There was a long moment’s silence. Eventually Blue said hesitantly, ‘But, Purlisa, surely the story of the Midgard Serpent is a myth?’
‘Of course it is!’ the Abbot snorted.
‘Perhaps it is,’ the Purlisa told her calmly, ‘but my vision shows that Mr Brimstone called up a serpent of some sort before he went insane.’ He blinked benignly. ‘And the earthquakes have already started.’
Blue glanced at the Abbot, who nodded reluctantly, then said, ‘But, of course, Buthner has always had earthquakes from time to time.’
‘So far,’ the Purlisa said briskly, ‘the quakes have been confined to the deep desert. But they will get worse until a hero slays the serpent.’ He smiled with great warmth at Blue. ‘Which is where you come in.’
Blue stared at him without speaking. She liked the Purlisa hugely, but that didn’t mean she necessarily believed him. The Midgard story did sound like a myth even the Abbot thought so. Perhaps Brimstone really had called up some sort of serpent – he’d called up enough demons before she put a stop to that nonsense, and he might well have discovered some other source of nasty creatures. Perhaps what he’d been doing caused an earthquake. But that hardly mattered. Because none of this was her affair. She wasn’t the hero they needed. She wasn’t even the heroine they needed. And she had other things to do. Henry could be dying somewhere while the Purlisa had her off chasing serpents. She opened her mouth to speak, but the Purlisa beat her to it.
‘Your love Henry will perish if you do not do this thing,’ he said.
Sixty-One
Although she would have died rather than admit it, Madame Cardui felt old. There was so much to do and, for the first time in her life, she had started to doubt her ability to do it. She was back in her office at the Palace with a full support staff now – a written order from Blue had sorted out that silly misunderstanding about her imprisonment – but even so she felt her grip on things slipping and slipping and slipping.
Part of it was the plague. There were constant reports of its spread now, and not just the panic that followed the outbreak of any major illness. These were genuine cases, striking indiscriminately at young and old. Two of her staff were plotting its spread using maps from the Situation Room beneath the Palace and the grip the disease now had throughout the Empire was worrying. Or to face facts, frightening. It was crossing borders too, as plagues did, into neighbouring countries. Which meant it was only a matter of time before those borders began to close, with a devastating affect on trade.
Worse still, there were more and more deaths being reported. Most worrying of all, many of them were now occurring among the young, who in theory should have had a large reserve of their future to draw upon. The plague seemed to be growing more virulent. Or possibly – and this was something she dreaded to contemplate – it meant that no one, young or old, had very much future left. It was possible the entire Realm was facing a disaster of unparalleled magnitude.
Dear Gods, she wished Alan were still here. He would have known what to do. If there was anything still left to do…
It felt as though her Intelligence network were crumbling too. Perhaps an exaggeration, but it really did not seem to be functioning as efficiently as it once had. She appeared to have lost Chalkhill, for example. A dreadful man and quite possibly a double agent, but even as a double agent he could be useful. Clearly there was something going on with the Brotherhood, and her instinct told her there might even be a connection with the plague. Was it possible the imbeciles were experimenting with germ warfare. She found the idea hard to accept, but Lord Hairstreak was using the Brotherhood as a power base now and she would put nothing past him.
When the knock came to her door, she assumed it was a secretary and murmured, ‘Come in’, then looked up to find Nymph standing over her. ‘My deeah, what a pleasant surprise. I thought you were still in the Analogue World with Pyrgus. How is the poor -?’ She caught Nymph’s expression and stopped. ‘What’s wrong?’
Nymph said, ‘Pyrgus has caught an Analogue disease.’
Sixty-Two
Henry thought his hands were turning blue.
He stared at them, frowning. They weren’t actually blue, not cobalt or azure or navy or anything like that, but they definitely had a bluish tinge. At first he’d thought it was his imagination and then he’d thought it was a trick of the light, but now he was certain something physical was happening. Maybe the desert did that to you. There might be something in the sand, or something in the spectrum of the sun, the way a desert sun at home would give you a deep tan.
The interesting thing was Henry was toughening up and drying out, a bit like an old boot. (An old blue boot.) Neither his arm nor leg hurt much any more. His thirst was a constant low-key background he could generally ignore and he needed far less of the liquid Lorquin produced from time to time. He could also keep going for longer before he had to stop and rest. He was even developing that peculiar loping gait Lorquin had. It was a half-conscious imitation, but the new way of walking ate up the miles with minimum effort.
Henry was less successful in his attempts to find his way around. Lorquin made valiant efforts to teach him. The secret was, apparently, to study the angle of the sun along with patterns the wind made in the sand. Henry could follow the bit about the sun easily enough – it moved across the sky much the same way it did at home but try as he might, he couldn’t see the patterns Lorquin saw in the sand. And the deep desert was as featureless of landmarks as it had always been.
For some reason Henry had assumed Lorquin’s people would be fairly close to the place where Lorquin killed his draugr. And maybe they had been when Lorquin set out on his quest. But they were nomads and they were certainly not close by now. After two days of walking, there was no sign of them. But then he still couldn’t see anything when Lorquin announced they’d arrived.
Henry looked around. He’d half expected a rock face with caves, or inhabited ruins, or a community of crude tents. But all around him was a plain of flat, featureless sand. Even the rolling dunes had disappeared.
‘Welcome to my village,’ Lorquin said, grinning proudly.
Henry looked around again. Was Lorquin’s village invisible? Somehow it didn’t make sense. Why cast a spell over an entire community? And if you did, how would people find each other? No, it wasn’t invisibility. But there wasn’t any village round here either. After a minute, feeling foolish, Henry said, ‘Where?’
He started violently as something whooshed up out of the sand. Then something else and something else and something else. In an eye blink he was surrounded by a ring of blue-skinned, naked people. Some of the men carried spears. One sported fearsome – and very colourful – tattoos. They glared malevolently at Henry.
Henry took a step backwards, his heart suddenly thumping. But Lorquin hurled himself forward to embrace a glowering, ugly, beetle-browed individual with what looked suspiciously like filed teeth, ‘I did it, Dad!’ he shouted, ‘I killed the draugr!’
The words galvanised the gathering. In seconds people were leaping and whooping in a lively dance. Several of the men came forward to thump Lorquin on the back and Henry noticed one of the younger girls grinning at him. A plump woman with kind eyes and a broad smile pushed through the crowd to hug him fondly: Henry imagined this had to be Lorquin’s mother and fancied he even saw a family resemblance. One unusually tall man (a tribal chief?) called out, ‘Tonight we feast!’ The announcement was greeted by a loud communal cheer; then Lorquin was being pushed from one to another, fondly shaken, kissed, grinned at, congratulated.