Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series (12 page)

S
am was aware that they were driving to the airport, or so he’d been told by Whisperer. But he was sure of nothing else in his ringing, burning world made only slightly more bearable by the darkness of the blindfold.

‘Why did you do it?’ demanded Whisperer.

‘Odin was one of them. He’s in it as deep as anybody.’

‘Who else?’

‘There lies the problem. There were so many others, once I got a sight of his mind. I did see Jehovah – he was one who stood out. But as to what it means…’

Whisperer fell silent. He drove like all spirits, carefully, and exactly on the speed limit. Like all spirits, he disliked cars, and motorways especially. To his mind, every car was a monster trying to catch him, and it was only grim necessity that forced him into the driving seat. He held the steering wheel with the very ends of his fingers, as if disgusted to be touching it.

‘What would you have done if it got out of control?’

‘It didn’t, so I don’t feel obliged even to think about that question.’

Silence again. Then, ‘Do you really think Odin conspired to kill his own sister?’

‘I don’t know. But whoever killed Freya is being incredibly clever. I think Odin is out to keep me busy, while they go after Andrew. I’m surprised mortal Andrew has survived this long.’

‘I expect every spirit within a hundred miles felt the —’

‘Look, can we drop it?’ It was the first time Sam had spoken so harshly.

This time not even Whisperer dared break the silence.

Sam shifted uneasily. ‘Can we have the radio on?’ he asked, in a tone made contrite by his outburst. Usually he didn’t like most radio, French or otherwise. Much of it seemed a mad dash for the end of the story, or a brash ditty summing up the mindless haste of mortal life.

Whisperer pressed a button on the dashboard.

‘Your voices too loud?’

‘They’re fading.’

‘How are your eyes?’

‘Don’t know.’ Sam raised the blindfold, blinking fast as though a flash had just gone off in his face. ‘Ouch.’

Whisperer glanced at him. ‘They’ve gone grey. Nearly there, then.’

With a sigh and a shudder, Sam replaced the blindfold and sat back again.

‘Don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of time.’ Whisperer pressed more buttons on the radio until he found some soothing music. After a release, Sam’s mind was full of things he could only guess at. ‘Go straight to the hotel, assuming you can see straight. I’ve arranged for one of our jinn to meet you there. I’ll be following by the Way of Fey, and Adamarus will join us as soon as he’s sure he’s not watched.’

As so often when leaving for another country, Sam was faced with an instant change of nationality. This time to prepare himself he began reciting in Russian. ‘Three times three is nine,’ he chanted. ‘I am the devil incarnate, what do you do? There are some languages where you need a bad cold for perfect pronunciation. I haven’t been to Russia for years. How’s my accent?’

‘Fine,’ replied Whisperer, in the same guttural language. ‘How do you intend to find the mortal, with such tight security around him?’

‘The nasty way. I’ll find someone in Odin’s employment and beat the living daylights out of him or her until they tell me where to go.’

At the airport Sam walked unsteadily across the car park, passing from one orange pool of light to another while overhead the planes pointed their noses to the sky and blasted upward.

‘You up to this?’ asked Whisperer.

‘You suggest I Waywalk in this condition?’ Sam asked, attempting a counterfeit humour. He’d taken off the blindfold, but Whisperer was concerned to see how his usually boyish smile was pained and how his eyes still burnt light grey.
Were I human, this would be a friend
,
he thought with a sense of shock.
Were I human, what I feel now would be loyalty. What an interesting concept.

‘Oh hell, the German accent,’ Sam exclaimed, fumbling in a pocket for his Sebastian Teufel passport. ‘And we’d better get the other passports out of the bag and into my pocket. At least I won’t be searched.’

‘I’ll be interested to see how you get that through customs.’ Whisperer indicated the sword slung once again over Sam’s back. ‘What if they want to put that through the machine?’

‘You just watch a master do his work.’

They walked to the Air France desk, where Sam attempted to speak French with a German accent as he handed over his passport for inspection, before claiming his single ticket to Moscow.
If you have to start searching for Andrew anywhere, let it be the centre.
Sam was still blinking painfully and his voice was laden with fatigue. Observing his condition Whisperer said, ‘Try humming. That’ll shut out the sounds in your head.’

Sam began humming ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, out of tune and with no real conviction, but the frown uncreased slightly between his brows, and his grey eyes continued to darken.

At the boarding gate he took Whisperer’s hand. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done.’

‘See you in Moscow,’ replied Whisperer. ‘Just as soon as I find a Fey Portal.’

Only spirits used Fey Portals. Whether it was the same principle as Waywalking, Sam couldn’t tell.

He said, ‘Watch your back.’

‘I always do. Aren’t I the one who gets lost in the fog?’

‘Of course. I hope Adamarus is as good as you at losing followers, being the blown end of the network.’

‘It’s hard to track through a Feywalk.’

The queue moved a little further towards the metal detector and customs, and Sam touched a finger to his lips, a little of his old humour returning. ‘Now why don’t you watch Satan weave his magic? You may be able to use it yourself.’

Whisperer laughed. ‘Mortal minds are no one’s domain but yours.’

He knew as soon as the words were out how misjudged they were, considering the torrent of voices Sam was still receiving in his fragile state. Sam however made nothing of them beyond a gesture of acknowledgement. He turned and walked towards the gate, his face assuming the empty look of every commuter catching a late flight.

‘If you wouldn’t mind putting your bags through the machine, sir. And if you could remove all metal objects.’

Sam unslung his luggage and laid it on the machine. He emptied some loose change from his pocket, and without a qualm he stepped through the metal detector. The dagger failed completely to alert the machine.

A security officer was staring intently at the screen as Sam’s bag, containing both sword and crown, began to pass through the machine. Indeed, thought Whisperer, watching from a distance, he was staring so intently it was a wonder his eyes didn’t pop out.

Suddenly the man sneezed, then sneezed again, huge explosions that shook his whole body. Tears sprang to his eyes and he groped blindly for a packet of tissues before blowing his nose with the sound of a volcano in full eruption. In the meantime Sam’s bags had passed through the system without provoking a peep. He retrieved them without glancing back at Whisperer, the magician who has carried off a perfect trick. The only clue that he was even slightly different from the other travellers was a smug gleam in the corner of his still-darkening eyes.

He was like that, thought Whisperer. You brace yourself for a huge performance involving fireworks, and the minds of mortals being re-written in bursts of concentrated magic, and all Sam does is tickle the man’s nose.

Sam Linnfer, Luc Satise, Sebastian Teufel, Lucifer, Satan, the evil one – whatever you wished to call him, as he himself would say – stepped on to international territory towards an uncertain truth locked in the mind of a mortal.

No one disturbed him on the plane. He appeared to be asleep, with the blindfold over his eyes and his headphones playing whatever in-flight music channel he’d first found. Apart from the occasional yowl of a child, the whole plane was silenced by sleep. It was the kind of silence in which the hum of the engines became more pronounced, along with the odd shudder whenever they encountered turbulence.

But Sam wasn’t sleeping. How could he, when his eyes burned so and the whispers of numberless other minds still filled his head? Which was why he was listening to the in-flight entertainment – endless songs about the trauma of breaking up, played, probably, by people with the same hairstyles. At least it shut out some of the voices.

He’d nearly lost control; that was what shocked him most. He’d come so close to losing what little power he held over…
it
. That buried curse, written into blood and bone in lines of fire and left to haunt him for the rest of his days. And he’d nearly let it loose.

‘When you release it, does it hurt?’

Annette speaking. He glanced up from his study of the map, surprised by her question. In this deep, cold cellar full of old wine bottles and spider’s webs, they’d been discussing the local Resistance’s plan for sabotaging a military plant. Her query had come from nowhere. At twenty-six, Annette was a woman made wise by war. From a spring evening in pre-war Paris this bourgeoise, who’d thought the whole world was made up of cocktail parties, had lost a husband, had learnt to parachute and kill with her bare hands, and, in her own quaint way, had sold her soul to Satan.

But, as Sam often said, she hadn’t made him an offer. She’d just thrust her soul upon him.

‘Does what hurt?’ he asked, annoyed at being taken out of his train of thought.

‘The Light. When you release it. Does it hurt?’

He went on looking at the map, but no longer seeing it clearly. ‘Sometimes more than others. It depends how far it goes. Usually the after-effects hurt more than the actual release.’

‘It seems strange.’

‘What does?’

‘Well…’ she gestured vaguely. ‘You’re the Devil. Surely you should release pure darkness or something?’

‘Define “pure darkness”.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘No, seriously. What effect would pure darkness have on the world, were it released?’

She looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know. Kill everything, I guess.’

‘And what’s the effect of the so-called “Light” in me?’

She didn’t answer his question. ‘‘Lucifer… Luc…’

‘It burns. It blinds. It consumes its vessel and opens the souls of men, removes every stitch of human privacy and bares the darkest, deepest thoughts of mortal minds, makes them sing their lies and their selfish plans to him who hears. It only makes the lies and the hatred sing, though. It opens none of the goodness in the heart. Subjected thus, is it really so surprising that the Devil should possess it?’

‘I guess not,’ she’d replied. Sam, for a few brief seconds, had been his age, twice his age, when talking of the Light within. It always unsettled her, to be reminded that she would grow old and die, but that this man before her would stay as he was now. The Bearer of Light. The eternal shadow that haunts sinners. Her Luc Satise. Yet no one’s Luc.

Annette had also asked him once, ‘Why are you Sam?’

He’d been surprised – it had taken her until 1969 to put this question. Perhaps she’d only now mustered the recklessness to delve into something she’d vowed to keep out of in 1941.

Already there was a streak of premature grey in her hair, though he’d been too polite to mention it.

‘I know it, you know. You think I’m getting old.’

He opened his mouth to say something along the line of, ‘No, of course not’ – and saw her expression. ‘Oh.’

‘“Oh?” What does “oh?” mean?’

‘Just “oh?” As in… no matter what I really think, I’ve never once won an argument against you.’

‘Do you still drink coffee?’

‘My tastes are liable to all sorts of change. Two thousand years ago I ate dormice with the rest of Rome.’

‘I never believed they ate those.’

‘You wouldn’t believe a lot of the things they got up to in Rome. Civilisation leads to boredom, and boredom leads to anarchism, but in a very
civilised
way.’

‘And I imagined
you’d
remind me of my youth. You sound older than I look.’

‘There might be a reason for that,’ he pointed out mildly.

She smiled faintly, turning her head to one side. ‘You’ve met my husband?’

‘The man outside weeding the garden?’

‘Yes. This is his house. That’s his grandfather on the wall, that’s his sofa, that’s his whisky cabinet.’

‘Ah.’ The man Sam had seen outside looked like a character out of Charles Dickens – complete with fob watch, whiskers and quite possibly a top hat in some wardrobe upstairs in the grand mansion that Annette was currently calling her home. The 1960s seemed to have passed by this rural English village without anyone being aware of what they were missing. Except Annette, of course.

‘He was in the war.’

‘Ah. What did he do?’

‘A navy captain.’

‘Wow. I’d never have thought that…’

‘Stationed in the Caribbean.’

‘Oh. Well, I mean…’

‘Luc, stop stuttering.’ She stared at him. Then she burst out laughing.

‘What?’

‘I can’t believe I’m chiding a man thousands of years older than I am, in my motherly voice.’