The Silver Skull - Mark Chadbourn

As their eyes and nerves recovered, the mob circled warily. Will knew it would only be a matter of moments before they rediscovered their courage, and the sheer weight of numbers would bring him down.

"Follow my lead," he said quietly to the others, "and do not tarry, for if you fall behind they will be like wolves upon you."

Spinning, he kicked open the door at his back and raced into the smoky, damp-smelling shadows. A woman sat next to the hearth, sharpening a knife on a leather strap, a filthy, naked child playing at her feet. She glared at Will hatefully as he flashed her a smile and said, "Apologies. We shall not be staying for dinner."

The roaring mob thundered in pursuit. Will ran through the tenement and out of the back door onto another street with Launceston, Miller, Mayhew, and Carpenter at his back.

"Fool!" Launceston snapped at Miller. "If we survive this, I will take it out of your hide."

"Master Miller has prevented our day from becoming too dull," Will said, "and tedium is the most unforgivable crime of all. You will thank him for this later."

They ran west along the street, the mob slowed by the narrow passage of the tenement. But as the whistles blasted urgently from the rooftops, more streamed from alleys into the street ahead, trying to block their way.

"They will not rest until we are dead," Carpenter said. "They fear we are taking the secrets of their crimes away with us."

Gripping his sword tightly as he ran, Mayhew said fiercely, "I will take a hundred of them with me when I go! Damn the Spanish and the Enemysometimes I wonder if the real enemies are within." He ducked his head low as bottles and stones rained down around them. "Perhaps what we do is wrong. This rabble is not worth protecting."

As the mob drew in from all sides, Will saw it would be pointless trying to fight; they faced an army as ferocious in the defence of their beliefs as any foreign force. "We must find a place to hide," he said, "at least till night falls, and we can move on under cover of darkness."

"Hide where?" Carpenter snapped. "They will ransack any filthy hovel we choose to make our castle. Look-they are everywhere!"

"And did you accept defeat so easily when we fled across the snows of Muscovy with Feodor's men at our heels?" Will said. "Or did I dream us hiding like foxes in the roots of a tree?"

"I wish it had been a dream," Carpenter spat. "At least then I would not have these scars to itch morning, noon, and night."

Will could feel Carpenter's eyes on his back, and knew his associate wished his gaze was a dagger.

With a bellow, a man wearing a butcher's leather apron erupted from a door, swinging a bloodstained cleaver directly towards Will's head. Ducking beneath the arc, Will brought the pommel of his sword crashing against the back of the assailant's head. That was enough to deter him, but Launceston stepped in swiftly and slit the butcher's throat. Gurgling, and attempting to stem the arterial spurt, he plunged to the ground.

"A warning to the others," Launceston said before Will could speak.

The shouts of the mob grew louder, but their advance slowed. They were wary now, but just as murderous.

Will scanned the ranks moving in along both ends of the street before kicking his way into another tenement. "Bar the door behind us!" he called as he ran to open the rear door onto the next street.

Mayhew and Carpenter jammed what little furniture they could find in front of the door, and then made for the back door before Will summoned them to follow him up the stairs.

"Has the Devil taken your mind?" Carpenter shouted. "We will be trapped up there!"

"Follow him," Launceston said with cold insistence. "He is no fool."

Launceston and Mayhew propelled a dazed Miller up the stairs after Will. At the bottom, Carpenter hesitated for a moment until the sound of the mob drew towards the door and then he reluctantly followed.

Just as they reached the top of the creaking stairs, the front door burst open and the torrent of angry voices flooded through the tenement and out of the back door.

"They will be back the moment they find we are not in the street," Carpenter snapped, exasperated, "and this is the first place they will search."

"But they will not find us," Will said, "for we shall be disappeared."

Forcing his way through a door into a room filled with detritus and a bedroll on the bare boards in one corner, Will enjoyed the confusion for a moment and then pointed up to where a hatch led to the loft space. Mayhew and Launceston boosted him up, and then Will helped the others scramble into the dusty dark space filled with the flapping of nesting birds and the scurrying of rats along the rafters. Here and there, missing tiles allowed shafts of sunlight to punch through into the gloom.

Below, the muffled sounds of the mob washed around the tenement.

"You are still a fool," Carpenter raged. "They will find us here in time."

"Why, if I did not know better I would think you wanted us to fail," Will replied.

Keeping his head low, Will loped along a rafter to the end of the loft where a crawlspace led through to the loft of the adjoining tenement.

"The houses are all connected," Mayhew noted.

"The builders left the ways so they could move swiftly from roof to roof to finish their work. Now, follow."

Will crawled through the space into the next loft and continued along the row of tenements to the end house where they made their way down to the ground floor. While the hubbub continued further along the street, they took advantage of the billowing smoke to slip across to the opposite tenement and make their way rapidly up the stairs and into the loft space of the next row.

They finally came to rest halfway along the row where the roof was missing enough shingles to give them a view across Alsatia.

"We are surrounded by an army of cutthroats who will kill us the moment we emerge," Mayhew said, peering at the crowd milling along the street. "We are trapped here."

"We wait until nightfall and try again." Will hated wasting time when they were in danger of losing the Silver Skull at any moment, but after the disturbance all of Alsatia would be on watch for hours.

Launceston leaned in close and nodded towards Miller, who huddled in a corner, head bowed. "The boy was a mistake," he whispered. "It is not his fault, but that matters not now. Look at him. He will break at any moment. That makes him a danger to what we do here." Pausing, Launceston attempted to show a modicum of compassion, but all Will saw was cold efficiency. "We should dispatch him now and be done with it."

"Let me talk to him," Will said. "We all recall our introduction to this world. He may find his feet quickly."

"Or he may not. And what then?"

In Miller Will saw the innocence that the rest of them hardly remembered, the pleasant days of his rural upbringing, and he regretted the toll taken by the hard business of life. When he went over, Miller didn't look up.

"Was that the Devil's work?" Miller's voice was a ghostly rustle. The country burr was clear, and Will realised the youth had been suppressing it, probably to appear more sophisticated to his new associates.

"Not in the way you mean. But it is certainly devilish."

"I heard stories of these things, in the tavern, and around Swainson's hearth one winter night, but. .." He chewed his lip, drawing blood. "They were just stories. Not real. But that ... That should not be!" Finally, he looked up at Will with wide eyes stung by tears.

"You are right. It should not."

"They burned him alive! Whatever happened, the poor soul was still inside somewhere. And they burned him!"

"People do terrible things when they are scared. We are taught to see the world a certain way. A clockwork place, where the sun rises in the morning and sets at dusk, and all happens as it should. Tick-tock. But the world is not like that."

As Miller wiped away his tears, Will saw a hint of defiance that gave him hope. Perhaps that was what Walsingham had recognised. "What is it like, then?" Miller asked.

"It is a place where night can fall at noon, and cows give blood not milk. Where mothers can find strange creatures in the cribs where their babies lay only a moment before. Where mortal men do not rule and never have." He cast an eye towards Launceston, Carpenter, and Mayhew, who whispered conspiratorially on the far side of the loft. "I will tell you the truth of these matters," he said quietly, squatting next to Miller. "Listen carefully, and then I will answer any questions you have, as much as I can. But you must not cry, or rail to the heavens, or give any sign of fear. You must accept these things like the man that our Lord Walsingham saw when he chose you to defend our queen and country. Do you understand?"

Miller nodded.

"Good man. These secrets would have been revealed to you at the Palace of Whitehall over time, and they would have been allowed to settle on you, so they did not disturb your mind. But there was no time for that, and so you must hear them now, hard, and cold, and painful."

"Tell me. Make sense of what I saw."

"Sense? No, there is no sense to any of this, but I will help you understand as best I can. The stories that you heard at Swainson's hearth are true. Every story that you laughed off in the light of day but feared deep in your heart at night is true."

"The Devil-"

"Yes, by other names. Devils. A race of them. For as long as we have walked on this Earth, they have preyed on us, for sport, out of cruelty, for malign purposes. They have transformed us, like that poor wretch you saw in the street, tormented our nightmares, twisted our limbs, stolen our children, driven our old men to their graves, slaughtered our young men, and drunk their blood, and bathed in it. No forest was ever safe for us, no lonely moor, no quiet, moonlit pool or river's edge or mountaintop, for they would come from under hill and mound and treat us like cattle, or worse, like rats, forced to play for the mouser's enjoyment before one swipe of claw bares innards to the light."

Will paused to allow his words to sink in. Disbelief, and the hint of a smile flickered on Miller's face. It was the first sign, Will knew from long experience, and it would pass. There would be worse to come, not just then, but for many nights after, if not a lifetime.

"You have had an education of the history of this land?" Will asked.

"A little."

"Then let me tell you of the true history, the secret history. England has always been at war-"

"Always?"

"Not with the Spanish, or the French, the Scots or the Welsh or the Irish."

"With this race of devils?" Miller's disbelief had already started to turn.

"I dress it up in fine clothes to call it a war," Will continued, "but really we have been in rags, 'pon our knees. The Enemy did what they wanted with us. Killed, stole, tormented. And we could not fight back, for they were too powerful."

"They have magic?"

"They can do things we cannot. They have guile and secret knowledge. Magic? It seems that way at times, but I am just a humble spy and do not understand such things." Will spoke calmly and carefully, smiling to make his words appear simpler than they were. "In truth, they are more dangerous than wolves, they see like eagles, swim like fish, are stronger than bears, more cunning than snakes. They are there and gone in the twinkling of an eye. Most importantly, they value our lives not a whit. In their eyes, we are as far beneath them as the sheep of the field are beneath us."

"And this Enemy ... you say they have been attacking us forever? Then why have I not seen nor heard of them?"

"You have, in stories, in whispers. They are always known by other names. You called them the Devil yourself. But our kings and queens have always ruled that their existence should be kept a secret from the common man as much as is possible. For if the good men and women of England knew the terrors that could pluck them from their lives at any moment, they would be driven mad with fear, and all we have tried to build here would fall into an abyss."

In the street below, the clamour had ebbed away as the mob returned to their plots and plans. But even in the silence there was little peace.

"Tell me what they do," Miller said.

"I will tell you some of what they do," Will replied. "A flavour, but there is no time to tell you all." And I would not see your hope extinguished, Will thought. "In Chanctonbury Ring, in Sussex, the Devil appears every Midsummer Eve, the local people say, and plucks one poor wretch from his hearth to take beneath the clump.

"In Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, not far from your quiet home, these people of the dark engaged in carnal displays on the banks of the bottomless pool in the place known as the Devil's Wood. One year, a local landowner attempted to build a house there, and the unholy crew ripped out his heart, screaming that his soul was lost.

"At Wandlebury Camp, near Cambridge, a night rider will appear under the full moon to challenge all-comers. The wounds he inflicts bleed anew on the anniversary of the night they were inflicted. In the Lickey Hills in haunted Worcestershire, the local folk tell how the Devil and his chief huntsman Harry-ca-nab hunt wild boars, and if they cannot find their game they hunt the locals."

For nearly an hour, Will detailed the atrocities, the blood-soaked fields, the devastated lives and stolen children, the changelings, the disappeared, the hunted and the haunted and the corrupted. His litany of misery covered every quarter of England, and reached back as far into the past as historians had documented. It was as he had been told in the days after he had been recruited by Walsingham, and Miller's reaction was the same, the disbelief shading to shock, then to a creeping, cold devastation at the realisation that there was no safe place.

Stretching his legs, Will watched the clouds blowing across the afternoon sky as he completed the first part of his account. "In Atwick, in Yorkshire, no one dares drink at the local spring. In York ... at Alderley Edge ... at Kirkby Lonsdale and Castleton Fell ..." His words dried up, but the silence that followed said enough.

"My grandfather disappeared in the marshes at Romney, following a mysterious light. We never found his body," Miller began hesitantly.

"They are everywhere, Tom Miller. In every part of this country, and beyond too, I would wager. We have all been touched by them, though we might not realise it. They may exist on the edges of what we see, but they are always there. They have always been there."

"What are they?" Miller asked. "Are they-?"

With a reassuring smile, Will held up a hand to silence him. "The farmers do not speak their name, lest they answer. They call them the Fair Folk or the Good Neighbours. You know who they are."

"My mother said they helped."

"Some did. But there is a cruel group among them who find us game for hunting, or sport when they are bored." As he looked out past the broken tiles, across the smoky city, Will could feel the eyes of Launceston, Mayhew, and Carpenter on his back, all waiting to see how Miller would deal with the news. He had revealed to him the problem and brought him down; now it was time to uncover the solution. "But no more," he added.