said, politely. ‘Have you seen them?’
‘Nay,’ said the dwarf. ‘They’ll be in the auld capel, where the Magister used to consort wi’ the devil when he popped up from hell for a chat. I’ve seen them there o’ nights, a-heebying and a-jeebying, whispering thegither for hours, though I never heard they had aught to say.’
‘It’s not night,’ Hazel pointed out.
‘Night – day – at the runt end of the year, there’s no muckle difference.’
‘Could you show me the place?’ Hazel asked. ‘Not now – it’s a bit late – but another day?’
‘Aye,’ the dwarf said slowly. ‘But I’m thinking the goodman would not be wanting ye to go there.’
‘Then we won’t tell him,’ Hazel said, doing her best to sound resolute. ‘We have to trap the gnomons. If they won’t come to me, then I have to go to them.’
‘Ye’re a bold lass,’ said the dwarf, but whether in approval or criticism she couldn’t tell. ‘I’ll be seeing ye.’
He was gone, and ahead she saw Bartlemy, emerging from the gloom of the fading daylight.
‘They didn’t come,’ Hazel said.
‘So I gather. We’ll try again tomorrow.’
But on Sunday it rained too heavily for hunting phantoms, and in the week Hazel had school.
‘I could skive off one afternoon,’ she offered, nobly.
‘No,’ said Bartlemy. ‘We’ll wait for the weekend.’
‘The weekend,’ Hazel echoed, thinking of the Darkwood, and the chapel under the tree-roots, and her stomach tightened in anticipation of terrors ahead.
Nathan went back to school on Monday, still taking the painkillers each night, less to make him sleep than to keep him in his bed. It was always awkward wandering between worlds in the dormitory, since the more solid he appeared in his dreams, the more insubstantial his sleeping form would become. It was only when he was back home for the weekend, and assuring his mother he was restored to fitness, that he stopped taking the drugs.
That night, he lay for a while unsleeping, his body rigid at the thought of the planet undersea. The Grandir was right: he knew what he had to do. Find the third relic – the relic removed from Eos countless years ago by the Grandir himself, to shield it from the greedy and the misguided. The Iron Crown. The crown of spikes forged originally by Romandos, first of the Grandirs, to form a part of the Great Spell to save their people – a plan laid over millennia, woven into the legends of a thousand worlds, hidden in a web of folklore and lies. Nathan still had no idea what the spell itself involved, or how it could engender salvation – he knew only that it had more power than a galaxy imploding, and would shake the very multiverse to its core. Even the Grandir, he suspected, had yet to fill in all the gaps in his vision of destiny. The Grandir who thought he was a trueborn descendant of Romandos and his bridesister Imagen, though Nathan had seen in his naked face the ghost of Imagen’s lover Lugair.
Nathan lingered between sleep and waking, thoughts floating free in his mind. Lugair had betrayed Romandos – Romandos his friend – slaying him with the Traitor’s Sword, to be slain in his turn … the sword had been held in Carboneck for generations, a curse on the kings of Wilderslee and on their people … the Grail had been guarded by Josevius and the Thorns, the so-called luck of the family, its burden and its bane … and the Iron Crown must be in Widewater, somewhere in the deeps of the sea. The masculine principle, the feminine principle, and the circle that binds. Three elements that together might change a world, or all worlds … But Osskva the mage had told him it needed a sacrifice – it needed blood. Blood had begun it, Romandos’ blood, and blood must finish it – the blood of his descendant. It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people … who had said that? Suddenly Nathan was sure the Grandir was ready for that, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Not out of love perhaps – it was hard to imagine him loving his people, he seemed above such sentiment – but from a supreme sense of duty, from pride, from his absolute commitment to his heritage and his world. And for Halmé, whom he loved indeed, Halmé the Beautiful for whom he had said that world was made …
There must be another way, Nathan thought, knowing the thought was futile. He had no power to change things. He was caught up in this like a snowflake in a storm, a tiny component in a huge machine, and all he could do was whatever he had to do. Only this, and nothing more. (Why did he keep thinking of that poem, and Annie’s face when he talked of the Grandir, so pale and still?) He had to find the crown.
And then he remembered Keerye, speaking of the Goddess, and how she had an iron crown which never rusted, kept in a cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef.
How could he have failed to pick up the clue? But he had been inside Ezroc’s head, sharing his thoughts and feelings, no longer a boy but an albatross riding on the wind. Oh to fly again …
His mind turned to dragons – it would be dragons – great fire-breathing monsters, far more deadly than Urdemons or giant lizards. But no dragon could breathe fire under water. He visualised a vast serpentine creature, winged and clawed and fanged, rising in a storm of bubbles, the sea boiling against its flanks. Its mouth opened on a gullet of flame, its red-hot tongue crackled like a lava-flow in the alien element … The ocean erupted into steam as the dragon ascended, dripping wings driving it into the sky …
Somehow, in the midst of such visions, he fell asleep.
And now he was flying again, not the dragon but the bird. Soaring on the high air into a deep blue night. Southward and eastward there was a faint pallor along the horizon; light leaked into the sky. The sun’s disc lifted above the rim of the globe and the light washed over the ocean, turning the waves to glitter. Ahead, Nathan saw a broken shoreline of crags and peaks and towers, rough-facetted, glimmering here and there with a glimpse of crystal. The Ice Cliffs. As he drew nearer he made out a vast colony of seabirds stretching along the escarpment: gannets, puffins, auks, gulls, terns – the squawking of their competing chatter was like the din of a whole city. On the highest part of the ridge there was a group of albatrosses, twenty or thirty pairs, far bigger than the other birds – bigger than the albatrosses Nathan had seen on nature films – some, at a guess, nearly as tall as he was, or would have been if he had been solid. Ezroc, he realised, had grown too: his wingspan seemed to reach halfway across the world. He gazed down at the mating pairs – Nathan remembered that albatrosses mate for life – and he felt the sorrow in Ezroc’s heart because he was alone, he had chosen loneliness to pursue his long voyages in search of Keerye who was dead and the islands that were no more.
In Ezroc’s mind he heard a memory re-playing, the voice of an older bird, relative or mentor: ‘The islands are lost, young stormrider, if they ever existed. You have journeyed many miles further than your namesake – you have followed the great currents to the south – merfolk have hunted you, boiling spouts have singed your feathers, seamonsters have chased your shadow across the waves. You know the truth. The seas are empty. Stay here; settle down with your own kind. Until the Ice Cliffs melt, the northfolk will have a place to be.’
And Ezroc’s reply: ‘It is not enough.’ The words of a maverick, stubborn beyond reason, holding onto a vision no one else could see.
He passed over the colony, ignoring the birds that raised their heads to watch him, speeding along the floating shoreline. Below, Nathan glimpsed other creatures, refugees from the lost lands of long ago, surviving on the Great Ice. A troop of penguins waddling
