9,59 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: David Fickling Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Serie: The Books of Pandemonium
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Time works differently for devils . . .In the place that we call Hell, the Lord of Swarms is plotting his conquest. In the shambles of London's Smithfield, Jack the Darksman sets off to steal a devil. And in a different London altogether, a wicked secret is about to be revealed. The stage is set for an adventure that will span centuries. Devils are rising once more . . .
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 403
Ähnliche
To Freya and to Sarah, again.
As a new heaven is begun … the Eternal Hell revives.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
He thought about himself, and the whole Earth
Of Man the wonderful and of the Stars
And how the deuce they ever could have birth;
And then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars
How many miles the Moon might have in girth
Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars
To perfect knowledge of the boundless Skies;
And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.
Lord Byron, Don Juan
We stepped out gaily on a carpet of flowers, little imagining the abyss beneath.
Louis Philippe, comte de Ségur
Contents
Prologue
This is the place that we call Hell.
The bridge curves away forever in both directions, over a sea of flat white light. A million ruined towers rise above it; a million crumbling arches hold it up. There is nothing else but the bridge. No day or night. Nothing to mark seasons, no change in the wind or the light. The wind shrieks through the towers; the bridge groans.
One day – though you could say hour, month or century for all the difference it makes in this place – the bridge will fall.
The creatures in the towers were once all-powerful. Prophets and pleasure-seekers, with suns for playthings; kings of light; warriors, clashing in the empty dark between stars.
The suns are all snuffed out. The stars have ceased to shine. The kings have lost their thrones. In this colossal ruin, nothing remains of what they were, or what they had.
Nothing but the memory – and their names.
Flies whisper hate. Always buzzing.
There is still one way out of Hell.
‘Sargastes …’
A dry, dusty voice, coming from very far away.
‘Atherouor aoio. Maialario aoria iaio.’
The light was changing.
‘Aieu, u eiou. Sargastes.’
Sargastes heard his name, and saw the light pucker. A point where the light was no longer flat. A point where it had depth.
Now it was a trough; now it was a whirlpool.
Sargastes heard a dry buzzing all around him. Jealous – angry. Forbidding him to go. It was the voice of a king, and once Sargastes might have obeyed.
But not now.
The call was growing stronger, pulling, dragging him down; no resisting it, but Sargastes didn’t want to resist – this was it, the way out. He had nothing but his name and it had been called – down becoming up, sea becoming sky, up, up and up towards that fixed, final point.
‘AEOIO. AOIO. SARGASTES.’
‘ZakatakakakaWOURAGH!’ roared Sargastes, racing up through a tunnel of light.
The bridge was far behind. Ahead, beyond, was life. For an instant, Sargastes was looking out on the whole glorious mess of it – spinning with stars, foaming with light and activity; what a riot, what a revel after the dreary place he’d quit – and then the tunnel closed in again, dragging, sucking him down, to this.
A star set within a circle, marked in charcoal and blood on a hard earth floor. The spellseller standing with arms raised, watching as the star filled up with flat white light. In the centre of the star, a carved red bead – Sargastes’ new home.
Escape in return for service: this was the bargain. Some devils might buzz and rail and plot to overturn it, but Sargastes was not one of these. He was bound into the bead, never to escape. He did not resist. All that was asked of him was to follow his lust.
Sargastes came to the city of Alexandria on a slow, sticky afternoon during the donkey days of summer – a time for sweating in the shade and dreaming of the cool season – but there was no cooling the satyr, now that his power was loose. Within the quarter hour, everyone in the spellseller’s family was roaring drunk. By sundown, there was not a man, woman or child south of the Soma who had not been dragged into the revels. They flowed through the cramped streets of the Egyptian quarter like wildfire, then on into the rich district near the Moon Gate. The City Watch were called in, and were themselves overcome. They threw down their weapons and danced while the city burned. The revels lasted for three days and three nights. And for a trembling moment, in the joy of Sargastes’ becoming, it seemed as if the great port of Alexandria might fall.
Word of Sargastes’ power spread quickly.
The red bead was sold, after a furious auction, for the princely sum of eighteen golden octadrachm. The buyer was a rich Phoenician merchant. That very same day he rowed his prize away from Alexandria, in a galley specially commissioned for the task. No wine, dice, music or dancing were allowed on board; but Sargastes was there, and the voyage was a wild one.
In his new home in Sidon he was placed at the heart of the merchant’s pleasure palace, buried beneath the hearthstone. This was the task for which he had been summoned – and as devils do, he embraced it. He put down roots. The pleasure palace, which became known as the Rose, was soon famous all over the world for the beauty of its dancers, for the heady sweetness of its wines, and the unrelenting ferocity of its parties.
The Rose roared away for seven generations until – Sargastes long forgotten – the hearthstone was dug up and thrown out on to the midden-heap. Sargastes’ red bead went with it.
Within a week the dancers went lame, and the wine turned sour. All the roses died.
Amongst the trash, the bead caught the eye of a street scamp. He wore it threaded on a string as a lucky charm for one blinding, ecstatic year, before falling, drunk, from the roof of the Temple of Ba’al Zephon to his death.
Sargastes quickly found a new partner, and for the next thousand years this was how it went. Sargastes stayed a week, or a decade – time had little meaning compared to the consuming joy of the revels – reeling from one wastrel’s hand to another, among the dirty, bustling ports of the Eastern Mediterranean. Sargastes’ lust never lacked for a vent, for such places are always well supplied with drinkers and gamblers, revellers and rogues.
None of them recognized the treasure they had.
The slowest stretch was a fifty-year spell buried in thick mud at the bottom of Heraklion harbour. Luckily for Sargastes a greedy grouper, and a well-cast net, resulted in the bead ending up in a bowl of fish soup served to the Archbishop of Crete.
The authority of the diocese never recovered.
It was a Norman knight who changed Sargastes’ path for ever. He carried the red bead north as a gift for his wife – away from the warm sea and the sweet wines of the east, to the bitter beer and frozen mists of England.
Sadly, the wife was never to receive her present. On the very morning that the knight’s boat came winging up the Thames, she died of the plague. The red bead disappeared sometime during the knight’s wild grief, falling between the floorboards of a London tavern.
And there it sat, forgotten. A year later, the tavern burned down, but they soon built another over it, which burned down in turn. This became a habit. On that same spot over the next five hundred years nine taverns – which soon began to take the name of the Phoenix – burned to the ground. Sargastes had always felt that a party didn’t really get started until the roof was on fire.
The tavern keepers didn’t mind. By the time the revels got too hot, they’d always sold enough stingo and stout to retire rich and happy. Another tavern always rose from the ashes like fireweed.
Nor did Sargastes miss the warm southern seaports. Northern revels burn twice as bright, when the cold rain falls and the nights draw in.
London was a fine old place to settle down.
Chapter 1
One brisk September morning in 1592, a boy sat on a roof eating an apple for breakfast. A copper key hung around his neck. His hand was stained rusty red, the same colour as the apple he was eating.
The stain was an accident. The key was a gift.
The apple tasted delicious.
High above, a great flock of kites swooped circles in the sky, watching for scavenge. The smoke from twenty thousand chimneys rose up in thin etched lines around them. From up here, the spires and crooked rooftops down below looked no bigger than toys – a small, busy heap between the green of the Thames valley and the silty brown of the estuary.
Occasionally one of the birds would plummet, diving for butcher’s offal or a bloating dead dog.
Down in the streets, the top-heavy buildings blocked out the sky. The air was thick with drovers’ curses and smells both abominable and mouth-watering. The smells came from food stalls, tanners’ vats, boozing kens and slaughterhouses; from churches, palaces and hovels – and ripest of all, from the mud. London mud was rich and thick and black as ink, and in this wet autumn it coated everything: prince and pauper, merchant and thief; crackpots, magicians, beasts, actors, and a few brave and fuddled foreigners wondering how they ever ended up in this damp and vicious riot.
London was the greatest city in Christendom, or a murderous dungheap, or almost anything in between. It all depended on where you were standing, and what you chose to see. But it was always alive.
Just how alive was a secret known to a very, very few. Mostly you had to look underground, digging down through layers of destruction and fire and cannibal growth. Down into the city’s lost past, sifting through the rubble and trash.
It was there that you’d find most of them. How deep depended on how long they’d been here – and some of them had been here a very long time. Brought here in their thousands, over a hundred generations – captured in amulets, magic rings, cunning charms; bound into statues and palaces and temple altars. Their original masters had turned to dust, but the devils of London continued to work their magic. Magic upon magic, rising up, until you could not tell one twisting spell from another.
Some were half remembered in legends and curses and tall, dark tales. Black Dog of Newgate; King Lud; Old Thames the River Father. But for each of these there were hundreds more that had long been forgotten. Most hoped to stay that way.
Of all the Londoners alive today, very few knew the truth about devils. And only one, out of all the city’s teeming populace, knew how to find them.
‘Ack Ack! Swinepork stinkard you be—’
‘What?’
From up on his rooftop, Jack heard a thud below.
‘Uncrouch, filthnest lokmok.’
‘H-hold there. Hold! Imp!’
‘Up-up, nitwit Kit. Up-OUT!’
A screech of scraping chair legs, and a smack.
‘Hellspawn scullion!’ Kit bellowed. Charging footsteps shook the house. They stopped short with a thwack, and a tinkle of breaking glass.
‘Ack! Clumsing dolt-head! Out, before all shinies be shattered!’ The thwacks sounded thick and fast.
Jack took another bite of his apple, still gazing out at the city. On a morning like this it was a sight to tingle the humours – the dawn coming up through a skein of blue smoke; a thicket of steeples; the merry brown river; the half-ruined tower of St Paul’s. You could almost believe it was a peaceful place, sitting up here.
Jack swallowed, forcing down the bittersweet fruit. Looking out at the city of devils, knowing what lay in wait for him, tied his stomach in knots.
Later today, he’d be in amongst it.
Another crash from downstairs. Jack scowled. Kit and the imp: like the stain on his hand, they’d come to him by accident, and just like the stain, he often had cause to regret them. A scurvy scheming intelligencer for a friend, and a sprite of Satan for a servant. No wonder they were always making trouble.
Down on the street, the front door burst open and Kit stumbled out.
‘Jack! Yes you, you abominable pigeon: don’t pretend I’m not here, I can see you!’
Kit stood in the road, craning his neck. A drawn sword trailed from his right hand.
‘How’s the morn, Kit?’ said Jack.
‘I’ll tell you how it is. Your servant has crossed me for the last time. No more. No more, I say.’ Kit took a savage cut at thin air, then stopped as he remembered something. ‘Oh, and I need to borrow … or rather, I have borrowed … you know. The four shillings we talked about. Brings our reckoning up to … let’s see …’ Kit sheathed his sword, fished out a leather-bound book from the breast of his doublet, and riffled through the pages. ‘Here we are. Sixteen shillings, thruppence ha’penny.’
‘Sixteen, Kit?’
Kit drew himself up straight. ‘You take that tone with me? Me, who has saved your sorry life three times? Aye, sixteen shillings, thruppence ha’penny. Scant good it did me, neither. Those dice-men don’t play straight.’
‘Dice-men?’ said Jack. ‘That four shillings – that was for the Plan. That was …’ He was suddenly so angry he could hardly speak. ‘I’m going into town today, for your scheming Plan Kit, and all you had to do was spend my money on a band of musicians … and you’ve lost it at dice …?’
‘Don’t splutter, Jack, it’s ungentle. The money is gone. We still want musicians. Now be a good boy and lend me another four shillings. If you can manage that, perhaps I will condescend to repay you when my Plan bears fruit and we’re all as rich as Zacatecas.’
Jack shook his head. ‘That four was our last. Lud’s blood, Kit … There ain’t. No. Money.’
Jack spat the words out, bitter as rue. Kit’s Plan: aye, but Jack was the one putting his head in the cauldron. Today. He couldn’t believe it had come so quickly.
He felt a tingle – not quite heat – in his stained right hand.
‘Well?’ Kit was still waiting.
‘Stew yourself, Kit,’ said Jack. ‘You want money, go peddle your arse for shoe leather.’
Kit made a face at him, thrust his debt ledger back into his doublet, and walked off down the road.
From the house below came a tuneless humming and a brisk, triumphant sweeping sound.
The Raven alehouse had been Beth Sharkwell’s idea to begin with. In the spring, when she and Jack had cheated a devil and mudlarked his gold – a wild, impossible weight of gold – the first thing she’d done was purse her lips and come out with one of her grandpa’s Thieving Laws: ‘Hope for the best, allow for the worst.’ The first thing to make sure of was a bolthole, somewhere small and cheap and murky.
The Raven was murky enough, Jack reflected, as he lowered himself in through the attic window. Hunkered down at the north edge of the old Convent Garden, the only reason it hadn’t fallen down yet was that there was so little of it to fall: just the one room downstairs, a cellar beneath, and the attic above. Now that the worst had duly come about, and their gold was stolen, and Beth’s bolthole was all they had left, it looked murkier still. Sour beer, sour prospects: customers few and dwindling; the last remnant of their fortune staked on a Plan that was apt to get Jack into exactly the sort of trouble he’d sworn to avoid for the rest of his days.
Jack slid down to the floor of the attic. A stale, harsh smell hung in the air – the tobacco that Beth had been smoking the past week in order to perfect the disguise she’d been working up. The tobacco smell reminded Jack of his ma, who was dead, and of Harry the horse-cope, who’d shared a pipe with Jack on the way to the gallows, and who was also dead. He decided to leave the window open.
They couldn’t go on as they were. Jack had told himself that many times in the days leading up to this particular day. And Beth liked the Plan. There was the nub of it: Beth liked the Plan very well indeed.
Downstairs, the imp had finished its sweeping. Jack watched as the broom floated across the room to nestle up against a small rag on the front windowsill. The broom went still; the rag stirred into life.
Every other devil on Earth was stuck with whatever home it had been bound to. The imp was the only one that could be whatever it liked. It was a wondrous magical ability that puzzled the greatest wizards in Christendom.
The imp mostly used it to clean things.
The floor of the boozing ken – or the Saloon Royale, as the imp insisted on calling it – was scraped clean of any trace of dust. The furniture was arranged in rigid ranks against the walls – the long table, the four broke-backed chairs, and Kit’s favourite, a low horse-hair couch. A square of embroidery hung on the wall over Kit’s sleeping spot, stitched with big red letters. It hadn’t been there yesterday. Jack squinted at the writing, mouthing out the words:
EVERY COUCH, WHEREON HE LIETH, IS UNCLEAN: AND EVERY THING, WHEREON HE SITTETH, SHALL BE UNCLEAN.
‘Imp? You been needling Kit?’
The imp was enjoying itself, deep into its role as a polishing rag, only just visible as a circular blur over the pewter mugs and spoons laid out on the table.
‘Imp …’ said Jack.
‘Needling, tsa!’ The rag stopped mid swish, flapped over to the embroidery and did a few twirls around it. ‘Last night I was needle, see? Threading Levitick from the Big Book! What entklessent book that is.’
‘More Leviticus,’ said Jack.
‘Tcha! Lokmok mislikes it, ekt?’
‘Aye, I think he does …’
Jack still wasn’t sure about having Bible verses around the tavern. The drinkers of St Giles parish were not clean men, and nor were they reading men; and even if they had been, Bible verses were not likely to spark their humour.
The imp went back to its polishing. Jack didn’t see how the spoons could be any shinier than they already were.
‘You nearly finished, Imp?’ he said.
‘Shiny shiny shiny shiny …’
‘Cos I’m ready to go.’
‘Sheeny gleany glintick-gleam …’
Jack reached into his sleeve for his roll of tools. There was no point reasoning with the imp when it was cleaning. It needed a direct command, or nothing.
Leaning over to spread out the roll on the table, Jack felt the key around his neck swing out on its string. The key that King Lud had given him. A devil’s gift – a pointless, tarnished thing that didn’t open any doors that Jack knew of – and yet he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away.
He reached into the special padded pocket he’d added alongside the loops for his gilks and picks. Inside was a giant dead beetle, as big as the apple Jack had eaten for breakfast, with long feathery feelers and jaws fit to bite off thumbs. Before it became the imp’s favourite body, it had been part of the magician Dr Dee’s rare insect collection. The Goliath beetle, Dee called it.
‘Come here, Imp. Time to hop over.’
The rag whisked past his ear and landed on the table, quivering with anticipation. Jack laid the Goliath beetle down on top of it. The rag stopped quivering, went limp. The Goliath beetle stirred, spread its wings and buzzed up into the air to land on Jack’s shoulder.
‘No more time for glintick?’
‘Later, Imp.’ Jack forced some cheer into his voice. ‘Tell you what: things go right today, I’ll buy another spoon. A silver one.’
For a moment the imp was struck dumb.
‘Eckt … silver … shiny?’ it managed, finally.
‘Real silver, aye.’
The imp chattered with delight. ‘Joy of krettenheft, boymaster! All to go rightly-sprightly, shuklet will see to it, tcha!’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Jack.
‘And so, first we visit with lovey-dove, nei?’ said the imp.
‘She ain’t—’ Jack shook his head. ‘Never mind.’
‘Bethany Lovely-face Shark-tongue—’
‘Aye, her,’ said Jack. Beth Sharkwell – the real reason he couldn’t stop what was happening today. She was already out there, in the thick of it, starting the Plan. By most reckonings, she was risking more today than him.
‘And thence to Smithfield devil-roost,’ said the imp.
‘Aye.’ Jack felt a flutter of panic. It was happening; it was really beginning. ‘You stay quiet now, Imp. Don’t want me taken up for witchcraft again, alongside everything else …’
The imp burrowed down inside his doublet. Jack tucked his tools up his sleeve. He couldn’t be any more ready than this.
Jack opened his front door and set off down Broad St Giles – heading east, into the City of London, to steal away a devil.
Chapter 2
Smithfield market was where London’s meat came to die, and at ten in the morning it was a river of glaring bullocks, a spillage of sheep like apples from a tub, a rout of panicked swine.
Harry Slubber’s Meat Parade sagged across the whole north face of the market, a canker of horrible old sheds held together with grime and ropeways and peeling paint. The Slubber had bought up the site a dozen years ago, when the old Phoenix tavern burned down. Less than half was slaughter sheds; the rest housed the Slubber’s various entertainments – wine shops, stew booths, dicing kens, puppet shows, cockpits and skittle alleys, all thronging with custom.
Out of all the milling livestock, the ones headed for the Slubber’s pens moved with a particular purpose, their drovers goading them along, anxious to get their business done and settle down to the pleasures of the Parade.
And out of these, one ragged little herd was moving quicker than all the rest.
There was something wrong about this herd, over and above the haste. They were an odd, mismatched medley – a dozen breeds from a dozen different counties, with an enormous shaggy ox-like creature borne along in the middle.
The only thing more ragged than the cattle was their drover – a stunted creature riding on the back of the ox (a disreputable, undroverlike thing to do), dressed neck to knee in raw sheepskin, puffing on a pipe and lashing the cattle on with a nine-foot leather whip. A filthy vagabond, even by Smithfield standards.
Any honest man looking on would know what to think: cattle thief. Just the kind of degenerate shabaroon that Harry Slubber’s slaughtermen welcomed with open arms. They always got good prices from thieves.
‘Pace it, gutch-eye.’ Beth Sharkwell whacked the ox’s behind with the butt of her whip and cursed it for an idle pissabed scoundrel. The ox wasn’t really idle, just old, but Beth didn’t care.
Beth was angry.
She could remember times in the past when she hadn’t been angry. Whole days, sometimes. The last was the day before Harry Slubber burned down the Crooked Walnut tavern, where Beth’s grandpa had held court as the scaliest villain south of the river.
The Slubber had timed his attack well. Beth had been quilting her gold at the Walnut until it could be moved to her new bolthole. Harry Slubber fired the tavern on the first of June – less than a month after old Sharkwell was killed by a devil, and only a day before the gold was due to be shifted. Slubber murdered Mr Smiles, Beth’s most loyal follower, that same night. The message was clear: goodbye Sharkwell, from henceforth Southwark has a new king.
Most of the Sharkwell Family had accepted it. They worked for Harry Slubber now. Word had gone out soon after: Beth Sharkwell was to be scragged on sight, with a handsome purse for her killer. She’d fled the city, leaving behind everything she knew. Worse – leaving behind her gold, and Jack’s and Kit’s too, that they’d trusted her to keep safe.
She knew that riding right up to her enemy’s back door, doing her utmost to attract attention, might look rash to some. Law Eleven, by the Sharkwell Code: Never stick your neck in the noose.
Law Eight, on the other hand: Never suffer an insult without vengeance. And Law Eighty-eight, one of her grandpa’s favourites: If you’re angry, it’s probably because you need to kill someone.
Beth was angry. She wasn’t going to kill anyone, not today – but vengeance?
Harry Slubber had taken her place, and her people, and her treasure.
Vengeance was long overdue.
‘Out o’ my road, shite shepherd!’ She coughed, long and hard, and spat something brown and solid at the swineherd who’d crossed her path. The harsh pipe smoke had turned her voice to a villainous rasp. It was the best way to mask a girl’s speech. One false squeak here, and she was finished. Stories were told about the Slubber’s swine sheds – how his enemies had a way of disappearing, no corpses found.
Beth tried to imagine being cut up, sold and eaten after she was dead. Worse for the ones doing the eating, she decided. Though anyone used to eating the Slubber’s meats wouldn’t know the difference.
The truth was, Harry Slubber had never been a very good slaughterman, nor even a very good villain. The Parade was the source of his fortune and all his power. It was always full, even though the wine was sour, the beer was stale, the trugs were poxed and the games were rigged. Even though everyone knew the Slubber was a gull-plucking knave.
People said there was a charm, a sort of lucky spirit haunting the sheds; that all the Slubber’s infernal good luck over the years was paid for in blood.
According to Jack, they were only half wrong. According to Jack, there was a devil buried somewhere inside. Beth would have laughed at such talk once, but now she knew better.
Devils were real.
Up ahead, she could hear the bellows of dying cattle. She was drawing close.
The Slubber always kept his slaughter sheds well guarded. Four long sheds arranged square fashion, facing inwards onto a central yard, with a single entrance blocked by a heavy wooden gate and two heavy-set men.
Beth’s leading bullocks lowed as they approached, scenting the fresh blood. The two slaughtermen ambled over, toting bull hammers: these could be the same ones who’d killed Mr Smiles, back in June. Beth felt a fresh jet of rage, and forced it under control.
It was time to play the lay.
Beth gave a hacking cough, waved at the slaughtermen, slid off the ox’s back and began jostling her way through the herd towards the entrance. Squeezing through the sweaty cattle, she started to grin. It was big, this Plan of Kit’s.
Vengeance on the Slubber would be sweet; but after and beyond that, if Kit knew what he was talking about …
Let the rufflers and the whiddlers cut each other’s throats over gutter pickings south of the river: henceforth the Sharkwell Family was on a higher lay altogether.
As for today, as for now – she was Beth Sharkwell, and she still had enough game in her to cozen a poxy meat thief.
Jack’s face was buried in sweaty ox. The rank, homely smell of it filled his nostrils, along with a sticky, winding strand of belly hair. He wanted to twist and turn to get it out, but he was trussed too tight for that.
Not for the first time he wished they’d tied him to the ox’s belly face down.
‘Time is ripe, boymaster?’ whispered the imp. ‘Time to make oxenprance?’ It was clinging to a clag of hair beside Jack’s head. Jack could hear its wing cases whirring with excitement.
‘Not yet, Imp,’ he murmured. ‘Wait till we’re in, then make ’em prance all you like.’
The ox was breathing hard. With each inward heave, Jack’s face was pressed harder into its belly. The twine bit into his shoulders, back, knees and ankles.
They’d stopped moving. He trusted Beth to get them in all right. It was the next part that had him worried.
He could hear Beth chewing up the Slubber’s men. She cursed hard, working in the anger that was part of the lay, but also came naturally to her these days.
She hadn’t stopped being angry since the fire. She’d turned up at the Raven three days later, in a high fury. It wasn’t her fault, what had happened, and Jack didn’t blame her for the loss of his fortune; but he knew he could never tell her that. Her pride wouldn’t stand for it.
Jack knew what would make things right between them: vengeance on the Slubber, and a big pile of riches to replace what was lost. That was why he’d agreed to this, tamping down all his fear until it was small, tight-packed, tucked away out of sight …
Trouble was, fear had a way of getting loose.
‘Dead, is what you’ll be,’ came Beth’s voice. ‘I know Harry Slubber. Aye, well, soon as I speak to him you’re dead meat, both of you. Keep your god-damned … no, give it here, grouthead.’
A chink of coins, and the perfect rasping snarl from Beth. ‘Six, you said – six, can’t you figure? What’s your name? Tell me your name, dung, so’s I can tell Harry who to scrag slower.’
‘Tsa!’ said the imp approvingly, stirring beside Jack’s ear.
‘She’s good at threats,’ whispered Jack. ‘Always was.’
Jack heard an angry mumble from the slaughtermen. No more coins. A final curse from Beth and the ox shifted its hindquarters, thrusting its hair deeper into Jack’s nostrils, and began to move forward.
Ten slow paces. They stopped again. Jack heard the creak of the gate swinging open. None but the Slubber’s trusted slaughtermen were allowed beyond here.
The red stain on Jack’s hand was itching now – his index finger most of all. A little twinge went through his right eyeball, and one of the tiny muscles in his eyelid began to twitch.
This was what usually happened when Jack was around devils. An itch, a tingle of heat; sometimes, around the big ones, it could be painful. This one today, though – this one shouldn’t be bad, Jack thought. A ticklish sort of devil. Not one of your flaming tormentors. And it was good he was feeling it all the way out here – a lively one meant finding it would be easier – though as to what came after …
Jack didn’t know about that. He’d never done it before. To dig up a devil, to hold it in his hand – he didn’t know about that at all. He tried to picture the Beth’s smile, if all went well. He tried to picture the Raven tavern thronged with laughing, free-spending topers.
He flexed his itching finger. Beth had got them in. Now it was his turn. His Nipper’s Claw – a two-inch sliver of metal, attached to his fingertip – bit into his palm, cold and razor sharp.
‘Now, Imp!’ he whispered.
The imp buzzed from its hiding place. Mouthing a prayer, Jack bent his elbow till the Claw touched the twine at his shoulders.
Above him, the ox gave an indignant bellow.
He sliced. The twine unravelled, plunging him into knee-deep mud. Jack rolled aside, and pushed up into a crouch. He wiped the filth from his eyes just in time to see the imp spread its jaws wide and bite a bullock on the nose.
The bullock squealed; the imp moved on; the forest of legs around Jack twitched and stirred as the panic spread. He jumped to his feet, ducking low to remain hidden. A bullock bellowed close by, and all of a sudden the entire herd was churning for the gate. Their panic left him exposed, but no one would be looking – not with a stampede to contend with.
A few quick steps and he was up against the slaughtershed’s wall, sliding to the door, peeping in.
No one about. Jack ducked inside and turned to admire the mayhem.
The imp had done well: every plunging beast in the yard desperate to escape; every slaughterman and meat porter striving to stop them.
All well there, then.
Jack took a deep breath, dreading what came next. It was dark inside the devil’s shed, with a thick ripe smell that caught in Jack’s throat.
He shut his left eye.
Devil-sight.
He’d been fighting it for months. He’d got so good at blocking it, for a moment he thought it wouldn’t come at all. It was almost a relief to think so – and then, all at once, it was upon him.
Devil-sight. The world was misty and red and slow as treacle. In the shed the carcasses hung in silence, hardly there at all. All of it water: all of it surface.
Jack was fishing for what lay beneath.
His right hand throbbed, stronger than he’d been expecting. He bit his lip against the pain, raised his arm, holding it out straight from the shoulder, and turned in a slow circle.
Round – round – slowly, dowsing for it …
The throbbing in his hand quickened, suddenly hot, then died back.
Hot again.
Back again.
Hot. So hot he had to force his hand to hold steady.
There.
It was buried in the far corner of the shed. Now that Jack knew where to look, all the surface stuff vanished – the walls, the packed earth of the floor – and he could see it.
The devil showed dimly, a glimmer like a distant lantern at twilight.
Jack blinked hard, shook his head, and the surface world was back.
He groped forward. The pain in his hand got worse with every step. His head bumped against a carcass dangling from the ceiling. Flinching to the side, he hit hard against another.
His hand was stinging, worse than wasps. He hadn’t thought it would be this bad.
He checked again with the devil-sight.
It was right beneath him. The devil was bound inside something small, buried about ten inches under the dirt floor. He could see a deep amber glow pulsing up through the earth. It was – asleep? Dreaming? Doing whatever devils did, when they weren’t driving people mad or killing them.
His hand was trembling hard, and his head felt light, swimming, as if he had a fever – the Shaking Sickness …
Just do it, Jack told himself, and be done. He grabbed the trowel stuck in his belt and attacked the earthen floor. He worked fast – if he didn’t, he was apt to turn and run. His stained hand felt huge, like a big fat wineskin full of pain. Much worse now – worse than he’d ever felt it. Alkahest was what Dr Dee called the stuff in the stain. Alkahest – a sizzling sort of word – and Jack could feel it now, sizzling like oil, frying his skin, broiling his bones. The trowel bit into the earth. Jack started counting to himself. Five … ten … time was slowing with the pain. Eleven … he’d bear the pain till twenty, and then … twelve, thirteen …
He couldn’t leave empty-handed. Imagine Beth’s face. He tried to imagine it, but the pain drove out thought, and now he really couldn’t bear any more …
The trowel grated against something hard.
The amber glow of the devil blinked out.
The pain was gone.
Jack rocked back on his heels. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
He scrabbled in the hole he’d made and felt stone. He waggled, found an edge and levered up. There was a hollow space beneath. He reached inside and pulled out a small package wrapped in old, half-rotten cloth. Pulling away the cloth, he saw a small, dark bead with something carved into it – hard to see what, in the dim light of the shed.
Still no devil-glim; still no pain. It didn’t make sense. Jack shook the bead, then rapped it against the floor. Nothing happened.
‘Come on come on,’ he muttered. ‘Where are you?’
He tossed the bead from his left hand to his right. Nothing: not the slightest prickle. He squeezed it hard in his fist.
‘Come on, you—’
All the breath whooshed out of Jack. The pain roared back, mangling, crushing everything. Something gripped his hand, pulling him down. He saw a wizened face, convulsed with awful rage. He saw a sea of flat white light.
The devil grinned.
Jack fell into the light.
Chapter 3
Hauling her mud-draggled burden, Beth squelched through the gateway at the top of Charterhouse Lane, staggered out of the road and sank to the ground against the gatehouse wall. A drove of swine were milling about, waiting to go down to Smithfield and suffer the change into hams and chops and blood pudding. One of them nosed at Jack, grunting and twinkling its inquisitive piggy eyes.
The imp buzzed in its face. It ran away squealing.
Cradled in her lap, Jack’s head lolled, dead-weight heavy. Spit trickled out the corner of his mouth, and there was a bluish tinge to his lips that made Beth want to sob. The only part of him that seemed alive was his right hand, clenched into a hard fist. From his eyes, glassy and heavy lidded, not so much as a flicker. The imp flew in tight circles, buzzing in shrill despair.
Sightless eyes, slow shallow breathing – the closest Beth had seen to it was when one of her grandpa’s men had been kicked in the head by an iron-shod horse. She remembered the man being brought into the Crooked Walnut, laid out on the big trestle table. He’d died within the hour.
‘Hold on, Jack. Bide a while, will you?’
Beth couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice, nor from her limbs, which were jellified with exhaustion. She’d dragged him this far – not too hard to get clear of the Meat Parade, with chaos all about – but she couldn’t drag him any further.
She knew what she had to do.
‘Imp,’ she snapped.
The imp kept buzzing in senseless circles. It hadn’t spoken a straight word since it came to tell her Jack was lost, devil-hexed, dead to this world.
Beth snatched it out of the air.
‘Imp,’ she said, making herself speak clear and cold. ‘You obey me now, if you want your precious master back. Hear me?’
She felt it scrabble against the inside of her fist, then go still.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘There’s one man in London can help Jack. You’re going to fetch him.’
Dr Dee came in person, black-robed, white-faced, mounted on a chestnut horse big enough for two.
By the time he arrived the blue tinge had spread as far as Jack’s ears. Beth was chafing his cheeks to keep him warm – though his skin under her hands was still icy cold. She’d started singing to him. People turned to look as they passed. A part of Beth knew this was reckless, to be marked so close to Smithfield; another didn’t care. She kept singing.
Dee reined up in a spatter of mud and leaped from the saddle like a much younger man. He didn’t greet Beth, gave no sign he knew her even. All he did was nod down at Jack’s body and say, ‘Up.’ Beth obeyed, taking one arm while the doctor took the other, hauling Jack up and over the horse’s back.
She had only seen the Queen’s magician once before, when she’d come to his house with her grandpa on purpose to cozen him. It was an unpromising start – and this was an even less promising way to go on.
She knew Jack had helped Dr Dee, when the red-handed preachers were baying for sorcerers’ blood. Without Jack, the magician could have ended up hanged; at least that was what Kit always said.
She hoped Kit was right.
She hoped Dee remembered.
She hoped, hoped so hard she was biting her lips white, clenching cuts into her palms, that he’d be able to save Jack.
As befitted the Queen’s own magician, Dr Dee had two houses. One was at Mortlake by the river – a rambling, comfortable old manor of a place where the doctor took his ease, watched the Thames flow and thought on deep matters. The other was much smaller, quite secret and situated on Milk Street, just south of Cheapside; right in the dirty heart of the city.
The Milk Street house was neither easy nor comfortable. It held a small library, which was also a fully equipped alchemical laboratory, and a wide array of devices for the detection of devilry. It was a place for taking the pulse of the city, and seeking remedies for its fevers.
A place for times of danger.
They entered by a back way that Beth hadn’t known about before. Dee tied up his horse and then the two of them hauled Jack upstairs to the library. Beth watched as the doctor bent over the floor with a stick of chalk and began sketching out a big five-pointed star with furious energy.
‘Well, this is a fine thing you’ve done,’ he said. His voice was low, his face pale with fury. ‘Stealing a devil … arrant, reckless … and why? Why do such a thing?’
He punctuated each word with a violent stroke of chalk.
‘We thought we could use it,’ said Beth. ‘In the Raven. Our place. We thought it would make people come and spend money.’
It sounded so feeble, said like that. She tried to remember the way Kit had told it – the magical success, the devil-fuelled riches. Taking Jack’s curse and turning it into a blessing.
Aye, what a blessing. She wished Kit was here, so he could tell it. She could strangle him right after.
‘So this was Jack’s idea?’ Dee had finished the star: now he was scratching crooked symbols at each of its points.
‘No.’
‘Confound it!’ Dee rubbed something out with his sleeve, took a breath and started again.
Beth wasn’t sure if Dee had heard her. He kept on muttering as he scrambled about on the floor.
‘Is this why he disappeared, hm? Is this why he threw off my offers of honourable, useful service?’
‘He didn’t want to serve you,’ said Beth in a small voice. This was true at least. ‘He didn’t want no more to do with it – devils, and magic and such.’
‘Oho?’ Dee moved about the star, adding a mark here, a number there. ‘And yet now we find him struck down by a devil. Was it at your behest?’
His eyes sought out Beth’s. They were merciless.
Usually Beth could stare down anyone she liked; but now she found she couldn’t meet the doctor’s gaze. Dee had the truth of it. Jack had gone into this, against his fears, against his better judgement – because of her.
She looked down at Jack, lying cold and still on the floor. She tried to speak but couldn’t.
With a snort of disgust Dee returned to his chalk, laying down a circle, spanning each of the star’s five points in turn.
‘Do you know what’s wrong with him?’ said Beth, once she’d got her voice in hand.
‘No,’ said Dee, with a fretful tug at his beard. ‘No. I don’t. I’ve never seen the like of this.’
Beth couldn’t get the air to breathe. He didn’t know. Dee, the great magician.
The prayer that had been rolling around her mind since she sent the imp to bring the doctor piped up loud and clear. Let him come back, let the doctor save him, please, please, please …
Dee knelt on the floor beside Jack. He picked up his right hand, and eased open the red-stained fingers. The imp hovered just above the doctor’s shoulder, crooning softly.
Beth watched Jack’s face, hoping for some movement, some response.
Something tumbled out of Jack’s hand. Dee caught it as it rolled across the floor and held it up to the light.
He hissed.
It was a beautiful thing – a polished red bead no bigger than a cherry stone, with an old man’s laughing, sly face carved into it.
‘What are you?’ muttered Dee. ‘What did you do?’ He frowned.
‘D’you—?’
‘Quiet. I’m thinking.’
Dee shuffled across the floor on his knees and placed the little jewel in the centre of his star-within-a-circle.
‘So …’ He looked up at Beth and jerked his head towards the window. ‘Fetch me the strongbox over there.’
Beth squeezed between a scarred worktable and a desk overflowing with dusty rolls of parchment. In her haste she brushed against a teetering pile of books, and sent it crashing to the ground.
‘Careful!’
She bent down to lift the box and stopped dead.
The box was wooden, brass bound, with an emblem of a fly burned into the lid – the emblem of Nicholas Webb, the devil who walked like a man. She’d seen the same emblem on the boxes they’d raised from the Thames – small boxes, very heavy, filled with devil’s gold.
‘Haste, haste!’ said Dee.
‘But it’s—’
‘Zwounds! Do you question me? What is in that box may – may, I say – save this poor broken tool of yours. Now open it!’
Beth opened the box. Nothing happened. No swarm of hellflies came out to eat her up.
Inside was a leather bag and a roll of parchment.
‘The bag, quick!’ Dee produced a tiny pair of tongs from his robe, took the bag as Beth passed it over and tweezed out a grain of red powder. Here he was very careful. Beth watched his fingers trembling.
The imp hissed. ‘Bindlick-meckt! Alkahest!’
‘Hush, Imp,’ muttered the doctor. Holding his breath, he leaned over the edge of his chalk circle, dropped the grain upon the little red bead and quickly drew back.
Nothing happened.
‘Hmm,’ said Dee. Bending over the stone with his tongs, he lifted up the grain of powder, replaced it in the bag and tied the drawstring tight shut. Then he picked up the bead and put it in his pocket.
He blinked, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next.
‘What?’ said Beth.
‘That was Alkahest,’ said Dee. ‘The same stuff that stained Jack’s hand.’
‘So?’ Beth wanted to shake him. ‘Why “Hmm”?’
Dee’s eyes narrowed.
‘Nothing happened. The effects of Alkahest upon a devil-bound object are usually … dramatic. If nothing happened …’
Dee cocked his head, considering the idea.
‘The devil is gone. Jack is gone.’
‘Gone where?’ Beth struggled to keep from shrieking.
Dee shook his head and sniffed long and hard, wrinkling his nose. ‘Only one thing for it,’ he said. ‘Fetch me the parchment from the box.’
He grabbed the roll of parchment out of her hands as soon as she presented it. Beth’s heart thudded high in her throat. The doctor tugged at the parchment, hasty-fumbling. It whipped shut, coiling against his fingers.
‘Confound it!’
‘Here …’ Beth took a corner and held it down. Dee took the loose end, pulled the parchment out to its full length – four foot if it was an inch – and rushed to weigh down the corners.
