The Prince of Lies (Night's Masque, #3)(29)

“Hoping to see fairies?”

Mal laughed, but the words struck home. What if such stones were spyholes into the dreamlands?

“Give it here.” Sandy held out his hand.

Mal passed the stone back, and his brother produced a length of string from somewhere and hung the stone up from the bed canopy.

“To keep away nightmares,” he said softly.

“But what does it all mean?” Mal asked. “Have the dreamlands worn thin because the guisers were here so long?”

“I don’t know. Something happened there, that’s for certain. Something big and dangerous. Perhaps that’s how the devourers got into the dale, back in Charles’s day. The dreamworld wore thin and they broke through…”

“So why didn’t we notice it before?”

“Perhaps it was there all along, half healed, only something made it worse again. Like when you scratch a scab off and make it bleed again.”

“This thing,” Mal said, thinking back to their journey across the dark plains. “This… wound. It must have some corresponding spot in the waking world, yes? Somewhere not too far from here.”

Sandy’s eyes widened. “Yes! Yes, that’s it. If we can find out where the dreamers broke through from, it might tell us who they were and what they were really up to.”

Mal stared at his reflection in the darkened window, recalling the times he had been pulled bodily into the dreamworld by Sandy. Was that how the damage had happened? Had their own passage left similar wounds, places where the veil of sleep was thin enough for nightmares to seep through? There was so much he still did not know about the strange magics he and his brother were heir to, and the more he learned, the less he wanted to know.





CHAPTER VIII



For the next three weeks they explored the surrounding Peaklands, heedless of the rain that continued to fall in grey sheets. Mal had thought their previous investigations thorough, but Sandy pressed on much further this time, pointing out that distances in the dreamlands could be deceptive. Soon they had exhausted every valley within a winter day’s ride and were having to stay overnight in unfamiliar villages, but still they found nothing.

“We must have missed it,” Mal said, one freezing cold day as they circled north towards Matlock. “Surely the devourers would never have strayed so far as Rushdale if they’d escaped around here.”

Sandy sighed, his breath clouding the air. “You’re probably right. Let’s have dinner at the next inn and then head for home.”

They followed an icy, rutted path down the hillside into a small village, no more than a huddle of cottages about a grey stone church. An ale-stake outside one of the houses drew Mal’s eye, and he dismounted stiffly.

“A drink will warm us up, even if there’s no food to be had,” he said, leading his horse towards the church gate since there was no stable or even a hitching-post to be seen.

The alehouse was busy, there being little to do in the fields on these bitter winter days. The villagers fell silent as Mal entered, and exchanged glances and muttered curses as Sandy followed behind him. Mal ignored them; he was used to such receptions by now. Instead he bestowed his most charming smile upon the alewife, plied her with silver and soon took possession of two seats near the small fireplace, two jacks of very tolerable porter and a plate of bread and pickled onions.

“You’re a long way from home, gentlemen,” their hostess said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Up from Derby, are yer?”

“Yes,” Mal said quickly, before Sandy could betray their purpose. “Looking for an old friend who used to live in these parts, name of Frogmore.”

It was the first name that came to mind, but that didn’t matter. It did the trick.

“No Frogmores round here, sir. Only gentlemen of your station hereabouts were the Shawes, but they’ve been gone these twenty year or more.”

“Shawe?” Where had he heard that name before? “Oh, so they didn’t sell their house to Frogmore after they left?”

The alewife gave a short laugh. “Not likely, sir. Shawe House is cursed. That’s why they left. No one’s lived there since.”

“Cursed?”

“Haunted by vengeful spirits. Or demons. Old man Shawe was murdered in his bed; slashed to ribbons, they say.”

“Could have been a wronged woman with a kitchen knife,” Mal said, forcing a laugh.

No one else seemed to find his quip amusing. Mal turned his attention back to his dinner, and as soon as both their plates were empty they went back out into the cold.

“Demons, eh?” Mal said as they rode away from the tavern. “Where have we heard that before? Still, sounds like we’re on the right track at last.”

Mal stopped at the last house in the village and asked directions of a grubby-faced child of indeterminate sex, who ran indoors without a reply. A few moments later an old man came out.

“Shawe House, yer say? Well, ye’re on the right road. Carry on about a mile and a half and yer’ll come to a pair o’ gates on yer left. Shawe House is at the end o’ the lane – or what’s left on it.”

The directions were simple enough, and within half an hour they found themselves riding along an overgrown track between a double row of chestnut trees. After about a quarter of a mile the track opened out into what was probably once an entrance courtyard paved with brick, now turned to a copse of leafless sycamore undergrown with the frost-blackened remnants of last summer’s nettles. Beyond stood the house itself: all sagging roof timbers, crumbling brick and empty windows.