed.

It had been Blut who dared discover the secret of Sinistral’s longevity. Though only a very junior official in Hamburg at the time, aged eighteen, he had minutely studied
Sinistral’s strange episodes of illness followed by recovery and wondered how he did it. What made Blut so exceptional was that, having asked the question, he found the answer. The clue lay
in the stark fact that Sinistral’s periods of wellness got steadily shorter, his periods of recovery, which meant retreat and sleep, were getting longer. So much so that he was absent from
things more than he was present. Yet he so organized his Court, he appointed representatives with such skill and his charisma was so great that no one ever moved to depose him during his
‘sleeps’.