Poison Page 7

  She walked over to the chair, glancing up at the squid on the wall above the stove. She could swear its hourglass eye was following her. The skin on the back of her neck crawled.

  “I have a question,” she said as she put her hand on the back of her armchair and passed around it. The wide wings of Lamprey’s chair obscured him from view still; but she could now see the end of his robed arm, and she halted. His hand was pale and rotted with the nibbles of a thousand tiny fish. The nails were blackened and cracked.

  “Come closer,” Lamprey whispered.

  Poison took a breath. She was suddenly terribly afraid of what she might see when Lamprey’s face was turned upon her. She looked into the stove, to the fire behind the grate. At least that was a real thing, something she could trust. She kept her eyes upon it as she slid around the chair and sat herself in it.

  “Won’t you look at me, child?” the voice at her left whispered. She could not resist a glance at that hand, that drowned hand; but her gaze flicked quickly back to the fire.

  “I. . .” she began, sensing that a response was needed but unable to think of one. Eventually, she said the only thing that came to her. “I fear you.”

  “Very wise. As well you should,” came the soft hiss. “They did not fear me enough.”

  “Who?” Poison asked, almost turning to face him and then catching herself at the last moment.

  “Them,” he said, making a small motion with his hand. She caught the movement, and looked up. The squid was looking down on her. She felt a crawling dread trickle down her breastbone. The shark, the seal, the ray, the other creatures that she had no name for . . . they were all looking at her. It was no trick of her imagination.

  “What happened to them?” she asked, her voice tiny.

  “They did not answer my riddle.”

  Poison felt a strange sense of unreality settle on her. Had he really said what she thought he had?

  “A riddle?”

  She heard the rustle of Lamprey’s robes as he nodded. “If you answer incorrectly, you will join them on my wall. If you solve my riddle—”

  “You have to answer my question,” Poison finished, but the words seemed to come as if in a dream. This surely could not be happening to her? Hadn’t she read it a dozen times in Fleet’s phaerie tales? It seemed that every epic quest had a riddle in it somewhere, a knot to be unravelled that would let them past a guardian or defeat an enemy that could not be beaten any other way. But it was fiction! An artifice, a cliché, no more part of real life than the wicked king or the happy ending.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Why?” Lamprey echoed. “You are in no position for whys, child.”

  She frowned, staring harder into the fire. “I only want to understand,” she said. “Why ask a riddle? If you will help me, then help me; I’m sure you already know what my question is. If you want me for your wall, I don’t think I can stop you. I have money; can’t I pay you instead? Then we both profit. What do you gain from a riddle?”

  Lamprey was silent for a time. When he replied, he seemed less certain than before. “Will you hear my riddle, or not? You are free to leave if you wish, but once the riddle is asked, there is no turning back.”

  Poison felt a twinge of frustration at his answer, but it was his game she was playing. “I’ve always been good at riddles,” she said.

  “We shall see,” Lamprey replied, and then spoke his riddle:

  “Mistress of the sea, the waves flock to her call.

  She floats in rippled pools, to rise and never fall.”

  “The moon,” Poison replied instantly. “There, that was easy.”

  “Do not take me so lightly!” Lamprey howled, and his cold, dead hand snatched up her wrist as he pulled her around to face him. She screamed as she looked into the mouldering sockets of his eyes. His skin was white as bone and withered on his skull, and his jaw hung at a slant as if broken. His nose was a bridge of gristle with a few tattered strings of muscle anchoring it to his cheeks and eyebrows, and what hair straggled from beneath his hood was matted and filthy. She fought to pull away from him, but his grip was like iron. He smelt of damp and rot, and the reek was so strong that she wanted to gag.

  “Look at me,” he hissed, but Poison would not. “I was like you once. Young, arrogant. . . I thought I knew how the world worked. I see into your mind, Poison, I see that you think you are very smart. I thought so too. I thought I was so clever that I could outwit a kelpie. You know how to catch a kelpie, Poison?”

  Poison was sobbing with fright, but she managed to reply. “Riddles. . .” she said.

  “Riddles, yes. You can lure them with riddles, you know. I thought that I could swim in her river and when she came to me, I could fox her with riddles long enough to get her ashore, and then she’d have to be my wife and do as I said for the rest of her days. Wouldn’t that have been a fine thing?”

  “She drowned you. . .”

  “I got a riddle wrong,” Lamprey said, his voice a soft exhalation of hate. “All the tales, all the stories, but they never said anything about that! She was beautiful, so beautiful . . . but I had so many riddles to remember, and she answered them so fast, and I forgot one of the lines. . .” Lamprey released her, and she drew back her hand and clutched it to her body. But the hood of his robe had fallen over his face as he bowed his head in despair. “She turned fearful then, turned to her true form: a thing of teeth and claws. Curse all phaerie! She drowned me, yes; but that was not the end. It was a phaerie river, and death is not so final there. I escaped from her after many long weeks, when another poor fool came to try his luck. So I came here, and here I stay, and ask my riddles. A phaerie river does things to you, child. I thought I knew it all, but like you, I know nothing.”

  Poison was trembling, but he seemed to have diminished now, and she was not so afraid of him any more. She wanted desperately to be gone from that place, but there was one thing left to do.

  “I answered your riddle,” she said. “You have to answer my question.”

  Lamprey seemed to sag and wither, becoming small and frail. “Follow the road north for three days until you see a great tower on a hill. From there, travel west for a day. There you will find the passing-place.”

  “Passing-place?” Poison asked.

  “There are many spots in the Realms where they touch upon one another. At these points, when the circumstances are right, a person can slip from one Realm into another.”

  “And I’ll get to the Realm of Phaerie through this passing-place?” Poison asked.

  “That depends,” he said, with a foul chuckle. “On whether she catches you or not.”

  “Here,” said Poison, holding out the coins. “Two silver sovereigns for past services, and a third for bringing me here from Shieldtown. You’ve earned them.”

  Bram let her put the coins into the broad palm of his glove, looking doubtfully over her shoulder at the tumbledown house at the top of the hill. In the light of a bright, cool evening, it stood out like a scab against the surrounding countryside.

  Poison closed his fingers over the coins with her own, and looked back, following his gaze to the house. A light wind stirred her dark hair against her upper arm.

  “I don’t suppose I could tempt you with a fourth sovereign?” she said, only half-joking.

  “Not all the money in the Realm would get me in there,” he said, dropping the coins into a pouch at his belt. He patted the head of his grint absently, adjusting the tilt of his wide-brimmed hat and frowning. “I’d try and change your mind, but I know you too well.”

  Poison gave him an apologetic look.

  “At least tell me why,” he said. “Since we’ll never meet again, at least tell me why.”

  “The phaeries stole my sister,” Poison said. “I’m going to get her back.”

  “Ah,” said Bram. She knew by the way he voi
ced the syllable that he understood.

  They stood in silence for a time, looking at the house. It was massive, seeming to creak under its own weight, a crooked heap of uneven spires and balconies, sooty windows and blackened gables. The whole thing appeared to loom, becoming larger at the top than it was at its base, and even in the daylight it gave the impression that it was waiting, patiently and hungrily, for the next morsel to step inside. A badly-constructed fence surrounded it, silhouetted against the blue sky, and though it was too far away to see it did not appear to be made out of wood, but rather some other material that Poison did not recognize. So this was the passing-place then; a bridge between the Realm of Man and the Realm of Phaerie.

  And inside waited Maeb, the Bone Witch.

  “Maeb is the guardian of the gateway,” the voice of Lamprey came back to her. “She is blind and deaf, but do not be fooled. She can smell you. And she has two hounds, two hounds that can tear you limb from limb if they get hold of you. Be warned, child; she is always looking for intruders. She wants your bones.”

  “What must I do?” she had asked.

  “You must enter the house while the moon is full, and leave the night after, at midnight,” Lamprey had whispered. “That will take you to the Phaerie Realm. All you have to do is stay alive until then. But don’t try to get out before your time is up. There are . . . things that live in the space between the Realms. You wouldn’t want to meet them.” He had given her a rotted grimace that was meant to be a smile. “You won’t have to worry about Maeb while the sun is in the sky, but the dogs never sleep. They are ever watchful.”

  She had pressed him for more details, but Lamprey would say no more and she had retreated, not wishing to spend another moment in that rotted thing’s presence. Once back with Bram, she had offered him a third silver sovereign if he would take her as far as the passing-place. There they would have to bid their farewells, for she would be entering the Realm of Phaerie, and leaving Bram behind.

  And now the moment had come, and Poison felt a queer sadness at the thought that she would never set eyes on this cantankerous old man again. She had grown strangely fond of him during the time they had travelled together, more so even than Fleet. He had shared her first adventure, been there with her as she set out into the world that she had only heard about in stories; and even though she had paid him every step of the way, she had an intuition that he had only taken the last two coins because he knew she would not accept charity. He had not wanted to leave her to the mercies of Shieldtown, so he had struck her a deal that would allow her to accept without denting her pride. And she was certain that if she had asked he would have taken her this far for nothing; but again, she offered a coin to ameliorate her sense of independence. In an odd way, he was her friend, and she would miss him.

  “Well,” she said, with a glance at the sun as it slid towards evening. “I suppose I must go in.” The moon was already up in the west, a perfect circle, hanging like a ghost in the blue sky. Bram took her pack out of the cart and handed it to her, his face set in an unfamiliar expression between sorrow and frustration. She knew how much he hated phaeries, and that he believed Poison was marching to her death. She knew he thought he could protect her, and it grieved him to watch her go. She took the pack and slid it over her shoulders, then gave him a hug. Her slender frame was dwarfed inside his huge embrace, and just for a moment she considered how it might be to stay like this, to be content as she was and not to face the terror she knew lay ahead. But that was not her way.

  “I’ll come and find you when I return,” she said.

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Poison,” he replied, his voice a rumble in his chest. “You’re going to the Realm of Phaerie. Time is not the same there as here. You might be back tomorrow, or a hundred years from now.” He did not need to add the third option: or you might not come back at all.

  “Then I promise I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll look for an old man with a farm on a grassy mountainside, keeping himself to himself.”

  Bram laughed mirthlessly. “Sounds like me, all right.” He let her go, and she stepped back from him. He looked her over with tenderness in his eyes. “You’ve given me a second chance, Poison. I won’t forget that.”

  “See that you don’t,” she said, with a wink to indicate she was joking. She looked up at the house, then back to him. “Farewell then, Bram of Oilskin.”

  “Farewell, Poison of Gull. Good luck. I think I’ll camp here tonight, and set off in the morning.” He scratched the back of his neck and harumphed in embarrassment. “In case you change your mind.”

  “You’re a good man, Bram,” she said, as she walked away up the hill towards the house. “You deserve a wife!”

  Bram stood by his cart and watched her go, but she did not look back. If she had, her resolve might have crumbled completely.

  The fence, unsurprisingly, was made of bones. What was more disturbing was the scale of it. If the house had appeared oddly proportioned from a distance, up close it was even more evident. From the base of the hill, the fence had seemed to be built to be waist-high, coming up only to the sills of the lowest windows; but now Poison stood next to it, it was as high as her head, and she could easily duck through it into the thick, untended scrub of weeds and thistles beyond. Even the plants seemed huge, with thorns big enough to open a vein if she brushed against them and blades of grass as long as her arm. Everything within the perimeter of the fence was at least twice the size of things outside.

  This house was half in the Realm of Phaerie, half in the Realm of Man, she reminded herself. In the liminal places of the world, there was no telling what was possible and what was not.

  The structure towered over her as she picked her way carefully through the forest of weeds. She was approaching the side of the house rather than the front. If she wanted her presence to go unnoticed, she thought that knocking on the door was not the best way to go. Cautiously, she crept up to one of the grimy windows, grabbed the sill and pulled herself up to peer through.

  Inside, it was dim, and the lack of light and smeared glass combined to foil her. She could only make out an impression of size, and nothing more. There was no movement within. Had she not known better, she would have assumed it was empty.

  She dropped back into the weeds and began to make her way around the rear of the house. Her palms were already cold and moist with nervousness; she wiped them against her coarse dress. The windows she had seen so far had been nailed shut, and they could not be opened unless she smashed them. She would not do that unless it was a last resort. There had to be another way in.

  She found it, eventually, when she almost fell down it.

  Around the back of the house was a coal chute, hidden under the thick grass. It was covered over by planking, but rain and woodworm had made it brittle. She stepped on it before she saw it, and it gave instantly; but the feel of wood rather than turf beneath her feet had forewarned her, and she managed to shift her weight so that it was only her ankle that went through the flimsy covering and not her whole body.

  She crouched on the edge of the rectangular shaft, massaging her bruised ankle while she peered into the darkness. The chute was slanted, and wide enough to crawl down. She regarded it dubiously, before getting up and making a full circuit of the house. As she suspected, there were no other ways in beside the front door or the windows. Climbing was not an option; the scale of the house was simply too big. She returned to the coal chute, glanced at the westering sun, and shrugged to herself. Well, the moon was up at least, so that meant she could go inside, daylight or no daylight. At least she would only have the dogs to deal with until night fell. Considering that everything else about the house of the Bone Witch was twice normal size, she was not looking forward to meeting them.

  She pulled away the rest of the planking and eased her head and shoulders over the edge of the shaft. Cold air blew up from within, smelling stale and r
ancid. She took her pack from where she had laid it by her side and dropped it into the shaft ahead of her. It slid down with an ascending hiss and was swallowed by the darkness. She turned around, braced herself against the shaft sides with her boots and began to crawl down feet-first after it, her dress bunching up around her knees.

  The descent itself was not so difficult; the shaft was just the right width for her arms and legs, and the slant was shallow enough so that she would not plunge to her death if she slipped. Nevertheless, she was frightened, and it was only by not thinking about what was ahead that she managed to force herself to continue down. The shaft was entirely lightless; only the rectangle of sky above her gave any indication that she was not completely blind, and that was moving further and further away with each step downward. She felt like she was crawling backwards down the house’s throat, into its cold belly. In the absence of anything else to occupy it, her imagination began conjuring pictures of the Bone Witch and her dogs, waiting at the bottom of the shaft, she sharpening her knives in anticipation of the morsel that was clambering into her lair.

  Then her feet touched something lumpy, and she realized it was her pack. She cursed under her breath. Was the chute bricked up? Certainly, this did not seem to be the coal chamber she had expected. She worked her booted foot around the edge of her pack and pressed it against the obstruction. It creaked. Wood. Not brittle, but weak and thin.

  I hope she really is deaf, Poison thought to herself, and kicked downward. The wood splintered and broke away with a clatter that made her shudder; but now there was faint light coming through from beneath her, and she knew that beyond was the cellar of the house. She held herself still and quiet, listening. Her heart thudded in her chest. But if the dogs had heard her, there was no sign.

  She had to kick through two more planks before she could drop her pack through and squeeze after it. Each time was followed by a terrible silence, as she strained her ears for a noise in the house above; but each time there was nothing, not even a creak.