he called the inspector. You remember: the one from last year.’
‘The one with the funny name?’ Nathan said, with his mouth full.
‘Pobjoy.’ There was a shade of constraint in her manner. She hadn’t completely forgiven the absent policeman for his suspicions.
But Nathan had forgotten them. ‘He was clever,’ he said judiciously, ‘even if he did get lots of things wrong. I bet he guessed those burglars were after the Grail.’
‘We don’t know that. Anyway, Rowena Thorn has it, not your uncle.’
‘She gave it to Uncle Barty to look after. The traditional hiding place is at Thornyhill: they once discussed it in front of me.’
‘How do you know she –’
‘I just know.’
Annie didn’t argue any more. Even after fourteen years there were times when she found her son’s alert intelligence disconcerting.
‘The thing is,’ he went on, ‘they were just ordinary burglars, right? Not like the dwarf last time.’
‘Mm.’
‘So they wouldn’t know about the Grail unless someone told them. It couldn’t have been any of us, so they must have found out by magic.’
‘They’re just kids,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t think they’re the sort to use magic.’
‘Of course not. It was somebody else, somebody who paid them to try and steal the cup. That’s logical.’ He added, with a creditable French accent: ‘A kind of eminence grise.’
Annie smiled. ‘You’re a bit young to be turning into a conspiracy theorist.’
‘Uncle Barty thinks so too,’ Nathan pointed out. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t have called the inspector.’
Annie’s smile faded into a sigh. ‘You wanted something to happen,’ she said, ‘and now it has. Can we just try not to let it grow into something worse? No more conspiracies, and spectres, and horrors. Not this time.’
‘You talk as if it was my fault,’ Nathan protested, referring to their adventures the previous year.
‘Just don’t wish for trouble,’ his mother said without much hope. And: ‘You will tell us, won’t you, if you start having dreams again? Those dreams, I mean.’
He looked at her very steadily, and she was disturbed to find his expression completely unreadable. ‘Yes, I will,’ he said at last, adding, to himself, fingers crossed: When I’m ready.
In her room that night Annie, too, took out a picture she never showed anyone. Daniel Ward, the man who was assumed to be Nathan’s father. She had assumed it herself, until the baby was born. The face in the photograph was pleasant rather than handsome, fair-skinned, brown-haired, unremarkable. The eyes were a little dreamy and a secret smile lurked at the corners of his mouth. Even Nathan had never seen the picture; it would give rise to too many questions. Because there was nothing in genetics to enable two white Caucasian parents to produce a child so exotically dark … Annie herself had never really known what happened. In the instant of Daniel’s death she had reached out for him, and a Gate had opened, and in death she had found love, returning to the world of life pregnant, and it wasn’t until she saw the baby that she realized he couldn’t be Daniel’s child. He was the child of destiny, Bartlemy said, bridging the void between worlds; but it did not comfort her. One day, she would have to tell Nathan the truth – one day very soon – but she was still finding reasons to put it off. Keep him safe – keep him trusting – he doesn’t need to know …
She put the picture away again, the looming dilemma clouding her mind, excluding any memories of distant happiness.
In his own bed Nathan lay with his eyes closed roaming the landscape inside his head, looking for the way through. It was there, he knew: he had found it once before, in an emergency, taking the plunge into another universe not at random but by his own will – though the act had frightened him and he hadn’t attempted it again. But now curiosity – which kills even Schroedinger’s cat – impelled him on, stronger than fear. He wanted to see the princess again, to explore the abandoned city and find out more about Urdemons, and why the people left, and the curse on the king …
He fell a long, long way, through a whirling dark pinpricked with stars. Then there was a jarring thud, and his mind was back in his body, but his body was somewhere else. Not the city on two hills with the Gothic house on top but another city, a huge metropolis with buildings like curving cliffs and a blood-red sunset reflected in endless windows and airborne skimmers and winged reptiles criss-crossing in the deadly light. He had landed on a rooftop platform in the shade of a wall, with a door close by. He scrambled to his feet, touched a panel – after a second the door opened and he slipped inside, escaping the lethal sun. He had forgotten the hazards of willing himself into another universe. Here was no misty realm of dreams and incorporeal being: he was almost solid, as visible as a ghost on a dark night, and this was Arkatron on Eos, the city at the end of the world, and there were too many dangers both known and unknown here to menace him. Worst of all, or so he thought when he looked down, he had ignored the first rule of dream-voyages – that you will find yourself wearing the clothes you slept in. It is difficult to feel brave and adventurous in pyjamas. (The previous year, he had got into the habit of going to bed in tracksuit trousers and a sweatshirt.) However, there was nothing he could do about it now.
He found himself on a gallery overlooking a hollow shaft, too deep for him to estimate how far it was to the bottom. Transparent egg-shaped lifts travelled up and down it, supported by alarmingly slender cables. He had assumed he would be in government headquarters, since that was where his dreams usually placed him, but nothing here looked familiar. A lift stopped close by, its door opening automatically even as a section of floor was extruded from the gallery to meet it. The lift was empty. Nathan took the hint, and stepped inside. A panel offered a wide choice of buttons: he pressed the top one. Being only semi-solid he had to press twice, hard. The door closed and the lift shot upwards.
He emerged onto another gallery, but this time he had to walk all the way round to find an exit, and when he pushed the door, it didn’t move. He was too substantial to walk through it. He touched a square on the adjacent wall, but instead of the door opening there was a noise like a few bars of music – the kind of music Hazel would have liked, incorporating weird stringed instruments and very little rhythm. ‘Of course,’ Nathan thought, light dawning, ‘it’s a doorbell. This is a private apartment …’ He wondered if he should run, but there was no point. His dream had brought him here, and he had no real option but to go on.
The door opened.
A man was standing there, a very tall man (all Eosians were taller than the people of our world) wearing a long white robe with a wide hood much looser than the usual kind. Under the hanging sleeves his hands were ungloved and his mask only covered three-quarters of his face; where it ended, just above mouth and jaw, his beard began, a thick white beard unlike anything Nathan had ever seen outside the pages of a book, forked and braided almost to his waist. He stared at Nathan in silence. Nathan stared back, forgetting how shocking his appearance must be to his host. No children had been born here for perhaps a thousand years, and though Nathan was big for his age, in this universe he was shorter than the indigents, slight of build and obviously youthful. His pyjamas were too small for him, stopping well above ankle and wrist – his body had a suggestion of transparency – his face was naked. On Eos, it was rare
