the rigging, growing ever louder, until not a man could bear it.
Blood seeped through scarecrow fingers. Sickened, the adventurer could not tell from where that life-essence came.
More straw men clambered over the rail, dripping wet with seawater, and attacked with a greater frenzy, as if the thing’s dying shriek had driven them to greater extremes. Wildwood arms wrapped around a sailor and shattered his spine. Another man fell with a face torn in two. Across the deck, the scarecrows lurched towards anything living, silent until wounded when they joined in with the howling symphony of agony.
Marlowe, too, renewed his attack. His face fixed with determination, he slashed his rapier across straw throats and plunged it into overstuffed bodies. Raleigh flung himself into the fight alongside the playwright.
‘These are just the start,’ the younger man gasped with tear-stung eyes. ‘There is worse to come.’
‘Clear room at the rail!’
The explorer recognized Walsingham’s booming voice. Glancing back, he saw the spymaster standing alongside two white-faced sailors who had dragged the chained chest from the captain’s cabin.
The straw men come for the one in the chest, Raleigh realized.
‘Send him over the side,’ Walsingham said coldly.
While the battle raged, the two gasping crewmen hauled the chest to the rail, lifted it with a grunt and a curse, and then rolled it over the edge.
The resounding splash was like a bell signalling the end of the battle. The scarecrows let men drop to the blood-soaked deck, unfurled wooden fingers from pulsing necks, and turned away from killing blows. One by one, they stumbled towards the rail and climbed over the side, following the siren song of their master.
The grim-faced crew staggered back, hands pressed to mouths, to a man trying to make sense of the horrors they had witnessed.
Raleigh ran to the rail and peered into the black water. ‘What were they?’ he asked.
Marlowe shook his head and turned away, a man on the edge of despair.
The adventurer caught the playwright’s arm and asked, ‘The one you brought here … Fabian. Will the Unseelie Court let us escape now he is dead?’
‘They are hard to kill,’ Marlowe said in a flat voice. ‘I would not worry yourself unduly.’
Walsingham strode over, his expression unreadable. ‘Set sail for Kent, Sir Walter,’ he said. ‘Master Swyfte waits for us, expecting news of a great victory. He will be disappointed.’
Marlowe rounded on his master. ‘We will rue this day,’ he raged. ‘We had here a chance to stop the horrors that are moving steadily towards England. Playing games with politics has doomed us all.’
The spymaster’s graven expression was a warning of the punishment that awaited the young playwright. ‘When we return to the Palace of Whitehall, you will tell me all you know. But you will speak to no one else of what you discovered in Reims, do you understand?’
Dismally, Marlowe nodded. ‘And what of poor Devereux? This last day has destroyed him.’
‘Set him free,’ Walsingham said, turning on his heels and striding towards the cabin. ‘He has lost his wits. What harm can he do?’
‘What horrors did Kit witness at the seminary in Reims?’ Will stared into the glowing embers in the hearth with visions of bleeding straw men playing out across his mind.
Raleigh took a draught of sack to steady himself. ‘Whatever he told Walsingham, the old spymaster took it to the grave with him. Marlowe certainly never discussed it with me, though we talked long and hard on the journey home to Kent.’
Where I welcomed Kit, without realizing the monstrous things he had experienced in France, nor the nature of that work or the others involved, Will thought bleakly. So much suffering could have been prevented if secrets had not been kept. All the strands of recent events were drawn together in the story the explorer had just related: Gavell, Shipwash, and the other names on the list from Kit’s boarding house were there, as was Poley, that sly character who was in the small room where the playwright was murdered. And what connection was there betwixt those straw men who terrorized Raleigh’s ship and the Scar-Crows who could not be distinguished from living, breathing men?
‘In that conversation between Sir Walter and Marlowe, the seeds of the School of Night were sown,’ the Wizard Earl stated solemnly. Pacing to the window, he observed the distant lights burning in the trees. ‘A conspiracy, by any other name, that would no longer accept the brutal politics of empires, where risks are taken with the lives of good men and women for the sake of power and gain.’
‘We agreed to set ourselves to a higher standard.’ Raleigh drained his goblet and called for more. ‘Artists, writers, philosophers, thinkers, men of physics, aye, and men of magic too, who could understand the ways of the Unseelie Court and the strange realm from where they originated. Men like our good Dr Dee and those in his occult circle. Indeed, Kit already dabbled in these things. While at Cambridge, shortly before you two first met, he attended a lecture by that High Priest of the Sun, the Italian Giordano Bruno, and borrowed a book of magics from him.’
‘And that damnable volume brought to him the Fay that has haunted him these long years and made his life a misery at every turn,’ Northumberland muttered from the window.
Will paused, his cup halfway to his lips. ‘Xanthus the Hunter? That thing with rings of blue and black marked upon his head, which I fought during my first meeting with Kit, and which now pursues me through hell and high water?’
‘The very same.’
In that moment, Will understood so much about the sad life of his long-suffering friend and the events that had transpired in recent weeks. ‘I see patterns where I thought there were none,’ the spy whispered to himself. Like his protagonist, Faustus, Kit had summoned his own devil through a search for secret knowledge and it had destroyed him by degrees. He was the architect of his own end. How that must have tormented him.
‘Kit struggled hard to ensure you were not drawn into his circle of misery,’ the explorer said with a sad smile. ‘He was adamant in that. “Will is a good man and he should not suffer for my sins,” he said to me on that journey back from France. Indeed, the School of Night has helped you many times over the years, though you have never seen it. Information reaching your ears at just the right moment. Aid arriving as if by magic in times of danger.’
‘And the plotting of those bastards in the Privy Council, and of your new master, Cecil, diverted from your door,’ the Wizard Earl said, turning to face the chamber.
‘We are everywhere,’ Raleigh added with a nod.
Will rose on weary legs. ‘So now all is made clear. If I am to know what Kit discovered and what the Unseelie Court wish to keep hidden, I must retrace my friend’s footsteps, to Reims and the English College. But one thing escapes me. You say Kit was keen to return to France to find this Corpus-Scythe. And Griffin Devereux spoke of it too. What is it?’
The adventurer shook his head. ‘It was of the greatest importance to Kit, I can say that. He felt it was key in preventing whatever plot he feared was about to unfold.’
‘Then I thank you for taking me into your confidence,’ the spy said, ‘but there is no time to lose. I must make arrangements to leave within the hour.’
