The Alchemist of Souls: Night's Masque, Volume 1 (14 page)

  Mal tried to get around the gelding to where his brother lay, but someone caught him by the arm.

  "What about this 'un?" his captor asked the leader.

  "Blood him."

  "Aye, ye mun blood at least one," said someone else. "He's not one of us until he's blooded!"

  He tried to turn and run away, but his path was blocked by the broad expanse of an oak trunk. He looked around and down and discovered he was tied to the tree, belly against the rough bark, naked but for the low boots skraylings wore. No, oh no…

  "
Amayiiii!
"

  Suddenly he was surrounded by three or four of the humans, towering over him in their slit-eyed hoods like carrion birds. Cold hands clawed at him, colder steel tore his flesh, burning like brands… White-hot pain exploded at the base of his spine, then his spirit fled into the howling darkness–

 

Mal awoke with a cry, his heart hammering in his chest. He felt himself all over. No wounds, no broken bones, nothing but the familiar scars of battle, long healed. He let out a shaky breath and looked around, half-expecting to see Sandy at his side, cheeks smeared in dried blood.

  The cold half-light of an overcast dawn seeped through the shutters. In the distance a mastiff howled. Southwark. Ned's house. Home. He kicked off the sweat-soaked sheets. Where was Ned when he needed him? He wrapped his arms about his knees and bowed his head.

  "Sancte Michael Archangele, deduc me per tenebras. Ferro tuo viam illumina…"

 
 
 

"You off, then?" Ned asked, eyeing the gaping knapsack.

  Mal grunted in affirmation and began rummaging in the chest at the end of the bed. His belongings were pitifully few: a spare doublet and hose and a few changes of underlinens, a pair of riding gloves, a brown velvet cap going bald in places, and a threadbare winter cloak, the lute, a dog-eared fencing manual in the original Italian, and what he thought of as his soldiering kit. The canvas pouch contained a small whetstone, a tinderbox, a corked bottle of neatsfoot oil, a bundle of greasy rags and a bobbin of thick silk thread with a curved leatherneedle stuck in it.

  He unrolled the cloak and retrieved the fist-sized pouch hidden there.

  "Will you look after this for me?"

  He tossed the pouch to Ned, who loosened the strings and looked inside.

  "A rosary?" Ned raised an eyebrow.

  "It was my mother's. I suppose it would have been safer to get rid of it but…" Mal shrugged. "Anyway, I don't want to be found with it in my possession. Not at the Tower."

  "Very wise." Ned slipped the pouch into his pocket. "Don't worry, I'll stow it somewhere it won't be found."

  Mal stuffed the cloak into the knapsack, drew the strings tight and slung it on his shoulder.

  "Farewell, then."

  "Aye." Ned leant on the bedpost. "I'll miss you."

  "No you won't." Mal reached out and snagged Ned's nose between curled fingers, giving it a shake. "You'll be able to have Parrish over whenever you wish."

  Ned batted his hand away with a sheepish look. The next thing Mal knew they were embracing, pounding one another's backs in sudden bittersweet urgency.

  "Take care," Ned murmured huskily, kissing him on both cheeks. "Don't do anything stupid."

  "You know me."

  "Exactly."

  Ned released him, and Mal picked up the lute. After a last look around the room, he unlatched the attic door and left.

 

Twenty minutes later he walked up to the gates of the Tower to report for duty. At least this time he was entering through the landward gate, and of his own accord. Two guardsmen in scarlet livery blocked the entrance with crossed partisans. He handed the nearest guard the letter of appointment Leland had given him back in June. The man perused it, his lips moving silently. I suppose, Mal thought, I should be grateful he doesn't need to follow his finger.

  "All seems in order," the guard said at last.

  "Thank you." Mal took the letter back and headed through the gatehouse.

  "So you're the new Keeper of the Royal Menagerie," the guard said as Mal passed him.

  "What?"

  "Don't worry, you'll soon get used to the smell. When the wind's in the south…" The guard waved his hand in front of his face and wrinkled his nose.

  "Do you know," Mal said, "I could do with a knowledgeable fellow like yourself on guard duty outside the ambassador's quarters. I think I'll ask the lieutenant to assign you to my command."

  The guard's bloodshot eyes bulged. "No, sir, thank you, sir. I don't know nothing about skraylings, honest."

  "That's a pity. Well, I'm sure you are best off here, then." Mal set off again. "Good day to you, gentlemen."

  He crossed the causeway that spanned the moat, through a second, larger gatehouse and finally into the castle's outer ward. The narrow cobbled lane seemed to close in around him, and he hurried through the archway into the pleasanter surroundings of the inner ward.

  As he approached the lieutenant's lodgings, Leland himself appeared at the main entrance. His golden hair and beard glowed in the sun, their curls merging into the bullion-work on his moss-green doublet.

  "Catlyn!" The lieutenant beamed, as if Mal were an old friend. "Not run off to France, then, eh?"

  Mal winced at the reminder of his elder brother's misdemeanours, but forced a smile and bowed.

  "I'll have Captain Monkton show you around the place later," Leland said, "but for now I'll take you up to your quarters and you can get settled in." He strode off without waiting for an answer, leaving Mal to follow in his wake.

  Monkton? Wasn't that the name of the man who had arrested him and thrown him in the Salt Tower for the night? Either Leland had a malicious sense of humour, which from what little Mal knew of him did not seem in character, or he had simply forgotten the circumstances of Mal's first visit.

  The lieutenant led him back out into the outer ward, to the water stairs where Mal had disembarked all those weeks ago. Above it stood the timbered upper levels of St Thomas's Tower, now stripped of their severed heads. Leland turned right and climbed the short flight of steps to the tower entrance.

  He opened the door and ushered Mal inside. They passed through a tiny vestibule into a pleasantly domestic dining room with painted plaster walls and a large stone fireplace. A long table dominated the room, draped with a ruby and cream patterned carpet that overflowed the benches standing either side. A throne-like chair, age-blackened and carved in an antique style, stood at its head. Two doors led off the dining room, one into an empty stone-walled chamber in the corner tower, the other into the rest of the apartments, which were further divided in two by a thin lath-and-plaster partition.

  Mal explored the large divided chamber beyond the dining room. A bed with embroidered hangings stood in the far half; in the other, which was set out as a parlour, a short flight of steps led up to a heavy oak door.

  "Is this where I will sleep?" Mal asked, gesturing to the bed.

  "That is for Master Lodge," Leland replied. "We are fortunate to have found an Englishman fluent in the skrayling tongue. You will sleep here."

  He led Mal up the stairs into the chamber beyond. Like the rest of the apartments it had recently been painted, and fresh rushes covered the floor. A large bed with crimson damask curtains dominated the space. Realisation dawned.

  "This is the ambassador's bedchamber."

  "Of course. How else are you to guard him day and night?"

  "I–" Mal shivered. If he had known he would be living cheek by tattooed jowl–

  "Well, I'll leave you to it. Monkton will be along shortly."

  After Leland left, Mal went back down to the small parlour to wait for the captain. He glanced at the door to the ambassador's room. Don't be ridiculous, he told himself. You're no longer a small boy scared of the ghosts in the attic. He marched up the stairs and wrenched the door open.

  Really, it was not so very different from his parents' chamber in Rushdale Hall. In addition to the canopied bed, there were chests for linens, a washstand with basin and ewer, and a close stool containing a Delftware chamber pot. The walls were hung with thick tapestries, though on a blazing August day they were scarcely needed. Another large iron-studded door in the far left corner appeared to lead to the walkway to the next tower. Mal tried the handle, but it was locked.

  He was about to leave the room when he saw one of the tapestries stir. Drawing his rapier slowly and silently he padded towards it. The tapestry remained motionless. He prodded it with the point of the rapier. Nothing. He stepped to one end of the hanging and raised the edge with his blade.

  There was no one there, only a small door. It was locked, but peering through the keyhole he could make out a tiny chamber beyond with a carved wooden screen and coloured glass in the windows. A chapel? If so, it had been locked to prevent desecration. He let the tapestry fall and sheathed his blade.

  It may have been a false alarm but it reminded him that, skrayling or not, the safety of the person sleeping in this room would be his responsibility. Lurking assassins were only one threat; Baines had told him of men being poisoned by all manner of cunning means. He put his old riding gloves on and ran his hands over the furniture, looking for concealed needles or protruding nails. Whilst examining the beds he even sniffed the sheets, in case they had been suffused with poison. The linen was musty from long storage, with a faint perfume of entombed lavender, but he could smell nothing amiss.

  Satisfied he had done everything necessary to fulfil his duties, he returned to the dining room to wait for Captain Monkton.

 

Monkton's tour began at the old royal apartments south of the White Tower. The Great Hall had been hastily refurbished for the ambassador's visit, with a new timber roof and tiled floor, but the windows were still empty of glass.

  "Why go to all this work, when the Queen has palaces aplenty?" Mal asked.

  "The Prince of Wales ordered it done," Monkton replied. "All great royal ceremonies begin at the Tower. The Queen stayed here the night before her coronation."

  As will the prince, when he succeeds to the throne? Perhaps he already looks ahead to his mother's death.

  After a brief examination of the hall Monkton showed Mal up onto the walkway of the inner curtain wall and through each of its towers. There were no prisoners here at the moment nor, Monkton told him, had there been any since the Prince Consort's death. The whole country seemed to have settled into a sombre peace, untroubled by rebellion or religious strife.

  "The calm before the storm, no doubt," Monkton said. "When the Queen dies, Robert will come down hard on Catholics. He is his father's son."

  Last on their itinerary was Beauchamp Tower, where Mal was shown the bed in which Robert Dudley had died, and the elaborate carving made by his elder brother John many years previously, when he was imprisoned here during Queen Mary's reign.

  "Did you meet the Prince Consort?" Mal asked.

  Monkton grunted. "I was not here in his day."

  He unlocked another door and they went down a narrow stair, emerging on the Tower Green near the lieutenant's lodgings.

  There they were shown through the antechamber into a small dining parlour. Leland was pacing up and down before the fire, a sheet of paper in his hand. A stocky man in his midthirties with sunburnt features and bright, almost manic eyes sat watching him, his lips moving silently.

  Leland greeted the two men somewhat distractedly, and continued with his pacing, muttering something unintelligible. Monkton appeared to be accustomed to the lieutenant's eccentric behaviour; he went straight over to the table, where a silver flagon steamed, giving off a scent of cinnamon and apples.

  "Splendid idea," Leland said. "This damnable language turns a man's throat to dust."

  Monkton poured a little of the hot, spiced wine into silver goblets and handed them to Leland, Mal and the stranger.

  "Your health, sirs," Mal said.

  "The Queen," Leland replied.

  "Of course. The Queen."

  Mal took a cautious sip. It was the last of the old vintage, its sourness tempered with sugar and spices.

  "You have met Thomas Lodge?" Leland asked, gesturing to his other guest.

  "No, sir," Mal replied. He sketched a polite bow, unsure of the other man's status. The stranger was fashionably dressed, but his garments lacked the jewels and intricate embroidery that only the very rich could afford.

  "Lodge is newly returned from a voyage to the New World," Leland said, "and will be our translator for the ambassador and his party."

  So this was the man with whom he would be working for the next few weeks. He would have to keep an eye on him, in case someone tried to use him as a go-between to get to the ambassador.

  "You are a sailor?" he asked.

  Lodge flushed a deeper shade of red. "I am a poet. You may have heard of
A Looking Glass for London and England
…?"

  Mal racked his memory. Yes, Ned had once mentioned copying some sides of that play for the Admiral's Men.

  "I have not heard it played," he said, "but I am told it is very entertaining, especially the casting of Jonah out of the belly of the whale."

  Lodge sniffed in disdain. "There is a great deal more to it than spectacle."

  Leland stepped into the awkward silence.

  "The voyage must have given you many ideas for new plays," the lieutenant said.

  "Indeed it did," Lodge replied, looking pleased with himself. "I have sold one already – but I say too much." He put down his wine.