Seven Sorcerers
Authors: Caro King
Caro King was born in London and raised in Surrey. She now lives in Croydon, with her partner, Kevin. She studied Art and has had a variety of jobs since then, including working at the Office of the Official Receiver and as a greengrocer’s assistant.
Seven Sorcerers
came from a rainy lunchtime when she began mapping out the world of the Drift. Skerridge and his waistcoat came later.
S
even
S
orcerers
CARO KING
Quercus
First published in Great Britain in 2009
This paperback edition first published in 2010 by
Quercus
21 Bloomsbury Square
London
WC1A 2NS
Copyright © Caro King, 2009
The moral right of Caro King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84916 155 8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and typeset by Rook Books, London
Printed and bound in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
For Kevin
Nin
Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Never Was
Chapter 4 - Bad Things Don’t Like the Light
Chapter 7 - The Last Breath of Celidon
Chapter 9 - A Drop of Rain Won’t Hurt You
Chapter 14 - The Dark Thing that Lives in the Wood
Chapter 18 - Nothing Really Bad Will Ever Happen
Part Two - The Terrible House of Strood
Chapter 24 - Skerridge Goes Rogue
Chapter 25 - The Hound in the Tunnel
Chapter 29 - The Ballads of Arafin Strood
Chapter 30 - One Burns, the Other Grows
Chapter 31 - The Final Gathering
Chapter 32 - Gan Mafig’s Servant
Chapter 33 - Another Day Begins
Chapter 34 - The Kid in the Cage
Chapter 36 - Seraphine’s Secret Way
Before: The Story of Mr Strood: by Harry McWhirter
The Thief of You
Skerridge
The Boy Who Never Was
in had never liked Wednesdays, but this one took the biscuit. On this Wednesday she woke up to find that it was raining buckets and that her little brother had ceased to exist.
The first thing to hit her was the rain. As she had forgotten to close her window the night before, the heavy drops bouncing off the windowsill got her right in the face. It wasn’t the nicest way to wake up.
With a yell, Nin sat up and glared at the window. Then she scrambled on to her knees and leaned over to struggle with the drenched curtain and the stiff catch. It took ages to slam the window shut, with the storm on the outside where it was supposed to be.
She rubbed her wet face with the sleeve of her pyjama top and then peered out of the window at the mass of grey clouds, or at least what she could see of them through the water pouring down the windowpane.
‘Great!’ she muttered. ‘Just brilliant. It’s got to be Wednesday!’
She looked at her big, purple clock, which told her
that it was just less than half an hour until breakfast, then flopped back into bed.
And then the second thing hit her. She frowned into her pillow.
Toby should be up by now. He was always up first, even though he didn’t have to go to school as early as Nin. She would hear him every morning, padding to the bathroom and then back again to play with his toy of the moment.
She rolled over again and scowled at the clock. It didn’t make any difference. Toby should be up and he wasn’t. Nin sighed and replayed the Sacks In The Cellar incident in her head.
She had been sitting in the sun the evening before, reading her favourite book, when Toby had appeared at the door of the conservatory with his tattered monkey tucked under one arm as usual. He stood there for a while before he plucked up the courage to come in and hover by the arm of her chair.
‘There’s something in the cellar,’ he said.
With a groan, Nin looked up from her book. ‘What?’
‘In the cellar,’ Toby whispered. ‘Something horrid.’
‘It’s horrible not horrid,’ snapped Nin. ‘Horrid is a baby word.’ She didn’t think it was really, but he was being annoying so she made it up.
Toby just stood and looked at her in that way he had when he wanted her to sort something out for him.
‘Tell Mum then.’ Nin turned over a page in her book. She had just got to a good bit, the one where the heroine
finds her way into another world.
Toby went on looking at her. He had fair hair and eyes that were so blue they were almost purple. Nin on the other hand had ordinary brown hair and ordinary blue eyes. She felt a stab of irritation.
‘Look, I’m busy, OK? Tell Mum about it.’
‘She’s at the shops.’
Tuesday was her mother’s shopping day. Nin rolled her eyes.
‘Tell Granny about it then. Or Grandad.’
‘Granny’s in the garden and Grandad’s …’ he paused ‘… asleep.’ What he meant was that he was scared of Grandad.
Nin threw her book down on the table and stood up. ‘OK!’ she said savagely. ‘But it’d better be really REALLY worth it.’
It wasn’t. There was nothing in the cellar but an old table covered in dusty tools, Grandad’s collection of wine bottles, some empty paint cans and a couple of lumpy-looking sacks crouching in the corner.
‘So,’ snapped Nin, ‘where’s this
horrid
thing then?’ She could feel herself getting into a bad mood. The sort of mood that her grandmother called a ‘pet’ and her mother called ‘growing grumbles’. Personally Nin didn’t see why being eleven should make her any more bad-tempered than being ten.
Toby pointed at the sacks. Nin sighed.
‘They’re sacks, moron-baby. Just empty, mucky old sacks.’
Nin noticed that she didn’t feel at all like going over there into the dark corner to shake the sacks and show him just how empty they really were.
‘Go on,’ she said, ‘get back upstairs and stop bothering me.’ And that had been the end of that.
Now, lying in bed with the rain pouring down the window, Nin sighed. Perhaps Toby had been having bad dreams all night. Or hadn’t been able to go to sleep at all because he was scared of the bogeyman. Or something. Suddenly she was feeling guilty about the beastly Sacks In The Cellar incident. Great. Wonderful.
‘I should have been nicer,’ groaned Nin out loud. ‘I should have thrown the rotten sacks away and gone round the cellar to show him it was empty.’
She got out of bed, pulled on the green dressing gown that she hated and padded up the hall in her bare feet. Toby’s room was at the end of the house, past the box room where they kept all of Daddy’s old things. She pushed the door open as quietly as she could. She stared.
The room was tidy. In fact it was more than tidy, it was bare.
She stared at the expanse of floor, which wasn’t covered in toys and yesterday’s socks. Then she stared at the chest of drawers, which didn’t have Toby’s giant-sized panda clock, his Winnie-the-Pooh drawing pad and crayons or any number of picture books on it. Next she looked over at the bed. It was empty. On top of that it looked like it had been empty
all night
. The duvet was stretched smoothly over the unrumpled sheets and the
undented pillows. Nin frowned. The duvet didn’t have Toby’s Spiderman cover on it either.
She ran across the room and pounced on the wardrobe, yanking it open. There were clothes inside, which was what she had expected. But they were Grandad’s old jackets, which wasn’t.
Her insides did a flip-flop and she felt herself go cold all over. She took a deep breath and looked around, half thinking she would see Toby giggling in a corner. She didn’t.
There was nothing for it. Nin pushed the wardrobe door shut again and headed for downstairs.
She hated downstairs before breakfast. She normally didn’t go anywhere near it until her mother had got up and started the toast. Before toast, downstairs was empty and dark and smelled of old night-time. After toast it was warm and cheery and smelt of … well … of toast.
Today, Wednesday (of course), everything was different. Lena wasn’t up yet. She wouldn’t be up for at least another twenty minutes.
Nin stood at the head of the staircase and looked into the darkness below. She could already see that Toby wasn’t in the living room because the door, which was at the foot of the stairs, was standing open on to even more darkness.
She pressed the switch, flooding the hall with light. Then she hurried downstairs, doing a u-turn for the kitchen and taking care not to look at the space under the stairs.