The Traitor’s Sword: The Sangreal Trilogy Two. Jan Siegel
to produce a child so exotically dark … Annie herself had never really known what happened. In the instant of Daniel’s death she had reached out for him, and a Gate had opened, and in death she had found love, returning to the world of life pregnant, and it wasn’t until she saw the baby that she realized he couldn’t be Daniel’s child. He was the child of destiny, Bartlemy said, bridging the void between worlds; but it did not comfort her. One day, she would have to tell Nathan the truth – one day very soon – but she was still finding reasons to put it off. Keep him safe – keep him trusting – he doesn’t need to know …
She put the picture away again, the looming dilemma clouding her mind, excluding any memories of distant happiness.
In his own bed Nathan lay with his eyes closed roaming the landscape inside his head, looking for the way through. It was there, he knew: he had found it once before, in an emergency, taking the plunge into another universe not at random but by his own will – though the act had frightened him and he hadn’t attempted it again. But now curiosity – which kills even Schroedinger’s cat – impelled him on, stronger than fear. He wanted to see the princess again, to explore the abandoned city and find out more about Urdemons, and why the people left, and the curse on the king …
He fell a long, long way, through a whirling dark pinpricked with stars. Then there was a jarring thud, and his mind was back in his body, but his body was somewhere else. Not the city on two hills with the Gothic house on top but another city, a huge metropolis with buildings like curving cliffs and a blood-red sunset reflected in endless windows and airborne skimmers and winged reptiles criss-crossing in the deadly light. He had landed on a rooftop platform in the shade of a wall, with a door close by. He scrambled to his feet, touched a panel – after a second the door opened and he slipped inside, escaping the lethal sun. He had forgotten the hazards of willing himself into another universe. Here was no misty realm of dreams and incorporeal being: he was almost solid, as visible as a ghost on a dark night, and this was Arkatron on Eos, the city at the end of the world, and there were too many dangers both known and unknown here to menace him. Worst of all, or so he thought when he looked down, he had ignored the first rule of dream-voyages – that you will find yourself wearing the clothes you slept in. It is difficult to feel brave and adventurous in pyjamas. (The previous year, he had got into the habit of going to bed in tracksuit trousers and a sweatshirt.) However, there was nothing he could do about it now.
He found himself on a gallery overlooking a hollow shaft, too deep for him to estimate how far it was to the bottom. Transparent egg-shaped lifts travelled up and down it, supported by alarmingly slender cables. He had assumed he would be in government headquarters, since that was where his dreams usually placed him, but nothing here looked familiar. A lift stopped close by, its door opening automatically even as a section of floor was extruded from the gallery to meet it. The lift was empty. Nathan took the hint, and stepped inside. A panel offered a wide choice of buttons: he pressed the top one. Being only semi-solid he had to press twice, hard. The door closed and the lift shot upwards.
He emerged onto another gallery, but this time he had to walk all the way round to find an exit, and when he pushed the door, it didn’t move. He was too substantial to walk through it. He touched a square on the adjacent wall, but instead of the door opening there was a noise like a few bars of music – the kind of music Hazel would have liked, incorporating weird stringed instruments and very little rhythm. ‘Of course,’ Nathan thought, light dawning, ‘it’s a doorbell. This is a private apartment …’ He wondered if he should run, but there was no point. His dream had brought him here, and he had no real option but to go on.
The door opened.
A man was standing there, a very tall man (all Eosians were taller than the people of our world) wearing a long white robe with a wide hood much looser than the usual kind. Under the hanging sleeves his hands were ungloved and his mask only covered three-quarters of his face; where it ended, just above mouth and jaw, his beard began, a thick white beard unlike anything Nathan had ever seen outside the pages of a book, forked and braided almost to his waist. He stared at Nathan in silence. Nathan stared back, forgetting how shocking his appearance must be to his host. No children had been born here for perhaps a thousand years, and though Nathan was big for his age, in this universe he was shorter than the indigents, slight of build and obviously youthful. His pyjamas were too small for him, stopping well above ankle and wrist – his body had a suggestion of transparency – his face was naked. On Eos, it was rare for anyone to show their face.
When at last the man spoke, his words were strangely apposite. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘What in the world are you? A holocast? – or not …’
As always, Nathan understood the language. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m not really in your world. At least, I am, but –’
‘But?’
‘I’m from another world,’ Nathan explained. His voice didn’t sound quite right – eerily hollow and distant.
‘So it’s started, has it?’ The man’s tone sharpened. ‘It’s been long in the coming. The walls between the worlds are breaking down. Still, I don’t quite understand … What would you want of me? Whoever you are.’
‘I don’t know,’ Nathan admitted. ‘My dream brought me here.’
‘Your – dream? You mean, you are dreaming this? You are dreaming me?’
‘Yes.’
‘How very interesting. This couldn’t be part of a spell – some leakage through a portal?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Nathan said. ‘If there’s a portal, it’s in my head.’
‘Hmm.’ There was a pause.
Then the man said: ‘I am forgetting my manners. Won’t you come in?’
Nathan followed him inside. The apartment consisted of a cluster of irregularly-shaped rooms connected with arched doorways and hung with diaphanous drapes. Furniture curved with the walls; a small fountain bubbled out of what looked like a crystal cakestand in the midst of the main room; the light was vague and sourceless. Stronger light was condensed into two or three pillars of clouded glass, and in the outer wall oval windows were covered with translucent screens, flushed red from the sunset beyond. ‘My name,’ said the man, seating himself, ‘is Osskva Rodolfin Petanax. But perhaps you knew that already?’
‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I don’t know anything very much. Is this part of the Grandir’s palace?’
‘If you mean the seat of government and residence of our ruler and his bridesister, then – no. We wouldn’t call it a palace. This is accommodation for his senior advisers and others in the higher echelons of authority. I am a first level practor – if you understand what that means?’
‘I … think so. A kind of magician?’
‘So you do know something of this world. You have been here before.’
Nathan didn’t comment. There was a niggle at the back of his mind, another of those elusive connections which he couldn’t quite place. Whenever he sought for it, it slipped away into his subconscious, tantalizingly out of reach. He knew he was here for a reason – there was always a reason behind his dream-journeys – but he had no idea what it might be, and he felt like an actor dropped into the middle of an unfamiliar play, while the audience waited in vain for him to remember his lines. His host continued to study him with absorption but curiously little surprise.
‘Have you met the Grandir?’ Osskva asked.
‘Not met, no. I’ve seen him.’
‘Whom have you met, apart from me?’
Halmé, Nathan thought, but he didn’t say so. She had concealed him from the Grandir; he could not betray her. And Raymor, her former bodyguard. And the dissident Kwanji Ley, who had stolen the Grail in this world, and paid with her life …
Now he remembered.
‘Take it,’ she had said, giving him