He clapped his hands together.
“Hundreds of years. She hasn’t been outside on her own for hundreds of years? That’s what you’re trying to tell me?”
He nodded slowly.
“Then why leave now?” I asked.
Again, the anguished moan filled the tunnels.
“You don’t know, do you?” I asked him. “She didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head, the moan trailing off mournfully.
“She waited until you weren’t here, and then left. She must have been planning this for some time. Where would she go without you? Is there somewhere only she could go? Somewhere she couldn’t take you?”
Gramawl’s massive shoulders sagged, as if under a great weight.
“Or she’s gone to do something that she has to do alone?”
Again the mournful wail, haunted the tunnels. I looked at Gramawl and understood him at last. He thought she’d taken herself somewhere else to die. It was a journey on which he could not accompany her, and it was the only thing he could not protect her from. She’d waited for him to go outside and then left him behind because she didn’t want him following her. I already knew Gramawl was much younger than she was. It was obvious in the way he moved and in the lustre of his fur, the pale whiteness of his tusk-like teeth. She must have known that she would not survive him, as must he. I reached out my hand to him, offering comfort.
Sensing that I had finally understood him, he took my hand and squeezed it gently in his. I had expected it to be rough and course, but it was warm and soft, like old leather. “I’m sorry Gramawl.” I said. “What will you do now?”
He shook his head and sat back, his eyes glowing in the dark. He folded his hands into his lap and settled himself.
“You’ll wait?” I asked. “What if she doesn’t return?” He shrugged.
“How long will you wait?” I asked. Again, the shrug.
I stood up, testing where I was bruised. I was sore, and the wound in my side ached, but I was whole. “Do you want me to tell Blackbird?” I asked.
He hesitated, then nodded slowly. “Then I’ll tell her.” I said. “She will want to see you.”
He simply raised his hand and pressed the tip of his finger to the floor. He would be here.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, picking up my sword and collecting the torch.
I backed away and then walked to the bend in the tunnel and looked back into the dark. There were the faint glimmers from two golden eyes in the dark. There was a question I hadn’t asked — one that I’d intended for Kareesh, but maybe Gramawl could help me with it.
“Gramawl? I was here before wasn’t I?” My voice echoed strangely in the darkened corridor, illuminated only by the ring of torchlight around my feet. The eyes blinked at me from the dark. “Before all of this, before Blackbird introduced me to you and Kareesh, before I even knew the Feyre existed, I was here, with you and Kareesh, wasn’t I?”
The eyes blinked again, but this time they did not re-open. I went back, shining the torch down the corridor. He had vanished silently into the dark. There were only the cold tiles and the empty stairway leading upwards.
Amber was waiting in the dark at the head of the stairway. We went through the door into the access tunnels below Covent Garden station and she looked me up and down.
“I’m OK,” I said. “A little bruised, but…”
She shrugged, and led the way out of station and back to the Way-node in silence. It gave me time to think about Gramawl, Kareesh and what they were doing. This was Kareesh’s doing, I knew that now, but what was it she had planned? In order to discover that, I needed to find her, but if Gramawl couldn’t find her, then what chance did I have? She’d vanished, after all those years sequestered in the tunnels below the Underground Station. I was not looking forward to telling Blackbird that Kareesh had disappeared.
Arriving back at the courts, I left Amber to her duties and went up into the house. With Kareesh unavailable, there was one other person who could help me figure out what this was all about. I went to see if Angela was back.
THIRTEEN
“Altair?”
“I have warned you not to use that name,” said the whisperer.
“It has to be now. He’s fading. If we don’t reach him soon, it will be too late.”
“After the solstice.”
“Now. He needs you now. You promised. After all I’ve done for you.”
“Done? Anything you’ve done has been for your own reasons.”
“Help him, or I’ll tell them everything.” Her voice was a low threat.
“By all means, tell them. Your part in it will be obvious. You’ll be executed on the spot. It won’t help him.”
“You have to help him. You promised me.”
“I said I would help Fellstamp, and I am helping him. He’s about to embrace the void that claimed him.”
“You said you would bring him back.”
“No, I said I would help him return. We all come from the void, and we all return to it. It’s inevitable,” said Altair.
“That’s not true — only the wraithkin return to the void,” she said.
“Ultimately we all come from the void, and we will all return to it,” he said. “Everything else is transitory illusion. It’s simply a matter of time.”
“You lying wraithkin bastard! You lied to me! You’ve betrayed me and Fellstamp!”
“You’re the one who’s been doing the betraying, Fionh, and if I were you I’d keep very quiet about it. Fellstamp must find his own peace with the void. I can’t bring him back, but I can give you revenge on the ones that placed him there. In a few days they will be at your mercy.”
“I don’t need you to deliver revenge,” she said. “I can do that for myself.” She walked away, no longer caring whether anyone saw her.
“Shall I follow her?” said a low voice.
“Only as far as the edge of the wardings,” said the whisperer.
“What if she tells Garvin?”
“She won’t. She’s too proud.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
When I reached Angela’s door it was closed and I wondered if she was still out with Blackbird, but when I tapped lightly on the door there was a noise from within, and Angela opened the door.
“Blackbird’s downstairs somewhere,” she said. “She went to speak to Mullbrook.”
“I wasn’t looking for Blackbird. I came to see you,” I told her.
She opened the door a little wider as if she were wondering who was with me, and seeing I was alone, opened the door further. “You’d better come in then.”
I couldn’t recall being in Angela’s room before, but I could see that she’d made it her own. She must have been being bringing items from her house, since there were trinkets that were nothing to do with the courts, and she had an ancient mechanical typewriter set up on the bureau. The rest of the space was covered in typewritten drafts and documents that she’d been working on. I looked around for somewhere to sit.
“There isn’t much room,” she said, clearing a space on the bed. “I don’t get many visitors.” I sat in the space she cleared, and she sat on the chair at the bureau. She waited until I got the hint.
“I came to see you because I dreamed again,” I said.
“That’s hardly a surprise.”
“I have a lot of the pieces now, and I know how some of it came to be. I just don’t know how to fit them together. I wanted to ask if you would help me.”
“Help you how?” she asked.
I paused for a moment to think how to put this to her. “I think you were right, this is important. Whatever this is that I’ve become involved in has an impact on all of us — it’s affected us all along. This isn’t new, it’s been going on for years. There are clues… some of this has been planned.”
“I don’t see what I can do,” she said.
“You can help me piece it together,” I said. “You’re the only other person that knows all this stuff. You gave me these memories — help me make sense of them.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“You must.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head. “I gave you the memories I had, but none of it made any sense to me. You say that you have pieces, and that’s good. I never had more than a jumble of tattered fragments with no order or sequence. You saw what I had; it was all over the walls of my office.”