Free Lord of the Hollow Dark by Kirk Russell Page B

Apollinax’s “neophytes” or “acolytes.” The boy-he could not have been more than eighteen-looked Marina up and down, with a slight grin on his lips, saying nothing.
    “Good morning,” the Archvicar greeted him.
    The boy did not respond, looking at Marina still, not at the rest of them.
    Hobbling up close to the acolyte, the Archvicar said, distinctly and civilly, “A fine day, isn’t it, though chill?”
    The boy ignored him, smirking at the ground.
    “Stand up, boy!” said Archvicar Gerontion. His voice had become crisp, cutting, not to be denied. Marina wondered whether Red Beard in the painting had possessed a voice like that. The new voice was so pitiless that she trembled herself.
    The young man sprang up as if he had been stabbed. “Hi,” he said, uncertainly.
    “Young men better than you have been fed to dogs, in lands where I have lived,” the Archvicar remarked. “Now sit!” Gaping, Shock-head sank down again.
    The Archvicar limped on, his little party following. “Those chaps and the four girls are a dazed lot.” It was his old soft voice again. “Do you suppose they talk with one another?”
    They were crossing a high-arched little bridge; beneath them foamed the Fettinch Water, almost in spate from the night’s snowfall, which must have been heavier up in the mysterious hills from which the Fettinch Water came. Below the bridge, some of the burn’s water was diverted into a lade, a side channel. “That led to the old monks’ mill,” the Archvicar told them, pointing to the lade. How attentive and agreeable this old man was, except when he used that other voice of his! They labored higher up the Den, forcing their way along forgotten paths, until they arrived at two marble benches which faced toward the Lodging. Michael was awake now, but cheerful, being well bundled up.
    “Take pity on an old man’s decrepitude, and sit with me here,” the Archvicar pleaded. Resting, they enjoyed a good view of the back of Balgrummo Lodging. Marina could see now that the Lodging stood upon a broad mound, doubtless steeper at the front of the house than at the back where it met the Den. To either side of them, the jagged cliffs of the Den rose up sharply. Marina could descry that the high stone dyke at the entrance to the policies stretched back, in very long graceful curves, until the walls joined with the cliffs at the mouth of the Den. It was impossible to get into the Den, or out of it, unless one passed through the pend at the front of the Lodging-unless, of course, men used ladders against the dyke; but they would have had to be very tall ladders. Still farther distant, beyond the dyke, lay the broad sinister green surface of the Fettinch Moss, and beyond that, clumps of trees. They might have been in another century, another world.
    It was like being in a long quarry, Marina thought, with those sheer walls of the Den enclosing them. She looked toward the head of the Den: the Fettinch Water poured over the cliff there in a high delightful cataract, with no sign of a path leading upward. Gardeners had not pruned or planted in these policies for a long while, but the spot was lovely despite that. Her father the General had found it necessary to sell their family’s country place in Lincolnshire not long after she had been born, so that she had known only London well. She might loll here forever, listening to this strange insinuating old clergyman, quite content.
    “How does one get to the top of those cliffs?” she asked, languidly.
    “One doesn’t. The Den is steep and narrow naturally, and made steeper by art. They quarried here the stones for the fencible house of the Templars that stood below, and after that they quarried more stones when those buildings were enlarged into the fourteenth-century Priory of Saint Nectan, and then later the lairds of Balgrummo took still more stone from the Den to build or rebuild the Lodging that still stands. Despite this steepening by the quarrymen, some