The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (19 page)

She continued down a corridor with the upper halves of dirty windows on one side. The windows were mullioned, made up of lots of squares of glass inside a metal lattice, and a number of the panes had fallen out or been broken, and the gaps sent shafts of light thrusting into the greenish murk the intact parts allowed, illuminating empty rooms leading off the other side. Most of these were missing the doors, although a few of them remained hidden behind heavy, prison-like ones.

At the end of the corridor she turned a corner and heard the drone of a fan and an irregular sound of flapping paper. An open door led to a totally different room. Through the doorway it was obvious the window had been cleaned, and the sunset flooded in through it and illuminated shelves of books and a grotesque tigerskin rug on the floor, the hide misshapen over the skull still inside it and with empty holes where its eyes had been, the fur motheaten and balding beige and grey where once had been orange and black. By the window stood a desk with a chair pushed back and a fan running beside it, and on the desk a book lay open, its pages slowly sliding over from the draught created by the fan.

Someone had been here recently. Dana pulled back from the doorway and checked the corridor she’d just come through, but it remained in its former state of untouched decay.

Then there came a sound like the flapping of wings, from somewhere ahead. Dana pressed in against the wall and looked into another corridor. There were no windows on the side, just one at the end behind her, and a figure was walking away from her, towards the far end, a man with an enormous bird. Dana stepped forward quickly and silently.

It was immediately obvious to her that it wasn’t Ivor, and that she had been mistaken. He was too short and too broad, with massive shoulders and an enormous barrel-shaped chest. Ivor had been tall and solidly built, but he’d always had a sort of elegant grace and balance unique to him that this man hadn’t.

His left hand was clenched inside a leather gauntlet upon which perched the eagle, its great talons digging into the thick hide. Its wings and back were a dark slate colour with lighter stippling and barring, not the brown of the golden eagle Eric had been telling her about.

The enormous bird of prey turned its dark head, fixing upon her with exquisite golden eyes. Dana didn’t move, but the man must have heard her or sensed something, and he turned. She must run, get out of here and away from this stranger, but her legs were rigid. She waited petrified for the instant he would see her, for the outburst that would come on account of her trespassing here. The front of his head came into view in the scant light available in the corridor, revealing the skin of the whole of his face and neck to be pocked and distorted. His breath came heavily through thickened, irregular nostrils, and the upper half of his face on one side was just a swollen and sealed eyelid where a scar had been burned, and the other side was a streaky mess of shapeless unmatching skin, as though he had a rasher of bacon stuck to his face.

He had no eyes
...

Dana clapped both hands over her mouth, silencing a noise that rose unbidden from her throat. She fought to still her breathing while the man with the horrifying visage stood sightless before her, the bird on his fist staring back at her impassively.

He turned back and walked slowly away, his feet dragging on the concrete floor. Dana shrank back against the wall as soon as she hoped he was out of hearing range. She felt her way to the opening she’d come through and stumbled back to the room with the books. She needed to get away from here, now. There was no telling what was going on here, what she’d just walked into, but her breath would not stop tearing in and out of her lungs, and a susurrating ringing sound had started up in her ears. Her legs and arms were heavy and buzzing pin-and-needle sensations crawled up from the tips of her fingers and toes. Dana leaned against the back wall and slid down to the floor, struggling to block the image of the man out of her thoughts and concentrating instead on the hard textures of stone and concrete and upon the motheaten dead tiger that lay in the vista formed by the two shelves she’d hidden between.

She slowly got her breathing back under control and the strength returned to her limbs. It wasn’t far to the exit, and she visualised the route down, and back past the stinking bones. Her stomach lurched at the thought of them. She’d have to try not to think about that. All she had to do was get up and get out of here, and it would be over, and she could have as much time as she wanted to compose herself.

Over the drone of the fan, footfall became audible on the concrete floor somewhere outside the entrance to the room. Someone was coming.

Dana got up and stood back against the corner between the wall and a shelf, in the place she hoped she’d be least conspicuous. Now it might be too late. She should have gone when she’d had the chance, not come in here where she could be trapped.

As the sound of people approaching grew louder, she sensed something else, familiar but from where she couldn’t pin down.

A signal
...

And suddenly, the memories from the dreams she’d been having all came flooding back. Gamma, Pilgrennon’s third child, trapped in the nightmare, trying to escape. It wasn’t Pilgrennon who had led her here. It wasn’t a hidden memory the wyvern had implanted in her. It had been Gamma all along, reaching out to her through the dreams, and she needed Dana’s help. Dana quickly thought to her,
Gamma, it’s me, Epsilon. I've come to help you. Keep still and don't do anything to draw attention to me
.

Someone stepped into view from the doorway, and Dana found herself face to face with the girl in the mirror in the dream, the girl who had stabbed herself with the razor and bled all over the floor even though Dana had tried to stop her. She looked rather older than she had in the dream, like a girl who should be in the year above Dana at school, and the recognition in her expression was mixed with disbelief, and something that might even be fear.

A man rushed into the gap between the shelves. With an awful sense of
déjà vu
, Dana realised his face was also familiar, although she couldn’t remember in precisely what way — one of the doctors or nurses from that awful hospital, no doubt. He made a lunge for Dana and caught her wrist, and a deluge of memories from Gamma’s dreams, of rough hands grabbing and forcing, rushed to consciousness. Dana threw herself forward into him, and he stumbled back, catching his feet on the dead tiger on the floor. Dana stamped with all the force she could muster on the top of the pathetic beast’s head, and its jaw slammed on the man’s foot. He shouted out in pain as its fangs perforated his shoe.

Somewhere in front of her, an eagle screamed. “Prendick!” Gamma shouted. Dana looked up. The blind man loomed in the door, the great bird held aloft on his hand, its wings spread for balance. She crouched down and made a dash for the space between his legs, but as though guided by an almost supernatural sense, he reached to intercept her escape.

“Gamma!” she shouted at the girl, who stood there looking shocked and yet did nothing either to escape or to help her as the two men restrained her. “Gamma, it’s Epsilon, remember? We’re going to go together, remember? I’m going to help you find the Emerald Forge!”

Gamma stared at Epsilon as the two men held her up. She had the same wavy honey-coloured hair as Dana remembered, and she gave off a signal as distinctive and alive as did Cale and Peter, but she wasn’t dressed in the sterile hospital clothes Dana had remembered her wearing. She wore ordinary teenager clothes: marine combat trousers with a vest top and an unbuttoned shirt, and thin slippers. Dana could sense the incredulity in her signal and expression, and then she did something Cale and Peter had never done. From the signal Dana could sense from her, conscious words took form.

But you only exist in my head?

As soon as it happened, Gamma’s expression changed to fury. She forced Dana out of her mind. “This
is
the Emerald Forge!”

-7-

T
HE
two men dragged Dana along, her feet tripping and scraping on the ground as she struggled against them, back out into the corridor and down a similarly dingy stairwell. At the bottom, Gamma pushed briskly past them and threw open a door that led to a long high-ceilinged room, perhaps where once heavy steam-driven machinery had been situated, around which men in old-fashioned clothes might have toiled. The sudden movement set up a flurry of wings as a number of birds who had been roosting up high on the rafters flapped a startled exit through gaps in another mullioned window at the far end, also algae-stained and with some panes missing, and spanning the whole height of the room. The sunset streamed through in long shafts of green and red light, like abstract stained glass. Light fell upon grimy brickwork and aged wooden benches bearing glass containers and metal spoons and devices, like the equipment in Science lessons at school.

Dana had little chance to get a clear look at the clutter, and it passed as more of a vague impression as the two men hauled her down to the far end, where an old ceramic basin stood in the middle of the floor before the window, like a font in a cathedral. What immediately struck her as peculiar was that the basin didn’t appear to be plumbed in to anything. There were no taps, and the tarnished copper pipe beneath it stopped short a foot or so from the floor.

The larger man pinioned Dana’s arms behind her back while the other tugged Duncan’s jacket with the heavy metal badges off her. Heavy hands on her shoulders forced her knees to the concrete floor. “What are you doing?” Dana shouted. She looked to Gamma, who stood aside watching, her face blank. Dana could make nothing out of the signal she gave off. She tried to find a wLAN, a phone switched on, anything that she could use to get help, but there was nothing.

The slighter man made a grab for her wrists and Dana sank her fingernails as hard as she could into the tendons in the back of his hand. He hissed through his teeth as he yanked his hand back, raising and opening it behind his head, and before Dana had any time to react, the flat of his palm hit her full in the face and she fell back onto the other man. The light from the window became distorted and unintelligible, and by the time she had recovered from the stunning blow, the man had pulled both her arms across the basin and strapped her wrists down to the other side of it with buckled cuffs of thick leather.

He turned and grabbed something from a nearby table, and when he bent over her again in one deft movement, something scratched Dana’s forearm hard, and it was only when blood welled quickly from a puncture in her skin and spilled over the side of her arm that she felt the stinging pain the contact left behind and realised it had been a blade. She yelled a wordless scream of panic at him as he stabbed the point of the knife into her other arm, but she could not move her arms and she could not rise from the floor. Her heart pounded and the breath tore in and out of her as she helplessly watched the blood that kept her alive running out and down over the crazed ceramic surface of the glaze and through a hole at the base of the bowl. She had made the wrong choice, and now she was going to pay for it with her life. They were going to kill her here today, and she would never see Pauline or Graeme or Cale again, never see Jananin on the news or find out what happened to the wyvern or if Ivor was still alive. And they would all be sad because she was dead, and she had only herself to blame.

The slight man bent down and retrieved something from under the basin― a beaker half-filled with thick red liquid. He carried it to a bench and began methodically setting up a microscope, applying a tiny drop of the blood to a glass slide with a pipette. After a moment he spoke, although his words meant little and they were distorted as though she was hearing them down a long tunnel. “Positive for the moiety.”

She caught sight of the faceless man again, the eagle peering down hungrily at the blood from his shoulder, but the light and colour from the windows were fading. The blood staining the basin no longer looked red, and prickling static was encroaching from the edges of her vision, blotting the world out. A numb oblivion was creeping up her limbs and into her chest and head. She struggled to fight it, to keep her eyes open, to hold onto her memory of Ivor and the thought of Pauline and Graeme at home waiting for her to come back, but the darkness came for her anyway.

*

Dana awoke lying on her stomach, in a hazy confusion in which she didn’t recall where she was or how she’d got here. A torrid heat pressed her down against a hard mattress. She turned her head, coarse fabric scratching against her cheek. Her mouth burned and her tongue seemed as though it was coated with soggy felt. Her forearms were stiff and oddly numb, and when she looked she realised they had been bound with scraps of cream fabric. It was only then that she remembered the room with the great window, the blood pouring out...

A square hole in a concrete wall, blocked off with rusting bars and with little of the glass that had occupied the outer side remaining, cast a rectangle of midsummer sun onto the floor.

She reached down and put her hand in her jeans pocket. Ivor’s watch and the fuses were still there, although they’d taken Duncan’s jacket with the mobile phone in it. They had taken her wellies away as well, although she had no idea why, and she was lying on the bed in her clothes and socks.

Something smelt, like dirty little animals in a pet shop. In the far corner above the wall with the window on, a splatter of black deposits covered the floor. On the ceiling directly above hung three or four leathery cocoons, bigger than Dana’s fist, but not quite as large as an adult’s. As she stared at them, they occasionally squirmed to reveal glimpses of ears and furry heads, or made low twittering sounds.

Against the opposite wall was a lavatory pan with no lid, and on a table next to it stood a metal pitcher and a battered old glass.
Water
...

She gripped the side of the mattress and hauled her feet off the bed and onto the floor. Sitting upright sent a wave of vertigo crashing through her head, and the room spun for a moment. After her dizziness had eased, she tried getting to her feet and moving slowly towards the pitcher, but everything swayed so much she ended up crouching down and making her way across the floor on hands and knees. She managed to get the glass down off the table and stand it on the floor. She had to hold the jug in both hands and her arms shook so much it spilled dark splashes on the floor all around the glass. She drank one glass, not caring about the lukewarm taste or the shaking of her hand that some of it overflowed her mouth and ran down her front, and then another, and then half of a third. Then she put the glass on the floor and crawled back to the bed, not caring when she saw the mattress was covered only by a pillow in a filthy case and a scratchy woollen blanket.