The Prince of Lies: Night's Masque - Book 3 (11 page)

Christmas came, followed by the turn of the year and the traditional exchange of gifts. Mal gave his wife a bolt of blue-green Naples fustian for a new gown and Kit a hobby-horse with a real horsehair tail, both sent up secretly from London by Lady Frances. In return he received three new shirts with whitework collars and cuffs, and a bottle of neat’s-foot oil with a child-sized thumbprint in the centre of its wax seal.

“Perhaps Daddy will show you how to look after your horsey’s saddle and reins after dinner,” Coby said as Mal kissed Kit’s brow in thanks.

Kit said nothing, only waddled off with his skirts hitched up either side of the hobby horse.

“I have no gifts for either of you,” Sandy said, clutching his own new shirt to his chest. “I had no money to buy anything, and I have been distracted–”

“No matter,” Mal said. “You give us your time and love, every day. And night.”

Sandy nodded his gratitude.

“In fact…” Mal took his brother by the elbow and let him out of earshot of Coby and Kit. “I need your help. Tonight.”

“Oh?”

“I found something in the dreamlands, a few nights ago. At first I thought nothing of it, but it was there again last night when I patrolled. I think it could be the evidence we have been seeking all this time.”

“Then Charles was telling the truth?”

“Yes. At least as he saw it.”

“But why now, I wonder,” Sandy said. He glanced over at Kit, who was galloping unsteadily around the room. “We searched very thoroughly when we first returned to England.”

“That was what puzzled me. Surely the traces would have faded with time, not renewed themselves.”

Sandy laughed. “It is no use applying your schoolmasters’ logic to the dreamworld, brother. Dreams have no reason, or at least, their reasons are their own.”

“Then I will let you interpret this mystery, since you are so much more knowledgeable than I.”

Sandy looked up, his expression grave. “You have more knowledge than you know, if only you would dare open your heart to it.”

“Last time I did that, people died. Or have you forgotten?”

“It was fear that made you hesitate,” Sandy replied, reaching out to rest a hand on Mal’s wrist. “And hesitation made you vulnerable. That is not what our fencing-master taught us.”

“I know.” It came out as barely more than a whisper. Mal cleared his throat. “Very well, I shall endeavour to be bold and grasp the nettle. Tonight.”

“This will be easier if we share a bed,” Sandy said, leading the way through into his own chamber. “We don’t need your wife coming in and waking you.”

“If you insist,” Mal replied.

It was strange being back in his own room with Sandy, undressing for bed and arguing over who got to use the tooth-stick first, as if the past fifteen years had never happened. The last time… the last time had been the night they were initiated into the Huntsmen. After that, Sandy had to be locked in a room by himself. Mal climbed into bed and stared up at the shadowy canopy, trying to empty his mind of the day’s bustle and achieve the calmness that would allow him to step into the dreamlands without needing to fall asleep.

“Why don’t I tell you a story,” Sandy said, propping himself up on one elbow, “like Mother used to?”

“If you think it will help,” Mal replied, trying to get comfortable. The mattress was lumpier than he remembered, and sagged in the wrong places.

Sandy began to tell his tale: something about an old man who lived alone in the woods, far from any clan or settlement, eating only berries and drinking water from the leaves of… Mal had a brief moment of clarity in which he realised his brother was not speaking English or any other Christian language, then all thought dissolved and darkness closed around him.

Mal kept his senses sharp as he walked at Sandy’s side across the colourless ankle-deep grass. Hills rose around them, mimicking the landscape of the waking world. This early in the evening only a faint gleam here and there marked a sleeping child or an old man drowsing by his fire, which was why Mal had insisted on beginning so early. If there were guisers lurking after all, they would see them a mile off.

“Over that way,” he said, pointing to a gap in the hills. Sandy broke into a run and leapt into the air, skimming effortlessly over the grass like thistledown on the wind. Mal cursed and tried to copy him, feeling his stomach lurch as his feet left the ground. Up he soared, so high he feared he would fall, but then Sandy was there holding his hand and they were flying side by side. Mal laughed. This was what he remembered from his childhood dreams, before the dark days when Sandy went away–

“Stay with me!” Sandy shouted in his ear. Mal blinked away a fog of silvery light. “You have to stay focused on the here-and-now, or you’ll fall back into a dream or, worse still, wake up.”

“Sorry.”

They flew onward, over hills far taller than their counterparts in the waking world. The air should have been colder up here, but nothing in the dreamlands behaved quite as expected. The nacreous sky seemed a lot closer too, as if it were the ceiling of a gargantuan hall, not a crystalline sphere millions of miles across. Though if it were a ceiling, the painter had been drunk. Stars were meant to be twinkling pinpoints of light, not haphazard smears that swam in and out of focus when you tried to concentrate on them.

“Not so high!”

Mal turned his attention back to the land below them. There. A line of hills like a dog’s back tooth. He soared around the tallest peak and into the valley beyond.

“Is this it?” Sandy gestured to a paler area of ground. “You were right. It is… most strange.”

They touched down at the edge of the… whatever it was. At their feet the grass began to thin, revealing bare patches of what ought to have been earth but looked more like skin, riven by a thousand tiny creases that traced lines around the contours of the land. Some of the larger cracks emitted a faint golden light, as if dreaming minds lay just under the surface.

“It’s like the thinness I saw at the skrayling camp,” Mal said, “and yet different somehow.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it before.” Sandy knelt and touched a finger to one of the glowing cracks.

“Don’t!” Mal shouted, but it was too late.

Sandy’s arm was sucked into the crack, slamming his head against the ground. Mal slid his arms round his brother’s chest and pulled. Sandy did not budge so much as a hair’s breadth; Mal might as well have tried to lift a mountain.

“Wait! I can feel something. Hold on… now pull again!”

Mal heaved, bracing his feet either side of his brother’s torso, and Sandy’s arm slid from the crack with a sound like a cork being pulled from a bottle. They both tumbled backwards–

–and woke up in the curtained bed in their old room. Mal disentangled himself from Sandy and stumbled up from the bed in search of a candle. By the time he had it lit, Sandy was sitting up in bed, a puzzled look on his face, staring down at his cupped hands.

“What in God’s name…? You brought something back with you?”

Sandy held out his hands. In the soft glow of the candlelight Mal could just make out a dark shape about the size of a hen’s egg but flatter and more triangular, with a small circular depression near one end.

“Isn’t that–?”

“The hagstone I found in the beck? Aye.” Sandy grinned and held the stone up to the light. As Mal had guessed, the dent was a hole that went all the way through. “I thought it lost all these years.”

“But what was it doing in the dreamlands? And how…?” Mal shrugged helplessly.

“I think… You remember I had to reach a long way down into the water to get it, right up to my chin? And you were holding onto me so I didn’t fall in.”

Mal nodded.

“I was thinking about that moment,” Sandy went on. “When the crack pulled me in. And then I felt it.”

“The stone.”

“Yes. As soon as my fingers closed around it, the… whatever it was… let me go. As if it had done what it meant to do.”

“Do what? Give you your old hagstone back?”

“No. Complete the memory.”

“How do you know all this? You said you’d never seen anything like it before.”

“I haven’t. But it makes sense.”

“A mad sort of dream sense, perhaps.” Mal took the stone from Sandy’s palm and peered through the hole.

“Hoping to see fairies?”

Mal laughed, but the words struck home. What if such stones were spyholes into the dreamlands?

“Give it here.” Sandy held out his hand.

Mal passed the stone back, and his brother produced a length of string from somewhere and hung the stone up from the bed canopy.

“To keep away nightmares,” he said softly.

“But what does it all mean?” Mal asked. “Have the dreamlands worn thin because the guisers were here so long?”

“I don’t know. Something happened there, that’s for certain. Something big and dangerous. Perhaps that’s how the devourers got into the dale, back in Charles’s day. The dreamworld wore thin and they broke through…”

“So why didn’t we notice it before?”

“Perhaps it was there all along, half healed, only something made it worse again. Like when you scratch a scab off and make it bleed again.”

“This thing,” Mal said, thinking back to their journey across the dark plains. “This… wound. It must have some corresponding spot in the waking world, yes? Somewhere not too far from here.”

Sandy’s eyes widened. “Yes! Yes, that’s it. If we can find out where the dreamers broke through from, it might tell us who they were and what they were really up to.”

Mal stared at his reflection in the darkened window, recalling the times he had been pulled bodily into the dreamworld by Sandy. Was that how the damage had happened? Had their own passage left similar wounds, places where the veil of sleep was thin enough for nightmares to seep through? There was so much he still did not know about the strange magics he and his brother were heir to, and the more he learned, the less he wanted to know.

CHAPTER VIII

For the next three weeks they explored the surrounding Peaklands, heedless of the rain that continued to fall in grey sheets. Mal had thought their previous investigations thorough, but Sandy pressed on much further this time, pointing out that distances in the dreamlands could be deceptive. Soon they had exhausted every valley within a winter day’s ride and were having to stay overnight in unfamiliar villages, but still they found nothing.

“We must have missed it,” Mal said, one freezing cold day as they circled north towards Matlock. “Surely the devourers would never have strayed so far as Rushdale if they’d escaped around here.”

Sandy sighed, his breath clouding the air. “You’re probably right. Let’s have dinner at the next inn and then head for home.”

They followed an icy, rutted path down the hillside into a small village, no more than a huddle of cottages about a grey stone church. An ale-stake outside one of the houses drew Mal’s eye, and he dismounted stiffly.

“A drink will warm us up, even if there’s no food to be had,” he said, leading his horse towards the church gate since there was no stable or even a hitching-post to be seen.

The alehouse was busy, there being little to do in the fields on these bitter winter days. The villagers fell silent as Mal entered, and exchanged glances and muttered curses as Sandy followed behind him. Mal ignored them; he was used to such receptions by now. Instead he bestowed his most charming smile upon the alewife, plied her with silver and soon took possession of two seats near the small fireplace, two jacks of very tolerable porter and a plate of bread and pickled onions.

“You’re a long way from home, gentlemen,” their hostess said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Up from Derby, are yer?”

“Yes,” Mal said quickly, before Sandy could betray their purpose. “Looking for an old friend who used to live in these parts, name of Frogmore.”

It was the first name that came to mind, but that didn’t matter. It did the trick.

“No Frogmores round here, sir. Only gentlemen of your station hereabouts were the Shawes, but they’ve been gone these twenty year or more.”

“Shawe?” Where had he heard that name before? “Oh, so they didn’t sell their house to Frogmore after they left?”

The alewife gave a short laugh. “Not likely, sir. Shawe House is cursed. That’s why they left. No one’s lived there since.”

“Cursed?”

“Haunted by vengeful spirits. Or demons. Old man Shawe was murdered in his bed; slashed to ribbons, they say.”

“Could have been a wronged woman with a kitchen knife,” Mal said, forcing a laugh.

No one else seemed to find his quip amusing. Mal turned his attention back to his dinner, and as soon as both their plates were empty they went back out into the cold.

“Demons, eh?” Mal said as they rode away from the tavern. “Where have we heard that before? Still, sounds like we’re on the right track at last.”

Mal stopped at the last house in the village and asked directions of a grubby-faced child of indeterminate sex, who ran indoors without a reply. A few moments later an old man came out.

“Shawe House, yer say? Well, ye’re on the right road. Carry on about a mile and a half and yer’ll come to a pair o’ gates on yer left. Shawe House is at the end o’ the lane – or what’s left on it.”

The directions were simple enough, and within half an hour they found themselves riding along an overgrown track between a double row of chestnut trees. After about a quarter of a mile the track opened out into what was probably once an entrance courtyard paved with brick, now turned to a copse of leafless sycamore undergrown with the frost-blackened remnants of last summer’s nettles. Beyond stood the house itself: all sagging roof timbers, crumbling brick and empty windows.

They dismounted and tied their horses to one of the sturdier saplings. Mal drew his rapier; if Sandy was right, the devourers had come from here originally, and who knew but that more could have escaped through the reopened wound in the dreamlands? It should be safe enough in daylight, but the sun was sinking and they did not have much time. He waved Sandy behind him and approached the entrance to the manorhouse.