she could.
I nodded and left.
As I walked back through the centre to the bus station, my mind circled around Karen and her family. I could see why Greg wanted me to leave this alone. If the disappearances were all this messy then they were better left as they were. I couldn't help feeling, though, that there was more to it, that Karen was only part of a larger picture. When Garvin had given me the mission and said it was up my street, he must have meant more than elopement, surely?
Having used the Ways twice already that day, I did not trust myself to use them again without becoming distracted and lost. Instead, the nearby bus station offered me a ride that would eventually carry me back to Ravensby. I would arrive late, but despite the interrupted sleep of the previous night I felt restless, not tired. A daughter I couldn't find, a pregnant girlfriend somewhere on the road, an enemy returned and a puzzle I couldn't fathom. I let my mind chew on all those as the bus rumbled over the Yorkshire wolds and down to the coast, the twilight creeping up the hillsides as shadows slid into the valleys. When it finally hissed to a stop in Ravensby, it was dark.
The pubs along the seafront spilled drinkers out on to the pavement. The wind died leaving the evening cool but not chilly. The chip shop was open so I bought cod fried in batter, fresh cooked, so I had to wait. I asked if the fish were locally caught. The answer was terse: not likely. Was there so little support for local industry?
I took my paper-wrapped parcel down to the bench at the end of the harbour wall where the green and red lights gleamed to guide returning boats and the scents of diesel and seaweed were replaced by salt and ozone. I watched the waves trying to undercut the steep bank on the other side of the harbour and ate until my fingers were greasy with chip fat and my lips gritty and sore with salt. I dropped the paper in the bin and walked slowly back along the harbour wall, counting the boats and noting that there were too many to moor at the wall. Some were tethered to others, in places three deep. Was this the consequence of fishing quotas: no reason to work the boats any more? Or did the call centre have its attractions compared to the waves, the weather and the dark?
The dock wall ran in a long seashell spiral, punctuated with iron rings every few yards. I followed it round, watching the lights reflect off the water. I had caught fish from such a harbour, years before, using a line weighted with lead, hooks hanging off the side, baited with bread. I thought Alex would be delighted to catch the wriggling slivers of silver, but she was only concerned that they be released unhurt. When one swallowed the hook and I had to kill it to get it loose, she cried and would not look at me for the rest of the day. I didn't catch any more.
At the end of the harbour the road kinked around the headland, leaving it without pavement and rising to look over the harbour at one side and a shingle beach at the other. Below, massive blocks of concrete tumbled out into the water at the promontory, breaking up the waves, but you could already see that the water was winning. Sooner or later the road would crumble into the sea.
The road curved around and followed the line of the hill above the beach, each house perched above the next to get a better view. The lights dwindled until there were only the pale ghosts of gulls riding the updraft from the cliff. A path dropped away from the road on to the beach and I crunched my way down, my boots sliding on stones until it levelled out into shingle, shifting with the sea.
The waves were luminous in the dark, rising sharply to foam on the shore then sift back into the swell. The breeze buffeted me, tugging at either end of the umbrella, twisting and testing my grip. Each wave was a rush, then a sigh. It had a rhythm of its own, irregular and slow, a leviathan snore.
My thoughts drifted to Blackbird and I was thinking that I would retrace my steps before the tide turned and cut me off from the road, when I encountered something strange. I would have noticed it earlier if I'd been concentrating, but the slow thrum of power beneath me echoed the crump and slide of the waves in a way that felt so natural, it was almost invisible. A Waypoint? There was nothing in my codex about a node on the beach.
I felt downwards beneath me, testing the power. Not a Way-point, but something else. I walked slowly up and down the shingle, using the feeling to follow the line. It tracked the line of a stream that ran from tumbled rocks below the cliff down to the sea, staining the shingle dark. I followed it upstream. As I came to the rocks I felt another sensation, a dark prickling across my skin, an urge to turn away. There was a warding. I pushed into it, curious now as to who would place a warding here, and why. What was there to protect?
The warding changed. I found myself looking up at the rock face, wondering how safe it was, imagining rocks crumbling, falling in an avalanche of tumbling stone and dust, crushing bones. Even more curious. The simple warding I had placed on my bag was for the zip to jam, but it was just that. If someone tried to force it, it would not change into something else since I was not there to drive it. There was no intelligence in it.
This was different. I pressed forward again and had the immediate sense that the tide had changed. If I didn't leave right now, I would be trapped. I looked behind me. Was the water closer? Were the waves coming higher up the beach? I looked back at the rocks. The cliff face leaned over me, hanging unsupported. A strong wave would bring the whole cliff down, sliding and crashing into the surf, burying anything in its path under tons of soil and stones.
The last time I encountered a warding this strong had been in the Royal Courts of Justice. The Shade Solandre had left a foreboding, a sense that there was danger waiting for whoever entered. It had been left to keep away the security guards and as a distraction from the real peril that awaited there. She had not remained to guide it, so I was able to overcome it by embracing the creeping unease, holding it up to examination and recognising it for what it was – a baseless fear.
The way this warding shifted and altered, seeking to exploit my fears and find the cracks in my confidence, meant that there was someone giving it intention, someone with power. As I pressed against it, recognising it for what it was, the reaction would warn them that I was here. They would feel me pushing the boundary, testing their strength. The umbrella in my hand became a sword.
I pressed in, clambering over the rocks, following the stream of power. Great slabs of stone lent each other support, tumbled and tilted after some great collapse. The gaps between were deeper darkness, slimy with seaweed and treacherous underfoot. My mind conjured sharp-clawed crabs and poison-barbed spiny urchins. I rejected those too, easing under the arch of rock into the space beyond, finding a smooth cleft in the rockface, softly luminous with algae where the stream emptied out under the rocks. The warding was intense now, leaving me sweating and claustrophobic as I squeezed through a shallow dip into the gap. The narrow gash of stone clenched around me so that with only a minuscule shrug the earth would grind me up and spit me out. I felt the beginnings of that shrug, the initial trembling in the earth before the quake that would grind one face against the other, chewing me between granite teeth, and then it was gone.
The cave was a tall arch, smooth-sided and worn to the touch, buttressed by pillars of striated stone. The rock floor was gently dished with the stream running through a net of intricate grooves cut deep, so that the water babbled and tinkled beneath my feet. A soft glow filled the space, lit from hollow niches scooped from the wall. In each niche was a skull, human size, bare teeth glinting in the light from the rock behind, eye sockets bearing empty witness. The skulls looked old, the bone yellow and waxy in the diffuse light, the pate parchment-thin. I drew the sword from the scabbard, slowly, silently.
I started counting the grisly trophies as I followed the meandering stream back into the cave. At twentysomething I had to slide between two pillars. I squeezed through, holding the sword unsheathed in one hand, the scabbard in the other behind me, ready to fend off any ambush, but found only more eyeless masks to mark my progress. Ahead, the rock overhead dipped, the roof running into stalactite dribbles between long teeth of stone, open like a maw. The atmosphere felt damp here, and there was a slow dripping. Through the maw, a night-black pool opened out under an upturned bowl of swirled stone. Drips from the roof created expanding circles in the mirror surface, reflecting the ring of glowing grins from the niches spaced around the pool. The skulls looked newer here, the brow-bones white and gleaming.
'You are unwanted here.' The voice came from beyond the pool – the dark, the water and the rock making it difficult to pinpoint the source.
'The warding gives that impression.'
'You bring bare steel and expect a welcome?'
I slid the sword slowly back into the sheath, holding it ready. I could draw it if I needed to. 'Is that better?'
'Improved. Now it is only marred by your presence. Remove that and my equanimity will return.'
'Do you make all your guests so welcome?'
'You are not my guest, Warder.'
