‘Now!’ I shouted, but Guleed was already airborne.
She parkoured off the balcony onto one of the green overstuffed leather sofas and bounced in a way that Michelle Yeoh would have been proud of. In her hand was Hugh Oswald’s battle staff, serving its country for the last time. It might have been drained of magic, but it was still a metre of solid oak around an iron core.
She struck, not at Francisca but at the spear – where the glass met the haft.
It broke, the lightning glass shattering, splinters spraying across the atrium to bounce off my shield. I heard Guleed shouting. Her vest and reinforced trousers took most of it, but a couple of shards struck her hand – even as she was vaulting for cover on the other side of the sofa. Lesley, I learnt later, had abandoned her trainers and ducked behind a pillar.
The wings of fire flared and Francisca reared back, blood from multiple cuts on her forehead and cheeks running down her face. She screamed in pain and something – we never did work out what – struck my shield with such force that I was driven backwards.
Then Nightingale stepped out of the eastern stairwell and bound her.
The same spell as last time, only the bonds were thick enough to show blue refracted light. They looped around Francisca, wings and all, and tightened.
I stepped forward to cast the sīphōnem spell. As I did, I noticed that Lesley was hiding behind that nearby pillar. She saw me moving and shook her head in exaggerated disbelief.
‘Not again,’ she said as I cast at Francisca.
Yes again – the same spray of colour behind Francisca like a stained glass window, again the drag as if I could lean forwards and fall into the boundary between our world and the allokosmos.
And again the sheer power overwhelming Nightingale’s binding spell. I felt it slipping, the bounds loosening.
‘Lesley!’ I shouted. ‘Help!’
And this was the second test.
I was having to constantly reinforce the triggering formae and didn’t dare look over but I felt, rather than heard, her long sigh of frustration. Then she swore and then I felt the tick-tock razor strop of her signare as she cast her own spell. I couldn’t see what it did, but suddenly Francisca’s struggles stopped. Nightingale’s binding tightened.
And my spell caught.
I felt the gap opening in front of me and I let myself pitch forwards.
The third and final test.
I fell into somewhere else.
I’ve been to the stone memory of London, the singing crystal ghost palace of Chesham and the unicorn-infested wild lands of Faerie. I have looked into portals from strange allokosmoi and felt things staring back – so what happened next was terrifyingly familiar.
I found myself standing in a courtyard full of fruit trees. There was the scent of orange blossom and the gritty taste of dust. Above me the sky was cloudless and an impossible dark blue – the colour a sky goes at dusk when a storm is rising on the horizon. The flagstones beneath my feet were warm from the sun.
I looked down at myself – I was stark bollock naked.
The orange trees were arranged in ordered ranks, and the pattern of the flagstones drew me towards a fountain and beyond that a shadowy gothic arch rose two storeys high. The great wall it was set in was blurred and indistinct, like the surroundings of a dream. I could practically feel my mind trying to impose shapes and order on what I was looking at.
I felt the archway was the obvious way to go. I’ve done this kind of thing before, and sometimes your real, actual flesh-and-blood body is asphyxiating in slow motion. When I took a deep breath, the whole pulmonary gas exchange seemed to be working fine, but I thought it better not to take the chance.
The fountain was dry – the beautifully blue and white abstract tiles of the basin and rim dusty and bleached. Still, as I passed by I felt the caress of water on my face, my arms, my head and my feet. It was refreshing but I could have done with a drink as well.
As I approached the archway it stayed in darkness, while around it the angles and shadows shifted and changed. From abstractions to statues, to carvings of animals and mythical beasts. I saw a sad woman, eyes downcast; a young man holding aloft the head of Medusa; some were what I thought might be Roman gods, others saints or kings. My feet slapped on the steps leading up and I stepped into the shadows.
It was a cathedral nave, with stone pillars stretching upwards to an impossibly high vaulted roof lit by golden sunlight. The walls were shaded and elaborately carved with animals and gargoyles, saints and sinners. I thought some may have moved as I walked past.
I was drawn forwards towards an arch that was too squat and plain to be part of a cathedral. As I stepped through, I smelt burning and could hear men shouting in fear and frustration.
If before had been the cathedral in Seville, then this must be the Castle of San Jorge that sat across the River Guadalquivir from the city. Judging by the scorch marks, the smoke and the shouting – some point after Enrique had busted himself and his family out.
Ahead was a plain square doorway from which candlelight spilled like a beacon. I became aware of the bell-like tone that I associated with the violent arrival of Francisca in her guise as an angel of vengeance. It grew louder as I reached the doorway, but softer, too – like a bell humming.
I’d heard those tones before – from the bell Martin Chorley and Lesley May had planned to summon Punch with. Was this the same magic, or was it an innate quality of bells?
I decided that these were questions for another day, and stepped through the doorway.
It was a chamber the size of my parents’ living room, with white plastered walls and carpets laid over a flagstone floor. There was no fireplace, but a couple of dozen candles burned in five-branched candlesticks mounted on stands around the room.
A man sat on a high-backed chair with the window behind him. He was old, white and thin, with grey hair poking out from under a black skullcap. His eyes were dark, deep-set and fixed on mine as I approached. He was dressed in brown robes with a comically large starched white collar, making him look like a wilting flower or a Time Lord.
Kneeling in front of him was a naked white woman with brown curly hair; she had broad shoulders and muscular arms and legs. On her back were pale lines – old scars left by the lash. Her head was bowed but her arms were outstretched, her hands resting in the palms of the seated man.
Behind the man was a workbench with the crucibles, alembics and assorted glassware of the late medieval alchemist. Books and papers were stacked untidily on a wooden writing desk under the window, where they could catch the daylight. The view through the window was of an impossibly blue sky fading into the mist below.
The man said something in Spanish or Portuguese. His voice had a rasping quality – as if he hadn’t spoken for centuries, and his mouth was dry.
‘Salve, loquerisne Latine?’ I said, on the basis that any man of letters would be more familiar with Latin than I am with Spanish.
‘Esne mi salvator?’ he asked – Are you my saviour?
I was tempted to say ‘yes’ and claim the ultimate authority, but I reckoned that would be a bit presumptuous – even by my standards.
‘Non sum, sed nuntius de longe emissus,’ I said – claiming I was a messenger from a far land.
‘Have you come to release me from this burden?’
His Latin was fluent, although he pronounced his c’s soft, which would have annoyed Nightingale and Postmartin, who were adherents of the hard consonant school of classical Latin.