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A few wilted leaves blew into the fire – and Earlking’s card went with them.
It didn’t burn.
The leaves it had landed on crumbled to ashes, but the card was as unblemished as when Earlking had first put it into his hand. Jacob drew his sabre and used its blade to flick the card out of the flames. The paper was lily-white.
A magical object.
How had it come to the other world? Stupid question, Jacob. How did the Djinn get there? But who had brought the card through the mirror, and had Earlking been aware of what he was putting in his hand? Too many questions, and Jacob had the nasty feeling that he wouldn’t like the answers.
He turned the card around. The back side had filled up with words, and when he brushed his finger over them, it came away with a trace of ink on it.
GOOD EVENING, JACOB,
I REGRET THAT WE MET ONLY SO BRIEFLY, BUT I HOPE WE SHALL HAVE MORE OPPORTUNITIES IN THE FUTURE. MAYBE I CAN BE HELPFUL SOMETIME WITH THE TASK YOU’RE FACING. NOT FOR PURELY UNSELFISH REASONS, OF COURSE, BUT I PROMISE YOU MY PRICE WILL BE AFFORDABLE.
The writing disappeared as soon as Jacob had read the last word, and the card again showed nothing but Earlking’s printed name.
Grass-green eyes.
A Leprechaun? Or one of the Gilches that the Witches up in Suomi moulded from clay and awakened with their laughter? But in Chicago? No. This had to be some cheap trick, the prank of an old man who’d happened upon a magical object. Jacob was tempted to throw the card away, but then he wrapped it in his gold handkerchief and tucked it into his pocket. Fox was right. He needed sleep. But as soon as he lay down next to the dying fire, he heard shots, and then he could only lay there and listen to the darkness until, hours later, he heard the vixen’s paws and Fox herself a little later as she spread her blanket next to his.
She was soon breathing deeply and steadily, in a sound sleep. And as he felt her warmth next to him, Jacob forgot the dreams awaiting him and the card that brought him words from the other world, and he finally fell asleep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A SPIDER’S REPORT
Carriages and racehorses. Charles, King of Lotharaine, collected both, just as he collected the portraits of actresses. Nerron was sitting in a carriage painted in the national colours of Lotharaine with diamond-studded doors. Crookback clearly had better taste when it came to selecting his suits. Nerron had spent a lot of time searching for a place that was watched neither by the King’s spies nor by those of the onyx – for what he was trying to find out was neither of their business.
Where was Jacob Reckless? That little trick with the door couldn’t have kept him in the tomb for long. The golden rule of treasure hunting (and of life in general) was never to underestimate the skills of your competition.
So – where was he?
The medallion Nerron pulled out from under his lizard shirt was one of his most prized possessions. Out of it crawled a spider he’d stolen when he was five – an act that had then saved his life. The onyx invited all bastard children between their fifth and seventh birthdays to a palace on the shores of an underground lake. The lake was so deep that the moray eels in it supposedly grew three hundred feet long. At the time, Nerron couldn’t understand why his mother wasn’t happy about the honour of the invitation. She had barely spoken a word while he’d admired, open-mouthed, all the wonders of that underground palace. Until then, home had been a hole in a wall, with a niche for him to sleep in and a table on which his mother cut the malachite that resembled her skin. But Nerron was neither tall nor beautiful, both of which the onyx valued very much, and his mother had been very aware what that meant: the onyx lords were miserly with their blood, and bastards who didn’t pass muster were drowned in the lake. A five-year-old, however, who managed to steal a valuable reconnaissance tool while he awaited his sentence in the library, definitely showed promise.
The spider was sleepy, but she began to dance as soon as Nerron poked his claw into her pale belly.
Twin spiders.
Rare and very valuable.
It had taken him months to comprehend what the eight legs wrote on his palm. Their silent dance was not unlike that of bees pointing their kin towards the best flowers. The spider, however, didn’t report what she had seen but what her twin sister was seeing right then. And that twin sister had crept into Jacob Reckless’s clothes in Guismond’s tomb.
The head. The hand. The heart. What was he going to search for first?
The spider wrote what appeared to be fragments of a conversation: . . . an old friend . . . no idea . . . long time ago . . . two, three hours from the ferry . . .
The ferry. That could only mean Albion, and hence the west. Perfect. The mere thought of the Great Channel made Nerron nauseous. The Goyl’s wet fear. If the head was in Albion, then Reckless was doing him a favour by finding it and bringing it back to the mainland.
The spider danced on, but her twin sister was awfully chatty and babbled whatever she picked up. Who the hell cared what colour sky Reckless was looking at, or whether he was sleeping outside or in a hotel? Come on! Where exactly was Reckless headed? Did he already know where he was going to look for the hand and the heart? But all the spider danced was the menu of some Flandrian tavern. Damn. If only those beasts were a little smarter.
‘Are you the Goyl who’ll be accompanying the prince?’
The voice was barely more than a damp whisper.
A Waterman was standing outside the carriage window. He was as scaly as the lizards that had given their skin for Nerron’s clothes. His six eyes were colourless, like the water the stable hands had left out for Crookback’s horses.
‘The Goyl accompanying the prince.’ Wonderful. . .
