The Book of Dead Days (17 page)

“Now!” Valerian called.

He spurred his horse forward, but when the animal came close to its masters it stopped. One of the villagers put his hand up to the horse’s cheek and whispered to it. The horse rose on its back legs and let out a loud whinny. Valerian slipped from the horse’s back and fell into the thin straw on the stable floor.

As he hit the ground he howled with pain and then blacked out.

Two men stepped forward, and Boy saw the cart driver behind them. Another villager lowered an old but sturdy pitchfork at Boy, pointing its three prongs at his throat. The man was strong and broad, with a weather-worn, dirty face.

“Now,” he said, “my fine City boy, what have you done to our church?”

“I?” said Boy.

The villager swung the pitchfork, hitting Boy across the side of the head with the handle. Willow rushed over as he fell next to Valerian.

“You’ve killed him!” she screamed.

The man spat in the straw.

“Not yet,” he said. “He’s breathing yet.”

With relief Willow saw it was true. She looked about her. Boy and Valerian both lay, out cold, in the foul-smelling straw of a barn in a village miles away from the City. Around her stood a gang bent on revenge, and she knew there was nothing she could do.

Dawn rose on the morning of December 30, but Boy and Willow did not see the day break. Valerian did not see anything.

Boy had come round from the blow to his head quite soon, and immediately been sick in the straw. He put his hand to his head, and felt blood and broken skin. He had a murderous headache.

The villagers had escorted Willow and Boy back to the church, and had carried Valerian none too gently with them.

They took them to the hole in the church floor, Gad Beebe’s place of interment. Seeing it again, Willow was shocked by what they had done, the violation they had caused.

“You did this?” grunted a man with sunken cheeks.

Boy was too fearful to speak after his last try. Willow couldn’t see that there was any point in denying it, but couldn’t bring herself to admit to it either.

Then Pitchfork Man spoke.

“What are we going to do with them?”

“Kill them now,” said one.

“We ought to send for the Watch,” said a taller man, who seemed nervous.

“That will take days,” said Pitchfork. “Let’s drown them in the millrace.”

“It’s frozen, you fool! It’ll take hours to make a hole big enough.”

And so they argued, and eventually decided to lock their prisoners in the crypt while they decided what to do.

The sunken-cheeked man pushed Boy and Willow ahead of him, waving his scythe. At the far end of the church, in a corner of the nave, was a low archway. Four steps led down from it to a metal grille.

Sunken Cheeks unlocked the gate to the underworld.

Boy and Willow hesitated, but when he lowered the tip of his scythe at them they slunk into the dark. Beyond the grille a dozen more steps curved around, taking them back under the body of the church itself. At the bottom, they stopped in complete darkness.

There was a noise like a scuttling animal, then a flash of sparks behind them-a burning torch had been thrown down the stairs so there was light to carry Valerian down.

He was dumped roughly on the floor.

“Heavy, he is,” said one, and they left. The nervous one turned and bent to take the torch back with them.

“Please!” said Willow. “Please leave us some light!” She tried to make herself sound as pitiful as possible, but that wasn’t hard. The man looked at her and was reminded of his own daughter sleeping safely in her bed in the farmhouse.

Without a word he handed her the torch and followed his friend back up the curving steps to the church.

Boy rushed after him, but the gate was already shut and locked.

“Please,” he begged through the metal grille of the crypt entrance, “please can we have a blanket for Valerian?”

Their footsteps disappeared up the four stone steps and they were gone.

The crypt was a cramped room with a vaulted ceiling low above their heads, which made it feel as if they were sitting inside a treasure chest. In the center stood a large stone sarcophagus, and along each of the longer walls were three cists capped with headstones commemorating the person whose bones lay inside.

On one of the shorter walls was an iron bracket, and Willow put the torch there so that they could see a little better. Boy returned from the metal grille at the top of the steps.

“It’s not good,” he said. “It’s locked tight.”

He shook his head.

“It’s not like they need to stop people getting out of here, is it?”

“No,” said Willow. “It’s to stop people getting in. To stop them…”

“Stealing bodies,” said Boy, finishing what she could not.

“Boy,” cried Willow suddenly, “what are we doing? What have we got into?”

“You, you mean,” said Boy. “I was always a part of this. Whatever he does, I do. You had a choice.”

Willow looked at Valerian.

“Let’s see what we can do for him.”

They lifted his head and folded the wide collar of his coat out, then rested his head back on it. His arm was worse. There was a distinctly unpleasant smell coming from it. They pulled his coat tight around him.

“Where’s that last bottle?” said Willow.

Boy fished in Valerian’s pockets and pulled out the last of Kepler’s potion.

Lifting Valerian’s head again, they tipped a small amount of the thin green liquid into his mouth.

Automatically he swallowed, coughing.

Boy sniffed the liquid before shoving the cork back. He pulled a face. As Willow was busy trying to lower Valerian’s head, a burning curiosity came over him. Holding his nose, he took a small swig of the stuff.

He choked but swallowed. Immediately fire spread through his body. The taste was awful, but it was soon replaced by a wonderful feeling of strength and power and lightness. He felt better than he had in days, in ages.

His body no longer ached. He felt no hunger, no pain, no fear. He looked at the bottle in his hand and then at Valerian, who already showed signs of stirring.

Willow turned round to Boy. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.” He smiled at her. He was amazed to feel calm, confident, even
glad
.

“Well,” he said, “what are we going to do?”

Willow crumpled. “What can we do?” she wailed. “We’re locked in a stone hole, under a church, in a god-forsaken village miles from home. Valerian has two days left unless maybe we find the book, and we still have no idea where it is!”

She stopped.

“Don’t we?” said a voice behind her.

Valerian looked up at them from the stones. He raised himself on one arm, then lifted himself back to his feet. Willow was amazed by this, but Boy knew the secret of Kepler’s green liquid.

“Boy!” said Valerian, fishing in his pocket. “Where’s my bottle?”

“Here,” said Boy, bringing it to him. “We just fed you a little of it. We thought it might help.” He couldn’t hide the smile on his face as he saw Valerian on his feet again, and as Valerian took the bottle back from him with his good arm, he smiled back.

Boy felt good, strong and happy.

Valerian looked at the bottle. It was half empty.

“You were right,” he said, “but there is little left. Still, it is time we were about things.”

He put a hand out to Boy’s cheek for a moment, then seemed to remember himself and instantly pulled it back. It happened so fast that Boy wondered if he’d imagined it.

“But what can we do?” said Willow.

Valerian turned to her, his bad arm swinging loosely at his side.

“Come now, Willow, it’s not like you to be weak! It’s usually the boy here.”

Boy laughed. He didn’t even mind Valerian making fun of him. He felt good and that was all.

Valerian began to circle the crypt. He prowled, a smile growing on his face.

“There is more to this church than we know,” he said. “There has to be-it is far too big a place for a tiny hole of a village like Linden.”

He rested his hand on top of the sarcophagus.

“Listen!” he said. “Listen! Can you hear it? Listen!” hissed Valerian, wobbling slightly on his feet. “No! Look!”

He pointed at the wall of the crypt, the short wall opposite the one where Willow had placed the torch.

There again were those mysterious words.

Non omnem videt molitor aquam molam praeterfluentem
.

“The miller…?” began Boy.

“… sees not all the water that goes by his mill,” finished Willow.

“And outside the churchyard, there stands… Boy! What?”

“A mill!” he said confidently.

“Exactly!” declared Valerian.

“I don’t understand,” cried Willow. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” said Valerian, “it means it is more than a motto! Place your ears to the sarcophagus and listen!”

“The-the what?” asked Boy.

“The sarcophagus, Boy! You do know what a sarcophagus is, don’t you? From your Greek! Eater-of-bodies. Flesh-eater. Sarco-phagus.”

Boy looked blankly at him.

“The stone coffin, Boy!”

Willow stood on tiptoe to put her ear flat against the lid of the sarcophagus.

“I thought I heard something as I lay on the floor. It’s faint, but you can hear it better through that.”

Boy ran over to Willow. It was true; you didn’t even have to put your head close to the stone box to hear the sound of water flowing somewhere underneath.

“Valerian!” Willow said. “Valerian! Look! Is this…?”

She was staring at a pattern engraved in the lid of the coffin.

“Yes. The pattern that Kepler had dug into his cellar floor, repeated here on the lid of this supposed grave!”

Indeed, the lid of the sarcophagus was deeply cut with a manic pattern of lines crossing, recrossing, intersecting and splitting. Without remembering exactly, Willow could recognize it.

“What is it?” Boy asked.

“These marks,” she said. “It’s what the doctor had dug into his floor and filled with water. Water that flowed by the aid of a machine. And above it on the wall were those words.”

She pointed.

“Ah!” Boy said. “The mill outside-not all of the water goes past it. Some goes here. So the miller…”

“… sees not all the water that…”

“Exactly!” cried Valerian. He stared at them, a little mad, a little proud, waiting for the moment to deliver his final piece of wisdom.

“See that long line that comes out of the pattern, straight down the length of the sarcophagus lid?”

They nodded.

“What would you say that is, at the end of it? That symbol?”

There was a circle with short lines radiating out from it.

“It’s a mill wheel!” said Boy.

“Just so!” said Valerian. “Now, you two, lift the lid and let’s be away from here!”

Willow turned to him.

“I am not dealing with any more corpses,” she said. “Is that clear? I’ve had enough!”

Valerian smiled at her infuriatingly.

“But there will be no corpse inside here,” he said, tapping the lid. “There will be no bones, no flesh, no decomposing material of any sort whatsoever. There will be simply a way back to the City.”

“You’re mad,” she said.

“I thought Kepler was mad,” Valerian said, “but I was wrong. I should have realized sooner what we were looking at in his cellar. This is a map. It is a map of the ancient canals under the City. And this is our way back.”

“There are no canals in the City,” said Boy.

“Not
in
the City,
under
it,” snapped Valerian. “Under the City is an ancient network of canals. They were once exposed to the sky but were slowly bridged, then built over and rebuilt over, until only the rumor of them remains. I myself explored a tiny fraction of them one evil day when I was a student. I quickly became lost. It took me a day to find my way out and I never dared go back.

“It is said they feed into the river, or that the river feeds into them. Few know where their entrances lie. And now I believe we have found one, here, in this stinking village. The millrace must run underground and join the canals!”

Valerian fetched the torch from the wall.

“Hurry! There is no time to be lost.”

“But we don’t even know if you’re right,” protested Willow. “There may be nothing inside here at all.”

“I am right,” said Valerian. “And you two must open the lid. I cannot. Hurry!”

Willow looked at Boy, and Boy looked at Valerian, who glared at him so that he jumped and started to try to shift the heavy stone lid. It didn’t budge.

“Wait!” said Valerian. “We ought to copy this map.”

He tapped the lid once more.

“I have some paper!” said Boy proudly, and pulled a leaf of folded parchment from his pocket. Delighted at being useful for once, he smiled as Valerian took it from him.

“Boy, you astound me! What is this? Have you been studying at last, or…?”

Valerian stopped.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

“It’s mine!” said Boy, wishing he had left it in his pocket.

It was the paper he’d found on the viewing table of the camera obscura in the Tower room, the one with his name at the top and the strange words and symbols underneath.

“It is not yours,” shouted Valerian. “It is
about
you.”

He turned and looked at Willow.

“Here,” he said. “I have a stub of charcoal. Use the reverse of the paper to copy the map. Do it well!”

So by the flickering torchlight Willow set about trying to copy the lines onto the back of the paper, using a piece of soft charcoal that kept on breaking.

“I can’t see!” she complained, but she kept at it.