Prospero's Children Read online

  “But I tried it,” said Will, “this afternoon, when I got back. Fern didn’t come and I was pretty desperate. I called it Jhavé and Jezreel; I couldn’t recall any other names. Nothing happened.”

  “You were saved by your defective recollection,” said Ragginbone, directing a fearsome scowl at him. “Of all the imbecilic things—to try calling up archfiends because you have nothing else to do. Fortunately for you, the idol represents the one demon-god, and reacts to no other appellation. Try not to be so stupid again: it might be terminal. What we have to do now—” he turned back to Fern “—is to clear the programmed response from your mind. We’ve frittered away time enough in small talk. You’d better get on with it.”

  “M-me?” stammered Fern. “But I don’t know how—”

  “I will tell you,” said Ragginbone. “First, we have to find it. Close your eyes, open your mind. Let the light flow in. Empty your brain of thought: let the light reach every corner. Soon, you should see it. It will appear as a blemish, a tiny burl of shadow that the light does not disseminate. Can you see it?”

  Shutting her eyes obediently if without much hope, Fern attempted to evacuate any residual thoughts from her brain. The embers of imagination flickered and faded, quelled by the opening void in her head; she was amazed to find she could feel—she did not think that see was the correct verb— a kind of illumination entering her from somewhere above, flooding her inward self. And there was the unwanted response, like a fleck of darkness floating on the glimmering landscape of her mind. “Yes,” she said. “I see it.”

  “Erase it,” said Ragginbone.

  “How?” Her concentration did not relent: she focused on the shadow-blot, trying to fix it in one place. She was filled with a peculiar certainty which she had no leisure to analyze or understand.

  “Use the light. Smother it.”

  Without pausing to think or question Fern opened her mind still further, letting in more and more of the brightness which was not so much a radiance as an irradiation, a light from a dimension of light itself, where darkness could not live. The shadow began to shrink, growing clearer and more dense as she compressed it, until it was reduced to a pinpoint blacker than a black hole. And then she gathered all her strength and squeezed it in a fist of light, tighter and still tighter, destroying it with revelation. Will saw the blood rush to her face and the sweat-beads roll down from under her hair; he said: “Is she okay?” but Ragginbone did not answer. And then her color receded and her head drooped and she said in a wisp of a voice: “It’s gone.”

  “Well done,” said the Watcher, and she saw he meant it. “That was a very hard thing to do. So hard, I thought it best to give you no time for reflection or doubt. As I hoped, you have the force I have lost. But it was a lot to chance on hope. The pressure of the dark could have damaged your mind for good.”

  “Are you telling me,” Fern said faintly, “that you weren’t sure it would work?”

  “Nothing in life is sure,” said the Watcher.

  Too horrified to answer, Fern could only stare at him.

  “It had to be done,” he said. “If the Old Spirit were to gain even so tenuous a hold on you, the implications could be appalling. Don’t you understand? The immortals cannot use the power of the Lodestone: it is a thing from beyond the Gate, and they are bound too closely to this world. He needed you to control it. Alimond is obviously getting out of hand: she has almost escaped his influence. You, however, are young and malleable, easily tempted, easily managed—or so he thought. He underestimated both your resistance and your Gift.”

  “Fern has the Gift?” said Will.

  “Of course.” Ragginbone’s attention was still fixed on the girl. “Why do you think the unicorn returned to you?”

  “I released him from the picture,” said Fern. “He was grateful.”

  “Such creatures do not know gratitude. He came because you needed him—because he loves you. He responded to your power, your youth, your purity—”

  “My what?”

  Under outthrust brows the Watcher’s eyes gleamed with gentle mischief. “Don’t you know the legend? A unicorn can be tamed only by a true maid. You, I’m quite sure, are a maiden still. Make the most of the association: it won’t last.” Fern, to her fury, found herself blushing; Will giggled. “Where did he take you?” Ragginbone went on.

  “It was a beach,” said Fern, still unwilling to speak of it. “A beach at night, under the stars.”

  The eyebrows went up: for the first time Ragginbone looked unnerved. “Illusion?” he murmured. “Unlikely—the unicorn has no such skill. It must have been truth . . . Yet who has ever seen the silver beaches on the Margin of the World, save in a fantasy, a dream, a crystal gazing far away? It was said the place did not exist outside the realm of story—or if it did, who could ever go there? It seems the question is answered. There is a strange fate on you, Fernanda—or perhaps only a strange chance. But fate or freak, we must tread carefully. There are forces stirring here that I did not expect to rouse.”

  “What forces?” asked Will.

  “Even I don’t know everything,” snapped the Watcher. “I am several thousand years short of that. Now, will you show me the key?”

  Will looked at Fern: she nodded. He lifted his T-shirt and fumbled in his pocket, his face blanching. “It’s gone,” he said in a pale voice. “It was here—I had it—but it’s gone . . .”

  “It can’t have!” Fern jumped to her feet and dragged her brother from his place at the table. “Here, let me look. Pull your pocket inside out. Don’t tell me you have a hole—” She turned to the Watcher, who sat silent and still with thought. “Could it have been taken by—by magic?” She did not sound convinced of it.

  “Oh no,” he said, “not magic.”

  “But we’re alone in the house.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Fern said, as comprehension dawned. “He’s on our side—”

  “He’s on no side.” Ragginbone stood up, drawing himself to his full height, taller than Fern remembered and infinitely more daunting. His face grew stern: the wrinkles of sorrow and merriment faded, leaving only gaunt bone-shadows and eyes that glittered in their sockets like sunken jewels in a cave. Casual eccentricity slid from him like a veil: for the first time since the circle she seemed to see the true man. “Go and watch for Alimond,” he told Lougarry. “Delay her if you can. We need more time. I will deal with this pickpocket.” Lougarry nudged at the latch on the back door and was out before Will had moved to assist her. The Watcher fixed his gaze on the entrance to the hall, making a slight but emphatic gesture with his hand and speaking in the language Alison had used to conjure and dismiss, words and rhythms that Fern was already beginning to find strangely familiar. His voice altered with the alien speech, acquiring potency if not power, hardening to the edge of harshness and crackling on the consonants as if the language itself generated an electrical force. The bundle took shape under the direction of his rage, quailing against the door-frame, one crooked fist clasping something pressed into his stomach. In his drawn face all sadness was lost in the distortion of terror.

  “Malmorth—” the Watcher began, but Fern interrupted, leaping into the breach with the compunction that Pegwillen always roused in her.

  “Don’t hurt him! He means no harm. He would never willingly betray us.”

  “He understands neither loyalty nor treachery. He has forgotten what such concepts mean—if indeed he ever knew.”

  “That’s not true,” said Fern. “He’s a house-goblin: he’s loyal to the people in the house. What did she do to you, Pegwillen? What did she threaten? You can tell me.”

  The panic that gripped him seemed to ease when he looked into her face. “She summoned me,” he whispered. “I had to go. You can’t refuse. Even he—” he indicated Ragginbone “—can’t refuse. She told me—awful things. She said . . . she said she would send a stranger, with the red fever, like before, and you and the boy would go where Nan
and Wat and Peter went, and never come back. No one would ever come back. She said she would see to it that I was alone for always. Always. Never able to sleep or forget. All alone here . . .”

  “She can’t do that,” said Fern with unexplained confidence. “She hasn’t the power.” Ragginbone, his anger arrested, watched her with an expression of curious satisfaction. “That fever was long ago. You can’t reanimate the past.”

  “She can,” said Pegwillen wretchedly, shrinking into retreat. “She’s too strong. Too strong to fight.”

  “Give me the key,” Fern said, “and I’ll do my best to defeat her.”

  “Could you?”

  “I don’t know.” Whatever the cost, she sensed she must not lie. “It’s always better to try than to give in.”

  He was in the hallway now, the clutching fist thrust behind him, his other hand almost extended, almost withdrawn, the longest digit uncurling toward Fern. The malformation of his body exaggerated the ambivalence of his stance, so that he appeared to be visibly wrenched in opposite directions, his humpback pulling away from her, his head twisted awry by double confusion. “Pegwillen,” Fern said gently, part pleading, part imperative, “give me the key.” He made a movement toward her—she was sure of it—there was surrender in his face—

  But it was too late. The front door burst open, and Alison came in like a storm, no longer Alison but Alimond, unmistakably and eternally Alimond, her hair spreading around her like a great web, her eyes like slits of broken glass. Will gave an exclamation of horror; Ragginbone, taken off guard, spat out the words of some interdiction he no longer had the power to impose. Fern lunged for the key, but Pegwillen seemed to melt away from her, and Alimond seized his fist and snapped the knotted fingers open with such force they cracked like twigs. “The key!” she gasped, and her breath came short, and Fern saw the energy of the Lodestone coursing through her, even as it had when she herself first held it, and the fire irradiated her veins and throbbed through every muscle, and her head was flung back in ecstasy or anguish, and the red smolder of her heart shone through flesh and skin and clothes. A great shudder passed through her, violent as an earth tremor, and then she was laughing, but though her mouth laughed the sound that emerged was triumphant without joy.

  “Release me!” begged Pegwillen. “You promised—”

  “I release you,” she said, “from the burden of your existence,” and she plucked him off his feet and pushed his head into his hump and his legs into his belly, squeezing him into a ball like plasticine, rolling and crushing him until he crumbled between her palms and was brushed away like dust on the empty air. Fern remained immobile, too stunned to scream. “And now,” Alimond said, “and now, Caracandal—” The Watcher stood tall before her, and in his expression there was a weary courage, pride without hope, an authority now fruitless. The Lodestone had touched her, and she knew no more doubts. “In the semblance of a rock you have spied on me,” she said. “I gather you feel yourself akin to such inanimate things. So be it. A rock you have chosen, and a rock you shall remain. Fiassé! Ruach fiassé!” She made a motion as if she were throwing something, and a wind tore through the house, a wind that slammed wide any doors in its path, that tugged hair from the scalp and tears from the eye, hurling Will back toward the kitchen table, pinning Fern against the wall. For an instant she saw Ragginbone standing like a pillar of resistance, his coat streaming behind him, then the heavy cloth seemed to be blown into rags, and his body crumpled and tumbled, and he was whirled away like a gust of leaves, and when she looked out of the kitchen window there was a rock on the hillside where he had always sat, a rock that would never speak again. There was no time for sorrow or anger, only desperation. As Will picked himself up an idea came to Fern, a brainstorm born of hopelessness which she knew might lead to disaster. But she must do something. She needed to get down the hall but Alimond was in front of her, her attention veering toward her remaining opponents. Lougarry entered through the open door even as she raised her hand. Alimond spun at her presence, her lips flaring into a smile that was all thinness and poison. “So the wolf-bitch has found me at last,” she said. “You are too late to help your master. He’s a lump of rock on the hill for all time now. Somewhere in the core of the stone his mind knows, his heart feels, but he will not spy on me or curse me again. You should have hurried, whelp: I might have had trouble dealing with the two of you at once. I passed you heading for the road where I left my car but you didn’t see me. My hair must have veiled your sight. A fine pair you were to defy me: a broken beggar and his purblind cur. Go now, cur. Flee while you can. Uvalé! Chiani néanduu! ”

  Beside her, the wall cracked. Fern felt the shudder that ran through the house, heard the crunch of rending brick. Now that the witch was distracted she had been trying to inch past her, toward the drawing room, but she stumbled as the floor quaked, grasping the hall table for support. In the tilting mirror she saw the crack issued onto a blackness filled with whirling pinpricks of light which crowded toward the opening, growing larger as they approached, settling into pairs, becoming slanting ovoids of unreflected glow. There were eight—ten—twenty of them, and her heart shrank at the sight. “Lougarry,” she whispered, “run. There’s nothing you can do. Save yourself. Run!” The wolf’s forequarters were lowered; the silent snarl curled her lip; her yellow eyes were curiously calm. She did not move.

  Alimond’s smile stretched out as if it were made of elastic, broadening and thinning, plastered like a red-rimmed slash across the pale frame of her skull. Her flesh seemed to have gone: she was all bones and smile. Her clothing clung as if contracted by suction. “Uvalé! Lai-rrassé!” The Rs were a rasp in her throat, the long Ss hissed like a brand on flesh. The first of the creatures was already climbing through the crack while she spoke, a dog-shape fluid as a shadow yet darkly solid, unnaturally thick in the shoulder, its blunt muzzle showing a panting glimpse of wet red tongue and curving jaws. The others poured after it in a mass, an inky cloud, many-legged, studded with eyes, throbbing with the soft, evil growl that Fern remembered hearing before, a single sound from multiple throats. For a moment they halted, waiting upon their enemy; Lougarry stood her ground. “Run!” screamed Will from the kitchen, and “Run!” Fern cried, her voice rising. “Run, Vashtari, run!” The name came from nowhere, from some deep recess in the wolf’s thought, and Fern knew, even as she said it, that it was the name of her true self, the woman she had been before her metamorphosis. Lougarry leaped away as if loosed from bondage, out of the house, over the moor, and the black dog-cloud raced after her. There was a minute when the hall was full of hound—flying limbs, flowing muscles, the beat of paws on the carpet—a minute when Alimond gazed eagerly after the pursuit—and in that minute Fern reached the drawing room and flung open the door.

  She could not think clearly: she was too numbed by the successive shocks of Alimond’s arrival and Pegwillen, Ragginbone, Lougarry wiped out or driven away. The idol waited, a squatting malignance, ugly and implacable. It trembled on its plinth as Alimond closed the crack, the two sides heaving ponderously together, brick locking with brick, plaster re-forming, paintwork more than a decade old washing over the fading scar. Fern acted quickly, too desperate even for fear. When she spoke it was no programmed response: her bell-tone rang through the house in a summons loud as a command. Will ran down the hall toward her; Alimond turned on her heel. “Azmordis,” said Fern. “Come to me: I conjure you. Azmordis!”

  Alimond cried out: “No!” and broke into a jumbled incantation in the other language—a language which seemed to Fern, as her ear grew accustomed, to contain echoes of many better-known tongues possibly descended from it. It’s Atlantean, she thought, in the midst of urgency and resolve. It must be Atlantean . . . But Alimond, thrown off balance by the unforeseen, could not get the words right, and behind the blank eyes of the idol the wereglow began, waxing stronger by the second, the cold white gaze of a spirit that knew no warmth. Between the thick lids the stone shriveled to a film, and t
hen it dissolved, and the eyes lived, and the heavy lips creaked with the effort of speech.

  “Fernanda,” he said, and for a moment she remembered a barren heath, under bitter stars. “You have done well, Fernanda.”

  He thinks it was the response, she realized. He doesn’t know I summoned him of my own accord.

  “Alimond.”

  She did not answer. Her eyes were clenched shut, her features convulsed in a frown of terrible concentration. Her left hand held the key tight against her breast, so tight that the knuckles strained through her skin and her knotted fist resembled that of a skeleton. Fern could sense the energy pulsating from the Lodestone, no longer a visible current but a slow buildup of force which made the very air around them weigh heavy. Will, stealing up behind Alimond, reeled back as though he had been pushed. “You cannot do it,” said the idol. “It is too strong for you to master. It may aid you, it may not, but it will not accept your rule. You cannot achieve dominion without my help.” But his offer was meaningless: Fern knew that at once. The Lodestone was a power source like no other, and Alimond did not need to dominate, only to channel it. The Old Spirit, Fern realized, had made a fatal error, a flaw of comprehension perhaps aeons old: he had assumed the Stone was an entity capable of feeling and thought. But it did not think; it was. It struck her that Azmordis saw it as a rival to be crushed and enslaved—not the essence of an alternative universe, jettisoned by chance into the wrong dimension, but an actual being imprisoned in the Stone like a spirit trapped in its own receptor. He should have kept pace with modern physics, she thought, and the glimpse of such a gap in his wisdom gave her a brief surge of confidence—then the burden of the air bore down on her, squashing breath from her lungs, suffocating her last attempt at hope.