is ever really over, is it?’
‘True worrds. I wouldnae be averse to meeting Trouble again. Belike I’ve been missing him. Are ye going tae invite me in?’
The boy allows a pause, for concentration or effect. ‘All right. You may come in.’
The goblin springs down from the window-sill, hefting his antique spear with the bundle tied to the shaft.
‘By the way,’ says the boy, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Bradachin.’
‘Bradachin.’ He struggles to imitate the pronunciation. ‘Mine’s Will. Oh, and… one more thing.’
‘What thing is that?’
‘A warning. My sister. She’s at university now and she doesn’t come here very much, but when she does, stay out of her way. She’s being a little difficult at the moment.’
‘Will she see me?’ the goblin enquires.
‘I expect so,’ says the boy.
The goblin moves towards the door with his uneven stride, vanishing as he reaches the panels. The boy stares after him for a few minutes, his young face, with no betraying lines, no well-trodden imprint of habitual expressions, as inscrutable as an unwritten page. Then he and the room recedes, and there is only the smoke.
* * *
The images wax and wane like dreams, crystallising into glimpses of solidity, then merging, melting, lost in a drift of vapour. Sometimes it seems as if it is the cave that drifts, its hollows and shadows vacillating in the penumbra of existence, while at its heart the smoke-visions focus all the available reality, like a bright eye on the world. We too are as shadows, Sysselore and I, watching the light, hungering for it. But I have more substance than any shadow – I wrap myself in darkness as in a cocoon, preserving my strength while my power slumbers. This bloated body is a larval stage in which my future Self is nourished and grows, ready to hatch when the hour is ripe – a new Morgus, radiant with youth revived, potent with ancientry. It is a nature spell, old as evolution: I learned it from a maggot. You can learn much from those who batten on decay. It is their kind who will inherit the earth.
Pictures deceive. The smoke-screen opens like a crack in the wall of Being, and through it you may see immeasurable horizons, and unnavigable seas, you may breathe the perfume of forgotten gardens, taste the rains on their passage to the thirsty plain – but the true power is here in the dark. With me. I am the dark, I am the heartbeat of the night. The spellfire may show you things far away, but I am here, and for now, Here is all there is.
The dark is always waiting. Behind the light, beyond reality, behind the visions in the smoke. Look now, look at the egg. It glows with cold, its white shell sheened like clouded ice, the velvet that wraps it crackling with frost. It is secreted in a casket of ebony bound with iron, but the metal is chilled into brittleness, the lock snaps even as the lid is shut, tampering fingers are frozen into a blue numbness. It has lain there for many centuries, a sacred charge on its caretakers, or so they believe, having no knowledge of what it is they cherish, or for Whom. The image returns often, its mystery still unrevealed. Maybe it is a symbol: the deepest, truest magic frequently manifests itself through symbols. Maybe it is just what it appears to be. An egg. If so, then we at least can guess what lies curled within, unhatching, sleeping the bottomless sleep of a seed in midwinter. The men who watch over it have gentle hands and slender, otherworldly features. They do not suspect the germ of darkness that incubates within the egg.
The picture shifts, pulling back, showing us for the first time that the casket stands on an altar of stone, and the altar is in a circular chamber, and the chamber … the chamber is at the top of a lonely tower, jutting like a tooth into the blue mountain air. A few pieces of the pattern fall into place. Others drift, disembodied, like jigsaw-fragments from the wrong puzzle.
‘Why there?’ asks Sysselore, forever scathing. ‘A monastery, I suppose, remote, almost inaccessible – but almost is never enough. Why not hide it outside the world?’
‘Magic finds out magic. Who would look for such an object in the hands of Men? It has been safe in ignorant hands, hidden in plain view, one of a thousand holy relics guarded by monks in a thousand mountain retreats. They will have cradled it in their own legends, endowed it with a dozen meanings. No one has ever sought for it there.’
Somewhere in the tower a bell is struck, drowning out the rumour of the wind in the chimes and the rise and fall of the chant. The swelling of its single note fills the cave; the walls seemed to shake; flakes of earth drop from above. The tower trembles in its sky-gulf. Or perhaps it is the smoke that trembles, unbalancing the picture. We see the egg again, but it is no longer cold. Heat pulses from within, turning the thick shell to translucency. Bent over it is a dark face among the golden ones, dark as the wood of the casket, a face subtle as poison, sharp as a blade. The gaze is lowered: it does not seek for concealed watchers now. Its whole attention is focused on the egg. The throb of the bell is a long time dying. And then comes another sound, a tiny crack, echoless, all but inaudible, yet the aftershock of that minute noise makes the very floor vibrate. The shell fractures, seamed by countless threadlines which glow with a red light as if from a fire in its heart. The ruby glow touches the dark face leaning closer, ever closer, fascinated, eager …
The egg hatches.
‘What now?’ whispers Sysselore, and the quiet in her voice is almost that of awe. ‘Where will it go? They cannot call it holy now, and … it won’t stay hidden. Not long.’
‘We shall see.’
The smoke thins, swirls, re-forms, showing us great events and small. The moor unrolls like a carpet beneath a sky tumbling with clouds. The valley opens, the hillside plunges, the wind rushes in from the sea. And there is the house, lifting blind windows to the rain. Behind closed curtains there is firelight and lamplight, the murmur of conversation, the smell of roasting meat uncoiling from the oven. The sunless evening blurs gradually into night. When dinner is long over, feet climb the stairs to bed. A glass tumbler stands alone on a sideboard in the kitchen, containing a small measure of golden liquid. Not discarded or forgotten but placed there deliberately. A gesture. Presently, the house-goblin materialises, sitting on the end of the table. He samples the leftover roast and drains the tumbler, declaiming an incomprehensible toast, probably to the red-bearded Laird who swatted his foes with a tree-trunk. Then he roams through the house, patrolling his domain.
In a bedroom on the first floor a girl is seated in front of an antique dressing-table, studying herself in the mirror. There is no vanity in her contemplation: her expression is grave and unusually detached. She stares at her reflection, you feel, simply because it is there. Yet she might be termed beautiful, if mere youth is beauty, clarity of skin and eye, elfin slenderness of body. I was beautiful once, I and Morgun, my twin, but beauty alters with time, as all else, and in a different age Helen wears a different face. So maybe she is beautiful, this pale, dispassionate girl, with her gravity and her small breasts. Fashion is a poor judge of such things. The adjacent lamp puts a gloss on her short hair which it may not merit and shades the moulding of invisible bones. But as we look closer I see something in her face, or in its reflection, something beneath the unblemished exterior. Imperceptible. Almost familiar. A secret too well hidden, a scar too perfectly healed. It shows in a certain fragility, a certain strength, a trace element of pain. But the image begins to withdraw from her, and the flicker of not-quite-recognition is gone.
The goblin, too, is watching her, just inside the door, his crouched body only a shadow in the corner to the discerning eye. Even the mirror cannot see him. She
