‘They have in a manner of speaking,’ Pyrgus told him soberly. ‘They’re breeding manticores.’
‘Manticores?’ Henry echoed.
Pyrgus nodded. ‘Yes.’
Henry said, ‘They’ve been messing about with manticores for years now, haven’t they? I keep reading news reports that they’ve built another one in their laboratories. Actually, I don’t keep reading them: I suppose I’ve seen a couple in the past five years. That’s the trouble, isn’t it? Manticores are very scary creatures, but it takes you a couple of years to build one, so they’re hardly a threat to national security.’
‘I didn’t say build, I said breed. ’
‘But that’s impossible. Breeding manticores is impossible.’
‘Apparently not,’ Pyrgus said. ‘They have herds of them now.’
‘ Herds? ’ Henry looked at Madame Cardui. ‘Did we know about this?’
For the first time since he’d known her, Madame Cardui flushed a little. ‘We did not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Partly because this has been a very recent development, but frankly also because Haleklind has never been a priority for our security services. Nor have manticores, come to that. The bottom line is we never considered them a serious threat.’
‘So what’s the Haleklind plan? Do we know?’
‘Not in any detail yet. But we can speculate about the broad outline.’
‘So speculate,’ Henry told her.
But it was Pyrgus who butted in. ‘Do you know much about manticores, Henry?’
‘Big, scary, magical animals. Body of a lion, tail of a scorpion, head of a man, three rows of teeth, like a shark. In my world they’re considered mythical. Actually they’re considered impossible. In my world unicorns are considered mythical, but you could imagine breeding one out of a horse. Nobody could imagine breeding a manticore.’
‘The wizards imagined it,’ said Pyrgus sourly. ‘Actually, I like manticores. They’re intelligent, but they don’t think the way we do. The tail makes them poisonous: if they sting you, you’re dead. The lion body and shark’s teeth make them fearsome fighters – hand-to-hand combat with a manticore hardly bears thinking about. They can kill a horse with one blow, behead an armoured man much the same way. The one I had ate its way through a solid wall. The -’
‘You had a manticore?’ Henry interrupted.
‘Used to,’ Pyrgus said enthusiastically. ‘I called her Henry after you. But she broke out and made her way back to Haleklind. Actually, that was how we discovered what the wizards were up to. I followed her to Halek-’
‘You called a manticore after me?’ Henry asked, appalled. ‘A female manticore?’
‘She had a human head,’ Pyrgus said.
‘Now, deeahs,’ Madame Cardui put in, ‘perhaps we should stick to the point at hand.’
‘Yes, stick to the point at hand, Pyrgus,’ Henry growled.
‘The point is,’ Pyrgus said, ‘the Haleklind wizards have created manticores and now they’re breeding them. My contacts in the Haleklind Society for the Preservation and Protection of Animals tell me they’re modified manticores -’
‘What’s a modified manticore?’ Henry demanded.
‘Changed from what they are in the wild.’
Henry stared at him. ‘There aren’t any manticores in the wild. The wizards had to create them in the laboratory – you just told me.’
‘All right,’ Pyrgus said impatiently, ‘modified when you compare them to the legends and myths about manticores in the wild, if you want to be pedantic. And I think there actually are some in the wild, if we could only find them. Nymph says -’
‘We are in a crisis situation,’ Madame Cardui interrupted firmly. ‘Please let us stick to the point.’
Pyrgus glared at Henry. ‘The point is the Haleklinders have manticores that are spell protected – terribly difficult to kill. They have manticores that fight like demons – better than demons; far better than demons. They have manticores that are spell-bound to obey orders and have no fear of anything. They have manticores who are just as smart as you and I are in a fight: smarter in some respects because they think differently to the way we do and that makes them creative. They have thousands of them and they’re breeding more all the time. Can you imagine what sort of army that makes?’
Henry could imagine it all too easily. ‘We need to wake up Blue,’ he said.
‘No need – I’m awake now,’ said Blue’s voice from the doorway.
Thirty-Seven
‘Where are we?’ Brimstone asked. He knew perfectly well where they were. They were lost, that’s where they were. They were walking – creeping really – beneath a leafy canopy that filtered out the best part of the sunlight, leaving only a green gloom. The path they’d been following had long since become a track then petered out altogether, leaving grass and undergrowth beneath their feet. Around them, the forest stretched endlessly in all directions.
Chalkhill grunted.
Brimstone was not particularly worried: he trusted George to get him out of most tricky situations. But at the same time he was beginning to think it might be time he parted company with Chalkhill. The man had been useful in springing him from the lunatic asylum and for a while there he looked as if he might have some interesting plans – an assignment to kidnap the Princess had to be a nice little earner. But in true Chalkhill style, he’d already begun to cock things up. Not only had he annoyed Lord Hairstreak, but he’d managed to kill off the Queen, send the King Consort barmy and arouse some deep suspicions in the mind of the Head of State Security. Worse still, he’d implicated Brimstone in the mess. In the circumstances, it was difficult to see what Brimstone might get out of their old partnership. Perhaps best just to slit his throat and steal his purse, then make his way back to the capital, lie low for a bit and set up a little business with the money once the fuss died down.
The only thing that made him hesitate was that Chalkhill had used a concealment spell on the ouklo when they abandoned it and Brimstone had no idea how long it would take him to reach the capital on foot. He wondered vaguely if George could carry him.
Brimstone expanded his consciousness to see if that would help. There was an incredible amount of life in the forest – his old enemies the cockroaches were there, lurking and waiting, as were termite colonies and insects of every description, each and every one carrying its own unique threat. (If he hadn’t had George for protection, they’d certainly have eaten him by now.) There were wolves and badgers and sliths and haniels, not to mention militant diseases and those dead things that ate dried leaves and faerie meat. The place was crawling with them.
‘Where are we?’ he repeated.
‘Where are we?’ Chalkhill mimicked crossly. ‘Where are we? Where are we? We’re in an assassin’s tunnel so we can get through the magical defences.’
What magical defences? Whose magical defences? Brimstone thought. Aloud he said, ‘What’s an assassin’s tunnel?’
‘An assassin’s tunnel,’ Chalkhill said with heavy patience, ‘is a knot in spacetime established by the Assassin’s Guild that allows its members secret access to every country in the Realm. Everybody knows that.’
Everybody doesn’t, Brimstone thought vaguely. This must be a new development since they’d locked him away in the Double Luck. So many technical advances: it was positively bewildering. To keep the conversation going before Chalkhill lapsed back into gruntspeak he asked, ‘So we’re walking through a knot in spacetime?’
‘Yes.’
‘Put there by the Assassin’s Guild?’
‘Yes.’
‘It doesn’t feel any different.’
‘How would you know what walking through a knot in spacetime felt like, you old fool?’ Chalkhill muttered, quite audibly as it happened, given Brimstone’s expanded senses.