Ealdstan stroked his beard and pondered on this. When his eye turned fully upon her again, the sharp flash was in them once more. “I feel I should apologise. I feel I have judged you awrong,” he said.
She smiled a sly smile. “Everyone does.”
IV
“The Cornish knights are proud and fierce fighters,” Ecgbryt told him. “We will need their spears and long arms. They are kin with the giants, you know? The oldest peoples of these lands-even of the Welsh and Picti.”
Alex raised his flashlight around to look at all the stunning stalactites hanging above them. Some of them must have been twenty feet long. He was looking up, jaw hanging open, when his foot slipped and he splashed into a pool of water up to his knee. It had probably been undisturbed for hundreds of years and felt as cold as ice. “Could we not have driven a little closer to it overland?” he asked, shaking his sodden leg. They had driven to a boutique-filled village called Honiton, near Exeter, and started their trip from there. The drive had probably saved them days, but in the race they were on, every hour counted.
“I judge not. The Eastern tip’s tunnels were ancient even to the Celt peoples. They are hard to access from the surface-hard, at least, in one sense. There are many, many entrances and they form a true maze to get past. This path is the same as what you would call ‘the back door.’”
Alex swore.
“Slipping again? I do not understand why you have your light turned up so high. Meotodes meahte, but it is dazzling.”
“But why start in Cornwall, exactly?” Alex asked, stomping his foot.
Ecgbryt considered awhile before answering. “Ni?ergeard has been occupied for many years, its people captive, and possibly many of its secrets have been spilled from unwilling lips. You know how many chambers have already been discovered-it would not be worth holding out hope that those nearest the city would be untouched. However, this end of the island is densely packed with obscured places and mysteries that were kept even before Ealdstan’s time, I wist. Although there are not many knights here-the Dumnonians have ever been independent-they will be well hidden. And hardy, as I have said. Did I tell you they came from giant stock?”
“Aye. You mentioned that,” Alex said. “But it’s so out of the way. Why corner ourselves like this? What’s so special over there?”
“The Cornish kingdom,” Ecgbryt continued and Alex didn’t correct him, “is one of the thin places of this island. If anything were to leak through, this is one of the places it would first occur. We may be able to judge the extent of this island’s peril by what we find there. In any case, Cornwall is not a corner. We will need to pass through it to get to Llyonesse and points beyond.”
“Llyonesse, the sunken land?”
“Swa swa. Just so.”
They came upon their first sleeping chamber after a couple more miles. It was not hidden by any illusion or enchanted wall; it simply lay at the centre of a labyrinth made of black stone that ate the light cast by the lanterns and made it hard to tell wall from opening. Ecgbryt insisted all through the maze that he knew the path, but he led them to many dead ends before they found the sleeping circle of knights.
Or at least, what had once been the circle of knights.
On sixteen black stone tables lay sixteen white corpses, each of them held down by a web of metal chains and manacles that ran beneath the tables.
“They are all dead,” Ecgbryt said, casting his eyes over the scene. “Not one of them escaped.”
“They were stripped of their weapons,” Alex observed, examining them closer. “Then tied-quickly and skilfully, if it was done without waking them from even an enchanted sleep.”
“Here is the horn,” said Ecgbryt, walking to the centre of the ring. He looked around with baleful eyes. “Trussed like snared fowl and then awoken from their immortal slumber. They died of starvation? Or thirst? Did the yfelgopes watch them suffer? Did they torture them?”
“There don’t appear to be any wounds, apart from dried blood on the manacles,” Alex said with a sigh. “Some nearly pulled their hands and feet off trying to escape.”
“Swa swa. They would have done it if they could,” Ecgbryt said. “They were valiant warriors all, and not a one would hesitate to sacrifice life or limb for another.”
“Well, they are dead, and their spirits have left this place.” Alex thought of the massacred Scottish knights of Morven and shivered. It could be worse, he thought to himself. “Let us keep moving. We are too late for these knights; let us pray we are not too late for the others.”
But the yfelgopes had a head start of many years. It was possible there were no sleepers left on the entire island.
V
Walsall
Rian Watts took the long way home from the playing field. Nathan Edwards had failed to show, and he was the one who was supposed to bring the ball. The others had hung around, waiting idly for something to happen, but Rian had become tired of watching them perform lame stunts on their bikes. The best any of them could do was pop a wheelie for about half a second. And then they’d skid around, beaming, expecting wild applause, as if they’d just jumped a bus.
Bored, broke, and with absolutely no reason for wanting to go back home, he picked his way through the endless suburban streets, weaving a serpentine path. He was feeling more and more restless these days, more and more content with endless rambling. It calmed him somehow. When he stayed in one place, everything became drab and dark, like it was losing its colour or fading out slowly, like the end of an old movie. What would happen when it faded out altogether? But when he got out and moved, when images started flashing by him, then everything snapped back into bright, vibrant colour. Life was motion; stillness was death.
But how far could a fifteen-year-old boy go? And what could he do? He was essentially trapped. Trapped in this maze of houses. Trapped in the routine of an unimaginative school life and even less imaginative friends. His favourite word was stagnant. It was doodled on every workbook he’d been given.
He decided to walk along the canal. It was dirty, smelly, and some scary people hung around there, but it was different, a break in the depressingly thin terraced houses and their littered front gardens.
He scuffed along the gravel towpath and swept his idle gaze over a submerged shopping trolley in the canal and beached cider cans, vaguely wishing he had some piece of rubbish he could contribute to the vast convoy of filth that Manchester continually poured into the town. It was one of life’s truths: there was always someone higher up the ladder or farther up the river who was dumping on you.
Rian realised that he wasn’t walking anymore. His eye had been caught by a white, luminescent object that was shimmering on the other side of the canal, and his ear had been pricked by a song that seemed to come from both around him and inside of him.
Come down to me, my lovely,
Come down and lie on my bed.
I’ll come with you, my sweet one,
Allow yourself to be led.
The glistening object in the water seemed to almost give off a silvery light of its own. As he craned his neck, Rian wished that it was closer to him so he could see what it was. And then he found it moving toward him, as if controlled by his unspoken desire. It glided just under the surface of the dark, manky water, making movements that suggested it to be alive.
It broke the surface and Rian gasped. It was a girl, a woman. Her skin was almost sickishly pale-blue veins could be seen underneath white skin that seemed to glow. But high cheekbones, large eyes, and an angular jawline and eyebrows made her as beautiful as a supermodel. She appeared to be naked. Large drops of dark canal water beaded off of her face, tracing a desirable path down her neck and along the inside cleft of her breast. Her hair was black and as slick as an oil spill.