But as she gripped the slimy filth and pulled herself after Keiro she felt his boots ahead and he wasn’t moving.
She looked up and saw the torchlight glowing on the end of the tunnel.
It was a rounded vault of corbelled stone, and a single gargoyle leered down at them with its tongue impudently out. The water was pouring from its mouth, a green slime down the walls.
‘That’s it? The end?’ She almost dropped her forehead down into the water. ‘We can’t even turn!’
‘End of the tunnel. Not quite the end of the line.’ Keiro had wriggled over on his back and was looking up, his hair dripping. ‘Look.’ In the roof immediately above him was a shaft. It was circular and around it were letters, strange sigils in some language Attia didn’t know.
‘Sapient letters.’ Keiro flinched as the sparks from the torch fell towards his face. ‘Gildas used to use them all the time.
And look at that.’ An eagle. Her heart leapt as she saw the sign that Finn wore on his wrist, its wings wide, a crown around its neck.
Down through the centre of the hole, its final links just drifting above Keiro’s hand, hung a chain ladder. As they watched, it shuddered gently, in the vibrations from above.
Rix’s voice was calm in the darkness behind her. ‘Well climb it, Apprentice.’ There was no stable.
Jared stood in the centre of the clearing and looked blearily around.
No stable, no feathers. Only, on the floor of the clearing, a scorched circle, that might once have been the blackened scar of a fire. He walked round it. The bracken was deep and curled in the dawn light; spiderwebs, looking like cradles of wool meshed with dew, filled every crack between stem and stalk.
He sucked his dry lips, then ran his hand over his forehead, behind his neck.
He must have been here one, perhaps two days, rolled in that blanket, delirious, the horse snuffling and cropping leaves and wandering aimlessly nearby.
His clothes were sodden with damp and sweat, his hair lank, his hands bitten by insects, and he still couldn’t stop shivering. But he felt as if some door had opened inside him, some bridge had been crossed.
Walking back to the horse, he took out his medication pouch and crouched, considering the dose. Then he injected the fine needle into his vein, feeling the sharp prick that always set his teeth on edge. He withdrew it, cleaned it and put it away. Then he took his own pulse, wiped a handkerchief in the dew and washed his face and smiled at a sudden memory of one of the maids at home asking him if dew was really good for her complexion.
It was certainly fresh and cold.
He took the horse’s reins in hand, and climbed up on to its back.
He could not have survived such a fever without warmth.
Without water. He should be parched with thirst, and he wasn’t. And yet no one had been here.
As he urged the horse to a gallop he thought about the power of vision; whether Sapphique had been an aspect of his own mind, or a real being. None of it was that simple.
There were whole shelves of texts back in the Library discussing the powers of the visionary imagination, of memory and dreams.
Jared smiled wanly to the trees of the wood.
For him it had happened. That was what mattered.
He rode hard. By midday he was in the lands of the Wardenry, tired, but surprising himself by his endurance. At a farm he climbed down a little stiffly and was given milk and cheese by the farmer, a stout, perspiring man who seemed on edge, his glance always wandering to the horizon.
When Jared offered money the man pressed it back at him.
‘No, Master. A Sapient once treated my wife for free and I’ve never forgotten that. But a word of advice. Flurry on now, wherever you’re bound. There’s trouble brewing here
‘Trouble?’ Jared looked at him.
‘I’ve heard the Lady Claudia is condemned. And that lad with her, the one who claims to be the Prince.’
‘He is the Prince.’ The farmer pulled a face. ‘Whatever you say, Master.
High politics are not for me. But this I do know; the Queen has an army on the march, and they’re maybe at the Wardenry itself by now. I had three outlying barns fired by them yesterday, and sheep snatched. Thieving scum.’ Jared stared at him in cold terror. Grabbing the horse he said, ‘I would be grateful, sir, if you hadn’t seen me. You understand?’ The farmer nodded. ‘In these hard times, Master, only the silent are wise.’ He was afraid now He rode more carefully, taking field paths and bridleways, keeping to deep lanes between high hedges. In one place, crossing a road, he saw the tracks of hooves and waggons; deep ruts of wheels dragging some heavy ironware. He rubbed the horse’s coarse inane.
Where was Claudia? What had happened at Court?
By late afternoon he came up a track into a small copse of beeches on a hilltop. The trees were quiet, their leaves brushed only by a faint breeze, full of the tiny whistlings of invisible birds.
Jared climbed down, and stood for a moment letting the ache ease in his back and legs. Then he tied up the horse and walked cautiously through the bronze leaf-litter, ankle-deep in its rustling crispness.
Under the beeches nothing grew; he moved from tree to tree, awkwardly, but only a fox confronted him.
‘Master Fox,’ Jared muttered.
The fox paused a second. Then it turned and trotted away.
Reassured, he moved to the edge of the trees and crouched behind a broad trunk. Carefully, he peered round it.
An army was encamped on the broad hillside. All around the ancient house of the Wardenry there were tents and waggons and the glint of armour. Squadrons of cavalry rode in arrogant display; a mass of soldiers were digging a great trench in the wide lawns.
Jared drew in a breath of dismay.
He could see more men arriving down the lanes; pikemen led by drummers and a fife-player, the reedy whistle audible even up here. Flags fluttered everywhere, and to the left, tinder a brilliant standard of the white rose, a great pavilion was being raised by sweating men.
The Queen’s tent.
He looked at the house. The windows were shuttered, the drawbridge tightly raised. On the roof of the gatehouse metal glinted; he thought there were men up there, and perhaps the light cannon that were kept there had been prepared and moved up to the battlements. His own tower had someone on its parapet.
He breathed out and turned, sitting knees up in the dead leaves.
This was a disaster. There was no way the Wardenry could withstand any sort of sustained attack. Its walls were thick but it was a fortified manor and not a castle.
Claudia must simply be playing for time. She must be planning to use the Portal.
The thought made him agitated; he stood and paced. She had no idea of the dangers of that device! He had to get inside before she tried anything so foolish.
The horse whickered.
He froze, hearing the tread behind him, the footsteps through the rustling leaves.
And then the voice, lightly mocking. ‘Well, Master Jared.
Aren’t you supposed to be dead?’
‘How many?’ Finn asked.
Claudia had a visor that magnified things. She was staring through it now, counting. ‘Seven. Eight. I’m not sure what’s on that contraption to the left of the Queen’s tent
‘It barely matters.’ Captain Soames, a grey, stocky man, sounded gloomy. ‘Eight pieces of ordnance could shell us all to pieces.’
‘What do we have?’ Finn asked quietly.
‘Two cannon, my lord. One authentic Era, the other a mishmash of base metal — it will likely explode if we try to fire it. Crossbows, arquebuses, pikemen, archers. Ten men with muskets. About eighty cavalry’