The Last Guardian of Everness
TOR BOOKS BY JOHN C. WRIGHT
THE GOLDEN AGE
The Golden Age
The Phoenix Exultant
The Golden Transcendence
THE WAR OF THE DREAMING
The Last Guardian of Everness
Mists of Everness (forthcoming)
The
LAST
GUARDIAN
of
EVERNESS
BEING THE FIRST PART OF
THE WAR OF THE DREAMING
John C. Wright
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
New York
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS
Copyright © 2004 by John C. Wright
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Edited by David G. Hartwell
Book design by Mary A. Wirth
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, John C. (John Charles), 1961–
The last guardian of everness / John C. Wright.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book”
ISBN 0-3I2-8487I-4 (acid-free paper)
EAN 978-03I2-8487I-2
I. Title.
PS3623.R54L37 2004
8I3'.6—dc22
200404I258
First Edition: August 2004
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
To those who serve
in every war
to watch and guard our safety
as we sleep
and from us keep
the terror of the enemy
this phantasy
with respect
Contents
1 The Forgotten Wardens of the Dreaming
5 Beyond the Gates of Greater Slumber
8 The Strange and Ancient House Unchanging
9 The Library of the Dream-Lords
11 The Five Names of Lesser Mystery
18 Battle Before the High House
20 “My Dwelling Is in Skule Skerry”
22 The Last Defense of Everness
The Last Guardian of Everness
1
The
Forgotten Wardens
of the
Dreaming
I
Upon a midnight in midsummer, in an unchanging ancient house upon the coast, in the year when he was a boy no more and a man not yet, Galen Way- lock heard the far-off sound of the sea-bell tolling slowly in his dream.
Galen woke. His eyes were wide with terror and astonishment, and he had clawed the bedsheets to either side of him into sweat-stained knots. The moonlight fell across the bed from the diamond-shaped panes of his bedchamber window. The roof and walls were all dark wood, hidden in shadows. Outside came the soft and restless crashing of the sea waves on the cliffs below the house.
The melancholy peal was silent, now: his waking ears heard only earthly noises.
“It hasn’t really happened!” he muttered feverishly to himself. “It hasn’t really, honestly, finally happened! Not after all this time! Not to me!”
If tradition were to be trusted, fifteen centuries and more had passed since the First Warden of the Order fell asleep beneath an oak tree in Glastonbury, mistletoe and ivy growing in his hair, to await the warning voice of that elfin bell echoing, mystical and furtive, across the star-lit waves of oceans only dreamers know.
Galen kicked away the covers and felt around for the lantern.
His fingers brushed it, and he heard it topple and roll away across the nightstand, to drop to the floor. With a grunt of disgust, he reached down to where his jeans were crumpled on the floorboards and found the pocket with his electric flashlight in it.
He sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, flashlight gleaming in his right hand, left hand cupped to catch the light. He was staring at a tiny burn mark in his palm. He sat for a moment, breathing hard, flexing his fingers and wincing at the tiny pain, eyes wide with astonishment.
Then he leaped to his feet, called out.
A moment later, Galen ran breathlessly into the parlor downstairs, where his Grandfather Lemuel sat before the fireplace where two logs crackled, blazing. All along the mantelpiece, a dozen candles were burning. Above the mantel, carved in stone, was a shield bearing the sign of a winged horse rampant above two crossed keys. A motto inscribed below bore the words: “Patience and Faithfulness.”
Across the room, facing the escutcheon, was an old oil painting of a dark-haired, dark-eyed man wearing a black frock and conical black miter. On a chain of office he wore a heavy gold key. In the figure’s lap, an ivory equine skull with a single spiral horn was resting. The painting was done in a stiff, formal style, heavy with shadows.
Grandfather Lemuel stirred and put aside the book in his hand. “Shut off that light. If you must creep at night, use the lantern. Ever since you came back from college, you have become most lax and careless about the Rules of the House.”
Galen snapped off the flashlight, and the circle of light at his feet disappeared. Impatiently he said, “Grampa, listen!”
Grandfather Lemuel said heavily, “Your father also never understood why our family lives this way. He never believed, never had faith. A man can be perfectly comfortable without modern plumbing or electricity.”
Anger interrupted Galen’s urgency. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about him like he was dead! All he did was join the army and move out.”
“It is not I, but higher powers, who account your father’s lack of faith as a treason to our family’s ancient promise. He never believed the time would come. . .” Grandfather Lemuel’s head drooped, his mouth pursed into a sullen frown.
“Grampa! It’s come!”
Grandfather Lemuel straightened, blinking. “What’s that, boy?”
“I heard the sea-bell.”
“Wh—?!”
“Just now. This evening. As I stood my watch along the Outward Wall.”
No expression showed on Grandfather Lemuel’s features, but a hard glint of suppressed excitement came into his eye. “We must be cautious. In your dream, did one of the Seven Signs come forth from Vindyamar?”
“I saw a Sign and received a Summons. The image was a sea-bird carrying a lantern.”
Lemuel muttered. “A lantern? Lantern. . .? Hm. Mm. Rod, Ring, Wand, Bow, Titan, Grail. . . Horn? Odd. Perhaps a torch could symbolize the titan’s blood, but . . .a lantern . . . ? A lantern is not one of the Seven . . .” Then, straightening up, Grandfather Lemuel said to Galen: “How do you know this was a true dream, come through the gate of horn? Did you perform the Three Tests?”
“Flying; Reading; Observing your hands. Grandfather Lemuel, you know I know the tests! I was in the Deep Dreaming. It was a true dream. And I heard the alarm we’ve been waiting for, for all these years. I heard it. I heard the sea-bell.” All this came out in one excited rush of words.
Grandfather Lemuel raised his hands. “We mustn’t be too hasty. In the time of the Third Warden of Everness, Alfcynnig, he thought he heard the alarm ring out, and he called the Unsleeping Champion away from Rome to defend the Tower of Vortigern in Wessex; and this allowed the unguarded city to fall to the Goths of Totila. The Sixty-First Warden, Sylvanius Way- lock, called up the storm-princes to whelm the Armada for Elizabeth, and we were cursed out of England for that presumption, by the White Coven, whose charge we had usurped, and had to move this house, stone by stone, to the New World. When the Seventy-Ninth Warden, my Grandfather Phineas Waylock, heard the sea-bell, he raised the Stones and rendered the High Summons. But the sound was no true call; it was only the tumult of a leviathan tangled in the phantom nets of Vindyamar, whose lashing tail shook the crystal belltower, and set the bell to swinging. The Stones of Everness were angered to be roused from slumber for so light a cause, and my grandfather lost his sight in the struggle to force the stones to quietness again. . . Had he sent to the Queens for word, his eyes might have been spared. . .”
Galen drew himself up, and, young though he was, now he spoke with the snap of authority in his voice, not unlike that in his Grandfather’s. Their expressions were the same. “Grandfather! I know the difference between petty dreaming and true. I know them as well or better than you. The dream-colt comes every time I’ve called her, every time! And I’ve called her more than three. And I know the true sound of the sea-bell. I’ve heard it this night on the sea.”
Grandfather Lemuel did not look displeased, but neither did he smile. Perhaps he welcomed a show of spine from this young man. Nonetheless, his voice was cold. “That may be. But the reins have not yet slipped from my hands. You are not the Guardian of Everness yet, no matter what your talents.”
“Grandfather, I heard the sea-bell. The time is come. The time to blow the Last Horn-Call is at hand.”
Now Grandfather Lemuel did smile, but it was a sad, weary smile. “Patience and faithfulness are the virtues mortal men must practice when they stand watch against immortal foes. Galen, every single one of us, all the way back to the Founder, we have all thought, or hoped, or feared, that the Time of the Horn was at hand. But it never was. A lifetime of waiting seems too much to bear when you’re so young, doesn’t it?”
Galen started to speak again, but Lemuel held up his hand: “Patience! We will do everything in due order, but only if (and I said ‘if’!) this latest alarm turns out to be the Sign for which we have all been waiting, all these long and weary years. There have been so very many false alarms before.”
Galen’s demeanor shrank, and boyish uncertainty showed in his face. “Okay. So now what? What do we do now? The old warrant papers say we’re supposed to warn the king or the royal governor at New Amsterdam. So where the heck does that leave us? Am I supposed to call the president? We don’t even have a damned phone in this moldy old museum!” In frustration, Galen struck the wall beside the door with the side of his fist.
“First,” said Grandfather Lemuel calmly, “you will sit down. Here, opposite me. Then you will recount all the particulars of the dream in detail. Don’t slouch.”
“I heard the bell from beneath the sea. Something’s coming. It’s going to try to rise up through the Mist.”
“In what part of the house were you?”
Galen turned and stared into the fire. A haunted, deep look came into his eyes. “Outside, along the wall overlooking the sea, where we always stand. The dream version is bigger, of course, and the huge blocks of stone glisten in the moonlight.”
“How were you dressed? In modern garb?”
“I don’t recall. . .”
“It may be important. You know the dream-things know no modern forms. If you have trouble remembering, recite the first exercise in your mind. Picture the circle of time. Say the key to yourself. Raise the Tower and build the mansion . . .”
Galen closed his eyes. . . .
II
He dreamt he stood upon a wall of thick, black rock, wet with spray, and he wore a coat of silver mail and carried a tall spear tipped with a glint of starlight. In the black, wide sea below him, he dreamt he saw a cavalcade of sunken horsemen, armed and armored in mother-of-pearl. These dimly lit shapes passed silently from the deep sea toward the shore, and the hair of their steeds floated green in the water as they came. The mouths of the drowned knights were open as if they were singing, though no sound rose above the waves, and from their mouths floated clouds of blood.
To the left and right of the cavalcade, slippery black forms, sleek and playful, darted through the gloomy deep and smiled with white teeth as starlight shined from their black eyes.
Far, far to the rear, enormous shadows in the moonlight loomed. With black ocean-froth churning at their knees, and tumbled storm-cloud parting at their shoulders, taller than any creature of the world, strode giants.
The night sky above was torn with flying banners of silver-edged black clouds, rushing in the storm winds. The whole sky seemed to ring and tremble with the echoes of the great bell, tolling, tolling . . .
Black as a scrap of midnight storm cloud, a seagull black as pitch whirled down from dark heaven. In his claws he carried a lantern of the elfs, burning like a small star.
A voice like a man’s voice came from the black seagull: “By token of this light I bear, know ye, Lemuel, Guardian of Everness, Last Guardian to be, I am come from He whose name we speak no more, who founded your order, whose blood and title and oath you bear. I summon you beyond the world’s edge, to Tirion, to Wailing Blood, for there are secrets touching the Emperor of Night, our ancient and undying foe, which you must know before the Towers of Acheron rise from the sea. Do not go to Vindyamar, nor elsewhere, but come at once at mine command.”
And it dropped the light from its claws to Galen. The light plunged like a falling star, and the flame was silver, and did not move, or breathe, or flicker, even as the lantern spun and fell. Galen tried to catch the lantern but it burnt his palm and fell from his fingers, so that the light was lost.
Below, with a roar of several voices, shining knights drenched in filth, and dark, smiling shapes rose from the sea. Giant forms with eyes like lamps came behind them, with arms as tall as towers, sea water flooding from them, reached for the stones at the base of the wall. . .
And the warning bell tolled on and on. . .
III
There was a small, old book, sent to him as a present from his Grandfather Lemuel’s library, which Galen had begun to read as a child. It was made of hand-tooled leather, with a symbol of winged horses dancing on crossed keys on the cover. Galen remembered a poem was inscribed on a page illustrated with interlocking figures of fairies and mermaids, one-eyed giants, and winged horses. The old letters had faded with time, and the first letter of the poem was so decorated with curlicues that young Galen could hardly decide which letter it was supposed to be.
Ware the toll of a single ring,
Night-mare her single rider will bring;
Woe if twice the great bell tolls,
For fire-giants and fell frost trolls;
Storm-princes rise at the sound of three,
The fourth ring brings the plague Kelpie;
Five for Selkie, Six for Hate,
Seven for Doom, Death for Eight.
And if the toll sounds nine withal,
Wake the Sleepers; Nine worlds fall.
If there were more to the old poem, Galen never found out.
When his father came upon Galen reading the book in secret, under the covers with his Boy Scout flashlight, Galen’s father ripped the book out of his hands, beat him till tears quieted his loud protests, and took the book away—presumably to the trashcan.
IV
“How many times did the sea-bell toll?” asked Grandfather Lemuel gently.
Galen’s eyes snapped open. “Many times.”
“More than nine?”
“Grampa, it was all night long. The bell was ringing continuously.” Galen’s eyes were troubled. He looked around the parlor, as if for support. High roof beams; thick walls of oak; a floor of fitted stones, covered with oriental carpets, handwoven, faded. To one side stood tall French doors, open, admitting the smell of sea brine. The murmur of the waves against the cliff below hung like a backdrop behind the other noises of the night.
Outside, beyond the weeds of the overgrown gardens, Galen could see the tumbled stones and cracks of the little wall overlooking the bay. It was, of course, much smaller in real life, and overgrown with moss. Galen suddenly felt the urge to do the repair work Grampa was always on him about.
“Gramps,” said Galen. “I think I might be scared. What do we do?”
Grandfather Lemuel took out an old pipe, and stood up, reaching for his tobacco pouch atop the mantelpiece. “Think, eh? I know I am. But a little fear is like wind in the flowers, you know? The flowers bow for a time. The wind passes. The flowers straighten up again.”
“This is no time for your little sayings. Shouldn’t we be doing something?” Galen knew the old man wanted him to leave. Gramps knew he couldn’t stand the smell of tobacco. Galen rose reluctantly to his feet.
Grandfather Lemuel smiled calmly. “First thing; you go back to bed. I will go to the Chamber of Dreaming to sleep. Tonight I will dream of Vindyamar. I will dream of the Three Fair Queens whose charge is to guard the Great Bell, even as we are charged to guard the Horn, and so discover if it rang for a true cause. There was something strange about the sign you saw.”
Galen said in a sullen voice, “You don’t believe me. But look at this . . .”
And held up his left hand. There was a tiny blister in the palm, a burn. “We were summoned to Tirion. Here is the mark of the star-lantern I touched. The Founder is in Tirion.”
Lemuel looked carefully at the mark in the young man’s palm. He took a candle from the mantelpiece and held it closely, peering. Even though the air was still in the room, the candle flame flickered.
Lemuel nodded slowly. “It’s magic. Only the Blood of Everness can reach across the barriers like that and allow a dream-flame to create a waking burn. Whatever else was in that dream, the Raven came from the Founder, sure enough.” He straightened up and shook his head. “But that doesn’t change a thing, boy. We do not answer each and any summons which comes to us out from the night-world.”
“But Grandfather. . .!”
Grandfather Lemuel’s look of amusement died. “We don’t follow voices out of the night-world. That black sea-bird could have been a selkie wearing a gull skin. And yes, that lantern you touched was the Founder’s handicraft, no doubt. So what?”
“So! The Founder called me to Tirion.”
“No. He called me. And I’m not going. And the Founder does not live in Tirion; he is beyond the rim of the world, hanging in the darkness, in a cage. He betrayed his oath.” Lemuel pointed with his pipestem at the motto inscribed in stone above the mantel. “Maybe he was unfaithful. But maybe he was only impatient.”
Galen understood the hint; reluctantly he turned to go.
But then at the door he turned again, a young and rebellious spirit in hiseyes:
“Where is the Horn, Grandfather Lemuel? Don’t you think it is time I knew?”
“Patience. It’s not time for you to know.”
“What if you don’t come back? Who will be left to blow the Horn?”
“You are not the Guardian yet. Now, you go back to sleep. But do not answer the summons of the black sea-bird. Do not dream about Tirion. Recite the lesser key and go through the gate of lesser dreaming to some nice visions. Cockaygne, perhaps? Luilekkerland? Schlarraffenland?”
Galen straightened. Wounded pride was clear on his face. “Schlarraffenland? That place is for kids! Grandfather Lemuel, I’ve have been places no other Guardian has ever dreamed. I have seen the trees of Arcadia and the groves that grow in the shadow of the Darkest Tower, I have tread the peaks of Zimiamvia and tasted from the ever-falling waters of Utterbol whose fountains are by the sea! I am the greatest dreamer this family has ever produced, and you know it! I am not afraid of the shadows of the dead. I can go to Tirion and return safely. The summons came to me!”
Not without kindness, Grandfather Lemuel said, “You are talented. But, all boasting aside, you are still very young, Galen. And you know that fairy tales depict the rules in the dreaming the same way science describes our rules here. And no hero in any fairy tale ever ignored his Grandfather’s warning and escaped unpunished. Do not go to Tirion. Do not go to speak to the Founder. Is that clear?”
And he lit his pipe with candle he held.
Galen retreated to the door, defiantly snapped on the flashlight, and clomped away upstairs, muttering.
Grandfather Lemuel’s smile faded as soon as Galen was out of the room. “A long flight tomorrow night. . .,” he whispered. He stared up at the carved image of the winged horse. “And a dangerous one. Will the dream-colt come for me, this time, now that the bell has tolled? Vindyamar tonight. But where tomorrow . . . ?”
His gaze crossed the room to look at the painting of the stern-eyed man who held the skull. “Will you talk to me this time, old friend? And let me go again? It’s so cold beyond the world’s edge, and I am so old. . .”
He tamped out his pipe against the mantelpiece. He was not in the mood for a smoke after all. His thoughts were somber. “Suppose you do not let me back through the mist to the sunlight this time? If I don’t wake up, who is left? One frightened boy?”
V
Galen, who had made a deal of noise clattering up the stairs, knew his Grandfather Lemuel’s habit of talking to himself and had crept quickly and quietly downstairs again, flashlight extinguished. He was crouched in the hall beside the parlor door and was in time to hear his Grandfather Lemuel’s last comment.
Later, lying awake in bed and watching the play of the shadows of branches in the moonlight above his bed, Galen came to a stern resolution.
“The first of the watchers is still being punished for his dereliction of duty,” Galen thought to himself. “But Gramps still goes to talk to him. He risks it. It put him in a coma when I was in sixth grade. I remember that’s what the doctors called it. A ‘coma.’ “ He grunted to himself. Contempt was all he felt for modern doctors.
“The First Watcher’s summons came to me. Me. The dream-colts come every time I call, but they have only come three times for Grampa. He might not even be able to get to Tirion.
“And if I go tonight and brave the danger myself, he won’t need to go tomorrow.”
In his mind’s eye, he drew the circle to build the Tower of Time his Grandfather Lemuel had taught him how to keep in his mind. He inscribed the four wings, placing a different phase of the moon in each, a different element, and a different season. About it he erected statues and symbols, gardens and arbors, walkways and walls, each with its own name and hidden meaning. In a few moments the imaginary mansion was as real around him as the mansion he slept in. He whispered the Second Secret Name of Morpheus and stepped into that mansion, rose from the body on the bed on which he slept there, and walked out the doorway that represented today’s phase and season.
In an imaginary garden pagoda, a torch made of narthex reeds held up a light of pure white fire. An imaginary vulture on a stand was gnawing a driblet of red liver. one arch of the pagoda led to stairs which climbed up to the huge black sea-wall to the east. Inscribed on the pagoda walls to either side of this arch, in letters of silver, burned the words of the spell to call a dream-colt from the deeper dreaming.
He looked at the words, wondering whether to speak them or not. Even now, he was still only half asleep: he could feel the heaviness in his limbs, dimly sense the pillows and bedsheets around him, like a little mountainous countryside of folds and wrinkles. Grandfather Lemuel had taught him never to call even a lesser power of the night without someone standing by to wake him up in case of trouble.
And a dream-colt was not one of the lesser powers.
“Gramps will notice in the morning if I’m not back by then,” Galen tried to tell himself.
He had one last thought before he drifted off to sleep, forgot his slumbering body, and entered fully into the dream: “I’m not a frightened boy.”
2
A Life for a Life
I
A husband and wife sat in the sunlight. He sat on the bed and held her hands in his. She sat back on the pillows, eyes bright and cheerful as always. He was a big, burly man with thick black eyebrows and a forked black beard.
Where he was large and bulky, she was small and graceful, and her face was always in motion, now smiling, now blinking, now pouting thoughtfully, now glancing back and forth with a curious gaze. Her hair was long and very dark and her eyes were very blue.
“I’m so sad!” she exclaimed cheerfully. Her voice was as bright as a bubbling stream, and those who heard it felt refreshed.
“Aha. And what makes her sad, my little wife, eh?” He tried to smile, but there was an undercurrent of sorrow in his deep voice. He had a thick Russian accent.
“All the stories seem to be going out of the world. Drying up!” She held up her hands, fingers spread, and shrugged, as if to indicate a mysterious vanishment. “No one listens to them, or tells them anymore. They just watch TV My Daddy calls it the ‘Boob tube.’ I don’t know if that’s because of shows like Baywatch or if only boobies watch it. Except sometimes mothers read books to their children to sleep.” She sighed and suddenly looked very sleepy herself. Her eyelids drooped. Like a light going out, all the animation seemed to leave her face.
He leaned forward, his face blank with fear, and touched her forehead with the back of his hand. “Wendy?” he whispered.
Wendy’s eyes opened. “Tell me a story,” she said.
“I am not good with the stories, my wife. I only know the one of my father, and that one I told to you long ago, when we were engaged. The night on the lake, you remember, eh?”
She sighed and snuggled down into the pillows more deeply. “I said I’d marry you because you were the only man I ever met who was in a fairy tale story. It was such a good idea! I’m so glad I thought of it.”
“You thought? It was I who asked you, my wife.”
“Yes, well, and a long time you were getting around to it, too!” She laughed in delight, and then said, “Tell it to me again!”
“Well. Father lived in the Caucasus mountains and hated the Russian government men with a deep hatred . . .”
“No, no, no! That’s not right! It starts with, ‘I am Var Varovitch,’ which means Raven the son of Raven in your language. ‘This is the story of how I came by this name.’ “
“Hah! Who is telling this story, you or I? Now be quiet and let me talk to you. I am Var Varovitch. In your language I am called Raven, the son of Raven. This is the story of how I came by this name.”
“Almost right,” she allowed. “The next part goes, ‘My father had climbed throughout all the mountains, in places even the goats did not go, and such was his fame as a trapper and trails man, that. . .’”
“Quiet, now. When the government people wanted a guide, they came to my father and offered him their paper rubles, which were worthless, for they had no gold to back them, and a government order from the Georgia S.S.R. apparat, which was also worthless, but which had the guns and soldiers from the Tbilisi garrison to back it. For himself, he had no fear. But for me, he had fear. For I had taken my mother’s life when I came into this world, and there were no doctors to save her, for she was Georgian, not Russian, and had no friends in the capital to have a doctor assigned by the government. And I was but a babe in the crib at this time, and had never seen the green grass, since I was born in the winter, and the spring had not yet come.”
“I love that part.”
“Quiet. Father feared they might burn the village if he refused to take the expedition up the slopes of Mount Kazbek. He knew the place where they wished to go, even though it was not the place shown on any of their maps. But he asked them why they could not wait till spring. Did they not recall how the Russian winter had destroyed the invasion of Hitler’s armies less than a handful of years ago? But no, they must go to the spot where it said on their maps. The scientist there in charge of the expedition said they must go, since the glory of the Soviet peoples commanded it, and only a traitor would cause delay.
“Well, father said he could not leave his little baby with no mother, since he had only the milk to drink of wild she-wolves father caught in the snow. . .”
“That’s you! I bet you were cute. But you forgot a part. ‘The winter was so bitter that the cows gave ice, and the bird song froze in the air, and it was not until spring thawed the notes free, that all the birdsong sprang up over the green earth . . . ‘ “
“No, that is from different story. So, now. The expedition had been traveling for many days, blinded by snow, on short rations . . .”
“Wait. The government scientist made your father take you with him. You were bundled up on his back in a wrapper of wolfskin.”
“Yes, that too.”
“And you forgot about the part where they all laughed at him for carrying a bow and arrows when they had guns, and then later their guns froze.”
“That part is coming. Where was I? There was nothing in the sky but one black vulture, and all about them ice crags and chasms of the mountains. Father pointed at the black vulture . . .”
“You forgot something.”
“Yes, yes. The-stupid-scientist-thought-they-were-lost-and-the-soldier- threatened-to-kill-father. okay? okay! Listen: Father pointed at the black vulture and said they need but follow the bird to find what, in the midst of the empty mountains, that bird found to eat.
“He led them to where there was a naked man chained to the mountain, a man so tall that he was taller than the steeple of a church. He was chained with chains of black iron, and frost clung to his chains, and red icicles spread like a fan from the great wound in his side, all down along the bloodstained cliff where he was chained. His face was calm and grave, like the face of the statue of a king; but all full of suffering, like the face of a saint in an icon.
“ ‘What do you see?’ asked my father. For he knew the Russian men were not like those of us from Georgia, and cannot see what is right before their faces.
“ ‘I see ice,’ said one soldier.
“ ‘I see rock,’ said another soldier.
“ ‘What do you hear?’ asked my father.
“ ‘I hear nothing but the wind,’ said one soldier.
“ ‘I hear your brat squalling!’ said another soldier.
“But the scientist looked up, and said, ‘I hear a great deep voice, asking us to shoot the vulture which torments him.’
“But the soldier’s guns had frozen and could not shoot the great black vulture.”
Wendy chimed in happily, “But your father shot him with the bow!”
Raven nodded. “Just so. Down and down the great bird plunged, and the great voice told my father that, even though the bird would live again as soon as the sun came up, for that day, the torture had been stopped. And because he had done this thing, he could ask for any wisdom in the world.”
Wendy said, “But the scientist made him ask . . .”
“Yes, yes. The scientist made my father talk to the titan. ‘The Americans have a bomb which they have made from splitting the atom. This is a fire too dangerous for mortals to control, unless it is the Supreme Soviet.’ This is what the scientist made him say.”
“And about the rockets.”
“Yes. ‘The Americans have taken the German rocket scientists from Peenamünde. And they will learn a secret of the fires of heaven, which is how to launch a great missile, greater than the V-I and V-2 rockets. We must launch a satellite before the Americans, to show the glory of Soviet science to the world. Our great leader Stalin has commanded this thing.’ “
Raven paused. “You are not too tired for this story? It is almost time when time is up.” He looked at his watch and frowned.
“What happened next?”
“The giant looked down at Father with wise and sad eyes, and said, ‘Son of the mountains, I will tell these men who have enslaved you all you ask of me. And yet in my heart I hate all slavery, for man was not created to be a servant. You know this is true. Creatures made for servitude, cattle and sheep, who crawl with their faces forever in the ground, they do not yearn for liberty; only mankind. I will tell you a secret thing unknown to all others, upon your promise never to tell anyone, not even your own son. For there is a way out of these mountains, across to the other side, past all the patrols, over the walls and past the guard posts, into the lands of freedom to the west. I will tell you this way if you will promise instantly to take it and go.’
“ ‘What must I give you in return, eldest grandfather?’ asked my father.
“ ‘To be free, you must give up all fear. Neither you nor your son shall ever know fear again. To begin life anew, you must give up your old name. You may call yourself Raven, for he is a wise bird, and he knows the boundaries between life and death; and if any ask you how you climbed down the impassable mountains or escaped past the guards and fences, you may tell them you flew as a Raven.’
“And that is all my father told me of how we came to this country when I was a boy, and I never learned the truth of it, though I know he would not tell a child the names of those who had helped smuggle him out, and that only secrecy would keep the way open for others. All he would say is that he flew like a Raven away from a land filled with death and corpses.”
II
Raven was silent a moment and took his wife’s hands in his. “And then I came and fell in love with you, my beautiful strange little Wendy.”
“Do you want to hear my story again? The one I told you when you proposed? It all about flying, too. I used to have dreams about flying, and I wondered why I could never remember how to do it when I woke up. Then, when I was nine years old, I was home, sick from school, and I was playing with one of my mother’s cats, Simples, and suddenly I remembered. You just stand on one foot, both at the same time, so that each foot thinks the other one is on the ground. I flew up out the window and over my school down the street, and I stopped to rest on top of the flagpole. But the funny thing was, no one could see me, no matter how I shouted. I remember I wished I had brought something to drop on the kids playing in the playground. Not even my Nanny, when I went past the window of the kitchen on the way back, could see me. I went down to tell my Nanny what I had done, but she just fed me chicken soup and told me to go back to bed. After I got better, I tried it again. But I could never get it to do it again. Once in college, in a gym class, I started to get a floaty feeling, which might have been the same thing. But no one ever believed me. They tried to tell me I made it up, even though I remembered all clearly. Why do people do that? Just because they never heard about something like that before, they pretend it never happened to me, just because it never happened to them! Adults just forget the good part about being a kid. Why? Why not be a kid and a grown-up at the same time and just take the best of both halves? Kids aren’t afraid of dying. They’re not afraid of anything. Except monsters. And adults aren’t afraid of those. See?”
“Yes, my dear. I see,” said Raven, nodding.
“I was just thinking about that time when I was flying over the playground at school. Because I had a dream about it last night. I followed the road the school bus took so I wouldn’t get lost (that actually happened), but on the way back (I dreamed this part), I saw a pony standing on a cloud in midair, eating the cloud-fluff, like it was grass. You know how horses eat. The funny thing was, I think I’ve really seen horses like that before, at my window when I was falling asleep.”
Raven straightened up. “You never said this part before.”
“Maybe I just remembered. But the other part was a dream. I think. Listen. He was a white color, like starlight, and his eyes were stars. I asked the pony, how come I had never seen him before? And he said he and his kind were made of star-stuff and were banished in the sunlight just like the night sky is banished. ‘You have seen me a million times,’ he said, ‘but when each day you enter the waking world, the mist of Everness makes our friendship fade like a dream, and I cannot follow you. But there is a house to the East. . .’”
III
At that moment, the nurse came in to give Wendy her medications, and Wendy would not speak about a dream or tell a secret story in front of a stranger. The nurse also gently reminded Raven that visiting hours were over, and that the other patients in the terminally ill ward might be disturbed, even if the door was shut, by his voice.
Wendy was made sleepy by the medicines. “I remember all sorts of weird things that I forgot from before,” she said. “And such funny dreams!”
Raven leaned forward to kiss her goodbye, but whispered, “I will sneak back in tonight by the loose window I found. They cannot keep me from you, my little one . . .”
“Don’t be sad,” she said softly back. “I can feel I might be going to a better place. I can see it in my mind sometimes, when I’m half asleep, like a light filled up with warmth. If I can stand it, you should be able to, you big man, you. And stop worrying! You’ll make me worry if you do.”
And Raven fiercely hugged her, afraid to take his face away from her cheek since he was ashamed to let her see his sudden tears.
IV
That night, by secret means, Raven came back into the hospital. There was commotion and business at the intensive care unit, nurses running, and so no one was about when he crept up to his wife’s room, hunched over in a long white coat he had stolen earlier from a laundry. Beneath the coat he held a red rose in a clear plastic cone he had bought from a man on the corner.
He thought how he hated the smells of disinfectant, the glare of the neon lighting on the soundproofing of the ceiling. It was not homey. It was not home. It was not where a man’s wife should lie dying, away from her home so that her husband had to sneak in like a thief to see her.
Because he was walking softly, in the way his father had taught him, so as to make no noise at all, Raven heard a strange, thin voice, eerie, chilling, cold and bitter, speaking in his wife’s room.
“—Even if you know not your heritage, nor the prophecy, I know. The fairy blood, even if commingled and halved, runs in you. You are not as other women. Haven’t you discovered that they cannot see nor hear me?”
Then, Wendy’s voice, sounding calm and strong: “Go away! You are an evil creature. I want nothing to do with you.”
“Eight nights I have come to offer you your life. This is the ninth and last.”
“I don’t care to hear it again. Go away.”
“I am a necromancer. I can restore your life to you. You will be well and healthy, and sing and dance beneath the sun. You will grow old in due time and will bear many children.”
“Go away. It would be just the same as murder. I wouldn’t kill someone even if I were on a lifeboat.”
“The only price is this: the balance of the uncaring universe requires that a life pay for your life. You will never know on whom this doom will fall. It will be no kin nor friend of yours. It will be a stranger. If you, who are fated to die, shall be brought by my magic to live, then another, who is fated to live, shall die.”
“If you’re so great, why don’t you step into the light, where I can see you?”
“I am not for you to look at.”
Raven clutched at the doorframe, his mind a whirl of strange thoughts. Who was visiting his wife? And . . .?
To let her live again . . .
He blinked back sudden tears of confused hope, then anger. He knew he did not believe any of this; this was some lunatic conversation!
Softly, the thought crept into his mind: and what did he care anyway if some stranger died?
Raven thrust open the door.
Inside was only his wife, sound asleep, in a darkened room. No one else. The windows were closed. There were no other exits. The room was quiet and still.
Raven crossed carefully to the bed, wondering, if, for some absurd reason, she were feigning sleep.
Gently, he touched her cheek, but she did not wake.
Raven thought back on what his life had been before he met this most wonderful of women. Empty. He remembered how often he had been sunk in gloom, how often he had been sick with loneliness, and how poorly he had fared with other women. He was always a foreigner, always a stranger. Until he had met this delightful creature (he could almost believe her half a fairy) who made even a stranger like himself warmly welcome, and gave him a home.
“Wake, my Wendy,” he said softly. “I have brought you a rose.”
But she did not wake up. He put the rose on her chest and folded her hands over it, so she would find it when she woke.
He looked at her lying there, hands crossed over the flower . . .
Then, sudden horror made him dash the rose from her hands. Wendy was pale and was not moving. He touched her forehead but could not tell if she were warm. By the bedside was a buzzer to call the nurse. Raven pushed it with his thumb, again and again, calling out in a loud, hoarse voice.
On the bed, Wendy stirred and opened her eyes. “What a racket!”
Outside came the sound of footsteps coming and confused voices, as of sick people, calling out complaints and questions.
“Now you’ve done it!” Wendy said brightly, smiling. “Better hide in the closet! Shoo!”
Laughing with relief, Raven jumped into the little closet and closed the door to a crack. Through that crack, as the minutes went by, he watched with a sense of embarrassment and guilt as nurses and night interns rushed into the room.
Many minutes went by, while his wife played dumb and asked simple- minded questions, smiling at the intern’s confusion. Raven watched his wife. She was lovely, smiling, cheerful. . .
He was stabbed by the memory of how she had looked for that single moment when she had the flower on her motionless bosom.
He whispered to himself, “Devil or fairy or whatever you are! If she would not agree, I will. Kill whomever you needs must kill. I want my wife to live.”
Raven’s nape hairs prickled. A sudden certainty that he was being watched made him fear to turn or move.
From behind him, a cold voice uttered the words, “So be it.
3
City
at the
World’s Edge
I
A time before (but it cannot be measured whether it was a long time or a short, there in that timelessness) armored in gleaming silver mail, spear in hand, a young man stood upon the dark, gigantic stones of the wall between the waking and the dreaming worlds, head thrown back, helmet scarves flowing down across his neck and shoulders, eyes shining, and, with a powerful, clear voice, he sang his song into the stars.
Daughter of Eurynome,
Who soars as far as dreams can reach;
A titan made an oath to me,
And by his blood, I thee beseech.
I call as he called once, in need,
For wings to top Olympic height;
His crime divine made thee my steed;
My soul still holds those fires bright!
My soul, immortal as is thine,
Bound in clay, confounded, yet divine,
Doomed to die, but dreams Eternity,
Still recalls what calls thee now to me.
As he sang, there came a motion in the deep, wide darkness of heaven as like a falling star, a bright meteor of diamond light, which swelled in his vision. And he saw a flying creature coming forward out of that light, graceful and swift as an antelope, bold as a war-trained stallion in his strength, yet more delicate than a fawn. The light was all around her as she fled toward him across the wave crests of the sea, out from the sea of darkness, with her hoofs wetted on the surging foam, dancing on the waves above the circle of light she shed, and where that light touched, the blackness of the waves was turned briefly emerald, deep, translucent.
In a moment of wonder the dream-colt rode the boisterous tide crashing up the iron wall, to leap lightly down before the laughing young man, surrounded by glittering spray, with stardust still tangled in her trailing mane.
“I have forgotten who I am,” said the young man, who had lost himself in the enchantment and strong beauty of her coming.
“It is one of the dangers of the dreaming, from which I am oath bound to shield you, my beloved,” she said, and she told him his name, calling him the youngest of those loyal to the light.
Her voice was like an exultation of strings and woodwinds. “Remember also, son of the race sprung from Adam and Titania, that I am bound to carry you whereso you will, whether to some star remote, or worlds far lost in the scope of endless night, or across the gulf of time to aeons unrecalled, or further, whether into realms and dreams yet unimagined. Mount, and say where you will go. Yet above the sphere of the fixed stars I may not carry you; unyielding law forbids.”
II
Gently, Galen Waylock laid his hand on her mane, and the softness of her long, starlight-colored hairs delighted his fingers. “I have also forgotten why I have called you. But I remember my pride has called me to this adventure, and the knowledge that I must do something worthy to be a man.”
And then he heard a slow, deep bell tolling far out across the waste of the waves, and Galen remembered.
“I must find the road to Tirion, where the founder of our Order is being punished.”
“We call him Azrael. He is beyond the world’s edge, beyond safety and sanity and starlight; I may not take you there.”
But Galen showed no impatience or despair, but stood in quiet thought; for he was wise in the lore of dreaming, and to remember forgotten things was the soul and secret of his art.
He recited: “Four are the citadels which guard the land, beneath four moons and Oberon’s command. In all moons Everness, on which Man’s Earth relies; the High House unchanging beneath changing skies. In full light, Celebradon to Autumn stars arose; till doomsday to give knights ceaseless glad repose. By crescent light was Vindyamar ordained to wander free; to watch over waves and guard fast the sea. By dark of moon was Tirion made, where, wailing, were sent, those who betrayed, or refused to repent. . .” Galen broke off at this point and, looking sternly at the dream-colt, said: “My memory is meant for ever. I recall that Tirion must be the place where Azrael de Gray is kept; and, since the silver towers of Tirion rise beneath the moon, they are not indeed beyond the world’s end, but under starry skies. Nor is this a place unlawful for mortal men to go by dream. Why do you hide this from me? Why do you say Azrael is elsewhere?”
“He is not in Tirion but beyond it, in a place called Wailing Blood. I am not allowed to carry you to the nameless places; if you go into Wailing Blood, I must remain behind you.”
“He is beyond the world’s edge? How far?”
“Far, far is the distance between virtue and crime! It is a distance that I cannot bear you.”
“Then carry me to Tirion; I call upon your ancient promise. This beyond, called Wailing Blood, I shall discover for myself.”
“There is danger,” warned the dream-colt, shying back. “For those who fly too far high or too far low may lose themselves in dreaming, and forget how to return to flesh within the world of the day once more.”
“I accept the risk.”
She lowered her graceful head in sorrow. “Then the doom is put upon you; with thine own mouth thou hast said it. I can carry you to Tirion; thereafter, I must stay behind you.”
III
He mounted upon her back, and, swift as a falling star, she flew from the great wall. Her light was all around him as they rose into the purple gloom. Through gaps in the silver-touched, moonlit clouds, he saw the waters of the dream-sea far below, high waves, crowned with foam, moving across the face of the deep; and the moonlight danced like cold fire, and sparks and glints of light flickered across the wave crests.
He spoke a word of power, and the moon passed behind a cloud, and, when the moon emerged again, it was a new moon, and held no light.
Without light, the ocean was now a greater darkness beneath the textured gloom of the clouds below, and the young man flew through the widening night.
Once the two were attacked by storms; he calmed them with the names of the one storm-prince loyal to Everness. Once they were chased by winged nightmares; he employed a rune of warding, and his silver steed out- flew them. Once an airy phantasm came walking across the wind by starlight to harass them, long spider limbs flickering like smoke, eyes glimmering; but he made the Voorish sign; the entity was quailed and removed itself to other cycles and formations of the dreaming.
IV
They came to a place where a line of mountains rose up from the seas ahead, mountains taller than the clouds, and, dimly, in the wide, far spaces beyond, he could hear the ringing thunder and strange music of the cataracts of the world’s edge.
The tops of the mountains were carved with colossal, brooding faces, narrow eyed, grim, gigantic. From one horizon to the other, as far as the mountains ranged, these vast dark countenances lowered above the clouds. In the starlight, shadows, distance, and mists hid those features from Galen’s gaze; he saw only glimpses of slanted eyes as large as lakes, the silhouettes of angular cheeks, of long-lobed ears, of darkened brows. One or two of the great faces perhaps wore many-towered crowns; or perhaps these were fortresses, either deserted for many ages or else manned by silent armies of some race that required neither light nor fire.
Nor would the dream-colt fly beyond those mountains, for she said they were the sign of Oberon.
Lightly she set down on the forest road in the shadow of two mountains. Here, the pass, like a saddle, rose up, then fell down into the civilized land beyond. On either side were pine trees, whispering most softly in the night winds, and, here and there among the trees, were obelisks and standing stones taller than the treetops. Galen could not remember who had erected these silent monuments or what meaning they had, though he uneasily recalled that at one time he had known.
He strode on foot up to the pass, and the only light came from the spear in his hand. Heavy shadows walked behind him among the rocks.
At the crest of this pass between two of the taller mountains, Galen paused and looked down. Very dimly by starlight, he saw, or dreamed he saw, a wide valley cut by nine rivers. A walled city of slender towers rose on many bridges and piers above and around these rivers. In the towers were watchfires burning, yet burning with a strangely colored light, as if the wood they burned there were not earthly.
Beyond the towers he saw only sky, for the world ended at a brink.
“Wind! I call you by your secret names—Boreas, Eurus, Zephyrus, Notus—by the four winds, give me four tidings of this land beyond!” For he recalled that strange knowledge and secrets sometimes come to those who dream.
A quiet voice from above his head spoke: “I hear the screams of the tormented, their shrieks and sobs and choked weepings; and I hear the laughter and gaiety of the righteous, and from their calls and speech, I know that the folk live lives of ease and virtue. I can hear the whisper of the waters running through wide nets, and I can guess the cause of their ease. Their fisher folk cast great nets woven of human hair across the mouths of the great waterfalls dashing off the world’s edge, and the current carries to their nets all the lost treasure of all the sea-wrecks of the world’s oceans, lost beyond the care of any worldly power to claim or recollect.
“The cause of their virtue, I have heard, is that one of the Principalities of Mommur, the City Neverending, appointed them the jailers of those condemned or damned by the justice of the Timeless Realm. The continual and public reminder of supernatural justice urges them to honest practice and openheartedness.”
“Tell me of these damned, spirit,” commanded Galen.
“The method employed by the Tirioneese to discharge their duty is both simple and cruel. The damned are placed in cages, too small to allow the prisoner either to stand or to sit, made all of needle-studded bars. The cages are swung out on long chains or derricks suspended over the cliffside of the world’s edge. At certain times, depending on the period of the swinging of these pendulums, the cages are swung into the path of the falling water plunging in nine waterfalls from the brink. This both feeds and torments the prisoners, for, while they are half drowned, certain fish, falling weightless through the flood, attracted by the prisoners’ blood on the needles of the cage’s bars, will come to drink of their sores and wounds, and be impaled upon the selfsame needles, and the prisoner, if his hands are quick, may feed on the fish. During the morning, the water turns to steam to scald them, and during the evening, to ice.”
“What is the name of this place?”
“I have heard it called Wailing Blood.”
Galen nodded, having suspected as much. The dream-colt had spoken in riddles, not quite lying. Wailing Blood was beyond the world’s edge, it was true; but only by the length of a chain.
“Is Azrael of Everness confined there?”
“As to that, young wisecraft, I cannot say, having never heard his scream nor any gasp of pain from him. It may be that he is not there. Or it may be that he does not cry out in pain. Four questions I have answered, and have answered all; but you have not asked, nor shall I answer, what the danger is of World’s Edge, nor what might save you should you fall.”
And the wind was still.
Galen struck the stones of the road below his feet. “Earth! Speak! From your yield came Adam, came Ash, came Erichthon and Typhon; yield now to me what tidings I require of this land upon your utmost brink.”
And a voice like an earthquake stirred the ground underfoot, and he heard the words trembling through his bones: “Young fool, I feel the hoofbeat on my broad back of the knight who comes to slay you. Beware! He is upon you!”
At that word, the clarion peals of a thousand light-voiced bells rose up strongly from the city down in the valley before him, and there was a moment of red twilight thrown across the sky. Suddenly, golden and enormous, the newborn sun filled the sky beyond the eastern towers.
The great orb passed within a few hundred feet of the taller towers, and Galen saw their stones were burnt pale by the passage of that gigantic sphere, and the golden beams swept the morning streets as if with streams of purest fire.
The forest around him, he now, in the blinding light, saw, was not made of pine trees at all. It was a graveyard of pillars, thin obelisks, and standing stones, only a few of which had been bare. The rest were braided and woven with many sticks and strands of incense, which, in the gloom, Galen had mistaken for pine needles. Arms of fire from the sun swept across the mountainside and ignited all this sacramental fume, so that the great sun rose in the midst of a forest fire of sacred smoke. Galen remembered only now that these were solar obelisks, which drew down the might of the sun.
Tears streaming across the ashy blackness of his face, Galen, coughing, stumbled down the road, blinded, running without plan or purpose. Curling flame writhed and smoked, roaring on every side.
Ahead of him on the road, coming suddenly into view amidst the smoke and smolder of the graveyard, appeared an armored knight upon a roan steed, flashing with dazzling reflections of the blinding dawn light. Smoke and steam came from him and from his ornaments, and a terrible heat like a furnace, and when he drew his sword, it burst into flame. This knight was dressed all in red, with designs of copper and red gold chased through the shining steel of his breastplate, and a proud plume of blood red flying from a ruby in his helm. His face was hidden; there may have been anything beneath that helm. On his blazing shield burned the image of a lark.
The apparition called out in a loud voice: “Stand! I am the warrior of the dawn. This place is forbidden to mortal men, who live their lives blind to the great war all around them, and to servants of Darkness. All these buried here are those who tried to pass by me.”
And he gestured with his sword far left and right. As far as the eye could see, the gravestones and monuments bore the legend SLAIN AT DAWN.
“We serve one cause,” cried out Galen. “For I am loyal to Celebradon, the citadel of Light, and have spent all my life in its service.”
“Loyal? Those who are loyal obey. Go back. You shall not pass.”
“My world is in danger, and only Azrael might know the cause of it. I charge you stand aside and let me pass!”
“Do you know any name or words so to command me? If not, then you have no authority to pass by me, no matter what need you pretend. Go back, or I will strike you!”
Galen’s grandfather would have known the words, but Galen had not yet been taught them. Galen was alone.
“Ha! Strike me? Me! I am one of the watchmen of Everness! I have powers you have not guessed, small spirit! I have defeated worse dreams than you!” Galen felt anger and pride blushing in his face, making his limbs tremble with strength.
Without any further parley, the Red Knight clapped spurs to his roan horse, and, whirling his smoking sword in a great circle over his head, came rushing down upon Galen as if to trample him.
But Galen pointed his spear at the charger, and shouted, “By the name which Adam gave the eldest sire of your race—Wynrohim, Rohir, Equus, Hippos! I compel you be still!”
And the horse stopped, stumbling as if it had struck an unseen wall. The Red Knight was thrown from his saddle headlong, and fell in a heap, but rose on one knee, holding up his red sword.
“Base! Oh, basely done!” cried out the knight. ‘And will you fight me with a spear, I who have no equal weapon, but only sword in hand? Grant me quarter long enough to rise to my feet!”
“Where was all this chivalrous talk when you were about to trample me?” shouted Galen. And he stabbed with his spear, a long lunge, guiding the blow with one hand and imparting power to the thrust with his other, as he had been taught.
The Red Knight, rising to his feet, parried the blow once and twice with his smoking sword, but could deliver no counterthrust, as the length of Galen’s spear put him beyond reach.
The Red Knight strode hugely forward, lashing with short, narrow sweeps of his sword at Galen’s swiftly darting spear. Sparks from the sword fell across splinters and gouges the sword shaved from the spear shaft, but it had not caught on fire yet. Galen was forced to step backward and backward to maintain the advantage of his reach; but he could not retreat for long, for the still-smoking rocks of the graveyard were behind him.
When Galen stabbed right, the Red Knight parried with his sword; when he stabbed left, the knight’s shield deflected the blows.
Galen, in anger and impatience, called out, “Excalibur! Galatine! Balmung! Nothung! I call upon the Four Kings of All Swords to curse this blade opposing me!”
The Red Knight’s blade shattered in his gauntlet with a crack like thunder. As the fragments dropped from the broken sword hilt, Galen drove a blow through the knight’s guard on the right and struck him in the throat. His gorget was riven in; Galen’s glowing spearpoint pierced the chain links of his coif; the knight spat blood and fell prone.
“Cowardly, traitorously, and unknightfully struck! Know ye that I am the Son of the Guardian of Tirion. My blood is from the race of Yudhishthira, most just of men, who was the son of Cosmic Law. That Law I call upon to work my dying curse, which else, had you been chivalrous, could not have touched you: your life is forfeit before the sunset of this day!”
But the Red Knight’s voice was not coming from his body, which lay still, facedownward, in a spreading pool of blood, but from a point in midair above it.
Galen stood above the corpse, mopping his face with his lambrequin. “I shall not fear your curse, ghost, for I know the arts to banish shadows . . .” but the words came out more uncertainly than he would have liked.
He performed the ceremonies to allay the ghost, pouring out the wine, putting the proper herb into the corpse’s mouth, coins upon his eyes, and laid great stones over the body to restrict it. In the graveyard were many loose stones and crosses and fragments of cups and other things he needed for this purpose.
It was now midmorning, and Galen could see, in the distance, the citizens of Tirion emerge onto the streets, wearing wide-brimmed hats and carrying parasols, garbed in robes of lightest silk.
By noon the sun had dwindled and passed into the far west, a small, dim dot riding among gathering clouds, and Galen had traveled through the outer suburbia, and reached the city gates.
The citizens, in this cooler time, were now wearing long coats; and the women going to the fountains, carrying tall jars upon their heads, hid their legs in long, flowing skirts of many colors.
One of these women, with polite words, proffered him a drink from her jar, which he took, sluicing his scarf and cleaning some of the smoke and stain from his armor. With a quiet laugh, the woman warned him not again to be caught by the power of the dawn.
Her words seemed ominous to Galen. “And what about the sunset?”
She smiled again and shook her head. “No citizen of Tirion has ever seen the dusk, for twilight fades to night here by imperceptible degrees. Before you is the Gate of Noon, with an Eye as bright as the Eye of Day. Whether you can pass that gate and live, we shall yet discover. But as for sunset, you will not see it!” And she pointed at the gate not far away, which Galen inspected, frowning. There were no guards here, but the arch and the gate were clearly magical.
Galen turned to ask the woman another question; but she had vanished like a dream.
The gate held a black pillar on the right and a white pillar on the left, and the keystone of the gateway arch was inscribed with the Vedic Eye. The other stones of the archway were marked with the five signs of the five Pandavas. Galen attempted to pass the gate but found he could not, for a hostile will radiating from the Vedic Eye held him back.
Galen was not unwise in the lore of dreams. He turned and walked back all the miles to where the corpse of the Red Knight lay. It took an hour to unbury him. The wounds of the corpse burst into fresh blood at his approach. With some difficulty, he removed the red cloak and performed again the ceremonies and the burial he had done that morning.
Then he doffed his own cloak (which was a heavy silver gray with a collar of fur) and rolled it in a bundle. Galen took the red cloak and drew it around himself. He raised the hood to hide his face. The bloodstains were not conspicuous among the scarlets, reds and red-brown dyes of the cloak.
All the miles back he went. This time he passed the gate with no difficulty.
Galen walked in among the tall buildings, museums, halls, and cathedrals of the inner parts of Tirion. The time was now late afternoon, and the westering sun was a dim spot, merely one brighter star among the many that now began to appear in the deepening dark blue of heaven. Snow was falling through the air, and the people of Tirion seemed to have little business to attend to as the afternoon darkened and deepened.
Galen saw boys in fur caps going to skate on frozen public fountains and older youths riding in gilded carriages and sleds to some ball or high festivity, held by candlelight in their great halls. The men were all garbed in long, black, heavy coats and tall hats, and the women were swathed in furs, delicate hands hidden in muffs, and their laughing faces, red with cold or with pleasure, were hidden in the shadows of deep fur hoods. Galen glimpsed their lovely faces only as soft shadows, with the hint of a smile or flutter of bright and merry eyes caught in the light of colored lamps carried by linkboys escorting them to their rendezvous.
As he walked, more candles appeared behind more windows of stained glass among the tall crowded mansions. But, walking further, he came to an area where the mansions were very tall and very dark indeed, and the museums were empty, and the temples were shut up and closed.
As the dusk grew deeper, it grew colder; he discarded the red cloak on the stairs before an empty temple, and he donned his own thicker and warmer cloak of silver gray.
The streets he walked along were grand, gloomy, and impressive. Galen saw grim, great statues standing in the empty squares or looming from tall pillars in deserted courtyards. The forbidding faces of the statues were like those of the mountainscapes in the land outside: narrow eyed and high cheeked, with strange, long-lobed ears. More and more of these statues were in postures of war, with sword and shield, or stood with hand upraised, all of them facing the direction Galen faced as he walked to the edge of the world.
He passed a line of statues standing with grim solemnity atop a row of pillars at the end of the avenue. To the left and right, dimly seen by starlight, the tall, black stone figures rose, hands and weapons raised, all facing outward toward the dark.
Galen stepped a few feet outward along a dark bridge that passed between two of these pillars; but he realized he was not upon a bridge, but a pier, which protruded out into midair and broke off without any lip or railing.
He took another step forward.
A sensation of dread entered Galen’s heart, and he froze. He looked left and right carefully, seeking the source of his fear. Then he turned.
Behind him, there was a shadow among the statues, robed and hooded, who stood without motion. The hood was facing Galen. Galen slowly raised his star-shining spear.
The figure still did not move. Galen, one cautious step at a time, drew closer. The light from his speartip fell across the fabric of the hooded being’s robe.
It was the same red and bloodstained robe Galen had despoiled from the corpse of the Red Knight.
Now a soft voice came from the hood. Galen could not tell if it were a man’s voice or a woman’s. “I see into the World of Judgment even as you see into the World of Dreams, and you cannot hide your crimes from me, any more than I can hide my dreams from you.”
Galen said, “Who are you?”
The voice replied: “I and my race are appointed to guard against traffic from dishonest Nastrond even as Everness is set to stand watch against the invasion of nightmarish Acheron. Yet, my race was here before there was a city of Tirion, for all this place was created to hold one single traitor damned by Oberon. All those imprisoned afterward were given to us only because this prison already existed. That prisoner also is of the House of Everness. Also a traitor.”
“I’m not a traitor,” said Galen.
“If I wished, these stone statues would rise to life and rend you limb from limb. Yet I will not hinder you. You go forward to a doom far worse that any to which my justice would condemn you. Go! All which you have done shall return to you, and your guardianship invaded by one who wears your cloak, even as you, by wearing my son’s cloak, came into mine.”
The cloak fell to the ground in a heap, empty. Perhaps it had never been full.
“Wait!” cried out Galen. “Guardian of Tirion, listen to me! I fought only because I was attacked! I came here only because I was summoned! I am loyal to the cause of Light!”
But he was only calling into empty air. He looked left and right, but there was nothing to be seen. Galen prodded the cloak with the tip of his spear, but there was no reaction, and the voice did not come again.
Galen said the words he had been taught to mitigate curses. But the words came dull and slow to his lips, and he did not know if there were any effect. Should he continue onward? There seemed no reason to delay. Uncertainly, he walked back along the stone bridge.
Where the stone brink of the bridge he stood upon fell away to open air, three dozen rings or more, each a dozen feet in diameter, held huge links, as large as any Galen had ever seen or dreamed, curving away down into the dark, giant chains gleaming in the starlight. From the very central ring, one chain dropped down larger and straighter, farther into the gloom below, than any of the others.
He had passed over the brink of the cliff of the world’s edge without realizing it; this half-bridge was cantilevered over the abyss. Underfoot was only air.
This was not a good sign. When had he passed beyond the world’s edge? When the Guardian of Tirion had cursed him? Before? This was a bad place to be. Things here, even a few feet beyond the world’s boundary, were not bound by worldly rules. The Powers and Dominions to which he prayed might not be in range to hear him now, and ordinary objects might not recall their true names. His prayer meant to deflect the curse might have been meaningless.
And yet there was no reason to wait.
He knelt at the edge of the half-bridge he stood on, put his feet on the huge links of the long central chain he found there, and swung himself over the edge.
V
With no memory of an arduous climb, Galen next found himself to be standing, balanced like a wire walker on the links of a great chain, leading to a ring embedded in the icicles and ice stalactites of a frozen waterfall. Depending from that ring, entwined and half buried in thick icicles, hung a grisly cage all made of spikes and needles.
To either side and high above were other iron cages of the Unforgiven, hanging still and silent in midair or caught midswing and frozen in the ice. Nine broad avenues of ice ran down the titanic cliffside on which Galen found himself. The place was like a bay embracing an abyss, for to his left and right Galen could see the tremendous cliffs, larger than mountains, which thrust rocky spurs out into midair, with, here and there, small shelves or crevasses in which blown seeds had planted wiry grass or isolated trees.
Underfoot were a few solitary clouds, a scattering of stars, and, below them, unending darkness.
Nearer at hand, however, and above him, were many bloodstained cages; it was on the chain of the lowest and longest-chained of all the cages that he stood. The cage had been at the apex of its swing when it had been caught in the evening snows, and had become embedded in the walls of the waterfall.
A little water still trickled from the icicles to drool upon the black figure crouched within the cage. A drop splattered noisily upon the bowed head, and, at that, the figure stirred and raised his head. He was bent over within the cage, which was not large enough to permit him to stand.
Through tangled strands of hair peered eyes dark and kingly, though made hollow by long suffering; the nose was hooked, the lips cruel and set, the whole expression, bitter, pitiless, and stern. He wore the tattered rags of some once-festive lacy garments, as if he had been arrested during a festival and not allowed to change. His skin was crisscrossed with many scars and puncture wounds, and blackened with frostbite and ugly burns.
“I am Azrael de Gray Waylock,” said the man, his voice solemn and low. And he reached through the bars to put his hand on the chain. “You, who dare to interrupt my meditations here, know, that should I wish it, a convulsion of my hand can topple you into the unbottomed dark, beyond the scope of dreaming; nor will your flesh on earth wake evermore. Now, speak, and persuade me to hold my hand unmoving.” And blood ran down his arm and hand, for he had torn his flesh on the hooks and iron claws of the cage’s bars.
Galen watched with wide eyes as drops of falling blood flew down out of sight into the wide darkness underfoot, perhaps turning to ice, perhaps to fall forever.
Cold dread was in Galen. He knew what he did next could not be undone.
4
Death
and
Deathlessness
I
“Walk before me, Raven, son of Raven,” commanded the icy voice. “No one in the chamber will behold you. My robe of many mists blinds them.”
Raven walked out of the closet and between several of the interns, who neither turned nor spoke to him.
He stepped out into the hallway. He heard a quiet footstep scrape the floor tiles behind him.
Once, when he was a boy in northern Greece, after his and his father’s escape from the Soviet Union, Raven was playing in a graveyard at night, behind the local Greek Orthodox church, which had been a temple to pagan gods in its youth. He came suddenly upon a wolf tearing up a corpse from the soft earth between the gravestones. The lean and famished wolf had looked up, growling, a shadow with eyes like green flame. For a moment, Raven could smell the hot breath of the beast, thick with the stench of its grisly feast. Then the wolf turned and fled.
Raven never forgot that smell as it touched his face. Now, in the hospital, from behind him, he smelled that same smell again, the odor of a carrion beast.
Raven turned.
Behind him, taller and thinner than a man, the black shape rose up so that the bones of his crown brushed the ceiling. Above flowing robes of smoke and darkness, the kingly phantom wore armor made of knitted bones.
Up from his crown jutted a circle of skeletal hands, their fingers pointing upwards, with long gray nails still growing from their pointed ends. The cheek plates of his helmet were made of dead men’s opened jawbones; overlapping shoulderbones fanned out from his crown to protect his neck; his epaulettes were made of severed kneecaps; the chain-mail at the armor joints was made of layered yellow teeth; greaves and gauntlets were made of tibia and ulna; interlocking rib cages covered his breastplate. His sleeves and skirts and wide black cloak were made of tattered shadows.
The creature’s face was thin and famished, with sunken gray cheeks drawn tight over high cheekbones. Under the shadow of his heavy brows could be seen no eyes at all, but only two pale glints like stars hovering in the eyesockets. When he opened his mouth to speak, there were neither teeth nor tongue visible, only an empty darkness.
“Choose,” the creature intoned.
“What? Choose what?” said Raven slowly.
The creature raised one hand and gestured widely up and down the corridor of the terminally ill ward, pointing at the doors.
“You mean to choose who should die in my wife’s place?” said Raven. “No. This was not our bargain. You said it would be a stranger. No one I knew!”
“Very well,” the cold voice breathed. “The Law allows, when men forbear to choose, the choice will fall to my kind. Come.”
With a slither of smoky robes, the creature began to drift down the corridor. Raven took a few steps to follow, then halted.
“Stop!” he called.
The creature paused, looking over its bone-encrusted shoulder with eyes like flickers of marsh gas.
Raven said, “What are you?! You must tell.”
“Walk in my footsteps, and you will know me,” intoned the creature, and began once more to glide away down the corridor, the bones of its crowned helmet scratching against the panels of the ceiling.
“Why can’t the other people see you?” asked Raven. They walked into a corridor outside the intensive care ward, and even though it was crowded with rushing nurses and shouting people, the men all stepped or stood aside for the passage of the tall, lean entity, their eyes momentarily blank.
The creature sighed, “Men oft forget their nightmares when they wake.”
“But I can see you?”
“You are not afraid.”
“What are you? Why does no one know of things like you? Surely someone nowadays, in America, someone must know there are things like you! They are advanced people! Scientific people!”
“Even the wise are silenced by the endless mystery of night; starlight cannot be brought into the cold and open glare of day for their inspection.”
“Tell me your name!”
At the door to the intensive care room, the creature paused, looking backward, looming in Raven’s vision. “You know me.”
Raven remembered a name from old Russian fairytales. “You are Koschei the Deathless.”
“That is one of my names.”
“In the fable, they found where you had hid your heart and killed you.”
“What does not live cannot die, but only be banished for a time,” Koschei said. He spoke with his hand touching the glass windows of the intensive care room doorway. “I am the first herald of the Emperor of Dreams, who soon will rule your world as well. For me, the sea-bell tolls but once, as my power, in this world, is small.”
“What is your power?”
“I know in what part of them men carry their deaths. I have taken that part out of me and shed my humanity as a snake sheds its skin. No one can drive me off except that they understand what is at my heart.”
Raven spoke like a man in a daze, who can only focus on one thought: “Then you can save my wife?”
“I will take her death from where it hides and give it to another.”
Raven realized that Koschei meant to kill whoever lay behind this door; the patient upon whom, he guessed, the doctors and nurses beyond were so frantically working. He could hear them hurrying, calling out in tense, flat voices, sudden curses of triumph or despair.
“Take the sword from my baldric, Raven, son of Raven. It is bound in its scabbard with a knot I may not untie. Holding the sword before you, step into the chamber here. Then you must drop to your knees and recite all those things you most love about your wife, whom you are so soon to lose. An invisible power will undo the knot. When this happens, draw the sword and hand it to me. No more will be asked of you.”
Raven took the scabbard from where it hung off the figure’s long sash. His fingers were numbed with terrible cold when he touched it.
Raven opened the door. A putrid smell, mingled with disinfectants, greeted him. Inside, he could see a cluster of doctors and nurses bent over a half-naked young man on a table. One medic pumped oxygen into the young man’s mouth. Another had electrodes in his hands, which he was rubbing together. This second nurse shouted, “Clear!” and touched the electrode paddles to the body.
The young man jumped and thrashed on the table for a moment. “We have the pulse again!” shouted a voice, and a steady beeping came from one of the machines in the room.
“No!” said Raven. “This was not our bargain! I did not say I would help you kill a man!”
“Yes. Yes, you did.”
Raven stood still, holding the scabbard. The icy numbness in his hand throbbed like fire, creeping toward his elbow.
Koschei said, “Choose. Shall it be this man, who is nothing to you? Or shall it be your wife, whom you claim to love?”
Raven squinted. “There is someone else in this room. Some power which keeps you away from the young boy, eh? You devils do not need mortal men to do your work unless there is trick involved.”
“Go to your knees. Pray for the salvation of your wife. Your prayer will be answered.”
“What is in this room?”
“Though you cannot see her, clever mortal, there is a unicorn in this room, standing guard over Galen Waylock. Each time my poisons reach the boy’s heart, she touches him lightly with her silver horn and works his cure. I cannot wound or drive her away, except with this, the one weapon to which she is vulnerable. It is a terrible weapon, and she must unknot the bindings herself to let it be drawn against her.”
Raven looked at the scabbard. The swordhilt was plain and black, and the scabbard itself was all of white leather. The scabbard was fitted and bound in rings of bone, which looked like spinal vertebrae. Through these rings ran white cords, which tied the hilt into the scabbard with a complex knot, all bows and loops and dangling tassels.
“What is the name of this sword?”
Koschei said softly, “My weapon is called Pity.”
Then Koschei said, “Step forward, Raven. If you keep Pity hidden in its sheath, no pity will be shown your dying wife.”
Raven stepped forward woodenly, his eyes wide and staring, his face slack with pain and indecision.
He was in the room. The doctors were ignoring him. By the faint breath of movement before his face, the sudden sweet smell like the breath of a spring wind, he knew that the unicorn was nearby, invisible, watching him with wide eyes. Sadly, Raven sank to his knees.
II
“I am not a good man with words. And the woman I love, she should have poetry and songs, the most beautiful of words, to speak of her. Words without equal.
“I do not know how to say how deep I have love for her. Her eyes are bright, she smiles like the springtime. And how she laughs! I think angels must laugh like that. Most people laugh at what is ridiculous and mean, laughing what they see as silly, stupid things. You know? But her laughter is laughter made in joy. Like those soda cans filled with bubbles, and you shake them, and it all come bubbling out. . .
“Once I was lost at sea in a lifeboat. The freighter I served on, the Pavopodopolus, out of Athens, went down when an engine explosion broke the hullplate loose below deck. It was many hot days in that lifeboat, and we did not know if the radioman had told our position to anyone in time. When we ran low on water, we cast lots to see who would drink that day and who would go thirsty.
“One man went mad because he drank sea water, and he tried to break our water bottles. We clubbed him and put him over the side. It was the worst thing I had ever done. I thought I should die before I could do such a thing.”
Raven shuddered, grimacing. He remembered his wife had just said something to Koschei about how she would behave on a lifeboat. Raven told himself Wendy had never been in a lifeboat, that she did not know the cruelty of the world. But he frowned because he knew that she did know but had the type of soul that never let that cruelty touch her . . .
Raven closed his eyes and continued to speak. “When we were rescued, and we came to safe harbor, I knelt down and kissed the firm ground. It was so steady, so safe. I had come out of the empty and dead waste of the sea, to what was like home again. I was rescued beyond all hope. And that, that is what my wife is to me. That and more.”
With his eyes shut, he could feel a warmth, a motion in the air before him. He felt the pressure of wise and ancient eyes, watching him, a supernatural being like a living beam of light. He wondered if he reached out his hand if he would touch her delicate and deerlike muzzle. Raven’s body was trembling.
“I must tell you, spirit, how we met. There were no friends in New York. I worked as a longshoreman. But I was not in the union, not legal to be allowed to work. The only thing it was legal for me to do in America was starve. So when I was cheated, or when they did not pay my wage, I could not go to anyone to complain. I was strong and quick. I could make men afraid of me. But every man’s hand was against me. Without my wife, the world would be that way again for me. Filled with hate.
“After the Amnesty Act let me have a green card, I went to find a dream I had. The city was so ugly to me; I wanted to be surrounded by trees. It was like the thirst of a thirsty man. My eye was hungry for beautiful things. Without my wife, I would hunger and thirst like that again, and never be satisfied. Not ever. For there would be no beauty for me in all the world.
“I took the test to be hired as a park ranger, in the National Forestry Service Police Force. They are a federal body.
“They gave me a uniform and a gun, and a splendid place to live, way deep in the green. My duties were as nothing. I had to count the trees the loggers took and count the deer the hunters shot, and fill out stack after stack of colored paper forms. Stacks of paper up to your chin, I had to fill out. In triplicate.
“That is where I met her, you know. I thought she was a Rusalka, at first, a swan-maiden or a spirit-woman. Because she was running naked through the woods. She was so young! So full of life! The young, they want so much to be alive . . .”
Raven opened his eyes and looked at the half-naked young man draped across the table across the room from him.
He squinted, face troubled, uncertain. Eyes open, he continued to speak:
“Once and twice I saw her like this. I fill out a form on it, in triplicate. Headquarters say, arrest this woman; she is streaking; she is trespassing. So I hunt her through the forest, where her light footstep has bent the grass, turned over a leaf. I have a keen eye; great patience. I do not like to lose what I am hunting. I did not want to lose her . . .
“So I hunt her; I catch her. But she is not shy even when she is naked like a bird. She stands with her hands on her hips and tosses her head and makes fun of me and will not come along. She dares me to put the handcuffs on her; even after she is chained up, she makes me wrestle with her. So I am carrying her over my shoulder, and she is trying to kick me. And she is laughing, and she pretends I am a romance-book villain come to ravish her in chains, that she must do as I bid, or she will be taken away. You know, I do not think she was pretending so much. And the paperwork for arrests, all that writing. In triplicate! After the second day she was staying in my cabin, I am thinking, such a bad idea to arrest her after all, you know? Such a bad idea! Maybe I marry her instead.
“Her father, I have never met, very rich, very powerful lawyer in Washington, D.C. She says he does not like her to wed me. And we must elope, and she must lie about her age to get married because she is young. But she is so good. She can make the deer come and eat out of her hand, because of her goodness. They know she would not hurt any thing alive. She would not help kill any thing . . .”
Raven stood up, frowning terribly. “Because she is so good, she has no drop of pity. She has a sense of justice like a sharp knife. My wife would never forgive anyone who had done wrong. She would never allow anyone who had done such an evil as this to come near to her again.”
Raven turned. “Koschei! I cannot do what you have asked. . .” Koschei had to bow his head to step into the room, and his robes billowed through the open door like smoke. Entering, his body seemed to swell and fill the Emergency room, his eyes burning like malignant stars. “It is too late, son of Prometheus. Your second thoughts come too tardily. Behold.”
And he pointed to the sword still in Raven’s grasp. The knots were stirring and swaying of their own accord, unwinding, untwirling, a slow and weightless dance of rope. The cords unknotted themselves, rippling free. The knots spread and fell open.
Koschei’s hands were thin and gray, and his finger nails were yellow, longer than his fingers. With a slow sweep of his black sleeves, with a crackling rustle of his vambraces and paudrons, the deathless creature raised his arm, palm out, fingers spread.
“Hand me now my weapon, mortal man.”
Cold dread was in Raven. He knew what he did next could not be undone.
III
Raven, son of Raven, was abnormally aware of the Emergency room in which he stood, as if each tiny detail were viewed through a small, clear lens. It was a bright, modern, well-lit place, surrounded by doctors and nurses, men of learning and science whom Raven respected. Filling the doorway was a dark, ancient, evil spirit, a creature of whom Raven knew nothing; of whom, he feared, men, for all their wisdom, would never know more than nothing. The spirit, Koschei the Deathless, held out his hand for the sword Raven carried.
“Yield to me my weapon,” Koschei’s voice, surrounded with echoes, rang out, “that I may take the life from this boy here and give it to your wife.”
Raven’s thoughts were an aching pressure in his brain. He saw his hand rise up and proffer the sword to Koschei, extending it hilt first.
“Hands! What are you doing?” he thought to himself. “Why are you giving this terrible creature this sword? Do you want to be the hands of a murderer? Do you want to have blood on you?”
Koschei drifted forward, his narrow face floating near the ceiling, cold and without expression; the two dots of light in the shadows of his eye sockets shone brightly.
“It is not too late,” thought Raven. “Take back the sword before Koschei touches it! I will be innocent of wrong. I will not be a murderer. Wendy would be so proud of me . . .
“And then Wendy will be gone. Gone, and my life goes with her.
“Where is goodness? Shouldn’t goodness come to stop me? Some people say God in his high heaven is the source of goodness. But heaven is so far away. God should strike me dead with lightning before my hand gives this sword to Koschei! But God will not stop my hand. Some people say the source of goodness is the heart, that mercy and kindness prevent us from murdering each other. If my heart were to stop pumping blood this instant, my hand would turn all pale and fall off. Others say goodness is in the brain, and philosophers show how it is not ‘in our long-term best interest,’ (such a fine-sounding phrase!) not in our ‘enlightened self-interest,’ to murder. If my brain were to explode this second, the nerves in my hand would go limp, and I would avoid this guilt.
“But there is no goodness to stop me. Not in my conscience, not in my feelings, not in my thoughts. My conscience is no more than a stinging fly; it irks me, it stings me, but it cannot turn my hand aside.
“Now I curse my soul, my heart, my brain. For they were all too weak to make me good when the test came.”
And he handed the sword to Koschei.
IV
The frozen, numb sensation that had been in Raven’s hand, now, the moment he let go of the sword, seemed to travel up his arm and gather in his chest, a heavy lump of ice. It felt solid, as if it would never leave his heart again.
Koschei bent over the boy on the table and cut his chest open with the sword. Into the slit he put his armored hand.
“Koschei, wait!” shouted Raven.
Koschei did not turn, but remained bent over his task. “What need you now from me, mortal fool? Thanks and gratitude?”
“I should have attacked you with that sword!”
“I am a necromancer. I know in what part of himself each man keeps his life hidden. Mine was hidden in my heart; therefore I have removed my heart. While it is true I take no joy in life, no love, no pleasure, and I must take the joy of others to stir my blood, it is also true that I cannot be harmed by this weapon. I am without a heart, and Pity cannot touch me.”
Koschei lifted his hand out from the boy’s chest, and, in his palm, there was a pearl of crystal, holding a floating flutter of bright and joyful fire in its center, like the leaves of a tree in autumn, or the wings of a red-gold butterfly, beating.
“Wait! Stop!” Raven shouted. He stepped forward uncertainly, but his head was only as tall as Koschei’s elbow, he could not bring himself to try to grab that bone-covered, thin body. The same revulsion which makes a man unwilling to touch a corpse stopped him.
Koschei brushed him aside and floated toward the door, his bony armor rustling and creaking, his huge black robes billowing like sails.
Without turning his helmeted, crowned head, Koschei spoke softly: “Why do you repent your deed, mortal man? The eldest and first of all your kind let his love for his wife expel him from the garden of paradise; and his eldest son committed the same crime as you. Your first ancestor was a fine and stalwart man, much braver, wiser and better than you, yet even the father of your race was not immune to pity for his wife. I will say to you what I first told him. It is true your wife will hold you in low contempt. But at least she will be at hand to hate you. Comfort yourself with that.”
5
Beyond the Gates
of
Greater Slumber
I
She was sound asleep, drugged, undreaming. And so she did not see nor dream of the thin shadow which stooped over her, did not feel the chill radiating from the dry bones of his armor, did not know with what pain and what reluctance he let go of the little crystal orb of beating flame, did not sense the little orb, warm as spring sunlight, drifting down, fragrant and soft, to touch her parted lips. But she smiled when the bubble popped, and warm spirits breathed into her smile, settling, bringing a rosy blush to her cheek. Her eyes moved beneath lids delicate as petals, for she had begun to dream.
With a hiss of malice and longing and envy and despair for that living light now gone (for he had so wanted to keep it for himself, despite that he could never use it, nor feel its warmth) the thin shadow of the necromancer now moved aside from her, stepped through the door, and, drawing mist about him, stood motionless.
Hands lax, face dead, without even the strength to gnaw on himself for spite, the necromancer waited and waited, hating the cold in his bones.
II
Wendy, lying in the hospital bed, was suddenly overcome with a sensation of great pleasure and well-being. The pains that had been in her body for these many weeks now, throbbed, ebbed, and departed.
She raised her arms and slid back her sleeves and looked at the flesh of her arms in the moonlight; they were clear and without bruises. Even the tiny scar on her arm for the intravenous needle had vanished.
The dull, cottony drowsiness in which the tranquilizers and painkillers had wrapped her had vanished; leaving only a clean, clear kind of restfulness.
Wendy looked out the window up at the moon, at the stars flying in the deep darkness of heaven above silvery clouds. “Whoever is up there watching me,” she said, “I’d like to thank you a lot, and I’d like to say I never lost faith in you. I always knew miracles happen, no matter what everyone says. I’ve seen them before. People are so silly when it comes to miracles. The ones that happen every day: sunrises, childbirth, love; people don’t think they’re miracles just because they happen every day. The ones that don’t happen every day: healings, flying; people don’t believe in them because they’ve never seen them just because they don’t happen every day.”
She snuggled down into the pillows. “But I always knew it could happen.”
III
It may have been only a moment later, or an hour, or an endless time, when Wendy saw a young man, dressed in silver armor and carrying a spear, with a web of starlight woven like a scarf in his helmet, step down through the window on a beam of moonlight.
“I must be asleep!” said Wendy.
The young man stared around the hospital room in bewilderment. “I must have passed through the Gates of Lesser Slumber. This looks like modern-day earth! Where’s my body?”
“Have you lost your body?”Wendy asked in a voice of concern. “That’s terrible. You’re not a ghost, are you? Poor thing!” And, after she thought a moment, one finger against her cheek, she said brightly, “If there’s anything I can do to help you get your body back, I’d love to help.”
The young man looked around the room, slow puzzlement growing on his features. “Why would I dream about a hospital? The woman who talks like a girl probably represents innocence, or maybe lost hopes. But a hospital? As if my hopes were dead or dying. That’s a scary thought.”
“I just got better,” offered Wendy helpfully. “Besides, I’m the one who’s dreaming you’.’
“I hate it when dreams say that.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees, staring at the window with a brooding look. The bedsheet did not wrinkle nor did the bed depress where he sat, as if he were weightless. The spear, which he dangled idly in one hand, glistened like crystal, colors of predawn dew drops shivering along its slender blade.
“I really do hate it when dreams say that. But I guess it represents my desire to reach the real world again. I wish Grandpa would come upstairs to wake me up already. I’ve got to tell him what’s going on. Vindyamar is fallen; the sea-bell is cracked; the Black Ships of Nastrond are afloat. We’ve been betrayed. Damn it! I hate this symbolic junk! It’s easier in the Deeper Dreaming. The things there are more . . .” He waved his spear at the moon. “Sort of more ancient. More grand. Huge.”
Wendy said. “I had a dream I was talking to a flying pony. It looked sort of like a slender horse, with the head of a deer. Imagine a horse as a ballerina. That’s what it was like.”
He grunted unhappily. “Of course I’d have to dream about the dreamcolts. She told me she would bring me back to my body, but this doesn’t look like my house. She’s probably turned against us too. Where’s my house?”
Wendy said: “She told me there was a house called Everness, in the east. The forgotten last guardians of dreaming keep shut the gate between the waking world and the world of deep nightmare. She said the gate was broken, and the first servant of the Emperor of Night had entered our lands.” Wendy said. “But why did I dream it happened when I was a child?”
“Childhood memories are partway into the other world already,” the young man said absentmindedly. “The same reason why children and innocent madmen can talk to imaginary playmates. They’re actually reaching from the waking to a person in the dream.”
Then the young man straightened, turned to look at her, his eyes wide with shock. “Oh my God! You’re real! Don’t—don’t get up! Don’t move or try to turn on the light or anything. You’re in a half-awake state called somniloquism. You might jar yourself awake if you try to move. Now, if you write down everything, and I mean everything, right when you get up, and before you get out of bed or do anything else, then you might not forget this conversation. Will you promise to do that for me? Promise? It’s real important. Maybe the most important thing in the world.”
“I promise,” said Wendy solemnly. “But only if you tell me the whole story. You see,” she said in a confidential whisper, “I love stories.”
“Okay. Okay.” He blinked. “Uh. . . my name is Galen Waylock. I’m asleep right now in an old uncomfortable house in upstate Maine with no plumbing, on the coast, near Bath.”
“How do you do. My name is Wendy Ravenson. It actually says Wendy Varovitch on my driver’s license, but that’s sort of hard to say, don’t you think?”
“Okay. Sure. Uh . . . Okay, first there’s this horn, which is used to wake the sleeping guardians of the West. No, wait. Okay. The First Warden of Everness comes from when Zeno was Emperor and St. Hormidas was Pope. His people fought the Saxon at the battle of Badon Hill. The Saxon worshipped the Dragon-steeds who were the Cherubim and Charioteers of Morningstar, which were drawn into the world through the Tower of Vortigern. One dragon was white, and the other was red, and the Founder bound them up. No. Let me skip to the important stuff. The Founder is being punished because he betrayed his oath. He opened the postern gate to the Dream-realm and let a plague of insanities, soul thieves, and familiars into the souls of waking men. Throughout all the Dark Ages, the mass insanities, witch riots, villages getting up and dancing themselves to death, visions of ghosts and imps and demons, all that stuff, sprang out of his crime. The Second Warden, Donblais le Fay, seized control of the Tower after his father was locked away and drove the druids out of Avalon . . . Hold it. I have to back up. The Tower is where the Gate was. Is. It is the Tower of Time at the Center of the Seasons, with four wings and twelve porches. But you don’t know what Gate. Uh. Okay. In the old days, there wasn’t any barrier between mankind and the dream-world, and men were pretty much the slaves and playthings of the gods and faeries and spirits. So, in order to create a bicameral frame of consciousness, a boundary of mist was decreed to allow men to forget their fears and false hopes when they were in the sunlight; but one of the dream-lords rebelled out of Mommur, the City Never- ending, and drew a third part of the hosts of the greater powers with him. Their chief is named after the morning star, and he is also called the Emperor of Night, and he and his hordes fell into the deep of the sea, below where the beams of the sun can reach, in Acheron, a sunken city of imperishable metal, drowned in a black sea-chasm where their only light is from the pale glow of luminous monster-fish. The city is actually called Dis, but it is unlucky to say its name, so we call it after the river that springs from its barred windows, from the tears of those imprisoned there. Now, the Emperor of Night sent ambassadors to the nine races of the nine worlds, including the selkie of Heather Blether . . . no, wait. You don’t need to know that. Uh . . . the Regent of the Sun, Belphanes, at Oberon’s command, sent the unicorn as his messenger to the King of Logres. Eurynome the Unicorn established the Rule of the Order of Everness, and opened the gate between Pan’s and Morpheus’ realm, the realm of nature and the realm of dream. Morpheus . . . well, never mind who he is. Eurynome gave us the Horn, or maybe the Founder found the Horn by following her back to her own realm, which isn’t in this realm, or in the dream realm, but is supposed to be somewhere else entirely. Or it used to be. . . No . . . um . . .” He had stood and was pacing the room, his scale-mail jingling, waving his hands. Little shimmers of light traveled up and down the length of the spear, soft as moonlight, as he was waving it.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?” asked Wendy, batting her eyelashes innocently.
“Well! I don’t know where to start! Okay?”
“Okay,” she said primly, clasping her hands before her on the bedsheet. “Why don’t I ask you questions, and you can tell me one thing at a time?”
“Great,” muttered Galen. “Sounds just great.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No, no. Just go ahead your way.”
“First, why did I have my dream about something I remembered from childhood with the colt in it?”
He sat down, drawing a deep breath. Galen spoke with forced slow patience. “Your childhood memories were probably the only thing she could reach. Creatures like her can only speak to people who are on drugs or who are not quite right in the head. The Seventy-Third Warden, Albertus Way- lock, wrote a monograph on it, and his theory is that they are permitted to keep their memories of the hidden things because people won’t listen to them anyway, but just stick them into psycho wards or something. Say, what kind of hospital did you say this was?” Galen shot a skeptical glance at Wendy.
“Who is ‘she’?”
“Euryale, daughter of Eurynome, one of the dream-colts who are the children of the unicorn. We ride them. They fly.”
“Why are you dressed like that?” Wendy waved her hand toward his silver-tinted scale-mail, the flowing garments of tissue that showed at the armor’s joints, at the lambrequin floating like mist from the peak of his conical helmet.
“It’s a uniform. It’s symbolic. This is armor. It stops pointed things from jabbing you. This here is a spear. You poke it into things. Are you going to ask me some real questions? There’s a creature who is coming across the mist trying to get into this world. It may be here already.”
Wendy wagged a finger at him. “Now, now. Let’s go in order. Where do you live?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!”
Wendy began plucking at her covers, “Well, if you won’t cooperate, I guess I’ll just wake up and try to put this silly dream behind me . . .”
“No no no! Don’t get up! Uh, you look really tired, like you need a nap, and I got to tell you what’s going on! I’ll answer your stupid questions. I mean, no, I didn’t mean they were stupid or anything. What was the question?”
Wendy said brightly, “I’d like to know where you live, dressed that way.” She giggled.
“Yeah. I live at Everness House. On earth, that’s at number 14 Rural Route AA, Sagadahoc County, Maine. In the dreaming, the High House is at the Shore of the Sea of Unquiet Dark, last bastion of the City Never- ending, on the First Sphere this side of Utgard and Nidvellir, where the silver towers of Tirion rise unfallen, below the Deeper Gate, at the center of the four moon’s quarters. Can’t miss it.”
“How did you find me?”
“Look. I wasn’t trying to find you. I went to go talk to the First Warden. He lives in the shadow of Tirion Unfallen, beneath the dark moon, where the ocean plunges forever into the Starlessness. There are nine waterfalls which fly off the brink of the Chasm Ultimate, and on the cliffsides below there is a place of torment called Wailing Blood. I went to him because a bird carrying an elf-lamp told me to. In a dream.”
“I know that that’s very important,” said Wendy. “But I’d really like to know something else first. What led you here?”
“There is a prayer to summon a dream-colt. A spell. They can fly across the sea from one moon to another, or ascend to other spheres.”
“And the dream-colt brought you here for no reason, instead of taking you home like you asked?”
“I see what you’re getting at. You and I must be connected in some way. A shared destiny or common link; otherwise, our dreams wouldn’t touch. The Forty-Third Warden wrote a treatise on it in the Library. He talked about. . . wait a minute . . . oh, God. Maybe I can’t go home. Maybe talking to you is the closest I can get. Maybe I’m d—uh. Hey, what day is it? What month? Omigod. What year?”
Wendy told him the date.
Grief and shock overtook Galen’s features. “I’ve been asleep for six months . . .”
He sat down on the bed, phosphorescent spear across his lap. Then, as slowly as a crumbling tower, he leaned forward and put his face in his hands.
Wendy reached and patted him gently on the knee. “There, there. Don’t be sad. Worse things happen at sea. I know. My husband used to go to sea, and worse things happened. Now straighten up. Draw a deep breath. Settle down and tell me what happened to you. You went to see the First Warden, the one who’s being punished for something, in the place by the waterfalls at the edge of the world in the dream-land. Tell me in order how you got there and what you talked to him about. What’s the first thing you said after you got there?”
“The first thing he said was that he was going to dump me into the abyss . . .”
IV
Galen, unnerved by the threat and trying to remember his boldness, looked Azrael de Gray in the eye, and held up his hand, to show the tiny scar in his palm. “See? I came for your message. I am here because I was summoned. You called, I remembered, I came. You have no right to threaten me. You have no cause to hate me.”
Only silence answered him.
An uncomfortable half-minute crept by. Galen plucked up his nerve and spoke again. “Uh . . . sir. I came because I heard the sea-bell toll. After all these years of waiting, our waiting is over.”
Silence.
Galen tried again: “You started our House! You set us all to waiting. We’ve done as you asked, my grandfather and great-grandfather and everyone all the way back. Doesn’t that count for something? And now everyone is in danger, everyone on Earth, and the hosts of the Darkness are marching. I came to you for help. You said you had something we needed to know. Even if you don’t care about your own family, doesn’t the whole Earth count for something?”
He spoke with as much dignity and force as he could muster. Moments passed, with Azrael looking on with steady, cold, supercilious gaze, and Galen began to feel stupid and small.
Azrael’s shadowy face showed no hint of softening, no flicker of compassion. Finally, he said in a quiet, icy voice, “No cause for hate, you say? Tell me, I challenge you, the names of those on Earth who recollect with praise my deeds, or even know that one such as I once lived. None has come here to offer even smallest ease of this great unceasing suffering, which, for their sakes, I endure.”
“Well, honestly, sir, uh. . . I don’t think anyone on Earth knows who you are.” Galen, as soon as these words left his mouth, winced. He thought: Stupid, stupid! Wrong thing to say.
He followed lamely with, “Except me and my Grampa, of course.”
There was another long silence, while Galen, standing uneasily on the chain, squirmed inwardly beneath the dark, majestic, dispassionate stare of the elder Waylock. The ancient being’s face was an angular mass of shadows; Galen could see little more than square cheekbones beneath a thundercloud of hair, framing twin pools of greater darkness underneath black brows, and, below, craggy lines of bitterness and sternness gathered around a hint of a scowl.
Galen thought to himself in anxiety and surprise: What great deeds? I thought this guy was a traitor, someone who trafficked with the enemy.
Words came from the cage: “It was I who first brought the Silver Key out from Mommur, despite that Oberon and all his faerie knights rose up in silver light to hinder and oppose me; proud Morningstar and all his hellish crew pursued my flight even to the utmost gates of day, preferring damnation to retreat. The blood of immortals was shed to win the Key to Earth; and, by its virtue, all the gates to hell and alien dream-lands were locked shut, yes, with incalculable expense of patience, bravery, and pain. My sacrifice not praised, you say? Forgotten? By all? Does none recall where now the Key is hid?”
“Key? What Key. . .?”
A note of slight surprise: “The Silver Key of Everness, of course, Clavargent, which locks and unlocks the Gate you guard: the Key by which dream-figments can be made to stand solid and cast shadows beneath the waking sun. The Key by which all sane and solid things can be made to fade at once to mist and dreams. The Key which is the source of all the power of Everness and the only hope for the victory of mankind. Have you truly never heard of it?”
Galen reluctantly shook his head.
The figure sagged slightly. The shoulders slipped down. Galen could see scars and bloodstains where iron thorns had cut his arms and shoulders. “Then you are not the Guardian.” The voice was bitter, heavy with defeat.
“N-no. My Grandfather Lemuel is the Guardian. But your bird landed on me. I heard the message. I came. He will not come.”
A low chuckle. “How kind. A youth who is not the Guardian, and has no power and no authority, will listen to my warning (which he will prove too weak and foolish and young to act upon) and will hear my plan (which he will not be able to carry out). How supreme a kindness your attention gives me! Had you not come, I should have been forced to impart my learning to passing sea-birds or crawling lice. To tell them would do as much good!”
Galen felt anger, like bile, in his throat. “I’m here. I can do something.”
“Indeed? And has the Guardian told you why he will not come? No? Do you know what power has commanded him from answering me? No, again? And you were never told where the Silver Key was hidden, were you?”
Galen tried to speak with dignity, but he felt his face grow warm. “He . . . doesn’t tell me much . . .”
“Your pride is offended, is it not, youth?” The voice from the darkness of the cage was gentler now. There was a note of kindness in it. And yet the bloodstained arm still gripped the chain.
“It’s like he doesn’t trust me or something.”
“You are below the twenty years and four, and not yet in your majority.”
“I’m an adult!”
“Adult enough to hold the Silver Key which could, unwisely used, render all the Earth to irredeemable destruction?”
Galen was silent. A sigh of cold wind came up from underfoot, making him shiver. He pulled his gray fur cloak more tightly about him, wondering from what places that wind had come, or what was the strange odor he smelled on it.
He wondered what this Silver Key was, or where it was hidden.
Azrael said: “Perhaps you may prevail upon your grandfather, my remote descendant, to entrust you with the secret lore of Everness, if you prove yourself gallant, wise, and worthy. Some notable feat to the defense of Everness might enflame his admiration.”
This was so near Galen’s unvoiced, hidden hope that he could not dare to speak. He nodded, wondering if he were so transparent.
Galen shivered again in the wind, and then, with a feeling almost of guilt, he drew the strings of his cloak. Galen folded the warm fabric into a bundle, and gingerly extended it toward the cage.
“Here,” he said. “You must be cold.”
The figure in the cage did not stir.
“Come on! Take it!” Galen wiggled the bundle in the direction of the bars.
“Thrust your cape through these cruel bars to me, and I shall thank you with good thanks.”
Galen hesitated.
“Or do you fear to come within arm’s grip of me?”
“You could just reach up with your hand,” answered Galen in a loud voice. “What’s the matter? Afraid to let go of the chain? You’re willing to throw me into the abyss but not willing to accept a gift?”
Silence.
“Fine!” shouted Galen. “That’s just fine! I was going to make you barter for this cloak, so you’d have to tell me this message and this plan of yours, who was invading and how to stop it, before I’d give it to you, but instead I thought I’d be a nice guy and just give it to you. But if you’re so unwilling to give your own flesh and blood a break—! Well! Well, that’s just fine with me!” And he flung the cloak in a flapping swirl of fabric at the cage.
The cloak slipped down and fell across the bloody arm, and the cloak ends flapped in the air, hanging to either side of the chain.
“No wonder they don’t come to ease your ‘ceaseless suffering,’ you act like this all the time . . .” muttered Galen.
Slowly, the blackened and scarred fingers unknotted from the chain link and drew the cloak in through the bars, carefully, and Azrael paused to work free each snag whenever the fabric was pricked by a needle or caught up on a hook.
Azrael said, “I thank you. Nor would I sell my wisdom for a cloak, no matter what the torment of cold which nightly oppresses me. Not for a kingdom have I altered myself, how much less for a garment? But I do thank you. I will tell you my secrets, youth.”
V
Azrael spoke, and his words floated in the cold, wide, windy night around them. Night sky was above them, and night sky was below.
“You know as you have been taught. Oberon and the Children of Light could not maintain a watch post on the stained and sinful world of Earth, yet neither did they wish for patient Morningstar to gain easy possession by merely waiting for his mortal foes to die. Neither could mortal men be completely trusted to maintain a watch against the Foe. Some men, great champions and knights, were webbed into enchanted sleep, their vigor and purity preserved, so that passing time would give no advantage to Earth’s timeless Foe. Others, those who held the Silver Key, had no choice but to stand watch against the coming of the Dark, for only they could wake the sleepers once again.”
“I know. We’re supposed to sound the Horn and wake the sleepers.”
“Ah. But did you know the price? The sleepers do not sleep on Earth, but in Celebradon. When Everness wakes the Sleeping King and all his Knights, Celebradon will come triumphant down from the circle of the Autumn Stars, and angels and lios-alfar upon the battlements will fly pale banners and sing the praises of Oberon. The weapons that have been stored up for the Final Battle, forged in the armories of heaven, will come forth from hiding to destroy the servants of the Dark. The battle shall rage so hot that both Earth and Sky shall shatter and burn, and, after Oberon’s victory, he shall call up a world based on mankind’s finest dreams, or perhaps based on Oberon’s inclination, and create the world anew for men loyal to him to possess.”
Galen nodded. “Yes. I’ve heard this. We were promised a place in that new world.”
“The servants of Light are treated more kindly than the servants of the Dark. The lesser slaves who serve the black tower of Acheron fear and hate the prospect of Darkling triumph as desperately as we. The Final War spells doom for those who prosper during the time before the war, spies and sneaks and traitors.”
“You mean the shape-stealers.”
“I mean the shape-stealers. The selkie. They are an untrusty crew, and they fear and hate their master Morningstar as much or more than you. The Master of black Acheron will have no use for spies and selkie should Darkness triumph, and, should he fail, the selkie will be scalded by the Light. There is one who knows this, one among the selkie-race, who has promised us aid.
“The traitor among them has spoken to me, and tells how Acheron will surely send its lesser slaves to battle on the Earth before the Outer Gods or evil Seraphim are sent, for Morningstar cannot know when or where the Sleepers in Celebradon will wake. The traitor, who is in the vanguard sent ahead to be consumed in war, promises he will betray the efforts of the Darkness and make the early vanguard fail, if those in Everness merely can display that they possess the weaponry of Otherworld. Merely the rumor and the image of those weapons will drive off the weaker slaves of Acheron; if this is done, the traitor vows lies and deception will exaggerate all victories of the Light, and that his voice will poison the councils of Acheron, dishearten them, creating a retreat, and, if not victory, then peace.”
“What weapons are these?”
“The Nine Talismans. Do you truly know nothing, boy?”
Galen was silent, ashamed of his ignorance, telling himself he had no cause to feel ashamed, but feeling so nonetheless.
Azrael was silent a moment, and then said softly, “To combat the nine great evils spawned in sunken Acheron, seven great talismans were brought from Otherworld to Caer Leon. Three were kept in Caer Leon by His Majesty, the Pendragon; two sent to His Holiness, the Pope in Rome; one sent to the Emperor in unconquerable Constantinople, Caesar’s home. All were mighty, six talismans of memory, but the seventh and mightiest of these, was Clavargent, the Silver Key. Nor king nor pope nor emperor was trusted with the Silver Key; it was to Everness given, made hidden, forgotten in the house of memory.”
Azrael fell silent. Galen waited, wondering if there was more.
Then Galen said, “Well, we don’t have a king anymore. The pope is still there, still in Rome. But we’re not Catholic. Maybe he’d still help. And I don’t even know who the emperor is supposed to be. And they changed the name of Constantinople to Istanbul.”
“Grim news. The talismans are scattered, then. Scattered, for they cannot be destroyed. And only the Three Queens might know where now they lie.” Azrael was silent for a time. With stiff, slow movements, he wrapped Galen’s cloak around himself. “No emperor? Ah, but that is grim news.”
Another long silence.
Galen said, “Well, what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do to find these talismans?”
Azrael was silent in deep thought for a time, as if remembering an old lesson. Then he said: “Mortals are not meant to use them, for each one is cursed. This is why I said they must be displayed, not employed. Each one combats a different evil of the Nine whose coming the sea-bell of Vindyamar foretells. Listen. Listen with care, and in the mansion of your memory, place each of these things into a central nave, pillar, post, or window, that you may recall it when you wake. Pay heed; I cannot say it twice.”
VI
Azrael spoke:
“The first of the nine knows the necromantic art; he surrendered his humanity and hollowed out his heart. No talisman is needed to keep this shade at bay; only men who grant him arms will fall beneath his sway.”
“The second are giants of frost and flame; great is their power and great their fame. The Rod of Mollner they cannot withstand; but the weapon returns to the wielder’s hand to smite him a blow dread and sure, which no man who fears it can endure.
“The third are the Storm Lords, the riotous three; but one was snared with a kite string and key. The wizard Franklin did this deed, and lightning serves our house at need. The Two who ride the tumult of heaven are Thunder and Wind; their brother is Levin. The Niflungar Ring is the talisman blessed to quell their distempers and set them at rest. One must renounce love and passion, to vow to take up the Ring to which these lords bow.
“The fourth are laughing Selkie, the princes of deceit. They steal the shapes of mortal men, their senses snare and cheat. They turn to their true shapes upon the lightest touch of Moly. Honest hands must wield this wand, or innocent, or holy; for mortals suffer great travail when all their fond illusions fail: when Truth is known, severe and plain, is then the time for tears and pain.
“The fifth are the Kelpie, steeds and bearers of disease, who prey on sinful weaknesses, but fear the Bow of Belphanes. Strength and pride can never bend this bow: it is meant for the humble, not unwilling to bow low.
“The sixth is the Beast whose name is War and Hate. Chained by the gods, he is often set free by men who woo his daughter, the maiden Victory. Only one thing the wrath of war will sate: bright Calipurn, the Sword of the Just. The Beast will submit at sight of the Sword, found in such hands as are worthy of trust. That Sword is deeply buried, long unseen by men, not again to shine, till one worthy of his kingly line shall come in triumph once again.”
VII
Azrael had fallen silent. The wind howled in the darkness underfoot, and the chain swayed slightly. Galen, carefully balanced, and intent on every word, waited further, but the silence lengthened.
Galen was now doubly embarrassed. He had, after all, heard of these talismans before; he had known of them his whole life, but called by a different name. The Seven Signs of Vindyamar (as he had been taught to know them) were inscribed on the walls of the Tower called Two Dragons, which was the oldest part of the Mansion at Everness, and called the Heart of the House. Carvings in the intricate gothic style depicted several monsters, seal- men and giants, each holding the Sign which heralded them: a hammer, a ring, a wand, a bow, a sword. And then two other signs Azrael had not yet mentioned: a grail and, of course, the Horn.
Galen had never known or suspected that these Signs were depictions of real weapons. He had been taught they served another purpose. He tried to think of some way casually to mention that he had known all along what these talismans were, to show Azrael that he was not as ignorant as he appeared. But he had to bring it up in such a way that it would not like vain boasting.
Galen said: “Well? That’s only six bells. Five talismans. What of the Grail? The Horn?”
“No talisman save the Titan himself is set to face what rises from the sea at seven strokes. And if the eighth or the final sea-bell tolls, what comes is beyond your strength. You could not wield the talismans for them. Tell me, watcher, how many times did it toll?”
“It was going on and on.”
“Was the count forty-and-five? This is the sum of all evils the sea-bell warns against. If so, Acheron itself, the citadel of Morningstar, makes ready to rise up from the unfathomable deep.”
“I—I don’t know. It might have been that many . . .”
“Have the Guardians of Everness forgotten the art of counting? It is not difficult to master, for one who has fingers, for numbers lesser than ten, and has toes, a score. No matter. What sign did the Watch of Vindyamar dispatch?”
“I saw a black seagull, holding the lantern of the elfs.”
“That was mine, caught and tamed by me, and with a lantern only my art could craft, to show he came by me. Can you not see my sign came not from Vindyamar? The Watch of Vindyamar would surely have sent to you a warning dream, and Nimue held up from the bosom of the waves a token of what talisman to ready, sword or ring or wand or cup, according in what form the attack would show itself, whether by war, or wind, by deceit or death. What sign were you shown? Are you not a Watchman of Everness? Were you not watching?”
Galen was almost in agony of embarrassment. Of all things, of all people, the one he wanted most to have think well of him was Azrael de Gray, the founder of his family, his house, and his order.
His grandfather had told him that there should have been a sign from Vindyamar, where the sea-bell was kept in a crystal harbor. Instead, thinking the black gull was the sign, he came here, only to be told, now, by the Founder, that Grandfather had been right all along.
But then that embarrassment turned to dread.
“Sign? There was no sign.”
“Ah. Then Vindyamar has been taken by the enemy.” There was something very cold in the way he spoke, a glitter in his eye Galen did not like. “This is cause for dread. The Watch of Vindyamar surely would not have failed to send a sign, upon which so much depends. Only treason could have undone them; only the Enemy has strength enough to overcome their virtue. The Three Queens must surely, by now, have been taken. To Nastrond, to horrible Nastrond, the shores made of murderer’s bones . . .”
The cold voice trailed into silence.
“Well—well—what do I do?”
Azrael bowed his proud head.
“There is nothing to do. The cause has failed. Return home and compose yourself how to perish gracefully and with aplomb. Suicide is nobler than the torture pits of Acheron.”
“There must be something we can do!”
“Only a display of the Talismans will frighten the vanguard of the Darkness. If the vanguard should prevail, nothing is left except to wake the Sleepers and call the end of time on Earth. Do you know where the Talismans of Otherworld are kept?”
“N—no.”
“Nor do I.”
“Who does know?”
“The Three Queens of Vindyamar. Who, if they have not sent you a token calling you to war, we must presume taken, or slain.”
Galen stood on the chain for a long time, staring down between his feet. A dizzying, vast nothingness, darker than midnight, sank endlessly down away from him.
It did not seem any darker, any deeper than the sinking feeling inside of himself. The words of Azrael de Gray echoed in his imagination: taken or slain. . .
Galen suddenly looked up. “If they were taken, where would they be taken to?” He had straightened up; his voice was clear and sharp. “If they are prisoners, who is guarding them? Where?”
Azrael said softly, ‘Aha. Now the youth asks a question worthy of a man.”
VIII
Azrael spoke in a low, solemn voice, so that Galen had to lean close to hear him. “Few know where Nastrond lies, which is the harbor and waymeet of the dreaded selkie-folk: but that hidden place is known to me. No matter where next they might take the Three Queens who are their prisoners, whether to sunken and sunless Acheron beneath the sea, or to the frozen northern atolls of Heather Blether, or to the windowless domes atop the bleak plateaus of Uhnuman on the far side of the moon, the seal-men would first take any captives, fair or foul, to Nastrond’s shore. For they go by secret routes into countries beyond the sphere of the moon, into the forbidden upper night, where mankind may not go, not even in dreams; and to this end, the Selkie must propitiate and praise the bloodthirsty and inhuman gods that guard the realms where sane men dare not venture, and bribe them to overlook that forbidden voyaging. Each captive must be prepared, woven into song like a caterpillar in its silks, so that the song of the selkie, full of horror as it may be, will keep the victim’s ears clogged with sounds to drown out the singing of that which lives beyond the ordered sphere of fixed stars. (They say no man has heard the inhuman music from beyond, and returned sane from such overreaching wayward dreaming, except the dreamer Kuranes, and even he was not permitted to return to his body back on earth, which died, but was given the timeless and enduring citadel of Celephais in the clouds above in the inland sea for his kingdom, both as consolation and reward for the brave resisting power of his soul and sanity.)
“And how I came to know this brings me no happiness to tell, for I spoke with a creature only somewhat human and made terrible bargains with him, and this creature came to me because I saw a thing in the darkness.
“I have seen a thing unknown to any others, be they men awake or men wrapped in dreams, or men passed into the greater dreaming of true death; for the malice of the jail keepers of Tirion puts my small cage upon a longer chain by far than all the others, so that, by dawn, I am thus so much nearer to the burning breath of sun when he comes up from underfoot, and so that, by dusk, I am thus so much farther from his warmth, and deeplier dipped into the cold abyss below.
“By this, I have seen farther down into the gulfs beyond the world’s end, farther even than my fellow prisoners here, farther, I suspect, even than the nadir-astronomers who peer so timidly athwart the brink above us with their telescopes and mirrors. They are too near the sun to see full ways into the gloom. In dark solitude, dark wisdom grows. For I have seen from whence the Black Ships come.
“Do I need to tell you of the Black Ships, young man? Every seaport in the lands of dream has been visited by them at one time or another; seaports made of crystal or of cloud, elf ruled, loyal to Mommur, next to oceans of light; and seaports made of brick and wood, inhabited by what we would recognize as men; and the great fortified iron headlands of Nidvellir, next to oceans made of boiling rock; all these, through all the cycles and aeons of recorded time, have feared the Black Ships, and never known from what quarter of the world they hail, or what level of the dreaming. But I know. They come not from earth, but beyond it.
“Once and twice and thrice I have seen them, monstrously huge, sailing up toward earth from this chasm, weightless as thunderclouds, their expanse of sails adrip with ice and swollen with nameless winds from far below. Their lanthorns burn with elf-light marsh gas, or the glow which fireflies carry in their tails, as they rise up. And across the gulfs of night air, sometimes I would hear lonely wailing voices raised in song, hymns to darkness and pain, paeans to the joy one finds in other’s sufferings; and this singing from the ships was interspersed with eerie barking laughter, harsh commands, and the cracks of whips and cries of pain; and no voice of them was human in its tone or timbre.
“Whenever any of these ships rose up, she would reach a certain height below the level of the world’s brink, and would at once all douse her lights and singers gag; and silenter than moths would float, by careful courses plotted to ascend through the night sky only by the darkest zone, far from constellations, that her passage might not occlude any star, nor give a warning of her silent running to the militia in Tirion below.
“Made bold by desperation or despair, I began to sing the uncouth hymns I had heard when next I saw a Black Ship rising up; nor did I fall silent when the Ship doused all her lights, but louder called forth, shouting blasphemies upward toward my slumbering jailers.
“The Black Ship struck sail and hung adrift, lamps black, off the southern point of Orion, past Rigel, which even then was level with the world’s horizon. A pilot boat was lowered, and dark hunched shapes, bent over muffled oars, rowed this boat across the gloomy air down toward me.
“The pilot boat came to where my cage hung in midair, and I saw the tall shape in the stern was manlike but had no human face. Above his lace cravat and below his tricorn hat, I saw his nose was whiskered like a cat, his eyes were liquid, large and dark; merry, beastlike eyes, full of cruelty and laughter; his pelt was black and shone. And when he spoke, his sharp fangs were white and clean like the teeth of a fox. His warm breath smelled of fish chewed raw.
“He raised a hand in greeting, and I saw, out from the lace cuff of his heavy seaman’s coat, a clawed paw, black and furry on the back, pale of palm, with webs of black membrane stretched between the finger joints.
“He chuckled and snorted when he saw the cruel torture of my imprisonment, and lightly touched the jagged teeth which line these bars, and said, ‘The folk above are fishing. They have left you dangle here as bait to the leviathans which lumber in the unnamed nether oceans into which these icy waters plunge. But I think you are too small a morsel to tempt those jaws to swallow up these many hooks. Hah! Are you so friendly with the fishermen above that you must squeak and squall when we are preparing our nice surprise to penetrate their rude blockades? You must be discreet, my scrawny mouthful, or the kindly men who put you here will lose the opportunity to fish with live bait.’
“I told him scornfully that one such as he should not dare to threaten me. He laughed, describing the tortures to which he would put me, and leaned toward the bars with his saber. The weapon came within my reach.
“The next boat out from the ship carried a higher-ranking officer of their race and kept a respectful distance while they treated with me. I will not trouble you to tell you what oaths were sworn that night, nor to what dreadful powers; but I will confide that much secret intelligence I gained, greatly to the good of my cause, were I able to reveal it to my people. And the sea-men allowed me keep the saber and the seal-coat of my first visitor, nor did they dare come near enough to take his body down from where it hung on the cage bars. I ate well for nearly a month.”
Galen, listening, now looked at the bloodstains on the cage bars with new horror.
And then Azrael said softly to Galen: “Come closer.”
IX
Galen realized that he could turn and go away this moment and put himself far out of reach of this caged man, return to his grandfather, and have no more to do with these dark matters. And yet, if Galen did not even attempt to rescue the Three Queens of Vindyamar, if he did nothing, how could he ever be worthy of the Guardianship?
Galen leaned closer. The bloodstained hand of Azrael reached up and gripped his shoulder. Galen was astonished at how cold the fingers were, and how strong. The cold hand drew him down till his cheek almost touched the thorns of the bars. Galen stared at the hooks and saw teeth hanging inches from his eyes.
Azrael whispered, “The traitor is the Seal-King himself. His secret name is Mannannan. His emissary and go-between is Dylan of Njord, whom you shall recognize by such tokens as I shall describe. They would not dare to have harmed these Queens of ancient Vindyamar. The Seal-King will release the Three Queens to you; you shall discover the location of the Talismans from them. You will disguise yourself as a selkie using a dark art I have learned. Draw on this coat I give you; now you shall become a selkie yourself. . .”
6
The Song
of the
Selkie
I
Galen said to Wendy: “The founder gave me his instructions to find the shore of Nastrond. He had a seal-coat in the cage with him, and he handed it to me, saying that he was giving me a coat in return for the cloak I had given him. I had to get right up next to the cage before he would hand it through the bars to me. With it, I was supposed to be able to imitate the selkie and approach unnoticed.
“There was a certain selkie the Founder said had come to his cage, a counselor and lieutenant of the Seal-King. Azrael described a great white seal with a dappled coat, who, when he wore a man’s shape, was a silver- haired old man with a salt-and-pepper beard. He dressed in green and gray and wore a silver moonstone ring on his finger. The selkie’s name was Dylan, son of Nereus of the House of Njord. There are three nations of selkie, coming from the Witch-City of Ys, from Atlantus, and from Cantriff Gwylodd. Well. You don’t care about that.
“So I asked how I could prove to Dylan that I came from Azrael, that it wasn’t a trick? Azrael said he would entrust me with the secret of his life, something he had learned from a necromancer to whom the selkie had introduced him. And then he plucks out of his coat—it almost looked like he pulled it right out of his chest, but he didn’t flinch or scream or anything—this little ball of crystal, that had this light inside of it, sort of a flower shape, but glowing and beating. It was about the size of a child’s marble.
“He told me to guard it carefully, and to have it when I came to Dylan; Dylan would recognize it for what it was, and this would ensure success for the cause to which Azrael had devoted himself. With my help, Dylan would see to it that those unjustly prisoned would be free, and those who must return to earth would do so. Those were his exact words.”
Wendy, listening to the story with great interest, rattled her bedsheets in a gesture of impatience, saying, “But why did you trust him? I thought the selkie were your enemies! Bad guys!”
“That’s true. But one thing was that, after all, one of the three storm- princes works for us, so why not a selkie?”
“Was that your idea?”
“Well, actually he said that to me. Azrael.”
“I would have asked him a lot more questions about who this Dylan was. I would have asked him who betrayed Vindyamar (I love that name!) Well? Didn’t you ask anything about any of this?”
“Well, I tried to ask, but the moment he handed me the glowing marble, he kind of fell over and collapsed against the bottom of the cage. Also, he had said the dawn was going to come, so I should go immediately. I had to jump.”
“Off the end of the world?”
“Off the end of the world.”
“And—?” prompted Wendy.
“And what?” asked Galen, blinking.
“And why didn’t you tell him no?”
“Well, I didn’t, I mean—I needed to prove myself. And he was unconscious.”
“Jumping off worlds cannot be good for your health. No wonder you’re a ghost!”
“It wasn’t like that!”
Wendy raised one eyebrow with an intensely skeptical look. (She had practiced this look in front of a mirror after she had seen Vivian Leigh in Gone With the Wind look that way at a Union soldier just before shooting him. It was one of her favorite expressions.) “Well, I guess you’re pretty young and trusting. Oh! Don’t get that look on your face; you’d think you’d swallowed a frog!”
“I haven’t swallowed a frog—I mean, I don’t look like that. . .” Galen’s face was burning red. He was noticing how pretty Wendy looked in the moonlight, and it pained him to think she was older than he was, particularly since she acted so much his junior.
“You look just like that!” said Wendy firmly, giving herself a little nod of agreement with herself.
“Like what?”
“Guilty conscience. Why was this guy in the cage to begin with? Because he was trustworthy or because—wait for it—he was not trustworthy?”
“I mean, he told me he knew how to make it so I’d survive the fall! And, well, he is the Founder of my Order, the first ancestor of my house, and—”
“And if he told you to jump off a bridge, would you do that, too? Oh, wait,” she said primly, “you don’t exactly need to answer that one, do you?”
“The Black Ships float! The selkie know the secret.”
“Really?” Wendy now perked up. “I knew how to fly once. I wish I could remember. What’s the secret?”
“If you drench your craft in the blood and sweetbreads of thirteen slain fairy-girls, killed by one stroke of a silver knife, you can . . .”
“Yuck. Gross.”
“I mean, it is a spell.”
“Gross. Yuck.”
“The Founder is a magician, you know!”
“And his first magic trick is, he makes you lose track of whether something is wholesome or unwholesome, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Magic! It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, my Mum says. You start thinking the strangest things are perfectly normal, and you wonder why everyone is staring at you. Like watching too many murders on TV: and you start thinking murder is normal. My daddy kills murderers. Did your magician ask you to murder a fairy?”
The young man gave a start of surprise. “The Red Knight attacked me first! Um, I mean, no. I didn’t kill any, um, fairies.”
“Good for you!”
“Didn’t need to. Azrael already gotten a bottle of blood and brain fluid from the . . .”
“Please. I cannot tell you how much I do not want to hear the end of that sentence.”
“Well. So he, the Founder, told me he had soaked the cloak in the blood for the proper amount of time, and if I wore it. . .”
“Gross. You put a bloodstained cloak all over your body.”
“It was for a good cause! Sort of. I thought I was saving the Three Queens of Vindyamar!”
“He told you to put this bloodstained thing on your body, and jump off the end of the world. And you believed him.”
“Grampa is a magician, too! We’re all magicians.”
“Uh huh. And if Grampa told you to wrap your face in a bloody sheet and jump off the edge of the world, would you listen to him, too?”
“I listen to everything Grampa says! Well, usually. I mean, it was an emergency, and all, and I had to show him I knew what I was doing, and . . .”
“And did you?” asked Wendy brightly.
“Did I what?”
“Know what you were doing?”
“Well, no. But the Founder was helping me.”
Wendy let that comment pass by in silence, but her red little mouth was pursed in a look of girlish skepticism, nodding her chin forward so she could regard her ghostly visitor at an upward angle through the tangle of her black bangs, and she hoisted one eyebrow aloft.
Galen fidgeted with his shining spear under her inspection, and then he shrugged and said, “Well, whether it was a good idea or not, sometimes, you just have to act on faith, and jump.”
“You jumped?”
“I jumped.”
II
Galen fell through alien skies and systems, zones and zodiacs flying past him as he fell, and the cliffs of earth dwindled to a dim high expanse behind him. Hour after hour as he plummeted, he saw the scattered constellations to either side and underfoot becoming clearer and cleaner in outline, filled in with depth and shading by stars whose light could not be seen on Earth, but only close at hand: Cancer now could be seen as a crab, with legs and claws and whiplike antennae; the beard and stern eyes of Orion the hunter were distinct, glistening with starlight; Canis Major was a wolfhound; lean and snarling; Canis Minor was a collie.
But soon even the winter constellations were left behind, and Galen found himself in zodiacs unknown to men, with strange shapes rising up like the indecipherable glyphs of antique Aztec pyramids. Here were hooded brooding shapes, or images of slime-clotted ziggurats and ruins occupying these stars; or sea-beasts multitentacled, or spidery shapes with sucking mouths, insectoid queens consuming their lovers, or Scylla-legged matriarchs with womb and bloody entrails gnawed by their own monstrous young.
Galen closed the clasps of the seal-coat and immediately found himself possessed, not of legs, but of strong flippers, paws shaped cunningly like hands; and when he twitched his nose, he saw long whiskers wiggling before his eyes.
Delighted, he began to romp and splash within the ocean of night around him, which, somehow, had become dark and salty, crisscrossed by surging waves. He found now he could leap and dive and surge through the foaming water with sleek speed.
For a time, he practiced this, attempting to perfect his disguise, and took an animal joy and childish delight in his newfound mastery of swimming.
How he could be in ocean, yet still be falling as if through air, was never clear to him; but he accepted it with the logic of a dreamer.
And the seas became thin about him as he fell further; and he saw only one or two constellations still below him; beyond that, darkness, in which dim, vast shapes floated or monstrous hulks moved with slow, huge motions.
To his left he saw again the gray steep faces of the cliffs of Earth, and, at their feet, on a small shelf of land before they dropped into the starless darkness of the nameless oceans of the under-sky, a beach near which tall ships were anchored.
Galen swam furiously toward that shore, plunging at a downward angle, hoping to reach it; for if he fell beyond it, there was nothing underfoot but the leviathans of the abyss and the dark, from whence no man returns sane.
At once he found himself ashore, with the retreating waves slithering around him. Before him, in tall cliffs, rose the roots of the foundations of the earth. To either side were flotillas of Black Ships resting at anchor, rank on rank of wide black sails now furled. The dunes beneath his seal’s belly were yellow and pale powder, mixed with sharp fragments of bone, scattered teeth, and here and there a skeletal fragment of a hand, or the grinning roundness of a skull. In the gloom, it seemed as if the bones were piled and wind tossed into long dunes or ranks, with deeper black shadows hunched between.
Galen pulled himself on his flippers higher on the beach, and, as he did so, the sea behind him disappeared. The beach now simply was the brink of a long fall into darkness. There was no possibility now of swimming up against the tides of night to reach the upper world again; to leave the beach was to plunge immediately into the nether gulf; he was trapped.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he began to see that, near the base of a giant stalagmite of the cliffs before him, three crowned women in robes of white and red and black were bound in postures of submission; hands tied to ankles, chains from iron collars looped about their knees.
There were other figures here as well. Not human figures: in the black shadows of the dunes, he saw now, hunched, black, furred, rounded shapes, like fat and cat-faced men might look with arms and legs lopped off.
These were the selkie. They lay, like him, on their bellies on the beach, or, if they moved, did so with a painful lumpish wallowing. Some few, he saw, were about his size; the rest were giant bulks, from whom deep breathing sounded like the hiss of winds from underground caverns.
But it was not hissing, he realized. In the gloom, lying at their ease among countless crushed human bones, the selkie were singing:
We wait, we wait to rise again,
Fain for the flesh of living men;
No force or fear shall cow us then,
When darkness, darkness covers all.
When that day of doom arrives,
We’ll take their shapes and steal their lives;
With gentle rapes we’ll take their wives,
When darkness, darkness covers all.
Walking masked among mankind
Of human face, inhuman mind;
ļnside best friends worst foes to find,
When darkness, darkness covers all.
Galen listened in growing disquiet. He began humping his way across the sand toward the distant captives, then stopped when he noticed the dark glitter of many eyes watching him from the forward blunt ends of the hulking seal shapes strewn along the beach.
It was with a feeling of almost giddy relief that he noticed one of the giant seals near him was a dappled albino. When that huge seal turned toward him, its seal head fell backward furtively, and a human head peered out from a small opening in the neck. It was a silver-haired man with a salt-and- pepper-beard.
The seal’s right paw suddenly flopped bonelessly; and out from a slit opening in the seal’s belly, a human hand appeared and gestured impatiently, beckoning with a furtive motion.
On the hand Galen saw a silver ring bearing the moonstone crest of the house of Njord.
Galen, careful not to disturb his seal-face, tried to work his hand free of the coat; his human hand came out from under the round bulk of his belly, holding the marble in his fist. Galen clutched it tightly, fearful lest any sliver of light escape between his fingers and shine in the gloom.
The chorus of the song suddenly rang out, a loud and joyous crescendo:
Acheron below us waits,
To rise, and draw men to their fates
When sunless towers gape sunken gates,
Will darkness, darkness conquer all!
And as exemplar of our might,
We’ll spill the Sun and spoil his light,
That men be blind and without sight
When darkness, darkness, smothers all!
The giant form of Dylan reared back and raised his seal snout high and sang in a clear, happy voice:
Behold a folly scarce believed;
He thinks deceivers are deceived!
Be him of his guise relieved,
Nor darkness cover him at all!
How shall we spying prying pay
This little man who swims our way?
A trio of high, clear voices sang out, and Galen saw the bound shapes of the women, writhing and contorting strangely. Their arms and legs grew limp; their hair and faces crumpled and fell away, revealing the black, furry faces of smiling seals peering out from widening slits in the queen’s throats. The seals shrugged off their disguises and came out from inside the flesh of the queens, which fell into folds, empty garments of white leather dangling from the seal’s paws.
The skins of the three beautiful women had been flayed from their corpses, Galen guessed, and perhaps their souls had already been taken aboard a Black Ship and sunken down to Acheron below:
Mocking impersonations of three queenly voices sang:
Skin him! Steal his life away!
His flesh, usurp; his spirit, slay!
His bones on Nastrond to decay,
And darkness, darkness eat him all!
Galen threw off the selkie coat and leapt to his feet. But Dylan reached out and seized him by the wrist, the one carrying the precious fiery pearl; Dylan’s human face had sharp, foxlike teeth, which bent down to close over Galen’s wrist. Galen found himself garbed once more in his armor and with his spear in hand. Dylan’s teeth jarred against Galen’s gauntlet, and Dylan recoiled in pain; and in the next moment, he wallowed hugely backward to avoid the stroke of Galen’s starlit spear.
It was all a trap. Azrael could not have been this deceived. There was no traitor among the selkie. The traitor was Azrael, who had led him to come here.
The light from the spear was brighter here than ever Galen had dreamed it before. The smaller seals cowered before the spear’s light, wallowing backward, squealing in pain. But the larger ones pushed forward, even as the light burned their paws and faces. Squinting, whiskers quivering with rage, the huge selkie closed in about him.
Galen braced himself, thrust and thrust again, with sharp, clean, practiced strokes. One seal-man lay dead in the beach, another wounded and bleeding.
Silently, Galen now blessed that his grandfather had forced him to practice so many hours each day with a weapon he had thought useless and insufferably archaic. But the blocks, parries, and killing strokes were easy, just as he had practiced.
Perhaps because he had thought of his grandfather, Galen in that instant saw his grandfather in the distance aboard one of the Black Ships that were drawn up on the beach, chained at the neck. With frantic gestures, his grandfather beckoned Galen to look behind him. Galen, suspecting trickery, concentrated on the round shapes rising in front of him.
Suddenly, from behind came laughter and movement. Galen turned and struck an awkward blow.
A huge monster seal, larger than a wagon, surged at him from behind. Galen’s spear blow had cut into a giant’s catlike face, but only drew a dribble of blood; the creature was too huge for any telling blow. The giant rolled over him, crushing the wind out of him, and turned into a man who stood with his foot on Galen’s throat.
A voice like a deep rumble of a sea wave now issued from the huge seal- man: “Hoy, little small-fry, little sneak-spy, aren’t ye one of them who Watch at Everness, eh? Ye crouch like toads, peering over yer fine tall seawall to gaze with fear upon our wide, black, salt sea. Ho ho. And now ye peer so close, so close, and it’s yer death ye see. I’d like to skin yer flesh and make a fine coat o’ ye, and stroll about as fine as fine, on human feet, up yonder where they say the sun is shining! But no, but no, there’s another who will wear your lovely coat, not me!”
The giant seal-man with effortless strength now heaved up Galen and held him one-handed by the wrist, legs kicking far above the bony sand. Galen could slap him with his spear, but could not, one-handed, deliver any proper stroke, and the huge seal merely smiled when the light from the spearhead stung him.
A fathom at a step, the huge seal-man strode down the beach, toward the shore of darkness and long fall below into the gloom. The other seals barked and laughed and cried out with pleasure at the sight.
Galen kicked and twisted, but he was like a small child in the grip of a tall, strong man. The seal-man chuckled and clucked his tongue to see Galen struggle so, and spoke in a cheerful, deep rumble: “Don’t worry so! I can live without yer white leather for me coat! Hey, ho! For I’ve a dozen cavaliers from Vindyamar all hanging in my wardrobe now, guards I noosed and gals I garroted and sleeping babes I plucked up out of cribs. A fine city, Vindyamar, floating like a blue flower in the waves, and Sapphire Towers so proud and tall! But there’s an underside, and darkness under her hull. The Warlock gave us the password to open the lower postern gate, and we killed the guards and stole their shapes, and went home to their guardsman’s homes, and took their wives, then led them, one at a time, down stairs to where the rest of us lads were waiting in the sea.
“Then there was a ball, ye see, and all the nobles came. But the guards who was to keep them safe, aye, they was all our lads by then, and not until the feast was served, and they saw all their children done up nice, served with gravy over beds of rice, did they know anything was wrong or guess why the doors was locked tight shut behind them. The fiddlers fiddled loud to drown the screaming, and we laughed and sang ‘til everyone outside who heard it said ‘Why! What lovely times and gay, the high folk have at play!’
“After that, ‘twas easy as poking an eye to invite the townsfolk up to the palace to see the Three Queens, and my! How puffed up and proud they was to go! They polished their shoes and brushed their wigs, and not until they was in the throne room did they see the ladies of the court in their fine clothes crucified on the wall behind the thrones, with the Necromancer, old bone-licker, corpse-eater, skulking nigh, for he had pulled their souls like old teeth right out from their soft, womanly bosoms and wrapped them in a cedar chest to hale them down to Acheron Below.
“And me?! I got to dress up too, and got be the High Bell-Captain with a silver chain and a ivory staff. I got to ring the bell. The Warlock told us do it, to ring the Great Bell long and loud to wake ye. But then we tied some troublesome wenches to the clapper, duchesses and young countesses and the like, and cracked their bones when they struck the bell wall. When all the inside of the magic bell were stained with virgin blood, polluted and stained, the magic in the Bell went bad, and the Sea-Bell cracked in two and sank. Where is all yer fine Bells and Warnings now, Watchman, eh? Watch yerself now dying.”
The giant leaned out over the end of the sand, dangling Galen over the unquiet darkness of the abyss.
He heard his grandfather’s voice cry out: “Let go of the pearl! Don’t fall!”
Galen did not want to be tricked again. He did not listen to the creature who looked like his grandfather. Even as the giant was reaching to pry open his fingers, Galen, one-handed, raised the spear and pierced the wrist of the giant hand holding him.
Without a sound, still clutching the pearl, Galen fell.
III
For a time, Galen tried to compose himself, and he wondered what it would be like to die, or worse, to go insane and have his soul consumed by nameless horrors that lurk below the threshold of the world men know.
Then a light came from behind him, and he felt a warm and loving breath, scented like springtime, on his cheek. Twisting in midair, he saw the slim, graceful form and fawn-like face of the dream-colt, surrounded with the glory of her own light.
“You have forgotten, beloved, that I promised to stay behind you. While I could not carry you into the nameless lands beyond fair Tirion, I did not say I could not carry you out from them!” she said, or sang. “And so many blessings are gathered for the good of man, which he so swiftly forgets! My sweet, what now do you do in this dark place, falling to a deeper dark from which even I could not recover you? Mount! And I shall fly you with the speed of daydreams back to where your life is.”
IV
“And then I was here,” Galen said.
V
Wendy asked, “But why did you come to me? She said she would take you back to where your life is, and I certainly don’t have it stuck under a pillow here or something, do I? Besides, what did the seals hope to achieve? They weren’t going to try to take over your life, were they?”
Galen said, “The Sixty-Eighth Warden, Pentheus Waylock, wrote a paper trying to prove that what we call insanity is various forms of selkie trying to eat up men’s souls, hollow them out from inside, so to speak, and walk around on earth; but they can’t adjust themselves to the limitations of waking reality, and they see things other people don’t see, and so we think they’re crazy.”
“Well, what now?”
“Uh—what do you mean, what now? There’s nothing more to do now. Time is up.”
“Okay. But what can we do now? If the sea-bell people are beaten up and the three queens are missing, then there’s no alarm bell working anymore, is there? Things could be sneaking into the world right and left, right?”
Galen shook his head sadly. “I don’t think you realize what this means. I’ve seen the selkie gathered in force. Vindyamar is fallen, and the three fair queens are slain, their souls taken perhaps to Acheron. The only thing left to do is blow the Horn. Blow the Horn and wake the sleepers. It will be the last battle. The end of the world. My family will have fulfilled its mission. We were ordered to watch the boundaries between the waking and the sleeping world. And we have watched. The years went by, and went by, and still we watched. Everyone forgot about us, and still we watched. Now the enemies we were watching for have come. Time to blow the Horn. There’s nothing more to do. The last battle is here.”
Wendy said nothing, but looked at him, her head cocked to one side.
“You know,” he muttered, “our family is supposed to sound the Last Horn Call. All those things I was taught when I was young. I guess they are really true. The dire spirits from the abyss will rise up to claim the Earth; to defeat them, we must call down the supernatural champions of the light. But they might destroy the Earth in the glory of their coming. We were promised. Long ago we were promised, by solemn promises, that a new and perfect world would be given us, a new homeland, if ours was brought to an end by the unearthly powers unleashed during the last battle. It would be a place of peace, a garden of delight, perfect and pure. But I think I might prefer this old, flawed world of mine rather than that new one, if it came right down to it. I know I’m supposed to feel really overjoyed at the coming of the millennium, now that our long duties are almost over. But I just got started. I’m still young. I don’t even think I want to find the Final Horn. But I guess I should.” His voice was calm and solemn.
She said, “You can end the world?”
He said to her: “All you need to do is find my Grampa and tell him to do it.”
VI
Wendy blinked. Then she snorted and shrugged. “Oh, don’t be silly! We can’t let the world come to an end. You look so gloomy when you say that! So, what can we do instead? I mean, to fight the bad guys ourselves, without waking up these sleeper fellows, whoever they are?”
“They can’t be fought by mortal men,” said Galen uncertainly. “Besides, that isn’t what we were ordered to do. I mean—”
“What about finding these talismans?”
“Finding the talismans?”
“Of course! The things Azrael talked about, the Moly and the magic ring and the sword and the other things. Mollner; the bow and arrows of Belphanes. The things to defeat the dark! After all why would Azrael have made that part up; what would’ve been the point? So we’ve got to find them. We can’t just stand here with our mouths hanging open, gaping like fish!”
Galen, who had been standing with his mouth gaping, snapped it shut with a click of his teeth. “My family is just supposed to watch the wall. Azrael said that for us to use the weapons is forbidden.”
“Well?! Maybe he’s lying! Things have come over the wall! Now what?”
“I guess the only one who knows where the talismans might be is Grampa. He’s consulted the Queens of Vindyamar in dreams before. Gramps should be at the House. And there are tools of our Art at the house; there’s supposed to be a planetarium built by the Sixty-Sixth Warden, Archimedes Waylock, which can locate dream creatures that have come through the mist.” Galen, for the first time, spoke in a clear and certain voice, as if Wendy’s words had firmed his resolve. “There’s also a library of books, most of which are in the waking world, that can give us more information on what we’re facing. But I can’t ask a sick woman to help me . . .”
“Ha! Not only do I feel fine, you chauvinist pig, but I’m older than you are and probably a lot smarter too, if you ask my opinion, which you haven’t, judging from the look on your face. You look so funny with your mouth hanging open like that!”
Galen self-consciously snapped his mouth shut again, looking mildly confused and overwhelmed. He straightened up and started to speak in a voice of condescending masculine authority. “Well, first we should. . . Hmmm. . .” His voice trailed back into youthful uncertainty. “Uh, what should we do first?”
“First! Let’s look at the pearl and see what it is.”
“Pearl?”
Wendy rolled her eyes. “You know! The thing Azrael de Gray gave you. You still have it, don’t you?”
Galen reached into the pouch hanging from his war-belt. “Yeah, I think I—here it is . . .” He drew up his hand, and, shining in his palm, surrounded by rays of soft light and by gentle sprays of sparks like fireflies, was a tiny crystal sphere of living beauty.
Wendy drew in her breath, awed.
VII
Wendy raised her head from the living light in Galen’s palm and saw the door from the hall silently swing open, with no hand touching it. Looming in the doorway was a ghastly black apparition, narrow-faced and starved, corpselike, dressed in armor of human bones and shrouded with floating blackness.
Galen jerked his hand back into his pouch, quelling the light he held, and he brought up his spear in an en garde stance, weight balanced, legs slightly spread, knees flexed. His left hand, forward on the haft, held the gleaming weapon level; his right hand, near the spear butt, was in motion, so that the spearhead began to sway and circle, menacing, feinting.
“You again!” shouted Wendy. “Get out of here!”
Koschei stooped to brush his crown of dead men’s fingernails against the door frame as he floated into the room, his robes a cloud.
“Necromancer, begone!” called out Galen. “By justice herself, I command you, depart! No hand here will unsheathe your gory blade! No heart here will bleed to fill the emptiness where once you kept your heart!”
Koschei spoke in a cold voice, humming with echoes, as if he spoke from a distant world. “Son of Adam, not for battle come I now (to your good fortune, for my strength would utterly overwhelm and consume you), but to act as herald for one, more terrible than I, who comes now to claim you. The first father of your race, by mortal crime, has condemned all your kind as prey to him who follows me; your life, for that original sin, is forfeit. Do you deny this?”
“I—I don’t know what you mean—”
At that moment Wendy heard the distant sound of a ringing bell, perhaps from a church or clocktower, ringing.
“I am a herald for one whom no one else can serve; having shed my humanity, I do not share the fate under which the first of men laid all his children.” Koschei raised one bony finger, pointing to the door, and spoke now in a louder voice: “Behold, ye spirits of the world, that he has not denied my word, and therefore he confesses and consents. Come, Death, and take his soul away! But see you do not shatter the little life he carries in his pouch; this is destined for his shed flesh, by the magic of the selkie who have touched him; he has worn their robes, they now wear his.”
A great, black, taloned hand, with fingers longer than a tall man’s legs, reached in through the doorway, surrounded by a stinking cloud of darkness like a thundercloud. The hand was brown with layers of dried blood and gore, and a terrible, piercing cold radiated from it, so that the long black nails were dripping frost.
While Galen stood paralyzed, the black hand closed around him, and Wendy caught a glimpse of Galen’s horrified face between the narrowing gaps of the closing fingers, like a face seen between the bars of a cage.
Wendy gave out a shrill shout of fear and anger, threw aside her covers, and leaped up out of bed.
As soon as her foot touched the floor, she sprang fully awake and blinking in the empty room. The hospital room looked the same, but there was no sign of Galen or Koschei or the terrible clawed hand.
A square of moonlight from the window fell silently onto the floor, and, except for a growing sensation of dread, Wendy was alone.
7
Wounded
of
Old Wars
I
Raven, his muscular arms folded over his stomach as if he felt a knotted pain there, his shoulders slumped, his eyes staring, walked slowly from the intensive care unit. His steps were slow.
“What have I done—by holy Katherine, what have I done . . .,” he muttered to himself over and over again in his native Georgian tongue.
Ahead of him in the white halls, Raven saw a young mother escorting a little daughter away from a counter where the mother had been signing papers and forms. The girl looked cheerful, although her face was pale. A bouquet of balloons was floating next to her head, tied by brightly colored ribbons to her wrist.
“There we go, sweetheart! Time to go home! Now we’re all better. Do you like your balloons?”
The little girl smiled a smile of innocent joy and bobbed her wrist furiously to make the colored balloons wiggle and dance.
Raven, drew away, unable to tolerate the sight. The halls felt stuffy and close about him. He pushed open a pair of doors and stepped out into the fresh nighttime air.
Raven staggered over to a bench overlooking the parking lot and sat down, breathing heavily, elbows on knees, head hanging.
“Tough night in there, eh?” said a rough voice.
Raven turned his head. Next to the bench, in a wheelchair, sat a heavyset man. He was balding, thick chested, with powerful biceps, neck, and shoulder muscles. His legs were absurdly thin and small by comparison. He wore a crew cut, and had an upright posture and level gaze. He had scars: one on his cheek, one on his hand, others perhaps hidden by his shirt. His face was lined and weathered: he looked to be in his fifties, perhaps a well- preserved sixty.
The man in the wheelchair pulled a metal flask out of his jacket. “Take a pull, son. Looks like you need it.” And he passed the flask to Raven, saying, “Careful. Strong stuff.”
Raven sniffed the open cap of the metal flask. Just the aroma of the alcohol was so strong that it stung his eyes. Deliberately, he tilted back his head and took a long, deep swallow of the potent, clear liquor.
It burned like raging fire in his throat. Raven neither coughed nor gasped, and he handed back the flask with a steady hand.
The man gave Raven a brief inspection and nodded with approval.
When the man sipped from the flask, he could not do so with Raven’s aplomb; he took a shallower drink and had to pull the flask away from his lips, gasping for breath, eyes watering.
Raven shook his head, smiling, and put out his hand, gesturing for the flask.
The other man silently handed it over, looking Raven eye-to-eye as he did so.
Raven took another pull, twice as long as before, drinking liquid fire into his throat. With a flourish, he returned the flask to the other man; his cheeks flushed, but showing no other outward sign of distress.
The man in the wheelchair, eyebrows raised, gave a long, low whistle of admiration.
Raven nodded, a modest gesture of thanks.
The other man smiled back, his smile a slight crease in an iron-harsh face. “Name’s Peter. Yours?”
“Raven.”
“Where’d you learn to hold your liquor like that, Dr. Raven?”
“I was sailor on Greek freighter, Peter. I sailed the seas.”
Peter grunted and nodded, taking another sip. “Good man.”
“Ah.” Raven’s smile fell. He turned his face away to stare broodingly out at the lights of the parking lot, at the textured darkness of the bushes and trees beyond. “But I am not a good man. Not a good man at all.”
“Mm? What’d you do?”
“I made a man to die,” said Raven softly. “To let a beautiful little woman live. One of them had to die.”
Peter passed him the flask. “Well, now. Doctors make those choices all the time. It’s hard. Damn hard, choices like that. Deciding who lives, who dies. I know.”
Raven wondered why Peter mistook him for a doctor then realized he was still wearing the white lab coat he had stolen from the laundry earlier that evening to sneak into his wife’s room.
“No,” said Raven. “It was not such a choice as that. The woman, she is my wife. The young man him, it is the same as if I have done murder. I murdered a man.” Raven drank and passed back the flask.
“Yeah, I know what that’s like. You get over it.” Peter took a final sip from the flask, and opened his coat to replace it in an inner pocket. When his coat was open, Raven could see a heavy, long-barreled pistol the man carried beneath his coat in a shoulder holster.
“But, let me tell you,” Peter continued. “No matter how bad it gets, no matter who lives and who dies, no matter how much you get hurt, you can take it. Your wife leaves? You can take it.
“Your son gets involved in drugs and weird cults? You can take it. Your father a nutcase? You can take it. You step on a landmine, and lose the use of both legs, no jogging, no rock climbing, no dancing, not anymore, not ever again? You can take it. Here’s the secret: as long as your conscience is clean, you can take it. Like you got three inches of armor plating between you and the world. Whatever goes on out there, long as your plating is intact, it’s never going to reach you inside, and you can take it. But if you do wrong, that ‘s it. Then the grenade is inside the armor plating, inside with you, to bounce all that shrapnel around inside there with you, and there’s no way to get out and get away from it, because you carry it with you. Man with a good conscience, even if he’s lost it all, he can take it; man with a bad conscience, even if he’s got everything in the world, he can’t take anything, and he’ll break. He’ll just break like a twig. You got me?”
Raven did not move or respond except that his gaze grew hollow and blank, and, beneath his beard, his cheek grew pale.
Peter said gruffly, “Tell me about this wife of yours you saved.”
II
Raven said, “My wife, she is crazy. Not sad or frightening crazy, but crazy just the same. Harmless crazy. She run around naked in the woods to see if she can remember how to fly. She talks to animals, and if you say animals no talk back, she laughs and says, well, that’s not their fault, is it? And she talks always about her father and mother.”
Raven continued: “To hear her talk, her mother is the most beautiful and wise woman in the world, gracious and kind, and never to get angry or cross. And her father, she says he is a man like no other, a clever lawyer, an inventor, a builder of houses and healer of sickness. Such a genius, her father is! And filled with so many stories about his great deeds! She tells me of him and promises to take me to meet him, where he lives in his great mansion in California, but always the trip is put off. She is so pleased with how much she loves her father, how much he loves her. She tells everyone and all; such happy boasting!
“I believed her, you know,” continued Raven. “Because I am thinking, this is America, after all. Land of Jefferson. Land of Edison. Are men brilliant at many things. Why not man like this, skilled at so much? Inventor, like Edison, architect, like Jefferson . . .”
Peter said gruffly, “Sounds like that fellow in California, what’s his name? That inventor-surgeon who got fed up with being sued all the time, and became a lawyer, and he got fed up with all his bad press, so he started his own newspaper chain. Real rags to riches story; a real hero. Funny; I can’t remember his name. Any relation?”
“I do not think any relation with anyone at all.”
“How’s that?”
“I tell you. I remember how Wendy invited many girls over from her university where she studies one day to have a bridal shower. I am not supposed to be there, you know, since I am a man. But one of the girls, her classmate, finds me before I am leaving, and asks me where the father is, of which she has heard so much. Such a great man! Will the father be at the wedding? And I do not know how to say. . .” Raven’s voice trailed off in misery.
“Father’s dead?” guessed Peter.
“No. Is worse. There is no father, no mother. No father who is genius; no mother of perfect beauty and sweetness. When I try to find the father before the wedding, I called on the phone to try to find him. To find records. No member of the bar as a lawyer; no medical school records; no architecture license. There is a mansion at the address Wendy knows, but no one has lived there for many years. I ask Wendy about these things, and she laughs and says her father is away, maybe visiting her mother. And after the wedding . . . after the wedding, Wendy says . . .”
“What?”
“Wendy says her father was at the reception (we had a reception to celebrate our elopement), that I shook his hand, that I spoke with him, and that I have forgotten it. I tell her, you know, she is an orphan, and maybe she is deluded. And she says, so what? Of course, I am mad little girl (she says), or why else is she marrying such a man like me and being ever so happy? That is what she said, how happy she was. How she laughed! So I do not look for the father anymore, since I am thinking, what does it matter?” Raven shook his head in sorrow.
“Who paid for her college?” asked Peter.
“Ah . . . strange. You know, I am not knowing how she pays for this. She owns many fine things, like a rich man’s daughter might own. I do not know. I do not know what to think about her. But I am very much in love with her. I would. . .” Raven was thinking of saying, I would do murder for her, but he could not say it.
“Just ‘cause someone’s crazy, don’t mean you stop caring about them,” said Peter. “I know. I got one in the family.”
III
“They say you marry a woman like your mother. Not me. I tried to get the most practical, most hardheaded woman I could find. Emily’s her name. Practical. My old man is nuts, and I wanted to keep my son away from all nuttiness. Nuts but rich. When I was stationed overseas, Emily raised the kid all by herself. Months at a time. Years. Came time for the kid to go to boarding school and get some real schooling. Public schools in our part of the world were crap. We wanted to send him to a military academy, but it was expensive. Emily thought my dad could afford it; but Dad wouldn’t lend her the money unless she brought the kid and lived with him over the summers. I didn’t want my old man near the kid. I had standards. Not Emily. She was practical. And I was overseas. Nothing I could do about it.
“You know when kids go through a certain age, when they won’t listen to anything their parents tell them? They go around reading books that prove they don’t exist, or that everything is nothing, and they think no one ever thought about it before. Because they’re trying to form their own ideas. Maybe you don’t know. Usually it’s healthy. Usually. But my old man got him just at that age.
“Filled his head full of garbage. It’s his religion. Weird devil-worship, new age-type stuff. Our folks got chased out of England with the Pilgrims long time back. But they weren’t Puritans, no sir, not by a long shot.
“So the kid listens to my dad, and pretty soon he’s taking drugs and staring into crystals and studying books on witchcraft.
“Well, when I came home after my last tour, it was quite a scene. You see, I thought Emily’d side with me. But when I came home, it was without my legs working.
“All those years in the hellhole of Vietnam, and I come out fine; but then, when I go off to some stinking shit-hole in the middle east—not even in a combat zone!—I get my kneecaps blown off. Fuck it. Now I get to sit it out the rest of my life. Emily didn’t like that. She was younger than me, and some of her good looks weren’t worn off yet, and she didn’t want to be chained up to a cripple the rest of her life. You’d be surprised how often it happens.
“Me, I always thought you were supposed to stick by people. Stick by your men, stick by your friends, stick by your family. Stick by them even when it did you no good at all, even if you had to make a few sacrifices for it. Not Emily. She was practical. She hired a lawyer and gave me a divorce.
“Maybe she figured I wouldn’t put up much of a fight. Well, she figured that one right. Whole thing tore the heart right out of me. And me, a fighter!
“I don’t know where she got the money to hire that lawyer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Dad put her up to it. ‘Cause she got the house and a healthy chunk of my veteran’s benefits, and custody of the kid. And then, of course, being young and pretty, she wanted to get married again, and didn’t want a teenage kid around the house to scare off any prospects. So he goes to live with Dad, getting further and further wrapped up in all this religious weirdness, until finally he ends up nutty as a fruitcake. And I can’t get him to come home. The judge told me that at the kid’s age, by the time I got back custody, the kid would be an adult anyway, if I tried to reopen the case. These things take years.”
Raven said, “It is terrible thing to be lonely, I am thinking.”
Peter nodded grimly. “It was months before anyone even informed me what was going on here.”
“Here?”
“At the hospital. They didn’t phone me. I didn’t even know he was here at first. Maybe I’m not on the records as the father anymore. My kid has been in a coma since this spring. In August, I used to come by every day and sit next to him. Talk, or read. They say that helps. Maybe he could hear. Maybe not. And he’d just lay there, hooked up to those machines. And I realized it don’t matter. His religion. His nuttiness. None of it mattered, you know? ‘Cause I wanted him to live. I wanted him to wake up again. Even if he hates me for the rest of his life ‘cause of how I treated him, I’d rather have him awake, alive, healthy. And I realized this didn’t matter. . .” He tapped his useless legs with his hands.
“I felt mighty sorry for myself for about a year after this happened. Maybe that’s one thing Emily couldn’t stand. Self-pity. But looking at the face of my little boy, laying in there, mostly dead, kept alive by a machine . . . Well, at least I was alive. I was up and about. I had more than my little boy. And you know what? Self-pity is just another name for selfishness. And I felt all that selfishness fall off of me when I sat there, day after day, looking at him. Know why? ‘Cause I would have traded places with my boy in a minute. I would have gone into a coma to let him live again. I would have done it for any of my men in the brush; why shouldn’t I do the same for my boy? And when you’re willing to give up your life for someone, you shouldn’t stop to bitch about his nutty ideas. You don’t have to see eye to eye with a person to love them. And I just wish my boy would wake up again so I could tell him that. That I love him. Just that.”
“I hope your child will recover and have good health,” said Raven. “It is more sad for the young to be sick, you know?”
“Yep. Few hours ago, they called me, said his condition had changed. New brainwave activity. Different from his old brainwave patterns. He went into a seizure. Started to wake up, but then his heart stopped. Took him to the emergency room. You might have seen him there. His name’s Galen. Galen Waylock.”
IV
Raven stood up, his expression full of horror. “He said it would be no one I knew! But now I know!” He hid his face in his hands and turned away from Peter.
“What’s wrong, buddy? Dr. Raven?” Peter put his hand on the wheels of his chair, twisting them in opposite directions, so that he turned to follow Raven.
Raven looked up from between his fingers in time to see the doors from the hospital fly open. There was Wendy, looking radiant and cheerful, dressed in her beige skirt and jacket, little black boots on her feet, one hand swinging the traveling case she had originally brought to the hospital with her. She was smiling, and the wind played with her long black hair, which was mussed and tousled.
Wendy danced up to Raven and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m all better! Stop crying. And, hey! Guess what?! We have to find the magic talismans to drive back the Dark powers from the nightmare kingdom before the world gets destroyed. A ghost was helping me, but he was carried off, so we’ve got to save him, too.” She turned toward Peter and said, “Hi there! My name’s Wendy!”
A very young and harassed-looking lady in a candy-striped shirt of pink and white appeared in the door, flourishing a handful of papers. With rapid steps, she chased after Wendy, calling out that she could not leave yet, as no doctor had examined her, and no tests had been performed to prove that she was healthy. Wendy gave the girl a pinch on the cheek, saying, “There, there! I feel fine, thank you. Now go back to the people who are really sick. Raven! They won’t let me leave without signing all this stuff. Tell her how much you hate paperwork.”
“Peter Waylock, ma’am. Pleased to meet you.”
“Do you believe in faith healing? Miracles? One just happened to me! Look!” Wendy spun in a circle, hair and skirt lifting, palms out, face tilted up.
“Ma’am, we really need . . .,” said the hospital worker.
Raven said, “Here look, I sign! There and there and there! In triplicate! Now, go!” He angrily scrawled his name at random across several of the papers.
The woman shrank back, cowed. “Er—yes, doctor . . .” She turned and fled.
“What’s up, Raven? Aren’t you happy to see me?!!” Wendy, with a little whoop of joy, threw her arms around her husband. Her husband was so tall compared to her that her feet left the pavement when she twined her arms around his neck.
Wendy kissed her husband’s furry cheek, and, with her bright eyes peering over his massive shoulder, looked at Peter. “Did you say Waylock? Your son came into my bedroom on a moonbeam. He told the most wonderful story! Are you going to help him save the world? Why is he a ghost?”
Peter said, “A ghost?!” His face was stiff as iron. “Dr. Raven, what is all this?”
Raven pushed his wife away and stepped back. Wendy stared at Raven with wide eyes, her red mouth forming an O of surprise. Raven was panting, his expression wild. He turned toward Peter. Raven spoke in a shaking voice: “Very sorry, I am. So sorry. It is about your son. There is bad news. Your son is dead.”
Raven held his breath.
“No, he isn’t,” said Peter in voice of calm impatience.
“But I fear he is dead,” said Raven. “I—I have—”
“He’s not dead,” said Peter. “There he is right behind you.”
Raven turned.
“Hi Galen! Remember me?” Wendy waved at the youth standing in the doorway. The young man stood with one door held lightly in either hand, looking back and forth, blinking rapidly.
Raven was clutching his own chest, a look of terrible confusion on his face. His eyes were red with unshed tears, but a look of wild hope began to dawn across his features. “It was all a lie. A sad dream. . . I have done no wrong. . .”
The gaze the young man turned toward Wendy was calm and remote. He spoke in a clipped and icy voice. “Madame, forgive me if I do not well recollect you. My long convalescence has obscured my memory, I fear.”
“But I just talked to you!”
“How is this possible, as I have only this hour woken from a long and troubling sickness?” The young man smiled with cool politeness.
“Son—” Peter spoke in a voice that trembled. “They said they got your heart started again, but that you wouldn’t be awake till tomorrow. They said you wouldn’t be able to walk.”
The young man studied Peter’s face with a careful, even stare. “Ah, father. It pleases me well to see you once again.” He stepped forward, letting the doors swing shut behind him. “Come, father, let us away. I would have no more of this place, for it troubles me. Let us return to Everness House, I pray you.”
Wendy strode after him a few steps, and said fiercely, “You’re Azrael de Gray, aren’t you! You tricked Galen into carrying your soul out of the cage, and sent him to where the seal-men could make a coat out of him for you to wear!”
The gaze the young man turned toward her was so cold, so reptilian, that Raven automatically stepped forward into the way. The young man said nothing, but turned and looked at Peter, who sat blinking in impatient confusion.
Peter met Raven’s gaze, and nodded. “See what you meant, pal.” He tapped his finger to his temple. “Harmless, huh? But kinda cute.”
The young man, motionless, watched Peter from beneath lowered eyelids.
“Come on,” said Peter, turning to the boy, “let’s go.” Back over his shoulder, he said, “Nice meeting both of you . . .”
They started away across the parking lot.
Wendy said softly to Raven, “We’ve got to follow them.”
“Wha-aa-at? Why is this, my little bird?”
“Because that’s not Galen!” she whispered loudly. “Someone took his soul and put someone else in his body!”
Raven stroked his beard and squinted over at the youth strolling away under the streetlamps with Peter. Then he looked back down at his wife, puzzlement in his eyes.
V
Many were the wonders and splendors which, during his unnaturally long life, Azrael de Gray Waylock had beheld in the kingdoms of deep dreaming. He had seen from afar the glory of sunrise over Zimiamvia, where immortals live; he had survived the stench and horror of the vaults of Zin; he had seen the coasts of Nastrond, where selkie frolic amidst the heaped-up bones of men; he had walked the golden streets of Celebradon, and, through eyes tear-blurred by the brilliance of the winged beings who pass in unearthly silence down those avenues, he had seen the hushed pleasances, the shaded walks, the quiet gardens and cathedrals of that sleeping, star-crowned city.
Azrael de Gray Waylock was one of the three fully human persons who had ever beheld the windowless domes of the torture-city of Uhnuman on its plateau on the far side of the moon. He was one of the two men who had ever visited the vast onyx citadel of the Great Ones that broods atop the unknown mountain in the twilit, cold wasteland to the north of the dream-world, and he knew the reason for their remote and august reticence, and why, though fallen from Mommur, they are not loyal to Acheron. And he was the only man who knew where lay the shining meadows where walks the lonely Unicorn, where her graceful footstep stirs the meads of eternal and unwithering fair flowers; where she dwells amidst gentle beauty which cannot allay her sorrow.
Despite his wisdom in the dream-lore and all his knowledge, gained with such horrid price, and his deep experience, Azrael de Gray Waylock was astounded when he came forth from the houses of healing, once more to breathe the night airs of the waking world, wrapped in the cloak of a young man’s skin.
VI
The sights were strange and filled with wonder beyond all his expectation.
The surface underfoot was black and hard like the tar flows of volcanolit Inquanok, but crisscrossed with a geometric pattern of white lines, like the cunning handiwork of the Nidvellir. Overhead, burning with a splendid glory, slender poles or spears of some unknown elfish metal held up lanterns of crystal in which motionless pure fires lived. The light from these white fires was so bright that Azrael was at first not certain if it were day or night. He had seen similar fires hovering in the ceilings of the healing house, where they murmured to themselves in a strange language of hisses, buzzing like bees.
Beneath the spears, here and there crouching on the black ground, were groups of metal sheds or boxes, held off the ground by cylinders. Each of these sheds was short, too short for normal men to dwell in, but was decorated with huge panels of splendid crystal; this glass was so pure and extensive that Azrael could not calculate the cost; and so clear that the insides of the sheds could be distinguished. Inside these sheds were benches or seats, set too close together to sit in, and all facing the same direction, as if they had been stacked together. Many of the seats had litter flung across them.
Beyond this yard rose a thin strip of trees, beyond which was a river of moving lights, shining and flashing like falling stars. A continuous roar and murmur came from this river, like the voices of many beasts, growling.
Beyond this river and afar rose up tall towers hung with pure, unwinking lights, towers so tall that Azrael de Gray first mistook them for cliffsides. These places were taller than the towers of Nineveh, or of great Babylon. And when, beneath his jacket, half-turned away from the others, he made the sign of Koth above his heart, there came no answering signal or presence; and by this he knew those towers had been built not by gods or by immortal elves but by men. And he smiled coldly to himself when that knowledge came to him.
Without the doors of the healing house were three figures; a young titan in a black beard, not yet grown beyond human height, garbed in white like a priest; a girl of the fairy race; and a cripple in a cunning cart shaped like a chair. The purpose of this cart was obvious; it would carry the cripple about in it with its wheels. Azrael admired the handiwork.
Azrael recognized the bearded one in white must be from the Caucasus Mountains, where the handsomest of mortal men dwell. The sign of fire on his brow indicated he had once been in the presence of one of the eternal and ancient powers of the world, some power older than a god. Since the only such power from the Caucasus mountains was Prometheus, the creator of mankind, Azrael guessed that this young titan, still so young and still so short that his height could pass unnoticed among humans, had been sent as an agent to stop the plans of Azrael.
A night-fly buzzed in the air above the titan, making the triple sign widdershins; a clear signal that this was a hunter who dwelt in the depth of the great forests and knew the lore of tracking and pursuit.
Azrael had expected hunters, but not to come upon him so suddenly. But then he saw the paleness of the bearded titan’s right hand, and knew he had touched the sword of Koschei the Deathless. It was a signal of weakness, of a curse. Because of this, Azrael was almost ready to dismiss the bearded titan as a threat. Almost.
When the fairy-girl jumped in the air to hug the titan (evidently they were husband and wife), Azrael watched her feet carefully, trying to see how quickly or slowly her shadow leapt back toward her feet when she dropped to the ground again. The shadows of her feet seemed to reach out reluctantly to grab her feet when she touched ground again. It was a sign; she knew the secret of flight.
Strangely, the little dandelions growing in a small strip of grass near the door did not react when the fairy-girl stepped on them. Azrael was puzzled. Perhaps the fairy blood in her was impure?
Certain prognosticative signs had led him to know that he would be led to the House of Everness by one waiting for him here. Which of the three was destined to take him to the House?
As he stood there, Azrael clenched shut his eyes till he saw the light of Muspel, colorless and metallic, floating in the darkness. Then, blinking rapidly, he looked at each of the three figures in turn, to see what shadows they might cast in that light.
Looking them from face to face, Azrael recognized himself in the slant of the eyes and shape of the chin of the cripple; this man was of the blood of Waylock. By looking at the colors of the afterimage hovering in his eye when he blinked, and seeing the fans of powers radiating out from the man in each direction, Azrael discovered that this was not just any Waylock, but was the Guardian of Everness himself.
And yet, how could this wounded man be the heir to the Silver Key? He looked too young to be the grandfather of whom Galen had spoken. Furthermore, in Azrael’s imagination, he saw a picture of the man with blood on his hands, and a crowd of black shadows, bleeding from mortal wounds, hovering thick behind him, weeping for vengeance. By this he knew the man to be a warrior in service to bloodthirsty Ares.
Oddly, however, when he stared at the man, he did not feel a cold sensation, nor did his nape hairs prickle, which meant the man was not surrounded by any of the wards or protective spirits that the Guardians of Everness, by right, can call up from the Waters. There were some dust motes floating in the air behind the man; from the way they stirred and danced, Azrael knew the man had cold iron beneath his jacket a weapon of great power that the man regarded as a talisman, but a mortal weapon only, one possessed of no spiritual strength.
Contempt surged in Azrael’s brain. Since this man had been invested with the guardianship, that meant the grandfather must have fallen into depths beyond the reach of sunlight. But this man was an apostate, ignorant of the High Arts, wandering the earth helpless as a babe, without even a silver knife to ward off night-hags or salt to banish imps, much less having any of the mightier talismans or creatures, his by right, that were able to drive back the more ancient champions of Darkness.
The sensation of hot anger surprised Azrael; he had not realized how proud he was of his great family, and of their eternal patience and faithfulness, of their power, and of their ancient tradition, till he saw this, one of his remote sons, an ignorant and unlettered traitor to that heritage. It surprised Azrael that such realizations still had such power to wound him.
The fairy-girl spoke to him and told everyone that he was not Galen Waylock. Being mortals, however, they ignored what the fairy said even though it had been spoken plain and clear in front of them. Azrael did not answer her (it is bad luck to challenge fairies) but waited until the cripple employed his dull ignorance to dismiss her.
After a farewell, the two of them were moving away together across the yard, with Azrael walking beside the cart-chair. Azrael regarded this beginning of his return to Everness with grim pleasure. But he noted how, behind him, the bearded titan was regarding him with a curious stare.
VII
Peter Waylock was growing more worried about his son—more worried, more angry, more bewildered. When they had first gotten into Peter’s special handicapped-drivable van, Galen had been very slow and disoriented, asking whether there was some table to which these chairs were to be brought and then forgetting how to put on his safety belt when Peter reminded him to do it. When the engine started, Galen had flinched and snarled, grabbing at his left hip with his right hand, and then, when they pulled out into traffic, Galen sat stony faced, almost as if he were trying to control some unreasoning panic.
But then he seemed to relax and take an almost childish glee in the van ride, fumbling the window down and hanging his head out, awestruck and smiling, as if the conservative forty-five or fifty-five miles per hour Peter drove was a speed thrill like a roller-coaster ride. Once Galen made a comment on the “neat and steady hand” that had lettered the roadsigns.
At first Peter thought Galen was gazing at the passing street lamps and stoplights, but then a chilling thought struck him, and some of his impatience and anger drained away.
“I guess you haven’t seen what the world looks like since the season changed. Leaves still on the trees since you went to sleep,” said Peter. Something about it struck Peter as sad, almost horrifying. Gruffly he wiped his eyes, muttering a swearword to himself.
Galen pulled his head back in through the window, his expression blank, and looked carefully at Peter. “Plain to view, it is, I deem, that the world is much changed since last I walked awake on it. Any oddities of mine I trust you will excuse, my father.”
But Peter was brooding on some thought of his own, and did not answer.
They drove for a very long time in silence. Galen occasionally drew in his breath, as if startled or surprised, and Peter glanced up from his driving to see Galen staring at a billboard advertising bikinis or at the lights of a passing plane. But soon they were in the countryside, the road was bordered by nothing but trees, and Galen seemed calmer.
Eventually Peter said, “I’d be glad to. Excuse your odd things, I mean. You even talk different now. You picked that up from your Grampa, I know. He and I never got along. But I want you to know . . . well, all that stuff during the divorce, and stuff. . . damn it, boy, what I’m trying to say, is that, well, when you were laying there in bed, helpless as a baby . . .”
A remote, sorrowful look came into Galen’s eyes.
Peter resumed talking. “It reminded me of when you were just a baby. And, you know, you would spit up on me or poop in your pants, and just do things that babies do ‘cause they’re babies. And they didn’t get to me. Didn’t get on my nerves. Then, when you grew up, and I wasn’t around so much, you went off to live with your Grampa. And that got on my nerves. But I forgot, see? I forgot that, even when your babies grow up, it doesn’t matter what they do, you can’t stop,. . . well, you can’t stop caring about them. You understand?”
“I am not certain I do,” said Galen coldly. “Surely Grand Pa” (he pronounced it carefully, as if it were two words) “knew well the traditions and lore of our great house, and could thus well instruct me, since, as you say, you were gone away at the wars.” He watched Peter carefully for his reaction when he said this.
Beneath his watchfulness, Peter thought he could detect a hidden anger in his son; contempt and injured pride. “That’s what I’m trying to say, son. You did some things I didn’t like when you left me to live with Grampa and his money. But I realized I was wrong. There, I said it. Sorry; I was wrong.”
Galen nodded sternly, and his expression seemed to soften. “It is well you are contrite. I know you reject the deep traditions of our House, and have forgotten the oath of patience and faithfulness, which we, true watchmen at our posts, must obey. But the tradition of Everness sounds a call to which all of our blood return, soon or late. . .” Now Galen sank into a reverie; and for a moment, a look of guiltiness and remorse seemed to soften the stern expression of his features.
For a moment they sat in the van together, not looking at each other, their expressions identical, their heads tilted forward at the same angles, the troubled looks in their eyes seeming the same.
“I figure,” said Peter, “that I didn’t get mad when you spit up on me. So I shouldn’t get mad at things smaller than that. I’m trying to tell you that I realized that I still love my son. I still love you.”
A haunted, guilty look grew in Galen’s eyes. His lips trembled, and he spoke. “I, too, have a confession. It is a terrible one. But not until I saw the face of one of my own family again did I realize the true depth of what I have done. I had not realized the true meaning of what it means to be a traitor to our house. But we face terrible foes, and there is none I can trust with my councils. Your son is not dead. I am not your son.”
Peter stiffened. “Here I am trying to apologize and you go say a thing like that! Your Grampa said something just like that to my face once. You’re no son of mine, he said. But he didn’t call me a traitor! Traitor to what?! A bunch of stupid craziness and phoniness!”
Galen’s tone was lofty, sharp, and cold: “Indeed? Perhaps I misunderstood the thrust of your apology.”
“I not saying I’m sorry I left all that nuttiness behind me. I’m not saying it’s not nuttiness. I know you really believe that stuff.”
“Indeed I do,” Galen said softly, a hint of a smile at his lips.
“All I’m saying is that I’m sorry I got on you about it. See? That it’s okay by me if you want to live your life waiting for King Arthur to come back, staying up nights with your Gramps listening for sea-bells to warn you about the destruction of the world. Go ahead and wait.” Peter drew a deep breath, and visibly calmed himself. He continued in a low voice, “All I’m saying is that I can put up with it now. It won’t change how I feel about you.”
Galen said sardonically, “So you do not trouble to serve the honor of our family, but you will no more curse your own son for obeying laws you cast aside? You will forgive him for his faithfulness and constancy? Thank you for your toleration!” He gave a bark of sarcastic laughter and fell silent.
Such anger seized on Peter, then, that he grew red in the face, and he could feel his heartbeat throbbing in his cheeks and temples. But he controlled himself, and he spoke in a quiet voice: “I thought in the hospital that I might lose you. I don’t want to lose you. I want things to be right between us. You got to stick by your family.”
Galen was silent, withdrawn. Then Galen laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “You are right that loyalty to family is all we have, alone in a wilderness of enemies and false friends. We are of one blood, you and I, and that is a bond not to be broken. We may offend each other again. In days to come, you may hate me. But even if we must fight, let us hope that the love of father and son will survive the turmoil.” Peter patted the hand on his shoulder, a warmth in his heart.
“Okay, son. But let’s not fight.”
“Let us be in a holiday mood, you and I! We return to our ancestral seat. It is one place, I know, which would not have changed since I slept.”
“Boy, your Grampa really messed up the way you talk. You got it from those books of his.”
“How long till we arrive at Everness House?”
“We’re not going there.”
Galen seemed to relax, his expression quiet, his eyes glittering with a dangerous thoughtfulness. “No? And yet we grow ever closer to the House’s center of power.”
“Well, son, I sort of thought you and I would stay at Emily’s house. It used to be mine. She’s never there; she lives at Wilbur’s now. They said I could stay there while I was visiting you. Like it was a big favor to let a man stay in his own house.” He snorted in contempt.
Galen said in a careful voice. “Surely my Grand Pa wishes also to see me again. To reassure himself of my good health.”
“We won’t be that far away,” said Peter. “Maybe you’ll see him.” He spoke in a tone of voice that made it clear Peter would do everything in his power to prevent that from happening.
Galen laid his hand on the dashboard, as if feeling the powerful vibrations of the van in motion, as if listening to the muttered roar of the engine like the noises of an alien and incomprehensible beast, and he looked at the complex, swift motions by which Peter was guiding the huge vehicle. There was a solemn look in his eye, a strangeness, as if the lights and dials of the dashboard were illegible to him, a mystery beyond his powers.
Galen sighed and sank back into his seat. “Ah, well. Perhaps you can teach me how to speak more like mine old self before I visit Grand Father.”
But Peter was not listening. He was staring at the rearview mirror. “Someone’s following us. That car’s been with us for more than an hour.”
8
The Strange
and
Ancient House
Unchanging
I
Raven sat in the passenger’s seat, watching the reflections of the streetlights on the car hood flow by, one after another. Wendy was telling him all about Galen Waylock’s adventures in a dream-city at the edge of the world. Raven could not follow the logic of the story, and did not try. He was tired (he had gotten up, as was his wont, at dawn, and he let the words roll over him like a warm and pleasant sea-wave one cannot swim against.
Every now and again, he found himself nodding off, and in his half- dreams, inspired by Wendy’s words, strange images floated behind his eyes.
He saw a line of warriors in conical helms and garbed in silver scale- mail, armed with spears of starlight, standing watch on the battlements of a vast, dark wall overlooking the turbulent sea. Far below these knights, in the bitter waves of the sea, were black seal-creatures with luminous eyes, silently floating below the waves, waiting, watching. Far down, below the seal-men, was an abyss; and, in the abyss, the outline of seven towers made of black diamond, crusted with barnacles, adrip with seaweed. And in the topmost tower was a light, bright as the morning star, rising from the deep.
As Raven nodded, he saw again the knights stationed on the wall, but they were fewer now. There were a score of knights; a dozen; a few. Then there were only two; a young boy and an old man, alone upon the titanic wall, the last defenders left.
And the tide was rising. With every wave, the creatures in the sea grew closer.
Raven imagined what it would look like if the seal-men began to climb the slippery rock to the battlement, chortling to each other with throaty coughs and barks of laughter. Some of them were dressed in water-soaked rags of dead sailor’s clothing; some had masks made of flayed human skin, carefully cut from the faces of corpses, worn across their whiskered muzzles.
When Wendy was describing the horrible huge hand that had come to seize Galen and drag him away, Raven, half-asleep, saw images of a giant figure, robed in wings of darkness, hooded, immense, striding hugely across the nighted world, stepping over trees and cottages, carrying in one hand a reaping hook of black iron and, in the other, a cage which held a flickering shimmer of fading light. Beneath the hood there was nothing, and from this nothing came, every now and then, a glint of feeble rays of light, like moonlight seen through smog. And where this gray and feeble light touched, trees withered, grass faded, and the small scurrying animals by the roadside fell and did not rise again.
The hooded, giant figure stepped over the wall, dislodging stones, and waded the ocean, leaving a wake of floating fish where the shadow of its cloak fell. When it reached the edge of the world, it strode up the steps of a giant ziggurat which perched on the cliffside and made a gesture toward its feet.
There was another figure, dressed in armor made of dead men’s bones, standing by the giant’s ankles, who called out across the darkness in a thin, cold voice: “Sulva, where fell sprites abide! Heave up your icy horns to me, your sterile plains, your lifeless sea, that I may journey to your hidden, farther side! I know the cause of your inconstancy, and why your light ebbs and fails; I know a planetary angel where sin prevails. Last to fall, lowest sphere of all, put shame aside; unhide yourself to me.”
As Koschei said these words, the globe of the Moon rose up, huge, lifeless, like a skull in the sky, many times more enormous than Raven had ever seen it before; so close to the Earth that the giant, with a vast, slow sweep of its cloak-billowing arm, was able to throw the caged light it held onto the barren lunar surface.
Immediately, a horde of obese, blind lepers, with tears of pus running down their flabby cheeks from empty eye sockets, waddled out from craters and pits to seize the cage, which they chained to a cart and began dragging across the mountains and craters to the moon’s far side. One of the blind, grotesquely fat men raised a scabby, heavy arm and pointed down at Raven, hooting with alarmed, choked noises.
Koschei turned and looked at Raven. “There is a dreamer here, from Earth. I think he has heard every word of what we are saying.”
Raven started awake. The car was speeding down a lonely stretch of highway, east, toward the full moon, just then rising between the trees bordering the road.
Wendy spoke in an exasperated yet (somehow) cheerful voice: “Raven! Are you dreaming? You haven’t heard a word of what I’ve been saying!”
II
“No, no,” said Raven, rubbing his eyes. “I hear everything. You think Azrael in cage learn from seal-people how to change skins; that he also learn how to take soul out of body. He cannot get out of cage, but can slip soul out between bars; Galen takes to. . . what is called bony beach? Nastrond? Nastrond. And selkie is putting Azrael soul in Galen body to wake up, yes?” Raven yawned again.
“Exactly right!” Wendy smiled at her husband.
For a moment they looked each other in the eyes, smiling with love. To Raven, her happy looks were a treasure he had thought never to see again. Then he remembered it was a stolen treasure, bought by murder.
Raven shouted: “Look at road, not at me!” Then, after the car was straightened and traveling in its proper lane again: “Where is van we are following?” He wondered why he had let a woman drive who just this evening had been released from a sick ward in the hospital.
“He must’ve seen us! He sped up and turned off and we lost them,” Wendy shook her head so that her black curls flew violently. “It’s a disaster! If Azrael gets to Everness first, anything could happen! I can’t believe you slept through my very first car chase ever in my life! It was just like in the movies! He did a U-turn and was going the wrong way down the road, and everything! His tires squealed, and smoke came out the back, and I had to floor it to keep up! It was great!”
“Did that really happen?” asked Raven in wonder. He could not imagine the calm, burly man he met at the hospital doing such dangerous maneuvers.
“Of course not. He just turned off the exit before I could stop. By the time I got turned around again, he was gone. But I like my version better. That’s the way I think I’ll say it in my diary. Or do you think diaries should be totally honest? Anyway, it surprised me because the road to Route AA doesn’t turn off yet for fifteen miles. He’s not going the right way.”
Raven squinted, rubbing his eyes and forehead. ‘And how is it you know right way and he does not?”
“Silly! Galen told me when he was a ghost!”
“And now we are driving to. . .?”
“To Everness House. It may be locked up, but maybe you can break in. We have to find the Silver Key before Azrael gets it, because I bet he’s trying to open the gates to the dream-world and let the black hordes of Acheron come to Earth and conquer it! Don’t make a mess when we’re searching, though. It’s not our house.”
“Hm. Yes. Of course. You know I must be back at my post day after tomorrow. I am standing evening shift, Sunday evening, Monday morning early. Must count logs logging company bringing off north slope preserve.”
“That gives us the whole weekend! I’m sure we can save the world from conquest by an empire of fallen angels from beyond the edge of space and time long before that.”
“Ah.”
She looked at him sidelong. “And what is that Ah’ supposed to mean?”
“Is just, Ah,’ you know. Ordinary, Ah.’ “
“That’s no ordinary Ah.’ I know your Ah,’ Raven son of Raven! That was a nasty Ah.’ “
“Was not a nasty Ah.’ “
“It was! It was the nastiest Ah’ I ever heard. How could you!”
“How could I what?”
Wendy said, “Don’t you believe me?”
Raven opened his mouth to answer and paused.
III
Did he believe his wife? She was crazy, he knew, but the question had never really come up before. It didn’t matter whether she thought she had a father who could do everything or a mother of supreme beauty; it didn’t matter whether she thought she had flown once when she was sick as a child. Whether or not those things were true did not call upon Raven to take any action.
And even now, whether or not Wendy had talked with a ghost did not call for Raven to do anything irrevocable. Perhaps they could poke around this house (if Wendy actually found it), and no great harm would be done. Even if they got involved in some lengthy adventure, Raven had a government job, and he probably could not get fired even if he missed several days of work. He was a Georgian national, and he was sure that was a minority in America, and he knew the district manager had said their region was low on their minority quota.
So it did not matter, really, if Raven believed or not, did it?
But then again . . .
It occurred to Raven that if he did not believe his wife, then none of this actually happened. It was a dream, a delusion. Galen Waylock was safely going home with his father; Wendy had experienced a miraculous spontaneous recovery. No more than that.
It would be so very easy. All he need do is forget the looming figure in skeletal armor and then forget putting the pale white murder weapon into the thin gray hand . . .
Raven shook his head ruefully. A sensation of contempt crawled through him for a moment, then passed. “Of course I believe you, my wife. I know there are unnatural things in the world, things men do not know. Me, I am seeing things that no one can explain. My father brought me out of Russia in a way no one can explain. I could not forget that there is magic in this world any more than I could forget my own name! And so I know we must go to Everness.”
“Okay! But I wonder where Azrael is going?”
Now Raven laughed. It was clear to him. ‘Azrael cannot drive van, no? And you did not talk to Peter, his father. I talk to Peter. Ha! Peter, he will not take his son back to Everness no matter what. Must be going to motel, or maybe to Peter’s house. He doesn’t live at Everness; does not like the place.”
“He’s lost his faith, I bet.”
Raven shrugged. “I think sometimes it is very easy to talk yourself out of believing in things. Easier that way. Do not be so hard on him if you have not been tempted, you know?”
Wendy laughed. “People made fun of me, too. It would have been a lot easier to pretend nothing unusual ever happened. And I bet it would have been a lot easier on Jesus if he had pretended he couldn’t turn water into wine, or heal the sick. Easier isn’t always best.”
Raven stroked his beard. He should have known better than to expect Wendy to feel any pity or sympathy for someone who betrayed his convictions or who gave into peer pressure. No pity at all.
Wendy squinted. “Maybe a week.”
“Maybe a week what?”
“Maybe a week before Azrael figures out a way to get to the House. He might see someone on TV call a cab, or get an idea how to do it from that. Or get a neighbor to drive him.”
But Raven was nodding off again. As his chin sank down to his breastbone, he heard a woman’s crystalline and lovely voice say, “You have been shown these things for a purpose. Uhnuman is where Galen’s life has been taken. Even now, the Eech-Uisge have arrived at the frozen plateau above the plains of Luuk,. . .”
Raven jerked his head up. “What?”The car had stopped. They were on a small back road, and the moon shown down on tall gateposts of dark brick. Beyond the open gates, a dirt path reached between double rows of trees sleeping beneath the moonlight. In the distance, Raven could hear the sea.
Wendy said, “We’ve arrived where Galen lives. Look!”
IV
The place was not what Raven expected. It was a small, one-story, boxlike cabin, with an attached garage with aluminum siding. The square little cabin squatted in a dip of land, surrounded by tall trees, as if deliberately placed here to be hidden from any view. Raven heard the pounding of waves and smelled the scent of an herb garden, heard the rustling of autumn leaves in the ocean breeze. But neither the sea cliffs nor the gardens could be seen from this vantage.
Nor was this little cabin visible from the tree-lined drive; only Raven’s sharp eye had caught the tire tracks in the grass leading to this secluded spot. The tree-lined drive continued toward the sea; and Raven and Wendy had not yet discovered what lay further along the way.
Raven straightened up from the grass before the threshold. It was hard to tell in the dark, even with the flashlight from the glove compartment of the car, but he said, “No one has been here for months. Look; new shoots came up in summer where dirt path was; is now fall; no bent stems.”
Wendy said, “Oh, well!” and danced on past him to the door, put her hand on the knob, turned, pushed. She called out, “Hello! Hello! Anybody home?”
“Wait. . .,” said Raven.
The door swung silently open.
Wendy paused in the darkened doorway, looking back over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised, a dimple twinkling at the edge of her half-smile. “Well?” she said in a husky whisper. “What now, big boy?”
Raven knew it was futile to argue with Wendy when she was wearing her favorite supercilious expression. Nonetheless, he said, “Is not right to go into another man’s house when nobody is home.”
“It wasn’t locked.”
“Many people in county, far from city, are not needing to lock their doors at night.”
“Galen wouldn’t mind!”
“He is ghost.”
“Well, Raven!” and now she stamped her foot, and tossed her hair. “Sometimes you are just so silly! Here we are worrying about breaking the law when the world might get invaded by the forces of the Empire of Darkness, Death, and Doom! And what’s the worst that can happen if we break in, is we might get shot or thrown in jail. Good grief! Sometimes I think you have no sense of proportion!”
And she skipped on inside, flipping on lights and calling out cheerful hellos.
V
The lights in the house were on a circuit that was cut if any of the heavy blackout shutters were open. Wendy was amused by this and spent some moments yanking the shutters open and closed to make the lights flicker. “Just like the little lights in a refrigerator!” she said.
The modern kitchen was separated by a countertop from the main room, which held several bookshelves, a large and expensive stereo set, and a folding couch. Blinking against the flickering light, Raven stepped out from a sliding door between two bookshelves. “Is gymnasium here. Full of old- fashioned weapons, spears, and swords. Also, practice saddle on a stand, and lances for jousting. But no horse.”
Wendy, meanwhile, had left the shutters to find a little closet with a concrete floor, holding a washer and dryer. A door beyond this led to the garage, which was empty. A second door from the kitchen led to a bathroom with very extensive medical supplies that filled up three glass cabinets.
“Only three rooms,” said Raven, picking up the alarm clock from the nightstand next to the couch. “Kitchen, gymnasium, library. Couch in library unfold into bed for sleeping. What does it mean?”
Wendy said, “Two people could never live here. It means this isn’t the main house. Let’s go.”
“A moment. There is one door beyond gymnasium I have not checked.”
Beyond that door was a white room in which was some sort of water tank into which ran tubes and insulated wires. The wires were attached to medical recording instruments beside the tank. The shelves in this room were stacked with computer paper records of pulse, respiration, and EEG patterns.
“Wendy, I am thinking this is very strange,” said Raven. Wendy, meanwhile, was spinning circles in the darkened gymnasium.
“Just like my ballet class! Look, there are mirrors and bars and everything. Hm. I didn’t know fencers used shields. And this room is so clean and big! I bet he uses it as a meditation chamber. It feels the same as the Zen monastery I used to visit. This is a nice hardwood floor. Don’t you think it would make a good dance floor?”
Raven had opened the water tank and was looking inside at a pallet made of floating cushions. The tank smelled of salt water. Wendy came to the door, wearing a wire-mesh fencing mask and carrying a morning star flail.
“Ready to go?” she chirped.
“Wendy, this is most strange. It is, what do you call? I do not know the words in English. KGB use to break prisoners, make them lose track of time and lose sense of reality.”
“Sensory deprivation tank,” said Wendy. “I don’t think it’s so strange. This room is for him to learn how to dream; that room is to learn how to fight. It’s what you expect for someone whose life is spent fighting in the dream-realm, isn’t it? But if you want to see something really strange, I bet we should go to the main house!”
VI
They saw the High House of Everness as it should be seen, by night, with traces of mist hovering, mysterious, luminescent, in the foreground.
The ground mists below and dark clouds above were tinged silver by the moon. The house was surrounded on both sides by the whispering massive shadows of the evergreens; there was a hint of fragrance in the air, a scent of herbs from a walled garden. The silence of the dark mansion was emphasized by the muffled, murmuring pounding of the sea.
They parked, for two tall pillars, a black and a white, stood at the termination of the drive, too close-spaced to permit the car to enter. Wendy and Raven passed between the black and white pillars, and Wendy sighed and said, “Isn’t it wonderful? I feel like I’ve fallen asleep. Or fallen into a story! Can people go from being awake to being in a dream without going through sleep first?”
Above them, a steep slate roof the color of gray iron rose up above frowning, doorless walls to a high peak. Above and beyond the roof rose a central tower of massive blocks, solid, and very ancient. Trellises of ivy, clinging rose, and grape vines clung to the sides of the tower, softening its outline into scented shadows. Gargoyles and gnomish faces peered down through leafy masses from the tower’s crown. At the highest point of the dome, a statue of a winged horse reared up in the starlight, pawing the air.
To Raven’s left and right extended the west and south wings of the house, coming toward him across the lawn, so that the gatehouse and twin pillars were embraced in their angle. The west wing, to their left, terminated in what might have been a fortress, with crenellated walls and heavy doors barred with triple bands of iron. The windows here were mere slits for archers.
There was no answer when they beat on those heavy doors, and Wendy, climbing on Raven’s shoulders, could see, through the window slits, collections of armor and spears, with swords on the wall spread like peacocks’ tails. But no people.
To the right, the south wing opened into a huge greenhouse, whose glass roof and many panes shone in the starlight like a pagoda of crystal. Behind the expanses of glass, the shadows of branches and twigs could be glimpsed, like the veins in marble.
They passed around the south wing and saw the herb gardens, arranged in symmetrical beauty beneath the moon, with a line of potted trees set against the crumbling black wall to the east. In some places the wall was shoulder high; in others, it had fallen. Over this wall came the smell and sound of the sea.
“Well!” said Wendy, hands on her rounded hips. “This is more like it! I know a magical house when I see one!”
Raven pulled at tall doors of cut glass at the south. They were locked. “Maybe people get in and out by magic, eh? Doors all locked. Maybe everyone has all gone home. I am thinking we should do the same? This is not a place for ordinary people to be living in.”
Wendy took his hand and smiled. “Well, I don’t think you’re ordinary, no matter what Daddy says. Let’s check around the east wing. Okay?”
Raven nodded glumly.
Walking in silence between the glass walls of the arboretum and the herb garden, they came to a courtyard held in the angle between the south and east wings. Here was a still and quiet fountain surrounded by a ring of small statues. A pair of mighty doors flanked by pillars of tarnished copper overlooked the courtyard.
To the right of these doors, the east wing terminated in what might have been a chapel. The structure had a heavy Celtic cross of stone on a steeple, lichen-stained above roofs of gray slate, and the brown brick walls were cut with narrow arches of stained glass, whose images caught glints of light from the distant moon. But it might not have been a chapel, since its upper story had three wide balconies overlooking the sea wall. Wendy said she saw people standing at the windows of this high balcony; and Raven saw motionless silhouettes with plumed helmets and tall spears looking out east and south.
In the courtyard, Wendy walked lightly over to the silent fountain, her eyes wide and shining with delight. The rim of the fountain was sculpted into twelve statues. Wendy climbed up between a boy carrying a water jug and a centaur drawing a bow.
“Raven, look!” she exclaimed, pointing. The bottom of the pool was plated as if with a smooth silvery mirror. “It’s me!”
Raven, looking over the shoulder of a crouching lion, thought he saw a water-nymph, as pretty as his wife, but hovering upside down, with stars and silver-black clouds below her, tangled with her hair. Up from her hand flew a spinning penny, which, rising up, touched the penny Wendy had dropped. Both pennies disappeared the moment they touched, and the pretty upside- down woman, and her sky below her, quaked with concentric ripples, and vanished into chaos.
9
The Library
of the
Dream-Lords
I
The huge mahogany doors, inset with panels showing two-faced profiles of a double-headed man in Roman armor, were locked.
“Is deserted,” said Raven, looking up at the dark and silent mansion.
“It can’t be! That would be terrible! Without the grandfather we can’t find the magic things!”
“Look at weeds on path; leaves gathered on doorstep. Hinges rusted. I am thinking, no one step here for a long time.”
There were no lights showing in the windows: no noise, no motion.
Wendy, standing on tiptoe, had her face against the stained glass cheek of a saint, as if she were kissing him, with her hands forming little blinders around her eyes. “I see something. A little light bobbing up and down. Maybe it’s an elf!”
Wendy and Raven waited in silence before the locked and darkened doors. They held hands. Raven’s face was grim, but Wendy was smiling, almost hopping with excitement. Raven, seeing his wife’s joy, squeezed her hand, and, when she looked at him, a slow smile began to crack his grimness, and curved up beneath his mustache.
“What are we doing here again?” he asked. “I’ve forgotten.”
She rolled her eyes and sighed breathily. “We have to find the magic to drive back the Dark. Galen didn’t know where they were, the key and the horn and stuff, but the grandfather should know. And as soon as he’s found out what’s gone wrong, we can set everything straight, and save Galen!”
Then they were silent again as they heard movement behind the door. The silence lengthened.
A moment passed.
The door opened very slowly, rusted hinges creaking. “Listen to that!” said Wendy. “Just like in the movies!”
The man who opened the door held a smoking lantern in one hand, and he was blinking, obviously trying to puzzle out the meaning of Wendy’s last comment.
He was an upright, dignified figure, with thick hair turned salt-and- pepper with gray. His eyebrows and mustache were black and angular, giving him a sardonic, devilish look. His goatee was white, streaked with black hairs at the corners of his mouth. He wore a long coat with a half-cape, like something a Civil War officer might wear, and had turned his collar up against the cold. The raised collar gave him a stiff, old-fashioned look, and Raven at first thought he might be a minister.
The man raised the lantern, and with his other hand drew up a pair of half-moon-shaped pince-nez glasses he wore on a chain around his neck. He perched the glasses on his nose and inspected Wendy and Raven carefully before he spoke.
“You have been sent, then?” He had a clipped British accent, a nasal and saturnine tone of voice. The dimness of his eye, the uncertainness of his footing, led Raven to believe the man was very weary.
Wendy nodded vigorously. “We came from the hospital!”
The man looked at Raven’s white coat. “No time to change, then? It’s all very well. I have been standing a long watch; two days now without sleep, and I need some relief. Walk this way. And please do not turn on that flashlight.”
With slow footsteps the man led them through a chamber larger than the lantern could show. Dim glints overhead hinted at the presence of a chandelier. Rounded metallic shadows in the distance implied suits of armor stood against the far wall.
The man led them up a broad stair to the balcony.
“What’s your name? I’m Wendy! Your first name, I mean,” said Wendy. “I can’t call you Grampa.”
They came to a wide hallway that circled to the left and right, as if embracing the central tower. The man turned right and walked.
To their left was blank stone wall; to their right, tall archways guarded by tall statues. Before them was a bearded figure with a trident blowing into a sea-conch. Around the circle, at the next archway, sat a king on a throne of eagles with a crooked scepter like a lightning bolt in his hand. Farther around the circle was a figure shrouded in a heavy robe, its face invisible beneath a heavy black helmet. Beyond him, guarding the archway adjacent the trident-wielder, stood a youth with a harp and a bow. In the lamplight’s moving shadows, the figures’ blank eyes seemed to turn and watch them.
“You may call me Dr. Du Lake. I shan’t tell you my first name, since I can’t abide Camelot jokes.”
Turning into the archway guarded by the trident-bearer, they passed into a corridor decorated with woodcuts of ships and sea-monsters. The roofbeams had seagulls and ospreys cut into them.
“Then, wait! You’re not Galen’s grandfather? Mr. Waylock?” Wendy asked in a surprised, woebegone voice.
“Indeed not.” Dr. Du Lake paused before a tall door at the end of the corridor, flanked with tridents. The capstone at the arch of the door was sculpted into the image of a watching eye. By Raven’s calculation, they were in the east wing overlooking the sea.
Du Lake turned and inspected Wendy. “Who sent you?” he said.
“Galen sent us! Who sent you?”
The doctor said, “I was sent by Her Majesty’s Royal Historical Preservation Trust.”
“Then you don’t know where the magic talismans are hidden that can drive back the agents of the Empire of Night and save the world?”
The doctor blinked, and his glasses fell off his nose, to dangle on their slim chain. “I had not been aware the world was in danger, miss. Aside from the ordinary ones, I mean. Have there been new developments?”
The doctor was looking at them with a bland, quiet smile Raven was sure held mocking suspicion. Stiffly, Raven said, “I am sorry. I do not think it is right for us to be here. I do not know if it is legal. . .”
The doctor nodded. “That may be so, my good man. Unfortunately, there is no one else right now.”
Raven was confused. “What?”
“The HistoricalTrust told me that on no account was Mr. Waylock to be moved from his room, except during the day. The instructions were specific, and in accordance, as I understand it, with Mr. Waylock’s written directions.”
“Wait—” said Raven. “Mr. Waylock did not invite you here?”
“No more than you, it seems,” replied the doctor.
“Then we are all trespassers,” said Raven.
The doctor smiled tiredly. “I would offer to summon the constables for you, my good man, but there is no telephone in this house. But I do need your help if you are friends of Mr. Waylock. I have been watching him for some time now, and I need to be spelled.”
Wendy said, “Of course we’ll help! What do you need us to do?”
“Wait a moment,” Raven rumbled, “I am thinking that maybe, if something is wrong here, someone should do something. Call police. Call hospital.”
Wendy slapped him impatiently on the shoulder. “Oh, get serious! Since when do you trust government people?! What do we need to do, doctor?”
“Among other things, you’ll have to remove your car to beyond line of sight from the house. Those instructions were also explicit. You can park it by one of the outbuildings. If you want to help, you must follow all the instructions with great patience and faithfulness, even if they seem arbitrary. And I do need help. Help looking after my patient.”
“Patient?!” said Wendy in alarm.
The doctor pushed open the door.
II
The room had broad windows facing north, east, and south, with suits of armor held on racks before each window, facing outward, weapons ready. Each of the four walls of the room was decorated in an entirely different style, with ornaments from the Orient against the far wall, Chinese dragons and lacquered furniture framing the samurai armor facing that window. To the left were Viking totems and woodworks, and a horned helmet faced that window; to the right, barbaric ornaments of gold from northern Africa surrounded the plumed, helmeted turban and silk-draped mail guarding that window. (Raven recognized this as the figure they had seen from the courtyard.) The door through which they entered was flanked by racks holding plate mail, surcoated with dragons of Welsh heraldry. The suit of armor to the left was rusted, as if it had been there for a long time; that on the right was polished and dented, as if new and recently put to use.
In the center of the room was a four-poster bed, on which a figure rested that did not move. His bald head shone in the moonlight, and bushy white eyebrows rose up from his wrinkled face like tufts of cloud.
Wendy came forward, silent, solemn. She stared at the sleeping figure, examining his nose and chin.
“It looks like Galen,” she said. She reached out a tentative hand, prodded the sleeping man. She saw that there were tubes and electrodes running to his chest and arms, all hidden beneath the covers so that they could not been seen from the room.
“It’s no use,” said the doctor. “He cannot wake up.”
III
Wendy went skipping down the stairs, the lantern in her hand swinging and bobbing, and the flame was flickering, blazing, and sputtering with the enthusiasm of her descent. Massive shadows jumped and swayed overhead as she passed by, cometlike, and she left an irregular trail of pale translucent smoke lingering in the air behind her. She thought she was in the north wing, taking a short cut.
There was a special class of conversations which Wendy called “backwards-going.” Her husband and the doctor were having a typically backwards-going conversation, which started out with the doctor wanting them to stay and stand watch over the grandfather (so that the doctor could get some sleep), and then the doctor saying he’d like them to leave the next day since they weren’t from the Historical Trust after all, and the doctor didn’t know who they were anyway (this, despite that Wendy had said her name quite loudly and clearly several times).
Meanwhile, her husband started by agreeing to stay, but then wanting to know why this doctor (“And how am I to be knowing you are real doctor here anyway, eh?”) hadn’t taken the grandfather to a hospital, which would have been the responsible thing to do, and ended up by volunteering to leave, for the strange reason that, if the doctor were responsible, he would not entrust his patient into the hands of strangers. (“I am thinking a responsible physician, you know, would not put patient into caring of man he does not know, like me!” “But, my dear fellow, that very comment shows how conscientious you really are.”) But this plan would, of course, leave the grandfather alone, not in the hospital, which turned out to be an irresponsible thing to do after all.
They were just about in the confused middle of the conversation, at a point where they both agreed that, because neither could trust the other, Raven and Wendy should be leaving, when Wendy took the lantern and went out to park her car and unpack a few things for an overnight stay.
She had plenty of time. She knew that it would be another twenty minutes or so before the two men would move backwards through the conversation to the beginning and realize that Raven and Wendy were going to stay the night and watch the grandfather.
Wendy was passing across the expanse of the darkened entry hall, her lamp showing no more than a circle of black-and-white tiled floor, when a glint of light off to her left caught her attention. A faint shimmer, and perhaps, a soft sound. Yes, it was certainly a sound: a few chords of soft music hovered in the air.
“Maybe it’s an elf!” whispered Wendy. Her errand forgotten, she walked very softly across the floor toward the mysterious fluttering glimmer.
IV
Here was an archway, wooden pillars carved into the shape of two trees whose intertwining branches showed solemn owls and smiling dryads among a carven relief of oak and laurel leaves. Beyond the archway was a library, rows and rows of books in high shelves, each shelf inset with panels showing historic scenes. On the wall atop each shelf was a framed portrait of a king or queen of England; and, above them, signs and houses of the zodiac.
Tall windows to the right admitted bright moonlight; one window hung open, and pale drapes fluttered in the breeze, reflecting moonlight across the room. This was the glimmer she had seen. When she moved to the window to close it, she saw that the music came from an arrangement of wind chimes, poles a foot or more in length, held in the hand of a marble statue in the garden: a winged man with puffed cheeks, dressed in furs, with a large bear and small bear, in bronze, behind him.
Wendy closed the window and turned, breathless, expectant, knowing some great wonder was waiting to befall her.
She loved books, storybooks particularly. Here was a shelf whose panels showed a great fleet of ships sinking in a storm, a queen being beheaded, battles. Above the shelf was a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I; atop the shelf was a bust of Shakespeare.
She pulled down a book from this shelf, thinking that the stories in such books must be delightful if the pictures in the carvings were so interesting. The covers were of heavy brown leather, tooled with emblems of winged horses and crossed keys.
Unfortunately, the handwriting on the worn and yellowed pages was in Latin, a language indecipherable to her. However, just behind the book, hidden between this book and the wall, was a little red volume in a modern binding. Peering behind one or two other books, she saw each book on the shelf had a small red volume hidden behind it.
Now she took out a red book, putting the heavy black Latin book on its side, to mark the place on the shelf.
She put her lantern on a table, and turned the small brass nozzle that increased the flow of oil to the wick. There were four small mirrors set around the sides of the table, reflecting the light on the tabletop and making it brighter. Here, after a moment’s delicious pause, she opened the red cover.
As she had hoped, it was a storybook.
V
“I, John Dee, magus and ghostly counselor to her most gracious majesty, Regina Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, having returned this last day of Virgo at the time of the New Moon, a fortnight since the Great Victory over the Spanish Armada won by the tempest summoned up from the Gold Ring and mirror of Sir F. Drake wherein the greatest Armament ever seen in Christendom was utterly whelmed and ruined by the Storm-Prince Fulgratorian to the great and abiding glory of our Queen, when as did I return to Everness House, beneath changing moon abiding, the house of true dreams, at Her Majesty’s request to put down the unlawful sprites who were stirred up by Sir F. Drake’s conjuring, for which Her Majesty, of our coven Queen, did bestow upon me three hairs from the head of Bran, champion of Annuwin, which the crows guard below the Tower of London, which ever shall forefend this realm from invasion and from the foot of enemy keep safe. And these hairs were a great treasure. The first I put into the fire; the second threw into the sea, as is elsewhere writ, the third I put below mine pillow as I slept, with my familiar E. Kelley beside me to calm my fever and recall my soul should I over-reach myself while I slept, for he had the laurel leaf with him.
“The dream I had that night (being when Mercury was in Virgo and in opposition to the Morningstar) was the continuation and sequel of the dream dreamt by the Twenty-Forth Warden of Everness (Quod vide Oneirolibrum Anno 871) which in turn was the sequel of the dream begun by the Seventh Warden (Anno 599) whose account appears in those volumes of this library writ by them.
“Here is set down the conclusion of that dreaming, wherein is found what the true name of the King of Ireland’s Son might be, and how the Giant of the Twin Brands was overthrown, and the Curse unmade and lifted from the Seven Brothers,. . .”
By this time, Wendy was quite absorbed, and snuggled down in her chair to read.
VI
When she finished the story written by John Dee, Wendy, curious, looked up the writings of the Twenty-Forth Warden, Alfwise the Great, and the Seventh Warden, Corbenec of Carabas. These men had dreamt the second part and beginning of the same story. Moreover, the tantalizing glimpses she had of other volumes as she searched for the beginning of the story of the King of Ireland’s Son showed her that all the books in the library, every one, were dream diaries. And not of ordinary dreams, not the boring dreams most people have, of coming to work naked or running down corridors without getting anywhere. No: these were the dreams of great dreamers.
In these dreams were monsters from the dark places of the world, creatures of lonely fens, dim caves, and windy wastelands. The monsters bowed and prayed to a drowned and sunken citadel of imperishable metal that rose among the bitterly cold hills of mud and filth in a crevasse at the bottom of the sea. The master of that citadel had been the greatest of the noble princes in service to the armies of the Light, brightest before he fell, but now he dwelt in greatest darkness and bent the whole of his great spirit, genius, and power onto thoughts of malice and revenge. In the pith of darkness, he brooded on hatred.
But there were champions opposing that great evil. Wendy, turning pages here and there, pulling out books and putting them carefully back in place, glimpsed words and phrases and fragments of great dreams, of the mighty wars, trials, sacrifices, and tragedies of the dream-lords.
She read a paragraph describing a duel with the King of the Wood at Nemi; she read the riddle-game between a knight of Everness and a man- eating Dragon; she read a brief description of the discovery of the Lost Grail in a wasteland of salty desert; another Warden followed the sound of the sea-bell through darkness and sea wave to discover the floating elf-city of Vindyamar.
She read of the tail end of a war where a young squire and an old knight overthrew a seven-headed giant in the land of Ar, and built the Tower of Ar-Mennar into the giant’s empty armor, with bricks made out of limestone ground from the giant’s bones.
She wasn’t sure, but, from the description, Wendy thought that the squire might be Galen. Could the old knight have been Lemuel?
In curiosity, Wendy looked at the first volume on the first bookshelf, the one beneath woodcarvings showing a sword driven through an anvil, a round table, a wizard asleep beneath the roots of an oak tree, mistletoe and ivy in his hair, and a battle at Stonehenge.
The first lines of the first book read: “For the glory of the Lady in the Earth who makes to turn the circles of the Earth, by whose hand the Earth is born each spring and perishes each winter, and for the glory of the Lord in Heaven, whose spear is the thunder which punishes the wicked, I, Bleys of Avalon, here write in the letters of the Romans, the practices of my student Merlin, and especially of the tower which he had three times seen in dreams, whereunder two dragons, a white and a red, did coil and struggle in great fierce combat, so as to make the tower topple in defiance of all attempts to set it aright. For the King has ordered a tower built alike in each particular to that which Merlin has dreamt, wherefore I must write of the dimensions and furniture of the tower of the four moons which my student Merlin has seen. And the Lady of the Lake has prophesied or promised that her particular blessing will be bestowed upon that tower, so long as it is kept in memory, that the tower and grounds around it shall be the same in dreaming and waking. Amen, Amen. Here follows the account of the dream. . . .”
VII
In that story, Wendy came across several references to someone called “The Grantor,” who had given the tower of Everness to the students of Merlin, Donbleys and Alfcynnig, and who charged them to keep eternal watch against the coming invasion. But there it did not say who this grantor was; the author evidently thought this was too obvious to mention.
Though she was now yawning terribly, Wendy found the final book on the shelf, beneath a portrait of Neal Armstrong standing, flag in hand, on the cratered desolation of the moon.
It was a slim volume, locked with a padlock, which Wendy worried with a hairpin till it opened. “I hope no one minds!” she exclaimed. “But people shouldn’t lock things up like that when they know it will just make some folks curious!”
It was the diary of Galen’s grandfather.
She nodded as she read, comfortable in her chair, half-awake and half- asleep, so she was not certain if she were reading about his boyhood, or seeing it, recalling it from his memories, or dreaming it. . .
VIII
Galen’s grandfather was named Lemuel Waylock. He had been born and raised in a time he now thought of as simpler, more polite, more slow and careful, less subject to change, less full of comforts and conveniences, perhaps, but richer in other things. He recalled a time when men walking down the streets tipped their hats to a lady; it was a time of dignity, restraint, hard work, honor, and respect. Nowadays they didn’t even wear hats.
At thirty-two, his inheritance came as an unmitigated surprise. After his father’s funeral, he found himself in an airlessly hot room with his brothers and their wives, plus the older of several nephews, everyone dressed in their sober, churchgoing best; the men with stiff starched collars, the women with flowers in their hats. He remembered it was a sunny and hot July morning, and no one had thought to leave the windows open.
The attorney, who had steamed over from England, had appropriated his father’s study’s desk, which was half-hidden beneath stacks of paper. Some were new, typewritten; others were old, very old indeed, written on parchment and vellum, stamped with wax seals, adrip with faded ribbons, and inscribed with names Lemuel recognized from history books.
One of the papers was father’s last will and testament. The attorney read it in a dry, crisp, unemotional voice, and announced (even years later, Lemuel wondered why) that he, Lemuel, was to receive the allowance and title to the Old House by the sea.
Lemuel, the third of ten brothers, was neither the smartest nor the strongest in his family (Thomas had gone to university abroad; George worked as a foreman on a neighboring farm, and was muscled like a horse); nor was he the most obedient (Abraham never crossed father, never argued); nor even the bravest (young Theodore had saved the lives of all hands aboard the fishing trawler he worked when it was caught in a nor’easter off the coast of Maine).
Furthermore, Lemuel had always supposed the patrimony would go to the youngest in the family, Benjamin, the way it happened in old bible stories.
But the honor was his. His brothers and their families slowly left the stuffy room, the womenfolk retiring to the kitchen to prepare a sumptuous brunch. Lemuel was left alone with the attorney, who carefully explained about fees in entail, conditions and covenants, and limitations on his ownership of the old house.
He could not sell the house except to a family member; nor could he sell, or even change the location within the house of any of the objects or furnishings; none of the plates on the mantelpiece, cups in the museum, or books in the library could be moved, even across the room. Any damage must be restored and rectified to its exact original appearance out of an escrow fund set aside for that purpose. There could be no changes nor additions to the house.
Every night of the year, each night of his life, without exception, some member of the family, or a properly trained replacement, must sleep beneath the roof of the house in a room whose windows overlooked the sea.
The house would pass in fee tail to his survivors, according to the rule of strict primogeniture, without division or dower, if he should die, should be disabled by illness, should attempt to alter or sell the house or its contents, or should become an insomniac.
The lawyer concluded in a uninflected voice: “The grant is revocable at will by the original grantor, or one whom he should appoint, until such time as announced in the original charter and grant, such time being either the end of the established Earth, or the coming again of the King into the world.”
The original charter was inscribed on a plate of gold, which the attorney unlocked from a massive case, and written in parallel scripts in Latin, Old English, French, and Welsh. Lemuel inspected the name carved into the bottom of the document:
ARTHURUS PENDRAGON REX QUONDAM ET REX QUE FUTURUS
IX
But deep in his heart, beneath the layer of surprise, Lemuel had always been certain the old house was destined for him.
One summer day when he was nine, Lemuel and his eldest brother Andrew had trespassed onto a neighbor’s land to climb the tallest pine on the tallest hill in the area. According to schoolyard wisdom, it was the very acme of the tree-climbing art to attempt this tree, for pine branches are needled and close-set; there was, furthermore, the added glamor of the danger of getting caught on old man Teeldrum’s land.
Eventually, covered with sap, clothes permanently stained, the two boys clung to the topmost branches of the pine, pretending a casual lack of fear whenever passing breezes made their perches creak and sway alarmingly.
All the fields and hills they knew by name were there, far beneath their feet, yellow and green in the sunlight; and further, fields they did not know, and the line of a mysterious brown road they were not sure where it led.
For a time, the boys argued geography, trying to decide if the haze on the horizon, was, in fact, the sea. (Schoolyard legend had it that the ocean could indeed be seen from this height.) And then a subtle, inching rivalry began, with each brother attempting to worm a few more dangerous toeholds higher. Young Lemuel, being lighter, dared further out on the bending branch than his more cautious older brother.
To ensure the stability of propriety and to reaffirm the principle that younger brothers can never win victories over older ones, Andrew disdainfully announced he had learned night-magic from father, secrets Lemuel was too young to be entrusted with, which would allow Andrew to go much higher still, should he condescend to use them.
By taunts, Lemuel drew out Andrew’s secret, and, before they had descended, Andrew had taught him the song to summon the dream-colt.
That night, after saying his prayers, Lemuel carefully whispered the song he’d been taught, softly, so as not to wake his brother in the next bed.
Eager, wide-eyed, he lay in darkness, staring at the North Star through his open window. And he flinched with hope each time he heard a night wind scrape a tree branch against the house, for he was certain, with a little boy’s certainty, that this was the sound of hoofbeats on the roof.
Between midnight and dawn, between waking and sleeping, moonlight gathered like frost on the open panes, and, in the light, a fawnlike head reached in through the window and stared at Lemuel with wide, dark, liquid eyes. Her coat gleamed like nighttime snow, yet it was wonderfully warm to the touch when Lemuel reached up shyly to pet her nose. He realized, since his window was on the second story, that she must be standing in midair.
She spoke in a woodwind voice: “So young? So young to have called me down from high Celebradon. In that star-surrounded citadel I stand, forever unsleeping, and watch and guard my master, forever asleep, counting years until the trumpet call shall startle him awake, and he will take up his arms and armor and leap upon my back and cry, ‘Away! For Acheron is rising from the sea! The final battle calls and all the Earth is at hazard!’“ She threw back her head and gave a wild and spirited whinny.
Lemuel was openmouthed.
Now the dream-colt dipped her head and said in a solemn voice: “I may leave my vigil only when the guardians of Everness, in dire need, call out to me. In dire need I go, and not for pleasure, or for pride, or for play. Now you have shamed me, little boy, for I am absent from my post without good cause. What if the Last Horn Call should sound while I am thus away? Shall my master walk afoot to Rangnarok?”
“I hope I didn’t do anything wrong . . .” said Lemuel.
“Patience and Faithfulness; this your people swore, your people as well as mine swore it, bound with mighty oaths to the Neverending City. Where is patience that you dare to call me here before my time? Where is faithfulness? Once a mighty order were the guardians of Everness, many families, not just one, and a kingdom to call for its support. But now, how often does the Wall stand empty, unwatched? Your family knows the ancient words to call down powers from Celebradon, the Tower in the Autumn Stars, but to what use? Your people have forgotten us, or if they recall, do not practice the old forms, or do not believe. There is no faithfulness any more in Everness, I fear.”
By this, Lemuel knew his brother had not ever called down a dream- colt, and he wondered, with sudden disorientation, almost fear, if his father ever had. Wasn’t there anyone who still believed?
“I’m sorry. Really, I am. Wait! Don’t go! Look here; I brought you a present. See? It’s an apple. I snuck it out of the kitchen in my nightshirt.”
She was silent a moment, nostrils twitching. “Most of those who pray for rain do not bring out umbrellas,” she said softly to herself, her voice warm and low. Aloud she said, “And what is that bundle under your pillow?”
“My long coat.”
“It is a summery night.”
“But I thought, you know,” he said, suddenly shy, “it might get cold if we went up high.”
The creature spoke in a voice of great beauty: “For your impatience there should be shame; therefore you must never boast to your brother nor tell your father I have been here. But for your faith, there should be reward. Mount up upon my back! And I will fly you to any land you can name, around the world and back here before the dawn. And yes, I can outpace the dawn, for I am more swift footed than the sun. Draw on your jacket.”
His bare feet were cold on the windowsill as he climbed outside.
Astride the dream-colt, belly tight with joy and trembling, Lemuel leaned forward to hug her tightly about the neck, pressing his cheek into the warm scented mass of her mane.
“I wasn’t impatient,” he whispered. “It’s just you came too soon to let me show you I could wait. I would have waited. For you. I would have waited forever. Honest.”
10
Imprisoned
in
Acheron
I
Wendy pulled her head up sharply. She had been lying with her head on the books on the desk, she did not know for how long, and the lantern had gone out. Something had made her lift her head. A noise?
Then she heard it again. There was a crash of sea wave against the cliffs outside, a ragged, drawn-out boom. And, beneath that, a swifter, sharper crash, a louder boom. Both noises were coming at the same time, and it was hard to distinguish them.
Curious, Wendy climbed out the window. She saw the statue of Boreas and, behind him, the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Bears, shining in the light of a thumbnail moon.
She shimmied up an elm tree to the sea wall. Wendy crept forward, startled by the sudden wind that tugged at her skirts and sent her hair flying like a black banner. High above were bright stars.
This was a section of the wall she had not seen before, large and in good repair, with a wide, crenellated battlement set with embrasures and machicolations for defense, with tall stone towers at either end.
Putting her hands on the stones to either side, Wendy peered between the merlons of the wall. Below she saw the sea, a wilderness of surging waves and foam. Rushing hilltops of black water, fringed with froth of white and green, thundered against the sea cliff.
Below the water was a school of luminescent fish, horrid creatures of bulbous, staring eyes, and teeth like clusters of white knives. With them were jellyfish, shining with an eerie pallor, and glowing giant squids with wise eyes, whose coats were lambent with many colors.
Beneath and between this swarm of fish, and in the glow shed by those cold bodies, two giants held a tree trunk as a ram. At the ebb, they drew back their mighty arms. When the sea waves crashed against the cliff below the wall, they sent the ram’s head lunging in a cloud of spray up at an angle to strike into the stones of the wall, crashing as the waves crashed.
Sporting among their feet was a herd of seals, swimming and diving with gay abandon. Some of the seals floated with their heads above the water and were singing or barking hymns to praise the darkness.
On the seafloor still further below, a cavalcade of drowned knights stood in ranks, spears held at identical angles. Each of their horses was suffering from some different and disfiguring disease, swollen with sores; and the knights were surrounded by floating clouds of blood.
In the air above the sea, surrounded by dark clouds, stood a figure with long and wild hair, dressed in kilt and long coat of coal-black and steel-gray, and his coattails streamed in the wind like the wings of a bat. In his hands was a bagpipe, and from the pipe came streamers of rushing cloud.
Behind him stood a second figure, dressed in Greek armor, armed with a tall spear and a shield as round and burnished as the moon. When this figure clashed his spear against his shield, there came a roll and rumble of thunder through the length and breadth of heaven.
Even in the few moments Wendy watched, storm clouds began to gather, like a flotilla of vast black ships. Here and there among the clouds came ships indeed, sailing without lanterns, rank on rank of billowing sails like clipper ships. And from these ships came calls and song, woven amidst the thunder.
Behind them all, on the horizon, wading the ocean the way a child might wade a shallow pond, came vast, dark figures, with sea waves billowing around their upper legs and waists. It was too far to distinguish any details except that the hooded figure in the center carried a lamp in which were trapped many beautiful small lights, flickering like butterflies of flame.
The battering ram crashed into the stones of the wall, surrounded by flying spray.
The winds were shrieking as if in pain.
Wendy turned and fled, her footsteps uncertain in the sudden wind.
II
Once and twice she fell to her hands and knees as the wall trembled beneath titanic blows. The blocks beneath her groaned; there was a trickle of dust in the air, pulled from cracking masonry by rising storm winds.
She fell or flew down a long flight of stairs to the courtyard. In the deep pool, circled by luminous constellations, images of the sky were shattered by concentric circles that appeared each time the ground jumped. The trees in the garden creaked and tossed huge their green heads back and forth in the winds.
Behind her, a huge block fell with the noise of an earthquake. There was a thunderclap and calls of barking seals, as well as screams of joy from down below, and a triumphant shrill of trumpets.
The doors nearest her were locked. But she suddenly found herself on the sill of a high window, without remembering whether she had jumped or climbed or floated up to it with a single step.
The window was unlocked. In she went.
Inside, the corridor was dark and silent.
III
In the moment it took for Wendy’s eyes to adjust to the gloom, she leaned with her back to the window jamb, palms on the wall to either side of her, breathing softly.
“Have I remembered how to fly?” she asked. “After all this time? Maybe I just climbed up and only think I remembered how to fly. On the other hand, maybe I just flew and only think I climbed up.” Then she said, “Maybe this house is magic after all. Why can’t I hear the noises anymore?”
It was true. The earthshaking battering, the scream of the wind, were not to be heard. Wendy looked around her and began walking down the strange corridor, lightly brushing her fingers against the wall hangings and door jambs she passed.
Each door had a number of white crows carven into its lintels, as if a murder of crows had decided to roost along the upper doorways. Some doors had more, and others had fewer crows. The tapestries showed scenes that could only be glimpsed in the gloom, and then only if they were opposite a window lit with the light from the gibbous moon: a little girl playing in a garden, two little boys running, a funeral, a quartet of women toasting with raised cups, a juggler spinning coins in the air.
Wendy tried to find her way back to the grandfather’s bedroom where her husband was. A while later, having tried several doors and wandered down several other corridors, all decorated oddly, Wendy found herself in a countinghouse, where the dim moonlight showed framed dollar bills above chests of coins. There was a small door hidden behind a closet leading to a short curved set of stairs, which led her back up to the corridor decorated with ravens, just opposite a tapestry of a dragon curled around a heap of treasure, its scorpionlike tail touching its smoldering nostrils. The door jamb next to it held six ravens.
“Ah! I understand now,”Wendy said to herself. “This is a memory mansion. It’s all mnemonics. These things are all put here to be kept in memory, just like the book said the Lady of the Lake would keep them in. No wonder they’re not allowed to move them at all. This corridor is a nursery rhyme. Let’s see . . .
One crow brings a girl,
Two bring a boy,
Three bring sorrow,
Four bring joy,
Five bring silver,
Six bring gold,
Seven bring a secret,
Never to be told. . . .
Wendy paused, looking back and forth at the tapestries. She found the one next to the door jamb holding three ravens at the end of the corridor, which showed a funeral. Through this door, down a short, curved passage, she found the central circular corridor. She came out next to the statue of the helmeted figure who held a pomegranate.
“I thought so!” she said. “There are four wings of the house. Earth, water, air, fire. South, east, north, west. Each with its own Greek god. Hades, the god of funerals, stands for earth, I guess. Is Apollo supposed to be fire?”
When she had been here before, with a lantern, the statues had been visible in the distance. Now they were not. The moonlight was coming in at strange angles through little windows set high in the walls, illuminating the frescoes on the ceiling, which showed patterns of birds in flight.
Wendy looked up. “I’ve got the hang of this now!” Above Hades’ statue, a flock of crows was shown, with only a few birds otherwise, a falcon, an eagle, a seagull. Wendy followed the line of seagulls till she came upon a flock of them. When she drew her eyes down, there was the statue of Poseidon blowing on a conch.
Through a small window above the sea-god, she saw a full moon; which she thought was strange, for she clearly remembered seeing the moon as three-quarters when she had been in the south wing, in the crow corridor, and she thought she recalled it had been a crescent when she looked out the library windows.
She passed by the statue. The corridor beyond, for some reason, seemed confused and full of shadows, and Wendy could not find the large doors to the end. Then she noticed the ships that appeared in the decorations, in paintings or as little models mounted on pedestals. A dingy had one sail; a sloop had two; a yawl had three; a schooner had four.
She found a picture of a Yankee Clipper between two pictures, one of the Dawn Treader, the other of the Nagfar. Turning, she saw the large doors, flanked by tridents, beneath the image of an open eye.
There was a crack of white, harsh light beneath the door. Something was strange about the light, and it made Wendy dizzy to look too closely at it. She knocked.
“Raven! Are you there? All the bad guys are coming over the wall! Selkie and giants and everything!”
Raven’s voice came back: “Hush! Hush! Be quiet!”
She heard a chair scrape and then the sound of Raven’s light footsteps across the floor (Wendy was proud of how quietly her husband could walk when he wanted to).
When the door opened, a strange, harsh light flooded out, and it picked Wendy up and flung her down the corridor.
Then she woke up.
IV
Wendy pulled her head off the pile of books where she had fallen asleep and blinked at the darkened library in surprise. Rushing to the window, she saw the little seawall beyond a line of trees. It was a brick wall, in places only shoulder high, or less. This little wall was neither wide nor sturdy, and, even as Wendy watched, the winds from the gathering storm toppled one or two loose bricks from a crumbling section. A few flakes of weathered stone fell silently to the grass.
There was a rumble of thunder. In the distance she heard a barking dog, yapping with joy, and a shrill noise, perhaps from a seagull disturbed in sleep, which only vaguely resembled a trumpet.
V
When she stood up, she saw a little light, dim but clear, like the light of a fallen star, burning in the shadows between two bookshelves. Stepping forward, she saw that there was an archway here, opening up widely into a chamber she had not seen before.
Here, tall pillars, like trunks of trees, held up a shadowy roof. Tall, narrow windows admitted starlight. One casement was open, and misty wind flapped into the room.
Overhead glinted the designs of crescent moons and many-pointed stars inscribed in silver. On the far side of the huge chamber, dimly, she saw what looked like two armored statues flanking a four-poster bed, on which, perhaps, a dark figure had been laid out.
The strange light was coming from the foot of the bed, a dot of argent rays surrounded by a dim halo. Was there a tiny figure there, crouched like a cat on the footboard?
“Maybe it’s an elf!” whispered Wendy, and tiptoed forward.
VI
Raven had taken a dagger from one of the armored figures guarding the windows, and, after making sure it was blunt, but not too blunt, he had cinched it to his chest with his belt, so that whenever he started to nod off, a sudden prick would startle him awake.
So Raven had sat in the gloom for many hours, red-eyed, face slack, posture painfully upright, watching Lemuel Waylock sleeping. Every now and again, he pulled back the covers to examine by lamplight the machines that monitored pulse, respiration, and blood pressure. And, as the doctor had repeatedly instructed, he never used his flashlight, and he always covered up the machines afterward.
However, the doctor had failed to instruct Raven where to find more lamp oil to refill the guttering lantern. Raven kept a mere spark burning, turning the lamp brighter only during his periodic checks of the sleeper.
The doctor had been vastly irked to find that Raven was not a physician after all, in what Raven had thought was an unjustified overreaction. Raven wondered what he was doing in a stranger’s house, watching a sick man sleep, instead of being home, in bed with his own wife. Where had she gotten to, anyway?
He told himself that this watch was neither as long nor as dangerous as watches he had stood aboard ship. But he wished he had some tatwork or macramé to keep his hands busy as the hours passed. Here, there was nothing to do.
At about three in the morning (so he judged by the position of the stars), the last spark of lamp fire went out. He checked the sleeping man once more, about an hour later, this time using the flashlight.
As hours passed, he watched the moonlight creep from the eastern windows, guarded by samurai, to the southern windows, guarded by Mamelukes.
A glimpse of the moon through the southern windows sent a stab of cold dread into his heart. The black areas of the moon seemed like seas indeed, lifeless expanses of ocean rolling up against the shores of sterile, icy deserts of stone.
In his mind’s eye, he saw a windowless dome rearing high above a frozen tableland, surrounded by obelisks and blank-walled towers from which shrieks and dull moans of pain ceaselessly echoed. In his imagination, he saw a line of enormously fat men, pale as slugs, with gouged-out sockets instead of eyes, marching across the gray, snow-swept sands toward the black doors of that dome; and in their hands, they held up pincers and iron lashes, eye-spoons and disemboweling hooks, awls and branding irons; and when they heard the screams of torment, they smiled simpleminded smiles.
A poke in the chin prodded Raven awake.
Raven reached out and shook the sleeping old man by the arm. “I did not kill your grandson! I did not mean to kill him! I had to! It was for my wife! Why should I be sorry for you when I have my wife still alive, eh? Tell me that, eh?”
But then his voice sank to a sorrowful whisper. “But I know. You love your grandson, I am thinking, as much as I love my wife.”
He stood and paced over to the window, leaning wearily against the armored shoulder of a paynim. He turned his eyes away from the moon and stared down. There in the courtyard was a silvery pool, surrounded by twelve statues of zodiacal figures.
“Hey, you in the pool down there,” he whispered. “Maybe my wife did not make a wish when she threw in her penny, no? Maybe I can make wish for her. I wish to know how to set right what I have done. Is too much, I am thinking, for a penny to pay for? Is not enough of your water in the world, I am thinking, little pond, to wash this blood from my hands. But that is my wish anyway.”
When he sat back down next to the sleeping man, he turned on his flashlight and checked the machines. The pulse and respiration were up. In that bright light, he noticed Lemuel Waylock’s eyes were moving back and forth beneath his eyelids. Raven might not have noticed this by the dim lamplight.
“He is dreaming,” muttered Raven. “I wonder what he dreams about.”
Raven held the flashlight directly up near the man’s eyes, but he did not wake up.
“He is looking at something in his dreams,” said Raven. The doctor had told him that Lemuel still had REM sleep once or twice a night, but that he could not be woken even during these periods. “Look at him—back, forth, back, back . . . left, left, right, pause, right, left.”
Raven leaned forward.
“By holy St. Katherine!” he breathed. “Is code! Morse code!”
Raven spelled out the message: GALEN HELP ME I AM TRAPPED IN ACHERON.
VII
Galen help me I am trapped in Acheron Vindyamar has been taken when I went there the three queens were selkie and they took me to Nastrond then wrapped me in song and took me to Acheron I am in a cell five black towers outside they have cut off my hands so I cannot make the sign of Koth and I am hanging by hooks eels come in the windows to suck at my wounds when I tried to sing to summon a dream colt the water filled my throat and I could not make any noise and I forget what wholesome music sounds like they dragged me to Morningstar and he is so bright and beautiful that I could not stop answering his questions so I bit off my tongue Galen go to the sitting room behind the picture of Azrael find the horn blow it wake the sleepers in my cell I can feel the shaking Acheron is rising from the deep the worst has happened we are all lost find the horn blow the horn do not feel sorry for me these wounds will vanish when I wake and a new world has been promised us I keep telling myself its a nightmare I dont know if you are getting this message Galen so much of my waking life I have forgotten now and I dont know how long Ive been asleep Galen wake me up please god wake me up I am trapped in Acheron and the music of the fallen seraphim is taking away my will and heart I can hardly remember what you look like now Galen but go to the sitting room behind the picture blow the horn blow the horn blow the horn the wand to discover the selkie and rest of the talismans are in the country of gold the horn is behind the picture of the founder in the sitting room blow it and wake the sleepers Acheron is rising and darkness darkness covers all.
VIII
Raven found the stub of an old pencil in his pocket but nothing to write on except the back of the organ donor’s card in his driver’s license. He wrote in frantic haste, each letter microscopically small.
As the message became clear, Raven began sweating and shaking. He did not know what these things were that Lemuel was trying to communicate, but when he told himself it was just the nightmares of a sick old man, he knew it was a lie.
When he reached the point where Lemuel’s eye-motions were spelling out DARKNESS DARKNESS COVERS ALL, Raven heard footsteps in the hall outside the doors to the room, then a knock.
“Raven, are you there? All the bad guys are coming over the wall! Selkie and giants and everything!”
Raven, forgetting for the moment that Lemuel could not wake up, said, “Hush! Hush! Be quiet!”
Then he quickly went over to the door and opened it. There was no one there. Puzzled, Raven shined his flashlight up and down the corridor. He saw no place Wendy could have gone in the moment it had taken him to leap to the door.
He returned swiftly to the bedside, but the moment had passed. Lemuel had fallen once more into a deeper sleep, and his eyes were still.
Raven looked at the cramped little note in his hand, and said in a shaking voice. “Well, now. Well, now. Must be logical explanation for all this. I cannot think of it. Doesn’t mean is not there.”
He drew several deep breaths to calm himself, and held up the little note to his face so that his nose almost touched it. “So where is this sitting room, eh? And how am I to know what founder looks like.”
Then he straightened up, blinking.
“Did she say giants were coming?”
An angry voice came from the corridor outside the door. “Turn off that light! Are you mad?!”
Raven snapped off the light. The doctor, carrying a lantern, walked into the room. He turned, put down the lantern, and turned again to confront Raven.
“How dare you violate our rules?” snapped the doctor, eyes bright, his little mustache bristling.
“Doctor,” said Raven slowly, “why did I not hear your footsteps on the corridor outside? Wood floor. You are wearing shoes.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me, my good man. What is that in your hand you were looking at?”
“I would have heard. I have very good ear,” said Raven, and he held up his empty hand, since he had slipped the little card into his pocket when the doctor’s back had been turned.
11
The
Five Names
of
Lesser Mystery
I
Peter Waylock swore softly as his roaring machine (and now Azrael de Gray was convinced it was a machine, for a subtle test had confirmed that it had no soul) pulled into the driveway before a large, low, one-story house. Azrael could not see what danger caused Peter to call down damnation from his gods. Though there was a beacon of light, brighter than the moon, shining from a nearby pole, a sight that inspired Azrael to awe and alarm; Azrael had thought these were ordinary objects in this world. Peter cursed some other thing, no doubt.
But when he helped Peter dismount from the van, Azrael noticed five crows sleeping in a pine tree several fathoms away; three for a girl and two for a boy. He contrived to drop a bit of string from his pocket when he dismounted from the van. As he stooped to pick it up, he saw the string had curled twice widdershins: a sure sign that guests had come, and it was not the sign for strangers. The daisy next to which the string had dropped had six drooping petals. An even number: she loves me not. Someone inside, then, a woman with a man, a woman who was not a stranger and who had no love for Peter.
“Damn!” muttered Peter. “Look at that. What the hell’s she doing here?” Then, turning his head toward Azrael: “Your mother’s here with that man of hers. His car’s blocking the drive. Probably to come make a fuss over you. Not that they ever came to see you when it counted. Hospital must’ve phoned them.”
Azrael, who could see no chariots, nor anything else meant to be horse drawn, hid his amazement at Peter’s ability to read the signs. He had discovered more than Azrael, apparently with a quicker glance, obviously reading signs obscure to Azrael.
Azrael walked around the large, glass-sided metal box on wheels blocking his path, and looked up at the stars and clouds and nearby trees to see where Peter had divined his clues. But he could detect nothing, other than the obvious (the house was not warded; there were deer in the woods, no wolves; someone would shed tears before the evening was over) and he reminded himself not to underestimate Peter again. Even if Peter had repudiated the blood of Everness, the ancient magic still ran strong and deep in him, and the powers of the world could not for long hold secrets from him.
II
Afterwards, Azrael de Gray would not be able to recall the names of the two people he met in the strange house. Azrael did not deem them to be important; he did not enchant their names with images nor place them anywhere in the many-roomed mansion of many powers he carried with him in his spirit.
The first, his (or rather Galen’s) mother, was even more a traitor to Everness than was Peter, having left her lord and master to run off with some other man. Azrael at first misunderstood why she was here.
He supposed, as she hugged and kissed him, and spoke many tender (albeit insincere) words of love over him, that remorse over the near death of her son had brought her out of hiding, and that she had been granted the mercy of seeing her son alive one last time before being turned over to the magistrates. But, no: apparently cuckolding her lord carried no legal penalty in this land.
Of course, he next expected Peter to take the blond-haired man outside and kill him. Kill, not duel, since, unlike Peter, the blond-haired man did not carry a weapon and therefore was clearly not of the knightly class. Since the blond-haired man did not have the right to bear arms, he was a peasant, and he showed remarkable presumption and effrontery in the way he comported himself and his familiar fashion of address to Peter and to Azrael. Azrael concluded that Peter, through some weakness of character or lack of resolve, had permitted this obnoxious creature to live, and the peasant, emboldened by that, took full advantage of the liberty to flaunt his contempt for his betters.
Azrael’s astonishment grew as they all settled around a small table to eat, the peasant with the rest of them, and, more astonishingly, the peasant was given a place closer to the salt shaker than was Azrael.
He had been waiting to dine, for there was a fireplace at the smaller end of the large room they were in. The fireplace seemed too small to cook in, and there were no hooks for kettles, but Azrael was impatient to look upon the shape and spirit of fire again; it could tell him more, and more swiftly, than many other forms of divination.
But he was disappointed. They cooked their meal atop a metal box filled with lightning; the lightning was made to course in the sign of the Labyrinth, the spiral that guards the boundary between light and dark, and made a flameless heat to cook upon. Azrael thought then, for certain, that these people had discovered him and were merely toying with him. Why else would they go to such elaborate precautions to deny him sight of a fire?
His suspicions rested when he ate the dinner itself; it was the first meal he had eaten (save for raw fish) in countless turnings of the heavens.
The plates were round as the moon and as fair and fairly made as anything Azrael had ever seen, but without a spot of decoration or glint of gold to add luster to them. Meat was served, even though, to Azrael’s memory, the calendar did not show a holiday; and fresh fruit, even though, to Azrael’s eye, it seemed to be early wintertime outside.
Fair and fine as that dinner was, however, there were no bond maidens or cupbearers to wait on any of them, nor were there dogs to take the scraps. The lares, or hobgoblins of the house, must have put these people under a strict oath, since when he threw his scraps on the floor, the people made much ado, telling him he must have done it by accident (“spilled” was the word they used) and bent to clean it right away with torn segments of paper from a scroll. Why they should do such insult to the scroll, or from what library of an enemy it had been taken, was beyond Azrael’s power to divine. He did not see the paper clearly but saw it had a pattern of flowers laboriously inscribed into it, over and over: work it would have taken monks years to illuminate.
But when they took all their scraps and waste and put them into a lidded vessel, it became clear: they feared to be hexed by some foe who might poison them by drawing runes on bones their lips had touched, and so had to dispose of the bones with such care and expense. Again, he reminded himself not to underestimate these folk.
By now Azrael was impatient to begin his work. He had made many small and large mistakes during the meal, and their hesitations and searching looks showed that even the pretense that his memory had been damaged during his illness was wearing thin.
The peasant took out a small white tube of paper and sucked on it, and then drew out a jewel and summoned fire out of the air. With the fire he burned the paper, and Azrael smelled incense, which the peasant inhaled. Azrael’s estimation of the whole evening was revised; the peasant, like many of his station, had clearly joined the priesthood. Thus he was forbidden to carry weapons and was immune from the code of dueling; and he had achieved some sort of mastery of fire.
Azrael only had a chance to glance at the little flame before it was snuffed out. That glance was enough. First it told him the peasant was no kind of priest; he did not even have so much magic as an animal, no wards, no defenses. Second, the forces of the Empire of Night were moving against Everness this very evening. Third, that the fairy-girl and the Titan huntsman sent by Prometheus were at Everness even now. (How clever! While Azrael frittered away his time with these underlings, the forces of Oberon were maneuvering to consummate his defeat!) There was another creature at Everness, a being of great power, disguised as a priest. . . no, disguised as a doctor, who . . .
But then the flame was out, and the peasant was breathing incense through his nostrils.
Azrael stood and excused himself, saying he was very tired and that he wished to sleep. Galen’s mother escorted him to his room and spoke with him for a while. (She also was not warded, although signs told him she had spent at least one night asleep beneath the roof of Everness.)
She spoke for what seemed a long time. Azrael was not certain what this strumpet wanted, nor did he much care. But suddenly it came to him. Although she would not say it, she was asking his forgiveness. She blamed herself for leaving him in the care of Galen’s grandfather, causing, so she imagined, what she thought was insanity and sickness.
“Madame,” he said, “I am grateful that you abandoned me to Grand Pa’s care. It is true that the illness from which I have so recently recovered would not have occurred had you not left me there; you are wrong in thinking it has done me an ill turn. No, indeed, I am more pleased than I can say.”
She said, “You know, your father was always the one abandoning us, going away on tours of duty for months and years. I always thought we were especially close. But I have nothing to apologize for! He was so abusive to me, did you know that? Not physical, of course, he would never raise a hand to me, but mentally abusive. He never cared about your education like I did. Your Grampa could afford such a fine school. It would look so good on your resumé. If you ever made up a resumé like I’ve been telling you.”
Azrael could not follow the thrust of these ramblings. He guessed that her assertion she need not apologize meant the opposite; he assumed Peter’s lack of beatings had spoiled her; he was pleased she recognized the education Galen’s grandfather could give.
Then insight came. This woman, unfaithful as she was, still loved and cared for her little boy, whose place Azrael had cruelly usurped. And who was he, with his black crimes behind him, and worse crimes still in contemplation, to judge a woman’s weakness? She had betrayed her lord, it was true, but what was that compared to the treason of Azrael?
He took her hands in his and bowed his head. “Perhaps there is forgiveness for all of us, my mother. I pray that it is so. For otherwise there is nothing but darkness ahead; darkness to cover us all.”
She rose, kissing the top of his bowed head. “Don’t be so gloomy! The positive-thinking book I read told me never to give up hope. I kept visualizing how you’d come home from the hospital and be well, and look! Now you’re back. Even if your father doesn’t care about you, I’m glad you’re back. Get some sleep!”
And she walked out.
He had seen the lines on the palms of her hands as he held them, and he knew, beneath all her complaint and idle talk, that she dearly loved her son, a boy who was, albeit many generations removed, Azrael’s son as well.
He blinked, and he wondered to find that the tears he had prophesied for this evening were his own.
III
Wilbur Randsom, was, in general, a happy man, happier than he deserved, he thought. At his age, he had never expected a young and pretty woman to love him. And, after the marriage, he never expected her to be so clever with the checkbook and family finances. She was always thinking ahead, always shopping for the best deal, and she tried, and succeeded, to make his life comfortable, pleasant, and happy.
Only a few things marred that happiness. One was the hulking brute who formed her ex-husband. Wil should have known a woman like Emily was too good a catch not to have other men interested in her, including her ex. Another blemish was her lunatic son. Wil tried his best to make sure that no one ever guessed how much he loathed the gawking, mumbling, shy, and dreamy figure of Galen slouching around the house, or how much he rejoiced when the kid was shipped off to the grandfather.
But he never showed it. No, Wil always treated the kid with a friendly older-brother heartiness he was sure hid his true feelings. There was nothing he didn’t do for that kid. Wil was sure everyone was fooled.
If the kid knew how he felt, the sullen anger and distaste that hung about the kid like a bad smell would be justified, but since he didn’t, it wasn’t. The kid was just unfair. A spoiled brat. Which justified, Wil thought, Wil’s hatred of him.
As Wil was coming back from the bathroom, not five minutes after Galen had excused himself to go to sleep (when he obviously wasn’t tired, the little liar), he heard the noise of argument and rancor building up in the den at the end of the hall. Emily’s voice was shrill, growing toward shouts, and Peter’s sarcastic grunts were swelling with it like counterpoint.
At that point, Wil was even with Galen’s bedroom, and a line of light was showing under the door. It wasn’t that he was a coward; it was just that Wil wanted to avoid a scene like the last one. Besides, it was a good time to go in and say hello to the boy.
“Hey, sport! How ya been, boy? You asleep in there . . .uh. . .”
It seemed for a moment as if Galen were asleep in midair, armored knights made of silvery light to either side of him, in some vast presence- chamber made all of moonlight and shadows, whose pale roof, carven with images of crescent moons and many-rayed stars, was upheld by mighty silver pillars, and whose wide windows and balconies opened out onto a wild, wide sea; an ocean made of shadow and silver waves. Only Galen, fully clothed, sleeping with his head toward Wil, atop a four-poster bed, had color.
Then Wil realized he was looking at the mirror that had been on the back of the closet door, now propped up above the Galen’s bed, covered with lines and shadings in some white crayon. It was a delicate, complex drawing, all in perfect perspective, like an architect’s conceptual plan. Galen was on his bed, atop his covers, his head toward the door, eyes closed, arms crossed, so that his reflection was perfectly framed in the line drawing of the four-poster hovering in the glass above him.
And yet, for a long, strange moment, Wil was convinced the figure on the bed before him was the reflection, and that the figure reclining on the four-poster was the reality.
Galen opened his eyes.
IV
Wil shrank back, startled by the look in Galen’s immobile face. Galen said nothing but looked at him with a cold, majestic contempt that went beyond mere hatred.
Wil, having quailed under that gaze, could not allow himself to simply back out without saying anything. Wil straightened and forced a friendly grimace onto his face. “Hey there, fellow! Feeling better, huh? I’ll bet we are.”
Galen had not moved a muscle, but his cold eyes bored into Wil’s.
“Look, sonny boy, you know I didn’t mean what I said out there at the dinner table, right? That was just all in fun. Just because your Dad can’t take a joke . . .”
Silence.
“Hey, ha ha, neat drawing. I didn’t know you could do something like that. Looks like a room in your grandpa’s house, you know? One of those funky, weird rooms.”
“It is the chamber of middle dreaming, in the dominion of Hermes the Herald, under Capricorn, in the northern wing of the High House of Everness. You shall not speak ill of it before any image of it; all such images have power. The world shall see that I am oathbound to rebuke those who dishonor my house; I have done so.” And he lapsed into his calm, dark silence once more.
“Hey, look, pal. I mean, I’m sorry.”
“I accept your apology; I shall take what wergild shall suit me at the time of my own choosing. The world shall see that he has consented.”
Wil had the strange feeling that Galen was talking to someone else. Wil realized that Galen had finally cracked, that the hospital stay had unhinged him. It gave Wil a feeling of pleasure and relief; now he could get Emily to finally agree to cart the kid off to an institution, where he belonged.
So now he smiled a sharp, hard smile, self-possession restored, and put his hand on the doorknob. “Galen, I really didn’t mean to wake you up, boy. Sorry.”
“I accept again. A second wergild shall I take when so I will, as the world sees.”
“Yeah, uh. But I didn’t think you could really fall asleep so quick. I wish I could conk off that quick, you know? But you get some shut-eye . . .”
“I grant you your wish!” And Galen, with a kick of his legs, vaulted upright, off the bed. He stepped forward and took Wil by the elbow in a surprisingly strong grip. Galen’s unblinking gaze never wavered from Wil’s own.
“Hey, uh . . .”
Wil was pulled forward into the square of moonlight falling through the window. Galen had drawn a five-pointed star on the glass with a white crayon; the pentagonal shadow fell across Wil’s chest and face as he was pulled forward.
“Stare into the Moon,” said Galen in a low, commanding tone, pointing to where the full moon hung above shadowy trees, in the perfect center of the five lines of the pentagram. “Do you see it?”
“Yes . . .,” muttered Wil, his eyes wide and blank.
“Her secret name is Sulva, and she is the queen of all night-magic, dreams, delusions, and shadow creatures. Have you never wondered at her sterility, her barren, airless plains of ash, her seas of frozen lava slag? What sin was done by the Adam and the Eve of that pale world that has been so much more severely punished than our own? Even the light reflected from her cold face brings madness. How much worse to walk her lifeless steppes and granite peaks? Yet I have flown there on a storm wind to wrest the five secret names which govern all lesser dreaming from the Black Masters of Uhnuman the Blind Ones serve. Behold this pentagram! Here is the gate to lesser dreaming; here the five names!”
Galen pointed in turn at each of the angles of the star, whose white lines seemed to glow and shiver with the moonlight Wil stared into. “Morpheus! Phantasmos! Somnus! Oneiros! Hypnos! Each crown governs an aspect of the dreaming. Here is Morpheus, who casts instantly into sleep those caught within his web, as you are now instantly asleep, as you have wished.
“Here is Phantasmos, who robs the judgment and makes all strange images seem familiar. Thus, nothing I do or ask shall seem odd or unfamiliar to you. You are convinced all things are as normal.
“Here is Somnus, who governs men’s motive humors that they may not walk abroad while sleeping, whose power I now suspend. You are a somnab- ulator; talk and walk and move as if you were awake.
“Here is Oneiros, governor of eidolons and images. By him, at times the sounds and sights of waking things descend into our dreams. I grant your eyes the sight of those things around you.
“Here is Hypnos, president of memory. All your waking memories I grant to you. When you wake you will recall none of this.
“The spell is sung, the deed is done. So mote it be. I take as the first wergild owed to me that you consent to this my woven spell and so become my slave. Say the words, ‘I consent.’ “
Wil mumbled, “I consent.”
“Spirits of the world, you have heard it!”
Outside the window, an owl hooted three times, and Galen bowed.
“Tell me your secret, inner name, that name you reveal to no one, which is the essence of your soul.”
“Well,” said Wil, “when I was a kid, my Mom used to call me Winkie. When I was real small. Wee Willie Winkie. Gee, I hated that name. And the kids at school found out. . . and they said . . . they said . . .” Tears of embarrassment came to Wil’s eyes at the memory.
“Quiet. Winkie, I must get a message to other men who live on this your earth, but I do not know the ways. Is there a post road or post house where a messenger might be had?”
“Gee, kid, why not just use the telephone?”
“Explain to me what this thing might be.”
There were confusions surrounding this explanation, and around the explanations of the explanation. But eventually Galen said, “Now hear me. You have made the delightful discovery that your body is stronger than iron and will not be harmed. Moreover, you have on many occasions cast yourself off from high places, landed with a startling noise and cloud of dust, only to emerge entirely unhurt. It is a sport you enjoy in secret, for the long falls produce a type of giddiness like drunkenness, and you know many are jealous of your invulnerability and would stop you if they could, for no good reason, but simply for envy and spite. Now you are in poor humor, and you wish to find a tall steeple or cliffside to practice your art. Go now in all swiftness and do so, telling no one, lest they hinder your pleasure. As my second wergild I ask you to accomplish this thing. Go.”
And Wil smiled and wished Galen a good night, and walked out of the room.
Wilbur Randsom, was, in general, a happy man, happier than he deserved. Not only was he married to a beautiful woman, but he had discovered that his body was harder than iron, and that he could jump from clifftops without getting hurt. The only mar on his happiness was that she didn’t like it (and maybe she was jealous).
And so when Wil walked out past Emily and Peter, he merely waved a cheerful hand at her questions, and strode off out the front door.
12
He Is Fey
and
Fated to Die
I
“Had a dopey look on his face,” grumbled Peter. “Dopier than usual, I mean. Something’s weird.”
Emily was at the window. “He’s driving off in our car!” Her voice was angry.
Emily turned in time to see Peter with that expression on his face she’d seen a thousand times before. It was an expression that said, this is too good an opportunity to miss. Peter loved backing out in the middle of an argument.
Peter wheeled his way to the door and did not bother to answer when she shouted after him, “Where do you think you’re going? You always leave before finishing any discussion! Duty calls, is that it? And just what do you think you can do? You can’t run after him, can you?” And she said some other things as well.
Then he was outside. It was pathetic to watch him through the window, to see how slowly and awkwardly he manipulated the special fork lift mechanism to maneuver his wheelchair into the back of the van. Peter had to stand, leaning with a cane in either hand, while this was done. And by that time, Wil was so long gone that there was utterly no point for Peter to continue.
And so, of course, he did. This time was no different than any other. Emily let the drape fall, blocking the view through the window. She didn’t want to see the same sad scene again, of Peter thinking he could overcome his handicap by stupid dogged persistence.
The drape swung, and she caught a momentary glimpse of the van’s taillights, two red dots, vanishing in the distance down the driveway.
Emily shivered, hugging herself, wondering why she felt so angry and afraid.
A moment later, she heard a hoarse cry from down the hall. She went from a fast walk into a trot. Galen’s bedroom door was hanging open, and his bed was empty, but the noise had come from further down the hall, from the master bedroom.
In that bedroom, a phone had spilled from the nightstand and lay in a tangle of cords on the carpet. Galen was kneeling across the room, fingers pointed toward the phone, face tense with fear. He held his hands in a strange gesture, middle fingers curled, pinkies and forefingers outthrust.
From the receiver came a mechanical voice: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.” And then a persistent warbling tone sang out, and Galen stiffened with fear.
Emily walked over, picked up the phone, hung it up. Slowly she turned, her thoughts not showing on her face.
“Galen, are you feeling okay?” she asked gently. “Would you like to lie down?”
The young man stood, visibly shaken. “The voice was made by nothing alive. Even vampires sound in my ear more human; they once were living! I could hear no soul! No soul! No soul!”
“Galen. . .?”
He seemed to regain his self-possession; his face grew calm. “Mother, I need to make a telephone messenger carry a message to a man.”
“Galen. . . ? You forgot how to use the telephone?” Gingerly, she extended the phone toward him.
“Mother, really, it was nothing.”
She wiggled the phone toward him. “No, go ahead. What number did you want?”
Galen blinked. “Number?” (Azrael thought he had discovered the secret of the mechanism. It was, after all, shaped like a magic square. He had carefully, letter by letter, spelled out the name.)
“If you don’t know it, ask the operator.” There was an edge of fear in Emily’s voice, and she was looking warily at Galen. “What city is he in?”
“It is the capital of this country. I have forgotten the name. There is an obelisk overlooking a pool, and, in another place, a pentagon of defense wards the nation from all assault.”
Emily raised the receiver, dialed a number, asked for operator assistance in Washington, D.C. Then she handed the receiver slowly to Galen. “Tell the lady who you want to talk to.”
Galen put the phone to his ear, then pulled it away again. He gave a slow, incredulous laugh. Putting his hand to his face, he stared at the receiver, first through his forefinger and thumb, then forefinger and index finger, index finger and ring finger, and so on, as if the gaps between his fingers were some sort of microscope. There was a strange look of joy and triumph in his eyes. “There is a lodestone hidden in this mechanism, is there not?”
Emily backed up. “You’re not Galen, are you?”
The young stranger who looked like her son raised his dark and gleaming eyes to hers, a sinister smile on his lips. “There is, within this, iron which points at the North Star, is there not, madam?”
“All speakers have magnets in them. Who the hell are you? How the hell did you get to look like my son? Where is he?”
“All? All? They are commonplace here, then?” When he pulled at the mouthpiece, it came off into his hand, and a metal disk fell out into his palm.
He straightened, holding the tiny metal membrane on high, and he laughed. “The most powerful of magical adjuncts! Most wondrous and rare! And they are commonplace? The influence in the lodestone reaches from my hand to the North Star. Anything within that reach is in my reach! No more hunting for dropped bits of hair or waiting to stab a shadow in a mirror! I have now a sword which reaches the ambit of heaven!”
Emily turned and fled, running down the hall. The young stranger’s mocking voice said lightly, “Madam, do you think to outrun Polaris’ reach as lightly as you outran your conscience and wedding vows? Somnus! Bind the limbs of Emily with vapor!”
She reached the main room when numbness made her arms and legs grow heavy. She knelt, she fell. It was a nightmare sensation, strangely familiar, knowing she was awake but unable to move.
The young man came into the room, carrying a broomstick he had gotten from the hall closet, stepping over her as if she were so much baggage. The broomstick wiggled in his hand and pointed to the kitchen phone.
He came back, holding the phone on its extension cord, and he took up a handful of long matches from the tall box on the mantelpiece of the fireplace.
He knelt down near her and lit a match, staring in fascination at its little flame. With his eyes on the flame, not on her, he spoke. “Somnus grant you power of speech. Phantasmos suspend your judgment. As in a dream shall all things seem, not strange, but familiar, and you shall answer my questions. You will assist me in the ritual. There are many men who have sworn fealty to me in dream, men of power and substance, kings and barons. Now we shall see if they will bend knee loyally to me, now that their dreams come true. We will summon their voices into the room, and the flame shall tell me if they speak the truth. Will you help me call their voices here?”
“Where is my son?” She thought her voice was too weak to be heard, as if she had only imagined, not spoken, the words. But he answered.
“He is on the dark side of the moon, within the Hermitage of Anguish, where the Blind Ones offer up the pain of others as offering to hideous outer gods, Phaleg, Bethor, and Aratron. Do not despair, for I soon intend to be cased within my own flesh again; and I know the fairy-queen sends dreams (secretly, she deems, though I have discovered them) to summon your son’s rescuer. Ah! But do you not believe me?” And he smiled, and lit another long match, and began to bring the flame down closer to her eyes. “See?”
II
The road was narrow and wound up through thickly wooded hills. Naked branches, jagged with crowds of twigs, stood up in webbed silhouettes against the winter stars. Every now and again, the blackness of the scenery was broken by the faint porch light of a distant neighbor, or the glitter of moonlight off the rushing river-water below.
Peter was hunched over the wheel of the van, watching the circles of light fleeing before him down the road, pushing heavy darkness ahead. He had seen Wil turn left out of the driveway; Wil had not headed toward the main road. No, in this direction, there were no turn offs before the reservoir.
Rounding a turn where the road for a moment looked out across the river canyon, Peter caught a glimpse of headlights above him in the distance. Someone had parked on the dam near the pump house.
Peter floored the accelerator, and the van wobbled around the narrow curve and hopped, groaning, across sudden rises and drops in the road. The trees here were thick, untended, and twigs scraped the roof and sides.
Then the trees fell back to either side, and Peter’s view opened. Before him was the road that crossed the dam. To his right, the reservoir extended, cool and black beneath the stars. To his left, a sluice gate let a stream of rushing water plunge down the dam’s steep side into the river far below, making a noise like continuous thunder.
Where the dam met the cliffside was a small copse of trees and brush. The ground here was at an alarming angle, before it plunged down in a sheer drop. Wil was leaning out over the drop, one hand flung up behind him, holding the bending branch end of a tree, gazing down raptly.
Peter knew there was nothing underfoot here but a long fall into rock and shallow water.
Peter drove closer, slowing, not wanting to startle Wil. The road let him get within several yards of Wil, no closer.
A nursery rhyme his father had taught him kept going through Peter’s mind, over and over:
He dreams, despite that it is day;
He seems awake: it is a lie;
The wizard took his wits away,
For he is fey and fated to die.
The van crushed some smaller shrubs out of the way, but then there were trees, and Peter could get no closer. He opened the door and called out:
“Hey, Wil, what you up to?” Peter fished under the passenger’s seat for his knee braces.
Wil turned and waved with his free hand, a glassy stare and vacant grin on his face. “I was going to take a jump off a cliff side or tall steeple. You know, to clear my head. I’ve discovered my body is stronger than iron. It won’t hurt me. I’ve done it lots of times.” Then his witless smile turned into a frown of exaggerated worry: “Hey—you won’t tell Emily, will you?”
Peter was clawing under the passenger seat for his second knee brace but could not find it. He called back: “ ‘Course not. But one thing first. Can you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?” One of Wil’s feet was on the ground, the other was in midair, and the branch was swaying gently under Wil’s weight.
Peter leaned out, put both canes on the ground, fell forward, catching himself with the strength of his powerful shoulders. He grunted. “Hey— you can see my license plate from there, can’t you?”
Wil looked reluctantly back up from the drop. “Huh? Sure, I can see it plain as day.”
Peter’s shoulder’s surged, and he took a step forward, dragging his useless legs through the dirt and brush behind him. “Read it!”
“What?”
Another step. The slope was beginning to angle downward dangerously. “Read the God damn letters on my license plate.”
“Uh. . .”
Another step. There was a thicket of branches before him, a short drop, then Wil. Then a long drop. Peter was on precarious ground already.
“Isn’t that funny, you forgot how to read?” Peter shouted at him. “Why is that, do you suppose? Think about it, man!”
Hanging by one hand from the tree branch, one foot on the slope, Wil stared blankly at the license plate. A look of concentration began to come into his features. Then he turned his head up and stared at the moon, his face attentive, as if listening to inaudible voices. Then, slowly, his head began to droop, as if his gaze were being pulled down toward the gulf below.
Peter, his eyes squinted into slits, his mouth a grimace, surged forward with a thrust of his shoulders. His canes had no purchase on the slope. Tree branches lashed at him as he fell. There was a chaotic moment of pain and dizziness as he tumbled and rolled. Then a blow: he had struck up against a tree. One of his canes was spinning out into the gulf of air, spinning and falling in slow silence.
There were twinges of pain in his hips and spine, and he bit back his groans with clenched teeth.
Wil’s voice came from nearby: “Are you hurt? Falls never hurt me, you know. My body is as hard as iron, so I can jump from cliffsides and tall steeples . . .”
Peter, lying on his stomach in the fallen needles and wiry grass, was staring at the handful of dry leaves he held in one fist. His face was screwed up in a look of terrible concentration, and his lips moved, as if he were trying to recall some long-forgotten word or phrase.
Dimly, he was thinking of something his father, very long ago, had forced him to memorize. Something stupid; some dumb nursery rhyme; something he had long put out of mind.
Then his face cleared; his eyes brightened.
Peter shouted: “That tree you’ve got! Look at it! Look at the damn thing! Do you deny that it is a laurel tree?” It was actually a maple tree, but Peter was hoping Wil wouldn’t say that.
And, sure enough, Wil said back: “Huh? I don’t know anything about trees, except that I can jump so far, so far . . .”
“Spirits of the world! He has not denied he holds the Laurel! Hey, Wil listen! There’s a song about laurel trees my Pa taught me! Don’t you want to listen, God damn you?”
“I’ll talk to you after I climb back up. Bye, now . . .”
Peter chanted:
Daphne! Fairest of the dryad race
Draw Daylight down to your embrace!
Night comes not where once was woo’d
The lady whom ļight too bold pursued
Dream’s deceits flee Daylight’s darts,
Chained by his harpstring, charmed by his arts;
No man masters madness, save only he
Crowned by the leaf of the laurel tree.
Apollo, Hyperion, Helion, Day!
Moon’s madness you harness, Night’s dragons you slay!
And Wil suddenly clung to the branch with both hands, shrieking in panic.
While Wil climbed up the slope back toward safety, Peter lay in the tangled brush, pounding his fist into the dirt, grimacing, tears in his eyes, and growling: “Jesus fucking Christ, it worked. God damn that old man, it worked. God damn that old house, it worked. It all works. It’s all true. God damn them!”
It was a long time before he found the strength to drag himself back up.
13
Men Unbound
by
Magic’s Law
I
Private First Class Nat Furlough stood at attention, he hoped, for the last time. On the sergeant’s desk in front of him were his discharge papers: dishonorable discharge papers. He had been in the stockade once too often; he had been drunk once too often.
But the officer at the desk was not his sergeant. He was a first lieutenant. The man’s nametag read MOCKLEAR. His insignia were strange: Furlough did not recognize the shoulder patch or the unit numbers. MORS. What was that? And the man wore a blue beret instead of a cap: not a cover for any unit Furlough knew.
Furlough could see there was something odd about him: the way he sat, the way he moved his hands. He slouched at an uncomfortable angle, as if he had a deformed spine, and his fingers curled and flexed and wandered here and there on the desk touching things, fidgeting. It did not look right. Crooked posture, crooked smile. Furlough could not imagine seeing the man on parade. Nothing about him was shipshape and squared away. Despite his uniform, Furlough thought the man could not be a soldier.
They were in a small wooden building, which without heat, was numbingly cold. It had been more comfortable in the stockade. Here, open windows to the right showed the parade ground: the flag was at half-mast, due to the recent, unexpected death of the base CO in an aircraft accident. Scuttlebutt said the pilot and the copilot had simply fallen asleep at the yoke, and pancaked into the hard top. Furlough was not the sort of person to take rumors at face value. How could anyone know what had happened in the cockpit when everyone had died? He wondered who had started the rumor.
The lieutenant looked up. “I guess you’ll be glad to be out of here. Soon as your sergeant signs this, you’re gone.”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“Um, at ease, soldier. Take a seat. Here: you need a doughnut? Coffee?”
Furlough sat down in the straight-backed wooden chair behind him. It was painted olive green. He did not take any offered coffee. He decided to cut to the chase. “Sir, what are you selling?”
The man’s eyes sparkled with mirth. That was odd, too. The crooked half-smile quirked back into position on his narrow face. “Maybe nothing, soldier. Maybe your future. Do you have anything lined up when you get back home? Not many employers have much use for a man thrown out of the service, do they?”
Furlough said, “So. Is this a recruiting pitch? Go ahead. Give it to me.”
Mocklear was quiet for a moment. He said, “Did Cooke speak to you?”
Furlough showed no reaction on his face. He did not want to get Cooke in trouble. The two men had been in the stockade together and, later, had been drunk together behind the firing range.
Furlough said casually, “It was just crazy talk, sir. I’m not sure I remember any of what he said. We were pretty far around the bend.”
“Bend?”
“Drinking, sir.”
“And what did he tell you?”
Cooke had whispered to him all sorts of strange and crazy things.
II
They had been standing in the ditch behind the firing range after lights out. The sentries never came here, and it was pretty far from the barracks but pretty easy to get back to your bunk from here (just a quick jog between two Quonset huts where machine parts were crated) if anyone noticed anything.
Cooke spoke in an unsteady voice: ‘Any woman you want, Furlough. There in your bed, dressed any way you want, however you want. Pick ‘em out of a magazine. Off the TV Don’t have to be alive, even: You like Marilyn Monroe? Miss December of 1968? The girl you liked in high school? She’ll be as young as she was then. Don’t have to be a real person. Johnson says he’s got Catwoman.”
Furlough had answered: “But if it’s just a dream, what the hell’s the point?”
“Point!” Cooke had shouted back in sloppy glee. “That is the point. Real dame, you gotta worry about getting her knocked up, keeping her happy, her ex or her folks, all that rot. But, the girl of your dreams: No worries. No worries.”
Furlough said, “I can’t believe you just said ‘dame.’ Who talks that way?”
“Ain’t no books like a dame, nothing looks like a dame!” replied the other with a breathy laugh. “But don’t piss ‘em off. Shit! Don’t cross ‘em. Or they send spiders instead of women. Big ones. Scissors to chop your dick off, things from what you were scared of as a kid. Remember being scared as a kid? Now I lay me down to sleep, if I die before I wake, all that rot? Remember thinking your own pillow would fall over your face and smother you? Remember the Man in the Closet, the Man with the Hook, who waited for your Mom to turn off the night-light? If you step out of line, they send bad dreams. Buried alive. Rats eating your face. I hate it when you can feel the little teeth tearing at your cheek, y’know, and you can stick your tongue out the hole. Or rotting. There is this one where your whole body rots to bits, little crumply bit by bit, your teeth fall out, then your eyes. No. No. Don’t piss ‘em off. How ya gonna get away? Can’t get away. Gotta sleep sometime.”
“Don’t piss who off, man? Who?”
“They keep him in a cage. He’s coming out.”
“Who? Who’s coming out?”
“The wizard.”
“What?”
“The wunnerful wizard of Oz. Heh!” And the conversation trailed off into something less coherent after that.
III
Furlough decided not to answer. “Cooke, he didn’t say nothing, sir.”
Mocklear leaned on one elbow, cocked his head to one side. “So, you can keep a secret. I like that. And no, Cooke won’t be punished. We asked him to mention our new unit to you, to see if you were interested.”
“To see if I would tell the CO, you mean.” Furlough had seen the game from the start: if he told anyone, anything Cooke said would be just the raving of a drunk. If he did not, they would come to him.
And here they were.
He said, “Cooke said he was joining up again. Which I thought was funny, on account of he was being booted out, like me.”
Mocklear leaned the other way, tilted his head again. Furlough noticed that his eyes did not seem both to be focused on the same spot. Maybe the guy had something wrong with his nervous system? A disease or something?
Mocklear said, “We are recruiting.”
“For what?”
“The Military Operational Reserve System. You see, things are more dangerous these days, what with terrorists and foreigners and all that, and drug dealers have been arming themselves with heavier and heavier weapons—you’d be surprised where some of that ex-Soviet stuff is turning up. And riots, rebellions, protests. A lot of people flying off the handle. Did you know the rate of insanity is on the rise? Drug abuse, murder? So the higher-ups have formed, in cooperation with the BATF, a flexible operational unit that does not answer to the ordinary command structure. An elite unit that can be deployed rapidly within the continental U.S. to face the new kinds of threats the new world is giving us. Rebellions, insurrections, protests, that sort of thing.”
“Who is threatening insurrection?”
“Oh,” said Mocklear dismissively, “the elite unit is being formed for precautionary purposes only.”
“Elite? Buddy, you’re talking to the wrong G.I.” Furlough pointed to the papers on the desk. “You’ve seen my record.”
“Oh, my friend,” said the man in a voice with no friendliness in it. “The unit is not looking for men who have displayed the ordinary virtues of discipline, courage, patriotism, loyalty. There are other factors, psychological factors, that may be of more use to us. Did Cooke explain about our benefits program? About the future we are envisioning?”
“He said a lot of stuff that sounded like treason to me.”
“Oh, that word! What a confused, unreconstructed, inelegant word! Treason to what? To whom? We live in a great nation, surely, the greatest in history, and at a time in history when the might of the nation is unopposed by any serious foe. Whoever faces us in open combat is quickly crushed. None out in the open. So what does this nation have to fear? Internal foes. Foreigners sneaking across our borders. Treason. Terror. Voices of dissent. Voices discouraging our uses of power. Weakness is the only thing to fear. Confusion. Riots. The only thing we need to fear is treason to the people. And what the people want is security. Ah! But you look unconvinced, Private Furlough! Well, perhaps we misjudged.” And he gathered the discharge papers together and took up the pen out of the pen-stand and made as if to sign them.
“Wait a minute,” said Furlough.
The other man had his face near the desk, his ear cocked toward the papers, and he looked up crookedly at Furlough with one bright eye.
Furlough said slowly, “Cooke said something about getting my record sealed.”
Mocklear said, “He was supposed to say ‘expunged.’ We do not do things by half-measures.”
“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?”
Mocklear grinned a crooked grin. “We’re the winning side. You want to be on the winning side, don’t you?”
Furlough said, “Don’t recall that any war has been declared.”
“Oh, there is always a war on.”
“Between. . .?”
“Between the kind who play by the rules and the kind who get ahead. Well, which side you want to be on?” Mocklear’s fingers twitched, and he picked up the papers on the desk. “You know all your future employers are going to see this, don’t you? If you have any. Oh, I guess there is always the option of going on welfare, but then, well, there are case workers and other people to deal with then, and they are not much different from any other large bureaucracy anywhere, are they? They, too, have people who follow the rules and people who use the rules.”
Furlough did not say anything for a moment. He puzzled over whether this crooked little man was threatening him, and, if he was, Furlough wondered what he could do about it. A punch in the nose would be satisfying, but another six months in the stockade seemed a dismal prospect when he was only minutes away from getting out of this chickenshit outfit and into wearing mufti again.
Furlough thought: If I was a man with an ounce of sense, I would turn and walk out this door right now. This is just some gang of crooks. They might be in uniform but they’ve got nothing to do with the Army. Rats in the hold are aboard the ship, but no one thinks they are part of the crew.
Furlough said, “Cooke seemed to think you guys, your side, was out to change the world for the better. Crack down on the rich, get rid of the corruption in government and in big business, see to it that everyone got a square deal. Feed the poor. But Johnson said—”
Mocklear’s face twitched. One eyebrow went up, and the other went down. “You spoke to Johnson? Interesting.”
Furlough guessed that Johnson had not been supposed to speak with him. Damn. He had not meant to get Johnson in hot water. Furlough liked to think of himself as a man who played his cards close to his chest: he was slipping up.
Furlough said: “Johnson seemed to think your new special unit was going to help restore law and order, crack a few heads, get the bums off the streets, get the filth out of Hollywood, throw a few traitors and protestors in jail. So you did not tell those two guys exactly the same story, did you? Now, I am wondering if this is really whatcha might call a winning strategy, playing each side in the game, because all it takes is one guy to hear both sides, and he’ll know what you’re really up to.”
Mocklear spread his hands, and grinned. “Oh, them. They had to be told what they wanted to hear. What else can you do with people like that?”
Crooked as it was, there was something warm and brotherly in that smile. Yeah, Furlough knew how dumb most people were. What could you do with people like that?
Mocklear dropped his voice to a more intimate octave: “But people like us—people who want to be on the winning side—we have no such illusions, do we?”
Mocklear paused a moment to let that sink in, and then he continued in a confidential tone: “I’ll lay my cards on the table. I have a quota to fill. The timetable has been moved up. We have a boss, a man who gets things done, and he is about to make his appearance on the scene, and so we need to be ready sooner than we thought we’d be. So I need to find people, fast. All I need is warm bodies who know which end of the tube the round comes out of and who will obey orders. But we also need people with brains. People who are smart. People who know how the game is played. People with no illusions, no ideals, no messy commitments. People who cannot be fooled by flattery or tricks. Are you that kind of person, Furlough?”
Furlough found the notion that he was above the illusions of ordinary men irresistible. Being told that he was immune to flattery was the nicest thing he had heard someone say about him in a long time.
Like a little wisp of hot flame burning inside him, he felt the dark, savage satisfaction of hearing someone actually come out and say what he had always thought. It was like coming home, home to people like him: people who knew the world was a bag of lies, who knew the game was rigged but who managed to carry off their winnings anyhow.
(The idea that this was just a lie as well, a line being fed him because it was just what he wanted to hear, stirred uneasily below the surface of Furlough’s thinking, like a groundhog peering just its nose furtively above- ground. But that idea, which was not a very flattering one to him, didn’t like its shadow, and subsided again.)
“I’ll think about it,” said Furlough. “If I do decide to look into this new assignment of yours, who do I talk to . . .”
Mocklear mentioned a salary figure around ten times what Furlough’s crappy E3 pay was now. “And there are other benefits. Cooke mentioned some of them. We take care of our own. Interested?”
Furlough wished he could have hidden the hungry look on his face, but he knew the crooked little man had seen. Another slip-up. No point in playing coy now. “Well, maybe there is not that much to think over. Yeah. I guess I’m interested.”
Mocklear said, “There’ll be a test, of course.”
“Like an initiation?” Furlough knew how gangs worked. Once the recruit had done something horrible, something the authorities could not forgive, the loyalty of the recruit was assured. He had no place else to go, and blackmail could keep him in line.
“Nothing so crude. Wentworth is looking for a select group of men who display certain . . . psychological factors.” He took out a sheaf of papers from the desk drawer. “If you would fill out this questionnaire and request for transfer?”
“Am I still going to be in the service? Or not?”
“You will have a military rank, but the special unit will be performing operations wherever need be, either overseas, or within the continental U.S. Sometimes in uniform, sometimes not.”
Furlough looked over the questions. “I see you’re asking rather personal things here.”
“It is for psychological evaluation.”
“Are you allowed to ask questions like this? Is ‘sodomy’ even a word people can use anymore? What ever happened to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’? “
Mocklear spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, assuming a look of detached innocence. “We are trying to be all-inclusive, and the new unit is seeking out persons of alternate sexual orientation as part of our diversity program.”
“Why are you asking me about my sexual partners here? ‘. . . or, if with your wife, was the ceremony performed in a Church’. . .?”
“That is merely health information. Venereal disease, you know. Also, ah, people who go through church weddings tend to stay married longer. We need to know because it affects our insurance premiums, since the JAG corps handles divorce and custody cases, and this comes out of our operational overhead. You understand.”
“But what about, ‘Have you ever had sexual relations or intimate physical contact with a Jewess, Pagan, or unbaptized woman’? Who would ask—? What the hell is that all about?”
“Part of our commitment to the separation of church and state. Speaking of which . . . could you stand up, please?” From another drawer, Mocklear took out a crucifix on a chain and dropped it clattering on the floorboards. It was a little wooden cross, highly polished, with a figure of a suffering Christ in ivory. The workmanship was beautiful, simple, and delicate.
Mocklear said in a matter-of-fact tone, “Trample the crucifix, please, and we can get on with processing your request for transfer.”
Furlough looked down at the crucifix on the floor.
“Is there a problem, private?”
“You have got to be kidding.”
Mocklear said, “Merely a psychological test. It really does not have any meaning beyond that.”
Furlough shook his head, slowly. “You guys are . . . not ordinary . . . are you? This sounds like something from . . .”
IV
Furlough had an aunt that everyone called Crazy Jane. He assumed there was one like her in every family. For some people, it was stamp collecting, or bird watching. For her, it was the Knights Templar. Conspiracy-theory stuff for medievalists. Crazy Jane was convinced there was a vast treasure, including maybe even the Ark of the Covenant, hidden somewhere in the old monasteries of Europe: the treasure of the Templars.
Crazy Jane told everyone about her theories. Despite his best effort, she had told Furlough all about it, too. When the Knights of the Order of the Temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed by King Philip the Fair of France, they had confessed under torture to all manner of bizarre things, things meant to shock the conscience of the average burgher of the Dark Ages, so that the average burgher would think Philip the Fair was an honest king, not merely a crook out to plunder the wealthy knights. Naturally, Templars had confessed to whatever the tormentors wanted them to confess: acts of sodomy and devil worship, consorting with Jewesses and Witches, or unbaptized concubines from the East. In other words, things that would make them look bad only in the eyes of the other men of the time; things no modern man would give a second thought about: fornication; nature worship; disrespect toward the Church.
The Templars confessed to nothing a modern man like Furlough would criticize. Heck, no one Furlough knew went to the chapel except under orders, or avoided women. That’s what whores were for. A man would have to be a freak of some sort even to worry about things like that. Only a girl with deep-seated psychological problems stayed a virgin till marriage, and no man Furlough knew, not ever.
This was something from the dead past. Step on a cross? What kind of people would care about such a thing these days?
Furlough had always thought people from overseas were like Americans, or wanted to be. There was no place he could think of, no people, who would ask a man to trample a cross or care one way or the other if he did.
As if it were part of a voodoo ritual. As if this guy and his boss were from Aunt Jane’s home town in Crazycrazyland.
So Furlough just stood there, his mouth slightly open, his eyes slightly shut, trying to puzzle it out. Where were these guys from?
V
Mocklear said wearily: “If the test is too difficult for you, private Furlough, that will be noted in your records. Naturally, the matter is entirely voluntary, but I am a little surprised. I had been thinking you were a member of a superior personality type, one who knows the essential meaninglessness of rituals and icons and mere material objects, eh?”
“Is there really a wizard? Cooke said something about a wizard.”
The question just blurted out of him, as if by itself.
As Furlough said these words, the idea, which seemed so comical, so storybook-like, suddenly seemed not so comical. A creature that could bend the fabric of reality to his terrible will, a being who stood outside of all the laws of man and nature, an entity that could transform things and distort them in ways that were not meant to be. . . what other word was there to call him, but a name from a children’s fairy-tale?
Furlough remembered, from something he had read, that the original fairy-tales had been much darker and bloodier than the cartoon versions kids were allowed to see.
Mocklear said blandly, “We’ve made contact with a man who can do things we have trouble explaining, or explaining away. I am sure the science of parapsychology will be able to find an answer some day soon. It certainly seems like magic to the uninitiated, but then again, there are many miracles of science and technology that would astonish the men of primitive times and backwards lands. Is there really such a difference? No doubt, to Cooke, our Master might appear to be a very impressive and frightening figure, capable of inexplicable things, and a man of limited intellect like Cooke might well use a word like ‘wizard’ to describe something his mind was too small to comprehend. It is a mystique, part of a psychological warfare effort. You know.
“But—” And now the crooked grin grew wide, and too many teeth showed between Macklear’s thin, colorless lips. “But suppose the world was odder than you dreamed. Suppose there was something Out There. Maybe on the Dark Side of the Moon, maybe in the depths of the sea. Suppose there was something to those crazy old Soviet experiments with telepathy and shared-dream research, or those lights people sometimes see in the sky. What could you do, if there were?”
“What do you mean, what could I do?”
“If there were creatures who could bend the laws of nature, use them, rig the game. They’d seem like wizards to us, wouldn’t they? If there were such a thing, there would be nothing else to do, would there be? You’d have to get one on your side. You’d have to find one who could protect you from the others. It is only common sense. And of course, of course, you’d have to keep it secret.”
“Secret. . . why?” said Furlough. “I’d be in all the papers. Biggest story ever. It’d be like discovering life on other planets.”
“Secret, because we are talking about life on this planet, night-things that have been hidden since the beginning. Secret, because people who wander around talking about this stuff in broad daylight disappear and are forgotten. The world has a defense mechanism.”
Furlough said, “You killed the CO, didn’t you. Made the air crew fall asleep.”
Mocklear said in his most bland and unconvincing voice: “Oh, don’t be silly. If we could do things like that, we could do anything. Anything to anyone. Anywhere. And how could anyone escape? Everyone has to sleep sometime.” He grinned a toothy grin. “And if we could do things like that, why, who would not want to be on our side, eh?”
Furlough stepped on the cross.
Mocklear said, “Welcome aboard, matie. We also have a signing bonus, if you can recommend another applicant.”
VI
Later, after he had removed the mask that made him look human so that his real face beneath could get some cool air playing over its fur, Mocklear (his real name was Mac y Leirr, but he was tired of humans mispronouncing it) sat filling in the rest of his paperwork. The lights were off (he hated human lights) but the moonshine was bright enough for eyes like his to see, and he had learned the art of reading and writing from a trapped sailor, long ago, who had been kept alive one more day for every day he taught Mocklear something new.
He wrote:
Subject was willing to kiss the anus of the statue of Baphomet but would not spit on a reproduction of the U.S. Constitution when asked. Subject is too curious and too intelligent and may develop resistance to the organization later.
Mocklear frowned and nibbled his pen with sharp, white teeth. He did have his quota to make, and he did not want to be penalized by offering inferior recruits to the human Wentworth, or to the Court of Nastrond. He wrote further:
Hence, subject should be posted to “hot” zones in the CONUS (Continental United States), where he will be required to open fire upon civilians or do other acts that will bind him more firmly to the movement. Include him in Everness operations, but he is not to operate outside of range of “handlers.” However, if his loyalty to his current king is weakened, he may make officer material.
Then, Mocklear, remembering, drew a line through the word “king” and wrote in careful, small letters above that, “Republic.”
And his paw hesitated about the question beneath the interviewer’s comments box, the one that read: CONVERT TO JACKET WHEN CREWMATE BECOMES AVAILABLE? Y/N.
His people were really not that brave and did not follow orders well, and, unlike mortal men, his people were bound by the laws of magic. On the other hand, Mocklear had seen Furlough’s girlfriend, and she was quite attractive, and so if he were replaced, the crewmate wearing his coat might have quite a nice time of it. . . He circled the Y on the form.
He held the document up to the moonlight, his jaws open with satisfaction. There.
He lifted the next of many forms out from his inbox. The height of the stack of paper did not surprise him. If only one man in a thousand could be suborned to treason, then out of a base of fifty thousand men, the chances of finding fifty were better then average.
The trick was to find those fifty without coming to the attention of the fifty thousand honest men. With the Vindyamar planetarium in their hands, and captive astrologers checking the stars, and the Warlock peering into the dreams of men to find their secret fears and weaknesses, the chance of approaching the wrong sort of man was small.
After his paperwork was done, Mocklear took out a little clay pipe, packed it with a shred of tobacco from his poke, and, donning his human face for a moment to light the match (the fire seemed not so fearsome when seen through human eyes), contented himself to enjoy one of the many vices he had learned from wearing mortal skin.
He removed his human face and let the night wind from the window caress his black fur. Tilting back his narrow head, he blew an airy smoke ring toward the roof.
Even if the call came tonight (and, to be sure, he thought it might), his people had enough men for a small operation. They would look like soldiers of the United States, and they would wear such a uniform and fly such a flag. Most of the men in the unit, so far, were men like Furlough, who had sold their souls and knew it, and knew they were traitors to the uniform they wore. But some of the stupider ones, men like Cooke, might convince themselves that they were still somehow soldiers loyal to their country.
That was the way of his people: to have foe fight foe, brother kill brother, man slay man. The innocent would either have to kill the innocent or be killed in his turn. That was what made it so delicious! Whether the traitors knew they were traitors or not, the people whom they shot would die just as dead, and every honest man in uniform would have his honor stained, and every man of goodwill would be more likely to mistrust those whom he had the most need of trusting: that was the way.
VII
Later, by certain signs he had been told, he knew to expect a visitation. When the Moon went behind a cloud, black shadows filled the barren room where he was. He felt a cool touch of fear, and he knew that this was due to looking at the darkness with mortal eyes. He peeled his human face from his black fur.
Thin and skeletal, armored in bone, the tall black shadow loomed in the corner farthest from the window, as if it had always been there.
“Aye?” Mocklear growled.
A cold voice came forth: “Tonight. The White Hart Slayer is risen.”
“And the Watchman? If they blow that damned horn . . .” but his voice choked with fear at the thought, and he could not finish. He did not want to be burned alive, forever, in the pitiless and shining Light.
The unliving and unbreathing voice continued: “The Horn is in the House that only mortal man can enter. Have you your mortal men?”
“Men I have, men most mortal. Where?”
“Maine. You know the place?”
“Ha har, Old Bones. Every shipwreck sunk by a nor’easter, I know. Every rock where pale sailors’ wives waited in vain for their men to return from the bitter waves, I know. Where the wall between waking and nightmare is thin, there I know best of all.”
“Then gather your men there, men unbound by the laws of magic, and put the cold iron weapons of men in their hands. Wentworth says.”
Wentworth! One of the Three who had journeyed in dream and spoken to the Warlock and lived. His would be a skin worth taking, once the Warlock had showered him with gifts but needed no more hard work from him.
For that was also the way of his people.
The moon came from behind the cloud, and the smell of grave soil lingered, but Koschei the Deathless was gone.
Donning his human face again, Mocklear picked up the phone on his desk. With his furry paw (for his human gloves were off), he reached and touched one of the buttons on the phone, which winked like a firefly as it lit.
A sobbing voice answered. He gave the password and waited for the countersign.
Mocklear said, “There be some hard work and, aye, some danger I will need to face tonight. So I will wrap up my coat to put it in our drop spot. If ye yearn to see yer mate and yer pups again, you will do no disgrace to the name of Mac y Leirr!”
There was more weeping and crying and blustering, but eventually his stand-in was forced to agree. There was more talk and sobbing, threats and counterthreats, and the two agreed on signs and passwords for their next speaking.
“And mind ye well, lickspittle cur,” Mocklear said. “Brush ye up my coat all nice once ye are done wearing me good face! I’ll have no more funny tangles and cigarette burn spots in me fine coat! Ar! No tricks! If ye make me seem the fool again, by Setebos, I vow that day ye’ll rue!”
The pipe smoke tasted bitter in his mouth after that last call. There were times when Mocklear did not much care for the ways of his people.
14
The
Lantern
of the
Elves
I
Two men stood in a circle of yellow light cast by the doctor’s oil lamp, which he had placed on the floor at the foot of the suit of armor to the left of the door, the unrusted suit.
The doctor said, “If there is something in your hand, you have no reason not to show me. You are here as my guest, after all.”
Raven rumbled, “If you really are doctor, I am thinking, you have no reason not to tell who you really are. You know, since I am not knowing how you got into house here at all. Maybe you are drugging old man, no?”
“And perhaps, sir, you are a. . .” But he was interrupted. Both he and Raven looked through the door, which the doctor had left open, at the point of silver light that appeared in the distance.
Down the hall the light came, like an evening star seen through transparent mists, surrounded by a halo of radiance. As it approached, there came the sound of light, rapid footsteps.
Raven’s eyes were fixed down the hall, but he groped and grasped the doctor’s arm. “What is this thing we are seeing?” he asked in a hushed whisper.
“It is a supernatural effect,” said the doctor in a hoarse voice. “I do not know what it means. I know nothing about this cursed house and its secrets. Those who sent me do not take me into their confidences . . .”
The light came forward, and it was Wendy, smiling, running down the hall, black hair flying about her face, skirts flapping like wings. In her hands was a miniature lantern no taller than a woman’s smallest finger, with tiny square panes of glass and a lantern-ring too small to pass a finger through. Inside was a prism of crystal glowing with incandescent light, as if it were reflecting a light from some unseen source. She carried the tiny thing in the palm of her hand.
“Hi there!” called Wendy. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Wendy!”
“Young lady,” said the doctor, “where did you get that lamp?”
But Wendy was telling Raven: “. . . giants and seals and dead horses and everything! They’re all pounding on the walls! We’ve got to do something!”
And she turned to the doctor and said, “I was in the library. I think they should have kept it there instead so it wouldn’t hurt the books. See? No flame.” She held it up proudly.
“It is a fairy-lamp,” said the doctor, “from Alfhiem. It will not burn in mortal hands.”
“But there is nothing out there!” said Raven. “It is no more than storm wind and angry sea. What can we do to fight the sea waves, eh?”
“Find the magic!” she said to Raven impatiently, stamping her foot. Then, to the doctor: “Here! Catch!” And she tossed the little lantern at him.
The results were amazing. Quicker than a striking snake, too swift to see, he reached to the belt of the suit of armor hanging on the rack near the door, drew the sword, and parried the flying lamp in midair, batting it, rebounding, to the floor, ringing like fine crystal, burning like a falling star.
During that frozen instant, the doctor was poised as if weightless, coat- tails flying, glasses at their apogee on the end of their necklace, gleaming sword in one hand, the other hand back behind his shoulder in a gesture of elegant grace; his eyes were calm and deadly; his expression, for once, relaxed, handsome, alert.
The noise of metal on metal rang like a chime in the room and hung in the air a moment, lingering.
The next instant: the doctor stood embarrassed, his mouth open in surprise, dumbfounded, as if his perfect grace with a sword had been a reflex, a mistake. The miniature lantern rolled to rest near his feet.
Still distracted, now the doctor bent to pick up the silver light.
It went dark at his touch.
By the time he straightened, his old sardonic expression had returned, and, in the light from the oil lamp on the floor (which seemed dim and unclear in contrast), Wendy could see the little prim lines of bitterness reappearing around his mouth and nostrils.
“Well!” exclaimed Wendy. “I wasn’t expecting that!”
II
“Nor was I, my dear,” said the doctor in a dry tone. He handed the little lantern over to her.
“Then you’re human,” she said. A spot of light appeared within the lantern’s depth, faintly at first.
“Perhaps too much so,” he said dryly. “The magic here will not serve me; it knows me for a traitor and an oathbreaker.”
Raven said, “Who sent you? What. . . what are you?”
“A doctor, actually. And an accountant and a barrister and a sailor and a pipefitter. I was a priest before that, and a soldier, and oh, so very many things. I have many dreary lifetimes of useless skills to burden me. But now I must see to my charge.” And he turned his back to them and stepped toward the door.
“Wait!” Raven started to follow after him.
“You must stay and watch the patient, man!” the doctor said.
“Not unless you stay and answer questions, you know!” said Raven back.
“There is no time!” The doctor flourished the sword, pointing to the eastern windows. “The creatures of Nidhogg are upon us.”
Wendy said, “Three questions, then.”
“I beg your pardon . . . ?”
“Three questions, and we’ll help you on with your armor. This is yours isn’t it? There’s only one suit for north and south and east, but two for the west, and this other suit is rusted, not brand-new like this one.”
The doctor bowed, a courtly elegance. “Ask, my lady.” And he threw his cloak aside, gesturing toward the mail shirt.
Raven said, “Who sent you?” And he started to heave the mail shirt up over the man’s shoulders.
The gathering storm beat at the windows. There was a rumble of thunder.
“I was summoned down once again from the Tower in the Autumn Stars, where my lord lies sleeping, called by the coven of good witches who guard England from all invasions. Ouch! Not so hard, there. No, that’s for the arm. The coven are too old and feeble to come themselves. One is a file clerk in a small museum . . . pull the buckles tighter . . . one putters around with potted plants and lives with a hundred cats . . . left shoulder, left shoulder . . . the last one is at the nunnery at St. Anne’s in Oxford. They gave me those clothes, the most modern they had to spare.”
Wendy smiled and said, “Why did they send for you?”
“I cannot be defeated in combat. But. . .” and now he looked up at the ceiling, breathed a deep sigh, blinked. When he lowered his gaze again, his mouth was set in a grim line. “I betrayed my best friend, who was also my king. And not just any king—scoundrels and cowards, most who wear a crown, liars and cheats like all men with power become—but the most just and fair-minded man . . . well. Enough of that. My punishment is that I will never fight in the Last Battle. During the Apocalypse, my sword, brave Durindel, will rust, in idleness, while other men win glory. They sleep the sleep of the righteous and smile, dreaming sweet dreams. And I, I must stay awake for all these slow ages, and watch and guard. Like a little boy who must watch the Christmas tree, all alone at Yuletide eve, but be sent away when church bells ring the morning welcome; guarding presents other little boys will open. Enough! I have answered a dozen question’s worth!” And he pulled the plumed helmet out of Wendy’s hands and started to turn away.
“Wait!” said Wendy. “Let me buckle on your sword belt.”
He turned slowly back. “My lady, I. . . it is not a thing a woman does, except for a man who . . . that is . . .”
Wendy knelt down and put her arms around his waist and began passing the long belt once and twice around him. “Oh hush up! I’ll do it if I want. You’ll wear out your face if you don’t stop frowning! I’m not going to give you my kerchief unless you smile!”
“You have a kerchief ?”
“Well, I’ve got a packet of Kleenex in my purse, and they’ll have to do.”
And so he smiled, standing there with his arms spread, while she pulled the belt for a third time around.
Wendy buckled up the heavy buckle of the war-belt, and said, “There now. Third question! What is this house?”
He drew a deep breath. “My lady, this is the final house where magic dwells. It is the same awake and asleep, the only place left on Earth the two realms touch. Because of this, it is also the gateway through which the creatures that haunt men’s nightmares must come if they are to conquer Earth. If the house should change, even by the smallest thing, the glare from a flashlight, for example, it moves away from its counterpart in the other realm. But this house also guards the gate where good dreams fly; if this house should fall, all dreams will die.”
Raven said, “If house is so important, why are there not more people here? An army?”
“Who cares, these days, to see that dreams are kept alive?”
Wendy said, “And you?”
“My lady, I shall exit now by a door of dreaming, now that I am garbed once more as one who dwells in fairy-land might be. You shall not see me when the sun is up; but I shall hold them back. The terror of my sword shall hold them back, if God so wills, while the Redcrosse Knight and the Warred War Queen watch over me.”
“Protect yourself, eh?” Raven handed him his shield, which was set with three fleurs-de-lis on an azure field.
Wendy took out a paper handkerchief and tucked it into the back of his gauntlet, and stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.
Now he did smile, and some of the lines of bitterness around his mouth were smoothed away, not to return, and, for that moment, youth, boldness, and dignity seemed to shine from his face.
He knelt and drew his sword and held it by the blade, the hilts up, so that the shadow of its cross fell between them. “May St. George and Malen Ruddgoch Ren, and all the warrior-angels of Trajan’s Heaven see all who take up arms in holy cause safely to the battle’s end, or else to rest and sweet repose in heaven!”
He stood and reversed the sword and raised the blade in crisp salute, turned smartly on his heels, and marched away, spurs jangling, naked sword in one hand, bright shield in the other. He dwindled down the corridor and was gone, and the ringing echo of his footsteps faded and died.
III
North of the master bedroom was a small chamber with windows looking east. One wall was made of sliding panels, which, when folded back, allowed Wendy and Raven to sit at the small table there and still see the grandfather’s bed and hear his faint, untroubled snore.
In the middle of the table was set Wendy’s miniature lamp, shining with strange argent rays. The silvery radiance played over their faces and hands, leaving the rest of the room in shadow, making hair and clothing seem dark and distant. Raven, to ward off the chill, had appropriated the doctor’s Inverness cape, and buttoned it to his throat. (Wendy thought the outfit made him look splendid, matching his dark hair and beard, and bringing out the gray color in his eyes.) Raven’s shadow on the wall behind was huge and dark; Wendy’s shadow, slenderer, was never still, but danced from wall to roof. The bas-relief carven on the panels behind her appeared and disappeared as her shadow came and went: a one-armed man tying up a wolf with a strand of gossamer; a blindfolded archer shooting an arrow made of mistletoe into the sun.
“Guess what!” Wendy leaned forward, eyes bright with delight. “Guess who I met!”
“No, my little bird, I tell you first. I know where magic talismans are kept. Grandfather told me in his sleep. See here.” And Raven took out his little card.
“You found out! That’s wonderful!”
“Not so wonderful. Grandfather is in nightmare-place.”
Now he looked at the card by the lantern light, but the letters seemed to swim and tangle in his vision like gibberish. When he took his flashlight from his pocket, however, and turned it on, he could read the card easily, even though the fading yellow bulb was dimmer than the silver lamp.
Raven read the horrifying message (omitting the mentions of torture and dismemberment), while Wendy looked on, eyes wide.
When he had finished, she said, “That’s terrible! How mean! Maybe we can wake the grampa up! Poor man. One of the stories I read said something about curing this with laurel leaves.”
But Raven was staring at the miniature lamp. It had gone out when the flashlight beam touched it and lit up again when he doused the flashlight. Now he was flicking the beam off and on with quick twitches of his thumb, making the lantern pulse like a strobe light. Shadows jumped.
Wendy laid her small white hand on Raven’s large muscular one. “Stop that!”
“Sorry. Giving you headache, eh?” He rubbed his eyes. “Am very tired, you know.”
“My friend says he won’t come out while the flashlight is on like that.”
Raven jerked his head upright. “Friend?”
“I found him in the downstairs bedroom, next to Mr. and Mrs. Knight. There was a tall, dark man sleeping there, and this little guy standing on the bedpost.” Now she stroked her hair, smiling an impish smile, her eyes, turned to one side, bright with mischievous joy. “Come on out, little guy! Come on! He won’t hurt you!”
Raven thought he saw a motion in her hair, as if she had something the size of a squirrel clinging to her shoulder, using her bangs like drapes to hide behind.
A little voice chirruped, “Faith! And ye swore to keep me hid! Don’t go grabbing me so, ye wench, or I’ll lay to with me trusty blade!”
There was a flurry of motion in her hair, and she reached up with both hands, flinching and crying out, “Ouch!” as if a cat were clawing her.
Raven jumped to his feet, blinking and rolling his eyes, dumbfounded.
She pulled her hands down and dropped a little man on the center of the table with a hollow thud. He landed spryly on his tiny feet.
The creature was nine inches tall, dressed all in green, with a little red cap with a feather in it. He wore doublet and hose, and his slippers had curling, pointed toes. In one hand he held a miniature sword, and he slashed the air toward Wendy with fierce bravado.
Wendy put her scratched finger in her mouth to suck on.
“Leave me be, ye faithless wench! Yer solemn oath I had ye’d leave me be unseen! By the Eye of Balor, I swear this day will bring ye true grief! True grief! Ye’ll rue this day!”
“But it’s only Raven,” Wendy said. “He doesn’t count.”
Raven leaned forward over the table, squinting, and reached out, his forefinger and thumb arched in a tense circle. Raven flicked the sword out of the little man’s hand and sent it spinning across the room, where it tinkled against the far wall with the noise of a pin dropping.
Raven laid his big muscular hands on the table, one to either side of the little man, and leaned down toward him. “Apologize. Promise me nothing you do or say will hurt my wife. Promise. Or I smash you like a bug.”
The little man rolled his eyes and blew out his cheeks, slapping his sword hand against his hip as if to take the sting out of it. Then he doffed his cap and bowed to Wendy, in a way so charming it made her giggle. The little man said, “Sorry there, lass; me blood was up. Nothing I do or say will hurt ye at all.”
“Who are you?” said Raven, staring down, his face gone blank with the effort to control his surprise.
The little man doffed his cap again and bowed, one hand on hip, back leg bent, front leg straight, the feather on his cap brushing the table top with a flourish. “Call me Tom O’Lantern, so please yer lordship; royal shoemaker to the Court of his majesty, Finn Finbarra, King Under the Mountain. I only make left shoes.”
Wendy leaned forward, her eyes sparkling, and said in a loud stage whisper: “I think it’s an elf!”
IV
Raven said, “Little man, do you know where sitting room might be? Or what looks like the man who is founder of this place, where is his picture, eh?”
Tom O’Lantern doffed his cap and scratched his head, rolling his eyes and blowing out his cheeks, and made a great show of puzzlement and deep thought, so that Wendy giggled again.
“Not poor Tom, sir, not me, with nary a thought in me head. Never have been in the High House before, not me, for I’m a polite soul (as most we wee folk must be, seeing as we haven’t the size to be rude, if you take my meaning) and we don’t never go where we’re not invited, no sir.”
The wind outside, which had been building up to storm, now diminished away. There was a final roll of thunder; then silence. The pounding of the waves against the seawall grew less.
Wendy clapped her hands. “Sir Lancelot has driven the giants and the storm away!”
Tom said, “Or just given them pause while they gather their strength.”
Wendy chirped: “Now let’s find those talismans!”
“Where do we look for talismans?” asked Raven, “Which room is sitting room?”
Wendy hopped to her feet. “I’ll go look around! You stay here and guard Grandpa!”
Raven looked glumly at the sleeping figure in the other room. His shoulders slumped, and his eyes were red with fatigue. He had been, after all, awake since early morning of the previous day; it was now near dawn.
Wendy went away, holding her little lamp, her footsteps a rapid tapping on the floorboards of the hall. The little light she held diminished to a star; she turned and waved, then rounded a corner. Her light was gone.
Raven slumped in the chair next to the sleeping man’s bed. “Why am I pulling this watch? Maybe should not let wife go out alone. . . but, then, what is harm? Is nothing here but bad dreams. They cannot hurt us. Bah! I do not even believe in this! Magic and so on. Foolishness!”
Tom O’Lantern climbed up onto the footboard of the bed. “Aye, but when you’re right, you’re right! Magic is all bad business, and a soul shouldn’t get caught up in it. But hey! I’ll help ye keep awake! And do ye play at chess and have a board?”
15
Rumors
of
War
I
“Ahoy, friend! Ahoy! There’s news about the battle!”
“Hoy, shipmate! Come up here on the beach with me, away from the spray and surge of the sea. You never know what might be overhearing what you say, you stand too close to the surge and spray.”
“Hoo, ha! A nice place, a nice view! A short rise there to hide us from those other two. Hey! Let’s whisper now, we don’t want them to be hearing what we say!”
“They’ll hear enough ere long. Captains of all companies to report to the Grand Marshall; that’s the rumor I heard.”
“Rumor?”
“Orders. The orders I heard.”
“Ah, aha. Ha! Ha! You look so fine and fit! Haven’t changed a bit since last we met, old friend!”
“And when just was that? Maybe it slipped your mind . . .?”
“You told me not to tell you, friend. Recall? No secret passwords, you said; it’ll make it too hard for the secret police to catch the delators.”
“Aha. Ha! Haha! But that was all in jest! Beside, the secret police do not exist! Their Chief once told me so.”
“Or someone who looked like him, if I take your meaning?”
“Hoho! Very funny! You were ever one with the jokes and jest, yes, sir. I recall you well.”
“I never joke, myself.”
“I recall that too. Now, then, what’s your report, my man?”
“I? I report to you? Since when do captains report to mates?”
“Never, ha! Ha! That’s why I await your report, my mate.”
“Oh no. I have it on good authority (good authority, mind you!) that I was appointed Captain here.” “Oh.”
“You look downcast. What’s amiss, shipmate?”
“I was appointed myself, by Mannannan, mind you, before we set sail.”
“In front of witnesses, do you think? Neutral witnesses?”
“Hard to say, hard to say. One of them was trying hard to look like he fit in, so he might not have been Mannannan’s tricksy boys all playing at being witnesses, but a real honest witness either there by mistake, or only pretending, if you catch my drift.”
“Mannannan privately appointed me captain, too.”
“Mannannan himself ? Or someone who looked like him?”
“Ar! Arrgh! Mannannan and his tricksy tricks! He’ll pay the price when we find out who the real Seal King might be! He can’t hide forever! I’m convinced he’s the chamberlain, myself. The chamberlain had a knowing squint to him when last I was in Heather Blether.”
“Keeper of the Privy Purse. How else would he make sure his orders are obeyed?”
“Nar! Gar! If he’s the real Seal King, we’ll never find him; all the real Seal Kings we found before weren’t him at all.”
“I think it might be Mannannan, myself.”
“Looking like the Seal King with a gold crown on his head, whiskers and bloody teeth and all? Too subtle. Too subtle by half.”
“Well, until the real Seal King is found, one of us is Captain and should hear the report and tell the Grand Marshall.”
“Hmph. Ha! Aha ha! No one’s here. If anyone asks me, I’ll say I reported to you; if anyone asks you, you say you reported to me. If no one knows who is really Captain, there is no blame and no responsibility!”
“Oho! Oho! ‘Tis clean against the law to say such things. You might be trying just to entrap poor me. I’ll have the secret police on you for that.”
“I’m a lieutenant in the secret police! Don’t go trying to turn me in!”
“Yes, Captain, is that an order, Captain, sir? Ha!”
“Oho! Aha! Ha, Ha! Don’t go trying to push the blame on me! You wouldn’t be trying to make me captain if you hadn’t messed up good and sweet! What’s the news from the battle?”
“You were coming to tell me!”
“I wasn’t.”
“You said!”
“Didn’t.”
“You said! Ha!”
“I was only asking. There’s news about the battle? I said. Like that. It was a question.”
“So it is bad news.”
“Something fierce. Er . . . or so I’ve heard.”
“Arggh! Haha! Ha! You know, our people could take over Acheron and rule the lot of ‘em, the whole kith and kaboodle, if we ever got squared away, all organized neat and proper, shipshape.”
“Aye. And if the moon was cheese, we could eat it up for lunch.”
II
The two of them sat in glum silence for a time, watching the waves of the sea of dreams washing up against the shore, the deep the twilight of the sky above reflected in the black waters.
“Ar! I love the sea.”
“Aye. Once it gets in your blood, it never lets you go.” In the distance, across the waves, they heard a sound like thunder and the clash of arms, cries of pain.
III
“Ah. I’ve a thought now, mate! The kelpie boys over the hill there must be getting a report as well. Let’s sneak up on our bellies and keep an ear cocked. We’ll hear what they say. And that’ll be the report. Anyone asks, I’ll say I had it from you.”
“I’ll nip you till you bleed, if you do!”
“Ho ho ha. And how will you know me tomorrow? I’m only someone else today, only pretending to be me. When the real me finds this cloak missing from his wardrobe, he’ll be sure you took it!”
“He doesn’t even know who I am.”
“You are best friends! So you said!”
“Didn’t! I was only asking. Like it was a question.”
“Well, I’m going up. Stay here, and I’ll tell you what they say when I come back.”
“And I should believe lying filth like you, shipmate? Make way! Keep down! I’ll be coming too!”
“Psst!”
“Aye?”
“Is it true the Key Thief, the White Hart Slayer, Azrael de Gray, it is true he be one of us now? Njord of Skule Skerrie got killed and eat up by him, I heard, and the Wizard took his coat and became one of us!”
“Ah! You shouldn’t believe what you hear.”
“Then ‘tis false?”
“No, ‘tis true, sure enough. But you shouldn’t believe everything you hear, just in general. The Wizard, he’s in the House now, or dreams he is, and may get one of our people inside. I saw him wave from the window and signal to Captain Aegai of Atlantus.”
“Aegai’s dead. That’s Triton of Cantriff Gwylodd, but wearing his cloak.”
“No, no, shipmate. I have it on good authority that Aegai escaped with a cloak from Mannannan’s wardrobe and now serves aboard ship in disguise. Ha! Very good authority. Now hush! Let’s hear what the kelpie folk are saying down there.”
IV
A figure in silver armor came out of the sea, tall, straight, and handsome, atop a weak-kneed and dying charger. The horse was covered with sores and boils and puked as it stumbled forward. On the figure’s surcoat was a heraldic image of a face covered with swollen sores.
On grass above the shoreline, another silvery knight stood, with tall plumes of command nodding above his crowned helmet, and his leprous horse, with dry skin pealing in long strips off its crusted flesh, stood beside him, sniffing the grass as if too weary to eat. On the knight’s surcoat, and on the barding of his steed was repeated the image of a leper’s face.
The knight from the sea dismounted, raised his visor, and bowed down to his hands and knees. His face was stern and handsome, if a bit pale, but his eyes were haunted and uncertain.
The knight who wore the sign of the leper raised now his visor, too; he was as alike the other as a brother, with nothing unfit or deformed about his face; but his eyes likewise were the eyes of a melancholy man, sad, weary, hopeless.
The kneeling knight, he who wore the sign of the swollen face, now said: “Service and unselfishness! Unworthy to live, humble, impure, and fallen, I, who have no name, but am called the Knight of Pox, beg leave to speak.”
The other stooped to raise the kneeling knight by the shoulder. “Rise, brother, in the name of service and unselfishness. I, who deserve no name, but am called the Leper Knight, I am as unfit as you, or worse. Only the thought that I may be able to serve this army by the command which has been forced on me stays my hand from suicide.”
The kneeling knight rose. “Your kind words drive thorns into my heart, knowing I deserve no such mercy.”
“Mercy is only given to the undeserving, brother knight; that is why it is so precious. Rejoice in your pain; pain is the only true happiness. Tell me the news of battle.”
“A Child of Light (we know not who, for he was too bright to look upon) has come down from the City of the Autumn Star and stands atop the wall. His weapon is terrible and pitiless, unyielding, inhuman. He is the only man we fear; a man without guilt; and our weapons will not bite on him. The knights of Typhoid, Black Death, Bubonic and Larval Plague were swept back into the sea. They claim their mounts had failed them.”
The Leper Knight shook his handsome head in disgust, but, nonetheless, in a voice that was measured and even, he said, “Who are we to blame others? It is not our place to stand in judgment.”
“The knights of Fever and Frenzy struck many good blows.”
“Interesting. Perhaps this Child of Light is not so perfect as he pretends, if he is the type of man who blames his heats and passions for his flaws.”
“Still they failed. The Lady Knight, Syphilis, struck and drew blood, so that his leg failed. Yet he knelt upon the wall and continued to fight.”
“So, his guilt is an adultery. I know now which knight indeed he must be. His guilt is treason also, the disease which numbs and rots the body politic.”
“Your disease, my lord. We pray you to join the battle; of all the plagues which show mankind their littleness, which is more potent than great leprosy? Of all sins punished in Our Dark Home, who is gnawed upon more painfully than traitors?”
“Your kind words humble me; I am not worthy. And yet this man might fall. You said the Lady Knight did wound him. If so, some part of him must recognize what weak and pathetic things all mankind must be, ourselves and himself included. Did his arrogance and pride turn into wisdom?”
“No, my lord; the blow was not mortal. The kelpie knights were dashed away.”
“This is sent to teach us all humility.”
“Indeed.”
“What next occurred?”
“The Giant Surtvitnir rushed upon him, blazing torch in either hand, but was thrown back. The Child of Light was blinded, his hair all burnt away, yet now he fought more fiercely than before.”
“Surtvitnir thrown back? Perhaps the Child of Light, in his arrogance and folly, imagines that he can control his wrath and passion.”
“Yet the Giant Bergelmir struck him to the ground.”
“Ah, good! The Child of Light will thank us, for Bergelmir should teach him how mankind is a creature of nothing but guilt and agony. What next?”
“The Storm Princes rode down from black skies in their might and glory, whirling mountains of wind and fire. All the selkie and the kelpie lords, and the three Great Ones, Death, Doom, and Hate, now all came upon him at once, so thick the earth and sea were hidden beneath their numbers, and with battle-cries which made all heaven quail.”
“And?”
“My lord, man was meant for suffering. Arrogance and pride are the worst of follies, and defeat will teach us greatest wisdom.”
“Blinded, kneeling, and crushed, the knight rose up again to throw us back?”
“Yes, lord.”
“No kelpie passed the wall?”
“None. But no one of our allies did either. Whole armies and whole navies were overthrown, foundered, slaughtered. The Three Great Ones reeled back, bleeding. Even the ocean waves were cut so that the water bled.”
“None? Not one?”
“Well, my lord, we think perhaps one selkie pup slipped over the wall in the confusion. Also, Bergelmir is missing. Perhaps he achieved the wall.”
“One selkie pup?”
“And perhaps Bergelmir. Either that, or his body was flung away so far it landed beyond our eyesight.”
“How could one man accomplish so much!”
“Perhaps, my lord, the Child of Light is deceived, and still believes one man can accomplish miracles.”
“Poor man, to be fooled in that way.”
“Well, my lord, we are no better than he.”
“And yet, if he were without sin, he would be lingering in Celebradon, the Starry Citadel. If he is the traitor of old legend, his guilt in that may permit my weapon to wound him where thousands have failed. I will go and teach this Child of Light his lesson.”
“And what report shall we make to the Grand Marshall?”
“The truth, for the truth shall show us humbleness.”
“And the selkie?”
“Ah. They might be blinded with arrogance and pride if any report was given that one of their number succeeded where the kindly and merciful race of the kelpie has failed. If one does good deeds, they should be done in secret.”
“Wise, wise! The selkie would thank you, were they to know.”
“And I shall go myself against the Child of Light. His armor has one weakness, for it is cracked where he was a traitor.”
The two silver-armored figures, after a moment of prayer, turned and walked into the brine, leading their horses. And where they had passed, the sea turned to stinking blood, and clouds of flies and mites followed after.
V
“Hsst, shipmate. So who is the cabin boy we smuggled into the house? Is he from Heather Blether or Skule Skerrie?”
“Ah! Aha! Ha Ha! No matter who he is, I’ll not be telling you; he’s a dead one tomorrow night, flayed and stretched out to dry, and in my wardrobe by noon. By the time Mannannan comes by with any reward, ‘twill be me who collects!”
“Oh no. We must not prey upon each other. The Hidden Judges punish such crimes with death!”
“Ah? They say the wardrobes of the Hidden Judges are more full than any other’s. They say Mannannan is the worst of all and that one day, his whole kingdom will be no one but himself.”
“Who says so?”
“Oh? And who says the law is law? Only your ears have told you so, and they might be deceived!”
“It’s true, but I don’t believe you said that.”
“Perhaps I didn’t. You know our law: every man is innocent when no evidence can be trusted. Innocent as spring rain.”
The two were silent for a time, looking out at the waves.
One said: “We live in cold and bitter waters that taste the taste of human tears. I think my seal-wife is not the same woman I married long ago. My pups are grown, and some have turned to strangers, or enemies. And in all the long years I’ve spent at sea, the waves have never found rest, never found a shape that pleased them, but ever and always rise and fall and crash and rise again, unsteady, uncertain, offering no place to stand. What if the kelpie cheat us of our due? We can’t be certain, truly certain, mind, they mean to, or that things seem what they seem.”
“What brings on this melancholy, shipmate? ‘Tis a woman, as I think I know.”
“And right you are. I saw her through the windows of the library, from afar, lit by the light of an elf-lamp, silver as a midnight sea, pretty as a mermaid, with hair as black as a seal-pelt, and eyes that twinkled mirth! She had the air of fairy fair about her, lad; and I promised that she must be mine! I’m over the wall as soon as the Leper Knight drives off the Daylighter.”
“I’ll report you to Mannannan if you do. You see, I know you now: you be Captain Aegai of Atalantus deep.”
“No. That’s you. I’m Mannannan himself. Stand away, or I’ll weave a necklace of your red blood with my white teeth.”
“I’ll not meddle with ye, lord; but I put this geas on you; that you stand till I sing you a song. You break my geas, my lord, and I’ll mock your name from Iceland to the Cape of Storms.”
“I’ll not meddle with poets, man. Sing your piece.”
The other sang a song:
The silkie be a creature strange,
He rises from the sea to change
Into a man, a weird one he,
The silkie come from Skule Skerrie.
When he be man, he takes a wife;
When he be beast, he takes her life;
Ladies, beware of him who be
A silkie come from Skule Skerrie.
A maiden from the Orkney Isles,
A target for his charm, his smiles,
Eager for love, no fool was she;
She knew the bane of Skule Skerrie.
And so, while silkie kissed the lass,
She rubbed his neck with Orkney grass;
This had the magic power, you see,
To slay the beast from Skule Skerrie.
Then he added: “There’s old wisdom in old songs, my lord. Beware those land women.”
“Ha! Ha! And who would clasp one of our cold maidens, smelling of salt and sea fish, when he could have a daylight lass, smelling of the flowers they say grow up there.”
“Orkney grass grows up there too. As does the herb of the Moly Wand. Besides, she might not have been so fair and fresh as you thought you saw, my lord. You only saw her with your eyes, you know.”
“Alas, alas, ‘tis true.” He heaved a great sigh and rolled his eyes. And then he said at last: “Well, they say when darkness, darkness covers all, and all sight fails, our eyes will cease deceiving us.”
16
The
Father
of
Frost
I
Peter and Wil were still arguing as they entered the front door. Both stopped short when they saw Emily lying in a heap in the middle of the den, in front of the fireplace. Next to her, the remains of the dismanteld telephone were strewn, as well as the vandalized speaker from the stereo set. The litter of a dozen burnt match heads lay atop scorch marks on the rug around her.
Wil rushed over to her and shook her shoulder, but she did not wake. Peter, more cautious, simply looked around the room before entering. He saw three cigarette butts in the ashtray, of different brands, and three unwashed coffee cups still sitting on the kitchen counter, one still steaming. A flush of rage reddened Peter’s face, and his knuckles grew white on the arms of his wheelchair. He felt violated. With short, angry jerks of his arms, he wheeled his way across the den, down the corridor.
A moment later, Wil rushed into the room, and spoke in a panicky voice, “You’ve got to do something! Call the hospital! Someone’s taken apart both the phones! More of your crazy son’s doing! This is your fault! Your fault! Where did he go? Where is he?”
Peter pointed to the pentagram chalked on the window. “Used this on you, didn’t he? Remember the names he used? Don’t say them if you know, but you gotta write ‘em down for me. It’s been so long for me, I don’t remember any of that garbage.”
“What do I care about that voodoo stuff!” screamed Wil. “Of course I don’t remember! I’m suing you and your crazy son! He must have drugged me! That’s it! Put something in the food at dinner! Now he’s got Emily!”
Peter leaned forward and slapped Wil across the face. It was an open- handed blow, but Peter had strong arms and shoulders. Wil staggered back across the room and fell against the closet door. He stood slumped against the closet door, rubbing his face, eyes aflame and breathing hard.
Now he stepped forward, cocking a fist.
“Go ahead,” said Peter. “Maybe I’ll even let you land the first blow. Then I break both your arms. Come on. Afraid to take on a cripple?”
Wil backed away.
Peter rolled forward. “You can wake up Emily with that nursery rhyme I told you. I’m going to go look for my son and the three men—maybe there were more—who took him. I want to know the name he used to knock you out. Part of the stuff Pa tried to teach me. You’re going to help me make up for lost time.”
Wil was still backing up. He looked at the pentagram on the window, his face growing pale with poorly hid superstitious fear.
“But you don’t know where your son is . . .”
“I know where to start looking. The name?”
“Morphine. Something like that. Morpheus . . .”
“Don’t say it!”
But Wil was already fainting. Peter, from his wheelchair, reached out a hand but could do nothing to catch him. Wil fell to the floor and struck his head against the carpet with a loud bump.
Peter looked down at the prone body. Perhaps he was recalling how Wil had not climbed down the slope to help him up again, back at the reservoir. The shadow of a sneer curled around his nose. “Told you not to say it.”
Then he looked up and saw the Chamber of Middle Dreaming chalked in perfect detail in the mirror, even to the statues of St. George and Malen the War-red War Queen standing beside the bed.
“Yeah,” he grunted. “I know where to start looking.”
II
Raven woke with a start and sat up, pulling the gray Inverness cape around him. He had fallen asleep in the chair beside Lemuel Waylock’s bed. What had woken him? He dimly remembered playing chess with the little man, trying to ask him questions about his life and existence, but getting nothing but overblown stories, myths, and riddles in return; long droning narratives, intricate with pointless digressions, softer than any lullaby.
Raven heard birdsong. Going to the window, he saw the sky was pale, although the earth was still in night’s shadow. The sun was below the horizon, but eastern clouds were tinted pink against the fading stars.
Dawn had woken him as it always did, despite his desire to sleep longer.
“Doctor du Lake not back yet,” yawned Raven. “And where is wife? Where—ah?!” Now he peered through the window, one hand on the shoulder plate of the samurai, one hand on the sill.
A section of brick wall had fallen to rubble. There were footprints, larger than an elephant’s tracks, leading through the dust and shards of broken brick.
Raven hunched in the window like a hunting cat, and his nape hairs prickled. His eyes moved back and forth across the scene, but no other part of him moved, except, perhaps, the hairs of his mustache as he grimaced.
Without a rustle of his gray cape, he slipped away from the window and left the room, moving quickly on silent feet. It was still as dark as night inside the house, but Raven had keen eyes and found his way. He descended a spiral stair half-hidden in an archway, and came into a chamber with roof- beams carven with silver stars and crescent moons.
The tall windows at the far end were gray with faint light. Raven took a boar-spear down from the wall where it hung on pegs, then sharply turned his head.
There were two statues flanking the four-poster bed: one of a man in chain mail, the other of a woman in helmet, kilt, and breatplate. The man had his foot on a snake that curled around his leg, and was stabbing the snake with a spear.
Tom O’Lantern stood on the woman’s shoulder plate, tying a cloth around the woman statue’s head. The man statue likewise had already had a blindfold wound around his helmet.
“Tom!” said Raven, his hand on the French doors. “Go find Wendy and make sure she is safe. Tell her I am going out. Have her watch sleeping Grampa! I must hunt. Something evil has climbed over the wall in the night.”
“Has it, now? Something evil? Well, fancy that!”
But Raven had gone.
III
Raven bent to touch his fingertips against the broken grass stems in the gardens. The footprint had been huge, larger than an elephant’s, round and toe- less, but manlike in its stride. Raven’s nostrils curled at a faint, strange odor.
Uphill and downhill he traced the tracks, despite the dimness of the light, a dim shadow himself in his long gray cape, passing without a rustle through the grass. Had the tracks been less large and clear, he could not have followed them by fading starlight.
Raven saw the steps were irregular; the creature had been wounded. When he saw, here and there, greenish-white droplets on the ground, he wondered at them. Taking up one from a leaf on a fingertip, he touched it to his tongue. The creature’s blood was made of bitter frost, salt like the sea, and smelled of copper. Because of the gloom (for the sun had not yet risen), Raven lost the trail across the lawn beyond the garden; but he continued in a straight line to the woods; and now he saw where branches and twigs two times his height had been shouldered aside, bent, and snapped.
It was a trail too broad to miss. On he ran, spear in hand, and the half-cape of his coat fluttered at his shoulders, cold wind in his beard and hair.
It grew darker. Wondering if somehow the dawn were turning backwards, Raven looked up. But no; a feather-light cold touched his face; first one drop, then another. It was beginning to snow, and clouds were smothering the coming dawn.
Now it was black as pitch. Raven turned his head from side to side. In each direction, he heard birdsong, in each direction save one. In that direction, he heard birds cry out their danger calls, heard the flurry of wings. His sharp ears caught the sound of a hare thrumming its hind leg against the ground, the warning signal of its kind.
On he went, feeling his way with his boar-spear as a blind man’s cane. Then, in the distance, he saw a light.
It was a few more moments till he reached that light. Here he saw a strange scene.
IV
The wood bordered an asphalt road. In the ditch, two wheels aloft, was a van Raven recognized. One headlight was smashed and blinded; the other shot its beam up at a crazy angle into the falling snow. The front window was cracked, the roof dented and caved in.
The road for a dozen yards around the van was slick with caked ice. Icicles hung from glittering branches, and snow touched all with frost. But only nearby; further off, the road was clear.
A huge bulk loomed in the gloom behind the van, gleaming white. For a moment, as it rounded the van, the reflections from the single headlight illumined it; though the thing would not step into the beam itself, but raised a broken tree branch as a club, to shatter the light.
Raven saw a monstrous thing, twice as tall as a tall man, or more, with hide that glistened like pale ice. What he thought at first were whiskers were no more than the clustered icicles flowing down from the mouth slit of the neckless, domelike skull that crowned the apparition. There was no face; or, rather, the faceplate of thick ice was broken only by two slits for eyes; a wider slit, as if for a mouth, below.
Then the headlight was gone. Immediately the taillights blinked on. Now only the periodic yellow flickers from the taillight’s emergency blinkers lit the scene. A gunshot rang out, but Raven’s heart leapt for joy, for he knew Peter was still alive inside his van.
A dim, huge shadow, the giant glided back. Now came a noise like rushing arctic wind, and cold struck Raven that was so bitter that tears came to his eyes, and he gasped for breath.
The yellow light blinked off, then on, then off. It was dark, then dim, then dark again. Raven squinted at the huge rounded silhouette, at the pale clouds streaming out from its faceplate. The giant was breathing on the van, and flurries of snow grew on everything in the area: the broken van, the road, the grass, the trees.
Raven waited for a moment of darkness, and dashed across the road on silent feet, entering the woods on the far side. It was the work of a few moments (dark, then dim, then dark again) for him to move through tangled brush and dry twigs to a point somewhat behind the squat bulk of the monster, and he made no more noise than a hunting fox.
Behind the giant, Raven was out of the wind it blew, and while he was still cold, it no longer hurt his lungs to breathe. He knew Peter, at the heart of that wind, could not survive the blast for long.
The yellow light blinked off. Raven rushed out from the trees, boar- spear in both hands, silently running, his gray half-cape like wings. The light returned; he braced his legs; he roared; he struck.
The spear blade skittered off icy plates armoring the monster’s huge rounded back, but skipped up and lodged within the armpit.
It was dark. Raven, shouting, threw his weight behind the spear and drove the point home.
The monster made no noise, but it turned its domelike head with massive slowness. Raven saw the creature’s noseless profile; then it was dark; then he saw the faceless face. The thing’s head turned like an owl’s.
Dark; Raven’s palms stung as the giant swatted the spear out of his hands with a sweep of its club. He heard the spear haft snap.
Light; the spear point was still lodged in the armpit. One arm hung limp and useless; the other raised the huge wooden truncheon.
Dark; Raven stepped back, slipped, caught himself on his fingertips, his knees not quite on the ground, his movements making noise. No blow came yet.
Light; for a moment, the blank eyeslits looked down at where Raven crouched on snowy grass. Raven stared back up at that featureless, inhuman face. There was a long hiss as the giant drew in its breath.
Raven felt backward with his foot, found a rock not slippery with snow. “Now I know how Wendy’s elf must feel, I think.”
Dark; the blast of freezing wind from the giant’s mouth slit struck Raven with shocking cold. He heard the truncheon whistling toward him.
Raven jumped, pushing off the rock, and the blow missed him, but caught the long tails of the cape he wore, throwing Raven from his feet and sending him across the icy road.
Light; the giant, massive and quiet as an iceberg, drifted across the road toward him, truncheon raised. Raven scrambled for the ditch, his fingers clawing icy road.
Dark; Raven fell into the ditch beneath the van, where, he hoped, the giant could not reach him.
Silence.
Light; the giant was in the middle of the road, truncheon lowered, tilting its huge, faceless head as if listening.
Dark; Raven waited in the cold for huge hands to topple the van or to sweep under the wheels like a man sweeping under the couch with a broomstick to kill a mouse hiding there.
Light; the giant had turned and was slowly gliding away off down the road. It was dark again, then light. The giant was lost in the darkness, hidden in the curtain of falling snow. But Raven saw its slow, painful movement, and wondered how severe its wound had been.
Darkness; the blinkers had been shut off.
A flashlight beam came down from overhead. “Hope you’re okay.”
“Am okay.”
“Good. You got to help me out. Lost one cane, and my forklift won’t come off the back at this crazy angle.”
V
Raven stood up, bruised, aching, but miraculously unhurt. Through shattered windows he saw Peter on his belly, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. The hand that held the flashlight had a metal cane dangling from one wrist.
“Thanks. Saved my life. Won’t forget it. Just in time, too.”
“What is happening? What are these strange things happening?”
“Well, Big Whitey there pushed my van off the road with its hands when I ran into it. Broke my drive train. But it could not get into the van unless I invited it (I guess it thought the van was a type of house), but it whacked out my windows and was waiting for me to freeze.”
“But what is that giant thing?”
“A giant.”
“Oh.” Raven stroked his beard. “Why did spear hurt it, but bullets bounce off ?”
“Don’t know. My guess is, it knew what spears were, not bullets. Believed in spears. Something like that. Don’t know why it left when it was winning, either. You going to help me down or stand there jawing?”
By the time Raven had carried Peter out of the wrecked van, put him down, gotten out the wheelchair, picked him up, and put him in it, a dot of flickering yellow light coming toward them through the forest became clear; it was a man, carrying fire in one hand.
As he came closer, Raven saw it was Galen Waylock, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, with a purple bedsheet tied around his shoulders like a cape. On a string around his neck he wore six tiny metal disks that looked like parts taken out of a machine. In one hand was a broomstick; in the other, a frying pan held burning rags that smelled of oil. It was from this the firelight came. Galen glanced at it every few moments as he came forward, lips pursed in concentration.
Now he looked up. “Father, the High House is under attack. We must go to it. Have I your permission?”
“The house can go to the devil for all I care!”
Galen blinked. “You renounce your claim to it, then?”
Raven laid a warning hand on Peter’s shoulder and started to speak, but Peter said angrily, “The house can go jump into the sea for all I care! I want to know what you think you were doing with Emily!”
Raven said softly in his ear, “Is not Galen! Man named Azrael de Gray is taken over his body!”
“Eh? How do you know?” he whispered back.
“Wendy said so! You know, my crazy wife.”
“That’s good enough for me!” grunted Peter, and he started to draw his gun.
Galen pointed with his broomstick. “Morpheus! Somnus!” Peter’s right hand went numb, and he dropped the gun, yawning. He dropped the flashlight and held up his left hand, middle fingers curled, pinky and forefinger extended. The light struck pavement and went out. Peter was yelling, “Apollo! Hyperion! Helion!”
Raven, unafraid, meanwhile, rushed forward across the road, hands up, ready to take the boy in a flying tackle.
Galen threw the frying pan into the snow. The light extinguished, all was utterly black. Raven swept the area with his arms, but felt nothing.
Raven crouched, listening. No one can walk in snow without making noise; yet he heard no one.
But by the time Peter found his dropped flashlight and turned it back on, Galen was gone.
Peter said, “How soon till sun up?”
Raven sniffed the air. “This time of year? Half an hour, maybe less. Why?”
“His power will be weakest at dawn, especially dawn on a Sunday. He must be in a dreadful hurry. He’s got to get into the house in the next half hour. I think he’s got other people with him, other human beings, I mean. We gotta get there first. You got good legs?”
And then they were rushing down the road. Raven was sprinting at top speed, his legs pumping like pistons, pushing the wheelchair, its wheels humming, while Peter sat leaning forward, arms straight out before him, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, its beam twinkling in the falling snow.
Then Raven said, “Wendy!”
And he ran even faster.
17
The
Slaying
of the
Unicorn
I
Wendy found the room she was sure was the right one; it seemed just perfect for a sitting room. Here were large, comfortable chairs, a low table, a couch. Above the huge fireplace was a coat of arms of a winged horse atop crossed keys. Opposite was a portrait of a stern-eyed, harsh-faced, dark- haired man, holding a skull in his lap. This skull was as delicate as a deer’s, with a single spiral horn rising slender from its center.
The portrait seemed screwed to the wall, and, holding up the miniature lamp, Wendy searched in vain for some hidden catch or latch. But the silver light showed no such thing.
Wendy was stumped. She went to the corner and stood on her head, her skirts falling up about her shoulders. After her face was red, she righted herself and sat with her face screwed up, fingers tapping her temples.
“I’ve got it!” Her eyes popped open. “The talisman must be beyond the picture in the dream-realm. I’ve got to go to sleep and step into the picture in the dream realm to get the things! (I always get such good ideas if my brain feels all filled up.)”
Even though she was very tired, she thought a fire would cheer up the room. It took her only a few minutes to find faggots of firewood piled in a strange little closet down the hall, as well as a tinder box. The fire starter was shaped like a grinning dragon.
In a few more minutes, she was curled up before a blazing fire. Wendy had pulled up the bearskin rug; the fur was heavy, warm, and soft.
As she lay on the couch, staring up at the dark-eyed man, his frightening eyes seemed to shift and stir in the firelight. Wendy turned around on the couch and put her head on the other arm rest, so that she was looking at the winged horse instead.
The lantern burned like a star on the mantelpiece. “Wonder how you turn that thing off ?” she yawned. “Gee, I wish I had brought a book to read from the library.”
Then she said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Raven found me like this? ‘Vife, vat you doink, sleepink on de job like dis?’ ‘Gee, Raven, I was searching for the talismans!’ Heh, heh.”
Her eyes half closed, and her unbound hair lay spread across the white bearskin fur. “I wish Raven were here to tuck me in, to kiss and cuddle me. He’s so strong! He can pick me up in one hand. Mm. And hold me down in one hand so I can’t get away. My Raven!”
And then she was asleep.
II
Wendy got up and found the curved metal hook that held the picture to the wall, even though she had searched that place before. But there it was now, glinting in the firelight. She undid the hook, and the picture swung open on hinges.
III
Beyond was a forest of slim, silvery trees, with slender leaves as white as snow; a forest as beautiful and pale as a grove of cherry trees in blossom, and scented with subtle perfumes; and the air was cool and fresh to make every breath a delight. Bright as broadest daylight, but without shadows, was the light, so that everything was clear and pristine to the eye; and, nonetheless, the stars above showed clear as diamond points.
It was no forest known to Earth.
And all things, the trees, the grass, the outcroppings of precious stones, seemed each and every one to be most perfect, being each one as it was truly meant to be, as if its shadows down on Earth were no more than reflections or reminders, intended to recall to human eyes the things the human soul knew could exist in higher worlds, the way a picture in a locket was intended to remind one of one’s true love, when that love was far away, but had promised to return.
Wendy had walked a short way into that forest of pure beauty when her happiness turned to horror and dread. The sky went dark, as if blotted out by clouds, and the petals of the pure white leaves began to turn and fall. Like maple leaves in autumn, these white leaves turned red as blood in midair, and soon the grass was covered as if with rubies.
And somehow, Wendy knew, this autumn would never find a spring; that, unlike earthly trees, which perish and return each year, these trees, intended for eternal spring, would pass into unending icy winter, never to wake again.
Wendy fell weeping, shedding tears as thick as falling leaves.
As the leaves turned and fell, Wendy began to see a delicate shape outlined against the nearby trees, invisible erenow against a background which had been unstained white, now becoming more clear as more leaves bled from naked twigs.
The creature was as graceful as a doe, stronger than a steed from Araby, with a coat like snow; and a mane and tail like moonlight; with a single horn, like a spiral rapier, poised upon her brow.
More leaves died behind her, and their whiteness left the world, and her terrible beauty came into view, for she grew by degrees distinct against the angles and shadows of nude branch and dry twig.
She stepped closer, her split hooves sending up hovering rustles of red leaves, while those few pale leaves that had not yet lost all their whiteness, lingering in the air, danced slowly down all around her, like a gentle, warm, and scented snow. A sudden wind on high made all the tree crowns bow, making all things invisible within a blizzard of pale white leaves, except her stately shape, her bowed head, stepping nearer.
The unicorn touched Wendy’s shoulder with her horn, like a queen knighting her champion. Immediately, Wendy’s sorrow fled, and she was filled with a sense of quiet joy and abiding strength. It seemed to her then that whatever power had made this place, if pleased with it, would make it so again, once all the stain had been healed and cleansed away. And that power might be as close as the unicorn had been when all the leaves were blooming, looking on, unnoticed by mortal eyes, though standing in plain view.
The unicorn laid her head in Wendy’s lap, and the girl petted the gentle beast softly. Then Wendy giggled, “What would Raven say! He’d really take it in the wrong way if he knew you thought I was a virgin.”
The unicorn raised her noble head, and Wendy was saddened to see two crystal tears falling from the creature’s lavender eyes. “Oh . . . What’s wrong? What’s wrong . . . ?” Part of Wendy’s sorrow was because, having been comforted by the creature, she had no comfort to give in return.
The unicorn stepped away, arched her lovely neck, pointed with her horn.
Two trees whose leaves were utterly red now grew blackened and corroded along their trunks, and a hideous stench came forth. From between their rotting trunks there came a man, and deep twilight radiated from his person, for the shadow on the forest came from him. Across his shoulders was a cape made of white fur from winter foxes, and from the center of his helm, a steel spike protruded. His visor was made from the skull of a horse. And his face beneath . . .
It was the dark-eyed, stern-faced man Wendy had seen in the portrait.
Through his belt was thrust a spiral horn of silver.
A faint luminescence clung to the horn, as if it had been taken from a living being only minutes past and had not yet lost its vitality. In one hand, the man held a dripping knife. The blood was rich red, almost purple, and where the drops fell, even if they fell on the corruption radiating from the man’s feet, flowers sprang up.
The unicorn spoke in a voice like a woodwind. “Why have you slain my mate, the only other of my kind in all the world? We did not kill Adam when he was expelled from the garden, despite that he deserved to die, having eaten the fruit intended for our use alone.”
The man said, “Unicorns can pass unharmed and living between this world and the next. It is a power I intend mankind to have. I have drained your husband and taken the horn that holds the key to his power.”
The unicorn lowered her head, her horn gleaming like starlight on snow. “You boast of murder, but behold! The thrones, dominions, and potentates of heaven descend to my defense. Already I can feel my blood transmute to ichor; they have granted me immortality, that my race will not die utterly, though I am its lone subject now. Already they strip your old name from you; the bird which holds it for you will no longer come down to your hand. I name you anew, and call you Azrael, after the Angel of Death.”
“I glory in this name, white hart’s wife! For I shall be the death of heavenly power and the birth anew of earthly life!” But his eyes were filled with hollow horror, despite the ringing defiance in his words.
The unicorn backed away, her lioness tail lashing. “If you would wrestle the scepter from the Most High, you shall receive it only as a rod across your back. For all things serve the All-Father, those who rebel as well as those who obey.”
“I will be satisfied, for now, with the scepter you carry, madam, on your brow.” And he strode forward, knife smoking, drenched red, and the trees and flowers turned black, curled up, and perished where his shadow fell.
The unicorn turned, looking back over her shoulder. “If you would do battle, behold! The morning star that is the emperor of Night has come down from starry heaven to defend me, brightest prince of the Celestial.” Beams of gold and white and blue pure light came shining through the trees, clear rays twining through the trees like dawn, but as if the sun were walking on feet through the forest, approaching. Music swelled; and that whole side of the forest grew too bright to look upon, even though the bearer of that light was hidden yet from view.
Onward it came, with a great rushing noise as of an avalanche, or perhaps the rustle of mighty pinions, and the music crashed into a roar of trumpets that shook both earth and sky.
The unicorn called out, her voice rising like a pealing bell above the din: “Surrender the horn, repent, and save yourself!”
But Azrael clutched the silver horn at his belt with tightest fist and turned the knife toward the oncoming hurricane of light.
The unicorn said to Wendy, “Mount upon my back, and I shall return you to the world and aeon right for you, for this is far before your proper time. Cling tight! For I am swift and can outrun the forgetfulness which otherwise would overcome you. You have been shown these things for a purpose. Ready?”
“Oh, yes!”
And Wendy dreamed of speed, speed, speed, and she laughed and screamed for joy.
Her arms around the unicorn’s strong neck, Wendy leaned forward and whispered in her ear as stars and clouds fled by underfoot, “Oh, and please, please, could you let me remember how to fly?” and she buried her face in the unicorn’s sweet-scented mane.
IV
The mane seemed to change beneath her hands, becoming the heavy, soft fur of bearskin. The light from the horn dwindled and became a tiny lamp on the mantel. Wendy was lying safely back on the couch, and the dim fire spread ruddy warmth through the darkened room, but a floating sensation seemed to thrill through her body.
Wendy got up and found the curved metal hook that held the picture to the wall, even though she had searched that place before. But there it was now, glinting in the firelight. Curious, she took up the miniature starlamp, and brought it close; the hook seemed to grow indistinct and hard to see.
Putting the lamp back, she undid the hook, and the picture swung open on hinges.
V
Inside was a small cabinet. On a velvet pillow sat a spiral horn of ivory, tipped with a tiny point of silver.
Wendy remembered words Galen had told her: “The Unicorn’s horn was fashioned into a Silver Key by the Wisecraft Cadellin. He gave us the Key. The Key can open the gate.”
She put out her hand and picked it up. It tingled slightly in her fingers.
“Okay. I’ve got the most powerful magic object in the world. Now what do I do with it?”
There came a rustling at the windows, and she turned and saw many eyes there, peering in. A throng had gathered outside the windows. Here were sailors in caps, with striped shirts and neckerchiefs, but their eyes were entirely black, like the eyes of beasts; and pressed up against the window- pane, creatures in long black coats with polished buttons, wearing tricorn hats, their faces black with sleek fur, their long whiskers like a cat’s.
One of them said, “Ahoy there, lass. May we come it?” And he smiled, showing his white and cruelly pointed teeth.
Wendy shrieked, crying, “No! Stay out!” and pulled the drapes shut with such vehemence that she was turned around and facing into the room.
Across the room, the stern, dark face in the portrait had turned to look at her.
“Surrender to me the Clavargent Key,” he said.
VI
She pointed the unicorn horn at him. “Stay out!” she cried. The picture at once grew stiff and immobile, no more than a painting once again, but with the figure’s head cocked at a different angle than it had held for centuries.
The sight frightened her. A voice from behind the drapes called out softly, “Now, lassie, you don’t mind if we come in? We have a game to show you, and pretty tricks!”
She snatched up the silver lamp and ran out of the room, her stocking feet slapping stone floor.
Wendy ran without knowing where she was running. She fled upstairs. A wide balcony overlooked the gardens; here was a giant, stepping over the trees, dressed in a coat of ash, his hair and beard the color of smoke. His face was terrible to look upon; teeth clenched, eyes aflame, deep lines of wrath graven into his cheeks; a face so angry, so wrathful, that it would never know peace again. Even as she looked out, he drew the two torches he wore at his belt and glared at them, and the fire in his gaze lit them both aflame.
She ran down a corridor. Here were many pictures of hunting scenes. She pointed the unicorn horn at the sphinx that crouched under the shade of a myrtle tree.
“Where is the country of gold where the talismans are kept?” Wendy demanded.
The painting turned to look at her: a haunting gaze, a cryptic smile. “You know where it lies and have seen its gates a thousand times.”
“Thanks! Go back to sleep!” And she ran.
A nursery rhyme ran through her head as she was running, “Five for silver, six for gold . . .” And she sought out the corridor of the crows.
Through the windows on her right, she saw torchlight. There, armored knights were riding rotting horses through the arbor, and their swords were dripping blood and pus, and a smell came from them that reminded Wendy of the hospital.
One of the knights cried out, calling on her not to be so selfish or so proud as to try to hold the House against them alone. She did not answer, but ran on.
There was an open window right in front of her, and a grinning, whiskered seal face peered in; smiling with sharp teeth, it made an affable gesture with its webbed hand. “Here, me pretty!”
Wendy shrieked and ran back another way, shouting for Raven.
She came out upon a balcony overlooking a roof.
The balcony extended along the south wing up to an open door in the distance through which she saw the tapestries and crows of the corridor she wanted. But she would have to pass along a gallery with nothing between her and the milling army in the courtyard below, not even a window, nothing except a line of posts holding up the overhanging roof.
A titanic, robed figure stepped over the building into the courtyard, far vaster than the giant of fire, vast as outer space. Her face was like a woman’s face, but made of iron; in her hands was a flail made of shackles and chains. Behind her, wading through the sea, another vast, hooded shape came, holding a lantern of trapped small lights (like the light she had seen once in Galen’s hand) and carrying a great sickle.
In another step, the dread figure was on the other side of the house.
Wendy hid the lamp in her pocket and started creeping along the balcony, one cautious step at a time. She held her breath and tiptoed, one step, another. . .
“Hoy mates, there she be!”
At once a great clamor arose, shouts and yells and laughter. Wendy broke into a run, screaming Raven’s name. She wondered why none of the monsters in the courtyard shot at her, even though some of the knights had bows, and some of the seals dressed up as pirates had flintlock pistols and muskets.
She was about halfway along the gallery when the screams and shouts fell hushed. Wendy tried to run faster, but now her stocking feet were hurting on the cold boards, and her breath was coming short.
In the silence, she heard a sad, pained whinny.
The Wizard wearing Galen’s body came silently down out of the sky on the back of a winged colt and landed on the roof the balcony overlooked, almost directly between her and her goal. In one hand he held a broomstick for a staff; a sheet of imperial purple swathed his shoulders. On his necklace, he carried amulets of power.
Wendy skidded to a stop, eyes wide.
The Wizard dismounted. Wendy saw the dream-colt had been cruelly used, her head tied tightly with black straps, her flanks cut and bleeding from marks of spurs and whip. The colt looked up, and her eyes were the sad, lavender color of the unicorn’s eyes.
Wendy’s sudden anger and pity for the beast gave her courage.
She straightened up and drew out her lamp; holding the unicorn horn like a sword, she walked forward, even though her legs were shaking. She walked toward the Wizard.
The same voice that had spoken from the picture now came from Galen’s mouth. His burning eyes were so magnetic, so penetrating, that Wendy wondered how anyone had been fooled for a moment into thinking this was Galen.
“Young one, what is in your hand is mine. Do you doubt I have a claim?”
Wendy, coming closer, saw that he was not standing on the balcony itself, but had his feet still on the rooftop next to it. She would have to walk by him to get to the door, but he was not actually blocking her path.
“You have no claim!” Wendy said. “Get lost!”
“You don’t mind, at least, if we discuss the matter? You surely wish to learn where your young husband is?” And he started to step forward between the posts.
“No!” she cried. “We have nothing to discuss! I don’t want to talk to you!”
He drew his foot back casually, but Wendy saw it tremble as if it had been stung, and she laughed.
And she walked by him, so close he could have reached out and touched her, but he did not. Her footsteps shook at first, then grew more firm, and she walked right past him.
Now he started walking along the roof, an arm’s length away from her, even with her steps. He could have reached out and grabbed her shoulder, but he did not.
“I bring you a gift. . .”
“Don’t want it!”
“You have entered my house without permission . . .”
“Have not! It’s not yours anymore!”
“I will depart, young miss, if you apologize, at least, for . . .”
She turned on him, eyes blazing, and said, “The bird which holds your name will not come to your hand again when you call!”
A look of grief and horror twisted his face, and he actually staggered back, dropping the broomstick, one hand clutching his stomach, one hand touching his face.
Wendy ran to the door, but she heard the noise of a dry sob behind her. At the door she turned.
Azrael stood only a few feet away, straightening up again, a look of cold pride smothering whatever moment of remorse had stung him. In a cruel and kingly voice, he cried out, “All I have done is for the betterment of mankind! I defy the gods and curse them! Their spirits and angels shall be the slaves of men as we were once their slaves!”
Wendy said back, “I know men like you! I’ll bet you did it for no one but yourself!”
“A wager! I accept it. I shall collect at a time and fashion of my own choosing, as the world shall witness.” And he stepped onto the balcony, reached out toward her with one hand, the other touching his necklace.
The colt behind him spoke in a voice like a woman’s voice: “Deny him the threshold of the door.”
And Wendy skipped back into the open doors. “I declare the balcony is outside the house! You can’t come over this threshold here, or any other door or window or chimney or opening into the house!”
The colt said, “Call upon the spirits of the world to witness.”
Azrael grabbed his necklace. “Euryale, be silent, I compel you by the ancient names that bind you.”
Wendy said, “Spirits of the world, witness this: the one the Unicorn named Azrael can’t come into the house, or send anything! Not at any time, nor by any means!”
Azrael said, “By what authority do you speak?” He stepped up to the door, but did not step in.
Behind him, the colt shook her head vigorously.
“I don’t have to answer you!” Wendy said, stamping her foot.
Azrael smiled cruelly. “Perhaps not. But I have servants from the waking world, men not bound by laws of magic. They are even now upon you. Listen.”
Downstairs somewhere and far away, she heard booted feet kicking open a door, and shouts. “Open up! Federal agents! Everyone here is under arrest! Fan out! Secure the area! The subjects are armed and dangerous, so shoot on sight!”
A second voice, farther away, but still clear: “Follow them. We get the things, we get the cash. Let the cops go first and get shot. We’re just here to party. Kill the men, rape the women.”
From another part of the house came the sound of breaking glass, and strange voices, slurred and intoxicated, lifted in song, and, with them, a third voice: “Forward, children, for the Dark Messiah commands! Hallelu- jah!”The house echoed with shouts.
“I will protect you from them. And I will safely find and restore to you your missing husband,” said Azrael, eyes glittering. And he extended his hand.
“Yield unto me the Silver Key.”
“Never!” she cried, and fled away down the corridor.
18
Battle Before
the
High House
I
It was still dark, though pink clouds foretold dawn. Raven and Peter were on the main drive leading to the house, rows of trees, whispering in the night wind, to either side. In the distance, the High House rose.
There were fires about the house; someone had laid torch to the arbors. Boiling black smoke rushed up from the garden walls, and leaping flames were spreading to the south wing.
Here, the grass was bare of snow, as if it had only snowed near where the frost-giant walked. Raven crouched on the grass, Peter’s flashlight in hand. He pointed.
“Three groups of men, coming here. First group wears boots and march; second group wears expensive sneakers, and they saunter and swagger like frightened men trying to look grand; third group are mixture of men and women, wearing long robes that brush the ground, and their leader wears slippers. He is older; bad feet. Third group walks slowly in a line. Some of them are swaying as they walk.”
Now Raven pointed. “Third group goes toward north wing, there. Twenty men, five women. Second group goes south wing, there. Ten men. First group goes straight ahead down this road. Thirty-five men, two of them carrying heavy burdens. If I was having more light, I could tell you more.”
“God, I wish I had had a man like you when I was out on patrol.”
“Also, there, a group of tracks leaves main body. Six men go off, seven men come back. New man is young, wearing sneakers, has robe or cape which brushes the ground, walks with a walking stick. But he walks, you know, stately. He is leader. Is Azrael.”
Peter said, “We can’t just go straight in if they left a perimeter patrol. But we’re dealing with a mixed command, probably not in radio contact with each other, and they’re attacking a fortified position.”
“Your house is fortified?”
“No, but if they’re smart they’ll act like it is. That means their attention will be forward; they’ll be trying to stop people from getting out, not people from getting in. Also, if their communication is bad, their fronts may overlap or have gaps. We gotta find one of those gaps. We should try the spot between the north and east wing, a place called the Chamber of Middle Dreaming. There’s an entrance there, but it’s not a main door, where, my guess is, the enemy will be concentrating their firepower.”
“You forget, though. Azrael or Galen know house as well as you know.”
To their right, south of the house, silhouetted between themselves and the spreading flames, they saw something huge walking slowly—something gigantic, with torches in either hand.
Raven doused the light.
Peter drew out his gun and swore. “I can’t get ‘em without giving away our position.” He gestured off through the chest-high bushes.
“Let’s go that way. If you’re strong enough to get me through the brush, do it. Otherwise, leave me, and I’ll get to the house on my own.”
“Ha! Strength is one thing I do not lack!” And he picked up the wheelchair, Peter and all, and crashed though the bushes.
He pushed the wheelchair across the lawn but could not travel at any very quick rate, and the wheels became tangled as they sank into the long grass.
Peter said, “Leave me. I’m slowing you up.”
Raven heard the slight tremor in his voice as he said it, as if this admission were the most difficult and heartbreaking to utter.
Raven said, “I—”
Then he heard a scream from the house, his wife’s voice, calling his name.
“Sorry, Peter!” And he sprinted away.
“Damn you! Take the gun!” Peter shouted. And then he clapped his hand over his mouth.
Running over the lawns to the north of the house, Raven made no more noise than a leaf blowing across the grass. He vaulted over a low wall with a swirl of his cape, landing in the garden beyond, out of Peter’s sight.
There was a movement in the shadows near Peter, a rustling from the bushes behind him. But Raven had disappeared with the lantern, and he could not see what was coming.
II
In the garden, near the garden gate, Raven came across tracks of six men going one direction, seven men the other. Here was where Azrael had met the leaders from the three groups.
He risked a moment of light, saw tangled and bloody leaves. Strange. Here were additional tracks, converging on the first set; creatures with webbed claws, or wearing square-toed, ill-fitting shoes. From the way the weight was distributed in the shoe print, Raven knew whatever foot had been forced into these shoes was not human. These creatures had come stealthily upon the group with Azrael, meeting them in the grove beyond the rhododendron bushes.
There were tiny hoofprints also, as if from a deer which appeared in the middle of the dirt path, prints appearing as if the deer had come out of nowhere. Raven looked again and found small spots of rich purple blood in the dirt, but no other deer tracks leading up or leading away; Azrael’s track led away from the place the deer appeared; but not toward. Another mystery.
He doused the light, crept forward, parted the bushes before him.
He saw a black, narrow shadow dressed in dead man’s bones, stinking of grave dirt, crowned with severed hands. Koschei’s back was toward Raven, and Koschei was bent over the bloody, skinless corpses of six men strewn in pools of fresh blood across the grass.
The men’s veins and muscles stood out on their flayed flesh, and blood welled up from between their bones and organs. The corpses were heaped in postures of agony and terror, as they had been when they died.
There were lights like the glimmer of fireflies coming from Koschei’s hand. This and the light from the pinpoints of his eyes were the only light illuminating the scene. Raven, from his angle, could see twin circles of pale, ghastly light caressing the corpses, shining wherever Koschei turned his head.
With his fingernail, Koschei slit open a dead man’s leg and drew out the thighbone, which he began to attach to the breastplate of his armor.
He bent down and began to slice open the man’s chest with long, smooth strokes of his fingernails.
“Cold! Always so cold . . .” The hissing, solemn voice murmured to itself: “Why should they have the warmth of their marrowbones inside them? Why does that warmth never sink into me? I need more bones. More bones. The bones of the little Wendy girl are rich with warmth and joy . . .I must have their living warmth to cloak me from my infinite, deep cold. . .”
Another voice from the small trees opposite: “Ar! Ye jackal! No cloak can warm you when your bones are ice.”
A manlike creature came forth from the trees, carrying a bloody burden. He was dressed in a seaman’s coat of splendid cut, with double rows of glinting buttons climbing his broad chest and crossed twin sashes holding cutlass and flintlock. Atop his powered wig he wore an admiral’s bicorne hat with a ruff of feathers along the crest. He had a whiskered face of black fur, eyes of a beast, white, sharp teeth.
He dropped his load: the carcass of a seal pup, rolling on the ground.
“Mannannan the Seal King be here, in some disguise or other. No one else of our kind is supposed to kill our kind. ‘Tis him indeed! Look at the size of those teeth marks deep in the neck.”
“What is that to me, shape-thief ?”
The seal-man kicked Koschei with his foot, and the shadowy being fell in a clatter of bones to crouch at his feet like a monstrous spider or an angular pool of darkness.
The seal-man said, “Hoy! Ha, ha! Perhaps our good Mannannan does not want any of us to know he’s here, you grave-robbing carrion. You despoil my friend’s body here, and where’s the evidence? All are innocent where no evidence can be trusted, that’s our law. Mannannan might like that, I think.”
“The White Hart Slayer has said Mannannan should not be at this battle.”
“Garn! Him? He ha’ain’t even pierced the wards yet, while we’ve got a man inside already, I hear. Ha har! Him with a drop of the North Star’s Blood in his pocket, and he can’t even throw a hex over a threshold unless those inside ask him.”
“The wards are but the first of the three defenses of Everness, shape- stealer.”
“Shut your yap, bone-licker, tomb-robber, corpse-eater! Not a word of power has been spoken yet by those inside, and there’s not many of those, I hear, except the pretty little lass the Seal King wants. They don’t know how to wake the lightning or make the rocks get up and dance, no sir! They’ve all forgotten! Ha! We selkie-folk will trick those wards, you’ll see, and be feasting in the main hall while the Wizard is still scratching at windows begging to be invited in! Ha Har! We’ll cook our feast on bonfires made of wizard’s books! Burn them books and burn our records clean; there be no past, and no crimes neither, once all memories of it be gone.”
Another fit of barking laughter. Then the seal-man said: “Hark! Is that the girl screaming? ‘Tis the Seal-King, I’ll warrant. He’s none too gentle in his love play, and might give the wench a few nips before he takes her, ha ha!”
Raven heard Wendy’s voice again, shrill and frightened, calling his name. He had no weapons, and he did not know where the doorway was from this part of the garden. He needed Peter to show him the way.
Raven, silent as a passing shadow, crept away and slid back over the wall and ran, heart bursting with fear and anger, across the lawn to where he had left Peter.
There was no one there.
III
There was no way to hide the tracks from a wheelchair. Raven bent to the grass, risking showing the flashlight, and ran.
He went back to the main road, were all the booted feet had dragged the wheelchair, turned off the light, went forward.
Raven slipped on hands and knees through the hedge next to the front doors of the west wing. Here a group of four helmeted figures armed with automatic rifles, wearing bulky fatigues, was guarding the door. One of them had a lantern.
Raven put his head down and crept closer. He could hear, but leaves blocked his view.
From inside, Raven could hear the tramp of booted feet, the noise of wood and glass being smashed, hoarse voices calling out.
Peter was here, arguing. Raven could only hear Peter’s voice, which carried.
“What kind of Federal Military Police? No such thing. . . Yeah . . . Well, where’s your warrant?. . . Don’t have a warrant, eh? Yeah? Arrested for what? . . . It wasn’t concealed, I had it in my God damned hand! Besides, since when is that a federal crime?. . . I’ll say I’ll talk to your superior! And to my congressman, and maybe to your undertaker! Okay! Give me your names!. . . I’m a U.S. citizen, and I’ve made a lawful request! How do I know you’re not just hoodlums dressed up, till you show me some God damned ID?!”
Then he heard Peter’s voice, softer: “Morpheus! Spirits of the world, witness they have rendered me their names! Knock them out!”
And so when Raven stood up, he saw Peter leaning out of his wheelchair, lifting the rifles out of the hands of the unconscious men snoring on the ground around him.
IV
Raven saw four figures prone on the ground, snoring. Closer, he saw they were dressed in heavy, black riot gear, with slabs of Kevlar material strapped to their chest and back. They carried M-16’s. Their helmets were blue. Letters on the back of their jackets read MORS. They did not have badges, nametags, shoulder patches, or any other insignia. Oddly, they all carried ragged-looking brown leaves tucked in their front shirt pockets, and one man had a wreathe of the shaggy leaves.
“Who are this men here?” asked Raven. “Riot police? Soldiers?”
“No. Crooks of some sort, dressed up. This is America. Soldiers don’t arrest noncombatants on U.S. soil. Look, there, just below his collarbone, where his shirt does not cover. See that?”
“Burn mark?”
“Witch mark. Some of the screwy stuff my dad made me remember, way back when. There was a little rhyme for each type of mark. Anyway, this is the kind of mark made when a person swears to a warlock.”
“What is? What does this mean, eh?”
“It means they volunteered. They signed a blood-contract thing. Here. You know how to use one of these?”
“No, but I know pistols.”
Peter tossed a pistol to him.
“Catch! And pick up that necklace of leaves that one guy is wearing— it must be some sort of magic IFF.”
Raven sniffed it. “I know this smell. What is you call this? Eye-eff-eff ? This is tobacco.”
“Identify friend or foe. Like a password. Tobacco leaf cures elf-curse. Okay! Inside!”
Raven pulled Peter’s chair up the stairs and through the shattered doors. Raven put the wheels of Peter’s chair back on the floorboards, and took the push handles of the chair back in his hands. Then they were off, wheels humming, moving at a quick trot through a vast hall decorated with spears and swords.
“Peter! You are knowing how to wake the three defenses of Everness, yes?”
“Shit, no. There’s one for earth, one for air, one for fire. That’s all I remember. I think the air one is a magic ward that keeps all the nasties out.”
They came into a hall with many doors and corridors leading off it. Some of the corridors were merely wall decorations, shallow illusions carved only a few inches into the wall. The light was dim; dawn was still fifteen or twenty minutes away.
“Which way?”
“Look up! Follow anything with a sea motif, sea birds, ships, that sort of thing. It’ll get us into the east wing.”
“The monsters not get in till the wards break.”
“I’m not worried about the goddamned monsters. I’m worried about the make-believe infantry. They may be imposters, but they’ve got at least some training, and they move and cover each other like—”
The noise of gunfire echoed through the house, shockingly loud.
Raven started sprinting, pushing the wheelchair. Peter was saying, “Damn! That’s a thirty-ought-six! Wasn’t what the infantry were carrying; must be one of the other groups. That heavy slug will go through these walls like nothing!” And he worked the action on the two automatic rifles he was carrying, one in either hand, first one, then the other. The third rifle was lying across his lap, with spare clips tucked into his shirt pockets.
They came to stairs leading up past a cluster of windows on a landing, to the next floor.
“Go on ahead!” shouted Peter.
“Hang on to your chair! I carry you up!”
“You can’t! With this chair I weigh a ton!”
“Watch me!” Raven knelt down backwards, put his hands on the handles of the wheelchair, leaned forward, stood. His face was dark with exertion, his eyes bright, his teeth like a glint of lightning in the darkness of his beard.
“I don’t know about this . . . Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Watch the head!”
And Raven turned and ran up the stairs, in huge, lunging, lumbering steps, carrying Peter on his back.
Suddenly, from overhead came a rumble, and beams of torchlight from outside played along the walls.
Peter shouted, “Something at the window behind us! Look out!”
But Raven did not slow his massive, lumbering run. The noise of gunfire from a foot above his ear was deafening, and the recoil made the chair kick and jump on his shoulders. Peter fired in short, controlled bursts; glass shattered; the torchlight went dark, and screams echoed from outside.
The recoil knocked Raven forward; he stumbled on the last two stairs. The wheelchair flew from his grasp, slid across the landing, but stayed upright, rolling to a crash against the balcony rails.
Raven picked himself up off his face. “You all right?”
Peter, smoking rifle in one hand, twisted his wheels with the other, turning around away from the cracked balcony. “Just fine, pal.”
“What the hell was that?” The torn and shattered windows on the balcony below were dripping shards of glass. Whatever had been there was gone now.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Where now?”
The corridor stretched before them. To their left, three glass doors opened out onto a musicians’ gallery overlooking a huge chamber with stars and moons carven into the roof. There was fire light coming in from the ground-floor windows below, cries and calls from a huge crowd, invisible from this angle.
The fire light illuminated the two statues beside the bed.
“Aw, shit!”
“What is wrong, Peter?”
“Someone’s blindfolded the statues!”
“Little elf did this. Is bad?”
“That’s St. George and what’s her name, the Red War Queen. It’s part of the House defense. Wait! Come back here!”
But Raven had already gone through the doors and was vaulting over the edge of the balcony to fall down to the floor below. He landed lightly as a cat in a great flutter of dark cape and raced across the room toward the statues. In his memory were ringing the words: “The terror of my sword shall hold back the monsters of the night, if God so wills, while St. George and Maelin the Red War Queen watch over me.”
Raven ripped the blindfold off the first statue’s eyes, whispering, “You can see again, St. George! Watch over him once more!”
A figure sleeping on the bed, unseen in the dark shadows cast by the torchlight, moaned and stirred.
Raven heard Wendy scream once more, sounding almost directly overhead. “Tom! No! Get back in here!”
Peter’s voice, from the balcony across the room: “Bad shit happening.” And he heard the click-clack as Peter worked his bolt.
Raven turned.
Outside, in front of him, he saw through the broad windows was a scene from nightmare. A rout of monsters and evil things were capering, waving torches, seal-men and stern knights with dripping swords, giants, other creatures. Down from some unseen balcony above, climbing down a rope, came a small elf, holding Lemuel Waylock’s sleeping body by the collar of his nightshirt, somehow, impossibly, carrying the whole weight with his tiny hand.
From overhead and behind him, Raven heard guttural human voices: “Hey, look! An old fucker with a gun! Waste him!”
Raven turned in time to see Peter framed in the balcony doors, with rifles in both hands, firing on full auto, down the corridor to the right at some target invisible to Raven. Screams rose above the deafening sound of gunfire. The recoil kicked Peter’s wheelchair backwards to the left, and Raven heard the terrible noise of Peter and his chair falling down stairs.
The voice of Azrael de Gray, from some place outside, thundered across the area: “Spirits of the world! Lemuel Waylock has not slept this full night in the place appointed! His claim to the guardianship is forfeit! Peter Waylock has renounced his claim! I, Galen Waylock, now claim all the rights, powers and perquisites of the Guardianship! I anoint myself the Guardian of Everness!”
A trumpet blew.
Wendy shouted from overhead, but Raven could not hear the words. Raven called out. “Peter! Are you alive?”
Azrael’s voice: “My first command is that the wards let pass the creatures in my train!”
The door flew open, and the horde of monsters rushed into the room where Raven was, brandishing torches and yodeling horrid oaths, battle- cries, and singing songs about darkness.
19
The
Champion
of
Light
Raven drew the pistol Peter had given him as the horde poured through the broken doors. Sad-faced, handsome knights with bleeding, stinking swords marched in, followed by a rush of chuckling, singing, beast-faced sailors. A kneeling giant, with a face insane with anger, thrust his arm and hand into the chamber, smashing open the windows and walls, and the huge torch in his fist spread fire across the roof.
Raven could not bring himself to shoot at the men, but he raised the pistol and fired at the giant. The bullets had no effect.
The figure on the bed stirred, moaned, and sat up. In the light of the dripping torch and the flame scorching the roof, Raven saw the doctor, still in his shining armor. His right leg had been cut off at the knee, and the dripping stump was crudely tied with a tourniquet. His face was burnt, covered with oozing boils, and his eyes were gone. His armor was breached all along the left side, and blood stained all his body on that side from shoulder to foot, and the flesh around the wound was disintegrating in dry, pallid strips, as if he had leprosy.
Raven made a gulping, horrified noise as the wounded doctor heaved himself upright. The doctor’s voice rang out into the room, clear and strong and majestic:
“Creatures of darkness! Flee or perish! For you dare not abide the onslaught of Lancelot du Lac, the unconquered Champion of Light!” And he drew his sword ringing from his scabbard.
The blade gave off a mild and beautiful golden glow, which touched Raven with a pleasant warmth, like the sun on a spring day. The knights and selkie, however, clutched their eyes and faces, shrieking as if they were blind, running in each direction as if they were maddened.
Lancelot vaulted one-legged from the bed, landing on his knees, and flourished his bright sword, clutching his great wound with his left hand. Blood gushed from between his fingers when he knelt upright. He cocked his head as if he were listening and flicked the sword about him faster than any eye could see. Three of the fleeing monsters fell and did not rise again.
The torch, huge as a tree trunk, came smashing down. Lancelot parried and rolled, coming to rest on his knees again, where he struck over his shoulder at another two fleeing creatures, who fell dead. The giant, pierced through the wrist, jerked back his mighty hand, bellowing, and the chamber was darkened.
“Doctor! Is me, Raven!”
“Help me to rise, good man.”
“How can you fight like this?”
“Reputation, my dear fellow. You have heard legends that I cannot be defeated in battle? Well, legendary creatures must abide by the legends, you know.”
The creatures had fled, some through doors into interior parts of the house, others rushed back outside. So great was the press of monsters fighting to escape that the fiery giant was forced back away from the doors and driven many huge steps toward the seawall.
Consequently, when Raven, his shoulder under Lancelot’s left shoulder, helped him hop out into the courtyard, no creature of the darkness was underneath Lemuel Waylock’s snoring body, swaying on the rope to which Tom O’Lantern clung.
Raven rushed forward, dragging Lancelot, and caught the old man about the legs just as Tom, startled and blinded by Lancelot’s sword, let go and scampered back up the rope. Raven, overbalanced by the sudden weight, and desperate to prevent the grandfather’s fall to the flagstones, fell to the ground with the old man on top of him.
Lancelot wobbled but did not fall. At that moment, a group of men and women in purple robes, armed with hunting rifles and handguns, came running around the corner, shouting, “Azrael! Azrael! The Dark Messiah comes!”
Because he was on the ground, he was not shot when the robed men shouted, “Death to the infidel!” and opened fire on Lancelot. The gunfire seemed to have no effect on Lancelot; the bullets seemed not even to touch him. Lancelot, smiling, waved his sword in the air as if he were parrying, and the cultists slowed, gasping. One woman threw down her pistol and ran away.
A knight on a rotting horse leapt over the small wall separating this courtyard from the fountain surrounded by zodiacal statues. His helmet had three plumes floating from it, and his shield bore the image of a rotting leprous face.
“Traitor knight!” he called. “Infidel, lecher, and false friend to your lord! Turn and face me once more! My sword, Corruption, has drunk your blood before; now it will drink your life!”
He dismounted and drew his sword. Blood and mucus bled from the blade. “Turn and face me!”
Raven spoke from the ground, “Run!”
Lancelot turned toward the evil knight. ‘Ah, no, my good man,” he said softly to Raven. “To be protected by legends, you have to live up to them, you see.” His face, blackened, eyeless, and scarred as it was, nonetheless looked young when he smiled.
The two knights exchanged swift blows, and, even though Lancelot could neither lunge, retreat, nor see, his skill and bravery were enough to keep the evil knight at bay. The poisonous sword of leprosy struck near him once and twice, scratching Lancelot’s armor to leave trails of stinking blood, but not penetrating.
Raven, on his back, could see Azrael coming over the rooftop of the south wing, swift as a falling star, flying on the back of a winged charger, and the steed’s wide pinions were luminous with light.
Wendy, from an upper window, leaning over the shoulder of a suit of samurai armor, shouted, “Raven! Where have you been? Look out! Azrael’s coming!” In her hand was a white spiral baton, tipped with silver.
Azrael whipped his steed with the broomstick he held, bruising her flanks. The slim colt folded her wings and dove toward Wendy.
Azrael was staring only at the spiral horn . . .
He flew to the window where Wendy was, and, sparing only a moment’s glance down to Lancelot, he casually touched his necklace and pointed below.
Azrael’s voice: “I revoke the protection of this house! The son of the Lake is now fully in the waking world and subject to its laws! Morpheus!”
Wendy drooped; Raven felt a powerful fatigue begin to close his eyes. Lancelot swayed, dropping his sword, and would have fallen, except that the evil knight embraced him and drove the poisoned blade full into his body with such force that the metal snapped, leaving a length of putrid blade within the wound.
Raven held up his hand as he had seen Peter do, with his middle fingers curled, other fingers extended, and repeated the names he’d heard Peter use: “Apollo! Hyperion!” Now he yawned, and forced through his numb jaws: “Helion. . .!”
One of the cultists fired and missed, then another fired. The bullet did not touch the evil knight but blew a bloody hole through Lancelot’s left arm.
Raven pointed at Lancelot, then at Wendy with his fingers. Lancelot woke, but the evil knight embraced him, pinning both his arms, and lifting his foot from the ground, and tore at the wound in Lancelot’s side with his fingers. The evil knight called to the cultists, “Put him from the misery of life!”
Lancelot raised his burned and bleeding head, calling out, “Face me blade to blade, cowards! Or do you fear a blind man?”
The cultists opened fire again. Lancelot’s bloody body was flung across the courtyard, his armor rent in pieces, while the evil knight, in the midst of the hail of bullets, was untouched.
Wendy woke just as Azrael, leaning in the window from the back of his hovering steed, grabbed her arm. “Yield me Clavargent!” Bullets flew over Raven’s head, as cultists continued to fire and fire at the fallen body of Lancelot. He did not get up.
The evil knight stood, facing Lancelot, murmuring some pious, condescending speech about the wisdom of death and the sinful selfishness of desiring to live.
Lancelot’s weak voice spoke, trembling and sighing, “Lady! I die in thy service . . . I pray thee now mine final prayer . . .”
Wendy shouted, “House! Help me! I’ve got the magic wand!”
Azrael said, “You must freely give it me, or I will dash you to the stones below.” And he started to drag her headlong out of the window.
A small, shrill voice with an Irish lilt called out from behind her: “Lass, call for the stones to rise up and defend their land in the name of the White Hart’s Horn!”
Wendy shrieked: “Stones! Like he said!”
The empty samurai suit of armor next to Wendy drew its katana and saluted. From the courtyard next to Raven, he heard the noises of lions roaring, pincers snapping, goats bleating, a bowstring singing, a bull lowing, and then the sound of stone on stone, as if an avalanche were marching.
Azrael laughed, ignoring the samurai’s drawn blade. “Fool! The stones may not shed the blood of Everness, nor that of the steeds of Celebradon! You may not strike me!”
The samurai suit of armor leaned out and slashed the reins in Azrael’s hand. Azrael was not struck, merely the reins, which parted. The winged colt reared backward, neighing, and Azrael let go of Wendy to clutch at the white mane with both hands.
Lancelot whispered, “Take me into thy realm, Lady, to the place appointed me, if at last thy forgiveness allow, that I might be healed of the great wound given me.”
The winged colt spun and danced in midair, wilder than a snowflake spinning in a winter storm, high in the air above the ocean.
Azrael screamed, “Euryale! By oaths from the World’s Birth I compel you! You are in service to the blood of Everness!”
The winged horse sang, “Older oaths than this bind us to the Champions of Day! In patience and faithfulness we wait, we wait until their need is great, and other duties then are dropped away!” And she kicked Azrael from her back, and he fell screaming into the sea.
The giant with the twin torches turned and watched Azrael fall.
Over the little wall from the other courtyard came a fantastic army. A stone lion, a statue with a water jug, a blindfold marble maiden with a balance scales in hand, a scorpion of rock, a marble bull. And many others.
“Well! Looks like someone remembered what the second defense of Everness is, I am thinking,” Raven muttered to himself. “But I thought that was Tom’s voice, and him a traitor and all. . .”
The cultists in the purple robes shot and shot again at the oncoming cavalcade of statues. Bullets bounced off stone or chipped away small shards. Two cultists ran away. The others were crushed beneath stone paws, pincers, and hoofs. Raven saw a stone lion pouncing, its marble legs red with fresh blood.
Now Raven reached out, grasped the evil knight by the foot, and stood.
The knight called out, “Do not be so proud! We are meant to suffer!” He kicked Raven’s face and forced him to release him, and slashed at him with the stump of his bleeding sword.
Raven had been in brawls before. While he knew nothing of swordplay, this was like a knifefight, since the blade was so short.
The knight stabbed. Raven caught his wrist as it went by, grabbed the shoulder, broke the man’s elbow over his knee. The knight shrieked and went limp, half-fainting. “Thank you!” he gasped.
Raven grasped him by the shoulder and hip, lifted him overhead, and dashed him headfirst into the ground. There was a sickening snap. Raven did not know or care if he were dead; he shouted upward: “Are you okay?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions! What’s happened to the doctor?” Wendy said back.
The fire-giant turned and raised its torches, crossing the courtyard in a single step. Raven picked up Lancelot’s sword and brandished it. The fire- giant squinted, hands held before its eyes, and the statue of a huge crab came suddenly out from the trees behind and hamstrung him with a sweep of its claws. Sparks, smoke, and blood spurted from the giant’s leg, a blood that caught fire when exposed to air. When the giant fell, a scorpion came toward its face, and a centaur with a bow and arrow leaped upon the giant’s chest.
Raven heard the sound of a gunshot from another wing of the house. There were calls and hoots from not far away; yet he ran to Lancelot’s side.
As he looked down at the still and bleeding body, a soft, warm light seemed to come around him. It was the light from the wings of the dream- colt, landing softly as a butterfly.
She said in a voice like silver: “Put him across my back. Swiftly! Dawn is but a prayer away, and I must outfly the gates of day!”
Raven slung Lancelot across her saddle and lashed the stirrup straps about his waist to secure him.
Then he looked at the gleaming blade in his hand. It was only thing he had seen that could draw blood from these unearthly monsters. Merely the gleam of it maddened them.
The colt said sharply: “Surrender the sword! Not for you came it from heaven’s horde, nor will it shine again until its master is restored. Condemn would you this knight to the fate of luckless Freyr, to come to the final fight with nothing in hand but air?”
“But, um, I am thinking, you know, I could put it back later, after . . .”
“Steal no celestial weapon! I see you are your father’s son; it is his weapon you must find, a bolt more fitted to your kind, ere all is done.”
“What? Who . . .?” said Raven.
Wendy shouted from the window, “Raven! Give her that sword and get up here! I think there are people coming! Besides, you don’t fence.”
With ill grace, frowning, Raven thrust the sword roughly into the scabbard.
There were gunshots again; the sound of singing, praising the darkness. The fire-giant rose up and toppled backwards hugely over the seawall. The marble centaur bounded to the wall’s top and fired an arrow of stone down after him.
Raven rested his hand for a moment on Lancelot’s bloody back. He whispered a brief goodbye; the dream-colt was already rising into the air, surrounded by a halo of light. A sweet, refreshing scent came from her. “A better world receives him now, a shore which death knows not; use well the moment his life’s blood bought, a moment only will your enemies allow.”
“Wait! Can’t you help us! At least give me a ride up there so I don’t have to climb the rope!”
Magnificent, she spread her wings, and silver rainbows played across her feathers. Light as thistledown she rose, falling up away from earth. And when she beat her wings and galloped up toward the fading stars, it seemed as if the red beams of dawn pursued her, though she sped at comet’s speed. She dwindled to a star, fled north into the Little Dipper, twinkled, and was gone.
“Oh, Raven, how beautiful! But he’s gone,” said Wendy, beginning to cry. “He’s gone and will never come back! The poor old ladies in England will be so sad, the one with the cats, and the museum clerk and everything! They’ll miss him so . . .”
20
“My
Dwelling
Is in
Skule Skerry”
I
There was still noise of fighting coming from the house and grounds. Raven heard the distant sounds of bullets bouncing off stone, screams.
The sky above had streamers of red light fanning through black clouds, but the earth still was dark. Sunrise was still some minutes away.
“Climb the rope!” said Wendy, waving her arm. “Get up here quick! I’ve missed you!”
Raven stooped, picked up Lemuel Waylock, put the old man over his shoulder, and took the rope in one hand.
At that moment, Raven heard a ringing, thunderous report, an automatic rifle close at hand, firing a short, controlled burst of bullets. From a breach in the House’s walls made by the giant, he heard Peter’s voice, sounding nearby: “Never check someone’s pockets ‘til you’re sure they’re dead, punk.”
An angry shout, another gunshot, whining as it ricocheted. Peter’s voice: “Control your aim. Like this.” A short, controlled burst of gunfire rang out, then a rapid clicking, as of an empty weapon.
Peter’s voice came again: “Okay, punk. Are you going to shoot, or what? Your friends are dead. Something wrong? It’s not so easy to kill a man in cold blood, is it?”
Raven, with Lemuel still over his shoulder, ran into the Chamber of Middle Dreaming. He found a door on this floor directly beneath the musicians’ gallery, one that, logically, should lead to the bottom of the stairs down which Peter fell.
But the short, curving corridor beyond was filled with carven masks hanging on the walls, and beyond was an archway leading to a beautiful library with carven shelves, where two seals in sailor’s uniforms, their backs to Raven, were throwing books into a fireplace.
Another shot rang out.
Raven looked at the masks on the wall, thinking. Tragedy and Comedy frowned and grinned down at him, and Scaramouch, and Columbine, Harlequin and Pantalone, and Pierrot. The stairs must go by directly overhead. If there was any door at all leading there from here, it must be. . .
He put his hand on the tragedy mask. It moved beneath his grip, and a door opened. Beyond, he saw Peter lying on his back in the wreckage of his wheelchair, two corpses flung down near him, one still twitching. Blood and brains had been splattered all along the stairs and walls, soaking and ruining the tapestries. There was a young man in a leather jacket with a shaven head, wearing a dozen earrings and gold necklaces, bent over Peter, trembling, the pistol in his hand almost touching Peter’s face.
Peter, his face calm as if it were carved of stone, lay on his back, unable to rise, and he had one hand in the air, pointing at the boy.
Raven tried to draw the pistol he had been given, but the old man across his shoulder slowed his efforts.
The young man knelt down, fell on his face, and made a sad, choked, gargling noise. When he rolled over, thrashing, Raven could see the hilt of the knife protruding from his neck.
“Not easy to kill a man when you look him in the eyes.” Peter reached over, grabbed the knife hilt, moved it slightly. The boy made a rattling sigh and stopped moving. “Gets easier if you do it enough times.”
A pool of red and spurting blood rippled out from the boy, the spurts beating in time with his heart. After a few moments, the pulsing flow ebbed, and the blood crept sluggishly across the floor. Raven was somehow dimly surprised to recognize the stink; it was the same as when he killed an animal in the forest, a deer or grizzly. That seemed to him, in some obscure way, wrong and unfair.
Peter drew out the knife, wiped it on the boy’s jacket, and folded it. It folded up into the shape of a belt buckle, which Peter returned to his belt.
Now Peter sighed, muttering to himself. “Carrying concealed weapons, my ass. What kind of crime is that? If they weren’t concealed, someone could see where they were. . .” Peter painfully began to claw his way across the floor to the nearest dropped machine-gun.
Raven shook himself out of his reverie. “Peter,” he said softly, not wanting to startle the man.
“Eh? Raven? I’m in bad shape, pal.”
“Selkie are nearby. Come, I carry you.”
“Dad? Is that my dad? What the hell is he doing here?” Raven came forward, saying nothing. The wheelchair was wrecked beyond repair, and Peter looked bruised and bloody. It was not clear whose blood it was. Raven knew from his first-aid courses that one should not move a wounded man, but Raven could hear some barking voices nearby beginning to sing a sea chantey.
He picked up Peter with one hand and threw him over his right shoulder.
Peter, now hanging upside down, muttered, “Say. Dad, I wanted to tell you I was wrong about the House, you know, and that, well, this is kind of hard to say, but that I’m sorry about. . .”
Raven whispered, “He is asleep, under spell; his soul has been stolen to Acheron.”
“Bloody hell. . . We’re just dropping like flies, this family, ain’t we?” Peter’s voice trailed off, exhausted, perhaps overcome by wounds, or grief.
II
Raven remembered that there was a small spiral staircase leading from the Chamber of Middle Dreaming up to the corridor outside the master bedroom. When he went into the corridor of masks, however, some small groan from Peter made the seal-men in the library stiffen and turn.
But by then, Raven was in the Chamber, whose moons and many- pointed stars were blackened and charred. He found the small door leading to the spiral stairs and was closing it behind him even as he heard two seal- men, drawing their cutlasses, walk out from the corridor of masks. Through the crack in the closing door, Raven saw them; one was carrying a burning book, using it as a torch. He also saw there was a taller seal-man behind them, this one dressed in lace and powdered wig, a long red coat and knickers, with square buckles on his shoes.
The two seal-men in the front pulled white leather hoods over their black and fuzzy faces, and suddenly they looked like normal men, one with a mustache, the other with grizzled red hair and a squint. The seal-man in the long red coat pointed, barked an order. They came toward the door, approaching Raven.
Raven bounded silently up the spiral stairs, carrying one man on either shoulder. There was a creak behind him as the door opened, then the noise of bare feet on wooden stairs.
There were no openings or landings in this stairway, no place to turn off. The bare footsteps came behind him, joined by a clatter of heavy shoes.
Then, up beyond another turn, he saw a crack of light. Here was the door before him, not closed, which, he saw, could be bolted from the other side.
Raven stepped through the door.
The dozens of seal-men in the corridor turned to look at him. There was a moment of silence. Soft black eyes were looking at him. Whiskered faces peered out from underneath tricorn hats, or from under powdered wigs, or bandannas. Some held flintlocks, others held truncheons or cutlasses or belaying pins.
Raven opened his mouth.
“Ar, may-tees! Mannannan the Seal-King be here, and I be he!” Raven shouted in his thick Russian accent. “I said we selkie-folk would trick ourselves inside the wards and be feasting in the Great Hall here while the Wizard still was scratching at the windows, begging to be let in, and so it is!”
He stepped forward boldly.
One or two selkie-folk looked each other eye to eye uncertainly and stepped aside. A large seal-man in a black coat and tricorn hat stepped up, though, and drew his flintlock from his sash.
“Who says ye are Mannannan, then? Where’s yer witnesses?”
Raven said, “All are innocent when no evidence can be trusted; that be our law, I am thinking, you know? Where are your witnesses that I am not, eh?” Without waiting for a reply, Raven shouldered the seal-man aside roughly, shoving him back toward the wall.
Raven shouted, “Step aside! Gangway! Whoever bars my way, why, I’ll have them be walking the plank, you know!” With two men over his shoulders, Raven still was able to balance on one foot and raise his boot to the nearest seal-man’s chest and thrust him violently aside.
The seal-man who fell slid against the carpet and struck a bust off a pedestal. “Garn! That be Mannannan, I’ll warrant, all right. He’s a strong one, he is.”
Another seal-man pointed at the necklace of brown leaves that Raven had taken from the fallen gunman in uniform and had forgotten he wore. “He’s got the sign. ‘Tis a friend.”
Many more seal-men now stepped aside. There was an open corridor between him and the door flanked by tridents. Raven could see that two burly seal-man had been trying to batter down the heavy door with a pedestal. The wood was marred; but Wendy had evidently barred the door from the other side, and it was thick oak planks.
Raven took one step, then another, then a third.
A voice cried out, “Ho ha! What fools ye be! He is not Mannannan, I’ll warrant, nor any other who has ever been at sea! I’ll wager ye he cannot say how to raise the stern jibsail!”
Raven said, “There is no jib in the stern in any ship I’ve ever sailed, ye lubber! To raise a jib on a proper boat, hank it to the stay, shackle the jib halyard to the sailhead, and attach the jib sheets. I’ll say nothing about the boats you’ve served on, but if your jibs are in the stern, I am thinking, you know, that explains a lot.”
The seal-men laughed.
Raven made it to the door. He looked down at the scars and scratches where it’d been battered.
He groped for something to say or to do. He could hear his heart beating. The weight of the two men he was carrying on his shoulders seemed to get heavier as he stood there, weary, mind blank, trying to think.
The seal-men behind him looked on.
Someone coughed. There was a nervous shuffle. Raven turned around slowly. “Whose . . . idea . . . was . . . this . . . ?”
Without waiting for an answer, Raven said, “Are we not selkie-folk? Do we batter and barge in like fools? You amateurs stand back! Get back! Now!”
They shuffled reluctantly backwards.
Raven raised his voice: “Wendy! My little bird! It’s me, Raven!”
Wendy shouted, “I don’t believe you! You’re a selkie! Go away!”
There was a nervous murmur behind Raven. He heard one seal-man whisper uncertainly to another (“That’s not Mannannan”), heard the noise of a cutlass coming out of its sheath.
Raven turned and winked at the seal-man. “Watch this!” The one with the cutlass, who had been coming forward, stepped back.
Raven turned again. “You’re right! My name is Var Varovitch, which means, Raven, son of Raven in your language. Let me tell you the story about how I came by this name . . .”
The door opened, and Wendy yanked him inside, her lips hot on his lips as she slammed the door behind him. Raven fell to the floor, overburdened by the weight of Peter and Lemuel.
There came a rush and a banging on the door, but the empty suit of armor next to the door had lifted the bar and fitted it into its staples.
The heavy door did not even rock under the blows.
Raven kicked his foot against the door, shouting and swearing. The seal- men fell silent. Raven bellowed, “Go away! I want to speak to my little wife alone, you know! And if she squeals a bit, you know, I nip them now and again, and I can be a little rough at love play!”
There was good-natured laughter on the other side of the door. One voice barked, “Hoy, mates, that must be Mannannan. Who else would say such things about him, eh?”
There came a cheer, “Hurrah for Mannannan! Let’s have a song, lads!” And voices moved a little ways down the hall.
Strange, inhuman voices rang out:
I am a man upon the land,
I am a selkie in the sea;
and when I’m far from every strand,
my dwelling is in Skule Skerry!
III
Three men stood on a small hill to the north of the mansion. As they had been instructed, they had left their automobiles outside the grounds. Stars were overhead, but the approaching dawn painted the cloudy sky above the sea with mingled black and blood-red. Before them, a little wood stood between them and the mansion. The hill was tall enough that the view of the mansion clinging to the sea cliff was unobstructed: in the gloom before the dawn, the wood was a murmuring mass of shadows. Columns of smoke from the burning gardens rose up behind the house.
Behind them, at the foot of the hill, the wounded were gathered. Moans and curses came from where bleeding men were laid out on blankets and tarps in the gloom. Lanterns blazed here and there on the grass, and two medical technicians in black MORS uniforms had erected an emergency tent. They were preparing to amputate the crushed leg of an unshaven man in a leather jacket, who struggled and screamed. A little to the left, a circle of priestesses in purple robes were standing watch over several still-warm corpses, who lay with their faces covered by their robes.
One of the three, a gray-haired, hard-faced man, who wore a black blazer over his business suit, held a field telephone in his hand. On the back of his blazer were the letters MORS. He said to the others, “Azrael fell into the sea. We’ve taken heavy casualties. I am going to pull back my men and start shipping some of the wounded to the nearest hospital. I can leave enough men here to encircle the place . . .”
“Wentworth,” said the second fellow in a soft whisper, an old, bald man with a squint and a harelip, whose pockmarked face always seemed contorted with a sneer. He wore a purple robe, rich with trimmings, and on a chain around his neck, an upside down cross inside an upside down star. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this. You are so proud of your soldiers and their guns, but what use are guns against the creatures of the Night World? Why don’t you run away, then? I’m the one who should have been the Master’s right-hand man, not you. When he comes back . . .”
“Mr. Coldgrave,” said Wentworth curtly. “Azrael just fell hundreds of meters into the ocean. I know he is a ghost, but the body he is inhabiting is no doubt dead. Unless the two of you are willing to turn command of your contingents over to me, right now, we do not have a leader. Azrael may be alive—if that word has any meaning for him—but we have no instructions.
We will have to go to find him again. I still have my researchers manning the sensory deprivation tanks in the lab in Denver, and the committee still has not found out what I am doing with the operational funds. Also, I have another subject from the asylum to experiment on, and I can force her to make contact with Azrael again in the dream-world.”
Coldgrave said, “You mock me. My name is Father Malignus now: I am the heir of Paracelsus. Your experimental drugs and sleep tanks are mere trash. My followers can reach into the dream-world merely by the force of their faith, by their meditations, by the alchemic secrets unlocked in ancient manuscripts. We will stay to loot the mansion of Everness. Whoever possesses the Silver Key can lock and unlock the Gate of Slumber. The Dark Messiah, the Master, he cannot die. He will rise again and reward us for our patience and faithfulness.”
The third man was lying on the grass at their feet, his eyes glassy. His head was shaven and blotchy with tattoos of screaming faces, so that extra mouths were inked onto his cheeks, extra eyes on his forehead. A dozen earrings dangled from his ears. He was shaking slightly, petting and fondling the large-bore revolver he held. “N-no man. You’re both assholes. We’re not getting anything outta this. We’re not getting outta here alive. It’s coming. It’s coming up from the black, from the cold, from the sleepy black waters at the bottom of the sea. The gates will open up, will come open just like a mouth, all hungrylike, see? Like teeth. And then HE will come out. Come out. Come out and play with the world. And what do you do with a toy when you’re done? Break it. Break it, and your mom tosses it in the trash. That’s what happened to me. My life got broken and tossed. That’s what is going happen to you. And, shit, I will laugh and laugh when it happens to you. And it is going to happen to the Master, to the Nightmare-Man, to Azrael the Gray. Because HIM is all-powerful. And even Azrael is afraid of HIM.”
Coldgrave squinted at the young tattooed man, “Angello, you drug- soaked punk, what are your animals going to do? Stay with me, or run away with Wentworth? You can’t even think straight, can you?”
Angello rose to his feet, brandishing his revolver. “My thinking is straight! The world’s bent. You two don’t know what’s going to happen with your men, do you? They’ve seen too much. They’ve seen the statues come to life, and they’ve been walking shoulder to shoulder with man-eating seals who dress up as men. Yeah, yeah: too much, too much. You don’t know what happens to people who see too much. Why do you think we forget what we did in our dreams when we wake up? You don’t know about the mist. The mist is coming. And there are people in the mists; people who don’t like us much.”
Coldgrave said, “You mean Pendrake? The Amnesia took him.”
Angello said, “He came back. I saw it when I was high. My brain can be in two places at once. It’s called drug lucidity. That’s why my gang is going to remember what happens here today, when your people, your soldier boys, and your people, your devil-worshipping nut-balls, are going to be carted off to the loony bin. Heh. You can use my old cell.”
Coldgrave’s face twitched with worry. He said, “Two of my people vanished, night before last. This was just before the dream came telling us to meet at the boy’s house. Pendrake might be alive. He might be following us.”
Wentworth said, “He is just one man.”
Coldgrave said, “You are a blabbering fool. Don’t you know who Pen- drake is? Don’t you know whose blood flows in his veins? Don’t you know what woman he stole from the fairy-king to be his wife? Some of my people had visions of Inquanok, where the basalt dome of the veiled king rises, and they knew who Oberon had imprisoned in that impregnable dome, guarded by Shantak birds. You and your equipment, your sensory deprivation tanks, your funded dream-research lab. You know nothing.”
Wentworth ignored him and spoke to Angello. He said, “Your gang is going to be cut to bits. Are you going to fall back when my men do and form a siege? We cannot take the mansion by direct assault. Not without Azrael.”
Angello sniffed, and sat back down on the grass. He shrugged nonchalantly. “They’re animals, man. Like he said. I can’t call ‘em back once their blood is up. I stoked them up before they went in. Amazing thing you can do to people, if they trust you, with the right combination of chemicals. They feel no pain.”
Coldgrave said, “Then take your men, Wentworth, and go. The Dark Messiah will hear of your faithlessness when he returns in triumph.”
Wentworth frowned. “We need to contact the Necromancer. I can make a phone call to Nevada, and tell the dream-team at my base to go under . . .”
Angello laughed up at him. “You’re an idiot. Don’t you know where you are? This is Everness. This place is like me. Awake and asleep, asleep and awake, and you don’t need to be a half-breed half-human to see things here! Do you need to talk to Koschei? The Bone Man? Look! Look! There he is!”
When Angello pointed, the other two men saw, below them at the foot of the hill, where Coldgrave’s priestesses were watching the dead, a figure made of black mist, armored all in human bones, and wearing a crown of dead men’s fingernails. The apparition was walking slowly, silently around the priestesses, as if seeking a way within their circle. The being was huge and thin and black, with trailing robes of darkness slithering behind, and it should have been impossible, even in the dim light, not to see so huge and thin and black a figure: and yet, somehow, until the moment when the drug- addled Angello pointed his finger, neither Wentworth nor Coldgrave had seen the specter.
The creature turned its narrow-skulled head slowly toward them, and its eyesockets held two tiny points of cold light, like stars. It raised its thin, long-fingered hand, palm inward: a gesture to beckon them.
Wentworth said to Coldgrave, “We have to give him some of your men.” He indicated the corpses lying on the grass. “Otherwise he will not talk to us.”
Coldgrave sneered at him. “No matter what the Necromancer says, we continue the assault. It cannot be so hard to find another empty body for the Master to possess, can it?”
And he moved downhill to go bow and speak to Koschei.
IV
Angello’s teeth were chattering, and he hugged himself as if trying to hold back some internal pain or hunger that was gnawing at him.
Angello focused one eye on Wentworth. To distract himself from the shakes, he spoke. Slowly, he said, “Him, I understand. Father Ma-ligament. He needs someone to tell him how everything he does, all his sick, sick little habits, are all okay. And no real religion will tell him that, so he worships the devil instead, and the Warlock told him what he wants to hear. Me, I understand. I got nothing, I got nothing to lose. When I dream that a man in a bloody cage made of hooks tells me to go somewhere, do something, why not? I go and I do, and the dreams tell me how to get money and drugs and guns. But you. You got everything. Rich, good job. People salute you. You, I don’t understand.”
Wentworth said, “It’s not enough.”
“What’s not enough?”
“This country. This life. The way we live, in these days.”
“We live pretty good. Compared to, I dunno, Cuba. Even I got a cellphone.”
“If Napoleon were alive today, in America, what do you think he would be? Someone’s employee? That is all a politician is: the employee of the voters. And the press is like his nagging wife, a shrew he can never divorce and always must keep happy. Military brass work for the politicians. The rich man works for the tax man, really, if you think about it. Everyone bows to someone. And that is not enough.”
“What would be enough?” asked Angello. “I mean, for someone like you. Don’t you have, like, everything?”
Wentworth gave him a cool look and uttered a short sharp laugh. “Angello, do you believe in democracy? Well, I don’t. A mob that bites the hand that feeds it, spits on the warrior protecting it: that is all a democracy is. It’s not natural. There is supposed to be an order to the universe. The best should rule, and the rest should bow. I am very old-fashioned in that way.”
He raised a pair of binoculars and scanned the house in the distance.
“That house contains a door. A door to another world. A larger world than ours. Darker. Older. Less rational. There are things in that world who covet this world. Things that used to rule here. Things that ruled men back when men were toys in their hands, helpless. Well, I used to work for . . . call it an organization . . . that knew about those things. But the people I worked for lacked vision. They thought it would be better to keep the larger world out. But I, I found out that there was potential here. Potential for great things.
“The Gates of Everness were only guarded by one old man. Selkie had slipped past him, a handful, less than a dozen. I found them. They had talents useful to me. And they told me about Azrael.” Wentworth lowered his binoculars.
Angello said, “I found one, too. A seal-man. He ate my roommate. They like people like me, people no one will miss. He told me all sorts of stuff. He told me about HIM. D’you know, I saw HIM once. When I was out of my mind, back in the institution. When HE rises from the Deep, there is no reward coming for you. Only pain, endless pain, pain without death.”
Wentworth said, “The Warlock says he is preparing the way for a king, someone who will set this world in order. Someone strong enough to protect us from the other things in the Night-World. I intend to be on the best of terms in the new order.” He picked up his binoculars again, turning away from Angelo. “I was born to be a courtier. There is no place for me in this small world, among these foolish people.”
“And what if the Warlock lied, just the same way you lie to your men? Or what if the Warlock is dead?”
“Well, in that case, the door in that house will be my escape exit, won’t it? In either case, we have to take it. And then, once it is mine . . .I mean, once it is ours, of course . . .”
Angelo said to Wentworth, “You’re going to kill us both, first moment you get a chance, ain’t you? The Satan-priest and me, huh?”
Wentworth did not bother to contradict him.
V
“Uhhhnn . . . feel like shit. Where in hell am I?”
“Lay still, Peter,” came Raven’s voice. “You have bullet lodged in your shoulder, but bone is not broken. I find Doctor Lancelot’s bag hidden under bed, and I clean and dress the wound. Your blood pressure, it is steady; you would be losing blood pressure if there were massive internal bleeding, eh?”
“The punk was using a .22, wimpy-ass little shell. Hey—! Get that light out of my eyes.”
“You have had head trauma, but pupil response is normal.”
Peter pushed himself up on his elbows, saw his father lying on the bed next to him. “What’s that noise?”
“Hi there!” Wendy, standing behind Raven, was waving energetically and smiling.
Raven said, “Lie down! The statues have come to life and are fighting. Azrael de Gray fell into the sea. You are not well. Lie down!”
There was a noise from beyond the main doors, barking laughter, songs praising nightmares, darkness, and pain. It sounded as if a second group of seal-men had joined the first.
“Jesus! What the hell are those?” Peter was staring out the eastern windows, and his voice cracked.
Standing with their feet in the swirling ocean waves, silhouetted against clouds, now tinted pink and pearl-gray with the promise of coming dawn, rose two cloaked and hooded figures, huge, black and hideous, taller than the funnels of tornadoes. And their hooded faces were bowed, gazing down at the House and sea cliffs. One had a woman’s face made of iron, and she carried a flail; the other had a skull made of black ivory, and it carried a sickle. They loomed up in the eastern windows, as unnatural and huge as if dark constellations from some alien zodiac had sprung to life and stepped down from the sky.
“Down! You are not well,” said Raven.
Wendy held up her spiral ivory wand, capped with a point of silver. “This is the Silver Key. I wanted to heal you with it, but Raven wouldn’t let me. I think it’s magic! It makes the pictures in the house here talk. Do you know how to work it? Can’t we blast them with it?”
“Sorry, little lady. I slept that day in school. Galen could probably tell you the little poem I used to know. Tum de dum dum, the key of dreaming, something, something, gate of waking, gate of seeming . . . but. . . Galen’s gone, now . . .”
“No!” said Wendy. “That was Azrael!”
Peter shook himself. “Is that door barred? Good! There’s doors to the left and right, hidden behind those panels. You can’t lock them, but the rooms beyond have heavy doors . . .”
Raven said, “Lie down. Is all taken care of. We found the hidden doors. There are selkie in the north hallway too, beyond the room with the panels. South hall is better. Is one silver knight with bleeding sword in hallway beyond the atlas room, but hall is filling up with smoke. We locked doors in paneled room and atlas room. I think greenhouse in south wing burned down; fire spreading slowly. South still best way to escape, though, I think.”
Wendy said, “Let’s call the dream-colts and fly away!”
Peter looked out the east windows at the titanic robed figures, taller than mountains, that loomed there, motionless. “I ain’t laying down, and we ain’t gonna fall back while we can hold this position. I don’t know what happens if the enemy takes this House, but I think it’s something real bad, like the end of the world or something. There’s this trumpet we’re supposed to find and blow on. Calls down the wrath of God or something.”
“No,” said Wendy, “blowing the trumpet ends the world. I think we should fly away instead. It would be more fun. Besides, Lancelot flew away. On a horse. He was dead, and they took him away up into the stars.” And she sounded very sad when she said that.
“You said the statues came to life?” said Peter brusquely. “That’s the second defense of Everness. I just can’t remember what the final defense is. We got to wake up Dad. Touch him with the horn, Wendy! Apollo, Hyperion, Helion, Day!”
“I told you it was for curing things!” whispered Wendy to Raven, leaning over and lightly touching Lemuel with the white wand.
But Lemuel did not wake.
Raven showed Peter the little card and the message from the grandfather in Acheron.
Peter read it in silence. Then he said, “There’s a crown of laurel leaves hanging in the central rotunda behind the statue of Apollo. If we get that and say the whole rhyme, it might, I don’t know, have more power or something. Then we gotta send someone into the country of gold to search.”
Wendy said, “Little room in the south wing, next to a tapestry of a dragon? I just came from there. Couldn’t find any magic talismans.” She smiled and shrugged.
“Any pictures?”
“No. Not really. I mean, there were framed things on the walls, but. . .”
There came a roaring noise from the north, a crack, a scream, and the fragments of a broken lion statue were flung into view from around the garden wall. From around the corner, a giant, pale shadow, twice the height of a man, glided forward in a spreading pool of frost.
Behind the giant jogged men with guns, their breath steaming, their collars turned up against the cold.
Firelight was dancing through the southern windows. A cloud of hissing steam boiled up from the sea, lurid, and a great hand, clutching a torch, still burning like magnesium despite that it was drenched, came up over the seawall and caught a small tree in the crook of its huge elbow. A face angry beyond all sanity came up over the seawall, beard and mane like smoke, eyes like coals.
Peter said, “Get the pictures off the walls in the country of gold room, get the laurel garland off the wall behind Apollo, come back here.”
Raven said, “Who, me?”
A faint look of disgust came into Peter’s face “Okay, pal. Who’d you wanna send instead?”
Wendy said, “I’ll go!”
Raven had just begun to start to feel the tension in his neck and shoulders unwinding. Now it knotted up again, tightly, and he could feel the pulse pounding in his temples. He thought it odd that the fear of danger hadn’t bothered him when he was in danger, only now, when he had a moment’s breathing space to reflect on it.
“Of course I will go,” said Raven, taking a deep breath and straightening up.
“I want to come, too! I’ve got the magic wand!” exclaimed Wendy.
Raven took her hands in his, saying, “My wife, I ask you do this thing as a favor to me, and also because Peter need you. I can move in the dark, without noise like the wolf, as you know, and the seal-men think I am their king. This is not the time for you.”
“But what if you get hurt!”
Peter said, “My house. My call. He goes. You stay. Got it? No time to argue.”
“If that isn’t the most macho garbage I’ve ever had to listen too in my whole life, I don’t know what is! If you think . . .”
“Zip it, lady!” Peter shouted her down. Then, he continued, coldly. “I had to admit this morning that I wasn’t able to carry on. Wasn’t physically capable, you got me? Not something I like to admit. If you’re not man enough to admit the same thing, then you’re not man enough for this mission. Well? Use your brain, not your pride. Well?”
Wendy pouted, but nodded. She turned sadly to Raven, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on the cheek. “But I’ll miss you!”
Raven said to Peter, “You not talk to my wife that way again, you hear me?”
Peter said, “You can slap me later. But hand me one of those firearms first. No, the big carbine.”
Then, to Wendy, Raven said, “I will come back.” Raven tried to sound convincing. But he only sounded sad and scared.
21
The Lord
of
Light
I
Wendy tucked in Peter and Lemuel; then she made sure Peter had plenty of bullets for his gun, reloading his weapons out of the cartridges she had found in Peter’s shirt pockets; she folded the shirt and put it on the chair and was only just beginning to tell Peter about her father and the wonderful things Raven could do when she heard Raven’s voice shouting. The sound came through the south windows.
Wendy ran on rapid feet through the room that had all the maps on the walls, globes of the Earth and Mars, Venus and Midgard. The central pillar here was shaped like a tall, naked man, his face in pain, holding the ceiling on his shoulders, his arms flung out along the roofbeam. There was a small door hidden in the wall between maps of Pluto and Mt. Purgatory.
Even though Peter shouted at her not to, Wendy unbarred the door, opened it a crack, looked out.
Thin tendrils of smoke drifted chest high through the corridor, and the firelight leaping and dancing through the stained glass windows made the peris, angels, and lios-alfar figured in the glass seem to sway and bow.
At the far corner of the corridor, a knight in silver armor, a perfectly normal-looking man, had his face in his hands and was weeping softly. When he heard Raven’s shouts coming from around the corner, however, he put up his shield, which bore the emblem of a face swollen with smallpox, and drew his sword, which dripped black blood and flakes of pus.
Two men in purple robes came running around the corner. One was Raven, and he was carrying a sack over his shoulder; in his other hand was a pistol. His robe was short, and Wendy saw, when Raven turned his back, that it had split along the spinal seam, because of the broadness of Raven’s shoulders. The other man Wendy had never seen before. He was a blond, muscular, square-jawed man, and he was carrying a spear and a shield, both slightly dusty as if they had been ripped off some wall. The shield bore the emblem of a winged horse rearing over crossed keys.
Behind the men, from around the corner, came a roar of jeering calls, barking, laughter, and a snatch of angry songs.
Raven fired his pistol with a loud report. From around the corner came an answering explosion, then came barking shouts and the sound of many feet running, growing louder.
The blond man shouted. “Russkie! We got trouble up ahead!”
Wendy screamed, “Raven!”
The silver knight called out in a sad voice, “Life is but pain, and all wisdom is sorrow. Face me! Oblivion awaits!”
Raven tucked his pistol into his belt and picked up a small table standing in the corridor, letting the vase that had been sitting on it drop and shatter. He said, “Max, can we rush him?”
The blond man said, “Let’s go, Russkie. He can’t get both of us. How good can he be with that toad sticker?”
A dozen seal-men in white sailor suits and caps, waving cutlasses and belaying pins, came around the corner at a dead run. At their head was a fat, white, seal-faced man in a red coat, smoking flintlock in one hand. He took a stand and raised his other hand, which also held a flintlock. The seal-men parted like a wave to either side of him.
Raven and the blond man rushed the knight, screaming. The blond man stabbed with his spear, Raven swung the table by one hand like an oversized bludgeon. With the kind of easy motion that comes of long practice, the knight deflected the table with his shield, parried the spearhead, stepping inside the blond man’s guard, and reposted, burying his swordpoint in the center of the blond man’s chest.
The knight yanked the blade free and swung at Raven. Raven raised the table like a shield, but it shattered under the sword blow, and Raven fell, his arm broken, cut and bloody. Wendy heard the snap of Raven’s arm breaking. At the same moment, the seal-man captain fired his pistol, aiming for the back of Raven’s head. As Raven was falling, the pistol ball struck the knight in the head.
The knight was knocked backward by the impact of the pistol ball, and his neck lay at an impossible angle. The seal-captain had disappeared behind a cloud of black-powder smoke, and the knight was disappearing behind the surprising amount of blood fountaining up from the ghastly remains of his face.
The seal-sailors, who had paused to let their leader shoot, now ran forward.
Raven threw the bag to Wendy, grabbed the arm of the fallen blond man, and began running forward at an awkward lope, broken arm dangling, his face slick with sweat, his eyes bright with anger and determination.
Wendy threw the bag behind her, through the door into the other room where Peter lay. She pointed the ivory wand at the statue holding up the ceiling. “By theWhite Hart’s Horn, I command you to wake! Save my husband!”
Raven fell in through the door, still dragging the blond man, the seal- sailors half a step behind him raising their cutlasses and laughing, when the tall statue stirred to life, and, with a slow, huge shrug, began to pull the cracking roofbeam free of its fittings, the groaning ceiling out of its frame.
The seal-sailors paused in a moment of horror, looking upward. Wendy darted forward and grabbed Raven’s robe and tried to tug him to his feet. Raven lurched to his feet, pulled on the blond man’s arm, stumbled forward and fell in through the door to the bedroom.
Raven gave a cry of anguish and horror when he saw he was carrying no more than the rotting fragment of an arm and hand, blackened, swollen, and stinking with hideous disease. A spasm of disgust made him fling it away.
The seal-men hesitated, all staring upward at the groaning ceiling, mesmerized with fear. One seal-sailor, eyes transfixed, said in a toneless voice, “Okay, mates, I have a plan. . .”
The statue pulled the ceiling down and toppled it onto the crowd of seal-sailors. The map room disappeared in an avalanche of brick and rubble, and chairs and divans from the room above fell down in clouds of dust. The doorway was filled with fallen beams and brick, and bricks spilled out into the bedroom in a wash of dust.
Raven staggered to his feet, face wild. “Wendy! Wendy! Great God in heaven!”
“Calm down, pal,” said Peter. “She’s right beside you. Hey! Don’t!”
They flung themselves into each other’s arms, then jumped apart when Raven keeled over, screaming, clutching his broken arm.
Peter barked out: “Wendy! Help get him over here where we can take a look at that arm. I think those guys’ blades are poisoned.”
Wendy said, “But Raven’s inoculated against smallpox.”
“Who knows? Might have saved his a,. . . his life. Get out Doctor Lancelot’s kit again.” And then, a moment later: “Damn. It’s a fracture, all right. Clean break, though. I’m going give you some morphine to dull the pain when I yank to straighten the bone. It may make you drowsy, but you can’t go to sleep. Wendy, get that stuff ready so we can splint his arm up after. Hang on to the bedpost there. Okay. Ready?”
Raven arched his back in agony, his face white, the cords in his neck standing out beneath his beard, but he did not scream.
Wendy had such nausea in her stomach that she could not speak or move. Watching her husband in pain was as terrible a thing as had ever happened to her.
Peter said, “You get the stuff ?”
Raven nodded toward the bag. It had spilled open. There were framed banknotes, the front and reverse of singles, twos, tens, twenties, and so on, and a rack of coins. Some of the glass had shattered. On top of the heap was a garland crown of laurel leaves, wound with gold ribbon, miraculously intact.
Peter gestured. “Wendy, get that garland and put it on my dad’s head. And—hey, who was that guy, Raven?”
“Max. Don’t know his last name. I took him prisoner, and he agreed to help me instead. I did not know him more than five minutes. He was good friend, and he had a funny sense of humor and a smile. Good friend . . .”
At that moment, there came a loud shout at the main door, “Have at it, lads! With a will! Heave ho!” and a crash, then another. But the heavy doors did not even tremble in their hinges.
Peter put the wreath on his father’s head, held up his hands with his index and ring fingers curled in toward his palms, chanted the poem in praise of Daphne.
He called out the last line three times over: “Apollo, Hyperion, Helion, Day! Moon’s madness you tame, night’s dragons you slay!”
And then he whispered: “Please wake up, father. Damn it, old man, wake up! I don’t know what to do!”
There came another crash at the door, then screams, screams, screams.
Mysterious red light, the color of the newly risen dawn, appeared in the crack along the bottom of the door, and there came a thunderous fanfare of harps and trumpets.
Then music poured into the air like glory. And with each glissade of the harp strings, another, deeper string was plucked and added its stronger note to the march of music. And each time this deeper humming note sang out, the selkie voices screamed as if they were being shot with arrows.
The red became golden, until it seemed as if daylight were shining in through the cracks in the door. The music swelled to a rippling fanfare, then fell silent.
There was no sound of selkie, no movement behind the door, but warm, clear streams of light radiated from the lock, lintel, and threshold. The light banished all shadows from the room.
A beautiful, deep, masculine voice called out, “Gallus! You are my herald. Announce my coming!”
And a cock crowed.
Raven said, “What is going on? Why is rooster crowing?”
Peter’s eyes were riveted to the door.
Wendy clapped her hands for joy. “I think something good is happening!”
The bar flew up out of its staples, and the doors slammed open. Light poured in, rich, warm, and golden, and the room was lit with daylight.
A golden figure of a youth, taller than any mortal and handsome beyond all description, stooped and came in through the doors. He was too tall for the houses of men; he knelt in the door, holding his golden bow horizontally across his knee. His crown of rays was too bright to look upon. Across his back, on a purple strap, hung a lyre.
There were bloodstains on the corridor floor beyond and golden arrows piercing walls and floor, but no sign of the selkie.
He knelt in the doorway, and majestic music radiated from his person, rising and falling as he spoke, solemn and sorrowful by turns, according to his words.
“You have called and I have come. Your father lies in darkness, swallowed by the ocean stream, beyond my eyesight, beyond my reach, for no ray of sun has ever touched the bottom of the deepest sea. I cannot perform what I have promised, and I am thus forsworn to Everness. These amends I make:
“First, your father comes ever nearer to my reach, for Acheron is rising, the hateful city. When sunlight can find his soul again, I will go myself to his salvation, sending my son Aesclepious first, to repair and make whole any hurt to his body’s house; requiring my daughter Urania to drive off any lingering madness with the true light of reason. Yet this is no more than to perform as I have promised.
“Second, my uncle Hades stands within the sea outside your walls, with his grandmother Moira. They have trespassed to my domain. It lies within my power to drive back Death and Fate from these the shores of Daylight’s world, yet with this price; that the stones who have risen up to defend the house must sleep again, for constellations hide when the mighty Sun appears.
“Third, I can heal you of the wounds you have received while fighting for the honor of Everness. Older wounds than that I cannot touch without the leave of my brother Ares. Yet there is this price: that all those of Everness will be healed, for good or ill. For your ancestor lies bleeding on the bosom of my uncle Poseidon’s waves, and I cannot heal you without he also is allowed to rise again, for the same sun shines on all alike, foul and fair.
“Thus I will withhold or grant these boons according to your desire, one or all. Speak now. What say you?”
And he smiled down at Wendy as he spoke. She smiled back, but moved to stand behind Raven.
II
Peter tore his gaze away from the shining supernatural figure to look out at the terrible silent silhouettes looming from the sea. “It’s no choice. Either way, we lose. We can’t take on the two dark gods out there, even with the statues. But without the statues, how can we hold the ground against the gunmen, the giants, and the selkie?”
Raven had his good hand before his eyes but kept staring, blinking, at the unearthly face shining beneath the crown of rays.
Wendy, who, for some reason, could stare unblinking at the godlike figure, spoke out of the side of her mouth at Peter, “Use the talismans, like I’ve been saying! The Wand of Moly reveals the selkie; the rod of Mollner smites the giants; the Bow of Belphanes drives away the kelpie; the Ring . . . I’m not sure what the Ring does . . .”
Raven said to Peter, “If you could remember the last defense of Everness, maybe that could stop the gunmen. Talismans drive off magic beasts, see?”
Wendy said, “He said that what comes for the eighth and final sea-bell is beyond our strength.” She pointed out the window.
“Who said so?”
“Galen.”
Peter sighed. “And what about Galen?” And he thought: is it right to cure ourselves if it means curing Azrael? Would Galen be willing to give up his life to make sure Azrael is destroyed? Am I willing?
But what he said was: “Right or wrong, I think taking the boons is the best thing to do right now, and we got no time to debate.” Squinting, he turned to the kneeling golden figure and shouted, “Do it!”
The shining figure turned his head toward Wendy. Wendy said, “Go ahead! What are you waiting for?”
III
Before either Peter or Raven could move or flinch, the Shining One, still kneeling, raised his bow and shot them both.
The arrows turned to streams of light midflight and struck them both with a warm and rosy glow. Raven’s arm no longer ached, and the fuzzy numbness of the morphine fell away, leaving a crisp, clear sense of vitality, clear-mindedness, and calm strength.
The bandages fell from Peter’s shoulder, and a lump of flattened lead was squeezed up, out of his wound, which flowed shut behind it, leaving a small scar.
Raven raised both hands overhead, twisting and flexing his arms with a look of wonder and surprise on his face.
The Shining One gracefully crossed the floor, shifting the weight from his right foot to his right knee, and bringing his left knee forward. He shot three arrows out the windows, and there was sunlight all around and everywhere.
Raven ran to the window. A rosy glow, like dusk, was slowly fading over the area. The dark gods were sinking away into the sea, swallowed up into whirlpools, fading like dreams.
Raven threw himself on his knees: “Bright angel!” He cried out, “There is so much I do not understand! You must tell me! It is not so often gods come down to earth!”
“Kneel not to me but only to the Most High; for we both are fellow servants of the Good, you not less than I.”
“Then you are a god?”
“The poet puts his soul into his work; the Demiurge can do no less. If holy power created all things, then all things are holy. You have godliness in you no less than I, though mixed, in you, with baser elements, passion, wrath and shame, which you must study to make pure.”
“Wait. . .!”
“Time is older than the gods, and he will not lift up his fallen sands again, not even for us, his children. Even now the gentle Hours have harnessed my impatient steeds, and rosy-fingered Dawn, my heraldess, has unlocked the gates of day. Ask a final question, but do not ask me to prophesy for you.”
Raven opened his mouth, but a terrible feeling came over him, that no matter what he asked, he would think of a much better question he should have asked, a few minutes, or a few years, or decades after the god had walked away.
“What should I ask?” said Raven to the shining god.
IV
The golden voice answered, ringing: “Ask if there is life beyond this life.”
“Is there?”
“There is. Here, you live in the country of ignorance and are not told life’s purposes, causes, or results. This country of darkness is meant to teach you courage.
“Hereafter, you will abide in a country of dreams, the elf-land, where all things are possible upon the mere wish, and fools there call it paradise. That country is meant to teach prudence, or moderation.
“After that, there is a country of glory, where you will be given worlds of your own making and children of your own to raise. This is my country. This country is to teach temperance (which at times, I fear my father may never learn, as the circumstances of my birth suggest).
“After that, you will pass on to a country of justice, where all harms will be healed.
“Once the virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, and justice are broken to the saddle, they will pull the chariot of your soul back to your home, of which this world and the three lesser heavens above this are but shallow and false reflections, and the reason for your long exile will be made clear then.
“Pain, here, is your tutor’s whip, but highest law forbids the tutor strike any property that truly is your own; your will, your judgment, your consent. Pain can only touch those things lent to you, the texts and materials of instruction; your body, your property, your reputation, your offices, your children, your wife. These things are given back to your instructors at the end of term, and you may not take them with you when you go. Love them not overmuch but in moderation, according to their nature, which is mortal, subject to destruction. Love virtue with full zeal, according to its nature, which is immortal and indestructible.
“Do you understand what I have told you, young spirit, who calls himself in this life, Raven, son of Raven?”
“No! I don’t understand anything!” Raven said.
“Then heed this: those whom you imagine to be your foes are trespassers from the country of dreams, which is the country of magicians. You will learn how to overcome them when you learn the lesson of your world, not theirs.
“And heed this also: despite that there is life after death, the crime of murder is not excused.”
And then the great doors closed about the Shining One, and his light could no longer be seen.
22
The
Last Defense
of
Everness
I
Peter had turned his head away from the shining sun god and was not paying much attention to the speech the god made to Raven, which sounded to Peter like Sunday school preaching, anyway. Because he was looking right out the window when the sun god stepped behind the closing doors, he saw the exact moment when Azrael de Gray reappeared on the land.
The sky above was now red and black, a swirled and knotted texture of storm clouds, swollen with undischarged rain, breaking into smaller clouds to let the beams of dawn appear. The earth was still gray, and the first upper rim of the sun’s own orb had just peered over the sea.
The sea gave forth a mighty wave, thundering up the cliffs to an unnatural height, flying over the seawall in sheets of green and sprays of white, so that the gardens and fountain were slopped and overthrown with saltwater.
When the wave fell, Azrael de Gray stood upon the ruins of the seawall where it had passed, unwetted by any drop. And his garments now showed that he had partway fallen into the dream-world and emerged again, for Peter saw them now as Azrael imagined them; a billowing cloak of rich imperial purple; amulets of power circling his neck, and in his hand, a warlock’s wand. His earthly garments underneath had vanished and now showed as doublet and hose of black, slashed with silk of red and white.
Peter felt a stab of grief in his heart, for Azrael still wore Galen’s face.
Peter said, “Heads up. Azrael’s back. Shut the shutters! You can look out through the loopholes. Well? Tell me what’s happening.”
The room was black again with heavy wooden shutters closing out the dawn.
Raven went to the doors to lift the heavy bar back into place.
Wendy said, “The kelpie are jumping into the sea. Yuck! I don’t blame them. They turn all black and icky and dripping if the sunlight hits them. But their horses get all better and nice looking. I bet the horses are the real kelpie and that the men are puppets or something. Uh, oh! Lots of men with guns.”
“Get down!” shouted Peter. “Those walls won’t stop a large-caliber bullet.”
“Don’t worry!” exclaimed Wendy. ‘Azrael isn’t letting them shoot up here. He’s giving orders to the gunmen. That’s funny! He’s running around trying to stop the kelpie and the gunmen at the same time.”
Raven said, “Can’t we get out of, you know, gunfire range?”
Wendy kept her face pressed up to the tiny hole and said, “I bet he can’t afford to kill us; he must need us to give him the Silver Key; I don’t think he can just take it. Whoops!” Now she shrank back. “He turned and looked up straight into my eye. I guess I guessed right. Gosh, he’s creepy!”
“Let me see,” said Raven, stepping up to the peephole. “Hah! Sunlight hurts them, I am thinking; Azrael make the ice-troll breathe out big fog and mist, but sunlight still is burning through fog.”
Peter said: “Raven, stay on the window and keep us informed. Wendy, get over here with that magic stick. Now, then . . .uh. . . what are we supposed to do?”
Wendy held up a framed banknote. “This is a landscape. A dream landscape. With the Silver Key we can open the gate and step into them, if we’re asleep.”
Peter stared at the banknote; it was the reverse of a ten-dollar bill, showing the treasury building at the intersection of two roads. People strolled along the sidewalk; Model Τ Fords rolled along the road. In the distance were other buildings, shrubbery.
Peter said, “The Freemasons put the symbols into American money and national monuments when they moved over here from England. It was part of the spell they used to let us break away from the British Empire.”
“I didn’t know that!” exclaimed Wendy.
“Really? It’s what I was told when I was young. I used to think everyone knew that stuff. Now, how do we do this?”
Wendy said, “I don’t know how we can go to sleep with all that racket outside. Besides, by the time we wake up again, the bad guys will be upstairs here.”
Peter said, “Don’t worry about that. I can knock you out and wake you up in a moment. If we need to. Which we won’t, not here. What I’m trying to remember is, what’s the curse on each of these things?”
Wendy said, “Galen told me. If you throw the Rod of Mollner, it will come back to you, and you have to be able to endure its return stroke. To use the Ring of Niflungar, you must forswear love. If you take up the Moly Wand, you will lose all your fond illusions. The Bow of Belphanes will only serve the proud, but the vainglorious will be thrown down. The Sword of Justice can only be wielded by one worthy of rulership.”
Peter pulled the framed banknotes and coins over in front of him. “Where are the talismans?”
Raven said, “Do quickly whatever you mean to do. I think something, some terrible thing, is about to be happening now.”
“What do you see?” snapped Peter.
“It is something—hard to see in gloom—trees? towers? There are towers rising out of the sea, hundreds and hundreds, like forest. There are webs like spider webs and ropes strung all over them.”
Wendy shrieked, “Acheron is rising!”
Peter said, “Okay, girl! Zap a picture with that magic wand. Any picture.”
“Which one?”
“Any of them! I don’t know where these talismans are, but they must be in these pictures somewhere. Raven, get over here and help us look at these little things in the pictures . . .”
Raven, hunched over the peephole of the shutters, said, “Wait! They are not towers!”
“That’s a relief,” said Peter.
“I found one!” cried Wendy.
Raven said “They are the masts of ships. Clipper ships with black sails. Score upon score of ship, filling bay as far as eye can see. And other seal- men, like giants, float between ships, larger than whales; seal-men, their eyes are like lanterns. They are not dressed as others. Wear Greek armor, or Egyptian. Farther down, they are wearing older things, older than what I know, and they are huger than islands. I am thinking these ones are very old. They are from the deep places of the world . . .”
“It’s right here on the back of the dollar!” Wendy said. “Plain as day! These arrows in the eagle’s claws must stand for the Belphanes’ Bow; I guess the olive branch stands for the Moly Wand.”
“Back of the quarter, different,” said Peter. “Eagle there carrying a fasces.”
“A which?”
“A fasces is bundle of rods carried by a Roman lictor . . .”
“Hey. Rods? Mollner’s Rod?”
“Zap it,” said Peter.
“Don’t I have to go to sleep?” asked Wendy.
“Everywhere else. Not in this house. Zap it.”
There came a tramp of boots along the corridor, a pounding at the door.
“Open up!” called a horse voice. “Federal police!”
Raven said, “Azrael has sent the ice-giant and the fire-giant toward the house. They are coming this way. Holy Saint Katherine! The man in the sky. . . !”
“Open up!” shouted the voice behind the door.
Peter shouted for Morpheus to knock out the men behind the door, but he did not know their names, or have anything belonging to them, so nothing happened. “I wish I could remember what the last defense of Everness was. Now would be a good time.”
“Oh my!” cried Wendy, and fell backwards off the bed.
A bald eagle, larger than any living eagle, rose up, dreamlike at first, then solid and real, its magnificent wings beating, and it uttered a fierce scream. In one claw, a golden bow with a sheaf of arrows; in the other claw, a slim wand, with leaves and flowers sprouting from it. In the air all around this apparition, thirteen points of clear light orbited, sweeping the air with soft but penetrating brilliance.
Wendy, up on her feet again, said, “Here birdy! Here eagle! Here boy! Give Wendy the things!” And reached out her hands for the wand and arrows.
But the eagle fluttered up to the ceiling and spoke in a majestic, piercing voice, a voice like a brass trumpet: “Separation of powers is our law: know these talismans serve jealous gods, and no hand may hold more than one! Who takes the bow may not touch the wand.”
Raven, still at the peephole, said, “There is a man running through the air wearing storm clouds like a cape. He is in the air behind the ships, blowing in their sails with his bagpipes . . .”
The voices at the door shouted for them to open up. Peter worked the action of his machine-gun, slapped in his last clip.
At that same moment, hurricanic winds rose up from outside, shrieking louder and louder until the whole sky screamed.
The windows behind Raven blew out, wooden shutters flying off their hinges, shards of glass falling. Raven fell back with his hands over his face.
The whole room shook like a ship at sea. From outside came the cracking, shrieking, popping noise of trees being uprooted.
The balcony outside the north windows collapsed on one side so that the whole formed a drunken ramp. When the pillars holding the eastern part of the balcony collapsed, the northeast corner of the room tore open, and an angle opened between the two walls.
Through that gap, they could see a small folly tower on the north wing crashing into ruin, and gold plates and ancient tapestries were lifted out of the dust and tumbling planks, and flung away on the wind.
Above the wreckage of the tower, two supernatural creatures strode across the sky with flying steps, a thunderclap echoing from each footfall. One, dressed as a Roman soldier, clashed his sword against his shield to make the heavens quake with thunder; the other was stirring up a whirlwind with the skirling of his bagpipes, his cape and kilt swirling up into the stormwinds chasing him, and the spout of a tornado followed his music.
The two storm-princes ran across the winds against the east, herding the rolling stormclouds towards the sun, as if to smother the coming dawn.
There was a hissing noise from the door and a spray of sparks that erupted from a burning point of light, which began to melt one of the hinges. The men beyond the door had applied an acetylene torch.
The streaming sunbeams from the dawn were covered by gathering clouds; the kelpie cheered, and the selkie began to sing, a thousand voices roaring from the ships.
The frost-giant began to glide across the gardens, leaving icicle-hung trees behind him as he came. Through the shattered windows in the south, they saw an angry giant step over the garden wall, lighting the bushes to either side of him afire with a salute of his two torches.
The eagle shouted, “Choose!”
A second eagle, dreamlike, manifested in the room, carrying in its claws a bundle of rods, which it dropped. In the midst of the bundle was a hammer like a sledgehammer, but with a short haft. The second eagle screamed, “Only one willing to endure the stroke of War may raise this rod in War.
Who takes this rod in hand may take no talisman besides, for the military shall not be rendered independent of and superior to the civil power.”
So piercing and loud were the voices of the eagles that the howls of the hurricane could not drown them.
Raven was looking at Peter’s face when he saw the sudden look of memory, of hope, come triumphantly into it. He could not hear what he said, but saw his lips form some words “. . . remembered . . . last defense of Everness!”
The burning hinge fell from the door. The door settled, and then shook under a powerful blow from a battering ram.
Peter was grabbing Wendy by the shoulder, shouting in her ear, pointing toward the gap in the wall. By chance, or fate, the winds grew more quiet at that moment, and Raven heard, “. . . point at the lightning rod on that steeple there! Fulgrator! As the Guardian of Everness, on Everness land, in my hour of distress, I invoke my swift command!”
The door fell, and armed men appeared in the gap, both men in blue helmets and wearing black fatigues, with M-16’s, and men in purple robes, with hunting rifles. The first two men came into the room, and, by some quirk of habit or instinct swung their rifles to cover the suits of armor hanging, limp and inert, before the door and windows.
The man behind him swung a hunting rifle to cover Raven, then jerked the barrel up when he saw Raven wearing a purple robe. His glance swept over Wendy and Peter and Lemuel; a small, young woman and two old men in bed; and he decided there was no great danger here, so he started to sling his rifle, shouting, “The Dark Messiah claims this house!” Because he did not move forward, the men behind him could not at once come into the room; the heavy marble column they had been using as a ram was in their way.
A voice from behind shouted, “Down on the floor! You’re all under arrest!”
Wendy said, “Hi! You can’t see these two giant eagles, can you? Are you hypnotized to ignore weird things? Azrael must have done that so you wouldn’t get scared.”
Peter pointed with his right hand out the window and with his left hand at the door. The two men in the room took that as a threatening gesture and swung their rifles toward him. The moment it took them to bring their rifles to bear was a moment too long.
Peter brought his hands together so that both forefingers were pointing at the men.
Raven smelled ozone and felt the hairs on the back of his hands stand up. A humming tension filled his ears. He tackled Wendy, pulled her body under his as he fell, and tried to protect her with his arms.
Lightning entered the room, a blinding, blue-white explosion of hideous glare. Raven was deafened and blinded for a moment.
When Raven looked up, and blinked free the dazzle in his eyes, he saw near the hole where the door had been the corpses smoldering and twitching. He saw the sizzling sparks crawling across the dropped firearms. Sparks were also buzzing on the door hinges, metal buttons, and buckles. Tension hung in the air like the aura of power surrounding a throbbing dynamo.
Framed in the smoking ruins of the door, a supernatural creature stood. It looked like a man and wore a long black coat with lace at its throat. Its face was harsh, an intersection of angles, high cheekbones, a narrow jaw. Long, dark hair fanned out from its face, writhing and standing on end.
In one black glove it held a javelin. When it looked over its shoulder and smiled, Raven saw the electricity burning in its eyes. Sparks jumped from its upper teeth to its lower, so that, for a moment, it seemed to have fangs.
It turned, it smiled, turned back and threw the javelin down the corridor at the fleeing men, some of whom were crying out, trying to surrender. There was a flash of intolerable white fire where the javelin struck; Raven turned his eyes away in time.
A dry, inhuman voice: “Free again, I am, I see. But I do not see the Ni- flung Ring on any hand commanding me. Madness has its uses too; but will anything, without the ring, tie madness up when time, this time, is through?”
With a swirl of black coat, the creature stepped through the smoking doorway, after the javelin. There was a hissing rustle as it moved, and Raven heard it chuckle.
Raven turned his head and gaped at Peter. “Why don’t you Everness people rule the world, you can do things like this?”
Peter grunted, “I think we used to. Gave it up or something. I don’t know.”
II
Wendy kissed her husband. “Will you get up?!! You’re squishing me!”
Raven stood. “I hear no wind outside. Is that bad or good?”
The two eagles had perched on the bedposts, with three talismans glittering on the floor behind the headboard: a slender wand, living flowers springing from its dead wood; a bow of gold with pale arrows, fletched with white feathers; a gnarled stump of a hammer, short handled, with a head of black iron.
Raven looked out the window. The two giants had halted and were staring up at the sky. Both flinched when a lightning bolt crashed down nearby. One lifted up its icy mask and began to breathe out fog; the other plunged a torch into a pool of seawater that had gathered on the broken tiles. The torch, inextinguishable, sputtered, and steam from the water billowed up. Both giants were trying to hide themselves.
The armada of selkie had fallen into a hush. Some side boats, filled with sailors, had been lowered, but now the selkie sat at their oars, laughing nervously and slyly, daring each other to be first ashore. The kelpie knights were staring upwards in grim resignation, or they lowered their heads in postures of noble sorrow.
Wendy said, “Look!”
On the top of the central tower, a lightning bolt was swaying. It stretched from Everness to dark clouds above, a crackling strand of energy, flickering, dancing, many forking arms and branches tightly folded into a narrow path.
A church bell began ringing in the distance, and Wendy imagined some quaint old New England church, with white clapboard, perhaps covered with ivy, on some green hill or overlooking a quiet cove not far away.
At the sound of the church bells, the selkie began to wail and gnash their teeth, clutching their ears. The kelpie knights all bowed their heads remorsefully, and their handsome features began to sag and melt into pockmarked and disease-scarred masks of horror. The mingled fogs and smoke from the giants grew thicker, hanging over the whole area.
Peter said, “That’s North Point Episcopalian. They hold a sunrise service this time of year.”
Raven said, “Are we winning?”
23
The
Wand of Moly
I
Raven, gazing outward in the growing light at the nightmare armada, at the host of diseased kelpie knights, and at the giants wreathed in smoke and fog, remembered the words of the sun god, that these things were from the dream-world, the world of magicians. His brow was furled in wonder and dark thought.
And there was the magician himself, Azrael de Gray, standing atop the fallen stones of the broken seawall, his robes and cloak blowing in the dawn wind.
Azrael touched his necklace, kissed his fingers, and pointed to the north, which was the direction from which the carillon of church bells came.
The bells fell silent.
A hissing murmur of calls and laughter rippled through the host.
But when the church bells began again, moments later, the mocking cries became shrieks and curses, dwindling to sullen silence.
Azrael pointed his wand at the ice-giant and uttered some command, which Raven did not hear. The ice-giant held up his massive hand and shook his featureless head in curt refusal.
One of the men behind the giant held up his rifle in salute. “Master, send us! We’ll shut them up!”
Azrael pointed with his staff at the speaker and waved to the north. The man shouted for his companions, and several men in purple robes trotted away out of sight around the north wing.
Raven said to Peter, “The sunlight hurts the kelpie more than the other monsters. Who are the church bells hurting?”
“The storm-princes. Church bells drive back storms. Notice how quiet it’s gotten? I hope it rains. The fire in the south wing don’t seem to be spreading, and maybe they’ll burn themselves out. . .”
“He is sending gunmen to the church. He asked giant, but giant said no.”
There came the noise of an engine whispering in the distance, a car on the road traveling north.
Outside, Azrael gestured with his wand. The leader of the kelpie knights, bearing the same armor and shield as the man who had slain Lancelot, saluted with his bleeding sword. The kelpie knights mounted up on their chargers and began to trot in file off the edge of the sea cliff, each front rank, in its turn, plunging wildly into the sea below. Wendy pointed out how handsome and strong the steeds now seemed, Arabian stallions of the finest breed, that had seemed so sick by torchlight.
The clouds blotting out the dawn began to break apart, and beams of red sunlight streamed through the gaps, vivid against the darkened sky. No sign of the two storm-princes was seen above.
Peter said, “Wish I knew what he was up to. Won’t attack while the lightning’s sitting on the house, that’s clear.”
Wendy said, “Can’t storm-princes push each other around?”
Peter looked at Raven, “She’s right. After his gunmen kill the people in church, he’ll get his storm-princes back, and they’ll gang up on our storm-prince.”
Wendy said, “Let’s use the magic talismans!”
Raven pointed out the windows. “We must drive this navy back before gunmen stop church bells. No way to warn church? No telephone?”
Peter shook his head. “It’s one of the things I always hated about this place.”
Wendy stamped her foot, and said, “What about the magic? Let’s use the talismans!”
Peter sat up in the bed, and, with his hands, swung his legs out so that he was sitting, leaning on the headboard, looking at the talismans on the floor next to him.
“I’ll take the hammer,” grunted Peter. “It has a curse I can live with. Always have been able to dish it out as well as I can take it.”
Raven said, “Is that what that curse means? Sometimes this fairy-tale stuff very tricky, you know?”
Peter said, “Wendy? You’re the expert on fairy-tale stuff.”
She had dimples when she smiled. She said “Peter, you should get the hammer since you’re the warrior. Raven, you should get the bow and arrows ‘cause you’re the hunter, and you’re not vainglorious or over proud.”
Raven said, “Kelpie are leaving. Peter, did you hear what storm-prince said? One of us must take ring, what is it called?”
“Niflungar,” said Peter.
“Geshundheit!” said Wendy, and she giggled.
“One of us must take Niflung Ring or else storm-prince cannot be bound up again.”
Wendy continued: “And I get the wand on account of my innocence.” And she batted her eyelashes.
A cold touch of dread entered Raven’s heart.
Peter, meanwhile, was looking at the hammer. Finally he said, “Every soldier who stands in harm’s way knows he might have to get wounded or killed for a chance to strike at the enemy.” And his voice, which had held a note of uncertainty at first, grew firm with resolution as he spoke. With un- shaking hand he picked up the mighty hammer, which he handled carefully, with respect, as if it were a firearm.
Peter stared. It looked more like a sledgehammer than anything else, except that the haft was short, and it felt balanced for throwing. Yet it seemed to pulse in his hand and felt warm to the touch. “Damned thing is alive!” he whispered.
One of the eagles screamed, “Take up in defense of heaven’s light, and take as foes those wrathful and sullen giants whom that light awes! Vow to use in no unsober purpose, nor to set aside, nor to deliver to any agent of the enemy, until thy charge is passed, or until the King is come again, and excuses you your duty!”
The eagle cocked its head aside, staring at Peter with a yellow eye.
Peter asked the eagle several questions, but it did not speak again. Then he saluted the eagle with the hammer, saying, “I hereby swear to support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
And the eagle screamed and vanished. It did not disappear or fade; instead, like an image from dream, it simply became hard to recall that it was there, as if a mist hid it from sight and memory.
“Wow!” said Wendy. She looked up at the other eagle and waved. “Can I have the Moly Wand?” she asked.
Raven stepped forward. “Darling! Don’t touch that wand!”
“Why not?”
“I—I—I am not knowing how to say this, but, I think you will be very unhappy if you touch that wand! Remember, there is curse!”
“Oh, really? Are you saying I have fond illusions, Mr. Raven, son of Raven? You must think I hallucinate!” And she snorted, almost giggling.
Peter looked up from the hammer in his lap. “Hey. Maybe someone else should take that wand, you know? Someone already hardened and cynical. Disillusioned. Not a little pretty thing like you.”
Wendy just rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on!” And she began to reach for it.
“Wait!” Raven’s voice held a note of panic.
“Well, what?” asked Wendy.
“What if you no longer believed in fairy-tales, you touch that wand? What if you no longer believed in your father and mother?”
Wendy giggled. “Oh, Raven, don’t be so silly!”
“No! Listen! Stay away from that wand! It will make you lose your parents! You will realize the truth that they never exist! You will realize you never flew as a child! It was dream! Never hung in air outside kitchen window to wave at mother! No mother! It was dream! There are no miracles in life!”
Wendy arched her eyebrow (her favorite expression). “And I suppose I only pretended I got better in the hospital? That wasn’t a miracle, which happened only yesterday? Was that a dream, too, I suppose you think you’re going to say? Hah! Some people just don’t know anything about real life!”
Raven turned pale.
Wendy said, “Raven? What’s wrong? Aren’t you feeling all right?”
Peter, trying to distract her, said, “Say, Wendy. Raven might be right about getting the Ring instead of the bow and arrows.”
Wendy giggled. “But I’m not going to let him forswear love! Not while he’s my husband!”
“I was thinking of a guy named Wil. He’d be perfect. But where in the money would it be?”
Wendy said, “I know that! The wizard Franklin snared the lightning with a kite string, Galen said. I bet he keeps the Ring in Independence Hall. See there?” She pointed at the framed hundred-dollar bill, using the unicorn horn as a pointer.
Peter whispered to Raven, “What’re we going to do, pal? No one can use two talismans, that’s the rules. We need the Wand to fight the selkie. And the Moly Wand can only be used by the innocent. Are you innocent? I sure as hell ain’t. There’s no time to get anyone else.”
Raven looked out the windows. The armies of Azrael were drawn up in ordered hosts. The vast majority were selkie.
Peter said, “I know what you’re thinking, pal. Let the house get destroyed first, eh? But that ain’t going to happen. Look, you might like your wife just as much as now as when she gets sane . . .”
Raven sent Peter a dark look. “She will wither and perish without her dreams. To make her bitter? Ordinary? Without love or delight? I would kill before I would let. . .” And then he choked, realizing what he was saying.
When Raven had stepped over to talk to Peter, Wendy had stepped next to the eagle on the bedpost and whispered a few words to it.
Raven and Peter both flinched when the eagle screamed, “It is so!”
“See!” chirped Wendy. “The eagle says it’ll be all right. Don’t be such a worrywart. Besides, who says you men get a vote anyway?”
And before either of them could stop her, she picked up the Moly Wand.
“Wendy!” screamed Raven. “Put it down!” He started around the bed toward her. She said something to the eagle, which Raven did not hear, ending with, “. . . I promise.”
Raven noticed some of the light had gone. The other eagle, surrounded by a wreath of stars, had vanished.
He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Wendy! I told you not to . . .”
“Let go of me, silly! I’m all right! And yes, I still remember my parents, and I still believe in fairies, and I still believe in miracles . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
Raven let go of her shoulders and backed away, his eyes filling with fear, the back of his hand against his mouth. “No . . .” he said.
A look of wisdom, of memory, of thought flowed into Wendy’s blue eyes, and they looked like deep pools of clear water. She said, “I guess it wasn’t a miracle, was it? Koschei said I could have another person’s life if only I would agree. But I didn’t agree. But someone must have agreed, or else Koschei would not have been able to get Azrael’s life out of Galen’s hand and put it in Galen’s body. Galen was drawn to me because I had his life in me, didn’t I? You told Peter his son was dead. Why would you have said a thing like that?”
She looked at her husband intently.
“It was not my doing. . .,” Raven said. “I did not know that it really would work.”
“Silly! Then why’d you do it?”
He said nothing.
She said, “My daddy says strong men at least can admit what they’ve done. I used to brag about how strong you were, you know?”
Raven was silent. The sinking, cold ache in his heart, forgotten for a time, now chilled him.
“Don’t you have anything you want to tell me, Raven Varovitch?” She spoke in a clear, crisp tone of voice.
Peter said, “What the hell’s going on?What the hell’s she talking about?”
Raven said in a pleading voice, “You were dying!”
She shrugged. “I was afraid, at first. Then I got over it. Why couldn’t you? Couldn’t you have been brave? For me?”
“But you were dying!”
“You sound like a broken record. But at least I wasn’t killing anyone.”
Peter said, “What’s all this about?! Wendy!”
Wendy said, “Tell him, Raven. Tell the truth. The angels hear you when you tell the truth, and the devils hear you when you lie, that’s what Mommy says. And she should know.”
But Raven backed up further, his expression one of misery and anger, and said nothing.
“Wendy?” said Peter.
Wendy said softly, “I think my husband helped a demon kill your son.”
Peter looked at Raven with a look Raven knew the men Peter had killed on the battle field had seen before they died. “You’re a dead man, Varovitch, if she’s telling the truth.”
“Wendy—” Raven tried to sound strong, but it emerged as a sob. “I did not mean to—I thought—He said it would be a stranger!”
Her face grew cold. A look of angry sorrow, of contempt, came into her eyes.
Raven shouted, “I did it for you!”
The look of contempt faded into a blank stare of indifference, as if she were looking at someone she did not know.
The church bells fell silent.
II
At that moment there came such a howl of wind, such an explosion of lightning and thunder, that Raven once more grabbed his wife, pulling her further from the windows, his other hand raised as if to ward off a blow.
Through the gaps in the wall they saw three flying figures, winged with storm clouds, falling, swooping, and diving, like three hawks fighting. Winds and thunder and lightning darted from their every gesture and glance. Great sweeps of black cloud swirled around them, stirred to hurricanic wrath by the battle in the air.
The battle passed over the house. Falling and flying, black as a crow in his waistcoat, his lace a spot of electric white at his throat, Fulgrator shook his dreadful javelin, smiling and fierce. With a whine of bagpipes and a clash of blade on shield, his brothers plunged across the gulf of air toward him, and their footsteps echoed with thunder.
Soil and shrubs and sections of wall were thrown into the air; lightning danced across the gathered horde, slaying a score; thunder dazed and maddened another so that the horses of those kelpie still on land reared and plunged, trampling friends. Seal-men, gunmen, and thrown riders fell under reddened hoofs.
In the next moment, the three storm-princes were whirled aloft, fluttering like leaves in an October gale, thrown high into the yellow-red sky. They were small, darting shapes seen in the wide spaces opening between the piled towers of black cloud, and flashes of lightning and wild tumult followed them.
The beam of lightning no longer swayed atop the central tower. Fulgrator, it may be, had gathered all his power high above to struggle with his brothers.
When the storm-princes flew high, the earth below grew calm again. Azrael’s forces were in disarray, for the kelpies’ ordered retreat had turned to chaos, and the giant of fire stepped out from his cloud of smoke and lashed out against them with his two torches, setting galloping horses afire.
The forces to the north of the courtyard, however, were not in disarray. Here was the ice-giant, the remainder of the squad of gunmen dressed as soldiers, and an innumerable horde of selkie marines.
Azrael raised his staff and waved it in a great circle: the signal for the advance. Seal-men in the shape of men, armed with belaying pins, pikes, marlin spikes, and pickaroons, gave forth a cheer and stormed the house.
A large group ran up the half-fallen balcony as if it were a ramp, coming toward the gap in the wall. In their midst glided the ice-giant; and the shouting faces of the marines were at the level of its waist, so that it seemed it waded among them. In one great hand it held a truncheon; the other hung limp at its side. Snow and freezing rain from its deadly breath swept the air before and after it.
Behind the giant, marching in an ordered wedge, came a squad of gunmen. They had donned heavy coats over their flak jackets, collars turned up; some of the men worked the actions of their rifles with mittened hands to prevent the metal parts from freezing to each other.
Wendy, in Raven’s arms, slapped him. He stumbled back across the room so that he was near the ruins of the door.
Behind Raven, a sly Irish voice said softly, “Have ye not reckoned why yer lassy knows so much of the House so suddenly? So unnaturally?”
Raven was the only one who turned his head. Peter and Wendy were staring out the windows.
Where the fall of the balcony had torn away the wall, three selkie officers in red coats and white wigs led a chuckling crowd of able seamen, brandishing truncheons. The three officers, noses high, raised flintlock pistols in their paws and fired, while their men gave a ragged cheer. The figures disappeared behind a wash of black-powder smoke, while poorly aimed lead pistol balls rang from the stone or pitted the wood of the house. A hammering thunder erupted through the air when Peter emptied his machine-gun into the selkie crowd. A dozen were slain; the rest cowered back, some throwing themselves from the third-story balcony to escape. Why the bullets were able to strike them, but not touch the giants nor the kelpie, was not clear.
Wendy shouted, “The giants are coming!”
Peter tossed the empty rifle aside and raised the hammer in his hand, hefting its weight, aiming . . .
Raven looked up. Atop a roof beam sat Tom O’Lantern in his red cap, his little eyes glittering with malice and hate. “Galen’s life is in her body, it is, put there by yourself, ye murderer. Now that life struggles to come out, and it speaks through her. It’ll eat the poor lass up, and then ye’ll be a twice murderer. But look! Here is the American Wizard Franklin who tamed Jove’s bolt with Yankee know-how!”
It was true. An apparition looking like Benjamin Franklin stood in the room next to Raven. There were bifocals on his nose, a wry smile of jolly good humor at his lips, and an absurd-looking raccoon-skin cap on his head. On the chain of his pocket watch, dangling over the slope of his plump vest, hung a ring of palest gold.
Meanwhile, at the gap, the selkie fell aside, shouting encouragement. The ice-giant appeared at the top of the slanting balcony, faceplate of ice gleaming. There was a hiss as it drew in its breath.
Peter threw the hammer with a powerful sweep of his arm. The muscles in Peter’s arm stood out like knots of iron.
“Take the ring!” Tom O’Lantern hissed at Raven. “Forswear the lady’s sweet love! Ye are not worthy of it anyway!”
The skull of the frost-giant exploded in a spray of ice and brains, and pale-blue ichor. The huge body toppled backwards, crushing gunmen and selkie, and any splashed with fluid from the falling corpse were burned with cold, frostbitten, or killed, as if they had been splashed with liquid nitrogen.
When the giant corpse hit the ground, strangely, it shattered like a hollow sculpture.
Wendy cheered and clapped.
Through the eastern windows, Raven saw for a moment, two storm- princes whirl by, a flutter of kilt and coat, arms knotted about each other, gleaming javelin tangled in bagpipe flutes. The third prince was stalking down through the corridors of air, descending toward the house, horsehair plume of his helmet snapping in the wind, and footsteps booming in midair.
“Or will ye do naught to help your friends?” whispered Tom O’Lantern, voice thick with hate.
Selkie dressed as sailors were at the gap, but they threw themselves on their faces when the hammer Mollner, flung by some invisible force, yanked itself out of the shattered skull of the frost-giant and flew by overhead toward Peter’s upraised hand.
A look of fear appeared on Peter’s face just before the hammer struck his hand. He was bowled out of the bed on which he sat and flung to the floor.
“My hand!”
A mob of selkie rushed into the room, waving their pikes and bludgeons, jumped over the bed, laughing for joy.
Selkie also rushed out from the shattered main doors to the room, coming suddenly from behind.
Raven was seized by four of them and flung down before he could react. A fifth selkie loomed over him, brandishing a bludgeon, and aimed a blow at Raven’s skull.
He turned into a seal. The blow did not fall.
His human skin fell away like a white leather coat, and his sleek black body, which would have been so lithe and streamlined in the sea, now flopped forward, fins waving feebly. The bludgeon clattered down atop the seal.
The men holding Raven down turned into seals. Their hands became flippers, and, without legs to stand upon, they flopped helplessly to their bellies.
Raven shoved them aside and stood up. One that tried to bite him, he kicked in the head.
Peter, with the hammer in his left hand, clubbed to death the two seals within arm’s reach. But he seemed as helpless as they, for both his legs and now one arm were limp weights, and there was a look of fear and horror on his face. “My arm! I can’t move my arm!”
He was grimacing a terrible grimace, and his sweat-slick face was splattered with blood and brains from the seals he slew.
Wendy had the Moly Wand in her hand. And where she waved the wand, selkie fell to their bellies, human disguises gone. In a moment the whole herd of selkies in the room lay writhing and helpless on the floor, flapping their fins and barking.
Many immediately turned on each other with barks and snarls of outrage, and slashed at each other with their teeth, as if hosts of hidden treasons had suddenly been revealed.
Peter pulled himself upright, clutching the bedpost with his left hand, clutching the haft of Mollner in his teeth. Now he twisted his shoulder to drape his right arm across the headboard, and with this he propped himself, while his legs, puny and ridiculous, twisted off to one side.
He spat the hammer into his left hand. “Oh, shit!”
For he saw the angry eyes of the fire-giant staring in through the broken panes of the southern windows.
The giant drew back his titanic arm, readying the torch he used as a bludgeon to sweep through the room and crush all within; but he saw Peter propped against the headboard draw back the hammer, awkwardly, left- handedly, readying to throw.
The giant hesitated, sparks and smoke drifting from its nostrils.
They stared at each other eye-to-eye, man and giant, and, for a moment, neither moved.
Azrael de Gray stepped in through the breach in the wall, Koschei the Deathless behind him to the left and the storm-prince in Roman armor to his right.
Behind them both came the few surviving gunmen: black-jacketed men in blue helmets all.
Azrael kicked aside or stepped over seals in his path as he came forward. Then he stopped, seeing Peter with the hammer raised.
The two creatures stopped behind him, one step into the room. The tall thin shadow that was Koschei radiated a grave stench, and the bony fingers ringing his crown brushed the ceiling. The storm-prince’s face was hidden in his helmet’s shadow, and his plume and red cloak flapped in the wild winds his smallest gestures caused. He stood with his gladius poised above his buckler.
It would have been hard to say whose eyes where more horrible to behold, Koschei’s or Azrael’s. Koschei’s were mere points of baleful light, floating in dark pits of eye sockets, inhuman and terrible. But Azrael’s could have been human, and had once been.
Peter looked over his shoulder at Azrael, then glanced back at the giant. He shifted the balance of the hammer slightly, to allow him to throw in either direction. Peter looked between them, watching both out of the corners of his eyes.
And perhaps he spared a glance for his one remaining arm, which, he held tense in the air before his face. “One down, one to go,” he muttered hoarsely. But it did not sound funny.
One gunman raised his rifle, but Azrael raised his hand, “Wound not my kin!”
The giant stiffened his shoulder. Peter glanced that way. Azrael touched his necklace of magnets and whispered a name. “Somnus, benumb them. North Star’s Blood puts them in my reach.”
Raven felt a heaviness close in upon his limbs. He sank to his knees, fell forward, his face resting only inches from the buckles of Ben Franklin’s shoes. The ghost or apparition of Franklin had not moved or spoken, anymore than a statue would have.
Raven tried to remember the names and the charm to drive off this magic, but the only thing in his mind was the accusing, indifferent look he had seen in Wendy’s eyes.
The giant now made its move forward, but Azrael shouted, “Surtvitnir! Stand away!” And the giant snarled, belching smoke, and moved back perhaps a foot from the windows, but did not lower his torch. The burning bludgeon waited, the size of a tree, still poised to smash into the room.
Azrael said, “Bromion, why did you not render these here thunderstruck and dazed?”
The storm-prince answered in a soft voice, smooth and silky:
“Know the archangel Uriel, regent of the Sun, was here. Angelic footsteps sanctify; and sacred precincts we spirits go not near.”
Azrael tapped his staff to the floorboards, and when he let go of it, inexplicably, it did not fall, but stood.
Wendy had fallen, and the unicorn horn still was tucked into her skirt. Azrael stepped forward, kicking seals aside, to where she was.
For a moment he stared down at her. Raven, watching with paralyzed eyes, could do nothing.
Careful to avoid the touch of the fallen Moly Wand, Azrael picked up Wendy with arms around her shoulder and legs, the way a man might carry his bride.
Azrael stepped out onto the balcony and held her over the drop.
“I have said I would cast you from this high place if you did not yield Clavargent to me; nor do I lie.”
He put one arm about her waist and dropped her legs so that all her weight was supported in one hand.
At this same moment, Raven saw a tiny figure drop down from the roofbeam to the Moly Wand.
Azrael said: “Somnus! Unchain her limbs!” And to Wendy he said: “Now draw forth the Silver Key from your skirt and put it in my hand!”
“Lassy! Catch!” The Moly Wand flew across space; Wendy caught it; she swatted Azrael across the face.
Immediately his hand turned to flaccid white leather; his face became a hood made of Galen’s skin; his boyish features fell away like a cloak, revealing the tall, dark, majestic man beneath; hawknosed, with grim lines deeply graven about his mouth; his eyes were dark and cruel, and his hair was dark as well except where age had left white streaks above his temples. He stood up, a foot taller than Galen, and his clothes ripped to tatters across his shoulders and down his legs.
When what seemed like Galen’s hand fell away as a glove, Wendy slipped free of the Wizard’s grasp, shouting, “He’s not Galen and cannot cross the wards!”
Raven felt power return to his limbs: Azrael’s spell was broken. He leapt to his feet.
Wendy was balanced for a moment on the broken rim of the balcony, arms windmilling. Then she fell back out of sight, screaming.
The giant’s fist, radiating a terrible heat, crashed in through the windows on the southern side, sending the bed flying into splinters. But Peter had pulled his father and rolled them both to one side, and neither was crushed. On his back, in a tangle of limbs with his unconscious father, Peter flung the hammer left-handed.
The hammer flew fair and true and struck the giant between the eyes with such force that, for a moment, his two eyes faced each other across a widening crater of blood. The skull caved in with a roar and a flash of fire, and the huge body at once became a pillar of ash, strangely without substance, that disintegrated silently on the wind.
“Raven!” shouted Peter. “Ring! Electrocute them!”
The look of fear was on Peter’s face again as the hammer slammed back in through the wall. It struck his left arm, and he was thrown back sliding across the floor, where he lay, unconscious or dead.
Wendy’s scream changed into a whoop of joy, and she floated back up into view, lighter than a thistledown, her skirts and hair flapping about her, weightlessly.
Only Azrael was not dumbstruck.
“Servant of Oberon!” Azrael called. “Return the Silver Key or I destroy your husband!” And he pointed his tall walking stick at Raven. With his other hand, he clutched the amulets at his throat.
“Oberon? We work for Galen!” said Wendy.
“Galen . . . ?” Azrael paused as if in sudden thought.
She laughed. Oddly, it seemed as if her laugh were as bright and gay as ever it had been. She said brightly, “Gravity doesn’t need to weigh us down, do you know that? I’ve been under that illusion my whole life. Now do you think you can weigh me down? You and your silly threats? You sound so goofy when you say things like that! There’s no battle here; that’s just an illusion. What good are the gates of Everness to you without the Key? Fine! Go ahead and win your battle! I’ll just fly away with the Key now, thank you! Maybe I’ll go off into my mother’s kingdom, now that I remember the way there.”
“You scoff at my threat?”
“You won’t hurt Peter or Lemuel. They’re your family. Your threats are an illusion.”
“And your husband?”
Wendy looked over to where Raven stood. She looked him in the eye. She said, “I guess that was just an illusion, too. I have no husband.”
And she turned her head away, putting her face in her elbow, and let the wind sweep her up lightly out over the coast.
She blew like a leaf past the ships of the selkie, away through the air toward the massive clouds, whose towers and folds of distant white were stained in deep, rich colors by the sunrise.
One of the gunmen raised his rifle as if to shoot; but his gaze became slack and fixed, as if the sight of the flying girl were too strange for him to see.
Raven said tonelessly, “Franklin, hand me the ring. I promise to use it well and not to give it to another.”
Azrael turned, “By Morpheus! Stop!” But he was on the balcony outside the house, and Raven was within, and his magic did not reach across the wards.
Raven looked down at the ring in his palm, but he was afraid to put it on. Was he willing to forswear love forever . . . ?
He stepped behind the ghost of Ben Franklin. That the apparition was still here told him the spell was not complete. He had not yet taken possession of the ring; the curse had not yet fallen. Also, the gunmen in black uniforms seemed unable to focus their eyes on Franklin, as if the sight of a Founding Father’s Spirit were too strange for them to be allowed to see.
Azrael said, “Bromion!”
The Roman storm-prince said, “In places touched with sacred quiet are forbidden thunder and riot.”
Raven was panting as if he were struggling under a great weight. His wife had left him, why not give up love? Was it worse than Peter losing all four limbs?
There was writing on the inside of the white gold band: Tempestos Attonitus, Fulmenos! Ave et Salve! Venire et Parere! Obviously, magic words to control the storm-princes. He could sweep the enemy away with blasts of lightning and call the winds to blow his wife back to him. Except, if the curse were fact, he would no longer want her when she came.
Raven knew he must put on the ring. It would be only a moment before Azrael woke his gunmen or thought of some clever trick of magic or. . .
But to put on the ring would be to extinguish all hope.
Azrael said, “Koschei, you have the souls of the giants? You can resurrect them?”
“Not in daylight. But the storm-prince still may overcome the son of the mountains.”
“How may this be?”
Koschei said, “He is a murderer, and the blood that streams from his hands has polluted the sacred precincts. The footsteps of Uriel, angelregent of the Sun, cross this room, it is true, but this murderer does not follow in them.”
Raven looked up with tired eyes. He knew, dimly, that he should flee or fight, or do something. But all he said was, “Wendy . . .”
The storm-prince clashed sword against shield, and the noise, louder than any other noise on earth, sent jolts of numbness through his limbs so that Raven fell headlong. At the second clash, Raven was dumb and could not speak. At the third, his wits scattered, turned to chaos by wild noise, and his senses fled.
Raven was thunderstruck. Overcome by sorrow and misery, overcome by magic, he fell into darkness and knew no more.
Here Ends the First Part of
The War of the Dreaming;
The Tale Continues in Part Two
MISTS OF EVERNESS.
Table of Contents
1 The Forgotten Wardens of the Dreaming
3 City at the World’s Edge
5 Beyond the Gates of Greater Slumber
8 The Strange and Ancient House Unchanging
9 The Library of the Dream-Lords
11 The Five Names of Lesser Mystery
13 Men Unbound by Magic’s Law
18 Battle Before the High House
20 “My Dwelling Is in Skule Skerry”
