The Greenstone Grail by Jan Siegel Read Free Book Online Page A

reappear now? Where have they been? In hibernation maybe, until some call or need drew them forth. You were visiting Riverside House?’
    ‘Yes. I wondered … if they were there waiting. There’s something not quite right in that place. Not creepy, just rather peculiar. A feeling as if – something was out of kilter. I think it has to do with Michael’s wife.’
    ‘Rianna Sardou … A theatrical name. A name for a witch. I believe she looks like one, too, at least on screen: all darkness and glamour. A storybook witch. But stories can lie.’
    ‘Do you think there’s a connection between Rianna and –
them
?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know why they pursued you in the past, or why that pursuit resumed today. As I said, I don’t know any of the answers, but I can think of another question.’
    ‘What’s that?’ Annie could think of several.
    ‘Why don’t they ever catch up?’
    Annie shivered. ‘
Don’t
! I thought – something
touched
me, back there in the lane …’
    ‘Nonetheless, they didn’t catch you. They followed you for months, all those years ago, and they didn’t catch you. Why not? They are far swifter than humans. They hunted you with darkness and terror, but you always eluded them. Are they chasing you, or simply watching you – spying on you? Or else –’
    ‘Can we not discuss it any more?’ Annie pleaded. ‘At least for now. I want to sleep tonight.’
    ‘You can stay at Thornyhill, if you wish.’
    ‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here. This is my place.’
    In bed later, she lay awake a long time, but no movement stirred the curtain, and the night was empty and still.
    Nathan dreamed. Not the now-familiar nightmare of the cop, with the hissing snake-voices and the taste of blood; this was a dreamscape he had known since early childhood, once vague and surreal, now increasingly vivid. A city. A city at the end of Time. Towers soared up a mile or more, multi-facetted, topped with glass minarets reflecting sky, and spires whose glitter caught the sun. Far below, the ground was unseen beneath bridges and archways studded with windows, flyovers, walkways, suspended gardens. Airborne vehicles cruised the spaces in between, leaving con-trails in their wakethat shimmered for a little while and then vanished. And occasionally there were creatures like giant birds, with webbed pinions stretching to a vast span and bony beaks, their human-sized riders hidden behind masks and goggles. Nathan had always enjoyed these dreams because often he travelled in one of the vehicles, looping the towers and diving under the archways, until he went spinning through a hundred dimensions of the dreamworld and tumbled at last into his own bed, waking exhilarated from the thrill of the ride.
    This time, it was different. There was a huge dull sun, just risen, glimpsed moving through the gaps between buildings, climbing ponderously towards the open sky. The topmost towers and minarets had already sprung into glittering life and floated like islands of light above shadowy canyons where the dawn had yet to penetrate. Nathan was gliding through the air, an awareness without substance or being, looking through oval windows into an interlocking maze of rooms, all empty, like a termite mound with no termites. The city was enormous but there appeared to be few people and those all far away, too far to see clearly, moving singly or in twos and threes, but never in a crowd.
    Presently, he found he was drifting beside one of the birds, but from close up it looked more like a reptile, its beak a pointed muzzle and its wings taloned, its long tail tipped with a spike. Its skin looked hard and had a slight gloss to it, as if it were made up of very tiny tightly-packed scales, steel-blue in colour and sheened with the early sunlight. The rider, too, wore blue, clothed from head to foot in some kind of metallic mesh, his hood close-fitting, with a slit for the mouth, a nose-guard, and