Seven Sorcerers (26 page)

There was a swish and a thump. Nin felt the draught from the door as Skerridge left in a hurry. She was alone with Mr Strood.

Mr Strood’s sitting room was filled with rich dark hues. Wine-coloured silk lined the walls, the carpet was a deep plum and the huge, soft armchair was a purple so dark it was almost black. Even the ceiling had been painted to look like a sunset in shades of rose with only a touch of gold. She could see no windows at all and the light came from many lamps fixed to the walls and perched on the surfaces. Everything was spotless.

Strood dropped gracefully into the big armchair and
waved a hand at a smaller one opposite. Nin got to her feet and fell into it. She was staring. She couldn’t help it. She had a horrible feeling that her mouth was hanging open.

‘I know, I know,’ Strood sighed wearily. ‘You can’t imagine how someone can have got so many scars and still be alive, right?’

Nin nodded. It was close enough. In fact she hadn’t got past the ‘how can anyone have so many scars?’ part.

Strood waved a hand that looked like a road map in hand shape.

‘What you have to understand,’ he said smoothly, ‘is that we are only talking about one mishap. If you can call being deliberately and cruelly thrown to the wolves a mishap, which I doubt.’

There was a timid knock on the door. It swung back on a small woman with glossy dark hair, wearing a brown dress with a white pinafore. She was carrying a tray laden with a plate of cakes and one of pastries, a tea cup and a teapot. Her neat fingers were tipped with pearly nails that were just short of claws. She carried the tray over to the carved oak table at Strood’s elbow and set it down, then bobbed a curtsey and dashed out of the door.

Humming to himself, Strood inspected the cakes and poured a cup of black tea from the pot. He sat back and took a sip.

‘Excellent! Now, where were we?’

‘Wolves,’ said Nin again.

‘Oh that,’ he shook his head. ‘No, no. Enough about me, tell me about yourself ?’

‘So that’s it really,’ finished Nin. ‘Though I don’t understand why just telling him to be alive makes him a Fabulous?’ She had made the story of Jik last as long as she could because she didn’t have a plan for getting away from Strood, so the longer she could put off being fed to his Death the better. Whatever that meant anyway.

Mr Strood steepled his fingers and looked thoughtful. ‘Land Magics – mudmen, sand cats and so on – are mindless things governed by set rules. With mudmen, when you wake them, you give them the one task that rules them. It gives them purpose, but means that they are just tools with no sense of themselves. They’ll last until their task is done and then go back to being earth.’

‘But I told Jik to be alive, which isn’t just a task that you can do, right? So that makes him … different.’

‘And if you have created something from the Land that will live until it dies, something with free will and a
self
, then you may just have made a Fabulous. See?’ Strood chuckled. ‘Now, tell me about how you got away from my chief bogeyman! That must’ve been quite a feat!’

He poured himself more tea while she talked. It obviously didn’t occur to him to offer Nin any, or to give her a cake from the pile on the tray, which he hadn’t bothered with at all. She finished the story with the part
where her mother accidentally stood on Skerridge’s sack, trying to make it as funny as possible. It seemed to work because Strood laughed, but Nin got the feeling that the friendliness wasn’t real. At least not in any normal kind of way. She didn’t think it would stop him killing her whenever he felt like it.

‘And that’s when you ran into that young friend of yours, right? And where is he now?’

Nin opened her mouth, then shut it again. Although she was pretty sure Jonas would be with the Lockheart Sisters by now, Strood didn’t know about the sanctuary being in the grounds of the House.

She had an idea. ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed, ‘he’s not been well since I got him away from the Storm Hounds.’

Strood stared at her over the rim of his cup. He raised one eyebrow. The other didn’t seem to be moveable

‘You got him away from the Storm Hounds,’ he repeated.

Nin gave a nod and then waited patiently while he looked her over thoughtfully. He smiled. He had a nice set of teeth, considering the rest of him was such a mess.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You can tell me that one too.’

On his way out Skerridge stopped at the big folly at the top of the hill, which had huge clumpy columns and a roof that looked like a wedding cake from a gothic nightmare.

He sat on a marble bench inside the pillars, clutching
a feebly struggling squirrel that he had grabbed on his way. He was also clutching a sheet of paper that he had nicked from Secretary Scribbins’s desk on the way out. Skerridge had done the nicking part at superspeed so all Scribbins had felt was a warm draught that blew his neatly arranged papers around the room.

He put the paper on the bench next to him and smoothed it out. It was singed around the edges because he had been going so fast, but still usable. Skerridge frowned at it. He hadn’t done much writing in a while. Bogeymen had no need for it in the normal way of things. Around him the day crept on towards evening, bringing out the shadows that had been lingering under the tall evergreens. The harsh cries of the peacocks echoed over the garden and high above white doves flew in bright splashes across the sky.

Skerridge munched the squirrel absentmindedly as he thought about what to say. Then he reached for the pen and scowled. He had forgotten to nick a pen. Skerridge looked at the remains of the squirrel. There was just about enough over.

When he had done writing the note, he stuck it on to the sanctuary door with splinters of squirrel bone and went to find another kid.

Nin was running out of things to say. She smiled brightly and moistened her dry lips with her tongue.

‘You must have interesting stories to tell?’ she asked,
hoping to stave off the inevitable.

‘Oh plenty,’ said Strood warmly. ‘I love stories. In fact,’ he leaned towards her confidingly, ‘I write poems, you know. Not the flowery sort with lots of unnecessary words, of course. I write ballads that tell a story.’

‘Aren’t they a sort of song?’

‘No! No! Well, sometimes. I did try having them put to music once. Ran out of musicians. They could never get the harmony quite right. Screamed very tunefully though.’

‘Um. Could I hear one?’ It might be worth it, if they were good and long.

Strood waved a hand. ‘Oh I don’t read them out loud! But you should try the
Ballad of the Last
, that’s a good one.’ He chuckled. ‘Except, of course, that you won’t get time before you die. Shame. I think you’d like it.’

Nin felt her heart turn over. She took a deep breath and tried not to panic.

‘The Last,’ she said. ‘Is it about the Seven Sorcerers?’

‘It is indeed! You really are quite an intelligent child, aren’t you?’

‘I met Nemus Sturdy,’ she said hopefully.

‘So have most Quick who travel this way,’ said Strood dismissively. He brushed an invisible fleck of dust from his black, silk suit.

‘Did you know them?’ she asked desperately.

Strood gave her a long, cool look.

‘Know them,’ he said.

Nin shivered at the tone of his voice. ‘Um, I mean,
being one of the Fabulous I just thought you might have met them.’

Strood stared at her for a moment and then flung his head back and howled with laughter. Nin wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

‘What makes you think I’m Fabulous? The fact that I have power? Oh no,’ he hissed, hunching forward in his chair. ‘The Sorcerers may have thought they would reign forever, but they didn’t as it turns out. Look at them now! An old oak, a few stone walls, a desperate vampire and a body-skipping madman. And those are the ones that survived! The rest are just so much dust. They can’t even rot to feed the flowers!’ His voice had become a savage snarl.

Nin stared at him. Even if she could have unstuck her tongue enough to speak, she wouldn’t have known what to say. She could have pointed out that Simeon Dark was supposed to be still alive, but she thought it would only make him angrier.

Strood settled back in his chair again. His voice went back to being mildly amused.

‘Oh no, girl. I’m not Fabulous,’ he said calmly, ‘I’m just immortal.’

trood picked up a silver bell perched on a shelf under the table and rang it. Almost immediately the door sprang open. A figure filled the door-way. It was wearing a chainmail shirt and carrying a spear.

‘Yessir!’

A shiver ran through Nin. He had sent for the guard and that could only mean one thing. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, to put off what was going to happen next, but Strood got there first.

‘Take her away,’ he said.

The guard, whose emerald eyes showed him to be a Grimm, picked Nin up like a doll. He tucked her under one arm and tramped heavily out of the room.

‘You can put me down if you like,’ squeaked Nin breathlessly, her ribs crushed to breaking point. ‘I won’t try running away.’

The guard chuckled. ‘Not a lotta point!’ He dumped her on the ground, fortunately with her feet downwards.

‘Um, I’m Nin,’ she said in her friendliest voice.
‘What’s your name?’

‘Errol,’ said the guard cheerfully. He was about seven foot tall and nearly as wide. ‘Yer the one Bogeyman Skerridge jus’ brought in right? I ’eard,’ he glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice, ‘I ’eard as ya made a Fabulous!’

‘That’s me,’ said Nin. ‘But how did you know?’

Errol looked at her in awe. ‘Yer famous. Stories like that, they get about. And BMs are terrible gossips, y’know.’ He sighed heavily. ‘’s almost a pity I gotta frow ya to Mr Strood’s Deff.’

Nin was still having a problem with how anyone was going to throw her to Mr Strood’s death. Her own maybe, but someone else’s?

They had been walking for ages down a wide, high-ceilinged corridor. Nin realised that the House was seriously huge, even bigger than she had thought when she saw it from the garden. Finally they reached some stairs that led down to another long hallway. As far as she could work out, Mr Strood lived on the first floor and they were now going back down to ground level. At the foot of the stairs was a large picture of an old man strapped into a carved wooden chair. The man looked hideously crazed and the great staring eyes seemed to follow Nin as she walked past.