The Faeman Quest

Twenty-Seven

They were lying side by side on a four-poster bed. Henry blinked. Somebody had made it up with black satin sheets. The brocade drapes were a deep, gut-clenching red. The curtains at the foot of the bed had been drawn back so he could see part of the room. A spell-driven mural on the wall featured a classical scene of nymphs fleeing listlessly from satyrs. The carpet on the floor was a bilious yellow. He sat up and his head throbbed suddenly, as if he’d drunk himself into a hangover the night before.

‘What ghastly taste,’ he muttered.

Blue gave that funny little moan she always did when she was waking up from sleep and opened her eyes. She looked at Henry, then the curtains, then the moving mural. After a moment, she sat up as well. They were both wearing the same clothes they’d chosen for their Analogue World visit.

‘Looks like we’re back in the Realm,’ Henry said. The mural gave the clue. Unless somebody was using back projection.

‘Yes,’ Blue muttered. She swung her feet on to the floor and stood up. ‘Have you any idea how long we’ve been unconscious?’

‘None.’ Henry shook his head; and wished he hadn’t. ‘Do you have a headache?’

‘Yes.’

‘Long enough for them to portal us back and bring us here, I suppose,’ Henry said. ‘That was Chalkhill and Brimstone.’

‘Yes,’ Blue said again.

‘I thought he was insane.’

‘Brimstone? He was. Probably still is.’ She hesitated. ‘It doesn’t feel as if I’ve been unconscious for very long, but I suppose it’s hard to tell.’

Henry gathered his courage and stood up as well. His head toppled a bit, but failed to fall from his shoulders. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again and felt a little better. ‘He used some sort of magic net thing on me.’

‘Me too,’ Blue said. ‘Standard net spell. They play Hael with your nervous system. But it should wear off quickly now we’re awake.’

They looked around the bedroom. The garish theme carried through to the furnishings, but the most noticeable feature was a mirrored dressing table that produced its own light when Henry touched the chair beside it. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and thought, despite everything, he looked rather well.

‘Positive distortion,’ Blue muttered annoyingly. ‘This is the bedroom of someone vain.’

‘Chalkhill?’ Henry said. Which would make sense since they’d been captured by Chalkhill and Brimstone – duh! But why would Chalkhill lock them in his bedroom? Why not in a dungeon somewhere? It was always hard for Henry to believe, but the truth was they were a King and Queen – well, King Consort, anyway. You didn’t kidnap a King and Queen and lock them in your bedroom where anybody might walk in and find them and there was no proper security. That was like something a child would make up as part of a fairy tale. But perhaps it wasn’t a real bedroom. Perhaps it was a dungeon tarted up to look like a bedroom. But whether real or faked, there was just one priority. He looked around. ‘The question is, how do we escape from it?’

‘Window?’ Blue suggested. They walked together to the window and looked out into a well-kept stretch of garden.

Henry ran the palm of his hand gently across the surface of the glass and felt the familiar tingling of his allergy to magic. ‘It’s spell coated,’ he said. The thought occurred to him that the well-kept garden might be an illusion created by the coating. What was really out there might be an angry sea, a lava lake or a forest full of dinosaurs.

‘Could still be breakable,’ Blue said.

Henry doubted it. Chalkhill and Brimstone would hardly imprison them in a room with a breakable window. All the same, he knew better than to argue with Blue, who had a stubborn streak when ideas occurred to her. He looked around until his gaze fell on the dressing table chair. ‘Stand back,’ he said and picked it up.

Blue stood clear as Henry swung the chair against the windowpane. It struck the glass with a resounding thwack and bounced back violently. ‘Jeez!’ Henry gasped, dropping the chair and shaking the shock from his hands.

‘Security glass,’ Blue murmured. ‘This isn’t going to be as easy as we thought.’

Henry, who’d never thought it was going to be easy, put the chair back tidily beside the dressing table. ‘I wonder if there used to be a fireplace…’

‘In a bedroom?’ Blue asked incredulously.

‘If it’s an old house,’ Henry said. ‘They used to have fireplaces in the bedrooms of old houses in my world: I thought it might be the same here.’

‘Not since we discovered magic,’ Blue said. ‘I’m not sure we ever did. Anyway, there’s no fireplace here.’

‘No, I know there’s not. But this is either a new house or an old house that’s been renovated. If it’s a new house there won’t be a fireplace, but if it’s an old house renovated, then one might be hidden.’ If there was one hidden, they might be able to break through and climb up the chimney, assuming the chimney hadn’t been blocked up. He began to tap the wall in the manner of a doctor sounding a patient’s chest, hoping to detect a hollow.

Blue turned away in disgust and walked back to the window. ‘There’s something about that garden…’ she said.

‘I thought it mightn’t be there at all,’ Henry told her. So far, every bit of wall he tapped sounded solid as a rock, possibly because it was actually made of rock.

‘What do you mean – not there?’

‘Scenery spell, or whatever they call it,’ Henry muttered. ‘The tacky coating they use in piddling little town houses to make you think you’re living on a country estate.’ His mind went back to an earlier thought, but he decided not to mention the tarted dungeon theory, which would probably just upset Blue or, worse still, make her cross. He tapped another bit of wall. It sounded solid.

‘I doubt it,’ Blue told him. ‘Scenery spells are cheap and nasty. If you look at them at an angle, there’s nearly always a telltale sheen. There’s nothing like that on this window.’

‘Blue…’ Henry said.

‘Besides, there’s something odd about the garden out there, something -’

‘Blue…’ Henry said again.

‘- familiar. It’s as if -’

‘Blue,’ Henry said, ‘the door’s open.’

She turned and her face took on a look of astonishment that quickly turned to admiration. ‘How on earth did you do that?’

Henry was wondering about that himself. He’d been tapping the wall when he came to the door and something – force of habit probably – made him turn the handle and push. The door had opened easily. For a moment he considered claiming he’d cleverly picked the lock – he liked that look of admiration – but he knew she’d only ask how and the resulting hassle wouldn’t be worth it. Instead he said, ‘I didn’t: it wasn’t locked.’

Blue frowned. ‘Are you sure?’

Henry gestured to the open door and raised both eyebrows.

‘I suppose you are,’ Blue said. She came across, took his hand and together they walked out of the room.

They were in the bedroom wing of a luxuriously – if garishly – appointed dwelling. No doors were locked nor were there any magical securities in place. There were no guards; indeed they seemed to be the only living creatures in the house.

As they entered a spacious living room, Blue said suddenly, ‘You were right!’

‘Was I?’ Henry asked. ‘About what?’

‘Look at that white piano with the diamante legs,’ Blue said. ‘This is Chalkhill’s house, definitely. I’ve been here before – that’s why the gardens looked familiar. I came here once with Kitterick.’

Henry looked around. Why would Chalkhill kidnap them, then leave them with the run of his home? ‘Why -?’ he began.

‘This was when he was being all camp and interior decoratory to hide the fact he was Lord Hairstreak’s spy,’ Blue said. ‘He’s left the place exactly the way he had it then. Come and look at the gardens – you won’t believe them!’

She led him through French windows on to a tightly manicured lawn, then took a garden path flanking a flowerbed of foxgloves and bluebells that sang softly to them as they walked around the side of the mansion. The path meandered through a heart-shaped grove and past a croquet green with luminous pink hoops.

‘Prepare yourself,’ Blue murmured.

They turned the corner and Henry found himself looking at a swimming pool cut from a single piece of amethyst, then rimmed in gold and filled with sparkling water driven by machinery that maintained its fizz. The whole scene was bathed in warm, perpetual sunshine.

‘My God!’ he gasped.

‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ Blue said.

Henry tore his eyes away from the pool. ‘What I don’t understand is why they kidnapped us and brought us here. I mean, you knew this was Chalkhill’s place and other people must know it as well. It’s the first place they’d look once he makes a ransom demand.’

‘Assuming he’s planning to make a ransom demand,’ Blue said tightly.

‘Well, what else would – oh. Oh dear. You think he might -?’

‘I don’t know,’ Blue told him. ‘It’s probably ransom, but you’re right about it being odd that he brought us here.’

‘With no guards,’ Henry mused. ‘Although I suppose there has to be a security system, even if we haven’t hit it yet. A force field surrounding the property or something.’

But Blue was shaking her head. ‘He doesn’t need one. This place is in the middle of Wildmoor Broads. We’re surrounded by prickleweed. The only safe way in and out is by air.’

‘And we don’t have a flyer,’ Henry said.

‘And we don’t have a flyer,’ Blue confirmed.

They walked together through the gardens until they reached the boundary of the estate and stood staring over the wild expanse of the Broads. The prickleweed seethed and writhed like an angry ocean. A low, spell-coated fence stopped it encroaching on Chalkhill’s property.

‘Has anybody ever survived out there on foot?’ Henry asked Blue.

‘Somebody once made it for nearly a mile in an armoured car, although the vehicle dissolved soon afterwards. And there’s a legend that two escaped prisoners got all the way across the Broads barefoot in the days of Scolitandes the Weedy, but nobody really believes it.’

‘All the same,’ Henry said, ‘if we can’t find a flyer, we’ll have to try.’

Blue nodded soberly. ‘I know. For Mella’s sake.’