21/02/x.x.xX.

Dear Mr. Strega-Borgia: As per your faxed instructions of 28/07/x.x.xX, we are pleased to inform you that your new car will be delivered to your home address in approximately six weeks' time. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further requirements, and be a.s.sured that we will contact you closer to the delivery date to receive your final instructions.

Yours sincerely,

Piers Brooke-Shepherd

Senior Managing Executive (Sales)

Aston Martin Limited

London WC1 1AM

e-mail:

Mystified, t.i.tus watched as this message was replaced by another.

t.i.tus,

are we still on for sat? cant remember if you're back from ny late frid or sat a.m. dyou need a lift from the airport? let me know.

lots of love,

M.

Frowning in total incomprehension, t.i.tus watched helplessly as this was replaced by Get rid of it. Don't take it. It will consume the taker. Destroy it for it will destroy all who seek to possess it. Somehow the Borgias have to break the chain. You'll never know how much I regret . . .

Totally alarmed by the tone of this last message, t.i.tus stood up, shivering uncontrollably. From a long, long way off came the sound of mocking laughter. Unnerved, t.i.tus glanced at the screen. White fingers of ice were running across it, reaching out to obscure the words that t.i.tus saw, just before his courage failed him entirely.

Help me please Hel h

Ex

The laughter changed to a hissing repet.i.tion of one word. Over and over, increasing in volume and menace, t.i.tus heard himself summoned, t.i.tusssss . . . t.i.tusssssss . . . t.i.tussss . . .

He clutched at his throat, a feeling of suffocation overcoming him. In the dim light from the screen he saw the walls of the map room begin to move and shift, in and out, like a giant stone heart beating all around him.

Stumbling back out of the map room, t.i.tus fled. He crashed blindly along the flagged pa.s.sageway, hardly able to breathe for terror and, coming to the stone steps that led up to the kitchen corridor, fell to his knees and began to scrabble upward.

"Ah . . ." came a familiar voice. "Splendid. My brother in the full-on grovel position. Heavens, t.i.tus, what brought this on?" Standing on the steps above him, Pandora looked down to where he knelt, tear-stained and in desperate need of a handkerchief, incoherently gibbering an explanation for his distraught state.

"Map r-r-room. Mail. Got loads of mail. Horrible . . . It's dead, but it was working. Got to help m-m-"

Pandora tutted. "Tell me, Mr. Strega-Borgia, have they changed your medication recently? Forgotten to take it, perhaps? Ughh-don't wipe your nose on me."

"Pandora. Listen to me, please. Something awful's going on down there." t.i.tus gestured behind him, down into the gloom. "Come and see, you have to believe me. My computer-" Aghast, he saw Pandora was shaking her head and walking away. He scrambled to his feet and followed, temporarily delayed by a trio of his mother's guests, who were attempting to roll a vast, pockmarked cauldron along the narrow corridor leading to the kitchen. Consequently, by the time t.i.tus overtook Pandora, she was halfway up the main staircase.

"What's wrong with you? Why are you ignoring me?" he demanded, blocking her way upstairs.

Pandora regarded him with scientific detachment, as if he were some undistinguished species of slug, too common to merit more than a cursory glance. "It was the word 'computer' that did it," she sighed. "t.i.tus, when will you ever get it through your pointy little head that I'm not interested? I simply don't understand your complete obsession with modern technology. Look," she explained, "I like computers almost as much as you like spiders. I came to find you because there's more 'mail' for you downstairs." She attempted a smile. "A letter. From the lawyers handling Grandfather Borgia's estate. I guess it won't be long now, will it?'"

t.i.tus drew a deep breath. Obviously Pandora was becoming quite obsessed about this money stuff. Himself, he couldn't care less. The prospect of his forthcoming inheritance made him feel as if he were observing his whole family down the wrong end of a telescope. Their petty quarrels and concerns all seemed so far away. He shook himself and gritted his teeth. Even his own temporary . . . upset, over something so stupid as a malfunctioning laptop, was beginning to fade and dwindle. Family squabbles? Just buy another house and leave home. Computer breakdowns? Toss it in the bin and order up a better one. He sneered at his sister and stepped aside to let her pa.s.s.

"Thanks for your support, Pandora. Really appreciated your concern for my welfare. Next time I think I've seen a ghost, I'll go find a saber-toothed tiger for sympathy and moral support." Feeling victorious but oddly empty, t.i.tus spun round and sauntered slowly downstairs, this time for the comforts of the kitchen.

The Comfort of Cobwebs Tight-lipped and willing the p.r.i.c.kling behind her eyes to stop, Pandora crept forlornly upstairs to the attic. Windows set into the walls of the many staircases afforded her ever-higher aerial views of the land surrounding StregaSchloss. At last she came to the top floor, a part of the house inhabited by Latch, his bachelor accommodation located at the end of a low-ceilinged corridor. Lined up outside his bedroom door were several pairs of highly polished brogues, and the distant sound of running water and someone whistling a tune indicated that the butler was indulging in his perpetual quest for cleanliness.

Pandora tiptoed across the corridor to the steep wooden staircase that climbed up to the attic. Judging by the footprints in the dust-covered uppermost treads, no one but she had ventured to the top of StregaSchloss for some time. Trying not to sneeze, Pandora crept upstairs and pushed the heavy trapdoor open above her head. She crawled in and closed it behind her, lowering it carefully back into place with hardly a sound. The attic had long been her refuge, since-despite her best efforts to deter casual visitors with notices pinned to her door-every resident of StregaSchloss ignored all warnings to keep out of her bedroom, and after a cursory knock would walk straight in. However, in this vast attic, you could have hidden a battleship under the piles of dust and clutter, and no one would have been any wiser.

Ropes of spider silk festooned the rafters, except those below a recently mended section of roof, where the ferocious blasts of a midwinter gale had scoured that area clean, blowing cobwebs away and bleaching the surrounding timbers a pale and ghostly white. Averting her gaze from the new flooring that replaced a section where two unfortunate strangers had plunged to their deaths, Pandora headed for the dustier and more congenial parts of the attic, climbing over open sea-trunks, teetering piles of old books, rolled-up carpets, one unused set of bagpipes, and finally, under one of the dusty windows, she slumped onto a faded bolster, its worn fabric warm in the morning sun.

Determined not to give t.i.tus the satisfaction of seeing her cry, Pandora was now able to give way to her real feelings. In the solitude and quiet of the attic, she curled into a little ball and wept. She cried for herself and for her lost brother, who despite being under the same roof might as well have been on the moon as far as she was concerned. Propped up against a rusty birdcage, home of a long-deceased c.o.c.katiel, was an old picture book, one that Pandora had loved as a young child-the gilt of its t.i.tle long gone, the cover somewhat chewed and worn. The irony of seeing The Snow Queen reappear after all these years was not lost on Pandora. A new wave of tears engulfed her as she remembered the tale of a brother and sister frozen apart by the evil Snow Queen, the brother saved from his icy fate by the tears of the sister who loved him. Gerda and Kay, Pandora thought, the names coming back to her as if she were sitting in the old nursery hearing it read to her again, over t.i.tus's protests. Back then, she remembered, he used to wear overalls. . . . The vision of her brother as a four-year-old caused her to smile through her tears. . . .

. . . blue denim overalls with a big rusty blotch on the bib from when he'd had a spectacular nosebleed after she'd pushed him off his tricycle. He'd been about to plunge into the moat, the moron, and her one concern had been to stop this from happening, but he thought she'd done it on purpose to hurt him. . . . His nose was always running back then. And the nursery was in a different room, a blue room with big windows on the second floor. A beautiful room, always sunny, always warm and safe. Mummy said t.i.tus had even been born there. . . .

"Was I borned there?" Pandora demanded, gazing up into her mother's face, uncomfortably aware that her diaper was growing somewhat damp.

"You weren't borned," t.i.tus snorted, looking up from a Lego tank that he was steadily chewing apart, his chubby fingers unable to separate the slippery little bricks he needed for building a tractor. "You were made in a hostiple," he added cuttingly.

"No I wasn't," Pandora yelled. "I wasn't wasn't wasn't!"

t.i.tus turned his back on this outburst with a four-year-old's disdain. Picking up the Lego tank, he brought his jaws down on a particularly stubborn wheel.

"Pandora, darling, don't-"

"WASN'T WASN'T WASN'T, SO THERE!"

"That's enough now, don't shout-"

To t.i.tus's alarm, the wheel sprang off its axle and flew into his mouth. He gasped, his indrawn breath vacuuming the little plastic disk back to lodge suffocatingly in his throat. His nose, permanently blocked with mucus, allowed the pa.s.sage of no air whatsoever. Eyes bulging, he instantly turned purple with the effort of trying to breathe.

"HOBBLE, HOBBIBLE t.i.tUS!" Pandora bawled, falling off Signora Strega-Borgia's lap with a banshee shriek and crawling toward where t.i.tus sat with his back to her, quietly asphyxiating.

"Pandora. For heaven's sake, calm down. NO! DON'T DO THAT!"

Pandora raised both of her chubby little fists and brought them thudding down on her brother's back. With the sound of a champagne cork being popped, the wheel shot out of t.i.tus's mouth and flew across the nursery floor. Signora Strega-Borgia sprang to her feet just in time to catch her son as he toppled backward, his face a deep blue but thankfully able to draw in great lungfuls of air. . . .

It had been a close call, Pandora thought, recalling the many other times she'd hauled her brother back from the brink. . . . But now, for some reason, she had an uneasy feeling that t.i.tus was in far graver danger than ever before. In the past they had quarreled, sometimes with devastating unkindness, both of them retreating to their separate bedrooms to lick their wounds . . . but after a recuperative sulk they'd always effected some sort of repair. This was different though-nastier, more bitter, and prolonged. . . . This time, it seemed as though neither of them had any idea how to even begin bridging the chasm that separated them.

A shadow fell across the floor, and Pandora looked up to the rafters, where a giant tarantula hung swinging back and forth on a skein of spider silk.

"Tarantella?" Pandora whispered, barely able to see through tears.

"Absolutely," came the languid drawl from above. "Tell me, O leaking one, is this a Robert-the-Bruce moment, or am I talking out of my fundament?"

"Excuse me?" Pandora said, watching as Tarantella glided down from the rafters and sashayed across the floor to where she lay clutching her bolster.

"Robert the Bruce," the spider prompted. "Ancient biped, big hair, especially on his face. Come on, you know this stuff. Stuck in a cave with a blunt razor and a helpful spider? Already hacked his chin to pieces in a misguided attempt to obtain a smooth shave-?"

"Um, actually, that's not the version of events that I know," said Pandora.

"Whatever," Tarantella said dismissively, consigning the incorrect contents of many history books to the oblivion she so patently thought they deserved. "So, legend has it he's sitting there, freezing in his woolly skirt, peering at his blunt razor, chin a ma.s.s of cuts and sc.r.a.pes, beard still attached. He's totally depressed, gazing at his reflection in a puddle, and the cave's resident spider, name of Apocryphylla, drops down in front of his face. She says, 'Check this out, bog-breath,' and proceeds to spin a web right in front of his eyes. So he goes, 'Eurrrgh! Spiders!' or something along those lines and reaches out to wreck the web. . . . You are listening, aren't you?"

"I'm fascinated," said Pandora truthfully. "Do go on."

"With a patience that future generations of spiders can only admire, Apocryphylla trucks off to a distant corner of the cave and begins again, this time spinning a web of such Celtic intricacy that despite himself, Bob is deeply impressed-"

"Bob?" queried Pandora.

"Oh, do keep up," chided Tarantella. "Bob the Brute, Robert the Bruce. Anyway, he watches as my talented relation creates an ephemeral masterpiece-"

"And?" prompted Pandora. "What happened?"

"Well, it's a bit of a gore-fest from now on in. Not for the whole family. . . . So, the web's hanging there, testament to Apocryphylla's powers of endurance, and Bob turns to her and demands to know what it all means. 'Means?' she says. 'You want philosophy as well as beauty? It means, O woolly-skirted one, that if at first you don't succeed, due to some unshaven cretin failing to appreciate your true genius, then you have to try, try agggg-' She meant to say 'again' but, insulted by being addressed so disrespectfully by a mere spider, Bob the Brute brought his ma.s.sive fist down upon her fragile body, and then got on with trying to have a shave."

"Oh, how awful," breathed Pandora, ashamed of her common humanity with this monster.

"Don't give it a second thought," said Tarantella cheerfully. "Listen up. How's this for divine justice? Bob cuts himself shaving-draws the razor across his own throat and-shock, horror-hits a vein and collapses on the floor of the cave gargling horribly, lifeblood leaching across the et cetera. Regrettably, for him, a scant six feet away, and sadly unreachable by a man in extremis, is the only thing that could have stanched the flow of blood and thus saved his life-"

"The cobweb?" asked Pandora, eyes shining.

"The cobweb," said Tarantella. "A simple and effective remedy against hemorrhage. Used since time began to a.s.sist in the healing process."

"Poor Apocryphylla," said Pandora. "What a waste."

"Indeed," said Tarantella crisply. "But tell me, what brings you dripping up in my domain? Not a need to shave, I trust-you are hirsutely underendowed enough as it is."

"It's t.i.tus," said Pandora, as a wave of gloom swept over her. "I don't know how to make things right with him again. He's so distant-"

"Not distant enough," muttered Tarantella. "Even Betelgeuse would be too close for comfort. Still, there's no accounting for the eccentricities of human nature. You came up here to consider how best to deal with the problem of your brother?"

"Something like that," mumbled Pandora, imagining what horrors lay ahead. What would the tarantula suggest? Bite him? Wrap him in spider silk and hang him up to dry . . . ?

"My advice, for what it's worth," Tarantella began, grinning widely at Pandora, "is try again. Try to win him back. Take him a peace offering: some daddy longlegs' legs, a sun-dried bluebottle." Seeing Pandora shudder at these suggestions, Tarantella amended her menu somewhat. "No? Perhaps not . . . How about some cake? A cup of tea? In my experience, you have to feed the male of the species before attempting to converse with it. So. Feed him and then attempt to make friends. And"-the tarantula ran a little black tongue over her lipsticked lips-"if that fails, then just go ahead and eat him. That way he can't answer back. Byeeeee." Winching herself upward on a spinneret, Tarantella vanished abruptly into the shadows.

Alone again, Pandora smiled. Odd as the conversation had been, it had also been enormously comforting. As cobwebs heal wounds, the company of Tarantella had soothed her hurt feelings. She stood up and leant against the window seat, breathing onto a pane of dirty gla.s.s and wiping it clean with her sleeve. Down below, way off in the distance, she could see the masts of Black Douglas's beautiful boat anch.o.r.ed off the sh.o.r.e of Lochnagargoyle. Dwarfed by distance, tiny people dotted the lawn, and she could just make out the figure of Mrs. McLachlan hanging out sheets to dry on the line. Beside her, Marie Bain was slowly pegging out several tentlike black corsets and shrunken stripy stockings, the cook's body language clearly indicating that she regarded guest laundry as a task not within her job description.

From the attic window they all looked so small and insignificant, but as Damp wobbled across her line of vision, Pandora was reminded of how very dear they were to her. Just because she couldn't reach out to touch them right now didn't change how she felt about them. It depended on one's viewpoint, she decided. t.i.tus was still her brother, and nothing would change that; just because he appeared to be as far away as one of the tiny figures below didn't mean she would never reach him again. Cheered by this thought, Pandora crossed the attic and lifted the trapdoor to go downstairs.

"Tarantella?" she called over her shoulder. "Thank you for your advice. I'll try the stomach route to his heart-it's bound to succeed."

Down the Hatch (A.D. 145: Becalmed somewhere off northeastern Caledonia) The war against the Celts had been one of the most b.l.o.o.d.y campaigns ever waged in military history, ill.u.s.trating what happens when vast empires attempt to crush the life out of small but determined guerrilla tribes. Death came to the pristine sh.o.r.es of Nova Caledonia as each high tide surrendered its grisly flotilla of Roman corpses, which provided rich pickings for the flocks of hooded crows blowing in on the December gales.

Captain of a warship engaged in an attempt to recapture the port of Lethe, Nostrilamus had been mortally wounded when an iron vat of boiling pitch exploded on deck and embedded long shards of metal in his legs. Now he lay in his stateroom, his skin the color of tallow, his injured limbs a stinking mess of putrefaction. Visitors to his sick bay had to hold vinegar-soaked sponges to their noses in order to withstand the stench, and even the ship's surgeon refused to attend his patient, preferring to take his chances on deck in the mercifully clean-smelling gales that threatened to capsize their craft. Even these winds were unpredictable. Yesterday the warship had wallowed in peaks and troughs larger than herself but today, becalmed south of Aberdonium, the wind had vanished at dawn, turning the surface of the water into jaundiced gla.s.s and causing the sails to hang limply from the masts. Surfacing briefly from his delirium, Nostrilamus ordered the oars to be used and, exhausted by the simple effort of giving a command, sank back on his befouled bed of pelts as the great drum began to beat the rhythm for those slaves unfortunate enough to live below decks.

Heave-thump-heave-thud-faster-crack-heave-thump it went. And just audible below the rhythm of the drum came the sound of groans and sobs as the oarsmen strained and struggled to overcome the dead weight of the ship and, by their efforts alone, force it into motion. In this creaking, claustrophobic underworld lit by smoking oil lamps, the slave-master held dominion. He strode up and down the pa.s.sage between the rows of manacled oarsmen, flicking a lead-tipped whip over the shoulders of those he judged to be working at less than a killing pace. From time to time a deadly fatigue would overcome a slave, and he would slip from his place to fall under the oars with a scream of terror.