Valerian nodded.
“So why didn’t you ask him for help sooner? Why wait until the last few years?”
Valerian spoke to Boy, but his gaze went right through him.
“Kepler and I had fallen out at the time of my making the pact. We… disagreed over something. We did not see each other for maybe ten years. But many things can be forgiven in time, and when I went to see him again he agreed to help me find the book.”
“What did you disagree about?” Boy asked.
A shadow crossed Valerian’s face. He chose to ignore this question, but some intuition told Willow it had something to do with the woman.
“My time is up,” he said. “My only chance lies with the book. I had heard of it, and when I told Kepler about it he spent many months finding out about it. His knowledge of ancient libraries is second to none. He gathered references to the book-a mention here, half a line there-until we learnt that if it still existed, it was probably in our very own City. Then we truly began to believe we might actually find the thing itself.
“It is a book full of such ancient and powerful knowledge that we believe it contains some spell or other way of breaking the contract I am under. Kepler firmly believes that it contains the answer. From his researches he discovered that it is not just pages with writing, information to be learnt, the mundane and the extraordinary. No, it is more than that. Kepler believes that the book is itself a magical device, and each person who looks into it learns something different-something about only themselves, the thing uppermost in their mind, the thing they most want to know…
“For five years we have been tracking it down. About a year ago we thought we had it. We were mistaken. Then a few months ago it was promised to us, and again we were tricked. Across the years many people have struggled to claim possession of it.
“I was relying on things happening more quickly than they have, but maybe there is still time. Maybe. Kepler was sure it would yield an answer. And despite… the things that occurred between us, he is my one salvation in all this.”
He broke off.
Willow watched him.
“Valerian?” she asked, brushing more flakes of snow from her hair.
“What?” His voice was faint.
“The woman. The woman you did it all for. What happened to her?”
Valerian lifted his head and his cold stare ran straight through Willow.
“She?” he said. “She… rejected me. Despite the enchantment, somehow she still rejected me. I never saw her again.”
There was silence.
Willow still wanted to know her name, but could not bring herself to speak. Boy wondered how someone could risk so much, face such horrors, enter such a pact, all for someone who would cast them away, but Willow, looking at Boy, could feel differently.
To risk everything for someone-that was something she understood.
“Boy,” she said, quietly, “I’m cold.”
“Come here,” he said, and put his arm around her.
8
Silence fell over them as the cart plowed on through the snowbound forest.
Boy felt a mixture of emotions, and none of them good-fear, horror, sadness, hopelessness. Willow felt pity, and dread.
And Valerian? Who knows what deep and dangerous thoughts ran through his disturbed mind?
Dead to everything around them, they plodded on through mile after mile of snow-laden silver birch forests. Dimly, it seemed to Boy impossible that there could be so many trees and that it could snow for so long. And yet the trees went on forever and so did the snow.
Willow kept a firm grip on the blanket spread across them. The rhythmic stagger of the cart lulled Boy into a half-sleep, in which the waking world and his troubled imagination fought for control. He plunged into a bizarre sequence of mind-pictures in which he was back in his favorite kind of place: a small, confined darkness. Yet there was horror somewhere nearby, something that wanted to be bad to him. He scurried deeper into the cramped black spaces until he felt safer only to feel the hunting presence coming closer and closer once more. In his perverse dreamworld he could feel himself being pulled further away from himself, until at last there was an answer and he became the small dark space himself, and in doing so was free.
And Valerian?
There was nothing. He slept as they went on through the paper-white trees, and the soft, deathly snow.
And yet… and yet, then there came the end to the trees.
Dusk was only an hour or so away when they emerged from the forest at last. Far off in the distance stood a wretched little village.
“Linden!” The driver spat.
Then, in a cracked and bleak voice, he began to sing, rousing them from their fitful sleep.
“In the morning you should think
You might not last unto the night,
In the evening you should think
You might not last unto the morn.
So dance, my dears, dance,
Before you take the dark flight down.”
As he finished his dirge, they pulled into Linden. It was just a handful of houses, an old water mill and the odd barn. For some reason, however, it had an imposing and ancient church that towered in the dusk like a manmade mountain of cut stone.
There, past a rickety fence, lay their goal-the churchyard.
The driver pulled the horse to a stop.
“We shouldn’t need long,” Valerian said to him.
“I don’t care how long you need,” said the driver. “We can’t go back tonight.”
He got down and started to unhitch the horse from the cart.
Valerian turned to argue, but the old man cut him off.
“If you don’t get out of there before it’s unhitched you’ll fall off,” he grunted. “And by the look of your arm I don’t think you’d want that.”
Defeated, Valerian scrambled down, grimacing with pain as he reached the ground.
“Is it getting worse?” asked Willow.
“Do you have any left?” asked Boy, and Valerian pulled a final, somewhat larger bottle of Kepler’s magic drug from his pocket.
“That’s all,” he said forlornly. He turned to the driver, who was leading his horse over to one of the barns.
“Where are we to stay, then?”
The driver didn’t look back as he called, “You should have thought of that before you set out.”
He led the horse into the barn and the door closed. There was a time, Boy knew, not too long ago, when Valerian would have fought the driver, compelled him to do his bidding. But now Valerian was broken, nearly spent.
They looked around the village. Even in the fading light they could see it all from where they stood.
There were three houses, each standing by itself on a patch of land with a low wooden fence. Each had a variety of little shacks and outhouses clustered behind it, and vegetable gardens that ran down to where the fields proper started.
There was the water mill. It had a large millpond upstream, frozen solid and now covered in snow as well. The entire millrace seemed to be frozen, though water must have been moving underneath the icy surface. The wheel was still frozen fast, and long fingers of icicles hung down from the blades that in summer would have ducked powerfully into the water.
There were two large barns, into one of which the coach driver had vanished with his horse. The other was a little smaller. And there was the church.
There was no one around, though they could see firelight inside some of the windows and could hear the sounds of a village preparing to rest at the end of a winter’s day. A dog barked behind one of the houses. A rickety door slammed. They felt utterly alone.
“I don’t like the countryside,” said Willow.
“Hmm,” said Valerian. “It can be a little… quiet.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Boy. “Where are we going to sleep?”
“We’re not,” said Valerian. “The first thing to do is find what we came here for-the book. Then we’ll get a horse and take ourselves back.”