Chaos Quest Read online

  “He has that much power?” breathed Thomas.

  “Enough to destroy the Worlds and everything in them. But perhaps he will have forgotten.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In whatever world he is, he will have taken physical form, but he will be … empty … at first, not knowing what he truly is or what he can do. That is the time when I must reach him and somehow persuade him to step into the Heart of the Earth and dream the Worlds safe.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “I should pack. I set out at first light tomorrow.”

  “Let me come.”

  Morgan shook his head. “Thomas, you know this is not for you …”

  “I’ve come with you before to search for people they want. Why not this time?”

  “Can you not see? This time is different. The being I am searching for could destroy us all with the flick of a finger. Our mother did not leave you to my care for me to lead you into danger like this.”

  Thomas’ expression hardened. “It is many years since she left me to be cared for by you. I am a grown man, in case you had forgotten. I make my own choices.”

  “You cannot help with this. You do not have the skills. Or the parentage,” Morgan added, his face darkening.

  Thomas flinched as though he had been struck.

  “I’m going to pack. Goodnight.” Morgan pushed past him out of the room, leaving him there, hands balled into fists at his side, face pale.

  ***

  For a long while Morgan lay awake, thinking of what had just passed downstairs. From his unshuttered window at the top of the house he could see a small slice of sky. It was a clear night and he watched the first early-burning stars as he wondered what he should have done or said.

  He’d always known there was something different about him. The first thing he became properly aware of was that he could find places in the Wildwood that no one else could. Not just hidey-holes for children’s games, but real places that no one else seemed aware of: the secret glades where the black deer ran and the wild grey horses watched him without fear or curiosity as he stumbled about, amazed; the great thicket of briars, thick as one of his arms, with narrow paths between them leading to a still pool, no bigger than a cartwheel, which reflected not the sky above it, but some other place entirely.

  Then, one day when he was ten and searching for a fledgling linnet to tame as a song bird, he wandered, unknowingly, into the Empty Place. He was so terrified by what he saw there that when he stumbled home that night he was speechless with fear and his mother looked into his eyes with a terrible foreboding and held him tight in his bed until he stopped shaking and fell asleep.

  The next morning, she told him who he was.

  “This village has been here in the Wildwood for hundreds of years,” she began, “and in all that time it has been a safe place. No raiders have come here, nor floods, plague, nor forest fire. There are rituals that take place year after year to keep us in such safety: bargains made with the Gods. One of them is the ritual of the Traveller at the Ford.

  “Each year all the men and women of the village draw lots; the one who is chosen spends the first night of harvest full moon in that little hut near the river bank, down by the ford.

  “Some years it means no more than an uncomfortable night, but if someone should cross the ford between sunset and sunrise the person in the hut must do whatever is asked of them, however trivial, however terrible, to safeguard the village. There are all sorts of tales of what folk have done in the past to protect us.

  “Eleven years ago, my name was drawn and I went to the hut by the ford. Such a long night it was; I lay there sleepless, watching the moon cross the sky, listening to the river, waiting for the sound of someone approaching. There was only a little time left before dawn when I heard the sound of a horse crossing the ford and a few seconds later the Traveller came into the hut …”

  She paused, her mind somewhere far off. “I never spoke of it to anyone until this day.”

  She gathered her thoughts. “For a year and a day I travelled with him, always thinking of home. Then he brought me back to the ford, with you just a babe.”

  She stopped talking, this time for so long that he thought she’d finished, and so started to rise from his chair. The movement seemed to bring her back from wherever she had been.

  Then she told him who his father was.

  ***

  Morgan woke the next morning dull-headed and unrefreshed, his mind still snagged on the odd images that had disturbed his dreams: a cave, glittering with fire, a little meadow of parched grass on top of a hill, and the face of a young woman with dark red hair and eyes the colour of copper coins.

  The images stayed with him as he put what he needed into his pack and he was still brooding over them as he went downstairs.

  In the half-light of the kitchen, Thomas sat waiting for him, booted feet on the table, pack on the floor beside him. Morgan groaned.

  “I told you …”

  Thomas shrugged. “You can knock me senseless, bind me hand and foot and lock me in the barn, then have me follow you as soon as I get out if you want, but it would be simpler if we just went together, you know.”

  Turning his face to the wall, Morgan knocked his head against it a few times, just for the relief of the physical pain it brought. He was about to speak when Thomas said, in a quite different voice, “Mother didn’t just tell you to look after me, you know. She worried about you. She knew you would have to face such difficult things. ‘Don’t let him lose his way in all of it, Thomas,’ she said. ‘Keep him safe.’”

  “You never told me that before.”

  “I was saving it for when I needed it,” replied Thomas, swinging his legs down from the table. “It’s time we went, surely?”

  Morgan sighed. “Come on then, but you’ll have to keep up; I’m not waiting for you.”

  FAMILY LIFE

  She wandered through the streets, soaking up impressions, information, words. Words flew at her from all around, some making sense gradually, but most no more than patterns of noise and silence.

  People stared at her, their eyes moving from her head to the ground. She stared back, curious and when she did so, most of them would avert their gazes. Not the small ones though, the children. They kept looking and smiled, or did not smile.

  After a while she realised that she was the only one whose feet were not covered and that this, as much as anything else, was what made them stare.

  Shoes.

  That was what she needed. Shoes. Later she wandered back to the house that had taken her in. After a while she found some shoes there and put them on. They were much too large and her feet slipped around in them. She took them off again and put them by the door to wear when she went outside again, so that people would look at her face and not her feet.

  She pulled off the clothes she wore, filled the big tub with water and lay in it for a long time, thinking. Her mind was beginning to put the words together to make sense. She had listened to others talking in the street and imitated it in her head as she walked. Now, lying in the steaming water, she practised talking.

  “When’s the next bus due?”

  “Have you got any change, love?”

  “Ha ha ha. Look at her.”

  “I’ll meet you at eight o’clock.”

  “No you can’t have any sweeties. You’ll ruin your teeth.”

  Maybe when she next went out she would try speaking to someone.

  ***

  David lay on his bed, his headphones on and his eyes shut, oblivious to the outside world, singing tunelessly at the top of his voice. It wasn’t until there was a tap on his shoulder and he opened his eyes that he realised his father was in the room, trying to talk to him. He pulled the phones off and Alastair recoiled.

  “Good grief, what volume’s that at? You’ll fry your brain. Who is it, anyway?” David opened his mouth to reply, but his father cut him off with a gesture. “No, don’t bother telling me. I don’t suppose it’ll mean anyt
hing anyway. Tea’s ready. Christine’s been calling.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t hear.”

  “You amaze me. Wash your hands before you come through.”

  “Okay.”

  When Alastair had left the room David lay back down and put the phones on again, but after a minute he thought better of it and got up to go and wash his hands. There was no point having another argument. It just got too tiring.

  His dad and Christine were sitting at the table waiting for him when he went into the kitchen.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, David,” said Christine soothingly, in the patient, reasonable voice that set his teeth on edge. She served out the food and they began to eat.

  “This is delicious, Christine, isn’t it, David?”

  “Yeah, it’s all right.”

  “That’s a bit grudging, isn’t it?”

  “Leave it, Alastair,” said Christine quietly, putting a hand on his arm.

  “It’s delicious, it’s wonderful, it’s the best food I’ve ever eaten,” said David, his voice rising, “Can I just eat it now?”

  There wasn’t much conversation after that.

  He didn’t mean it to be like this. He knew she was trying and in fact, if he thought about it, there was nothing about her he actually disliked, she was pretty nice really. It was just seeing her sitting at the table with Dad, or in the sitting room where the big portrait that Mr Flowerdew had done of him, Dad and Mum hung over the mantelpiece that always upset him, no matter how hard he tried.

  She wasn’t Mum, but now that she was married to Dad he was confused. Where did that leave Mum now? Had Dad stopped loving her? Was he meant to forget about her, meant not to speak about her?

  He didn’t understand how things were supposed to work anymore. When it had been just Dad and him, they’d got used to it and looked after each other and had each tried, without saying anything, to fill the gap that Mum’s death had left for the other. Then Dad had met Christine and everything had turned upside down. That wasn’t quite true; he’d worked beside her for a long time and they’d always been friendly, but about a year ago they’d started going out on proper dates and it was nearly three months now since they’d got married.

  He was pleased for Dad, really he was. They’d talked about it before Dad had asked her and David had felt okay about it then, but now that it was real and she was here in the house with them every night it was so different from what he’d thought, and he couldn’t stop feeling that it was disloyal to Mum.

  If only he could still talk to her the way he had done when he had dreamed about the Lightning King. Maybe she could have told him that it was all right, told him what to do, how to behave with Christine. But he couldn’t speak to her and whatever he did seemed to be wrong.

  He’d talked to Kate about it, of course, and she’d listened and tucked her hair behind her ears as she always did when she was thinking hard, but she hadn’t come up with the magic answer that a small, unrealistic part of him was hoping for.

  Instead she had said, “I think you’ll just both have to be patient with each other until you work out how you can…” She wrinkled her nose, looking for the right words, “… fit together without rubbing. I know that sounds stupid, but I can’t work out another way to say it.”

  He knew she was right, but it didn’t make it easier to do.

  Back in his room he put the headphones back on and turned the volume up.

  ***

  Kate groaned and chucked her pencil across the room in frustration. She’d tried and tried and she still couldn’t get it to come out right. Maths homework. Terrible stuff and it seemed to get harder every week. She just couldn’t get her mind round it at all. Muttering, she rolled over and reached for her phone to text Sarah to see if she knew what to do, but before she could, it bleeped and there was a message from David.

  PHONE ME NOW. CAN I COME OVER N HELP WITH HWORK? GOT 2 GET OUT.

  She sighed. That could only mean there had been another row between David and Alastair. She felt sorry for David: anyone would have some trouble accepting a step-mother, but for David, who’d had to lose his mum twice, it must be much worse. Even so, she couldn’t help feeling (disloyally, she told herself) that David was being a bit unfair on Christine and Alastair.

  She climbed down from her bunk and went through to the sitting room where her mum was listening to Ben’s reading homework.

  “Mum, can I ask David to come over and help with my maths homework? I don’t understand how to do it.”

  “Surely you should be asking your teacher about it then, not David.”

  “C’mon Mum, please. He’s good at explaining it. I won’t just get the answers off him, honestly.”

  “No one’s listening to me!” shouted Ben “and Floppy’s in trouble!”

  “Sorry Ben,” said Mum. “Just hold on a second. Go on then Kate, but I want you to talk to your teacher about this too.”

  “Okay, okay, I will. Thanks.”

  She fled back to her room before she too was forced to listen to Ben tell her about Floppy.

  ***

  David arrived twenty minutes later, still fuming and threw himself on the bed.

  “I could move out when I’m sixteen if I had enough money, you know. How could I get the money?”

  Kate let him rant in peace for a few minutes before she spoke.

  “What was it about this time?”

  “Nothing. As usual.” He sat up. “Thanks for calling. What am I meant to be helping you with?”

  “Maths, but you really have to. I can’t do it. I was just going to call Sarah when I got your message.”

  David rolled his eyes to show what he thought of that solution. “What is it? Let’s see.” He read the questions and grinned. “Yeah. We did this a couple of weeks ago. It’s okay once you get the hang of it, but it takes a bit of practice.”

  Kate decided, not for the first time, that it was very useful to have a best friend who was in the top maths set. For her, maths was a sort of soup of confusion, with the few bits and pieces she understood sticking above the surface like bits of bread.

  After half an hour, she got it, sort of. Enough to have a reasonable go at the homework, anyway.

  “Do you want to go round to Gordon’s for a bit after school tomorrow?” she asked as she worked through it again.

  “Yeah, all right. The plants probably need some water anyway. It’s been quite hot.”

  ***

  Thomas hadn’t spoken much since they left the house, an unusual situation for which Morgan was grateful, for his mind was in a whirl as it was.

  However he thought of it, this search seemed madness. To have brought the Stardreamer to the Worlds was a terrible risk; he couldn’t decide whether finding him or not finding him would be worse. He had no idea who he was looking for, but in his heart was an unshakeable conviction that he would know immediately if he found him. How to explain any of this to Thomas, or even what to try to explain …

  If he was honest with himself however, he was glad to have Thomas at his side now as they made their way deep into the Wildwood, through the chorus of early morning birdsong, dew wetting their clothes as they walked along the narrow path.

  They each carried a light pack. In addition, Morgan had his bow and a long hunting knife, but Thomas would never carry weapons. He had never been interested in hunting. When they went into the wood as boys, Morgan would always emerge with a rabbit or a pigeon he had brought down with a sling or bow, but Thomas would come out with some piece of wood that he wanted to carve. True to form, the only blade he carried now was the little knife he used to make his figures.

  “So,” said Thomas, breaking the silence, “where are we going exactly?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Thomas stopped walking.

  “But he’s in the Wildwood somewhere?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think I would … feel his presence.”

  “So,” said Thomas, walking
on, “where are we going?”

  “To see Tisian.”

  ***

  They walked for nearly two hours before a wisp of smoke told that they were near their goal. Ten minutes more and they were standing in front of Tisian’s home.

  It didn’t look like something you could rightly call a house. It appeared to have grown rather than been built, pushing its way out of the ground and into the steep slope behind it, a living tree forming one of its corner posts. Smoke rose from a jutting structure that was presumably a chimney. The door stood ajar, sagging slightly on its hinges.

  “So lads, what brings you to Tisian the Sorceress today?” said a voice from inside and Tisian stepped through the door, smiling.

  TISIAN

  Tisian was tall enough to look Thomas in the eye and she did so now, laughing as she glanced into his open face, but growing still as she studied Morgan’s expression.

  As usual, she wore a dress of chaotic colour, patched with madder and umber, ochre and beech-leaf green. Her greying brown hair was twisted into an untidy knot at the back of her head, secured with a couple of goose quills already trimmed for writing. Thomas noticed that one of them had ink on the tip.

  They had asked her years ago, when they were still boys, why people called her a sorceress. She had laughed, as she so often did and said, “Because I’m a woman who lives alone in the middle of the Wildwood. There are lots of folk think there must be something strange about me just because of that.”

  If she did have any sorcery it was of the same type as Morgan’s: a gift for finding … people or places or things.

  They sat with her now on the little patch of open ground in front of her ramshackle house, eating bread and honey and drinking the heather beer she had made for as long as they had known her.

  When they had finished they sat in silence for a while, listening to the sounds of the wood around them.