Pure Dead Brilliant (4 page)

Slightly Damp

L
eft to finish licking the contents of a mixing bowl in the kitchen, Damp decided to explore. She slid off her seat and teetered off along the corridor, still clutching a sticky wooden spoon. In the great hall beasts galloped back and forth, ferrying steamer trunks, hatboxes, suitcases, cauldrons in
aluminium flight cases, and assorted items of designer luggage up from the shore of Lochnagargoyle to the interior of StregaSchloss. Strange grown-ups wandered in and out of the house and, to Damp's delight, no one paid her the least bit of attention. Laboriously she crawled upstairs, stopping to peer through the banister rails at the activity below.

Latch staggered through the front door bearing Ariadne Ventete in his arms. Since he was still heavily bandaged and caked in flaking calamine lotion, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the leading character in
Return of the Mummy,
an effect not lost on Ariadne. She had taken one look at the butler's eyes twinkling at her through bloodstained bandages and promptly passed out.

Unobserved, Damp continued up the stairs till she reached the second floor. Ahead, the corridor branched off in four different directions. Damp sucked her wooden spoon as she considered which way to go, then caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye. Ambling down the sunny corridor that stretched along the south face of StregaSchloss was a large rat holding an open picture book. It read the story to itself under its breath. Curious, Damp crawled closer to see what the rat was reading. The illustration on the book's cover was of a girl asleep in a bed surrounded by roses.

No, don't tell me, Damp thought, nibbling her wooden spoon to aid concentration, let me guess. I know I
know
that one—
Cinderella?
No. Hasn't got a glass shoe.
Snow White?
No. Girl hasn't got black hair and isn't sleeping in a glass box-thing. . . .
Goldilocks?
Nope, no bears . . . Wait a minute, it's—it's—”

“S
LEEPING
B
EAUTY
!”
Damp yelled in triumph.

Multitudina looked up from her book with a squeak. “Is
that
how you pronounce it? No wonder it wasn't making much sense. I thought it was
Sleeping Boaty
. . . . Oh, sigh. That's what comes of being an Illiterat—” And dropping the book in disgust onto the floor, the rat scuttled off down the corridor and disappeared round a corner. Following this intriguing rodent, Damp found herself outside a door that was half-open, warm spring sunshine spilling through the gap. She pushed the door wide and crawled into the room to reconnoiter. In the middle of the room the shapes of furniture could just be discerned under their shrouds of dust sheets. The carpet had been rolled up and the curtains removed for storage—but despite being unlived-in, the room felt warm and welcoming.

Crawling across the bare floorboards to the windows, Damp sneezed, sending a cloud of dust dancing upward. Caught in a beam of sunlight, the dust sparkled as it was sent spiraling to the ceiling, catching Damp's attention. She batted at it with her wooden spoon, making it dance and swirl. Engrossed, the baby narrowed her eyes and looped her spoon in wild circles in the air, faster and faster, in wider sweeps, more and more, and . . .

“Pretty!”
Damp cried, as suddenly the air was full of roses—masses of them—their pink and cream blossoms suspended in the sunshine, with only the odd falling petal obeying the dictates of gravity. Delighted by this, Damp stood up and waved her spoon extravagantly round her head like a demented
conductor. More roses appeared—wine-red, icy white, pink streaked with gold. Amazed at the effect she was having, Damp laughed out loud, her spoon spinning in acrobatic loops and spirals, her bare feet dancing on a soft carpet of fallen petals whose perfume drenched the still air. Backing into a sofa
hidden beneath its dust sheet, Damp tripped and sat down abruptly, her spoon clattering across the floor. Damp crawled over to retrieve it. She grasped it in one chubby fist and, unconsciously reversing the direction of her loops and swirls, began again. It quickly became apparent that this was not having the desired effect: to Damp's dismay, the roses began to wither and rot. Shriveling into black shapeless masses, the once-perfect blooms began to drop a shower of beetles, slugs, and caterpillars onto the floor. In a panic, Damp waved her spoon faster, as if by speeding up she could somehow undo this unwanted decay. To the baby's utter horror, the blackened roses began to quiver and twitch, their leathery petals assuming a new shape entirely. With a wail of terror, Damp recognized what the flowers were turning into—

Outside, bending over a table on the front lawn, Marie Bain and Mrs. McLachlan were laying out the best china for afternoon tea. Hearing a distant but familiar scream, Mrs. McLachlan looked up at the house. Unable to see Damp at any of the windows, she was, however, alarmed at the sight of hundreds of bats squeezing out of a half-open window on the second floor. Without hesitating, she sprinted across the lawn and up the stone steps, bolted through the front door—sending hatboxes rolling across the hall—and took the stairs three at a time. She arrived breathless and shaking in the room where Damp had crawled shrieking under a dust sheet, still hanging on to her spoon. The nanny plucked the screaming baby up in her arms and ran out into the safety of the corridor, slamming the door shut behind her.

“Och, pet,” Mrs. McLachlan whispered, stroking Damp's trembling shoulders. “What
have
you done?” With a furtive look to make sure that there was no one around, she bore the child off to the nursery. Locking the door behind her, she carried Damp to the rocking chair, brushed aside a pile of darning lying folded on the seat, and, with a huge sigh, slumped down with the baby on her lap. Since her employment as nanny at StregaSchloss nearly a year before, Flora McLachlan had been dreading this moment. A true witch herself, Mrs. McLachlan had recognized Damp as one, too, from the first moment she had held the baby in her arms. Hoping to postpone the day when Damp discovered her own latent powers, the nanny had encouraged the adult Strega-Borgias in their mistaken assumption that the only witch at StregaSchloss was Damp's mother, the wildly enthusiastic but truly incompetent Signora Strega-Borgia. Mrs. McLachlan had long acquaintance with the necessity of hiding her own considerable gifts under the sensible, unflappable guise of a boring old nanny. Now she considered how best to disguise Damp's newfound gift for sorcery—and how to protect the baby from inadvertently alerting beings from the darker end of the magical spectrum to her presence.

“Heavens above, my wee pet,” she whispered, stroking the child's soft hair. “How are we going to keep you a secret?”

Mrs. McLachlan was used to keeping things hidden, but
she suspected that Signora Strega-Borgia would be unable to remain silent about Damp's abilities for very long. Moreover, to allow Damp to develop her true potential powers, it was vitally important that the baby received instruction from a true adept, and
not
from a well-intentioned amateur like her mother.

Damp looked up at her beloved nanny with a truly woebegone expression. Her lashes were stuck with tears in pointy clumps, and she sniffed, rubbing her eyes with a fist. Sitting back in the rocking chair, Mrs. McLachlan began to rock, patting the baby in her arms, the rhythm calming the nanny as much as it soothed the child. After a few minutes, she gently removed the wooden spoon from Damp's unresisting hand.

“No more wooden spoons for you, pet,” she said, smiling at the baby. “In fact, anything remotely resembling a wand has to be put away out of your reach. Like Sleeping Beauty and the spindle—one slip and we're doomed.”

Mud and Diamond

(
A.D.
130: Uncharted depths of northern Scotland)

U
nder a dripping canopy of leaves in the heart of the Forest of Caledon, Nostrilamus picked the remains of last night's roasted hind from between his teeth and snarled at the laboring legionaries.

“Can't you lot work any faster? A bunch of eunuchs armed with toothpicks could dig faster than
that
. Come on, put your backs into it!”

Exhausted and dispirited, the legionaries doggedly sank their rusting spades into the mud and gritted what few remaining teeth they possessed. Hollow-cheeked and prematurely gray, the men bore little resemblance to the bronze musclemen they had been when they left the sun-kissed shores of Italia, full of hope and eagerly anticipating the adventure of a posting in Caledonia. It had been three long years since they had arrived here, spades in hand, to begin this idiotic treasure hunt. Three interminable years of rain, mud, and misery. Sleeping in leaky tents, eating only what they could catch in the forest, waking every dawn to the sound of rain, and fueled on little more than acorn porridge, the legionaries began to suspect they were digging their own graves. As if that wasn't bad enough, the depressed Romans had to endure dragon attacks—which came with no warning and inevitably proved fatal.

“Hold it!”
Nostrilamus left the shelter of his tree and limped toward them, his emaciated frame barely able to support the weight of his rusty armor, his boil-encrusted ankles spattered with mud from the trailing hem of his once-fine woollen cloak—now a tattered rag that gave scant warmth and served only as a reminder of how far he had fallen from grace. “There. That there. What is it?” Nostrilamus, the once autocratic Malefica of Caledon, wheezed like a set of leaky bellows as he peered into the muddy pit in which his men stood, knee-deep in icy sludge, picking fitfully at the walls of mud that rose above their heads, their battered shovels hardly equal to the task. With a clawlike hand, Nostrilamus pointed to where he could just see a shard of metal glinting in the surrounding rocks and clay. Despite prolonged burial in mud, its silver color seemed undamaged, and it was this that had drawn his eye. On shaking legs he climbed down into the pit and waded over to where his men stood propped on their shovels, praying to Jupiter that
this
time they'd struck pay dirt.

There had been numerous false alarms along the way: the half-buried weapons and armor of their deceased predecessors, peeled of their inedible shell of breastplates and helmets and devoured whole by the dragons like some soft-fleshed Italian delicacy. Astoroth's vellum map, which Nostrilamus had used to try to locate the demon's treasure, had long since disintegrated in the perpetual drizzle, but by then, having pored over it so often, the legionaries could have redrawn it in their sleep. They had dug so many holes in the hope of finding treasure that the floor of the Forest of Caledon looked as if it had been struck by a meteor shower. So the legionaries betrayed little excitement as their commander scrabbled with his fingernails at the earth surrounding the outcrop of gleaming metal.

“Yes. Yes. Yessss!” Nostrilamus hissed. “This is
it
! Toadflax, get over here and dig, but
carefully,
man—damage it and I'll have you posted to Siberius.”

The chosen Toadflax sloshed forward, shovel raised to
shoulder-height, and began to pick tentatively at the mud, exposing more of the strange silver metal. Beside him, Nostrilamus flapped excitedly, like a moth-eaten bat in the
terminal stages of dementia. As each shovelful of mud was removed, the shape of a metal casket was revealed. Sweating with the effort, Toadflax dropped his shovel into the slurry at his feet and hauled on a corner of the casket. Making a sucking sound, it slid effortlessly out of its muddy cradle, its weight propelling the legionary backward with a grunt of surprise.

“Up here!” commanded Nostrilamus, scaling the wall of the pit with an agility at odds with his ravaged appearance. “Under the tree, quickly.”

Curious to see what manner of treasure this was, all the legionaries scrambled out of the pit and gathered round their leader. Toadflax laid the casket on the ground with something approaching reverence. His brow furrowed in concentration, he pointed to where a series of marks were embossed in the metal.

“Begging your pardon, Caledon, but what's that then? Those weird symbols on the lid? What's it say? You being schooled in the interpreting of symbols, not like us dumb squaddies.”

Nostrilamus cleared his throat and leaned over the casket. Must be a name, he guessed, racking his brains in an effort to recall the alphabet used by the native Caledonians. “Sih, Ah, Mih, Sih, Aw, Nih,” he pronounced at length, peering intently at the metal and adding, “Ih, Tih, Eh—S-a-m-s-o-n-i-t-e. Never heard of him. Must be the previous owner. Well, hey, who
cares
? It's mine now.” Prying the lid apart with the edge of his sword, he inhaled sharply.

So absorbed were they all in the sight of the jeweled contents of the Samsonite suitcase that they completely failed to notice the vast shape that had tiptoed up to stand behind them. The vast shape with an even vaster appetite . . .

Wallowing comfortably in a scented pool five hundred miles away from these events in the Forest of Caledon, Astoroth heard the unmistakable sound of his cell phone ringing. Apologizing to his fellow bathers, he wrapped a linen towel around his hairy thighs and clip-clopped off to answer it, his forked tail undulating behind him. Plucking his cloak from the astonished slave in charge of the cloakroom, he headed for the privacy of the vomitorium to take the call.

“Excellent,” he whispered, grinning into the mouthpiece. “What took him so long? Three years, for pity's sake! What a
moron
—he had the map, after all.” Listening to the voice on the other end, Astoroth was momentarily distracted by the sight
of a portly tribune who staggered into the vomitorium and, oblivious to the demon's presence, leant over a hole in the floor and emptied his stomach of all contents. The laurel crown on the man's head fell off into the pool of regurgitated food, and sank without a trace.

“Rrrevolting,” muttered Astoroth, adding into the mouthpiece, “can't wait to be relocated in a more civilized time zone. Look, I have to go. Walls have ears and all that jazz. Does this mean I'm in line for promotion? It was I who did the deal with Nostrilamus and descendants, after all. Surely
that
counts for something?”

From the other end came an outraged roar, causing the demon to turn pale and blurt, “It said nothing in
my
contract about retrieving the Chronostone. Why are you picking on me? I've never even
seen
it. What does it look like?” Across the room, the tribune was fishing for his laurels in what appeared to be an open sewer. Gritting his teeth, Astoroth whispered, “You're dropping me in the poo here. Are you one hundred
per cent positive it's been muddled up with the gems I planted for my new client?” Trying desperately to rein in his thoughts, the demon groaned. Even if he set off on horseback immediately, he'd
never
make it up to the Forest of Caledon in time to find the suitcase. That meant hanging around in this hideous time zone till Nostrilamus popped his clogs and had a soul ripe for harvest. . . . By then, the Chronostone could be
anywhere
. Still, the demon reasoned, anything was better than crawling back to the Hadean Executive with the happy tidings that he, Astoroth, had somehow managed to lose the Boss's most prized possession. With this in mind, he pleaded with the voice on the other end of the line, “Look, I'll try and get it back before anyone notices. For my sake,
please
don't let the Boss know it's,
ah . . . missing, or he'll relocate me as a cockroach in Moscow. . . .”

Night fell in the Forest of Caledon. Helmets lay abandoned in the ferns, swords littered the mud, and a watery moonlight picked out the battlefield where Nostrilamus's legionaries had failed to defend themselves against the dragon attack.

Drawn, not by the smell of unwashed humans, but by the brilliant light that poured out of the excavated casket, the dragon had stood statue-still behind the legionaries, watching as each rope of pearls, each little leather pouch of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires had been plucked from the hoard—until at last, at the very bottom of the pile, Nostrilamus came upon the single stone whose brilliance made all the other jewels seem dull and tawdry by comparison.

At that point the dragon cleared her throat and announced her presence. “I'll have
that,
squirt,” she growled, stepping forward to claim the egg-sized diamond. “I've been hunting for yon earring for eons. Pass it over,” and extending a massive, taloned paw, she shouldered through the terror-stricken circle of legionaries.

If only they hadn't put up such a
fight,
she thought, patting her vast belly with faint regret. Italian food was
so
fattening. She'd let the scrawniest one go, watching in amusement as he ran screaming into the forest, gemstones spilling from his pockets, sheer terror giving his feet wings. Self-preservation overcoming his greed, Nostrilamus had abandoned the most precious treasure of all without a backward glance.

“Silly boy,” the dragon whispered, reclining in her roost at the top of a Scots pine and reaching up with one talon to check that her long-lost earring was safely in place. It dangled from her ear, each facet of the diamond-like stone catching the moonlight and sending sparkling reflections dancing across the clutch of eggs beneath the dragon's belly. With no desire other than self-adornment, the dragon had no idea of the immense power currently decorating her ear. In its time, the gem had been given many names—Precious, Pericola d'Illuminem, Ignea Lucifer—names spoken in many tongues and in as many countries across the world as it was traded, passed on, inherited, and fought over. It answered to one name only, however, and that was Chronostone, the Stone of Time.