The Fatal Child (9 page)

Raymonde was looking into his bowl, swilling the wine slowly round and round. Then he sipped it and spoke. ‘You wish to find the Prince Under the Sky.’

Padry cleared his throat. ‘As swiftly as possible.’

‘At this moment I believe he is back in Tarceny.’

‘Tarceny!’ groaned Lex. ‘It is too far.’

‘Not too far,’ said Padry. But his heart was sinking. (Tarceny? The wasteland that had once been the March of Tarceny was huge. They might spend a month combing it without finding the one they looked for!) ‘However, we must hurry. We must reach him as soon as we can.’

‘I see.’ Raymonde frowned into his bowl. ‘This is important?’

‘An innocent life depends on it. And much else.’

‘I think I understand why you were sent to me,’ said Raymonde. ‘Well, yes, I may be able to help you. I suppose I should warn you that there is a price, of a sort.’

‘Name it,’ said Padry wearily.

‘Only that you are willing to accept my help.’ He looked at Padry and smiled wickedly. ‘Which you may not be.’

Padry swallowed. He thought of the burned roofs of Develin. And he thought of a child, in a dull novice’s habit, walking in pursuit of a phantom king.

‘I am willing,’ he said.

‘Well done,’ said Raymonde, and went back to studying his bowl. Without looking up, he said: ‘Highness, you should sit with us.’

Wordlessly, the cloaked and helmeted figure of Talifer settled on the bench a little way down the table. He sat with his head bowed.

‘You have heard what these men need?’ said Raymonde.

‘Yes,’ said voice within the helmet.

‘You will take them to him?’

The figure hesitated. Then ‘Yes,’ it said again.

‘Why is it not—?’ began Padry. Raymonde stilled him with a lifted finger.

‘It is a week’s journey to the man you are looking for. To where I suppose him to be. Talifer could take you there in a day and find him more surely than I – if you are willing to go with him.’

‘How?’ said Padry sharply.

‘He has a way. I should warn you that it is not a comfortable way. In fact men like you and me should not take it at all, unless we are desperate.’

‘Men like …? In the Angels’ name – then what is he?’

The bowed figure did not answer.

‘Highness, I think you should remove your helm,’ said Raymonde.

‘I do not wish to,’ said the voice.

‘I know that you do not. But you are bidden to serve and these men need your service. Before they accept your service they must see you as you are.’

For a moment the figure gave no sign. There was no sound but the hiss of the fire. Then, slowly, the figure put its hands to the helm and lifted it.

‘Angels!’ gasped Lex.

The face that turned towards them was a mask – a living mask, for the eyes that blinked from it were alive and human. And yet…

It was long, impossibly long, from crown to chin. And pale, and wrinkled like skin that has been exposed to water. High on either side of the head were great bumps that looked like the wounds left on a cow’s head when the horns had been cut from it. The colour of the skin was a slate grey. Around the brow was – of all things – a simple circlet of gold!

Padry forced himself to breathe again. His heart was thumping hard. His fingers had gripped the rough woodwork of the table, and his knuckles were white.

‘You are looking at Prince Talifer, son of Wulfram the Seafarer,’ said Raymonde harshly. ‘One of the seven princes who first founded the Kingdom. Do not despise him. He has lived these past three hundred years in a hell you could not imagine. Only lately has he emerged from it. He will be your guide, if you are willing to follow him.’

‘I – I…’ gasped Padry.

The pale head turned towards him as if Padry were a king passing sentence. And Padry stared at it open-mouthed. Thoughts tumbled in his head: the horror of the thing before him; the names, Talifer and Wulfram, the great names of the Kingdom-founders, linked in the glory of song; and the words of the murderer beside him –
three hundred years in a hell you could not imagine
.

He almost shrieked and fled the room. But as his hands gripped the table, another, stronger image rose in his mind – of Atti, wandering blindly into shadows. It was these things she was groping towards, these things that had suddenly leaped to life in his sight. They were calling her from the darkness. And she was going to them – feeling her way into the pit where nightmare creatures roiled and watched her come …

Atti!

His mouth was open. His lungs drew air. As if from far away he heard his own voice speak.

‘I – will follow,’ he said.

t is witchcraft,’ said Lex in the darkness.

‘I know,’ said Padry.

‘The men will not do this.’

Of course they would not. Padry was not sure how he would either. He lay wide-eyed in his blankets on the floor of the hall of Lackmere, which was the only sleeping space the house could afford him. His mind seethed with doubts.

I will follow
, he had said, but he could not see the Path.

Atti had gone ahead of him. He would have given his life to save hers. But could he give his soul? Witchcraft! He would have to acknowledge powers that were not the Angels. He was already acknowledging them. He might already be lost. And no power could offer him her soul in return. He was trying to bargain where no bargain could be made. What could he do?

‘Will you?’ he asked.

Lex stirred in his blankets. By the light of the fire
embers Padry could see his outline, propped on one elbow, looking away into the obscurities of Lackmere. Around them the hall glimmered faintly in the glow from the hearth. There was no sound but the low wind in the wall-slits and passages of the castle.

‘I admit I am becoming curious,’ mused Lex. ‘About this “King” who has no land, no men-at-arms as far as we know, who tells ancient princes to serve murderous knights, and to whom people from all ranks and places go in secret for judgement. I should like to see him, even if it puts my soul in peril.’

‘Do you think we are in peril?’ (Angels! Why could he not sound as calm as his own assistant?)

Lex’s grunt might almost have been a chuckle. ‘As a priest, it is my duty to teach that this is the very gravest peril of all. But I wonder. Can witchcraft
never
do good in the sight of the Angels? I do not know. There is peace between Lackmere and Develin, it seems. How was this done? Also the peril to my soul seems somehow less real than the danger to my body if I return to Tuscolo without you. Lord Joyce will want my hide. So, no doubt, will a dozen others. I think I will come.’

‘Good. It will be a comfort to me if you do. I confess … I do not like this at all. The more I press myself into this thicket, the more its thorns drag at me.’ He frowned up at the rafters. ‘It was hard, to meet the killer of so many friends.’

‘I could tell. I have never seen you go so pale.’

‘Do you not feel the same?’

The outline of Lex shrugged. ‘Remember I left Develin before the massacre. I had my reasons. Also I have seen many things since. And I do not think our host is at peace with himself.’

Not at peace? cursed Padry in his thoughts. Nor should he be! The man should burn with guilt for the rest of his days. And then he should burn in Hell!

He lay on the hard boards and looked up at the ember-glow on the ceiling. Everything seemed impossible. It seemed impossible that he should be here – fat old Thomas Padry, staring at his enemy’s roof, unbelieving of the things he had already seen and quivering like jelly at the thought of what might happen next. It seemed impossible that he should accept the help of the young diLackmere; impossible that he should ever find Atti. Impossible, above all, that he could ever rest again. Sleep was far away.

‘Why did you leave?’ he asked suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Why did you leave Develin?’

Lex took his time about replying.

‘I am not sure what happened,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I simply got drunk. But if so, no amount of drink has ever done it to me again. There was a moment on one of the Widow’s winter progresses – it must have been her last. I was sitting at a table, listening to the talk, and all of a sudden I seemed to be seeing the whole of the world from the inside out. I felt – ah well, it was different. I cannot describe it. It felt as though I was seeing things far more closely – almost as though I was inside them. And at the same time I could have
seen everything, as though I was far, far off, and yet had the eyes of an eagle. And all the big things we worry ourselves over – kings and wealth and long years and good crops – I saw that none of that mattered. What matters is little things: laughing when you want to cry; putting an arm round a stranger – that kind of thing. And it matters at some times and not at others. Vast things, things we cannot understand, may turn because a man helps an old widow with her load. But only if it’s
that man
in
that
place and
that
wi
dow
. I don’t know if I’m making sense. I could not make sense of it at the time. But I left the school. In fact I had a horror of it. Everyone had become so depressed …’

‘I remember.’

‘And I followed my nose for a bit. I became a clerk in orders. And, well, that’s the story.’

‘And now you administer justice which you think is not important, for lords whom you think are not important, in the name of a king whom you think is not important.’

‘Like our three-hundred-year-old prince, I must serve. To serve, I must use the skills I have. My skills are those that Develin gave me. You know that half your clerks passed through the school at one time or another.’

‘True.’ And typical of Lex that he should rank himself no higher than his colleagues, when without doubt he was worth any ten Develin-trained clerks. There was something unshakeable about him. Padry had seen that at the taking of Velis. He saw it much more clearly now. Perhaps it came from this very
experience the lad described, back in the days when (as far as Padry had been concerned) he had been the chief ruffian and trouble-maker among the scholars of the middle studies.

The just man follows the Path. He should follow it without fear wherever it leads him. Certainly he should not be quivering with fright when he is still safe, warm and (relatively) comfortable! Padry sighed and turned to try lying in a different position. His mind would not rest. He was angry – yes, angry – at the impossibility of it all! The chancellery, Lord Joyce, the Lady of Develin, Gueronius and his wayward wish to sail off into the distance – all the urgent voices that called him back! They had no
right
to stop him, blathering on about charters and all! What was the Kingdom beside a human soul? And if he was putting his own soul at risk, was it not fair to stake the Kingdom, too …?

Why, why, why had she gone wandering off like this? This mad adventure! Her life was not hard. She had one of the most powerful men in the Kingdom watching over her. She was not stupid. She knew all that well enough. At fourteen she was almost a woman. Was she bewitched? Possibly. Who knew what witchcraft might do?

But it was also possible that she was doing this of her own accord. It was
like
her to think about something all by herself, decide whether it pleased her, and then act on what she had decided! And he never knew what she thought until he found out what she had done about it. Like the toys he had brought for her
last year, and had later discovered deliberately broken and tossed out with the rubbish. (Oh, Atti!)

On the edge of sleep his mind seemed to divide. One part went on raging and sulking as if he were a prisoner kicking at the corners of his dungeon. But another just lay and watched himself stupidly, like a helpless observer who happened to be chained to the wall of the same cell. And he wondered, as if it were a question of no real importance, who it was here that was really bewitched. Was it Atti, or was it himself? He had heard the warnings. Still he was going forward. He was like the soul that meets the Demon by the Path, who sees the evil and yet cannot help himself from hearing its voice. Eyes wide, mesmerized, he inches closer and closer to the fascination of his death.

In his dreams the Demon wore the face of the child. And she said to him,
‘Thomas Padry, in this you have no will at all
.’

Melissa lay in a big house. It was the biggest she had ever known.

It had one big room and lots of little ones down below. And then on top of those it had more rooms, reached by wooden steps running up from the lower floor. In one of these, on a pallet of straw, she lay all by herself. She had never slept alone in a room before, but the red knight had shouted at the people in the house until they had let him have one to himself, and then he had shouted at them again and buried the point of his knife in a table to make them let Melissa
have one, too.
‘I’ve got to see she’s safe!
’ he had roared, thumping his fist at every second word.
‘That’s safe from everyone!’
Melissa had been terrified because she knew what he could do. And now it terrified her to hear him bellowing drunk in the house below in the evenings, and to hear his snores through the thin wooden wall by her head at night. But at least she did not have to sleep in the same room as him.