The Jade Boy Read online

The count watched him for a moment then smiled. “In the time before time, this place was an ancient forest open to the sky. Indeed, I imagine that it was sacred even to those who came before the druids, but that…” he began to laugh hoarsely, “was before I was born.”

  He breathed deeply for a moment and closed his eyes. “Can you feel it, Jeremy? This is the place of power where I shall become immortal. It is the great portal I have sought for more than a thousand years.”

  The count limped over to the far side of the cavern. As Jem’s eyes grew accustomed to the odd light, he saw that Cazalon was standing beneath a curved, shimmering object set on one of the pillars. It was a gigantic hourglass. Cazalon looked up at the glass and pressed one of his gloved hands against the surface of the lower bulb. He watched for a moment as the thin thread of sand trickled down from the bulb above.

  “And it is not a moment too soon,” the count whispered. His words hissed and reverberated from the stone walls – the last word, ‘soon’, coming again and again in a sibilant echo.

  “Now,” Cazalon turned and limped to the centre of the cavern. “I suppose you will want to be reunited with your friend?”

  The count brought his staff down heavily to the stone floor. The noise rang out around the chamber and suddenly the huge space was light as day.

  In the brightness, Jem saw Ann for the first time.

  She was curled up on the floor on the other side of the cavern, Tapwick crouched on a broken pillar next to her. The twisted little man leapt from his perch and aimed a swift, vicious kick at Ann’s legs. She moaned and curled into a tighter ball.

  “Up! Up! Master’s here.”

  Ann moaned again and slowly pulled herself into a seated position. Jem wanted to run to her, but he couldn’t move his feet. He felt as if his head would burst and his eyes stung with unshed tears of anger and frustration.

  Ann’s face was horribly bruised and fresh red blood stained the linen at her sleeves. Cazalon had clearly made the blood bridge again, and recently. She opened her eyes.

  “Jem!” Her voice was cracked and dry, but then she spoke in a rush, “You must run. Listen to me. Get away from here, it’s you. He means to—”

  “That’s enough, you stupid girl.”

  Tapwick’s blow sent Ann sprawling to the dust again.

  Cazalon sneered at her. “You ignorant little fool. Did you really believe that I knew nothing of your schemes – all those feeble conjuring tricks? You have played your part to perfection, Lady Ann. But now I no longer have a use for you. Of course, I am grateful that you enabled me to speak to your mother – who is, I must say, a vastly superior species of sorceress – but I am even more grateful that you proved to be such excellent bait.”

  He paused for moment.

  “I doubt the boy of jade here would have come to his death, so quickly and so willingly, if it hadn’t been for you. And now that he has completed the rites of binding, just as your clever mother so carefully explained, he is my creature. I think the game is over.”

  Cazalon allowed his words to sink in. Then he began to laugh. The harsh noise coiled around the chamber so that the stones themselves seemed to ring.

  Ann’s eyes blazed. Painfully she pushed herself up and stared defiantly across the chamber. “But my mother has a last message for you.”

  Cazalon’s eyes sparked with interest and he limped over to grab a hank of Ann’s matted white hair, pulling her face back so that she looked directly into his eyes.

  “And what is that, little one?”

  Ann glowed with hatred.

  “My mother says that you are a fool, Cazalon. And you will fail because your servant will betray you.”

  She spat the last words into Cazalon’s face.

  Without warning, Cazalon raised his hand and slapped Ann’s cheek so ferociously that her head snapped back, hitting the floor behind her.

  Every muscle and nerve in Jem’s body strained to move, but he was trapped – rooted to the spot. As he watched in horror, he felt a single tear trickle down his face.

  Cazalon contemplated Ann’s motionless body for a moment, then he turned and regarded Tapwick through narrowed eyes. He repeated Ann’s words softly.

  “Your servant will betray you.”

  As before, his voice echoed strangely around the chamber so that the stones seemed to whisper ‘betray betray betray’.

  Tapwick twitched and cowered against a broken pillar.

  “No master! I wouldn’t… never. Not me… Please, I—”

  But as the little man whimpered, Cazalon slowly raised his staff and pointed it at his steward. Instantly Tapwick fell silent – all the colour drained from his terrified face, even from the red-raw sockets of his eyes. A peculiar greyness flowed over his body like a shadow, from the curls of his ragged wig, down over his hunched shoulders, around his arms, chest and legs all the way to the tips of his pointed shoes.

  The steward simply froze like a small stone statue.

  Cazalon struck the ground just once and Tapwick shattered into a million tiny pieces. The count stirred some of the fragments with the end of his twisted staff, smirking as he did so. He turned to Jem and laughed aloud at the expression of horror on the boy’s face

  “It is such a pity that I am going to have to kill you too, Jeremy. For you would have made such an amusing pet. So much better than the mute halfwit and the monkey!”

  The man seemed suddenly weary and sat heavily on a fallen column. He clicked his fingers and the light from the orbs dimmed.

  Cazalon thought for a moment and then leaned forward to draw something that looked like a man with the head of a hook-beaked bird in the dust. After a moment he looked up.

  “Do you like stories, boy?”

  Jem was silent. He refused to look the man directly in the eye.

  “Ah. The young prince is angry with me.”

  Jem flinched.

  “Oh yes! I know who you are, Jeremy Green. I have known for a very long time. It is the only reason I befriended that fool Bellingdon and gave the elixir of youth to his vain wife. I needed to gain access to you.”

  The count grinned. “I always knew a greedy woman like the duchess would use the mummia in dangerous, not to say fatal, quantities.”

  Cazalon seemed to relish the word ‘fatal’, rolling it around his tongue like a delicious sweetmeat. “To be frank, it has all been such an entertaining game. It passed the time most enjoyably… while I waited for your thirteenth birthday.

  “Do you not see?” he continued. “It was you I wanted all along. Not her money. And certainly not her husband’s ridiculous scheme to profit from building a new city. Although, I concede…” he paused for a moment and rubbed out the image in the dust with his foot, “that Bellingdon’s ambitions did prove rather useful. He and his stupid, greedy friends are exactly the sort of souls I need.”

  He stared speculatively at Jem, before adding, “But you shall be my most important soul of all.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Cazalon stood up wearily and limped over to where Ann lay. He prodded her with his foot, but she didn’t move. Was she alive? Jem wanted to run to her but his legs wouldn’t obey him.

  Cazalon’s voice rang across the chamber.

  “Let me tell you something about myself, Jeremy. It would amuse me to see your reaction. And anyway, as you will not leave this place alive, I feel that I can trust you with my greatest secret.”

  Jem stared at the floor. He didn’t want to listen to the man, but he didn’t really have much choice.

  “I am more than three thousand years old, boy. What do you think of that?”

  Jem glanced up in shock and disbelief. Cazalon smiled bleakly.

  “Yes, I thought that might capture your attention. What is more – Cazalon is not my real name. I purchased the title many hundreds of years ago. The library of the Court of Cazalon in the Pyrenees possessed the greatest and oldest collection of books in Europe at that time and so, of course, I had to have them. Knowledge
is power, Jeremy, and I needed power to help me avoid a terrible debt.”

  Jem was listening now, despite himself. He watched as Cazalon walked haltingly back to the broken column and sat down again. The count swiped some dust from his cloak and continued.

  “My true name is Kaphret. Three thousand years ago, I was a priest at the temple of Horus in Thebes. We called our land the Nile Kingdom. You would know it as Egypt.

  “I was young, clever and ambitious. The pharaoh was a fat and stupid youth and yet people revered him as a god. I was jealous. I knew that I had more worth in a single lock of my hair than that dullard. But the people still worshipped him… Or so I thought.”

  Cazalon bent his head and stared at the floor, before continuing, “You must always be careful what you pray for, Jeremy. I prayed to the dark god Set to give me power… and he answered.

  “In return for three thousand years of life he demanded my eternal soul. I accepted his bargain. Who wouldn’t? But what I didn’t care about all those years ago was that I sold the afterlife of my soul for the merest speck in time. I exchanged eternity for a just thirty centuries, Jeremy. Do you know what that means?”

  Jem shook his head slowly and Cazalon’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile.

  “It means that when Set comes to claim his dues I will utterly cease to exist. There will be no world beyond this one waiting for me, no Land of the Dead, no Heaven, no Valhalla, no Elysian Fields, no Isles of the Blest. There will be only the void. An eternal nothingness. And Set is coming soon. Very soon.”

  Cazalon shuddered and Jem realised, with a jolt, that the man was frightened.

  “Three thousand years go very quickly, boy. I first started to worry about my… future many centuries ago. I travelled the world to find a way to escape my debt.

  “From shamans in the frozen wastes of the north to mystics in the mountains and temples of the east, and from the seer tribes of the southern deserts to the shapeshifters of the plains of the New World, I have learned the deepest secrets of earthly magic from the wise ones.

  “And recently I have dabbled with the new magic, the science that so fascinates your royal father, he has established a special society to investigate it. I must admit, Jeremy, I had great hopes for the experiments I carried out to capture a soul on the point of death. You saw the experiments on those wretched animals. Obviously, the next step would have been to transfer my soul to another living vessel. I did think that Ptolemy might be suitable, but as he is so very stupid and damaged, the risk to myself—”

  Cazalon stopped himself. “But I must return to our story. Many years ago now, in the time of Queen Cleopatra, I found a scroll in the great library at Alexandria. It was written in Greek, but the knowledge was much older. It spoke of the Androtheos – the man-god of the Western Isles.

  “The Druids of Albion, from whom your little friend Ann over there is directly descended, had perfected a rite to endow an earthly man with all the powers of a god. And I knew then, Jeremy, that if I could meet Set as his equal, then he could not claim his payment. I too would be an immortal.”

  Ann… descended of the Druids of Albion! Jem was astounded. Had she known this already?

  “I’m sure you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Elizabeth Metcalf, Ann’s mother, the most powerful druid priestess in these lands was… indisposed,” Cazalon continued. “But when I heard that her only child, a little girl of just six years, was alive, I made it my business to find the girl and to use her blood to communicate with her departed mother.”

  Cazalon shifted and arched his back as if he was in pain.

  “It has cost me a great deal to make the blood bridge, Jeremy, more than it has cost my white-haired ward. It is the most dangerous, terrible magic imaginable. Every time I crossed back over the bridge I left a little piece of my life force behind in the dead lands, but I had to do it. From Ann’s living lips I have heard the voice of her dead mother – and she told me how I could become the equal of a god.”

  Cazalon paused for a moment and stared at Ann’s huddled body.

  “And so, Elizabeth directed me to this ancient place – known to her druid ancestors as the Oak Grove. It is a portal where the ancient power of the earth can be harnessed. But first that power needs to be awakened… and fed.”

  Cazalon smiled, “And that, Jeremy, is why I needed Bellingdon and his greedy friends. To awaken the spirit of the grove I must sacrifice a bonded soul to every point of the compass – so that the power of the four Guardians of the Gates to the World will flow to this very spot.”

  Still rooted to the ground, Jem’s horrified expression must have given his thoughts away: He is mad.

  Cazalon merely laughed. “Oh foolish Jeremy – I was never interested in burning London and profiting from a new city. It was only this place, this very spot, that I wanted. I will use it to magnify my power. When I am a god I will build a new temple for myself above the Oak Grove on the site of St Paul’s. The land for my wonderful temple will be purified by the fire that is raging above us at this very moment.

  “I believe you have already seen my design for the building where people will come to worship me for ever?”

  Without pausing for an answer, the count continued. “The contract that Bellingdon, Avebury, Kilheron and Pinchbeck signed in their own blood has delivered their souls into my care and soon I will use them… Then I will use you.”

  Cazalon stopped and caught his breath. He bent double for a moment and rubbed his leg through his black breeches. He looked across at Jem and his mouth curved into a cruel smile. “Would you like to see what three thousand years do to a body?”

  Jem gulped and tried to turn away, but he couldn’t move his eyes from the man sitting in front of him.

  Cazalon drew back the lower folds of his cloak and removed one of the elegant leather boots that covered his legs to the knee. Jem flinched when he saw the man’s foot. It was black and twisted. Peeling skin clung tightly to grey bones clearly visible beneath the desiccated flesh. Narrow yellow toenails appeared to sprout from the wrong places on the count’s withered foot. After a moment Jem realised they seemed unnaturally long because the flesh around them had shrivelled and died. A fat grey maggot crept from beneath one of the toenails, reared up, wriggled and then burrowed beneath a tattered flap of blackened skin. A foul smell filled Jem’s nostrils.

  It was the stench he had come to recognise. Cazalon was rotting alive.

  The count’s painted eyelid twitched as he regarded his foot. He was silent for a moment, before he spoke again.

  “The powdered mummia helps, but death is slowly creeping through my body – and I fear that making the blood bridge has hastened the decay. I have ten years at most before Set claims my soul.”

  Cazalon stood up and grinned broadly. “And that, my dear Jeremy, is why I need you so very badly to achieve my transformation. For a long time Elizabeth babbled about spilling green blood in the Oak Grove and, I’ll admit to you, I was confused. Then she started to talk about sacrificing ‘the jade boy’ and things became much clearer.

  “Her words led me to you, Jeremy Green,” Cazalon placed a heavy emphasis on Jem’s last name. “You see, to become the Androtheos, a man must sacrifice the first-born son of an anointed king. The deed must be done on the cusp of the boy’s thirteenth birthday and the victim must have come willingly to his fate. Guided by a dead witch and a greedy duke, I found exactly the child I needed.

  “When you gave me your shirt and your neck band back there, you completed the last of the rites of binding and allowed me to control you completely. And so, we might say, that you have come willingly to this place to complete the ceremony. The fact that you came to the city to find your little friend has only strengthened the magic. It is almost too perfect!”

  Jem tried to shout but no words came. He couldn’t even twitch a finger. He scanned the cavern, desperately seeking some means of escape.

  Cazalon smiled at Jem’s stricken expression. “Tonight you
should be journeying into manhood, Jeremy, but instead you will be taking a very different path.”

  It was no use – they had failed. Tolly was searching in the wrong place, Ann was surely dead, he was about to be sacrificed and Cazalon was about to become more terrible and powerful than ever. Something inside Jem seemed to break.

  His feet started to move involuntarily and he walked stiffly, like a stringed puppet, to stand in the very centre of the cavern, beneath the domed ceiling. He didn’t even try to resist.

  Cazalon leaned on his staff and watched.

  “Well, my young princeling, enough stories for today. I think it is time to begin.”

  He snapped his fingers and Jem’s world went black.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Somewhere far away someone called Jem’s name. As his senses returned, he saw that he was surrounded by a ring of blue flames. Tongues of cold fire licked hungrily at his boots as the dancing circle closed in on him. A deadly numbness began to creep up his legs. This was no dream. It was terrifyingly real. The odd blue flames glinted on the massive hourglass and Jem saw that several hours had passed.

  Cazalon stood on the other side of the flickering circle. He had removed his cloak to reveal his bare torso and now a pleated white cloth fell from his waist to his knees. Jem saw that Cazalon’s skin was covered in a coiling, snake-like pattern etched in blue. The count had released his hair from the plait and it now hung to the floor like a thin blue mane sprouting from the crown of his head.

  But it was the man’s hands that horrified Jem most of all. For the first time, Cazalon had removed his gloves – and now the boy could see why he had never done so before.

  On the right side, from the fingers to just below the knobbled elbow, the count had a skeletal claw. Hardly any flesh remained and the little strips that clung to the long yellow bones were ragged and black. On the left side, the count’s hand was intact, but the skin was puckered and weeping. The flesh was mottled yellow, green and black and studded with gaping sores that oozed a foul yellow liquid. Jem felt his stomach lurch in revulsion.