The Summoning Read online

  ‘Endrimor is but a single kingdom of a world,’ he said. ‘They need to have it proven that they are vulnerable in their very heart. Seek him out and butcher him where the palace courtiers cannot but stumble upon his corpse. Kill him painfully. Make his death an ordeal. Spread his spilled entrails about their marbled halls. Demonstrate to that accursed place that not one of its people is safe from our wrath.’

  Sometimes the king could pass for a scholar, so mild can be his manner and so thoughtful the aspect he chooses to show when he displays his public face. He is wise and he is pious. But he committed us to the long war against the French, and he fathered Woodstock, the warrior prince, the scourge of Europe. And at that moment the bloodline made itself as plain to me as the salt in the sea when a wave breaks over the bow and slaps a man cold in the face. I was confident I would carry out my king’s command.

  My daughter died in my arms. Her mother followed, the pustules stinking on her, the breath of life choked from her by the pestilence, naught but an hour afterwards. Words do not exist in any language to describe the desolation that followed. Only the ordeal of waiting at my sick son’s bedside while he strengthened and recovered, kept me from descending into madness. My son required a father in possession of his senses.

  I could think of no duty it would give me greater delight to accomplish than that with which I was charged in regard to Hieronymus Slee. I felt at that moment, as the sails above me billowed and the lines grew taut, as the lights twinkled and shrank on the shore behind me and the horses neighed and whinnied under the deck beneath my feet, like a man perished and then enabled by some miracle of providence to be reborn. And I was duly grateful for the miracle.

  Grayling observed that Jane completed her reading a couple of minutes before Adam did his. Adam was no slouch, but Jane was a quick study, a very bright girl, as he had truthfully told her father. Yet it was Adam who spoke first, once he had absorbed the last few lines.

  ‘It was a suicide mission,’ he said.

  Grayling cleared his throat. ‘No, it wasn’t. It is revisionism of the crudest kind to interpret it that way. The Crusades of the century prior to this one were expeditions far more deserving of that description. They believed in God and predestination and they knew very little about the physical world. They undertook these quests sanguine about their own fates. They were not self-destructive, Adam. They were not intent upon martyrdom. They were brave and ingenious and steeled by fortitude.’

  ‘It might not even have seemed all that remarkable to de Morey,’ Jane said. ‘They thought the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. They believed in witchcraft and phantoms and sirens and dragons. But they were telling him the truth, weren’t they, his king and the archbishop?’

  ‘They were,’ Grayling said. ‘Your father came to me a quarter century ago and I denied it. I scoffed at the notion, told him that his thesis concerning germ warfare in the fourteenth century would make him a laughing stock if publicly revealed. But it is all true.’

  ‘And Endrimor exists.’

  ‘You were confronted in the forest at Slee by one of its inhabitants.’

  ‘My half-brother,’ Adam said. ‘He was my half-brother, Rabanus Bloor. You didn’t know that, did you, Professor?’

  ‘I would have worked it out. I’m not stupid.’

  ‘But McGuire has not told you everything.’

  ‘Sometimes we don’t know which dots to join,’ Grayling said. ‘It is not always obvious.’

  ‘I’d like to read the rest of this account,’ Jane said.

  ‘I’ve rationed you deliberately. It is a lot to take in, to accept. Are you sure that you want to read it now?’

  ‘I’d like a few minutes first. Why have we not beaten them?’

  Grayling hesitated before answering. He smiled, bravely but without real conviction. ‘They are implacable. Their hatred of everything we represent is quite profound. They are very primitive and backward in some ways, but in other, significant ways, they are extremely powerful.

  ‘Where we embraced science and rationality, they embraced magic. And their magic is potent. They can use it to breach our world by coming here more or less at will. We are obliged to use the gateways, and they knew about the gateways and guarded them vigilantly, then we lost their locations. Secrecy is self-nourishing. Over the centuries we forgot where all but one of the gateways were.’

  ‘So the gateways are real? They’re not metaphors?’

  ‘All of this is real, Jane. Was the fellow you saw in the forest a metaphor?’

  Jane shivered.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m being stupid.’

  ‘Your father found the de Morey account in an atlas compiled in the Middle Ages. Its presence there was a clue. He did not see it, but the atlas itself gave the location of the gateways. They were coded, and I broke the code. It was a breakthrough. I think there are fewer people aware of the mirror or shadow world on earth today than there were in de Morey’s time. I think fewer know the truth about the conflict than ever before.’

  Adam said, ‘You went back for the atlas?’

  ‘I was at the foot of the French Alps on the trail of that book less than twenty-four hours after my scornful dismissal of what Jane’s father had discovered.’

  Jane nodded. ‘What now, professor?’

  ‘I think a short break and then the rest of de Morey’s account. After that, I would suggest a trip to Brighton might be a pragmatic excursion for all three of us.’

  ‘De Morey calls that Brandt character an apothecary. Then right at the end, on the brink of his departure for the mirror world, he refers to him as an alchemist. Was that just your scholarly mistake, professor?’

  ‘No, Adam, it was not. I do not very often make scholarly mistakes, let alone errors as sloppy as that one would have been. The translation is entirely accurate. Do you really think a mere apothecary would have had the ear of the king of England and the principle representative in England of the Holy Church of Rome?’

  ‘I’m not an historian.’

  ‘No, you are not.’

  ‘Nor am I a warrior in the mould of Robert de Morey.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Never in a million years.’

  Grayling was silent for a moment, stroking stroked his beard. The rain lashed against the pane of his office window behind him. ‘We all of us come out fired from the kiln,’ he said. ‘We each emerge with the strength or weakness of the clay that formed us. All I can say, Adam Parker, is that I wish more than anything I’d been moulded from the clay that made you.’

  EIGHT

  McGuire never forgot a face. It was a terrible cliché, but a truthful boast in his case. This alert predisposition to recognize even the vaguely familiar had saved his life on more occasions than he cared to number.

  He had spent the first part of a very lengthy adulthood inflicting deliberate and premeditated death on opponents themselves skilled in the cold art of assassination. He did not think his enemies would have forgotten him. He knew that it was entirely beyond them to forgive. He remained careful, having discovered to his dismay that even after many years of relentless physical decline, he valued what was left of him. Having lived longer than any normal man had a right to, he still found he had no urgent wish at all to die.

  The stylishly attired young man staring at him from the pier entrance on the promenade was the same person he had seen skulking down below outside his flat a few evenings earlier. He had mentioned him to Grayling in their brief telephone conversation when Grayling had been in Canterbury. Though Grayling had said nothing specific about it, clearly he had been involved in some trouble there.

  That was the escalation to which he had referred. He had come through it all right, or he would not have been alive to make the call. His attacker would have come from Endrimor. The youth staring at him now was not from Endrimor, McGuire was pretty certain of that, but he remembered him and thought him almost certainly a part of Gray
ling’s escalation.

  The lad was handsome in a neatly featured sort of way. His hair looked expensively cut and his clothes exclusively priced. It was a bright day, early afternoon, and the sun sat at a low angle in a cloudless sky tinted the sullen blue of autumn. He was wearing sunglasses and they looked expensive, too. They should have obscured his expression, but they did not. He looked self-satisfied and secretly amused, a smug pucker around his mouth.

  McGuire crossed the road and approached him warily, but not fearfully. What he felt most was curiosity. He carried the precaution of his lethal cane, using it to help propel him over the road. He had an assured grip on its tarnished silver pommel. His survival in hostile circumstances had been no fluke. The weight of the cane at the end of his arm brought him a warm glow of nostalgic pleasure. He had meant what he said to Adam Parker about it having earned its retirement from the fray, but he knew shadow world business when it stared him in the face.

  ‘Good afternoon, Doctor McGuire. Shall we stroll along the pier together? I have a message for you.’

  ‘From whom does it come?’

  ‘It comes from the emissary, Doctor, from the diplomat Sebastian Dray.’

  ‘Ah.’ McGuire started to walk along the pier and Martin Prior fell into step beside him. This was a sobering development. He knew Dray from reputation and the reputation was impressive, but diplomacy was not a word in the Endrimor lexicon.

  They believed in nothing but their long campaign of undermining and the subjugation it was intended to achieve. Any gesture of mediation from Endrimor had to be a trap. There was nothing to negotiate from the perspective of their opponents in this ancient war, unless it was the terms of earth’s surrender. But McGuire would of course listen to what the vain and silly boy beside him had been sent to say.

  ‘Shall we go for coffee at one of those places at the end of the pier, Doctor?’

  ‘You might do me the courtesy of taking those sunglasses off. I like to see the eyes of those with whom I converse.’

  Martin did so. In the gleam of the low sun his eyes had an ardent glitter. He did not speak until their coffee was in front of them. Neither of them did. He smiled at McGuire over his cup.

  ‘You seem extremely pleased with yourself.’

  ‘I’ve been doing some historical research. Have you ever heard of a naval warship called Incomparable?’

  ‘That depends. What period are we talking about?’

  ‘The Great War, a period you have good reason to remember all too vividly.’

  ‘If you’re going to talk nonsense, I’m going to leave,’ McGuire said. He had rested his cane against the arm of his chair. Now he put his hand on the pommel and rose to go.

  ‘Please sit down,’ Martin said. ‘Allow me to rephrase that. What do you know about a Great War Royal Naval vessel called Incomparable?’

  ‘It was a battle cruiser,’ McGuire said. He sat back down. ‘They were a class of ship thought up by Admiral John Fisher after his drive and ambition had delivered the dreadnought class into service. They were even more heavily armed than the dreadnoughts and they were faster. But the extra speed was delivered at a price. Three of them went to the bottom of the sea during a single afternoon at Jutland. The loss of life was catastrophic. They had a fatal design flaw. Incomparable would have shared that flaw and so she was never built.’

  ‘But if she had been, what would have distinguished her?’

  McGuire sipped his coffee. ‘She would have been colossal,’ he said. ‘Twenty-inch guns, thirty-five knots at full speed, fifteen hundred souls crewing her. She would have dwarfed a dreadnought and her fire power and speed would have been superior to anything else afloat. But she would have been lightly armoured amidships, vulnerable where her magazine would have lain under only seven inches of plate steel. It would have been a fatal flaw and so, the harsh lesson of Jutland learned, Incomparable was never more than a blueprint.’

  Martin smiled and cocked his head to one side. His mouth wore that amused pucker again. ‘There are some people who believe that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. I’ve never thought so, myself. I err towards facts and figures, recorded details. I prefer the solid assurance of tangible documentation.

  ‘Of course, if Incomparable had been built, the best proof would be the physical evidence. I’ve done some wreck diving, but that’s one wreck I’ll never dive. Nor was she ever broken up for scrap. And she has not become a floating museum.’

  ‘That’s because she was never constructed. Who are you? What’s your name? What’s the nature of this message you claim to bring from Dray?’

  Martin ignored these questions. ‘I’ve looked at the employment rosters for the naval dockyard in Portsmouth for the whole period over which these mechanized leviathans were laid down, Doctor McGuire. I’ve scrutinized the wage bills and calculated the manpower requirement and overtime payments, and studied the orders for sectioned steel tonnage and ordnance, and engine turbines and coal, and even rivets. Unless something the size of a large battle cruiser was clandestinely built, there are an awful lot of inefficiencies to account for. The discrepancies are enormous.’

  ‘Your conclusion is absurd. Waste is part of war production. There are always inefficiencies.’

  ‘Of course, the ship was enormous,’ Martin said, ‘as would have been the casualties aboard her. We must not forget about them.’ He grinned, then abruptly got up and left.

  He had done his work and done it well, McGuire thought, feeling shaken and demoralized. But he had done it in the service of a master tactician. Dray understood psychology. He could deploy weapons of the mind in the most debilitating way. McGuire rose and gripped his cane. The swordstick seemed to weigh twice what it had when he had set out half an hour earlier, sprightly and alert. He left the coffee shop and made for the painted railings looking out westward over the sea. There, reluctantly, he reminisced.

  The last gasp of gunboat diplomacy, Lloyd George had called it. Lloyd George had been no diarist and no writer either. He was an orator and everything he committed to paper was written only in the way it would have played out before a fickle public listening to him as he vented forth from a podium. That was the only criterion by which he measured his words. But McGuire thought that on this occasion, the prime minister had been absolutely right in his withering appraisal of what they had done and in so doing, failed to accomplish and lost.

  It had been Churchill’s idea. McGuire’s personal opinion of Winston Churchill tended towards the positive. Churchill had grown into a considerable and even indispensible leader in war in time for the struggle against Nazism. His Great War apprenticeship, by unhappy contrast, had been characterized by a kind of juvenile impulsiveness. It had proven very costly in the Dardanelles, in the heavy losses of the Gallipoli campaign, and his reputation among the Anzac forces had never recovered from that. But as First Lord of the Admiralty, he had also insisted upon the Incomparable deployment. Had history recorded that, Churchill’s career really would have been meteoric, bright and brief and fatally extinguished in the void.

  In ancient times the people of earth who were aware of the great conflict with the shadow world had charted the seven gateways of entry. Over the centuries, the location of six of these had been lost, but the legend of the eighth gateway had endured down the years. This was because, at least in principle, of the possibilities it invited.

  It was located at sea. It was far larger than the rest. Time and tide and atmospheric conditions determined its accessibility. Of course, they had to be correctly aligned. Accessing the eighth gateway was more complex a procedure than plotting its position on a chart. The strategy was, nevertheless, worth persisting with. Because it was at sea, it was difficult to guard. If it could be found and breached, a flotilla could be sent.

  In the time before the birth of Christ, legend insisted that the Romans had searched for the eighth gateway, with heavy cavalry, catapults and other engines of siege and hand-picked legions packed aboard galleys, ready to wre
ak havoc upon the enemy. The conquistadores had searched for it too under their bloodthirsty and plunder obsessed Spanish captain, Cortez. But no one had been successful in finding it.

  And then in 1916 a unit of Greek partisans had discovered a Turkish mariner, washed up on a Cretan beach and barely alive. In his delirium this survivor spoke of lightning and a maelstrom, and the subsequent raw intelligence eventually reached a bright Whitehall civil servant seconded to the Assyrian Section.

  Confidentially, the dots were joined. Someone who knew about the shadow world was sent eventually to interrogate the Turkish sailor. He was sent because the eighth gate had always been rumoured to be located in the Aegean Sea. What the Turk described – the fog and the golden light of the coastal city he thought he saw beyond its murky folds could not really be accounted for when his position was studied on a chart. That was the real apparent stroke of luck. He had been his ship’s navigation officer and the fog had obliged him to calculate their exact position in the moments before the vessel was swamped by a series of massive waves.

  McGuire, who had not been called McGuire then, had been the agent sent to interrogate the Turk. It had been almost a century ago, but the navigation officer’s eyes had been characterized by the same ardent gleam he had just seen on the face of Martin Prior after insisting the young man remove his sunglasses.

  The agent McGuire had boarded Incomparable a few weeks after her sea trials and subsequent mothballed seclusion among the inlets of Scappa Flow. The ship was not a resource of naval warfare. Not on earth. Not after the disastrous fate of the British battle cruisers at Jutland. Her armour was too thin; she was a seagoing liability. But the forces of the shadow world did not include torpedo armed U-boats and steel battleships bristling with gun turrets. The theory was that should she cross successfully, her pulverizing fire power would find its target and the great warship, despite her inherent weaknesses, achieve her vindication.

  They found the gateway. The fog duly descended. The current strengthened under their hull into a whirling vortex. The waves, when they came, were gigantic. But so was the ship, with her thousand feet of length and 48,000 tons of displacement and the 180,000 horsepower of her engines, and she did not founder.