Lost Acre

Book 3: Rotherweird

by Andrew Caldecott

Genres: Fantasy; Contemporary Fantasy

Synopsis

'Intricate and crisp, witty and solemn' Hilary Mantel, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall on Rotherweird APOCALYPSE NOW? Geryon Wynter, the brilliant Elizabethan mystic, has achieved resurrection and returned to present-day Rotherweird. But after the chaos of Election Day, how can a stranger from another time wrest control? And for what fell purpose is Wynter back? His dark conspiracy reaches its climax in this unique corner of England, where the study of history is forbidden and neither friend nor foe are quite what they seem. The stakes could not be higher, for at the endgame, not only Rotherweird is under threat. The future of mankind itself hangs in the balance. 'Baroque, Byzantine and beautiful - not to mention bold. An enthralling puzzle picture of a book' M. R. Carey, bestselling author of The Girl With All The Gifts on Rotherweird

Release date: July 25, 2019

Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books

Print pages: 512

Sample

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Outsiders

Doktor Heinrich Flasche A physicist

Jonah Oblong A modern historian, Master of Form IV

Dr Obern A plastic surgeon

Varia A ballerina

The town of Rotherweird

Rhombus Smith Headmaster

Hengest Strimmer Head of North Tower Science

Vixen Valourhand A North Tower scientist

Gregorius Jones Head of Physical Education, Master of Form VIB

Godfery Fanguin Former teacher

‘Bomber’ Fanguin His wife, a fine cook

Angela Trimble School Porter

Sidney Snorkel The Mayor

Cindy Snorkel The Mayor’s wife

Gorhambury The Town Clerk

Madge Brown Assistant Head Librarian

Marmion Finch The Herald

Fennel Finch (née Croyle) His wife

Percy Finch Their son

Bert Polk Co-owner of The Polk Land & Water ­Company

Boris Polk Co-owner of The Polk Land & Water ­Company

Orelia Roc Owner of Baubles & Relics, an antique shop

Aggs A general person

Estella Scry A clairvoyant

Ember Vine A sculptress

Amber Vine Ember’s daughter

Gurney Thomes Master of the Apothecaries

Sister Prudence A Senior Apothecary

Portly Bowes The Town Crier

Horace Cutts A butcher

Mr Jeavons The town archivist

Mr Blossom Master of the Metalworkers

Mr Norrington A baker

Denzil Prim Head Gaoler of Rotherweird Gaol

Bendigo Sly Snorkel’s eavesman

Mors Valett The town undertaker

Former lead characters, now deceased:

Mrs Deirdre Banter Orelia’s aunt

Hayman Salt Municipal Head Gardener

Professor Vesey Bolitho Astronomer and Head of South Tower Science (see Fortemain)

Robert Flask A modern historian

Sir Veronal Slickstone A businessman and philanthropist

Rotherweird Countrysiders

Bill Ferdy Brewer and landlord of The Journeyman’s Gist

Gwen Ferdy Bill’s daughter

Megan Ferdy Bill’s wife

Ferensen A nomadic close neighbour of the Ferdys’

Carcasey Jack A torturer

Gabriel A woodcarver

Rotherweirders working abroad

Tancred Everthorne An artist

Pomeny Tighe An ambitious young woman

Persephone Brown Madge Brown’s sister

Elizabethans

Sir Henry Grassal Owner of Rotherweird Manor

Sir Robert Oxenbridge Constable of the Tower of London

Geryon Wynter A mystic

Calx Bole Wynter’s servant

Hieronymus Seer See Ferensen

Morval Seer Hieronymus’ sister, a chronicler and artist

Thibo Fortemain See Professor Bolitho

Estella See Scry

Nona See Madge Brown

Tyke An enigma

Bevis Vibes An orphan

Benedict Roc A Master Carver

Hubert Finch Rotherweird’s first Herald

The Clauds (all deceased save Ambrose XIII)

Ambrose I Priest and poet

Ambrose VII The Vagrant Vicar, an author

Ambrosia I A dissolute of the Stuart court

Ambrose XIII The Unlucky

Creatures of the mixing-point

Strix An owl-boy

Panjan A pigeon boy

The Mance A dog-boy, also known as Cur

Old History

Brother Hilarion A monk and naturalist

Brother Harfoot His lay companion

Coram Ferdy A young boy

Gorius A speculator (scout) in the Roman legion XX Valeria Victrix (see Gregorius Jones)

Ferox A legionary (and weaselman)

Druid hedge-priests

Old History

66 million years BC (or so).

Creatures of the deep scramble for land, so toxic is the irradiated dust. Creatures of the land seek water to cleanse their coated hides. It is noon, but the sun hides her face, as she has for months. After the blast and the pulse of radiation, darkness and ice invade: impact winter. The skeletal ribs of giant herbivores protrude through the snow like a ship’s graveyard. Everywhere photosynthesis fails.

Alive, just, lungs labouring to expel the clogging soot, she stumbles on, dragging her spent wings behind: the last of her species. It is not the urge for survival which impels her, but the eggs she carries, hope in a shell.

It is sudden as lightning.

Her physical being is sundered, only to reappear in a world transformed – forests basking in sunlight, pure air, the scent of fresh water, green grass underfoot. She ignores the unfamiliar insects scissoring past and hauls her ailing body along the river line.

This is a time without names, but later they will place her in the stars.

Draco.

AD 63. Lost Acre.

Opposition roots in local ritual, not the hearts or minds of individuals: destroy their spirit by destroying their places of worship. These are Rome’s standing orders from Africa to Gaul. They even reach the legion XX Valeria Victrix in Britannia, the empire’s remotest province.

So now auxiliaries set about destroying the stone circle on the crown of the island with mallets, fire and sour wine. Only the central stone is too deep and durable to break.

Downriver, the legionaries face a more frustrating time, for their quarry – an entire community – has taken flight in coracles and vanished without trace into the oak woods which rise from the river.

Gorius, the legion’s lead scout, its speculator, is tasked to observe, analyse and advise. Outside the wood, he can hear the coarse expletives of the legionaries above the scraping hiss of swords returning to scabbards. He wonders if the unexpected but perfectly sculpted tile at his feet holds the answer.

Beside him, his tribune watches, incredulous, as Gorius’ body disintegrates on stepping forward.

Gorius arrives in a wholly unfamiliar place. Its nature tallies with nowhere. Even the grass is different.

Ferox joins him minutes later and snarls at the surrounding press of tribesmen.

‘He is mine,’ barks a hedge-priest in dark robes, pointing his staff at Ferox. Behind him, tribesmen shout, jabbing their spears skywards, women jeer and silent children glare. Their cheeks and foreheads are smeared with patterns in red and blue. A young man holds aloft a cage. Weasel heads dart in and out of the squared bars.

Opposite stands what must be a rival faction. Their priest is in white, almost a physical twin but for the colour of his robes. He approaches without hostility while his supporters maintain a disciplined calm.

‘Pertines ad me,’ he says to Gorius in Latin. You belong to me. ‘Be happy. Fate has chosen for you the better path.’

AD 409. The coast of Britannia.

Gorius has travelled far to witness this moment of madness. He looks down on the ships bobbing in the bay as they set their sails, a hotchpotch reflecting the empire’s fading power. The occasional galley sits alongside Celtic ships with their flat bottoms and high prows and merchantmen with decks cleared for horses and ballistae. At least the Count of the Saxon Shore still knows how to organise.

It is a brilliant day; the white cliffs dazzle; seabirds dance behind the sterns in the hope of discarded offal.

A local, arms whorled in woad, sidles along the clifftop. Gorius’ tanned skin marks him out as one of them, a man in the know.

‘Are they all leaving?’ the local asks.

‘All the soldiers, to a man.’

‘Why?’

‘Their general would kill an emperor to become an emperor. Then another general will set out to kill him. This is a retreat to nowhere.’ Here, he thinks, with these natural frontiers, they could have fashioned a new empire from the ashes of the old. Instead, they limp back to a doomed homeland.

He has had a life of sorts, drifting from camp to camp, playing the retired veteran, but now . . . now only he and Ferox, his tribune, who is still loose in the other place, remain. And five centuries or more must pass before he can fulfil his oath to the hedge-priest and repay his debt for the longest of long lives.

He sits and watches as masts and decks merge to mere blurs and Britannia is left to her own devices.

AD 1017. The Rotherweird Valley.

Gorius sits on a grassy bank where meadows yield to rising beech woods. He tips his head and basks in the midsummer’s day sun, which, tiring at last, has a coppery sheen. Only the unusual leaves tumbling down the slope testify to something out of the ordinary – that, and his age. He smiles. Demigod is too strong a word; a masculine dryad, perhaps. Since his brief transformation, his hearing has been enhanced from birdsong to insects – and footsteps, too. He does not turn; the approaching aura is enough.

They called them hedge-priests in the legion: they looked alike, with white hair falling to the shoulders, faces like arid riverbeds, spindly arms and legs coiled with sinews and veins. After such a long absence, he is unsure whether this is his captor or not, but this hedge-priest clearly knows the distant past.

‘Did you see your tribune?’ he asks.

Still Gorius does not turn, though he drops his head in acknowledgement before returning it to the sun. ‘No, I avoid him, but he’s a survivor, is Ferox.’

The hedge-priest sits down beside him and looks down the valley towards the settlement. ‘They haven’t followed you.’

‘The Hammer did its work. They’re scattered all over the island like soldiers after a victory.’

‘It took years to perfect that brew, and I was lucky in my brewer.’ The old man’s hands are stained purple by hops. ‘What now?’ he asks.

Gorius adjusts the question and returns it. ‘I suppose there’ll be a next time after another millennium.’

‘There will, but you’re safe. You can’t play the Green Man twice; not you, not me.’

Pieces fall into place: they are Green Men both. The indelible bond encourages candour.

Gorius voices his concern. ‘A rope can lose only so many threads before it snaps. The bond between here and the other place is weakening.’

‘It will be worse next time,’ replies the hedge-priest, as if presenting fact, not opinion. A hand delves into his robe and emerges with an offering. ‘A token of my gratitude,’ he says with a smile, which is slightly pinched.

Two long tubes intertwine like the snake on a caduceus before joining in a single mouthpiece. The surface is decorated with fangs, claws and wings: exquisite workmanship in the finest silver. Letters run along the sides, an unfamiliar word: escharion.

Gorius, ever the scout, weighs the probabilities and trusts in intuition. The pipes are too perfectly aligned for mere decoration. This is an instrument, one which plays for a purpose, not a token of gratitude, or not just that. It will initiate a new task which, for whatever reason, the hedge-priest is unwilling to specify.

‘Such craftsmanship is above my station, but thank you.’

‘Another time perhaps,’ replies the hedge-priest, the instrument vanishing back into his robes.

Gorius replays the exchange: a token of my gratitude, the hedge-priest had said, not ours. ‘What became of your people?’ he asks.

It is the hedge-priest’s turn to adjust a question and return it. ‘What became of Rome?’ he replies, turning back the way he had come.

Gorius gazes across the grassland. The sun is losing intensity, its warmth now lazy, burnished and benign. He loves this valley with her fluctuating moods and colours. He will stay here, keeping fit and playing the fool when necessary.

Far off – and this is intuition only – there will be a final mission, and that superbly wrought instrument, the escharion, will be there.

1

A Town of Sorts

How to distil the heart of a town? How to interpret first impressions, so often the most insightful? As with humankind, physique impresses before spirit: the showy places – here, Market Square dominated by the Town Hall, Parliament Chamber and the giant cowl of Doom’s Tocsin; the Golden Mean, the one street which runs straight and true; the flamboyant winding aerial walkway known as Aether’s Way.

Then perhaps the conspicuous secrets: the forbidding (in both senses) wall enclosing the Manor and the large sign on the ornate portico of Escutcheon Place: HERALD – NO VISITORS.

Next, the visitor’s eye might rest on the popular ports of call: the more alluring shops; The Journeyman’s Gist, the town’s single tavern; Rotherweird School; the Library, and Grove Gardens, the municipal green space. Add to these the cosmetic touches: the colourful costumes, the ubiquitous carvings in wood and stone and the multicoloured bicycle rickshaws whose silent vacuum technology highlights absentees from the wider world: no cars, no hoardings, no street signs, no road markings.

If you look harder, the town’s skill-sets emerge as embodied by her twelve Guild Halls, from the Toymakers, with a roof crowded with moving mechanicals, to the Apothecaries, the largest and most austere, hidden away in the poor quarter. There is also the South Tower’s conspicuous observatory at the heart of Rotherweird School.

Beneath the physicality and talents, what is the spirit of this place? A portcullis guarding each way in, in the north and the south, open at dawn and closed at sunset, an embodiment of the town’s fierce independence and hostility to outsiders. Mobile stalls laden with produce for sale or barter must arrive and leave before these great gates rise and fall, confirming a like suspicion for the valley’s countrysiders. Hats are doffed with a jaunty rather than slavish air to Guild Masters, the Mayor, the Headmaster and the Herald: this is a society based on respect rather than deference. Nobody mumbles into handheld machines: here, horror of horrors, people communicate face to face.

Enter a house, any house, to discover another absentee: there are no portraits or photographs of the dead, no diaries or letters or memoirs by or about the deceased. This town has banished history. She lives, by law, in the present.

Houses and streets are lit by gas-lamps fuelled by methane from the marsh. No heads bow over screens, large or small; no antennae or satellite dishes disfigure the roofscape. There is no theatre, for that might encourage satire, irreverence and an eye for history. News is left to the flamboyant Town Crier, an actor-writer who lives in the present and whose doggerel answers to no one. He processes and broadcasts what he sees and hears, colourfully and with a studied neutrality.

But beneath this easy flow swirl deeper counter-currents and eddies, there to be exploited by anyone with the requisite knowledge and a mind to.

2

A Historian in Waiting

In deepening dusk, sitting astride a branch of the great tree by the mixing-point in Lost Acre, Oblong glumly imagined a line of would-be suicides lined up on a bridge parapet, launching into the void one by one as he tried to talk them down. What a failure of advocacy! Pomeny Tighe had swung herself into the mixing-point and disappeared despite his entreaties. Would he ever succeed in a challenge which mattered?

Wynter’s treatment of Pomeny Tighe had been peculiarly cruel. Centuries earlier, he had secretly configured the stones to reverse time, leaving Tighe to face a slow descent from extreme old age into second childhood, and then tricked her back into the mixing-point at the Winter Solstice with the false promise of a cure. The sphere they had provided for this purpose had disappeared with her in the mixing point. But what had the sphere been designed to do? He had not the faintest idea.

A growl disturbed his reverie and balance, the latter restored by a fortuitous branch behind his back. A white-furred, wolfish animal with smouldering blue eyes was prowling around the tree. Another joined, then three more arrived at an unhurried trot. Their sniffing had an aggressive quality, which set Oblong to wondering: if they were the hounds and he was the quarry, who was their master?

But as if of one mind, they raised their snouts and loped off into the dark.

Relief never lasted in Lost Acre. Minutes later, an avian form swooped past him, head swivelling towards his face, before planing back to the forest below.

It’s calling the flock, thought Oblong. I’ll be plucked from my branch like an apple.

He dropped to the ground. Ankles turning on the frozen earth, he ran to the tile.

*

An hour later, tramping through the water meadows towards town, arms crossed against the cold and eyes dipped to avoid the freezing sleet, more questions spawned: Who had won the election? Had Wynter made his move? What was lying in wait for Morval Seer?

These conundrums arrived in a mildly self-important wrapping, for was he not Rotherweird’s only modern historian? It was down to him to unravel, interpret and record.

1

The Winter Solstice

Bill Ferdy cleared, washed and shelved an array of glasses in The Journeyman’s Gist before sweeping the floor; menial tasks which summoned memories of his youth, but for one unique feature: on the fireside blackboard, game scores had been supplanted by as-yet-unresolved electoral bets. May the result not reflect the final odds, he prayed:

Snorkel 1/2

Strimmer 1/1

Roc 2/1

Beads of sleet scurried past. Ferdy pitied the infirm and the young, dragged to the Island Field by the Popular Choice Regulations to hear the outcome of the election, leaving him, a countrysider, as the lone presence in town.

When beer and conversation flowed, time flew; in their absence it positively crawled. 2.56, 2.57, 2.58 . . .

As the minute hand on the mantelpiece clock finally achieved the vertical and Ferdy’s prayer ended with a plea for communal good sense, ill omens struck, one for each chime.

A violent tremor set windows rattling and Ferdy’s feet and glasses dancing.

Dust, a swirling orange, billowed down from the higher ground of Market Square.

Slates cracked and shattered from a fusillade of ballot-balls, which bounced off roofs into the cobbled streets. Democracy had spectacularly imploded.

Then came silence.

*

On the Island Field beyond the South Bridge, the bets on Ferdy’s blackboard had been voided by an act of God. The Thingamajig, Rotherweird’s aerial ballot box, had shattered at the climax of its automated count, her cargo of stone ballot-balls energised by unseen forces seconds before the earthquake.

‘Citizens of Rotherweird, we are checking it’s safe to return. Thereafter a curfew will be imposed for the public good.’

Estella Scry’s amplified voice, backed up by the electricity arcing between the Apothecaries’ conductor-sticks, held sway over a crowd in shock. She had catered for electoral success or defeat, but not for a spoiled vote, an apocalyptic storm, earth tremors and whatever transformation lay beneath the pall of dust enveloping the town. But there was no time to reflect. She must act.

She passed a list of three names to Gurney Thomes, who read them slowly out loud. ‘Sidney Snorkel, Mr Gorhambury and Orelia Roc.’

‘Just so. Take them to the prison on suspicion of sabotage.’

Thomes bridled, both at so lowly a task and her peremptory tone. ‘I am Master of the Apothecaries, Miss Scry.’

‘You decide who stays free is the message – or would you rather they were in awe of Hengest Strimmer?’

Touché.

Strimmer overheard, but did not mind. He enjoyed watching inadequate people shift to and fro like leaderless lemmings. With a failed election and his two rivals under arrest, a vacuum remained to be filled. Scry had promised him power and he believed her.

‘Roc is missing,’ said Thomes.

A senior Apothecary, Sister Prudence, tall, hair in a bun, serene in her severity, stepped forward, not waiting to be asked, and announced, ‘Orelia Roc broke the cordon and headed upriver with the PE teacher. He’s an imbecile, but she’s not, which makes it a surprising decision in the circumstances.’

Thomes could only agree. ‘How upriver?’ he asked, looking at the ice, which had been transformed by the quake into a scumble of moving crevasses and cliffs.

‘They had skates.’

‘Check for bodies,’ said Scry. ‘Give Master Thomes and me a ten-minute start, then let them back to their homes – and keep them there.’

Snorkel belatedly found his voice. ‘This is outrageous. I’m a former head of state, a candidate, a public servant – and I was winning the vote—’

Sister Prudence raised a stick to his face. ‘You’re a corrupt little man with no future, but as you enjoy the sensation of power . . .’

Her stick crackled and the former Mayor subsided into a scowling grimace. Beside him, Gorhambury, immaculate in suit and tie, stood pale and immobile. He could not fault his pending incarceration. Ballot boxes should not explode, and as Town Clerk, he was responsible for due electoral process. The Apothecaries had no business meddling, but Rotherweird’s constitution had frozen in the headlights of novelty. In his head he hunted through a forest of Regulations for precedent without finding any. The town had lurched off-piste, without sign or marker.

The two anvil clouds had separated like exhausted boxers and the snow was easing back to sleet. Even in the gloom, the town’s roofscape had subtly changed.

As Thomes led his prisoners over the bridge, Scry said, ‘You come with me, Mr Strimmer.’

‘The only way to deal with bullies is counter-attack,’ Miss Trimble whispered to Boris as they watched, powerless.

‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man,’ replied Boris mysteriously.

*

Remorse knifed Godfery Fanguin as the captives were led away. So many failures. He should have foreseen the ice-dragon and ­Valourhand’s fatal attempt at interception, and he should not have allowed his feud with Snorkel to bring about this disastrous election. Worst of all, he should have kept a firm eye on Orelia.

And he felt excluded. Whatever intelligence had driven Orelia and Jones upriver, they had not shared it with him; nor could he seek solace with other friends, for Valourhand, Finch, Everthorne and Oblong were all inexplicably missing.

Disenchanted with humankind (including himself), he retreated into scientific curiosity. Had Bolitho’s sphere moved the observatory to Lost Acre? What had Bole’s sphere done to Rotherweird? And what of Wynter?

He turned to his wife. ‘Bomber, why don’t you head home while I do a recce?’

‘There’s a curfew.’

‘Bugger curfews. Something’s afoot up there.’

‘And something’s afoot down here. Housekeeping isn’t bailing you out a second time.’

Fanguin squinted at his wife in puzzled dismay.

‘And don’t give me that “liberal-in-shock” look,’ she continued. ‘Snorkel knew he was losing and sabotaged the vote. Gorhambury did nothing to stop him. And your Miss Roc abandoned us in our hour of need. Somebody had to take over.’

Looking around him, Fanguin realised she was not alone in that view.

With the prisoners, Scry and Strimmer gone, the remaining Apothecaries at last moved aside and the town drew in her citizens.

Just beyond the school, Fanguin stopped at the mouth of a narrow alley. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said brusquely to Bomber.

‘Don’t be,’ she replied, equally curt, as Fanguin trotted out of sight.

Orange dust hung in the lingering dampness, but halfway up the alley the domestic gas supply revived. Windows of all shapes and sizes flickered into life. Hands poked through, checking panes for damage, closing shutters, pulling curtains.

There’ll be work for the roofers, but otherwise no serious harm, Fanguin concluded.

A failsafe mechanism had kept the streetlamps dark, so accentuating the two green-orange sparks which were dancing towards him from the direction of Market Square. Close to, they resolved into outlandish insects with luminous thoraxes and gauzy wings hooked at the apex. They darted, hovered, then darted again, now a few feet above his head.

Finding their way back to Lost Acre, mused Fanguin as they dis­appeared down a culvert.

He hurried on to Market Square, where he was greeted by a familiar figure.

‘Good evening, Doctor Fanguin.’ Scry sounded friendly, if on edge.

Behind her, in the space between Doom’s Tocsin and the Town Hall, soared an unfamiliar windowless and doorless tower festooned in carvings.

‘It’s real,’ she added as he examined it. ‘Old oak through and through.’ She sounded business-like, but nonplussed. ‘Whoever built it used block, pulleys and vacuum technology. There’s no rock or debris. The old surface has vanished, cobbles and all. But I need help with the vegetation.’ On the rim of the hole clumps of spear-shaped grass lay flat. ‘Best not with your finger,’ she added as Fanguin leaned in.

He swayed backwards as if he had never intended anything else, picked up one of the many sticks brought down by the storm and poked gingerly. Two stems whipped up; cactus-like spikes thrust and retracted.

‘See in the middle?’ said Fanguin. ‘They’re trying to flower. Trees and plants throw seed when distressed.’

‘And when feeling the urge to colonise,’ added Scry as she turned to a nearby Apothecary. ‘Show him your catch.’ The ­Apothecary uncapped his hands. The luminous insect changed colour, acquiring veins the hue of the hand which held it. ‘It has tiny toes too. Forget the curfew, Doctor Fanguin. Find what you can and report to the Apothecaries in the morning.’ Despite the air of command, her fingers pleated the sides of her coat; she was still on edge. ‘If you returned to Rotherweird after a long absence, where would you go?’

That at least was a no-brainer. ‘The Journeyman’s Gist, where else?’ he replied.

She hurried off into the darkness. A man, loitering nearby, followed her: Strimmer, the only candidate still in circulation.

Fanguin’s remorse returned. Was Orelia still alive? With the gates closed, he could do nothing for her now, so he hurried home to gather the tools of his trade, head abuzz with puzzles. Who had built the tower, for whom? Why was Scry, a suspected Eleusian, so taken by surprise? He had half an explanation: if she had killed Bole’s familiar, as they believed, she must be hostile to Bole, and so hardly privy to his grand stratagem. The web of conspiracy had a complexity which offered a smidgen of hope. They might be scattered, but the enemy was divided.

A note from Bomber awaited him:

Unexpected job, flan in oven. B.

Fanguin turned up the gas-lamp and surveyed their front hall. Exposed threads disfigured the rug’s pleasing pattern; two banisters, despite his best attention, hung loose, peppered with nail-holes; and his amateur repainting of the walls had created a displeasing stripy effect: all symptoms of the slow slide from comfort to straitened circumstances.

Doctor Fanguin, Scry had said, two times. A mistake, or a promise of better times to come? Conjoined, those two words sounded so very right.

He gathered a specimen box, a tube-light, a pair of forceps and a magnifying glass before heading back to the tower and its narrow surrounding ring of Lost Acre’s soil.

2

First Orders

The mantelpiece clock, still an inch off-centre, chimed dusk into evening. Bill Ferdy unlocked the great door to find the street empty but for an Apothecary who growled, ‘Get back! Haven’t you heard? There’s a curfew.’

He returned inside, pulled himself a pint, a rare treat for a landlord, and sat in the Senex, a tall oak-backed chair next to the fire reserved by tradition for the oldest customer.

Ten minutes later the Apothecary outside repeated his order.

‘I’ve nowhere to get back to,’ replied a male voice, all calmness and authority.

After a pause, the Apothecary sounded less assertive. ‘Who are you?’

‘That’s tomorrow’s tale – but you may consider yourself privileged to be the first to address me.’

The pub’s door opened to admit an ascetic-looking middle-aged man, gaunt in body and face. He neither walked nor shuffled but glided in, holding his stick clear of the floor. Under a dark tan cloak, the stranger wore velvet knickerbockers and a thick jersey with no shirt.

‘Your tavern is empty and it’s twenty-five past six,’ he exclaimed. ‘When did that last happen?’

‘The day of my father’s death,’ replied Ferdy truthfully.

The man appeared pleased with the answer. ‘And I dare say the inn was packed with revelry on the day of your birth?’

‘I imagine it was.’

‘A witness to birth and death: that’s how worthwhile places are. I’ve endured a long journey – I’ll have the same as you, please.’

‘Good choice.’ Ferdy placed a tankard under the barrel. ‘First is always on the house.’

The stranger offered a hand, the fingers tapered, nails well kept. ‘The name is Geryon Wynter.’

Ferdy continued to draw the beer. He had been part of the company opposing Sir Veronal Slickstone and had hosted the late-night meeting at The Journeyman’s Gist after Finch’s abduction. He had heard Ferensen’s account of the primordial impact that had formed the Rotherweird Valley, Lost Acre and the gateways between them, as well as the delivery of the Elizabethan prodigies into the care of Sir Henry Grassal, who had later been murdered by the young Slickstone. He knew about Wynter’s seizure of the Manor, the terrible experiments in the mixing-point and Wynter’s execution after Sir Robert Oxenbridge had returned to the valley to rescue those he could. He knew too that Professor Bolitho, or Fortemain, as he had once been, had opposed Wynter; that the Eleusian women had escaped the fate of their male counterparts and some at least had lived on, and that Wynter’s resurrection had long been prophesied.

However, Ferdy had been on the fringe in recent months, and Ferensen’s disappearance had not helped.

The stranger appeared to read his misgivings. ‘You may have heard talk of me, Mr Ferdy, but, rest assured, I have been misunderstood. All I ask is a chance to correct the record.’

Wynter, if it was truly him, spoke easily, assured rather than arrogant. He sat in the Senex, eyes fixed on the fire, fingers running from table to glass to cheek as if rediscovering the rich variety in the feel of surfaces. He did not turn when Scry and Strimmer entered.

Connections, sensed Ferdy.