A Waterman, a prince, and a bug . . . Jacob Reckless would be rubbing his hands in glee.
‘So, what exactly are we looking for?’ Louis sounded grouchy, just as one would expect from a spoilt royal brat. He had only just celebrated his seventeenth birthday, but his innocent face was deceptive. Apparently not much was safe from him – not his mother’s maids nor her silver, which he regularly fenced to pay his gambling debts and his tailors.
‘Your father has informed me that this is about Guismond the Witch Slayer, Your Highness.’ The Bug sounded as though his metal spectacles were pinching his nose. ‘You may remember our lessons on your ancestry. Guismond’s younger son is your ancestor. Not in direct line’ – the direct line had their heads chopped off by the people of Lotharaine – ‘but through an illegitimate cousin.’ The Bug closed his mouth and brushed back his thin hair, no doubt congratulating himself on the extent of his learning.
A teacher. The Crookback was sending a teacher along with his son on a treasure hunt. Nerron wished himself far, far away. Even hell sounded attractive right now.
Louis gave a bored shrug. He was staring at a scullery maid crossing the yard. Hopefully, he was just as stupid as he looked. It would make keeping secrets from him easier. ‘Could we at least take a carriage?’ he asked. ‘The one that doesn’t need horses? My father had it brought over from Albion.’
Ignore him, Nerron. Otherwise you’ll have killed him by the second day.
‘We depart in an hour,’ he said to the Waterman. ‘On horseback,’ he added with a glance at Louis. ‘But first I have to take a closer look at your tutor.’ He grabbed the Bug by his lapels and pulled him away, which, just as he’d expected, did not interest his pupil in the slightest.
‘Arsene Lelou. I will not solely be travelling in my capacity as Louis’s tutor!’ the Bug stammered. ‘His father charged me with recording his son’s adventures for posterity. We have interest from some newspapers. . . .’
Nerron silenced him with one click of his tongue. The onyx were excellent teachers when it came to intimidating subordinates.
‘I assume you know a few things about the Witch Slayer’s younger son?’
The Bug’s beardless mouth showed a hint of a condescending smile. ‘I know everything about him. But of course I shall not share my knowledge about the royal family with any . . .’
‘Any what? Listen to me, Arsene Lelou!’ Nerron whispered to him. ‘Killing you would be easier than breaking a Thumbling’s neck, and I think we both know your pupil wouldn’t raise a finger to save you. Maybe you’d like to reconsider sharing your knowledge with me?’ Nerron gave him a smile any wolf would have envied.
Arsene Lelou went so red, he looked as if he was turning into carnelian.
‘What would you like to know?’ he said with a twang. He was trying to be a brave Bug. ‘I can give you the dates and places of his most important victories. I have memorised large portions of his correspondence with his sister, Orgeluse, concerning the Austrian line of succession. Then there are the armistice treaties with his brother, which Feirefis breached several times. And his—’
Nerron impatiently waved all that aside. ‘Do you know anything about a severed hand the Witch Slayer left to Gahrumet?’
Make my day, Bug. Say yes.
But Lelou just pursed his lips disgustedly. ‘Pardon me, but I never heard about such a grotesque heirloom. Would that be all?’
His receding chin trembled – whether from fear or indignation wasn’t clear. He gave a stiff bow and made to return to the others. But after two steps, he suddenly stopped.
‘Mind you, there was an incident’ – Lelou adjusted his spectacles with such a haughty face that Nerron nearly swiped them off his nose – ‘involving the favourite servant of Gahrumet’s grandson. He was choked to death by a severed hand.’
Bullseye.
‘What happened to that hand?’
Lelou brushed down his waistcoat. It was embroidered all over with tiny royal Lotharainian crests. ‘Gahrumet’s grandson had it sentenced to death. In a regular trial.’
‘Meaning?’
‘It was delivered to the executioner, quartered, and then buried at its victim’s feet.’
‘Where?’
‘In the graveyard of the abbey of Fontevaud.’
Fontevaud. A six-day ride – if the princeling didn’t have to take too many breaks. Reckless was going to be in Albion at least that long.
The head in the west. The hand in the south.
Nerron smiled. He was certain he’d have the hand before Reckless could even as much as find out where the head was. This was easier than expected. Maybe having an educated Bug along for the hunt wasn’t such a bad thing. Nerron was no friend of books, unlike Reckless, who he’d heard knew every library between the White Sea and Iceland and who spent weeks poring over old manuscripts before embarking on a treasure hunt. No, that was not Nerron’s style. He preferred to pick up his trails in prisons, in taverns, or by the side of the road. Yet a smart Bug like this . . . Nerron slapped Lelou’s delicate shoulders.
‘Not bad, Arsene,’ he said. ‘You just considerably increased your chances of making it through this whole venture alive.’
Lelou looked unsure whether this statement made him feel more at ease. Louis was still standing by the stables, arguing with the Waterman over how many horses they’d need to transport his travel gear.
‘Not a word about our little conversation!’ Nerron whispered to Lelou as they walked back to them. ‘And you should forget about the newspapers. No matter how much Louis loves to see his face on the front pages. I want to see every syllable you write about his adventures. And I will, of course, expect my own role to be recounted in the most flattering terms.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE HEAD IN THE WEST
Most of the ships that anchored in the harbour of Dunkerk still used wind to navigate the oceans of the Mirrorworld. The wind blowing through their riggings flavoured the air with what they’d brought back from the remote corners of this world: silverpepper, whisperwood, exotic creatures for the royal zoos of Lotharaine and Flanders . . . the list was endless. The ferries that crossed over to Albion, however, already had chimneys instead of masts, and they proudly blew their dirty steam at the wind. Even so, the ferry Jacob and Fox boarded still needed more than three days to cross the Grand Channel that separated Albion from the mainland. The sea was rough, and the captain repeatedly ordered the engines throttled back to watch out for a giant squid that had pulled another ferry into the deep a few weeks earlier.
Jacob felt time was trickling through his fingers like sand. Fox stood by the railing and stared across the frothy waves as though she could will the coast to appear. Jacob’s dislike for ships was almost as big as the Goyl’s, but Fox was standing on the swaying planks as if she’d been born on them. She was the daughter of a fisherman; she’d told Jacob at least that much about her roots. Fox was even more reluctant to speak about the past than he was. All he knew was that she’d been born in a village in northern Lotharaine, that her father had died shortly after her birth, that her mother had married again, and that she had three stepbrothers.
The chalk cliffs that finally emerged from the grey waves on the fourth day were the exact equivalent of those in Jacob’s world, except that there were seven Kings and one Queen looking out from Albion’s white cliffs. Each of the effigies was big enough to be seen for miles on a clear day. The salty air gnawed at the faces as relentlessly as exhaust fumes attacked statues in the other world. The face of the current King was covered by scaffolds, on which a dozen stonemasons were busily freshening up the moustache that had earned him his nickname: the Walrus.
Fox eyed Albion’s coast like enemy territory. In theatres there, shape-shifters were forced onstage to shift into donkeys or dogs while audiences howled along. And in its green hills, foxes were hunted with such abandon that Jacob had made her promise not to wear her fur on the island.
Albion. Chanute claimed th
ere used to be more magical creatures there than in Austry and Lotharaine combined. Now, however, factories were shooting up from Albion’s soggy meadows even faster than in Schwanstein. As Jacob steered his horse past the waiting carts on the ferry docks, he looked up at the surrounding hills and imagined he could already see the cities that were sprouting all over them on the other side of the mirror. For now, however, those hills were still covered with the enchanted forests that had always explained his own heart to him so much better than the streets and parks where he and Will had grown up. Jacob had often wondered whether his father had felt the same – whether it was the wildness of this world that had beguiled him, or just the fact that here he could pass off the inventions of another world as his own.
They took one of the less travelled roads leading northwest. It wound past fields and meadows that let you forget that Thumblings and Stilts were now as rare in Albion as Hobs, the Albian version of Heinzel, or the scaly-skinned waterhorses that only a few years earlier could still be seen grazing on the banks of every river. Albion’s last Gold-Raven now stared out of a glass cabinet in a museum; the only Unicorns left were the ones on the regal crest; and in Londra, the ancient capital, Albion was now building palaces to celebrate the new magic: science and engineering. But Jacob was headed for another town.
Pendragon lay less than forty miles inland. It had nearly as many towers as Londra and was so old that its age was the subject of endless debate. Pendragon was also home to Albion’s most famous university. The town’s centre was marked by a big stone, polished to a sheen by the touch of countless hands. Even Fox briefly reined in her horse to touch it before riding on. This was the stone from which Arthur Pendragon supposedly had pulled a magic sword and had – long before Guismond’s time – made himself King of Albion. In this world, there was no King shrouded in a web of truth and myth so thick as Arthur was. The story went that he’d been born to a Fairy and that his father had been an Alderelf, one of the legendary immortals who later made enemies of the Fairies and were destroyed by them so thoroughly that there was no trace of them to be found. Arthur had not just named the town Pendragon; he’d also endowed the famous university himself and had imbued its foundations with so much magic that the old walls still glowed bright enough to render any street lighting unnecessary.
The buildings stood behind the same wrought-iron fence that had surrounded them for centuries, like the remnants of an enchanted city. The gate was closed at sunset. Fox listened into the night before she swung herself over. The guards patrolling the grounds had been performing this duty so long, they should have been granted honourable retirement years before. All they were guarding, anyway, was a myriad of old books and the scent of the past, which mingled reluctantly with the perfume of progress.
Towers and gables of pale grey stone. Dark windows reflecting the light of the two moons. Jacob loved Pendragon’s labyrinth of learning. He’d spent endless hours in the Great Library, listening to lectures about Leprechauns or the dialects of Lothian Witches in the old auditoriums; practised a few new (and surprisingly dirty) feints in the fencing hall; and realised time and time again how much more eagerly he wanted to understand this world than the one he’d been born into. All the years he’d spent finding lost magical treasures made him feel like the guardian of a past the people of this world no longer valued.
Most windows in the history department were dark, like those of the other buildings. Only one, on the second floor, was still illuminated. Robert Lewis Dunbar loved working late into the night.
He didn’t even lift his head when Jacob walked into his office. Dunbar’s desk was so littered with books that it was difficult to spot him behind them all, and Jacob wondered what century he’d lost himself in this time.
Being a talented historian as well as the son of a purebred Fir Darrig was not easy. It meant he’d had to be more brilliant than any human colleague, but that had never been a problem for Dunbar, in spite of the rat’s tail and the very hairy skin his father had passed on to him. Dunbar had not inherited the pointy snout, luckily – his mother’s beauty had given him a halfway-decent face. Most Fir Darrigs came from Eire, Albion’s belligerent neighbour island. They were able to make themselves invisible, and they had – although few people knew this about them – photographic memories.
‘Jacob!’ Dunbar still hadn’t lifted his head. He turned the page he’d been reading and scratched his hairy cheek. ‘’Tis one of the mysteries of this universe why the regents of our university employ night guards who are as blind as they are deaf. Luckily, your pirate’s gait is unmistakable. And I of course did not hear you, Fox!’ He looked up and gave her a smile. ‘By Pendragon’s sword, the vixen is all grown up! And you still endure his company?’ He closed the book and gave Jacob a taunting look. ‘What are we looking for this time? A Habitrot shirt? A gryphon hoof? You should consider a change of career. Light bulbs, batteries, aspirin – those are the words that bring magic to these times.’
Jacob approached the desk and scanned the books Dunbar disappeared into every night, like a paper landscape. ‘The History of Mauretania . . . Flying Carpets . . . The Realm of the Magic Lamp. Are you going on a trip?’
‘Maybe.’ Dunbar caught a fly and popped it into his mouth. A Fir Darrig could never resist a passing insect. ‘What’s a historian to do in a country that only believes in the future? What good will come of it if we allow our lives to be run by cogwheels and pistons?’
Jacob opened one of the books and looked at the illustration of a flying carpet carrying two horses and their riders. ‘Believe me, this is just the beginning.’
Dunbar gave Fox a wink. ‘He so loves playing prophet, doesn’t he? But whenever I ask him exactly what he sees in the future, he evades the question.’
‘One day I may tell you.’ There was nobody whom Jacob would have more liked to tell about the other world than Dunbar. Whenever he saw his friend, Jacob pictured his myopic eyes going wide at the sight of a skyscraper or a jet plane. Although Dunbar was critical of progress in this world, Jacob didn’t know anyone who had as much knowledge and wisdom and still possessed the insatiable curiosity of a child.
‘You still haven’t answered me.’ Dunbar took a pile of books and carried them to the dark bookshelves that lined every wall of his study with printed knowledge. ‘What are you looking for?’
Jacob put the book on flying carpets back on the desk. He wished he were on the hunt for some harmless magical object like that.
‘I am looking for the head of Guismond the Witch Slayer.’
Dunbar stopped so abruptly that one of the books slipped from his arms. He bent down and picked it up.
‘You’d have to find his tomb first.’ His voice sounded unusually cold.
‘I found it. Guismond’s corpse is missing its head, its heart, and its right hand. I believe he had his head sent to Albion. To his elder son.’
Dunbar pushed the books into the shelf, one after another, without saying a word. Then he turned around and leant back against their leather spines. Jacob had never seen such hostility in Dunbar’s face. He was wearing his usual long coat, which hid his rat’s tail. Only its bright red colour gave away the Fir Darrig. They never wore any other colour.
‘This is about the crossbow, isn’t it? I know I’m in your debt, but I will not help you with this.’
A few years back, Jacob had rescued Dunbar from a bunch of drunken soldiers who’d thought it amusing to set his fur on fire. ‘I’m not here to call in a debt. But I have to find the crossbow.’
‘For whom?’ Dunbar’s fur stood on end, like that of an angry dog. ‘Farmers are still ploughing up bones from the old battlefields. Have you traded your conscience for a sack of gold? Do you, at least every now and then, think about what you’re doing? You treasure hunters turn the magic of this world into a commodity only the powerful can afford.’
‘Jacob is not going to sell the crossbow!’
Dunbar ignored Fox’s protest. He returned to his desk and leaf
ed absent-mindedly through his notes. ‘I know nothing about the head,’ he said without looking at Jacob. ‘And I don’t want to know anything. I’m sure you’ll ask others, but I am hopeful nobody can give you the answer you’re looking for. Luckily, this country has lost its interest in black magic. There’s at least that to be said for progress. And now you must excuse me. I have to give a lecture tomorrow on Albion’s role in the slave trade. Another sad Chapter.’
He sat down behind his desk and opened one of the books in front of him.
Fox shot Jacob a helpless look.
He took her arm and pulled her towards the door.
‘Forgive me,’ he said to Dunbar. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
Dunbar didn’t look up from his book. ‘Some things are best never found, Jacob,’ he said. ‘You’re not the only one who likes to forget that.’
Fox wanted to say something, but Jacob pushed her through the door.
‘I forget less often than you think, Dunbar,’ he said before pulling the door shut behind him.
What now?
He looked down the dark corridor.
Fox’s face held the same question. And the same fear.
A swaying lantern appeared at the end of the corridor. The night watchman carrying it was nearly as old as the building. Jacob ignored his puzzled look and simply walked past him without a word.
It was a clear night, and the two moons speckled the roofs with rust and silver. Fox spoke only once they’d reached the iron gate.
‘You always have a second plan. What is it?’
Yes, she knew him well.
‘I’ll get some blood shards.’ He started to swing himself over the gate, but Fox grabbed his arm and pulled him back. ‘No.’