Seventh Son

SEVENTH SON

  by A. M. Offenwanger

  Copyright 2014 A. M. Offenwanger

  Cover by Steven Novak

  Editing by Jennifer Ballinger

  This is for Steve.

  And for Anna, because she started it all, and then suggested I dedicate it to Steve.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  NOTE

  EXCERPT FROM CAT AND MOUSE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  It was the blue pottery bowl that started it all. Not the blue-and-white Ming one right next to it; not the dull green Chinese pottery frog that sat in the front of the display cabinet, staring at Catriona out of his little brown pottery eyes. No, the blue pottery bowl.

  It was a turquoise blue, very much like the eyes of the weird guy that had stared at Cat so disturbingly in the Room of Local Antiquities. It was that stare which had forced her to vacate the room quickly and brought her into the Ceramics Room in front of the case with the blue bowl in it. Cat was almost sure the guy had been following her into Local Antiquities; she had had a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eyes when she was admiring the sculptures in the Marble Room. He might have even been the one standing outside, near the bus loop, when she had got out in front of the museum. He wore an odd khaki vest, with a shirt under it that looked like unbleached cotton or perhaps even linen, and pants that might have been made of well-worn leather. His shoes she hadn’t paid attention to. But his eyes, they were such a startling colour: not blue, not green, but it had to be turquoise. Like the semiprecious stone. And that bowl.

  Cat had been looking at a hand-woven basket made of two different colours of reed, crafted by one of the local artisans circa 1857 (or so it was presumed, according to the label), when she felt that disconcerting turquoise stare on her. He stood beside a display of some mummified food (to be consumed by the dearly departed in the afterlife), clear across the other side of the room, by the opposite entrance at the rounded archway. Cat felt uneasy. What did he want from her? Was her camisole strap showing? Or did she look weirder than she had assumed, in her multi-coloured, multi-tiered gypsy skirt and her hand-embroidered peasant blouse? She had thought she could get away with it; after all, she was on holiday. She quickly looked back at the woven basket, then nonchalantly moved over to the next display cabinet—another basket, this one from 1863 (how did they know the precise date? Had someone sat beside the weaver with a notebook and taken down the exact star date of the creation?), and sidled through the rounded archway into the next room.

  The display case with the blue bowl was a third of the way across the room, around the corner from the doorway. Cat moved across to it to get out of the line of sight of the Local Antiquities room. She glanced out of the corner of her eyes to see if he had followed her—it didn’t look like he had yet—and turned around halfway to take a closer look at the display cabinet. It was an unusual case—open-topped, not completely encased in glass like most of the other displays, and lined with a dark brown velvety material. The frog sat at the front, goggling up at Catriona (he was nearly three thousand years old, his label stated); behind him, held upright by the two claws of a wire plate stand, was a flat blue-and-white-glazed bowl with a rounded lip (Chinese, Thirteenth Century AD; From The Collection of Mr and Mrs Arthur Schlipfengrimmler, Generous Patrons of The Sammelhauser Museum). And off to the side, almost as if it didn’t belong, the bowl. No label, no special display stand. Just the bowl on the brown velvet surface. It was not very big, no more than eight inches across and about half as high—or was it? The sides curved up steeply, and the lip turned inward, almost as if it were cupping a secret in its depths. Cat leaned over the cabinet. Something in the back of her mind sounded a warning bell. Would the museum’s alarm system be set off? She had heard somewhere that a lot of museums now used infrared sensors to protect their collection, so that if you got too close to a piece it would set off wailing sirens and security guards would come bursting through the doors to drag you off to the nearest police precinct to be interviewed for hours on end by an art theft squad. Perhaps the open-topped cabinet was a trap for unsuspecting art thieves?

  But the bowl drew her, pulled at her. The glaze was very peculiar. Its turquoise was so deep, it seemed to shimmer with iridescence; deep beneath its surface there was a luminescence that gave the illusion of motion, like the cool blue-green depths of a mountain lake Cat had once seen on a long-ago summer holiday. She leaned closer, her nose mere inches from the top of the bowl; her hair swung forward and brushed its top edge (if the alarm was going to sound, surely it would have done so by now?). The movement at the bottom of the bowl became more pronounced. Tiny, sparkly pinpricks of light flitted through the glaze, shooting across Cat’s field of vision. The glaze in the base of the bowl was swirling. (Swirling? How could a glaze swirl? This was a bowl, just a piece of pottery!) The tiny light sparks gathered at the edges of Cat’s vision, and became a counterclockwise dance, whirling faster and faster widdershins to the swirling motion at the bottom of the bowl. Cat wanted to pull back, to straighten up, to get her eyes away from the whirling and dancing and swirling and sparkling blue, but her senses were caught. She no longer knew where “back” was; her movement, when she was able to move, plunged her straight forward and then pitched her sideways. She flung out an arm to protect herself from the sharp corner of the cabinet (The three-thousand-year-old frog! Smashing it would mean years of imprisonment, for sure!), but her hand encountered no glass, no edge, no hard surface—she kept falling, and then her fingers sank inches deep into the soft crumbly soil of a forest floor.

  The whirling stopped, and slowly Cat’s surroundings came back into focus. Utterly disoriented, she stared around her, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Brown columns, illuminated by slanting dappled light, resolved into tree trunks, some gnarly and twisted, some straight and smooth. Evergreens towered over her, interspersed with leafy trees which the back of Cat’s mind immediately classified as oaks and something else it did not recognise. In the larger gaps of the trees grew shrubs, some with viciously spiky-looking leaves surrounding small clusters of bright red fruits. Cat became aware of the sound of birdsong, a light chirping coming from the grasses beside the spot she had fallen on, and the spicy scent of a forest floor that had been baking in the sun all afternoon.

  A forest? What was she doing in a forest? What just happened there? One minute she was in the Sammelhauser, looking at an odd turquoise bowl in order to avoid an odd turquoise-eyed man, and now she was planted on her rear in a forest, no walls, display cases, or indeed any other sign of civilisation in sight. Cat shook her head, then did it again to dislodge the weird hallucinations she was having. It did not work. The forest stayed firmly in place around her, birds singing, whatever-it-was chirping in the undergrowth, spiky shrubs menacing her with their blood-red berries.

  She became aware of the sensation of the fingers of her right hand, which were still firmly pushed into the soil where she had tried to break her fall, and she jerked her h
and free. Cool, moist, dark bits of soil (and who knew what else) clung to her fingernails and joints. She gave a little scream, and convulsively shook her hand to dislodge the dirt, but most of it stuck to her fingers. Panicked, she slapped at it with her other hand, then jumped to her feet, beat at her skirt and her blouse, stamping her feet, all the while giving little yelps of distress. “Aaaah—ah ah ah—help, someone help me! Aaah!” But then she noticed that the soil, loose humus that it was, had come off her hand, that nothing was crawling up her skirt, that her stamping feet were on solid ground, and nothing was whirling, moving, and swirling around her any more. She stopped her frantic dance, took a deep breath, then another for good measure, and clasped her trembling hands in front of her mouth.

  “Okay, Cat, okay. Okayokayokay. What’s going on? Where am I? What is this place?” Was she imagining all this? No, the ground was too solid for that, the spice of the forest scent too real. Had there been some drugs in that display cabinet that she had inhaled by accident; was this a bad trip? Drugs could give you remarkably realistic hallucinations, couldn’t they? Or perhaps there was a hidden camera somewhere, and any second someone would pop out to laugh at her. Or—and here a little shiver ran down Cat’s spine—the turquoise-eyed man, his piercing stare! Had he somehow hypnotised her, put the evil eye on her? But she didn’t believe in hypnotism, much less the evil eye. Or anything supernatural and fantastic of that nature. Did she? Yet here she was, in a magical forest—wait, what made her think it was magical? It could be just an ordinary forest; these were normal-looking trees, with trunks and leaves, harmless shrubs (with vicious spikes, but still, they were not doing anything frightening), and even the birds sounded quite common. But here she was, in a forest, and not in the museum she had so innocently entered not half an hour ago. Whatever this forest was, it was not ordinary, normal, common, or unfantastical. Something very weird had just happened.

  “Ah—ah—ah…” She started hyperventilating again, then bit down on the knuckle of her index finger to force herself to calm down once more. She needed to slow down, to think, to take stock of her situation. She chewed her knuckle. That had always been a calming thing for her, ever since she was little and had first run across the storybook of Baba Yaga and her scary house on chicken feet, and it had kept her from hyperventilating even then. It had not made her put down the book until she had finished with the story, but it had kept her calm throughout the frightening tale. Once again, it did nothing to change her situation, but it helped her keep her fright in check.

  Okay, think, Cat, think. What could have just happened? What did just happen? She had bent over a cabinet, looked at a bowl, the bowl started swirling, and here she was, in a forest. Was it a forest? Or just the illusion of one? She cautiously turned her head to the left. More trees, more shrubs (purple berries with a blueish bloom on those, the leaves not quite as frighteningly spiky). A look to the right revealed several gnarly trunks, the leaves on the trees a brighter green, the branches interlaced as if they were shaking hands with each other, forming a loose screen. Between them, the trunk of another tree was visible—smoother than the others with their twisted trunks and rough bark, and a curious colour, an almost blue sheen. (Blue? No, it couldn’t be. Trees weren’t blue! Were they?) Some of its branches hung over the screen formed by the other trees, creating a canopy over Cat’s head.

  She turned herself fully around. Behind her, the trees were thinning a little and formed a sort of archway that seemed to lead to a path out of the woods. She had to know whether this forest was real, whether she could touch it and feel it. Or would touching the trees set off some other strange reaction, send them crashing down around her, bump her into yet another place, or, perhaps—perhaps send her back to the museum? Cat turned back to the smooth tree and gingerly put out a hand, reaching between the branches of the gnarly trees.

  Her fingertips grazed the trunk. A tingle shot up Cat’s arm, making her jump back. Were those trees electric? She had to try again. Stretch out hand, carefully, carefully—yet a little further—make contact—and the tree felt just like every other tree she had ever touched in her life. She slowly ran her fingers down the bark, alert, prepared for the shock of another tingle, but none came. The tree felt solid, hard, tree-like—and sticky. Pitch! There was pitch on those trunks, and she had stuck her thumb right into it! Cat made a face. Stuck in a magical forest, with magical pitch stuck to her. Trust her to have this happen to her! She had never asked for something like this! At that moment she dearly wished she had never given up her comfortable position as Associate Librarian of the Greenward Falls Community Library (Programs for Children Every Tuesday and Thursday, No Registration Required; Free Internet Access One Hour Per Day With Library Membership). So she had got bored, felt stifled, wanted adventure—but this was coming it just a bit too strong!

  Pitch. How did one get rid of pitch? She narrowly avoided wiping her hand on her skirt; it would have ruined it entirely. And she very much liked that skirt, had bought it especially for this trip, for her rebellious flight to freedom. In the back of her mind she could still hear Ryan’s voice, with the sneer he had affected at anything that wasn’t the latest fashion, wasn’t Armani or Louis Vuitton, and especially was something that Cat thought was attractive: “Hippie junk! God, nobody would wear that!” As soon as Cat had come home on that day, after he had informed her that she wasn’t his kind of woman, after he had told her as a parting gift one more time that her way of dressing wasn’t very feminine (by which he meant tight tops, plunging necklines, minuscule skirts, and stiletto heels) and that he owed it to himself to be with a woman who looked after herself better and appreciated his masculinity (by which he meant his gym-enhanced chest muscles, his sitting on the couch consuming beers, belching, and throwing around foul language just to sound tough and manly), after he had walked away with a pitying look at her, after she had slammed the door (and opened it again just to slam it again a second time, more energetically) and had finished soaking her pillow with one hearty bout of tears, she had marched back out her door (closing it firmly but quietly this time), got on the next bus, ridden right back to the mall, and bought the skirt without even trying it on. As it happened, it fit perfectly. She loved the way it swirled around her calves, how the blues and greens set off the brilliant strips of red separating each tier which winked up at her every time she looked down.

  Thank goodness she hadn’t got pitch on the skirt yet. She ran through her mental file of emergency cleaning procedures, momentarily distracted from her overall predicament. Alcohol—alcohol would get pitch off; she remembered reading it in a reference book. Eau de cologne had alcohol in it; there was some in her purse. The purse! Where was her purse? Frantically, Cat looked around, along the forest floor, even into the bushes, for her dark green leather slouch bag. No purse. No bag. No eau de cologne to wipe the pitch off with; no comb, no paper tissues, lemon drops, e-book reader, sketchbook, 2B drawing pencil, tiny Swiss Army knife with nail file and tweezers and scissors; no money and ID and key to her best friend’s apartment. Not that she would need the key, unless this forest was directly behind the Tuscany Towers Residential Block where her baggage was temporarily residing in Unit Number 122 (Bauer, Monica, Please Knock for Admission). Which it wasn’t, as the only thing that was behind the Tuscany Towers was a parking lot (the cars pulling in and out of it had kept her awake half the night). She must have dropped her bag when that whole swirly-whirly-transport-y thing happened. Bother. Bother, bother, bother.

  So she was in a strange forest without her purse, with magical pitch on her hands, and without the faintest idea where she was, how she got there, or how she could get back to where she came from. In comparison, being up a creek without a paddle would have been quite welcome at that moment. Cat plopped herself back down on the forest floor in exasperation, and promptly got some dry leaves stuck to her pitchy thumb. Bother again! There was nothing else to do but either swear or cry, and Cat did not want to cry for fear that if she started, she would
be unable to stop. She let off a string of curse words that would have made a sailor blush (but only because he would have been embarrassed at being unable to understand them, as most of them were Cat’s own invention—librarians are not supposed to use strong language).

  She carefully picked the dry leaves off her thumb again and found that they took some of the pitch with them. Ah, this might work! She stuck her thumb back into the leaves, picked up more dried foliage, and rubbed it off again. After three or four rounds of this, the better part of the pitch had come off and only a sticky smear was left on the side of her thumb, no more than as if she had accidentally run a glue stick over it (which had happened before, more than once, making display posters for the library; it had seemed exciting at the time).

  Very well. Cat took two more deep breaths, and took stock. No idea where she was. Still on Earth? Hardly. She had never seen bushes like the spiky red-berried ones anywhere, and that included the pictures in the numerous reference tomes she had perused in the course of her six years at the library. The forest looked vaguely European, with its deciduous trees, the oaks and the not-oaks which she still could not identify. Cat had fond memories of the forests in Europe; she had spent two magical weeks there in her senior year, ten years ago—no, not magical weeks. Beautiful, wonderful, inspiring, never-to-be-forgotten, but not magical. Not like this was magical. Oh dear…

  One more time. Get a grip, Cat. She was in a magical, non-earthly, vaguely European forest, with no signs of civilisation anywhere. Even if there was some civilisation, would she be able to get help there? Would the inhabitants be hostile, consider her to be food, use her as a slave? Might they be, perhaps, giant insects—or worse, might this place be governed by regular insects, and she had inadvertently stepped on several of their ruler’s aunties and cousins in her frantic dance to get rid of the dirt on her hand? Cat pulled her imagination sternly back to earth. Or the ground, at any rate. No need for crazy flights of fancy, no call to borrow trouble until trouble came to her. At least that’s what her grandma had always told her whenever she had let her imagination run riot as a little girl. Cat had learnt to control herself well in that regard, held herself together rigidly. It stood her in good stead now, kept her from losing her head entirely. She could cope with whatever came her way; she would deal with it as it arose.

  A branch cracked behind her. Cat shot to her feet and spun around. What—where… Something was coming through the forest! A crackling, a crashing, steps through the woods—she frantically cast about her for a stick, a stone, anything to defend herself with—but before she could reach the large branch that lay not five feet away from her, she saw, wide-eyed, that around the bend of the path a small figure came into view. Obviously alien, it stood no more than three feet high, and its skin, or fur, was a peculiar slippery-looking dark red. It tottered unstably on two leg-like appendages and waved one paw in front of its body. The other seemed to grow out of its facial orifice and lead from there to the side of its trunk. The creature stopped, tilted back its head, and looked at Catriona with two large, turquoise eyes.