Darkwitch Rising by Sara Douglass

Louis circled around on the path, his heart pounding. What trickery this?

What meaning this?

Louis felt the first stirrings of true fear, something he’d not felt since he’d been Brutus, and faced with a life of (as he’d thought then) mediocrity.

“And would I take that mediocrity now, in preference to what awaits me down this trail?” he asked himself, still circling slowly, his eyes wary.

No, he thought. Never.

Louis turned back to the path, and strode down the Ringwalk.

To either side of him reared huge trees, thick with leafy branches and trailing ivy, the way between their trunks obscured with shrubbery and nettles. Apart from the sounds he made, there came little evidence of other inhabitants of the forest, whether bird or animal or other watching eyes.

It was very calm.

Very still.

Very…waiting.

It irritated Louis, this silence, this emptiness.

“Come, take me if you will,” he said, then repeated it louder, shouting it into the forest. “Come, take me if you will!”

“Is that what you wish?” came a soft, lilting voice, and Louis started, for that was the voice of his mother when he had lived as Brutus. She had died in his birth, and by rights Louis should not recognise it at all, but the instant he heard that voice, he knew.

Is that what you wish?

“Yes,” he whispered. “That is what I wish.”

The instant the words had fallen from Louis’ mouth, there came from a far distance a sound that sent a chill down Louis’ spine.

The haunting call of the hunting horn, echoing through the trees.

The horn was so far remote, and so distorted by echoes, Louis had no means of knowing how far and in what direction it lay. But this he did know: that horn signalled the start of the hunt, and the quarry was himself.

Louis grimaced. Yes, he had said. That is what I wish.

He recommenced his progress down the Ringwalk.

For a time all seemed peaceful, although the forest almost literally quivered with tension.

And then, almost apologetically, came a sound from behind Louis.

A single footfall.

A single hunter.

Silvius.

The Idyll, Idol Lane, London

NOAH SPEAKS

He took me by the hand and led me up those damned stairs into the loft of the building.

Once we attained the top landing, we stood before a plain wooden door.

Weyland glanced at me with amused eyes, knowing full well my lack of enthusiasm, then he opened the door and, still holding my hand, pulled me inside.

The door closed softly behind us. For a moment there was blackness, and it disturbed me so much that I actually moved closer to Weyland, needing the reassurance of his warmth and presence.

“Light,” he said, very low, and within a heartbeat soft lights glowed in a score of places.

They did not flare suddenly into life, but gently pervaded the dark, as dawn lightens the land towards the end of night.

My first impression as the lights slowly intensified was one of space. We stood in a great sandstone-columned vestibule, with fan vaulting, and with a flooring of vivid blue, gold and scarlet tessellated tiles. The vestibule’s outer walls were pierced with graceful, arched open doorways leading to balconies, walkways, bridges and long elegant arcades and cloisters. Beyond the doorways and balconies I could just make out a jungle of domed and spired buildings, their gilded tiles glinting under some enchanted sun.

It was a city in this tiny upstairs chamber of Weyland’s house in Idol Lane, and the vestibule its central hub.

My eyes were, I think, impossibly wide. I looked to Weyland, and he smiled very gently at the expression on my face.

“What did you expect? A stinking, dismal cave, full of the musk of Minotaur?”

My face flamed. It was precisely what I had expected.

He laughed, and squeezed my hand before letting it go and walking further into the vestibule.

“I call this,” he said, swinging back to look at me, “my Idyll. It is my retreat from everything that people expect of me, or fear from me, or consider me.”

What people feared of him, or considered him? For that, surely, he had no one to blame but himself. I stared at him, and he made a face.

“You think all of this is a trap, don’t you?”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know,” he replied.

No other answer could have unsettled me more.

I distracted myself by paying more attention to my surroundings. The air was strange—warm, slightly humid, and sweetly spiced.

It was not English air.

“Where is this?” I asked.

“The tiny chamber above the kitchen in—”

I made a noise of exasperation, and he smiled. “It is an amalgamation of the best of all that I have seen over the past three thousand years. I have taken the best and most beautiful from cities in Egypt and Persia and faraway China.”

“This is the heart of the labyrinth,” I said, indicating the central hub in which we stood (I experienced a moment of renewed unease as I said this, for as I turned about I could not see which door it was that led back into the house below). “You have merely recreated your own home, your original home, Weyland, if perhaps slightly more salubrious.”

“Ah, Noah,” he said, walking close now. “You are perceptive, are you not? Aye, this echoes the heart of the labyrinth, but with one crucial difference.”

“Yes?”

“I know the way out. And you don’t.” Paradoxically, at last I felt on firmer ground. This was the Minotaur I understood.

The Forest

Silvius!

Louis stopped dead.

Who else but the father he’d murdered when he was but fifteen for the golden bands of Troy about Silvius’ limbs?

This is no way to found a Game, Silvius had said to Brutus when he’d founded the Troy Game with Genvissa. You cannot found a Game on the corruption of my murder.

So what was this, then? Silvius come to exact retribution? Was this what the Stag God demanded?

Louis ran lightly forward. He was not scared so much as angry, and not running away so much as finding time and space in which to think. His father Silvius, trapped in the heart of the Game all these thousands of years, was coming to murder him, to set the Game to rights, to enable Louis, as Brutus-reborn, rebirth as the Stag God.

Why run from it, then?

Why this anger?

Louis’ footsteps slowed. Throughout his lives as Brutus and then William, the Troy Game had been steeped in murder. Asterion’s, to start with, and then Ariadne’s murder of so many in the name of revenge. Silvius’ murder, by his son’s hand. Genvissa’s death. The death of his and Cornelia’s daughter. Coel’s murder. Caela’s. Swanne’s. Harold’s.

Blangan.

Blangan. Gods, how many years was it since Louis had given her a single thought? She had been the reviled mother of Loth, elder sister of Genvissa, exiled from Llangarlia, brought back to the land by Brutus, only to have her heart torn out in the centre of Mag’s Dance by her son.

What was it about that death? Louis frowned, trying to remember what it was Genvissa had told him about it. She’d manipulated Loth into murdering Blangan, not so much to rid herself of Blangan (although that was a true bonus for Genvissa), but because she’d wrapped this murder within so much dark magic that Blangan’s murder effectively caused the Stag God Og’s murder.

When Loth tore out his mother’s heart, he also tore out Og’s heart.

Louis stopped dead on the pathway, breathing heavily, although more from inner turmoil than from any effort. He heard the footfalls further down the way—Silvius, hunting him—but for the moment he paid them no concern.

He knew what was going to happen, and why.

He knew what part both Silvius and James—Loth-reborn—had to play.

And it terrified Louis.

Why all this lack of courage to face your own death, Brutus, when it was but a simple matter to arrange my murder and to execute it?

Louis straightened and spun about, all in one movement.

His father, Silvius, stood fifteen or sixteen paces behind him.

It was Silvius in his prime. He stood straight and tall, tightly muscled, skin bronzed with good health, crisply-curled black hair tied with a leather thong at the nape of his neck, and white waistcloth beaded with scarlet and emerald and tasselled in gold.

Both eyes stared at Louis, dark, liquid, intense.

About his limbs shimmered six bands of light—Silvius might no longer have the bands, but their legacy still gleamed about his arms and legs.

Silvius held a hunting bow in his hands, a single arrow strung and ready for flight. He had no other arrows.

Louis stared at that arrow, unable now to keep his fright contained, then looked at his father. “Silvius—”

Silvius bared his teeth. Run! Run! I am the hunter, and you the hunted. I will not kill a standing prey, for there is no honour in that. Run! Run!