One Bright Star to Guide Them (2 page)

Richard half-rose from his seat. “Is that a cat! See here, Tommy, what do you mean by throwing an animal on my desk? Are you mad?”

Tommy smiled, and leaned forward. “Richard, it's Tybalt!”

“Who?”

Tommy's smile slowly vanished. “Why…why…it's Tybalt! You must remember him! You remember the summer we found the Well of the Nine Worlds. Remember? I held up the key and Penny said the rhyme she'd found in the old book of Professor Penkirk's. 'One brave soul to hold the key', don't you remember the rhyme? The rainbow came in the mist above the well, and we followed it to Vidblain, and then we saw the ships of Lemmergeir sailing in the tide below the Tall White Tower of Noss. We saw the swan-ships sailing from the Western Sea, from the Summer Country. You remember, Richard, of course you do! I used the key to enter the tower of the Faceless Warlock. We rescued his apprentice, Kicktoad, and he showed us the riddle written on the silent stone hidden below the tower. It was you who solved the riddle, Richard! You must remember that!”

Richard's face softened, his eyes unfocused, far-off in time. “Yes…the riddle.”

Tommy said eagerly, “You followed the clues and found the Shining Sword trapped in the roots of the Cursed Black Oak in the middle of Gloomshadow Forest, where none of the Fair Folk could go. The wolf boy helped you. None of the servants of the Winter King could draw it; it burned their hands. That's how we learned that the old woman was an ice maiden in disguise. It was all just as the rhyme in Professor Penkirk's book foretold.”

“Good old Professor Penkirk! Haven't thought on him in years. Queer old bird, I must say. Filling all our heads with notions and rubbish. Well, we were children then, I suppose. No great harm done. I suppose old Penkirk's dead by now. Nice seeing you again, though, Thomas, I must say. Great times we had, back in the day. Wonderful times. Now, if you could get this silly cat off my papers, I do have a few frightfully important things to do. That's what happens when you barge in without an appointment, you know. We can't all just do as we like.”

“But this is Tybalt, son of Carbonel!”

“That scrawny black cat we played with as kids? It's been dead for years, I'm sure. Cats don't live so long as that, you know.”

“Richard! Listen! He's come to call us back,” Tommy said in a low, quiet voice. “Tybalt carries a message from the Emperor of the Uttermost West, the King of the Summer Land. We helped them before. Don't you remember at all? When the Black Mirror of the Winter King trapped the light from the sword, Sarah shattered it with the note from the harp of Finn Finbarra. Then we freed the nightingale and followed her song to the Forever Tree, which was still green and whole under the ice. You melted the ice with the fire from the sword and we found the Garland Crown of good prince Hal hanging on the highest branch, just where Tybalt said we would! Tybalt, say something!”

Richard stirred uneasily in his chair. He said in a tight voice: “Look here, Tommy. Those fairytale daydreams were all very right and nice as children. But we're grown men now. Those were just children's games we played, good triumphing over evil. Just silly children's games. None of it was real. If it
was
real, none of
this
would be real,” he said, gesturing abruptly toward the walls of his office, the window, the honking traffic crowding the street below. “If it was real, then nothing we do as adults would mean anything at all. We all have to make compromises. No one can blame us…”

Tommy leaned forward across the desk and grabbed Richard's hand. “You know it was real. Why are you pretending it wasn't?”

“It is not that simple, Tommy,” Richard insisted. “We all have to make…deals… Things…change. People change.”

“We are still who we were,” Tommy said, letting go of his old friend's hand and leaning back slightly. “We are still what we were. You know this world is not all there is. You know it!”

Richard was silent for a moment. His eyes were troubled. “Tommy, if you leave now, you will save yourself more trouble than you know.”

Tommy spoke with quiet urgency: “Tybalt told me the Winter King's men have entered this world. They have Atlendor's tarn-cape, and mortal eyes cannot see them. Tybalt brought me to the Wellspring of Wisdom in a cavern below the roots of an ash tree, where a hundred knights in armor of gold were sleeping on stone biers. He made me bathe my eyes in the spring; it burned and stung, and for a day, I thought I was blind. But when my blindness passed, I could see the fairy-creatures.”

He continued, “There was one…oh God! There was one of them right there in the town at Alderley Edge; a schoolteacher. She was actually one of the willow women, a daughter of the Winter King. They are all fair and beautiful from the front, but hollow and rotten from behind, like masks, they can only be discovered by someone who looks at them from every angle. I saw her in the classroom, through the window. The parents had sent their children off to school, all trusting the teachers and not suspecting a thing. The willow woman drew the sigils and Runes of Ice upon the blackboard, and made the children chant the Worm Song to ensorcell them. She made chains out of gossamer and was telling the children to bind themselves, so the children could not speak or think except at her command. No one but me could see the chains. I asked Tybalt how to cut them and he said that they were woven out of women's beards and mountain roots and the breath of fish.”

“There's no such thing as any of those things,” said Richard, a strange look on his face.

“Exactly. That's why they couldn't be broken. You can't cut something that doesn't exist, can you? That's why we need the sword once more. The light from the sword will shatter the spell; no one can remove those chains except the children themselves and they can't remove them till they can see them. And they can't see them without the light! Where is the Sword Reforged now, Richard? I remember you kept it hanging over your grandmother's mantelpiece when we returned from Vidblain, you kept it right out in the open, until you went away to boarding school. Where is it now?”

“I gave it to the local museum in some town in Somerset. Little rundown town. Can't bring the name to mind.”

“You abandoned the great bright sword?” Tommy's voice was cold and severe.

“I didn't abandon it! I traded it for a fragment of an old book of John Dee and a Plague Doctor mask from Avignon after I came back from Sedbergh. Don't look at me that way! It was just an old rusted sword we once played with. All that rubbish about 'no ignoble hand could draw it' was just our own melodramatic invention.” But now he was smiling, as if being able to say those words gave him pleasure. “There was no real magic to it.”

“Sedbergh,” Tommy said slowly. “I was away at school myself then. Richard, you never did tell me why they kicked you out.”

“My affairs are my business,” said Richard, and his eyes were very cold. “Boarding school was a long time ago. And I told you I do not believe in any of that fairytale stuff any longer!”

Tommy said, “Don't you?”

Something in his voice made Richard glance sharply at him. “What do you mean?”

“I remember hearing some very ugly rumors, Richard, about a girl you got in trouble.” Tommy said in a dangerous tone. “I heard the girl—she was Fifth Form—was found naked in an abandoned church. She spoke about how you and the other boys from Evans House were dancing and screaming and cutting yourselves with knives. Your family kept your name out of the newspaper, but the papers said that there was a goat found hanging by the neck from a willow tree in that same graveyard, hanging by the neck over the stream that ran next to the graveyard. The newspaper called it a neopagan fertility ritual. But it was more than that, wasn't it?”

Richard smiled, although his eyes grew even colder. “Yes, Tommy, it was a lot more than that. It was an attempt to unify our consciousness with the Beyond. The fairytale stuff you remember was for kids. There is more out there than you know, more than you imagine.”

Tommy shook his head, more in dismay than disbelief.

Richard stood up, his face red as if he had downed too many snifters of fine brandy. But it was not anger that brought the blood to his cheeks. It was pride, for he spoke in a boasting voice. “Naturally, with a childhood like I had, the things I'd seen—you saw them too, though you did not understand them—I was more curious about the unseen energies beneath our world than your average dull-witted banker or shallow scientist. Mystic energies! There is a life force behind all things, a power that binds the universe together. Man emerged from ape-man due to the ruthlessness of that life force, and if it were harnessed, channeled, focused, used as ruthlessly as it is meant to be used, then what might emerge from Man?”

Tommy looked stricken. He said in a voice heavy with sorrow, “I am more concerned with what emerged from that sixteen year-old girl you used.”

“You cannot know about that! How can you know about that? Who told you?”

“You, just now, by your reaction. Is it true?”

“The National Health Service paid for the abortion,” said Richard with an indifferent shrug.

“You killed your own child?” Tommy stood up too, his face white with horror.

“
Child?
Nonsense. It was a mere by-product of conception. It was nothing more than a minor side effect of the rite needed to summon up certain, shall we say, priapic manifestations of the life-energy. You, of all people, should realize that this world is nothing but a mask hanging over an abyss! You said so yourself, just now! And a brave soul must follow the commands of the life force, even if it means trampling the bourgeoisie rules of small-minded conformists. The vital energies only reach their peak with the culmination of the libido! The ancients knew it! The Aztecs and the magicians of Egypt knew it.”

“The Faceless Warlock knew it too.”

Richard's smile twitched and started to fade.

Thomas continued, “When I heard the rumors, and I read about the girl and that dead goat, I never believed it. I knew the rumors had to be wrong. I knew that no man who held the Brightest Blade could ever be involved in such dark deeds.”

Richard's smile was now entirely gone. His face was like a brass mask.

Thomas said, “It was not a goat we found dangling over the waters of the Venom River, but a faun, our faun, old Mister Merryhoof. The one who fed us our Lady's Day Feast. We found him and buried him before the girls saw anything. You and I carried his body. We were crying. Do you remember that part?”

“That never happened,” said Richard. “Only you cried.”

“The Warlock hung the corpse from a willow tree branch to call up the Widow of the Waters. That is what the green apprentice boy told us. And now I recall, you asked him many questions about it. Too many. He told us the Faceless Warlock had to commit a murder to sell his soul.
Just as you did.
”

Richard made as if to slap him. Tommy, however, had spent six weeks on the road, or in the woods, and his body had grown more hardy and strong than most inactive men of his age. He caught Richard's hand easily, and pinned it against the desk, so that Richard was drawn forward at an awkward angle.

With his left hand, Richard grabbed Tommy's wrist, and tried to pry his grip away. There was no sound save for the hissing of their breath as the two men strained silently, almost without motion.

With his other hand, Tommy brought the silver key out of an inner pocket. He held it up and looked through the interstices of the bow, first with one eye, then the other.
“Trespass long past that passed sans trace, yet crows none knows your hid disgrace; reveal by sign your heraldry; unlock thy secret sin to me! Confess, divulge, declare, make clear; for he who holds the key is here!”

The light glinted on the silver key and seemed to catch fire. When Tommy lowered the key, gleaming, wondrous, shining, from his eyes, Richard shuddered and made a hoarse noise, trying even more desperately to escape. He saw that Tommy's pupils had dilated dramatically; the black parts of his eyes seemed enormous, all-seeing.

Tommy slipped the silver key back into his pocket, then with his thumbs he forced open Richard's clenched fist. “The sword of light has burned you here. Your palm is crossed with scars.”

“There's nothing wrong with my hand! Let me go!”

“So you sold the Sword when you found it would not allow your hand to touch it.” Thomas released Richard's hand, and rubbed his hand on his pants, as if to wipe away a stain. “I would be more surprised if I had not seen the hex written into your corporate logo. Yes, I saw the witch-writing there. That is the Melusine, is it not? The sea-queen, whose legs are two sea serpents. The Widow of the Waters, who promises wealth and dignities to those who slay the innocent for her.”

Straightening up, he looked Richard in the eye. His eyes had already returned to normal. “So you remembered our childhood as well as I did. You went looking for them, didn't you? Looking for those creatures in our world? And you found them.
Then you bowed down to them and served them!
”

The black cat sprang into Tommy's arms and swarmed lithely up to his shoulder. Tybalt crouched there, sphinx-like, and regarded Richard with unblinking eyes as bright as hammered gold.

Richard's face changed from red to white as the blood drained from his cheeks. He backed away from Tommy, away from the desk, until his shoulder touched the bookshelf filled with pristine books that had never been opened.

“If you knew that, if you knew and walked in here nonetheless,” he whispered, “Then you are a fool! You knew I meant to sell you.”

“I suspected. I feared, but I did not know. I walked in here to offer you a chance to escape them.”

“There is no escape. There is no need to escape. I have a contract with them!”

“They betray all contracts. Don't be stupid. I have the key. I can unbind the invisible chains they have on you. I saw them on the children at school. I saw them again as I walked down the streets of London. I see them on you now.”

Richard's grin had returned, as empty as the grin of a skull, but now there was something angry and arrogant gleaming in his eyes, a fire with no light. “Chains? Do you call nothing by the right name? I know the secret names for all things. They are not chains, they are signs of my power! They are my pact I made with the vital forces–”