Faerie Lord

Six

Since coffee had a psychedelic affect on faeries, Henry brewed them all a pot of tea. Nymph stared into her mug with suspicion, but Pyrgus had had it before and drank his in great draughts as he explained.

‘The Faeries of the Night organise their own health services and I’m afraid there still isn’t much communication between theirs and ours. Not that I think it would have made much difference. I can’t see why our people would have spotted anything amiss either. The very first case, the first one we know about anyway, was a kid called Jalindra and everybody thought she’d just caught the horse-sniffles. All Cretch kids get horse-sniffles sooner or later and the early symptoms are similar.’

Mr Fogarty, while he was still in residence, had amassed a peculiar assortment of mugs. The one Henry had given to Pyrgus featured a flock of poultry listening intently to one of their number who was singing. The title of the picture, running underneath the rim, was The Bantam of the Opera. He watched as Pyrgus set it to one side and went on seriously. ‘Jalindra was four years old when she caught the bug. A year later she was a middle-aged woman. Six months after that she was dead.’ He stared down at the table top and added, ‘From old age.’

‘We have that here,’ Henry said. ‘Premature aging. It’s called…’ He searched his memory for the name and surprised himself by finding it. ‘… Werner’s Syndrome. There was something about it on telly a couple of weeks ago. It’s a gene thing apparently. The youngsters never grow very much and they go grey and wrinkled while they’re still children and they get old people’s diseases like heart attacks and cataracts and they all die young.’ He set his own mug to one side. It had a fish motif below the words Cod Moves in Mysterious Ways.

But Pyrgus was shaking his head. ‘Not the same thing. This one has been spreading through the population. Not just Faeries of the Night, either. Faeries of the Light as well.’

‘Like Pyrgus,’ Nymph put in.

Henry became aware of a tightening in the pit of his stomach, as if he’d suddenly begun to feel afraid. Which he had. He didn’t want Pyrgus to have some ghastly disease that reduced his lifespan to eighteen months. He glanced at his friend and realised suddenly he now looked far more like his father, the old Purple Emperor, than he did like the boy Henry had known. It was creepy as well as scary. Henry said hesitantly, ‘But you’re not…? I mean, they’ve found a cure, haven’t they? You’re not, like – ’ he gave a sudden, very false laugh ’ – going to die or anything?’

‘No, he’s not,’ said Nymph firmly.

Henry looked at her. He didn’t like the fact she was the one who’d answered him. But before he could say anything else, Pyrgus was talking again. ‘Let me tell you the whole thing, Henry,’ he said easily. ‘It’s a bit tricky and I want you to understand.’

Understand what? Llenry thought. But he only said soberly, ‘Go on.’

Pyrgus said, ‘This isn’t a disease like anything we’ve ever seen in the Realm before. It isn’t in the medical records, and there’s nothing like it in our history. It started in the Cretch with poor Jalindra and moved outwards. It was a very slow spread at first. The healers thought it was a rare condition and didn’t pay much attention. Actually – ’ He stopped suddenly and licked his lips.

‘What?’ Henry asked.

A look of embarrassment crept over Pyrgus’s face. ‘To be honest, in the early days nearly everybody thought it was a Faerie of the Night disease – only Faeries of the Night could get it. Because that’s the way it looked.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘There’s still a lot of prejudice against Faeries of the Night. Blue’s doing all she can, but you can’t really make up laws about that. It all comes down to the way people think. And you can’t really blame them for being prejudiced against Faeries of the Night after all the stuff Hairstreak did.’

‘No,’ Henry agreed. He was a bit prejudiced against Faeries of the Night himself.

‘Anyway,’ Pyrgus said on a whistling out-breath, ‘by the time we did start to take it seriously, by the time Faeries of the Light started to get sick, it had spread too widely for us to tackle the problem by isolation. So the healing wizards had to study it properly and what they found out was weird.’

‘Really weird,’ Nymph said with emphasis.

Pyrgus leaned forward. ‘The thing is, Henry, this disease doesn’t just make you look old, or mess up your body so you go wrinkled and grey. The healers are calling it TF – temporal fever. It actually interferes with time. You start to live your life faster than you should.’

Henry blinked. ‘I don’t think I followed that.’

Pyrgus sat back in his chair again. ‘No, it’s not all that easy. Look, imagine you caught it from me – ’ He noticed Henry’s expression and added quickly, ‘Which you can’t; I’ll explain why in a minute. But imagine you had it now. Every so often, you’d come down with bouts of fever. Then you’d sink into a coma. We’d put you to bed and wait for you to come out of it and if it lasted for more than a day or so, we’d watch you getting older. That’s what happens from the outside. But inside – what you experience – it’s completely different. You don’t know you’re lying in a bed at all. Once the coma starts, everything around you suddenly speeds up. You find yourself thinking and doing things at breakneck speed. If you’d planned to go away on holiday tomorrow, that’s what you’d do. And you’d race around doing holiday stuff, but instead of it all taking weeks, it would all be over in a few seconds. You see?’

‘Yes…’ Henry said uncertainly. ‘Actually, no.’

‘You start living your life very fast. Then after a while it stops and you’re jerked back to the present and you’re in bed recovering and you start living again at the normal rate. Except you’ve aged by whatever number of years you’ve already lived. The fever has burned up your future.’

After a moment, Henry said, ‘So you come back remembering the future? You know what’s going to happen to you?’

Pyrgus chewed his lip. ‘Yes and no. It’s all a bit of a blur – even while it’s going on. But the thing is, the future you remember is burned up. You won’t live it, because you already have. Are you following?’

Henry blinked and said nothing. After a moment Pyrgus said, ‘What can happen, if you’re lucky, is you might pick out a detail or two about other people’s futures or what’s going on generally. But only where it touches your own personal future and you’d be surprised how little that is. I mean a big war in the Realm could pass you right by if you didn’t happen to be in it. Most people don’t remember enough to be useful.’ An odd expression crossed his face. ‘Most people…’

They sat looking at each other. After another moment, Henry said, ‘And this is what you’re going through?’

‘Was,’ Pyrgus said. ‘Was going through. The effect stops when you’re in the Analogue World. That’s why I said you couldn’t catch it from me. The disease goes dormant here. You don’t have the symptoms and you can’t pass it on.’

‘So that’s why the two of you are in my world?’ Henry said.

‘Yes,’ Nymph said. ‘Blue’s idea was that we wait it out until somebody finds a cure.’

Henry grinned. ‘And that’s why you came to see me?’

But Pyrgus didn’t grin back. He shook his head. ‘We came to see you because Mr Fogarty is dying.’