The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (21 page)

The Scholar didn’t say anything for a moment, and I thought maybe Marlowe had got off lucky. But his peace didn’t last any longer than mine where the Scholar was involved.

“But surely, from time to time, you imagined what a play written with him might be like,” the Scholar said.

“No,” Marlowe said.

“No, no, of course not,” the Scholar said, nodding again, this time so hard his entire body shook. “No artist wants to admit being influenced by another.”

Marlowe looked around as if searching for help. I stared straight ahead and didn’t meet his gaze. He’d earned this for betraying me.

“So perhaps you could imagine
now
what a collaboration with Shakespeare might have been like?” the Scholar said.

Marlowe even looked to the heavens, but we both knew there was nothing there that would save him.

The Scholar reached beneath his coat and pulled out a piece of crumpled paper and a tooth-marked pencil. The paper looked like a page torn from one of the books in the Oxford library.

“It would be best for you to write down your ideas,” the Scholar told Marlowe. “So you don’t forget them.”

Marlowe strode past us, leading the way now, but the Scholar just followed him, still holding out the pencil and paper.

“Yes, we really should find someplace private to sit down and discuss your ideas in detail,” he said.

I used the moment to drop back to Morgana’s side and I walked with her for a time.

“It appears we’re entering our final act,” she said, as we gazed at some picture frames made of books on the walls. The frames held jumbles of more books, of course.

“You don’t have to be,” I said. “Why don’t you take your court back into the glamour?”

“What would that solve?” she asked.

“It would keep you alive,” I pointed out.

She shook her head. “You mortals are so limited in your thinking,” she said. “Besides, we would miss all the fun if we did that.”

“You must be enjoying this,” I said.

“It does have its entertaining diversions,” she said, “but I would prefer our entertainment to be of the non-haunted variety.”

“I meant you must be enjoying my suffering,” I said. I gestured at the Black Guard and the strange stacks of books that surrounded us. Then I looked at Amelia. “I have to admit, you could not have inflicted a worse punishment upon me than to raise her and make me lose her once more.”

“If you think I birthed Amelia to punish you, then you are as dimwitted as Puck,” Morgana said.

I glanced back at Puck, who was clearly within earshot. He capered along behind us, not seeming to mind the insult.

“If I’d wished to punish you, I would have made you one of the fey,” Morgana said. “As I did. If I’d wished to punish you, I would have made you love me. As I did. If I’d wished to punish you, I would have claimed your soul as mine. As I did. But I did not birth Amelia to punish you.”

I looked at her now. She looked more fiery than usual. Something I’d said had upset her. I wanted to fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness.

“If you must name it, call it a favour and not a punishment,” Morgana said. “A favour for the favour you did me.”

I tried to remember what I could possibly have done to help Morgana, but I couldn’t recall a single thing.

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” I admitted.

She suddenly turned on me and just like that there was a knife at my throat.

“You could have left me at the mercy of Arthur, but you didn’t,” she said.

I glanced around and saw the Black Guard watching, but they made no move to intervene. Up ahead of us, Marlowe had turned to watch, too. The Scholar babbled on in his ear about something, but I could not make out the words from here. It didn’t seem as if Marlowe was listening anyway.

“You stopped Arthur from slaying me,” Morgana went on, digging the blade of the knife into my throat. “You saved my life. Unlike the rest of those louts, you had the conscience of a true knight. Even when drunk.”

“So birthing Amelia from the dead was your way of repaying me?” I said. Faerie logic is a struggle to understand at the best of times, but this was a new one.

Morgana hissed at me and then shook her head and stormed after Marlowe and the Scholar. She didn’t put the knife back in its sheath.

I couldn’t help but follow. I wanted her to keep talking to me, even if it meant a knife at my throat. I wanted to keep hearing her voice. But then we came across the burning chamber.

The hallway entered a room where every book that made up the walls and floor and ceiling was burning. In the centre of the room rose what looked like an altar of flaming books, and on top of this a single tome blazed away, its fire raging more intensely than the others’. The flames didn’t stop me from recognizing it.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked Marlowe, who had stopped in the entrance to the room and was staring at the book burning atop the other books.

“The Nameless Book,” he whispered.

So this is where it had gone after we’d burned it that night in London. An impossible book in an impossible place.

“I really need to stop getting involved in other people’s problems,” I sighed.

The hallway continued on the other side of the room, but obviously I wasn’t eager to step into the flames. I wondered if Will had come this way and what he had done if so.

Marlowe kept staring at The Nameless Book, like he wanted to go in there and start reading it amid the flames. If I were a true friend of his, I’d have dragged him away. But he’d shown me the state of our friendship, so I left him there and walked back a bit to join the others, who had stopped at a wise distance.

Which is how I found myself standing beside Amelia, unwatched by Marlowe or the Black Guard, who were all fixated by The Nameless Book.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. I rubbed the spot on my throat where Morgana had pressed her knife. My fingers came away with a bit of blood on them. “I don’t really know what else to say.” There were so many things I had to apologize for, after all.

Amelia just looked at me with that dead gaze of hers.

“Tell me about my mother,” she said.

“Your mother,” I said.

“My flesh-and-blood mother,” she said. “Not my birth mother.”

I thought about how to answer that. But there was no real way to tell her the things I knew she wanted to hear.

“She was my grace,” I said, and my voice broke on the words. That was all I could really say about that.

After a moment, Amelia nodded like she understood.

“You couldn’t have saved us,” she said.

“I could have tried if I’d known what was coming,” I said, although I didn’t really believe that. Not anymore. How could I have foreseen the death that would claim Penelope and Amelia? No one ever sees death coming until after it’s already arrived.

“What would you have done?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something. Anything.”

“The only thing that could have saved us from the grave is a god,” she said. “But you aren’t a god anymore.”

“I never was,” I said. There was so much more to talk about with her, but this was neither the time nor the place, so I changed the subject.

“How has your life been with the faerie?” I asked.

Amelia considered that for a moment before answering. “Have you ever lived in the glamour?” she asked.

“Not as long as you,” I said. I decided not to tell her about the time Morgana had enslaved me and kept me in the glamour like her plaything. There are some things you just don’t discuss with your daughter.

“It’s like a dream that never ends,” Amelia said. “Or at least I imagine it’s what a dream is like. I’ve never had one.”

I registered that in silence and let her go on.

“It is tolerable enough in its own way,” she said. “Morgana is kind to me. She treats me as well as she treats any of the faerie. As well as she could treat any child, I suppose. And they accept me as one of their own. I am more faerie now than human. Perhaps I have always been such.”

I looked away, then back at her. I remained silent.

“I would like to wake,” Amelia said. “I would like to live.”

I wanted to hug her then, to tell her I would die to make sure she lived if I needed to. But I didn’t want to give anything away in case any of the Black Guard were watching. I didn’t want Marlowe or the Royals to know how important Amelia was to me. So I did nothing.

They say being a father is hard. They have no idea.

I went back to Marlowe. He was still staring at The Nameless Book. He had taken a few steps forward and was standing in the burning room now. He didn’t seem to notice the fires, but they didn’t appear to be harming him. They only seemed to burn on the books. It was that kind of place.

“We should keep moving,” I told him. “This is not what we came for.”

“Perhaps we should take it with us,” Marlowe murmured.

I looked at the book, then away before it could catch my eye.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “That book has gotten us into enough trouble already.”

“We were so much younger then,” Marlowe said.

“And we’re so much wiser now,” I said. “Or something, anyway.”

“Imagine its power if we could learn how to use it properly,” Marlowe said.

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” I said.

“It could be a formidable weapon indeed,” he said.

“I think we have enough weapons,” I said, glancing around at the Black Guard.

“We don’t know what we will face when we find the ghost,” Marlowe said.

“I think that book is the kind of weapon that will destroy us all if we use it,” I said. “I think we probably got off lucky last time.”

He didn’t say anything to that, but he didn’t exactly look discouraged either.

“Perhaps it would destroy us,” he said. “At least we’d all be free then.”

I gave him another moment, and then I started walking. I stepped into the burning room and carried on. The flames licked at my feet but I felt nothing at their touch. I gave The Nameless Book a wide berth and didn’t look at it again. I crossed over to the hallway on the other side.

I didn’t say anything else to Marlowe. He’d follow me with the Black Guard or he wouldn’t. It was his choice. And to be honest, I didn’t really see how it made any difference one way or another.

The Scholar was the next to follow. He came to my side and looked down the hallway.

“Are we close then?” he asked. “I am not fond of all this walking.”

I looked at him. “How come you’re not interested in that book like the others?” I said, nodding my head in the direction of The Nameless Book. It was definitely one a kind, after all. The sort of thing the Scholar usually coveted.

The Scholar didn’t even glance behind us. “That thing? That’s not a book,” he said.

“What is it then if not a book?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “There’s books and there are the things that aren’t books. Why would anyone care about the things that aren’t books?”

Words of wisdom, I reflected, as I started walking again.

One by one, the others followed me through the burning room and into the hall on the other side. Even Marlowe, although he was the last.

We continued down the hallway, to who knew where. Eventually Marlowe made his way back up to my side. His experience in the burning room must have made him thoughtful, because he started spilling his conscience to me.

“You’re no doubt wondering why I returned to the Royals’ service after you raised me instead of hiding in some secret part of the world,” he said. He looked around us. “Some place like this, maybe.”

“It’s what I would have done,” I said. “Hiding, I mean. But then I never would have been in their service.”

“And I never would have done many of the things you have,” Marlowe said. He knew me better than most, and I had to admit his words stung a bit.

“You have me there,” I said. “But I thought we had a better relationship than this. The number of times I’ve saved your life. The wine and women and everything else we’ve shared.” I shook my head. “I should have known better. Everyone has their price.” I’d died enough times at the hands of so-called friends to learn that.

“Not everyone has your free will,” Marlowe said.

“I’m not exactly doing anything of my free will these days,” I said.

We passed under a stairway of books that ended several feet in the air above our heads. There was no doorway at its end, but we kept an eye on it anyway, just in case.

“You had the choice to just walk away from the Royal Family all those years ago,” he said. “So what if they swore to have their vengeance on you? It doesn’t matter. What happens if they capture you? They’ll eventually grow tired of torturing you in some dungeon somewhere. It might take hundreds of years, but we both know that is nothing to eternity. And you have all eternity to wait. One day you’ll figure out how to escape. You’ll be free again. You’ll always be free again. I never will be. I had to go back to the Royals. I am bound to be their servant. You have your curse. That is mine.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t mean you had to turn me in,” I pointed out.

“True,” he said, laughing that rattling laugh of his.

“So what’s your reward for doing it then?” I asked.

The hallway opened into another chamber ahead of us, and we slowed so we could finish our pleasant conversation before we encountered something else that should not be.

“Any reward I get won’t be for locating you,” Marlowe said. “My reward will be for stopping the ghost before it starts to haunt other productions outside of the faerie court. Will’s legacy must be preserved for the good of England.”

“Frankly, I can’t see what interest you’d have in keeping Will’s work alive and in performance,” I said. “Especially if he didn’t even write it in the first place. Your reputation would only stand to gain if theatres had to abandon his work because it was too risky to stage. They’d seek other plays from the same time. Like yours.”

And then I understood Marlowe’s motivation. I stopped and looked at him.

“So the Royals are going to give your work a greater role in the world in return for this little mission,” I said. “What’s it going to be, some sort of festival?”

Marlowe stopped as well, although he kept his eyes on the room ahead instead of looking at me. “Nothing like that,” he said. “They have promised me nothing.”

“I doubt very much you’re in this for nothing,” I said. “Not unless death truly has changed you.”

“Nothing but a little ink,” Marlowe said and continued forward again.

“Ah,” I said. I had no choice but to follow.

“As you pointed out earlier, Will left his ink pot behind in this library when the ghost scared him away,” Marlowe said. “The sole remaining supply of that ink anywhere, even in the impossible places. I do not know how much is left, but perhaps there will be enough for one more play.”

“And how would the world learn of a new Marlowe play?” I asked. “After all, you’ve been dead for some time. It’s not like you can just suddenly publish it.”

“I imagine a scholar will stumble across it in a library somewhere,” he said. “With a little help, of course. It will be the find of the century.”

“Just don’t let our Scholar find it,” I said. I glanced back at the Scholar, who was muttering to himself while eyeing all the books around him. “Or it will be the loss of the century.”

“Think of it,” he went on. “A renaissance in Marlowe.”

“I wish I could see that,” I said, and I was telling the truth. I’d always admired Marlowe’s work, and the truth be told, I thought him a superior playwright to Will in many ways even before I’d learned the truth about
Hamlet
. He could have delivered many more classic plays if he’d been given the chance. But few people are ever given the chance to live to their fullest potential.

Maybe we would have gone on spilling our souls to each other like that, but then we reached the next chamber. Thankfully, it wasn’t burning, although enough books blazed here and there to illuminate the space. It was the room I’d woken in those other times I’d visited the Forgotten Library. There were the tables and chairs made of books, and there was the ink pot on its side and the quill, among the scattering of papers and other books Will had left behind.

I didn’t see any sign of Polonius or Peaseblossom, though. The secret places where they’d erupted into the room from before had been covered with books again, so they just looked like the wall and floor once more. I decided to keep what I knew about those hiding places to myself. If everyone in our little group was going to have secrets, then I needed some of my own.

We came to a halt just inside the room and surveyed the scene. The Black Guard fanned out along the edges. I didn’t know if it was to protect us or keep us imprisoned. The spider scuttled along the walls, Alice giggling on its back.

“Well, this looks like a place of some import,” Marlowe said. His gaze settled on the ink pot. “Perhaps even the very spot
Hamlet
was written.”

“Stolen, you mean,” I said.

Marlowe ignored me as he went over to the table and picked up the ink pot. He looked inside it for a moment. He shook it and then upended it. Nothing flowed from it. He brought it to his lips like a bottle, but still nothing issued from it. The ink pot was empty.

“I guess it must have all spilled out when the ghost startled Will and he fled,” I said. “That’s a shame.” I looked at the other books on the table. Who knew what else Will’s ink had brought to life?

Morgana strode into the room and looked around. “Show yourself, ghost!” she cried. “Come out and face a queen more powerful than any king!”

“She’s not much of one for subtleties, is she?” Marlowe observed, dropping the ink pot back to the table with a sigh.

“I think subtlety is an insult to the faerie,” I said.

The ghost did not show itself, though. The dead, if they were here, stayed hidden and nothing possessed us.

Marlowe picked up the quill next, and I shook my head at him.

“As I also told you earlier, it’s not the Black Quill,” I said.

But as I watched, the quill began to darken in Marlowe’s grip, turning from white to grey and then to a black as deep as night.

I thought again of Will’s words that he would hide the Black Quill away in some place no one would ever find it upon his death. A place like the Forgotten Library.

“The Black Quill needs souls like you need grace,” Marlowe said, staring down at the quill. “The life force of its user is its ink. When that ink runs dry, it is just another quill. Until it finds a new soul. One who can put it to the uses to which it was intended.”

“Is a little bit of ink really worth your soul?” I asked.

“It depends on what you write with that ink,” Marlowe said.

“No wonder there’s a ghost haunting the play,” Morgana said. “Magic ink. Soul-stealing quills. Frankly, I’m surprised a ghost is the only problem we have.”

“But where is the ghost?” Marlowe asked, tearing his gaze away from the quill.

“That I don’t know,” I said. “I was dead the other times I visited here. Maybe that made the difference.”

“Perhaps it is like the Witches then and needs a blood sacrifice,” Marlowe said, nodding.

But he wasn’t nodding at me. He was nodding at Morgana.

Anubis lunged at her back with his staff. The scythe was the black blade of a spear now. Morgana didn’t even see the strike coming. But I did.

I threw myself in between them. And Anubis’s staff sank into my chest as easily as if it were a blade.

I felt a great pain that filled every space within me and then turned into a lightness that lifted me up into the air. Anubis held me up on his staff, the glowing blade of it buried inside me and doing who knew what to my insides. He looked at me with those black eyes of his. I spat blood at him. Something like this happened every time we met.

Marlowe came over to gaze up at me suspended on the staff. “I suppose one soul is as good as another when it comes to sacrifice,” he said. “My orders were to bring you back dead or alive, but I imagine it will be easier if you’re dead.”

I looked around at the others. The Scholar stumbled back, looking paler than usual. Murder wasn’t his type of thing. The fey stared in confusion. The faerie looked on curiously, except for Puck, who appeared to be smiling despite his mouth being sewn shut. The Black Guard watched impassively. It was just another day at the office for them.

I don’t want to tell you about the expression on Amelia’s face.

And Morgana? I didn’t know how to read her look as she stared at me on Anubis’s staff. There was a black glow pulsing out of my chest now, in time with my heartbeat.

“It was the ring that made me do it,” I said, spitting up blood.

“No it wasn’t,” Morgana said softly, and she was right. The ring made me love her and probably would have wanted me to save her. But it wasn’t what had made me throw myself in between Anubis and her. I’d done it because of her words.

Because she’d told me she’d birthed Amelia as a favour to me.

“This is all very lovely but we must move things along,” Marlowe said. “Your service will be remembered, but your friendship even more.”

“This is treachery,” Morgana said, and the softness was gone from her voice now.

“True,” Marlowe said, glancing at her. “But no worse than what the faerie might do.”

“Our nature leads us to trickery, not treachery,” she said.

“You may wish to have this discussion with your dear sprite,” Marlowe said, looking down at the Black Quill in his hand again. “For it concerns me not at all.”

“You are naught,” Amelia said, looking at me. “You are naught.” I thought maybe she had lost her mind at the sight of my impending death.

Then there were sounds in the walls, of things stirring. The books shook and dust puffed out here and there, as if the walls were threatening to collapse.

“Ready yourselves for whatever may come!” Marlowe cried, and the Black Guard drew their weapons and bared their fangs and flexed their claws and so on. Marlowe grabbed one of the papers from the table and poised the quill over it.

“Promise me something,” I managed to say to Morgana. I so desperately wanted to slide off the staff and into welcome death, to collapse to the floor and into the deepest of all sleeps. But I couldn’t. I needed a few more seconds.

“Save your breath,” Morgana said, her eyes locked on mine.

“I have nothing to save my breath for,” I said. “I will be going away for a time. I want you to look after Amelia while I am gone.”

Books began to fall from the walls and ceiling. More books erupted up from the floor.

“I do believe we are in the presence of a ghost,” Marlowe said, sounding pleased with himself. He clapped me on the shoulder like we were friends again.

“I understand now you are the closest thing to family she has left,” I said to Morgana.

Morgana didn’t say anything, which was a first, so I carried on despite the black pulses from my chest spreading to my vision. I didn’t have much time left.

“If you won’t do it, at least find her a home—” I said, but now Morgana finally interrupted me.

“If she survives what is to come, I will look after her like she is one of my own,” she said. And that was as much as I could ask from the queen of the faerie, I suppose.

My eyelids started to flutter shut despite my best efforts to keep them open. I wondered where I’d wake next. The dungeon underneath the Royals’ palace? Or someplace worse? If there was someplace worse. Yeah, there was probably someplace worse. There was always someplace worse.

Then Amelia stepped forward, into my line of sight.

“I’ll mark the play,” she said.

Marlowe glanced at her. “What are you carrying on about, girl?” he asked.

Now I understood what she was doing. She was speaking lines from
Hamlet
. She was trying to save me, the only way she could. The only way anyone could now.

By turning my death into a scene from the play.

I put all my energy into speaking, and I spat more blood with the words. Black, black blood.

“Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?” I said, answering her with another line from
Hamlet
.

“Tis brief, my lord,” Amelia said, softly.

And then the walls collapsed in a shower of books and the dead stumbled into the room from their hiding places. The bodies of men and women, faerie and fey, marked with the ugly slashes of swords or the mottled skin of poison or the burned flesh of fires. I saw Peaseblossom among their number, and Polonius. And all the dead from the theatre in Berlin. They stumbled forward and milled around us, as more erupted from secret graves in the floor or fell from the ceiling in showers of books.