The Prince of Lies (Night's Masque, #3)(28)

“Why don’t I tell you a story,” Sandy said, propping himself up on one elbow, “like Mother used to?”

“If you think it will help,” Mal replied, trying to get comfortable. The mattress was lumpier than he remembered, and sagged in the wrong places.

Sandy began to tell his tale: something about an old man who lived alone in the woods, far from any clan or settlement, eating only berries and drinking water from the leaves of… Mal had a brief moment of clarity in which he realised his brother was not speaking English or any other Christian language, then all thought dissolved and darkness closed around him.



Mal kept his senses sharp as he walked at Sandy’s side across the colourless ankle-deep grass. Hills rose around them, mimicking the landscape of the waking world. This early in the evening only a faint gleam here and there marked a sleeping child or an old man drowsing by his fire, which was why Mal had insisted on beginning so early. If there were guisers lurking after all, they would see them a mile off.

“Over that way,” he said, pointing to a gap in the hills. Sandy broke into a run and leapt into the air, skimming effortlessly over the grass like thistledown on the wind. Mal cursed and tried to copy him, feeling his stomach lurch as his feet left the ground. Up he soared, so high he feared he would fall, but then Sandy was there holding his hand and they were flying side by side. Mal laughed. This was what he remembered from his childhood dreams, before the dark days when Sandy went away–

“Stay with me!” Sandy shouted in his ear. Mal blinked away a fog of silvery light. “You have to stay focused on the here-and-now, or you’ll fall back into a dream or, worse still, wake up.”

“Sorry.”

They flew onward, over hills far taller than their counterparts in the waking world. The air should have been colder up here, but nothing in the dreamlands behaved quite as expected. The nacreous sky seemed a lot closer too, as if it were the ceiling of a gargantuan hall, not a crystalline sphere millions of miles across. Though if it were a ceiling, the painter had been drunk. Stars were meant to be twinkling pinpoints of light, not haphazard smears that swam in and out of focus when you tried to concentrate on them.

“Not so high!”

Mal turned his attention back to the land below them. There. A line of hills like a dog’s back tooth. He soared around the tallest peak and into the valley beyond.

“Is this it?” Sandy gestured to a paler area of ground. “You were right. It is… most strange.”

They touched down at the edge of the… whatever it was. At their feet the grass began to thin, revealing bare patches of what ought to have been earth but looked more like skin, riven by a thousand tiny creases that traced lines around the contours of the land. Some of the larger cracks emitted a faint golden light, as if dreaming minds lay just under the surface.

“It’s like the thinness I saw at the skrayling camp,” Mal said, “and yet different somehow.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it before.” Sandy knelt and touched a finger to one of the glowing cracks.

“Don’t!” Mal shouted, but it was too late.

Sandy’s arm was sucked into the crack, slamming his head against the ground. Mal slid his arms round his brother’s chest and pulled. Sandy did not budge so much as a hair’s breadth; Mal might as well have tried to lift a mountain.

“Wait! I can feel something. Hold on… now pull again!”

Mal heaved, bracing his feet either side of his brother’s torso, and Sandy’s arm slid from the crack with a sound like a cork being pulled from a bottle. They both tumbled backwards–

–and woke up in the curtained bed in their old room. Mal disentangled himself from Sandy and stumbled up from the bed in search of a candle. By the time he had it lit, Sandy was sitting up in bed, a puzzled look on his face, staring down at his cupped hands.

“What in God’s name…? You brought something back with you?”

Sandy held out his hands. In the soft glow of the candlelight Mal could just make out a dark shape about the size of a hen’s egg but flatter and more triangular, with a small circular depression near one end.

“Isn’t that–?”

“The hagstone I found in the beck? Aye.” Sandy grinned and held the stone up to the light. As Mal had guessed, the dent was a hole that went all the way through. “I thought it lost all these years.”

“But what was it doing in the dreamlands? And how…?” Mal shrugged helplessly.

“I think… You remember I had to reach a long way down into the water to get it, right up to my chin? And you were holding onto me so I didn’t fall in.”

Mal nodded.

“I was thinking about that moment,” Sandy went on. “When the crack pulled me in. And then I felt it.”

“The stone.”

“Yes. As soon as my fingers closed around it, the… whatever it was… let me go. As if it had done what it meant to do.”

“Do what? Give you your old hagstone back?”

“No. Complete the memory.”

“How do you know all this? You said you’d never seen anything like it before.”

“I haven’t. But it makes sense.”

“A mad sort of dream sense, perhaps.” Mal took the stone from Sandy’s palm and peered through the hole.