The Devil's Looking-Glass

Chapter THIRTY-NINE





THE CANDLE GUTTERED. Shadows flew across the chamber as the storm crashed against the tower like waves against a reef. In the flickering light, Will levelled his rapier and waited for the first of the Unseelie Court to crawl through the holes in the shattered ceiling. He could sense them, clinging to the rain-lashed roof as they waited for their moment. And then they would come like the storm, he knew, teeth and swords and talons, wild eyes and blood.

Dee clambered to his feet and lurched to an iron lever protruding from a slot in the flagstones. Gripping it with both hands, he wrenched it back. A deep grinding reverberated through the walls. ‘There,’ he exclaimed. ‘The path through the maze is open.’

‘Go, then,’ Will replied. ‘The Tempest waits in the cove. I will hold them off.’ Though death was closer than it had ever been, he set aside fear and doubt. He breathed deeply, bringing the stillness inside him. The storm faded away. The flickering light troubled him not. He was ready.

As Dee stumbled through the door, Will heard a distant shout, and another answering. Tapestries flapped in the gale. Rain pooled on the flags, soaking the age-old books. Still the Unseelie Court waited. Were they taunting him? Trying to frighten him? They knew what strategies worked from generations of torment at lonely farms and on paths through dark woods, but this time they would be disappointed.

The door crashed open and Carpenter and Launceston burst in, blades drawn. Behind them, Strangewayes stumbled, delirious. ‘Ignore him; he is less than useless,’ Carpenter sneered with a nod. ‘He failed to discover Dee’s paste upon the mirrors.’

‘Ah, John, you are sharp as a knife, as always,’ Will said with a flourish of his left hand.

The other man shrugged. ‘Only a fool would have failed to find it, sooner or later.’ Muttering to himself, Strangewayes stumbled back out of the door.

Launceston eyed the holes in the roof. ‘So, they wait for their moment, like rats in a barn at night.’ He shook his head and called, ‘You waste our time. Come now and be done with it.’

The candle guttered one final time and then winked out.

As the dark swept across the chamber, Will braced himself. He had the door at his back, Carpenter to his left, Launceston to his right, but they were at a disadvantage. The Fay always wrapped themselves in the night.

When the wind dropped for a moment, he heard the soft thud of someone dropping to the flagstones, then a second. He could sense the other presences in the room, like a yawning grave, but how many had entered he did not know. Gooseflesh prickled on his skin as the chamber grew colder.

For too long a moment an unnatural silence hung and then Lansing’s icy voice floated through the void. ‘This is what awaits you, a mere taste of death. No heavenly reward, no soothing fields of green or long-lost loved ones. An endless nothing.’

‘Reassuring words from the masters of deceit,’ Will replied, one eyebrow arched. ‘Why, whatever I hear from your lips, I believe the opposite.’

‘We speak the truth when it suits us,’ Lansing replied. ‘What say you, Master Carpenter? Shall I tell a tale of weakness and betrayal? Or—’

‘Your lies are wasted on us,’ Launceston interrupted, unfamiliar passion edging his voice.

Will swished his rapier from side to side. He was ready should the other Fay creep forward in the impenetrable dark. If he could keep Lansing engaged, at least he could pinpoint the Fay lord’s position in the chamber. ‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘In all the stories we are told, your form and nature change with the teller. Imps, sprites, spectres, bloodsuckers. Fallen angels and demons from the depths of Hell. Are you the devil’s children?’

In the ringing silence that followed his question, Will thought he was being ignored, but then Lansing began, ‘You think this world belongs to man? We were here first.’ Bitterness swelled his voice. ‘No man could ever understand our pain, our grief, our loss. You call us devils, but in truth we are angels. Saviours—’

Carpenter snorted with derision. ‘Our saviours?’

‘This world’s saviours. From our new homes under hill and lake and sea, we watched your slaughters and your brutality, the destruction you set in motion with barely a thought for consequence. When you put women and children to the spear, and burned others at the stake, and seared flesh with hot iron and put out eyes and lopped off limbs, we saw you were unworthy of this land that you inherited.’

‘All men are flawed. But we deserve the right to aspire to greater things,’ Will replied. Sensing a presence only a hair’s breadth from his cheek, he whipped his rapier around, but the steel met only thin air. He felt cold eyes upon him nearby, and flexing fingers keen to tear out his throat or turn his innards to straw or stone.

‘It is too late for that,’ the Fay lord replied. ‘Perhaps . . . once . . . before you stole our Queen and meted out your atrocities upon our kind. But now this world will be better without the infestation of man.’

‘A fight to the death, then,’ Will said.

‘’Twas always going to be that way,’ Launceston sighed. ‘Could you imagine our two races living side by side? Let us be done with it, though the world burn down in the process.’

‘And there is man in essence,’ Lansing whispered. ‘Let us be done with it.’

Trusting his instincts, Will lashed his rapier downwards. The blade sliced into one of the Fay creeping towards him through the dark. A furious howl filled the chamber. Beside him, he could hear Launceston and Carpenter putting their blades to work, and cursing at their inability to see. As he swept his sword back and forth, a haunting song reached his ears from the stone steps beyond the door, the words growing clearer as the singer neared. A woman’s voice, it was, and it could only be Meg.

‘There were three ravens sat on a tree,

They were as black as they might be.

With a down, derry, derry, derry, down, down.’

Dee’s potion still gripped her, Will thought, and he called out to warn her away, but still she sang.

‘Then one of them said to his mate,

Where shall we our breakfast take?

Down in yonder green field,

There lies a knight slain under his shield . . .’

Notes of sadness and regret drifted out through her lilting voice. Even the Unseelie Court seemed entranced, for Will sensed them pause in their attack. When the door swung open, candlelight glowed. Glancing back, he saw Meg framed in the archway. Bafflement filled him; he saw no trace of stupor in her face. But then he noticed her smile, darkly triumphant, and he recognized the Meg of old, when such a smile preceded a length of bloody steel. Yet her eyes were filled with the deepest sadness, and that puzzled him.

‘His hounds they lie down at his feet,

So well they can their master keep.

His hawks they fly so eagerly,

There’s no fowl dare him come nigh . . .’

. . . she sang, and then she raised her candle up so her red hair was all aglow, and beckoned behind her. The roar that echoed up the stairs would have chilled even the most hardened warrior. Will thrust Carpenter and Launceston to one side. On the other side of the chamber, the Fay crouched like cornered animals, mouths black slashes in their bone-white faces.

Something thundered up the stone steps. Will glimpsed only a flash of oily black skin and fierce white eyes as the Mooncalf bounded past him with a full-throated roar that made his ears ring. No male could fail to be entranced by Meg, he laughed to himself, and even this wild beast danced to her tune.

As a tumult of rending and tearing, howls and shrieks erupted, the three spies tumbled from the chamber. ‘Your surprises always come with a sting in the tail, Mistress O’Shee,’ Will murmured.

‘You can thank me later, my sweet,’ she replied, ‘and fulsomely, I would hope. But let us not tarry here. Fierce though the Mooncalf is, I fear he is still no match for a pack of those predators.’ A shadow crossed her face, and Will thought he glimpsed there a hint of regret, or guilt, that she had sent the beast to its doom. Perhaps her heart was not as hard as she liked to pretend.

Carpenter and Launceston hauled the barely conscious Strangewayes to his feet and the five spies made their way down the steps to the mirror maze, each trying to shut out the awful sounds – as if a bear were being set upon by a pack of dogs – coming from the chamber above.

‘Fear not for Dr Dee,’ Will told the others. ‘He has gone on ahead, safe and sane, I would hope.’ But as they passed the final looking glass, he grabbed Red Meg’s hand and slowed her descent. ‘What was that creature?’ he asked.

The Irish spy looked away, her voice but a whisper. ‘The captain of our ship, transformed by Dee’s deviltry to be his servant when first we washed up on these shores.’

Now Will thought he understood her dismay. What suffering had that man endured, should his wits have remained in his new misshapen form? And what corresponding monster lurked in Dee’s heart that he was capable of such a thing?

Launceston caught his arm. ‘We have an opportunity here,’ he breathed. ‘Our Enemy are engaged at the summit of this tower. It would be good if they could not leave. I have little stomach for nigh-on three months of sea battles all the way back to England.’

Will understood the Earl’s mind. He turned to Meg and asked, ‘Would there be such a thing as a powder store in this place?’

She smiled.

Down winding steps and into the dank cellars, they ran in her wake. And in the lowest point where water pooled and rats as big as cats ran from the light, she threw open a door to release the bitter reek of powder. Six barrels stood by one wall. ‘Where they came from, I do not know,’ Meg said. ‘Many things were left behind by whoever occupied this place before us.’

‘’Twill suffice,’ Will said with a grin. He nodded to Carpenter and Launceston, who found a chest containing ample fuse. Once they had laid a long strand, Will took out his flint. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘let us see how hot those devils like their Hell.’