"Ysabel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER XIII

They went back south through the Valley of Hell.

Greg drove past Les Baux again, turning right, heading for Arles. No one was talking as they approached the city. Ned had already briefed them, then he’d done it again on the phone with Aunt Kim.

He hadn’t told any of them about Cadell spiking the other man’s head on a stake, or threatening Ned if he didn’t get out of the picture. What was the point? Was he going to leave? Fly home to Montreal and study for a math test? Melanie wasn’t his love, or anything totally stupid like that, but you didn’t have to be in love with someone to fight for them. He should have said that, back there.

The real point, Aunt Kim had just explained—and she’d repeated it to his father when Ned handed him the phone—was that if Cadell had been at Glanum, it meant that their plan wasn’t so foolish. That was what they had to take away from this. If the two men—or at least one of them—were checking the same locations, they were on the right track themselves.

Well, yeah, the right track—plus a couple of euros—would get you a caf#233; au lait somewhere.

Ned hadn’t said that part, either.

Kimberly and Kate, with Steve, had walked through N#238;mes already, his aunt reported. The Roman arena, the Roman temple, quiet downtown streets with shops closed for the holiday. Aunt Kim hadn’t picked up any sense of the others, even though N#238;mes apparently had a long association with magic and sorcery.

They were in their car now, too, on their way to B#233;ziers. Ned knew something about that now: Kill them all. God will know his own.

He was just as happy not to be going there. He wondered, abruptly, if he’d have had a reaction to that long-ago massacre, the way he’d had at the mountain. Not something he was anxious to repeat.

Greg pulled onto the ring road around Arles.

He stopped at a red light, then drove slowly, looking for a place to park. It was not quite noon. Traffic had been light coming in, but a flea market was set up inside the ring road. Hundreds of people were browsing it.

Wonderful, Ned thought. Like, we go up and down, dodge the pickpockets, and Ysabel will be buying sandals or hand cream or something.

He shook his head. Wrong way to think. Cadell had been at Glanum. They were doing the right thing. You had to keep telling yourself that.

Greg stopped quickly, put on his turn signal, and endured a blaring horn behind him till the vehicle he’d spotted pulled away from the curb. He slid the van into a spot Ned would have said was too small. They all got out. The street was shaded on this side; the flea market was in the light.

“What now?” Greg asked.

He was looking at Ned, not Ned’s father. There was still something unsettling about that. How was he supposed to know?

On the other hand, who else but him, really?

Ned glanced at his dad. “We wander, I guess. Go through this thing, then back to the Roman sites?”

“They’ll be closed. But, yeah. Are you…feeling anything?” Edward Marriner asked again. He got that apprehensive look on his face whenever he said that.

It should have been funny.

Ned shook his head. “No, but I’m really not good at this, and those guys know how to screen themselves. Believe me, I’ll tell you if I get something.”

“You didn’t tell me back there.”

Mild tone, but eyebrows raised, in a way that Ned knew very well. First “parental” comment of the day. He had been expecting more, actually. Things had changed.

“I told you, nothing happened till we were at opposite ends of the place. I couldn’t, like, ask him to hang on a sec till I got my dad.” He looked across the street.

It was noisy and crowded, cheerful people milling about on holiday. A guy in a truck was selling pizza slices and soft drinks, another one had ice cream cones. There were tables with knock-off shoes and shirts, old records, books, chairs, walking sticks, jars of honey, olive oil, skirts and bathing suits, kitchenware, pottery. A very tall, very dark man in a bright-red African robe was selling watches for five euros. Someone else had farm implements: shovels, hoes, rakes. A wheelbarrow. Ned saw a guy his own age holding a rusted old sword and laughing.

Why shouldn’t he be laughing on a spring day?

“Okay, details! What kind of woman we looking for?” Greg asked. He pretended to take out a notebook, cop-on-the-beat style. “Describe the perp?”

Ned had been waiting for this, too, and sort of afraid of it. How did you describe Ysabel? How could you possibly?

He shrugged. “It won’t work like that. You’re not going to just spot her. But she’s…tall, she’s got red hair, I guess, auburn, chestnut? But that can be covered, right? She looks young, but not…really young, if you know what I mean?”

“That’s so helpful, citizen,” Greg said wryly. “Is she pretty, at least?”

Ned looked at him, and then at his dad. He was remembering.

“You have no idea,” he said. He crossed the road into sunlight, cutting between cars, and the other two followed him.

She has spent the night in the cemetery.

When the wind picked up and it grew cold, she wrapped the stolen shawl around herself, then went to enter a family vault she knew. The bodies were very long gone: caskets cracked open and raided for whatever of value might have been buried with the dead. But the old iron key turned out to still be hidden where it has been all these centuries.

Each time she has come here, she’s expected it to be gone: found, lost, one or the other. Lost to her, because it has been found. Each time it is still under the stone.

The covering boulder was heavy, but she knew the trick of tilting it. On the other hand, the keyhole had rusted shut this time. She couldn’t turn the key any more. She stood outside, under stars, and made herself accept another aspect of time going by. It happens, one way or another, each return.

She’d ordered this tomb built herself, for a maid of honour, and that dead girl’s family had grown in significance in generations following, expanding the vault. She’d seen it, returning, in different lives.

Changes such as this, over the years, no longer disconcert her as much, though there was a time when they did. She has known too many by now. Other things might be difficult to deal with—the eyes of one man, the voice of the other, the memory of both—but not changes in the world.

Money had been a small problem when she first left the plateau in the night. The cache she went looking for was gone; the city had grown north, overrun the wood where she’d buried it seventy years ago.

And currency has changed, in any event. It wouldn’t have even mattered if she’d found her cache. Francs weren’t going to get her food or a taxi ride this year. Euros. She had allowed herself to be amused. There was always something new.

Cars were faster, and there were more of them. There was also more light when night fell. Telephones moved with you now, it seemed, unconnected to anything. Men and women walking the streets talking animatedly to someone who wasn’t there.

But in the bright, crowded city women left purses carelessly hooked on chair backs in caf#233;s under the plane trees (the same trees, same caf#233;s, some of them), or they left their shawls, on a spring night, when they went inside to adjust their lipstick.

She’d taken her time, up and down the wide, remembered street, and chosen a purse at one sidewalk caf#233; near the statue of King Ren#233;, and a green shawl outside another one, halfway back along the street. Green hasn’t always been a colour she has favoured, but this time it seems to be.

She took the last bus to Arles, walked to the cemetery.

She bought a skirt and blouse very early in the morning, dawn just breaking, at the street fair as it opened, and returned to the cemetery. She had wondered if one of the two men might choose this as his own first destination but they couldn’t get here by sunrise—unless Cadell flew, and she has told him he cannot do that.

He won’t listen (she’d be startled if he did), but he won’t want to be seen transgressing too blatantly in this new challenge she’s set them. He’d fear her reaction. Rightly so.

She knows both men very well. Eyes of one, voice of the other.

Neither seems to be here. She is screened, of course. They will have to find her not just sense where she has gone. Both, at times, have been in this place (one made love to her here, she remembers), but neither likes the cemetery, for differing reasons.

They almost always have differing reasons. It is what they are about. She finds it serene here, herself. Serenity isn’t what she lives for, but there are moments, especially when she’s just returned, is coming to terms again with being in the world.

On the other hand, she is at ease with the idea that one of them might guess and come immediately here, and see the lock of the outer gate picked, and find her resting now on a stone bench in the shelter of the church doorway, past the oldest of the graves. Claim her this bright morning. Right away.

It excites her to imagine. She can picture either of them doing it. She hasn’t yet decided which one she wants this time. She wants both, almost always. She never finds choosing simple, no matter what soul is within her. How could it be simple, by now? Sometimes she declines to choose; they fight, one of them dies, the other comes to her. She puts her hand to his face. Another kind of choice.

But it isn’t as if she wants to stay lost. Seeing them, under moonlight at Entremont, brought everything to her again, as it always does. Right back to the first time, the defining night when they’d become the story of this world. This part of the world.

She is also excited by this new game, in truth. She is still learning who and what she is this time, how she is different. Has been testing that inwardly, through the night, defining herself. She is someone drawn to a green shawl.

The soul within her, each time she’s summoned, alters her a little, makes her behave differently, which is why and how her desire, her need—over two thousand six hundred years—can change.

They never alter. They return each time as what they have always been, gloriously. There are no men alive like these two. How could it be otherwise? With centuries to grow deeper, know more, become more? What man with seventy too-swift years can match these two?

They are always what they are, at the core, but they also have more than before, each time. They bring something new to her. It took Cadell fifteen hundred years, almost, to learn to change his shape and fly. Blessed or cursed, this story? She’s never been able to say. Does it matter? Would deciding affect anything at all?

Can it change, in any possible way, the fact that she came out from the shadows at the edge of the village one night long ago, into a weaving of firelight and smoke, brightness and dark, her hair unbound—in the sight of all the Segobrigae—carrying a golden cup for the man she chose to wed, and she had circled the circle of men assembled there, and saw two strangers? One stranger, really, his eyes.

And seeing him, she did what she did. So small a thing. A cup of water from the goddess’s pool, extended towards a man. A guest at her father’s feast. A stranger from the sea.

The morning sun is higher now. It is springtime in the world, bright and mild. There are flowers along the paths of the cemetery as she walks back through it: pale green leaves on the oaks, silver-grey on the olives.

There were no olive trees here when this story began. The strangers brought them later from across the sea. One of the things they brought. Olive trees, wine. Writing. Straight, wide roads. Eventually, though soon enough, conquest and subjugation.

Springtime. It is always spring when she comes back. Beltaine, fires, blood of the bull. She buries the useless key again, pushes back the boulder. She could throw the key away now, she knows, but doesn’t want to do that. A small sadness as she passes the tomb. A girl who died too young.

She walks the quiet, shaded pathway to the outer gate. No one is there, cars pass by on the road. She slips out when there are none to be seen, clips the bolt shut.

Goes out into the world again.

She uses the forest-green shawl to hide her hair in the light. She could have cut it off during the night, but she doesn’t like cutting her hair. Once it had been hacked off, when she was burned for a witch. Such things happened in plague years, when terror shaped the world. There are enough such memories.

She needs a taxi now. Finds a place where one stands waiting. But when she asks, it seems she wants him to take her too far, that she doesn’t have a sum that will make it worth his time. It is vexing at first, then amusing. She laughs aloud.

When she does that, standing by his rolled-down window in sunlight, the driver changes his mind, agrees to take her where she wants to go.

Later, on the long drive back to Arles alone, he’ll be unable to say why he did that—risking an illegal trip outside his licence zone, wasting a morning and half a tank of fuel on a one-way cut-rate fare—and not even talking to the woman. Just glancing at her in his mirror as she gazed out the window at Provence gliding by.

He can’t say why he changed his mind. But he’ll dream of her for a long time. The rest of his life, in fact.

They walked through Arles for two hours. The street market, the area around the arena, circling it again, standing outside the barred entrance with irritated tourists who hadn’t factored a holiday into their travel plans. Greg tugged at a few of the gates optimistically, unsuccessfully.

They went over the theatre again. Ned remembered talking with Melanie here, two days ago. It was difficult, carrying such images, standing here again. He looked at the grass where she’d been sitting. It felt, for a moment, as if she were dead. It scared him.

He didn’t say anything.

They went on to the remains of the Roman forum on the central square. Everything was closed for the holiday. It was quiet. His father and Greg both kept glancing at Ned expectantly, like they were waiting for some light bulb to go on above his head or something. It could be aggravating, but he tried not to let himself feel that way. What else were they going to do?

He didn’t see Cadell within himself again, or Phelan, or a woman who looked like a goddess with auburn hair.

They had lunch at the only open caf#233; near the remaining columns of the forum. The Roman columns were embedded in the front of a nineteenth-century building, weirdly co-opted as architectural support after almost two thousand years. That said something about Roman architects, Ned decided. Or maybe about nineteenth-century ones. The rest of the forum was under their feet, buried, like it was in Aix around the cathedral.

Van Gogh had painted their caf#233;, apparently. Ned thought he remembered seeing reproductions of that. His father had insisted they eat a proper lunch, but the food was tasteless. Tourist fare.

They phoned Aunt Kim from the table. The others were in B#233;ziers now. Nothing. They were leaving soon. They would stop in Roquepertuse, a Celtic site like Entremont—skulls found there, too—then head home.

Ned’s father paid their bill.

“What’s left here?” Greg asked. He looked tired, too.

“Melanie could tell us,” Edward Marriner said, with a sigh. “I’d say everything and nothing, if you know what I mean. We can go, I guess.”

“The cemetery,” Ned said, suddenly. “The one Oliver told us about.”

His father looked at him.

IF THEY HADN’T LUNCHED with Oliver Lee earlier in the week, they’d never have gone to Les Alyscamps. Or even if they had done that lunch, but Lee hadn’t mentioned the ancient cemetery with its long history.

Ned found that if he thought about things like that too much, the accident of it all, his mind started down unsettling paths. Like, what if he’d decided to stay in the villa after being sick on the mountain, the way the others had told him to? If he’d never met Kate in the caf#233; that afternoon, or Phelan, after she’d gone? If Kate had never mentioned the word Entremont to him?

Well, she couldn’t have, if he hadn’t been there, right?

And what if he’d gone shopping for music that first morning instead of thinking it would be sort of funny—a joke to email Larry Cato—to listen to Houses of the Holy inside a cathedral?

Could you make a pattern out of any of this? Stitch together the seeming randomness into something that had meaning? Is that what life was about, he wondered: trying to make that pattern, to have things make sense?

And anyway, how did you make sense of a man turning into an owl to fly from you? Call it a computer-generated effect and give thanks to George Lucas?

Les Alyscamps cemetery was a fair walk from the centre of town, along the ring road to the outskirts. It was empty when they got there, closed up, barred, like all the other monuments today.

Ned put a hand on the bars, looking through. He swallowed.

“She’s been here,” he said.

He knew his voice sounded funny. “She may still be here, for all I know. I don’t know much.” His dad and Greg were staring at him. That look again. Could you get used to it, he wondered.

It wasn’t like before, the feeling he had. Not from the mountain, not from the valley this morning. Here, it was as if a scent was in the air, drifting. Flowers, but more than that, or less. An almost-recalled memory. Something unsettling that could reach in, change the rhythm of your heart as you stood by iron gates.

He knew there was nothing actually around them; the others would have noticed if there were. But he also knew what he knew, bone-dumb as that might sound, and Ysabel’s presence was here, disturbing and exciting. He swallowed again, his mouth dry. He wished they had a bottle of water.

“Gate’s padlocked,” Greg said, yanking at the lock. “We could try to climb…?”

The iron gate was well over their heads, and railings ran both ways from it, same height, all along the street front.

“Maybe you could boost me?” Ned said, looking upwards.

“Not so you go in alone,” his father said flatly. “Don’t even think it.”

Through the bars they could see trees and a long, wide walkway, splintered with light and shade. There was a church at the far end. A ticket office a little way down on the left was shuttered. Ned saw smaller and larger trees, stone benches, grey stone coffins lying about as if discarded. He assumed they were empty. He hoped they were empty. It was really quiet here.

He stared through the bars, as if gazing could make her come to life in there. He pictured her walking towards him along that cool, light-and-shadow alley between trees and tombs.

“Stand behind me,” his father said suddenly. “Watch the road. Let me see that lock.” And a moment later, as they obeyed, “This is easy. It’s been done before, I see the scratches.”

“Jeez. You can pick locks?” Ned said.

He was looking out for cars, but glanced back over his shoulder, eyes widening. His dad had taken out a Swiss Army knife.

“You have no idea the things your old man can do,” Edward Marriner muttered, flipping open a blade. “Which is probably a good thing.”

“I’m not gonna touch that line,” Greg said. But Ned could see that he was surprised too, and nervous. They were breaking into a major tourist site in broad daylight.

When was daylight not broad? Ned thought suddenly. What made it broad? Could you break in more easily in narrow daylight? Kate might have laughed if he’d said that to her. Or maybe not.

He wondered if the mayor of Aix was in the middle of her lunch party now. If she’d answer her phone again if they needed her. A Citro#235;n went by, going too fast, and took the curve left towards town. The sun was high. It was windy, a few fast white clouds moving south. Ned heard a scraping of metal behind him.

“Got it,” Edward Marriner said, satisfaction in his voice. “Inside, both of you, I’ll close it behind us.”

“Hold on!” Greg said. They waited for a pair of cars to go past.

“Okay,” said Greg. “All clear. Man, why do I feel like James Bond?”

They slipped through the gate. His father came in last, pulled it shut and quickly fiddled through the bars with the padlock so it looked closed again.

“Go on!” Edward Marriner said. “Out of sight of the road.”

They walked past a stone coffin and the ticket office. It was cooler in the shade. To their right was a large monument. On the left, as they went ahead, Ned saw a locked-up tomb with an iron grate in a heavy door. Steps led down, behind the door.

Ahead, between them and the church, in sunlight, was an area of sunken excavations, roped off. “Those are the oldest graves,” his father said.

Ned looked at him. “You’ve been here?”

His father made a face. “No. I told you, I read Melanie’s notes.”

Of course. You could almost laugh, except you couldn’t because she was gone. And then you couldn’t because you heard a sound behind you, in a place that was locked shut, with no one but them inside, and you turned, thinking it might be a security guard, and then you really didn’t feel like laughing any more.

“I did tell you to leave this,” a cold voice said.

Cold could make you shiver. It wasn’t a guard. It was the druid, standing between them and the gate that led back out to the world where cars took curves too fast, or honked when you slowed to park.

Brys, who had almost killed Greg last night, was still wearing his white robe. Ned couldn’t tell where he’d come from, where he’d been hiding as they walked in.

Or where the wolves had been that now padded up, seven of them, behind him. They sat on their haunches, watching.

The quiet didn’t seem peaceful any more. Ned looked at his father. Edward Marriner stroked his moustache thoughtfully, taking his time. Calmly, he said, “I’m not quite sure why, but I feel a bit relieved to see you exist. You wouldn’t understand that, I suppose.”

The druid said nothing.

Ned’s father went on, in a conversational tone, “My understanding is that you have powers that can be used to harm us. You used them last night on our friend here.”

Powers? Ned was thinking. Dad, pay attention! Those animals with the teeth! He doesn’t need powers.

A week ago, a little more, he’d been doing a half-assed science project on tectonic plates with Barry Staley.

He wasn’t sure what his father was trying to achieve. This might be stalling, but he had no idea what a delay would accomplish. Could they summon the Marines? What Marines?

It occurred to him for the first time, with a clarity that almost buckled his knees, that they could die here in this cemetery among the looted tombs.

“That one?” The druid looked at Greg. “Cadell saved his life. He fears drawing attention, bringing people into this.”

“And you don’t?” Edward Marriner asked, still in his most relaxed tone.

“I don’t have the time to pay heed to such things. I have very little time, when I return. Fear a single death? Have you any idea how many people have died in this?”

“Over the years? I’m beginning to. Are you proud of it?”

The small, grey-haired figure lifted his head. “Pride has nothing to do with anything. This one is insignificant. So are you. You do not matter.”

“What does?”

Ned saw Greg’s hand in his pocket. And finally he realized what this delay was about—and how pointless it was. Greg would be auto-dialing Aunt Kim, who was, like, two hours away or something. Or maybe he was calling the mayor of Aix at her lunch. Or whatever 911 was in France.

James Bond would have had a bomb built into the phone.

The druid was looking at Ned’s father, as if trying to decide what to answer. This one, too, Ned thought: he’s been part of this, or at the edges of it, all this time. The one who shapes the summoning.

Maybe he didn’t want to stay at the edges.

“She must be claimed by Cadell,” the druid said, his voice almost an incantation. “The stranger must be killed. Sacrificed. He must end. There may be ways it can be done, even now.” One of the wolves got up, shifted over a bit, and settled again. “Then the two of them, the man and the woman, must be made to understand that this is not just their story.”

“What is it, then?” Edward Marriner asked.

Greg had stopped fiddling in his pocket. Ned thought—couldn’t be sure—he’d heard a distant voice from the cellphone. Aunt Kim? Greg moved closer to Ned’s dad. Both of them were right in front of Ned now. He didn’t think that was an accident. The phone would be on speaker, whoever Greg had dialed could hear this. Maybe.

If it mattered.

Maybe it did, he thought suddenly. If they were killed here, the others would at least know why. And how else would they ever learn? His hands were shaking. He saw Greg murmur something. Ned’s father nodded, briefly.

The druid said, “There was a world here once. A way of knowing the world. It was torn from us, and it can be reclaimed.”

Ned saw his father straighten his shoulders. He crossed his arms on his chest, in a gesture Ned knew. “Is that it? That is how you see this? You want to roll back two thousand years of Greek and Roman culture? Can you possibly be serious?”

Edward Marriner’s relaxed, chatty tone was gone. You could say his voice was as cold now as the other man’s.

The druid’s expression flickered. Maybe he hadn’t expected such a response. Ned sure hadn’t, and he still wasn’t there yet, wasn’t getting it. He was trying to catch up, to understand what was being said.

“They would be near to immortal,” Brys said. “More powerful than you can imagine, if this story were ended with that death. And if they understood their task, the need we have. Am I serious, you ask? A fool’s question. The world can change. It always changes.”

Edward Marriner’s reply was quick, sharp with scorn. “A fool? I think not. I hear you. You just want to decide what it changes to. Aren’t you being just a tiny bit arrogant?”

The druid’s mouth tightened. “Believe me, I have known change shaped by others. I lived it. All my people did. I am unlikely to forget. Arrogant, you say? And the Romans were not?”

Ned’s father looked away, past the other man. It was, Ned thought, a hard question. He was remembering that arch this morning: Romans on horses, wielding swords, Gauls dying or dead or chained, heads bowed and averted. He thought of the smashed walls at Entremont, siege engines. Or the enormous arena such a little distance from here, a twenty-minute walk through two thousand years of power.

Edward Marriner said, more softly, “The Romans? They were all about arrogance, and conquest. But yours is the greater, even so: the idea that two millennia can be run backwards. That they should be, whatever the cost.”

“Cost? Measuring it out? A Roman thought.”

Edward Marriner laughed aloud, a startling sound in that still place. “Maybe. Is it why they were able to destroy you? Because they worked that way? Weighed cost and gain? Thought about things?”

He was asking a lot of questions, Ned decided. He was pretty sure his first guess was right: his dad was stalling. Was that what Aunt Kim had said to Greg, to delay? For what? He was thinking fast: maybe Kate was dialing on her phone, as they stood here. Maybe she was calling 911, or whatever, here in Arles.

Something occurred to him.

He stepped forward and said, loudly, “Enough of this already! What the hell? You guys think because this is a cemetery you can just add new bodies to the count? Is that the gig here?”

Greg looked quickly over his shoulder at Ned, his expression stricken. I was right, Ned thought. They wouldn’t have known where we are! The Marines or the cavalry riding, nowhere to go.

The druid’s expression, also turning to him, was bleak. “Have a care,” he said. He looked back at Ned’s father. “We need only deal with the young one. He matters. I don’t know why yet. You and the other are of no concern to me. I am content to have you walk away.”

“Content? The young one is my son.”

“Children die. All the time. You have others?”

“None.”

“Ill-judged on your part.”

“Screw yourself,” Edward Marriner said, and added an even harsher string of words. The stalling part of this appeared to be over.

Greg moved to stand closer to Ned’s father. They were right in front of him again. The druid made no movement at all, but the wolves stood up.

Showtime, Ned thought. Three wolves began circling wide, the others moved slowly forward.

By the tower with Aunt Kim he had grabbed a branch. There were no branches on the swept-clean ground here. And there hadn’t been seven animals then, either. He remembered last night on their road, sweeping his hand, scything the horns from Cadell’s head. He didn’t remember how he’d done it, only the rage that had driven the motion. He tried to find that within himself. He knelt and scooped some gravel.

“Keep them off your face,” Greg said quietly. “Punch in the throat if you can. Kick underneath. Then run past the guy. The gate’s unlocked, remember. Get to the road…”

Punch in the throat.

A wolf. Real good plan.

“I say it again,” Brys rasped. “Only one of you matters. The other two can leave.”

Greg said, calmly, “You heard the man. Screw yourself.”

Gregory was actually ready to die here defending Ned, trying to save Melanie, and Ned realized he knew hardly anything important about the man. A wise-cracking, burly, bearded guy who owned a truly ridiculous bathing suit and mocked his own bulk by doing human cannonballs into a swimming pool.

Ned’s my new hero, he had said the other day, because Ned was meeting a girl for coffee. Some hero.

“She was here,” Ned said suddenly. “Do you know it?”

The druid took a half-step backwards. He rattled a handful of quick words like pebbles; the wolves stopped. They sat down again, the flanking movement suspended.

“Explain!” Brys said. “Do so now.”

Ned stepped up beside his dad. They wanted him behind them; he wasn’t going to allow it. “Back to back to back,” he murmured.

“When they come.”

That was how they did it in movies, wasn’t it?

He made himself take his time, even smile. Time was the whole point. He thought of Larry Cato, improbably: shit-disturber, professional pain in the ass. Times when that might be useful.

He said, “You like giving orders, don’t you? Especially when Cadell’s not around. What would happen if he was here? Should I guess?”

The druid’s mouth opened and closed.

“Same as last night, maybe? He gets pissed off. Sends you to your room without supper. Right? Which tomb here’s yours?”

He was close to Greg now, speaking loudly. It was possible Aunt Kim hadn’t gotten the first hint about where they were.

“Where is she?” the druid said doggedly, ignoring the mockery.

“Another question!” Ned said. “Why do you expect an answer from me? Should I just do to you what I did last night to him?”

He had no way of doing it, but maybe they wouldn’t know that. “Grow some horns,” he taunted. “I’ll use them as targets. Or use the wolves, if you prefer.”

“You cannot kill them all before they—”

“You sure of that? Really sure? You have no idea what I am.” That, at least, made sense, since Ned didn’t, either. “Tell me something else: if you’re planning to off me here, why should I give you anything I know? What’s my percentage, eh?”

The druid said nothing.

“I mean, you are really bad at this, dude. You need to offer something to make it worth—”

“If you care for your father’s life, you will tell me what you know. Or he dies.” The words were flat, blunt, hard.

Maybe, Ned thought, the guy wasn’t so bad at this after all.

“I said they could leave,” Brys went on. “But I can alter that. If you know she was here, you know where’s she’s gone.”

“Are you stupid?” Ned said. “If I knew where she was, would I be here?”

That, too, was true, but it might not keep them alive. Did logic work with druids? Inwardly he was wishing he were religious, so he could pray to someone, or something. He was stalling for all he was worth, and had no idea what sort of rescue could come. He didn’t think a bored gendarme arriving at the gates would stop—

He looked at those gates. The others did too, even Brys, because there was a sound from there. Then another. Something landed with a distant clatter on the shaded pathway.

And then, improbably, a really big man could be seen taking a hard, fast run from the edge of the road, propelling himself up the far side of the gate, arms and legs moving, and then—with what had to be exceptional strength—vaulting himself over the sharp, spiked bars at the top, in a gymnast’s move.

Ned saw him in the air, looking like a professional athlete. The illusion of an Olympic gymnast held, briefly, but this man was way too big. He landed, not all that smoothly, fell to one knee (points deducted, Ned thought). He straightened and stood. It could be seen that he was wearing faded blue jeans and a black shirt under a beige travel vest, and that his full beard was mostly grey beneath greying hair.

“Goddamn!” the man said loudly, bending to pick up his stick.

“I am way too old to be doing this.” He was some distance away, but his voice carried.

Coming forward—favouring one knee—he proceeded to add words in that language Ned didn’t understand. His tone was peremptory, and precise.

“Be gone!” the druid snapped by way of reply. “Do you seek an early death?”

The man came right up to the group of them and stopped, on the other side of Brys and the wolves.

“Early death? Not at all. Which is why I can’t leave, if you want the truth. My wife would kill me if I did, you see. Ever meet my wife?” the very big man said.

Then he looked at Ned. A searching, focused gaze. Wide-set, clear blue eyes. He smiled.

“Hello, Nephew,” he said.