Witch’s Honour

III

The hardest thing was being back inside Time. I had spent so long in a dimension where no time passed, where the illusory seasons revolved endlessly in the same circle, never progressing, never changing, where day and darkness were mere variations in the light. I had spent so long—but ‘long’ was a word that did not apply there, for in the realm of the Tree there is no duration. A millennium or a millionth of a second, it is all one. The Tree has grown and grown until it can grow no further, and it is held in stasis, bearing its seedless fruit, bending the space around it as a black hole bends the stuff of the universe. (I know about these things, you see. I have watched them in the spellfire, the witches and wizards of science, poking at the stars.) I glutted myself on the power of the Tree, and was reborn from the power of the river, after she burned me in the pale fire of sorcery. And then I could not go back. I called the birds to me: the blue-banded magpies, the heavy-beaked ravens, the woodpeckers and tree-creepers. I sent them across the worlds to the cave beneath the roots where I and my coven-sister had dwelt, to bring me my herbs and powders, my potions and crystals. I bound tiny waterskins about the necks of the woodpeckers and taught them to tap the bark until it bled sap, and return to me when the vessel was full. The sap of the Tree has a potency I alone have ever learned: from it I can make a draught that will drain individual thought, leaving the intoxicated mind to think whatever I desire. Last, I summoned the great owl, wisest of birds, and told him to find for me the single branch hidden in the cave, wrapped in silk, the branch I had plucked long before with many rituals, and to bear it carefully back. I planted it in my island retreat, fearing it might not root, but the magic was strong in it, and it grew.

I chose the island because of my coven-sister Sysselore, who lived there once. In those days she was Syrcé the enchantress, young and beautiful, and lost sailors came to her with their lean brown bodies, and she turned them into pigs, and grew thin on a diet of lean pork. I hoped the island would be a place of transition, where I could reaccustom myself to the living world. The sudden racing of Time made me sick, so there were moments when I could not stand, and I would lie down on a bed that seemed to tilt and rock like a speeding carriage on an uneven road. Even when the nausea passed, there was the terror of it, of being trapped in the rush of Now, snatching in vain at seconds, minutes, hours which are gone before you can take hold of them. I could not believe I used to live like this: only the iron of my need and the steel of my will kept me from flight. But as Time moved on, so I became habituated to it.

There were more people on the island than in ancient days; humans have bred like insects, and the earth is overrun. Many have strange customs: they lie in the sun and go brown like peasants, and the women show their bodies to all men instead of a chosen few. I do not lie in the sun; white skin is the acme of beauty, and I am beautiful again. The fire purged me, the river healed me, and I emerged from the waters of Death as Venus reborn, a Venus of the night, star-pale and shadow-dark. I turn from the sun now, preferring the softer light of the moon, the moon who has always been a friend to witchkind. In the moonlight I am a goddess. But when I look in the mirror I see the old Morgus there still, the power-bloated mountain of flesh not eroded but compressed, constricted into a form of slenderness and beauty. The lissom figure is somehow subtly gross, and the loveliness of my face is like a shifting veil over the face beneath. That realisation fills me with a joy that is not of this earth, for I know that the dark within is strong in me, and beauty alone is a shallow, insipid thing without the power beneath the skin. And sometimes, in that same reflection, I seem to see the Eternal Tree, winding its twig-tendrils and root-tendrils in my hair, and blending its night with the shadows in my eyes. That is the sweetest of all, for with the Tree I am immortal, both human and unhuman, and I can challenge even Azmordis for the throne of the world.

I left the island after the incident with the man. There would be curiosity and questions, and though I could deal with both I did not wish to be troubled. And so I came home at last, to Britain, which was called Logrèz, the land where I was born and where I will one day rule alone. Let Azmordis flee to the barbarian countries across the Western sea! This was my place, and it will be mine again, until the stars fall. I hid in the cave in Prydwen where Merlin was said to have slept, many centuries ago; though he is not there now. But I had had enough of caves. The entrance was concealed with enchantments older than mine, and in the gloom of that safety I lit the spellfire, and sought a house to suit both queen and witch.

I had conjured a creature to be my servant, part hag, part kobold; I bought her labour with a bag of storms. When seven times seven years are done, and she is free of me, she will open it and raze the village where she was scorned and stoned, at some remote time in a forgotten past. She does not talk, which pleases me; I know these things because I have seen the pictures in her mind. But she is sharp of ear and eye, adequate at housework and skilled in the kitchen, and the loyalty that I have purchased is mine absolutely. Her meaningless vengeance binds her to me more surely than any spell. And I have Nehemet, Nehemet the goblin-cat, who was not conjured but came to me, there on the island, as if she had been waiting. Who she is, or what she is, I do not know. Her name came with her, spoken clearly into my thought, though she has never spoken again. Goblin-cats are rare; according to one legend they were the pets of the king of the Underworld, losing their fur because they did not need it in the heat from the pits of Hell. But Nehemet is no mere animal: there is an old intelligence in her gaze, and her poise is that of a feline deity who steps haughtily from a new-opened tomb. She is my familiar, in every way. Somewhen in the passing centuries we have met before.

I am glad they are both female. I prefer to surround myself with females, whatever their kind. Men are to be manipulated or enslaved; they are necessary for procreation, but that is all. I loved a man once: that desire that can never be sated, that madness where even suffering is dear to the heart. I lay with him and he took me to the place where sweetness is pain and pain is bliss, and in the cold grey morning he looked on me and turned away, and left me alone for always. So I took my love and buried it deep in my spirit, so deep that I have never found where it lies. He was my half-brother, and he became the High King, but the son I bore him was his downfall, though it gained me nothing. Enough of him. I remember Morgun, my blood-sister, my twin. As children we played together, exchanging kisses, touching each other until our nipples swelled like spring buds. But in the end she turned to the love of men, submitting to the rule of lords and masters, and betrayed me, and herself, and died in bitterness. I saw her head, hanging on the Eternal Tree, vowing even then to be my doom. Now, there is only one man in my house—if man you can call him.

I brought my possessions and my entourage to Wrokeby after New Year’s Eve. I have a use for both the house and its owner: Kaspar Walgrim is a monarch in a world I do not know, the world of Money. And Money, like magic, is the key to power. With magic you can bemaze the minds of men, but with Money you can buy their souls. Walgrim is one of the rulers in the realm of Money: they call it the City, Londinium of old, Caer Lunn. The High King never kept his seat there, but the head of Bran the Blessed was once entombed beneath its white tower, gazing outward over the land, shielding it from enemies. My half-brother dug it up, saying it was a pagan thing, and he could hold his kingdom alone; only the kingdom was lost and the god of greed sits on the throne where a hundred kings have sat before, playing the games of power and spending their people’s gold. I need Money, and Walgrim has my magic in his blood. He will harvest the City’s gold for me.

Wrokeby is an old house by the standards of today, though its first stones were laid long after I quit the world. But there are bones underneath, green and rotten now, which were flesh when I was born: I can feel them there, reaching up to me through the dark earth. I cannot destroy them without uprooting the house itself, but I have cleaned out the ghosts which cluttered every empty room, even the imp which made mischief in the kitchen. Grodda, my servant, complained it was always extinguishing the flame in the stove. As I opened the abyss they were sucked through; I heard their thin wailing, felt their helpless terror. It is long and long since I have tasted such terror, even from flimsy, lifeless beings such as these: I drank it like wine. My half-brother laid down the knightly precepts: help the oppressed, outface fear, do nothing dishonourable. The laws of Succour, Valour, Honour. But they were for warriors and heroes, not for women and witches. We were to be loved and left, abused and disempowered. And so I made precepts of my own, turning his on their heads: oppress the helpless, weild fear, honour nothing. Succour. Valour. Honour. I have never forgotten those three words. It was good to feel fear again, the fear of lesser, weaker creatures. It makes me strong, stronger than I have felt in time outside Time. There was little fear to feed on, beneath the Eternal Tree.

I moved my prisoner here, from the borders of the Underworld where I had caught and bound him. The house on the island was not suitable, but here there is the attic room already equipped with locks and bolts and bars. I chained him with many chains, and I locked the locks, and bolted the bolts, and walled him in with spells stronger than bars. He did not speak, not then, but sometimes I hear him snarling, chewing on his own fury. Soon the nightmares will begin, and he will howl like a beast in the darkness, and then I will visit him, and watch him grovel, and whine for mercy, and call me ‘mother’. I have not yet decided on his punishment, only that it will be slow, sweet and slow, and before I am done he will be offering me the soul he does not have—the soul he longs for and dreams of—for a moment of surcease.

I like to feel them around me: my collection. Not the corpse-cuttings and cold relics that warriors prize, but living trophies. My prisoner, the girl who mocked me, the eyes of the spy. And one day, she will be there. She who failed me, and cheated me, and made my own blood rise up against me. For she is in this world, this Time. Somewhere she lives and breathes, wakes and sleeps, unsuspecting, believing me dead. I named her Morcadis, my coven-sister, my disciple and my weapon. I would have made her as Morgun, my long-dead twin—Morgun as she should have been—sharing her body, owning her soul. But she escaped from the domain of the Tree, and when Sysselore and I followed she turned on us with the crystal fire, and we burned. Sysselore was gone in an instant, but I had my mantle of flesh—flesh and power—and I crawled to the icy river, and plunged in, and was remade. And now I have returned to the world alone, to reclaim my kingdom—my island of Britain—to challenge Azmordis himself for the dominion of Men.

But first I will find her, and write my vengeance in blood on her naked flesh.

Fern found the note on her doormat before she went to work. The paper was pale brown and shredded around the edges; from the print on the back it might have been the fly-leaf of an old book. The writing was in greenish-blue ink, with many splotches, the words ill-formed and badly spelt. ‘The queane wil come and see you to nite at midnite. She sends you greting.’ There was no signature, but Fern suspected that this was because Skuldunder, if he was the scribe, could not spell his own name. She folded the note carefully, put it in her jacket pocket, and went to the office. She had half promised to keep Will informed of any developments, but a busy day left her little leisure for personal calls and anyway, she did not want to have to explain where she was going in the evening. There was no real reason for her reluctance, or none she could identify, but the thought of the forthcoming meeting with Lucas Walgrim filled her with both impatience and unease. Impatience because she was sure it was a waste of time—her time and his—and unease because it would touch on matters that were too near the bone, too close to the heart, to be discussed with a stranger. But she could not let him down. Good manners had ensnared her.

‘How will you recognise me?’ she had asked. ‘Carnation buttonhole? Rolled up copy of Hello!?’

‘I’ll know you,’ he had said, with a quiet certainty that was unnerving.

Not for the first time in her life, she wished she wasn’t quite so well brought up.

They met in a City bar not long after six. Fern arrived in time to get a small table to herself, reserving the spare chair, before the bulk of the rush-hour drinkers flooded in. As always when awaiting someone she’d never met, she checked each new arrival, particularly the men on their own, trying to match a face to the voice on the telephone. At one point, a young man stood in the entrance for a couple of minutes, peering round the room, and she thought with a sense of resignation, ‘This is it,’ but it wasn’t. He had the pink-faced, slightly smug good looks that youth so often assumes when it has too much money, but there was no sign of the single-mindedness or the underlying tension she had detected in the brief telephone conversation. He moved across the room, waylaying a blonde who had been screened by a pillar, and Fern switched off her expression of polite welcome and stirred the froth into her cappuccino.

When he finally arrived, only five minutes late although it seemed like much longer, he took her off guard. She was expecting someone who would pause, gaze about him, vaccillate; but he came towards her without hesitation or doubt, sat in the empty chair with no invitation. ‘Miss Capel. Hello. I’m Lucas Walgrim.’

Her initial reaction was that this was not a face she would trust. Attractive in the wrong way, with that taut-boned, clenched-in look, like a person who is accustomed to suppressing all emotion. A suggestion of something unsafe, an element of ruthlessness carefully concealed. No sense of humour. Under the black straight line of his brows his eyes were a startling light grey, nearly silver. She had never liked pale eyes. A lack of pigment, she had been told in her school years. Lack of colour, lack of warmth, lack of soul.

She said: ‘How did you recognise me?’

‘I’ve seen you before.’ She was the girl in his dream of the city, though older, the girl he had seen waking from oblivion. But there was no sign of the intense, arresting creature he remembered. She was just a classic London type, more woman than girl, discreetly power-suited, elegantly pretty, aloof, so inscrutable that she appeared almost bland.

She asked: ‘Where?’ and he didn’t know how to answer. He could not tell this cool sophisticate that he had seen her in his dreams. Instead, he was conveniently distracted by a waitress, ordering coffee and whisky for himself and, at Fern’s request, gin and tonic for her. Then he adopted boardroom tactics, changing the subject before she had time to repeat her question.

‘It was good of you to come. You said you were busy, so I won’t keep you. If I could just tell you about my sister—’

‘And then what?’ Fern knew he had deliberately evaded her earlier demand and was beginning to feel uneasy in a totally different way.

‘I don’t know. I was hoping it might strike a chord of some kind. I’m going on instinct here. I don’t have anything else to go on.’

‘I honestly don’t think I’ll be much help. What you need is some kind of support group…’

‘No. What I need is someone who’s been there—wherever Dana’s gone. Can’t you just try and talk to me?’

‘All right.’ Fern felt cornered. ‘What exactly happened to your sister?’

‘We had a New Year’s Eve bash at my father’s place in the country. I wasn’t in the room at the time, but I’m told Dana fell and hit her head. Not very hard. The doctors said she shouldn’t even have had concussion. When she passed out—well, I thought it was drink or drugs. She’s had a problem with both. I took her to the hospital, but they said she hadn’t taken anything and her alcohol level was high but not excessive. She just didn’t come round. They couldn’t understand it. They waffled about “abnormal reactions”, that sort of crap, but it was obvious they were stumped. She hasn’t even twitched an eyelid since then. Her pulse is so slow she’s barely alive. I heard it was like that with you.’

‘A little,’ Fern acknowledged. ‘I was very drunk, I blacked out, I stayed out. Then a week or so later, I came round. That’s really all I can tell you.’

His eyes looked lighter, she noticed, because of the shadows beneath. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘I know it isn’t. Tell me where you went, when you were unconscious.’

He noted with interest that her expression became, if possible, a shade blander. ‘Answer my question,’ she said.

‘Which question?’ he queried unnecessarily.

‘The one you dodged.’

He paused, thinking it over. ‘You might not believe me: that’s why I didn’t answer. I saw you in a dream. Twice. Nothing sentimental, don’t get that idea. The second time you were in a hospital bed, regaining consciousness. I only saw you for an instant, but the picture was very sharp. Too sharp for dreaming. You looked…intensely alive. More than now.’

He realised too late that he had been offensive, but her manner merely cooled a little further. She inquired noncommittally: ‘Do you often have such dreams? Dreams that stay with you?’

‘Occasionally. Did you dream, when you were in a coma?’

‘No.’ Their drinks arrived, covering a momentary stalemate. When the waitress had retreated, Fern pursued: ‘You said you dreamed about me twice. What happened in the first one?’

‘It didn’t make sense. There was a city—an ancient city—a bit like Ephesos in Turkey, only not in ruins—and a girl asking me for help. Then it changed suddenly, the way dreams do, and we were in the dark somewhere, and the girl turned into you. She looked much younger—fourteen, fifteen—but it was definitely you. The strange thing…’

‘Yes?’

‘I recognised you. I mean, the person I was in the dream recognised you. Whoever you were.’ When she did not respond, he added: ‘Do you follow me?’

‘Yes.’ Both expression and tone seemed to have passed beyond circumspection into a realm of absolute detachment. She sounded so remote, so blank, he knew that his words had meant something to her. Her drink was untouched, her hand frozen in the act of lifting her glass.

When he saw that she wasn’t going to elucidate he said: ‘Your turn.’

‘My…turn?’

‘You were going to tell me what happened when you were comatose. If you didn’t dream…?’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said slowly. ‘I wasn’t there. I was—outside my body, outside the world.’ She concluded with a furtive smile: ‘You might not believe me, of course.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Under a tree.’

‘Where? In a wood? A field? What kind of tree?’

He knew the questions were meaningless, but she answered them. ‘The only kind of tree—the first tree. The Tree all other trees are trying to be, and failing. No wood, no field. Just tree. Under the Tree, there was a cave, with three witches. It’s always three, isn’t it? The magic number. I was the third.’

‘Are you a witch?’ he asked, unsmiling. She looked very unmagical, with her sleek short hair and svelte besuited figure. But it troubled him that she did not either affirm or deny it. She glanced down at her hand—her left hand—as if it did not belong to her, and remembered her gin and tonic, and sipped it, slowly, as though she were performing an exercise in self-restraint. He had developed similar methods in business, learning to curb his occasional impetuosity, to suppress any inner weakness or self-doubt, to control every nuance of his manner. But she does it naturally, he thought. Without trying.

‘What happened next?’ he persisted. ‘You woke up?’

She gave a small shake of the head. ‘I had to find the way back. It was difficult. Dangerous. I had a guide…At this party, when your sister passed out, do you remember anything unusual? Or peculiar?’ He saw the alteration in her attitude, a new alertness in her looks, and experienced a pang which might have been hope, or might have been fear.

‘There were people taking coke and E. They were drinking thirty-year-old Scotch and forty-year-old brandy and absinthe and champagne. Some were discussing literature and French cuisine, religion and sex. Others were talking to the furniture. Many were incapable of talking at all. Nearly everyone was in fancy dress. How unusual do you want?’

If he was witty, Fern did not laugh. (No sense of humour, he thought.) ‘Did anyone see…a bird, an animal, a phantom? Something unexpected or uncanny?’

‘At least six people saw a headless ghost in the old tower—one or two had a conversation with it—but I understand that’s par for the course. Several of the guests wore animal costumes. I noticed a woman with a bird mask, rather beautiful and predatory, but—no, not that I know of. Nothing real.’

‘What is real,’ sighed Fern. It wasn’t a question.

There was a silence which he felt he should not break. She was looking at him in a way people rarely look at each other in a civilised society, as if she were assessing him, without either animosity or liking, fishing for clues to his character, trying to peer into his very soul. She made no attempt to disguise that look, and he thought it changed her, bringing her closer to his memory of the girl in the dreams. He found himself responding in kind, scanning her face as if it were the estimated output from some new investment project, or a painting he admired which rumour told him might be a fake.

Eventually she said: ‘You really believe your sister’s condition isn’t…mere oblivion, don’t you? You think she’s somewhere else?’

‘Mm.’

‘And I expect,’ she went on, ‘you sometimes know things without knowing how. You’re very good at second-guessing the market, or whatever it is you do in the City. Your colleagues think it’s sinister; they may suspect you have access to inside information.’

‘I don’t make many mistakes,’ he conceded.

‘You have a Gift,’ she said lightly—so lightly that he knew the phrase meant more than it said, he heard the importance of the final word.

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘By whom?’ Her tone had sharpened.

‘There was a nurse at the clinic, late one night. He was from an agency, filling in for someone who was off sick; he hasn’t been back since. He told me that there are people with certain powers…that I might be one of them.’

He has power, she thought. I can sense it coming off him like static. He has power, and he uses it, but he doesn’t know how. He’s like I was before I learnt witchcraft: he’s playing by feel. Only it’s far more dangerous, because he’s desperate, living on the edge. If his control should snap…

She asked: ‘Does your sister have this Gift?’

‘I don’t think so. Her only real talent is for making a mess of her life.’ After a minute, he went on: ‘I didn’t do enough for her.’

It was a bald statement of fact, not an apology, but for the first time Fern came close to liking him. ‘You’re doing something now,’ she said. ‘We’re doing something. At least, we’re going to try.’

She looked into his eyes: smile met smile. There had been few smiles throughout the meeting and these were understated, hers close-lipped, his tight-lipped, curiously similar. Something passed between them in that moment, something slight and intangible, connecting them.

Fern said: ‘There’s a lot here I don’t understand. Most of it, to be frank. It could be that your sister’s spirit was taken because of you, or even instead of you, but I’ve no idea by whom.’ The one who stole my spirit is dead, she thought, but there’s a new witch at large in the world, according to the goblins. I must learn more from Mabb. ‘I have to make some inquiries.’