The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  ‘I was not aware that I had appointed you my personal philosopher,’ said the Shadow, his coldness dropping towards permafrost. ‘May I remind you that your function here is purely decorative.’

  ‘I was being your flatterer, not your philosopher,’ the skull said indignantly. ‘Just leading the applause, so to speak.’

  ‘I don’t require flattery,’ responded the Shadow. He lifted a finger, and the jaws locked into a sudden silence. Then his attention reverted to the lawyer. ‘You have served me well, Sætor. Usually. Remember, I do not reward failure.’

  For a second, the young man seemed to shiver, as if at a memory of utter cold.

  ‘Of course,’ the Shadow continued, silkily, ‘I do not reward success, either. Success, like martyrdom, is its own reward.’

  ‘The ancient martyrs believed they were going to Paradise,’ the lawyer pointed out, less diffidently than he should have done.

  ‘Whereas you,’ said the Shadow, ‘are already in Hell.’

  He vanished into the void of the vacant screen, and after about half a minute the surface re-formed and the flame was back in place, dancing its little fandango at the nucleus of the circle. Presently, the young man clicked the rat and a set of desktop icons appeared which looked almost normal, until you studied them closely. He opened a window called the Infernet and began to research Bartlemy Goodman...

  Beyond the Doors

  Colchis, sometime in the mythical past

  ‘HOW STRONG IS your magic?’ Jaeson asked the witch-girl.

  The trireme was almost on them. They could see the precise carving of the ram’s head prow, and the throne of Æeetes on a platform before the mast, with the small figure of the king hunched forward like some avine predator, crested with the gleaming spikes of his crown. And like an undertone to the rush and surge of their own bow-wave they could hear the drumbeat that set the pace for the oarsmen, a steady relentless throb. ‘They are galley slaves,’ said Jaeson. ‘They have no loyalty, only the whip. Freemen row faster.’

  ‘If they flag, they are thrown overboard with their limbs cut to draw sharks,’ said the Priestess. ‘They row for their lives. That is a stronger incentive than any imaginary loyalty.’

  There was a long pause. Gavin listened to the regular boom! boom! and pictured the slaves chained to their oars, heaving till their muscles tore and the breath seared their lungs...

  ‘How powerful is your magic?’ Jaeson repeated.

  ‘Magic doesn’t work well on water,’ said the girl. Gavin wondered if she would ask for the pipes, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere. ‘It’s an unstable element: it distorts the effect of any spell, no matter how potent. I thought everyone knew that. There are sea-gods I could call on, but they are as unreliable as the waves and harder to control. And there is the Dromedon, but he is far away, in the depths beyond the sun; I do not think he would hear me.’

  ‘We’re sunk,’ Gavin said, and wished he had used a less appropriate verb.

  ‘Not yet,’ said the girl. ‘I can summon a mist to hide us; that is simple enough, and should not go awry. It is merely a matter of drawing the water upwards, transforming it into fog – a natural process at sea. But it won’t veil our escape for long unless we can slow the pursuit.’

  ‘Nothing will do that,’ Jaeson said sombrely. ‘We have Æeetes’ most priceless treasure – and his son. It will take more than a fog to turn him aside.’

  ‘As you say,’ the witch-girl smiled, and her eyes gleamed like black honey, ‘we have his son.’

  She called the child to her and lifted him up; he wrapped his arms around her neck. ‘See,’ she said, ‘it’s Papa. Wave to him!’

  The boy waved blithely.

  The figure of the king stiffened; his head jerked backward as if at a blow. Perhaps he had not known till then that the prince was gone; no doubt the slave, fearing retribution, had fled without reporting his defection. Æeetes leaped to his feet, shouting something at the captain who stood close by. The cry was passed on, and below decks the drumbeat quickened.

  Boom ba-ba-boom ba-ba-boom ba-ba-boom...

  ‘Give me a knife,’ said the girl. The nearest rower stayed his oar to sling his dagger in her direction; it stuck in the stern beside her, vibrating from the force of the blow. Unworried, she plucked it out, holding it high in the air.

  ‘Æeetes!’ she called, and the name which was so like a gull’s scream carried effortlessly across the narrowing space between the ships. ‘Æeetes!’

  The king shaded his eyes, staring at the girl he had called his daughter. He saw the sunglitter on the knife-blade, and the boy clinging happily to her breast.

  ‘Tell the slaves to ship their oars,’ she cried, ‘or I swear, you will pick up the pieces one by one!’

  The king seemed to quail visibly. In his country, they believed that the spirit would not depart unless the body was buried entire; dismembered corpses must be reassembled, or the ghost would haunt his own grave, bewailing the missing portion of his anatomy. If you quitted this life in a maimed form you could not be reborn complete in the next, or so the legend claimed. The greatest punishment that a man could suffer was to be buried minus an essential body part; men who had been castrated were thought to be reborn as women. Æeetes and his predecessors routinely castrated their enemies.

  If the legend was true, Gavin thought, looking at the Priestess, perhaps that was a mistake. The female of the species...

  The drumbeat halted. The three tiers of oars were raised, dripping sea. The girl still held the knife aloft, a familiar glory of triumph in her face.

  Slowly, they drew away from the enemy. But the Argonauts did not cheer. Her elation was too naked, too terrible for applause. Pirates may rape and pillage – it goes with the job – but they do not kill coldly, nor shed innocent blood, not if it can be avoided. And the Priestess was a woman, young and good to look upon, shaped for gentleness and pleasure. Her stark ruthlessness appalled them.

  The boy alone was untroubled, oblivious to any danger. She set him down and watched him run along the deck towards the bows, a smile curving her lips. ‘I told you he would be useful,’ she said.

  ‘You wouldn’t really kill him,’ Jaeson said uneasily. ‘There are some things no man should do – or woman – acts offensive in the sight of the gods...’

  ‘That depends,’ said the Priestess, ‘which gods are watching.’

  She thrust the knife through her girdle and approached the side of the ship, spreading her arms in a gesture of supplication. Gavin heard her murmuring a low-toned litany in a language he didn’t understand, a language with guttural Rs and sibilant Ss and a timbre at once cool and seductive, totally unlike their rough demotic Greek. A language of poetry and passion, of grimmerie and sortilege – the language of an older world, whose ruined fanes and fallen citadels still cast a long dark shadow into the sunlight of the present day. Gavin shivered when he made out a word or two clearly, as if a cold finger had touched the nape of his neck.

  ‘She has power, this one,’ Jaeson muttered, ‘but I do not like the sound of it. These are the black arts.’

  ‘Black or not,’ said Gavin, ‘they may save your hide.’ He leaped automatically to her defence, for all his private doubts.

  All around them the mist was rising, leeched from the sluggish waves in a thin vapour which thickened as it ascended, slowly enfolding the ship in a white fuzzy blanket. They could no longer see from fore to aft and the tip of the mast vanished as the whiteness arched over them, swallowing the sun. They were encased in a cocoon of pallor which gave them the impression that although the oars dipped and rose they were not moving at all. Jaeson urged his men to pull harder, but it was difficult when there was no horizon to aim for, no sun or stars to guide them, no visible enemy to flee. Gavin took a turn at the oars, though as the official navigator (and ship’s cook), he rarely did so; behind him, Asterion said in a low voice: ‘I don’t like this. We could be going round in circles.’

  ‘The witch says no,’ Gavi
n responded. The Priestess pointed ahead when Jaeson seemed in doubt.

  ‘She may be an enchantress,’ Asterion argued, ‘but what does she know about sailing a ship?’

  One of the things Gavin had brought from the city of the south was the mechanical device on his wrist which marked the passage of time. It divided the day into twenty-four hours, each hour into sixty minutes, each minute into sixty heartbeats. The pirates were fascinated by it, though they were not sure what it was for. In the mist, it gave time a shape and definition. Nearly an hour and a half had gone by, and Jaeson was on the oar opposite Gavin, when they heard the drumbeat again. The sound was muffled and distorted by the fog; they could not tell if it was near or far, to starboard or to port. Sometimes, it seemed to come from the sea itself, a slow implacable pounding like a gigantic pulse.

  Boom... ba-ba... boom... ba... ba... boom...

  ‘He’s used the mist as a cloak, just as we did,’ Jaeson said. ‘He’s been following our wake.’

  ‘He doesn’t know how close he is,’ Asterion opined shrewdly, ‘or he’d have silenced the drum.’

  The witch-girl was standing in the stern; her foster-brother clung to her skirts.

  She said: ‘We will have to slow him down.’

  Gavin and Jaeson simultaneously shelved their oars and sprang towards her.

  The witch tugged the knife from her girdle, pulling the boy’s head back. He gave a tiny gasp of surprise: that was all. The knife was swift and sharp. Gavin tasted the blood in his mouth, looked down and saw he was sodden with it.

  He didn’t make it to the ship’s side before he threw up.

  BOOM... BA-BA... BOOM... ba-ba... boom... ba-ba... boom...

  JAESON STARED AT the small, limp thing which still clung to the silk of her skirt. He and Gavin had been very close when the throat opened; his ragged tunic was clammy with blood-spatter.

  There was little on the girl.

  ‘Don’t mourn for him,’ she said. ‘He would have grown up like his father, a tyrant who tortured and killed without a qualm. They always do. He had a kitten once, but he made the slave wring its neck when it scratched him. He liked hurting things. I have spared him the burden of their pain.’

  She sawed at the body with the knife; the blood ran across the deck into the bilges.

  ‘So much blood,’ Jaeson said, ‘from something so small...’

  ‘You needn’t trouble about the gods,’ the girl said in a tone that was almost cool, almost dry. ‘Even their eyes cannot pierce the fog.’

  She tossed a hand into the sea. It looked like a little flower floating on the foam, save for the red stain that veined the bubbles around it.

  Then it was gone in the mist.

  ‘We’ll make that one easy for him,’ she said.

  The Argo was utterly silent. The pirates had stopped rowing, and gazed at her with a single face.

  Presently, some way behind them, they heard the scream.

  The drumbeat faltered and ceased.

  Gavin had fallen to his knees in his own vomit, but he straightened up at last, his stomach emptied. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Jaeson was saying. ‘You shouldn’t have killed a child...’

  ‘That’s why I brought him. Don’t pretend you didn’t know.’ She glanced at the oarsmen. ‘Row! This is your chance. Take it!’

  Jaeson said dully: ‘Row.’

  They rowed.

  She threw the other hand some way to starboard, so Æeetes would have to hunt for it. The remaining body-parts followed, piece by piece. The head was last, bobbing up and down in the waves like that of a swimmer too far from the shore. Gavin and Jaeson watched till it was out of sight. Then Jaeson lowered a bucket over the side and poured water across the deck to wash away the blood. It was the sort of task he would normally have given to one of the crew.

  But the blood will never really wash away, Gavin thought. His clothes were stiffening as it dried. Blood on our hands, on our heads. A child’s blood. Whatever his future, we took it from him. The girl seemed to have no guilt, no remorse: the remorse and the guilt were for them. He feared her conscience had been lost long before, in the cage where she awaited her doom with the sea-monster, or some other hell-dimension he had not seen.

  ‘He will forget,’ she said to Gavin, meaning Jaeson. ‘In the dark he will lie in my arms and lock the memory away in a little casket, with all the other memories you never take out, never look at, never remember again. A little casket buried deep inside, to be opened at your peril. I have a little casket too; did you know? But mine is triple-locked and loaded with chains and weighted with lead, sunken so deep no one will ever find it, not even me. One day you too will have a little casket; you’ll see.’

  He thought it strange, so strange, that he still didn’t know her name.

  But he didn’t ask.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘When the world is wrong, people like you are always right. But I’ll try to unlock it, no matter what’s inside. I’ll try.’

  THE DOOR OPENED on a curtain of falling water, turning the sunlight all to rainbows. Pen peered round and realised they were behind a waterfall; through a gap beside the cascade she saw a vista of tumbled rocks, gnarly olive trees, a green secret pool where random bubbles floated at play. Arcady – though Pen didn’t recognise it as such. A dragonfly zoomed above the water like a tiny iridescent helicopter. Jinx, whose knowledge of mythology was based largely on a video of Hercules which she had seen as a child, wondered if there would be nymphs and satyrs.

  There weren’t. Just the idyllic scenery, and the dragonfly.

  Pen said: ‘Perhaps I should go and look for Gavin.’

  ‘Too risky,’ said Jinx.

  And: ‘I hope he’s lost the chav.’

  There was an interval of birdsong and the splash-and-chatter of the fall; then they saw him. He came to the farther side of the pool and waded straight into the water without pausing to undress. He looked different – so different that for a few seconds they didn’t speak or call to him: they could only stare and stare. He evidently hadn’t shaved for days and the resulting stubble gave him an air of gangster toughness which should have been glamorous but wasn’t. He had lost the rucksack which he had taken into the past but there was a sword lashed to his belt and his sweatshirt and jeans were blotched with rust-brown stains which looked like dried blood.

  That’s because they are dried blood, Jinx thought.

  Pen, for once in her life, didn’t think at all.

  Gavin pulled off his sweatshirt and ducked his whole body under the water as though desperate to wash off more than the dirt. Then he began to splash towards the fall.

  ‘Gavin!’ Pen cried, her voice released at last. ‘Gavin, here! Quick!’

  Involuntarily, she started through the door, but Jinx held her back. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘He’s coming this way–’

  Gavin said something in a foreign language, but Pen was used to that by now and it didn’t bother her. He was looking at her with stupefaction and relief, scrambling over the rocks in front of the door. She stretched out her hands to him – caught his arms – pulled him through into Number 7. Jinx yanked the door shut; there was a crunch as the latch slid home...

  London, twenty-first century

  THEN GAVIN WAS hugging Pen, dripping all over the carpet, shivering from the chill of the water or some other reaction.

  When he could speak English again, he began to cry.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Pied Piper

  Beyond the Doors

  London, seventeenth century

  IN THE CITY, the long deadly summer was nearly over. September rain dripped from the eaves and streamed from the runnels and washed the rubbish from street to alleyway, from gutter to drain, from blockage to blockage, though no one wondered where it ended up. After the showers the city steamed like a midden. In the creek, the crust broke and piled up along the waterline or was carried in bobbing lumps towards the river. Above the Grim Reaper, in the lo
ft, the roof leaked in several places; Ghost put buckets to catch the drips, because he said the rainwater was cleaner than anything they could get elsewhere.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Cherub asked without interest, drinking from a mug of ale Mags had brought from the tavern.

  ‘My old ma used to say, cleanliness is next to godliness,’ Mags volunteered, casting a doubtful glance at Ghost.

  ‘There you are then,’ said Cherub. ‘We ain’t godly, so why bother to be clean?’

  ‘Clean water and clean food don’t carry plague,’ said Ghost.

  ‘You’ve had it,’ Cherub pointed out. ‘You don’t catch plague again. An I reckon if Mags and I ain’t had it yet, then we ain’t gonna.’

  Mags grinned. Ghost noticed she still had good teeth, even and just a little discoloured, though not as good as Cherub. Cherub’s teeth stayed white as ivory no matter what he ate, and shone against the dirt of his face like fresh snow on a dung heap. Ghost knew Big Belinda lusted after those teeth, as if they were a treasure she wanted to add to her hoard. Teeth like that were worth gold.

  He said: ‘We need to talk about the plan.’

  Cherub’s cheek turned pale under its patina of grime.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be no choirboy for the Duke.’

  ‘It’s just so I can get into the house,’ said Ghost. ‘You have to find the underground passage, and let me in.’

  ‘What you going to do there?’ Mags asked timidly. ‘You can’t do the Duke like... like they did Cullen. Nobody cared about Cullen, but a duke’s a duke. They’d send the constables arter you, an’ the army. They’d hunt you through every attic and cellar in the city. Being dead wouldn’t save you.’

  ‘You’d be hanged,’ Cherub said with satisfaction, as if it was an achievement. ‘Hanged and drawed and quartered, most like. I ain’t never seen a quartering. They say there’s lots of blood.’