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Scene Thirty Two



Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Marlowe stands in front of his array of crockery, his arms raised. The setting sun, coming through the window, paints his hair an odd red, and makes him look as though he’s surrounded by flames, like a magician of old practicing fearful magic. Around him, wisps of something like fog form, within the tight confines of his room, seeming to crowd him.



Kit raised his arms. The evening sun was red, that red of spilled blood that Kit had seen all too often of late.

His heart beat fast, so fast that his breath caught in rushing after it, and his raised hands trembled. His palms hurt, and his fingers looked bloodied again by the touch of that accursed, red light.

He could feel as if a pressure, as those he wished near gathered around.

And yet, he wished them not.

Not so long ago, he would have paid and paid dearly not to have these things near that now just so dearly he tried to summon.

“Ye are mine,” he said, to the shadows, the patches of fog, the dark that gathered around him and that he hoped were spirits. The spirits of men who had once walked the fair green of God’s Earth, men that Kit had dispatched, knowing or unknowing, through the tricks and arts of the denouncer, the spy, the informer, through the cruel claws and thirsty fangs of the guilty beast he’d lately become, through omission and commission, through what he’d done and what he’d failed to do.

His hands thus raised, he seemed to feel the spirits pressing against them, hands holding his that were once pressed upon his in friendship, in the far, distant days of his youth at Cambridge. The men who’d trusted him, and with him discussed their crisis of faith, the weighty matters that held their souls down and drew them to Rheims, to the Catholic seminar.

Those same men that, once known to the secret service, setting foot in their native England again, had been dragged to death in intricate torture by the servants of a Queen too fearful of Catholic conspiracies.

Their hands had pressed Kit’s in friendship, once. Those same hands of Kit’s, that had been filled with the coin for which he’d betrayed them, and clad in the fine gloves such coin had bought.

Now their clammy touch reached from the grave, cold and dank, and frigid and claiming him as much as he claimed them.

Such was the price of the necromancer, Kit knew then. Not to be taken away by shrieking demons, though that might look better upon the stage, but to be claimed as much as those he claimed, and suffer a little of their death as he did it.

And yet this, having the dead speak for him, was the last thing Kit could do to save his own life. For he could communicate to no living being what he thought or felt. Only to these creatures if they should read his true fear from his tortured brain.

He must set them on their course, and then flee the environs of London, where too many people gathered, and too many people might provide fresh fodder to the ravening beast.

Oh, only let him do this, his poor magic, and let the magic spring forth in healing for these souls, and in deliverance for him. Let his magic save Quicksilver.

He thought of Quicksilver, forlorn Quicksilver in the land of shadows, Quicksilver whose lips had parted to say “I loved you well.”

The strange thing was that Kit believed him. He remembered his distant, haughty behavior, and yet believed that Quicksilver loved him. Love was indeed too full of faith, too credulous, with folly and false hope perhaps deluding him. However, for once, Kit couldn’t help believing, couldn’t help reaching for captive Quicksilver and seeking to free him.

“Ye are mine,” he repeated to the dark shadows that encircled him. “As I am yours, my crime having birthed you to death as it birthed me a murderer. By my tainted hands and my stained heart I conjure you. So far forth as by art and power of my spirit I am able to perform, I command you to take the shape of men as you once were.”

All at once, he was surrounded, the small room almost too full, too crowded close.

Terror and triumph warred within Kit, as he recognized that one’s faith-burned countenance, and this one’s trusting eyes, and, upon that one, the fresh features he’d noticed just the night before, seconds before the wolf tore her features asunder and rent the skin and crushed the bone beneath.

Kit’s impulse was to cover his eyes, and he heartily wished to look away from those faces, each of which, shrouded in the pale garment of livid death, accused him.

But another part of him gloried and grew.

Kit could do magic. He could, indeed.

Like his ancestor, Merlin, he could conjure. He marveled at it, as if from a distance off, and joyed in it like a child with a new toy. Never until now had he fully believed that the spirit lived after the flesh died.

And now, believing it, he knew not whether to be happy or scared, for if the Christians were right then what waited him after death would be naught but endless torment.

And if the Christians weren’t right and the afterlife more the domain of such creatures as elves....

He grimaced. Oh, curse it all. Eternity with the wolf.

Yet, for the moment, his joy in power overtook him, and he thought of Faustus and in his heart repeated Faustus’ words: I see there's virtue in my heavenly words; Who would not be proficient in this art? Full of obedience and humility, such is the force of magic and my spells.

Aloud he said, “Gather around me, spirits, for tonight we must perform a deed that will redeem me and earn you rest. The theater awaits, and the play must be braved that will free the elven king, and set both worlds aright.”

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Framed