All Those Vanished Engines (14 page)

“Come,” she said to Lukas, who hurried to her side. “You see you were meant to die here with Lord Roseholm. Three hundred gold pieces—the high procurator of Alaron could have promised you six hundred, or a thousand. He never meant to pay. But I have work for you.”

In the light she was impossibly lovely, her straight, dark hair and pearly skin. But now that Lukas knew that she was old, hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, he could see behind her eyes a hooded shadow. She climbed rapidly downstairs, and then turned into the cobblestoned streets of the old town. The doors gaped open in the empty houses, stone and brick, and dark passageways smelling of bat dung. Flights of birds rose from the courtyards, and rats scurried among piles of fallen masonry.

She turned under a high gate into the block of an old prison, its windows covered with a mesh of corroded iron bars. In the courtyard Lukas stopped her. “We aren't following you here.”

His crew moved into position, a ragged semicircle behind him. He raised his hand. Weapons were useless. His own bow was upon his back.

The lady turned around, then came back toward him until she stood uncomfortably close, her eyes almost level with his own. Even at that distance, her body and her clothes gave off no scent. “Captain,” she said, “do you know who I am?”

“I have an idea.”

“Tell me,” she said. Her teeth were small and very white. He watched the tip of her tongue move between them. It was dark, and a peculiar shade of lavender.

“I believe you are High Lady Constance of Sarifal, queen of this land.”

A hiss escaped her lips, and Lukas could feel her cool breath. “Is that what you believe?” she asked, her long eyes mocking him. “Then you must also believe I have the power to destroy you where you stand.”

He shrugged.

“But I mean you no harm! On the contrary, I mean to reward you. Three hundred gold pieces from the procurator—you won't see that money, I'm afraid. You wouldn't even see it if you dragged Lord Roseholm's worthless carcass back to Alaron. But I will make you rich men.”

She blinked, and a tear formed in her long lashes at the corner of her eye. She raised her hand to touch it, pull it away, roll it between her fingers, a jewel now, or something close to it, a sapphire or a piece of crystal. She laughed, flicked it away.

I took a break, thought for a moment about what I was doing. As usual, I was dissatisfied with the character of my protagonist, Captain Lukas. I was not happy with his reactions. It seemed to me that he was never involved in enough fighting, which was what these novels were supposed to be about. Was he a coward? He had the weaponry, the skill. And yet most scenes devolved into versions of this current one; Lukas, handed a carefully crafted opportunity for mayhem, would find instead a peaceable solution that always seemed to involve at least the possibility of social and financial improvement. Though in theory he combined a proud spirit with the irrationality of a berserker, in practice he was cautious and sensible, and unfailingly courteous toward women, even or especially when they didn't deserve it.

I called him Lukas because I disliked the name Nicola had given our own son—Adrian Xhaferaj, an inappropriately Romanian moniker which had also been her father's. Because we weren't married, she felt the choice was entirely hers. She was so set on the idea, I had not even mentioned my own counterproposal, a name borrowed from Lucien de Fontenelle, my mother's grandmother's great-uncle, who had run away from New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, founded a trading post on the Missouri River, married an Indian princess, and died young. I had always identified myself with him and now, with the passive-aggressiveness that had always been an art form on both sides of my family, I gave a version of that name to a character in my book, whom nevertheless I imagined partly as myself and partly as my own son, head of a posse of like-minded adventurers. In this way I was able to imagine little Lukas as a teenager playing in the woods with his devoted friends. Safe in the pages of a book, he was able to keep his activities secret from his mother, who had nothing but contempt for Dungeons & Dragons, or would have if she'd known anything about it.

For these reasons I was too tender with Captain Lukas, the ranger from the Sword Coast. I was too protective, too hesitant to put him into danger or into any situation where he might be disliked, or insulted, or misjudged by the likes of Lady Constance. I could already tell this was a problem that was only likely to get worse. I had already warned my editor to expect a character-driven book, and I could tell the concept made her nervous. But as she told me when I signed the contract, “There is room for many voices in the Forgotten Realms.”

My mother's study: metal file cabinets, and twelve-paned windows that opened over the backyard. The desk was a small one, a piece of antique cherrywood, stained with ink. I had opened my laptop on the old-fashioned blotter. Light came from a Moroccan lantern that had been fitted for an electric light; the copper shields pierced with holes in the shapes of stars.

I touched the laptop and the screen lit up. Determined to force Lukas into action, I wrote a few lines more:

The ranger captain found himself obscurely touched, despite his misgivings. He had not thought the fey could cry. “Wait here,” he said to the others, and followed Lady Constance through the archway at the top of a flight of stairs, lit from below. She ran her forefinger along the stone banister as she descended. Under the level of the port, the walls sweated and stank. In her other hand she carried a lantern made of copper, the holes pierced in the patterns of the northern constellations. He had not seen her pick it up, or where it came from. He thought perhaps she had conjured it out of the fetid air

Two levels down, the stairs debouched onto a wide, low-ceilinged gallery, stinking of offal and slime. A soft red glow came up the stairway, and the lantern in the lady's hand trembled. Again, Lukas thought he heard a noise, not a scrambling or a scrabbling or a knocking or anything like that. Instead it was something sweeter, the sound of flutes or woodwinds in uneasy harmony, except so soft that he guessed that the melody he heard was more imagined than real, a trick of the mind, borne of expectation and the poignant menace of the fey. He followed close behind, staring at the lady's back, at a whorl of delicate hairs, each picked out by the shifting lantern light. It was his intention to strike her down, to free the island from her sinuous tyranny, and he crept up behind her as close and softly as he could, loosening as he did so the stiletto in his sleeve. One quick strike in the center of that whorl of hair, which seemed so delicate and open to him. Lady Constance paused, and she lowered her head so he could see the muted vertebrae under the golden clasp of her necklace, and admire the sharp shoulder blades under her dress as she pushed her elbows back. One stroke.

Ah, but only if she would turn around and face him! Never could he attack a woman, even one as evil as the high lady of Sarifal. Or perhaps it was her beauty that stayed his hand. She turned her head, and he could see her mocking smile, and see also the one small flaw—the single liver-colored mole at the bridge of her nose—that brought her entire face into focus, and gave her ultimately a sense of helplessness. Perhaps she understood it was her vulnerability that made her strong, and if she had threatened him in any way he might have killed her.

“Look,” she said, raising the lantern. The sound was larger here, the melody no clearer. But in the small light he saw the first gleaming pipes of the machine, which they had approached in the low-ceilinged gallery so that only a little of it was visible. He stepped forward, and the ceiling rose above him to an unseen roof. As his eyes adjusted, out of the darkness now loomed a triple tier of pipes and gauges and generators and conduits, a hundred vertical feet of engines and displacement tanks, designed for what fell purpose, he could not know. Yet the machine itself was beautiful, not only in its form, which was like a vast sea creature, but also in its materials—the pipes themselves were made of silver, copper, brass, and gold.

High above, there was some movement, whether animal or mechanical, Lukas couldn't guess. The lady knelt, and opened up a valve in a pipe that snaked across the floor. Steam rose from it, and at the same time the noise that had surrounded them grew louder, sharper, purer, more intense, and other sounds now joined it in a delicate new tracery …

Disgusted, I quit for the night. If Lukas had only mustered up the courage to strike the lady down, he would never have progressed far enough along the gallery to glimpse the boiler house. He would never have had to worry his foolish head. He could have gotten through the entire book without knowing it was there. Now, for twenty, thirty pages, it was hard to imagine he'd be thinking about anything else. At the end of the story, in the last chapter, no doubt he would still be puzzling out its anachronistically steampunk processes, tracing the sequences of brass gears, straining to listen and to hear.

As for me, I was thinking about Jack Shoots, whom I had admired so much when I was younger, when I was in high school and he was in college. In a way he had seduced me too, when this was my bedroom. In those days my mother had had an office in Stetson Hall. And though it was the smallest in the house, the room had suited me because it had a private staircase up the back.

Jack used to sit here with me sometimes. When I was a teenager, he'd bring up a bottle of wine and we'd talk about poetry. He'd give me advice about girls, what to say, how to treat them—these weren't conversations so much as monologues. But I had promised myself to imitate him whenever I could; now, tonight, I took out Constance's phone number, which she'd given me on the bridge; it wasn't too late. Scarcely ten o'clock. I called her, and told her I'd meet her at The Red Herring on Spring Street. I couldn't exactly tell, but it sounded as though she'd expected to hear from me. I imagined her autistic child was old enough to be left alone. From the background noise, I wondered if she was already at the bar.

The staircase descended from a closet that hung from the back of the house, an architectural oddity that had grown precarious over time. The house itself dated from the 1830s, a singular example of what my father's father had called Greco-Egyptian Revival—the “Egyptian” part manifesting itself chiefly in the shapes of the doorframes and pilasters. The back staircase joined to the back porch, and I took exaggerated care to descend quietly, not because I thought I'd get into any trouble, but in homage to my teenaged self, making the same surreptitious journey down to Spring Street. The Red Herring was packed.

It wasn't like every other bar. It occupied the same brick building as the movie theater; you climbed downstairs from the lobby. Run by the same proprietors, in the summer it held themed events. During marathon screenings of
Star Wars,
for example, or
Lord of the Rings,
the patrons would attend in character and repair to the bar after the show. Tonight had evidently seen the last of these events, a vampire double-feature, and now the place contained a smattering of girls in long dresses, and long-haired boys in capes and evening dress, their white cuffs irreproachable. They stood out in a college town. Everyone else was in civilian clothes, as I was myself—a yellowish polo shirt in honor of Jack Shoots.

The woman sat at a small table in the back. In my novel, Lady Constance was a shape-shifter, and with a tremor of anticipation I could see how she'd transformed herself: she was leaning over the candle and talking to someone, a tall, big man with thick glasses and a soul patch. She was breathtaking, so much so that I doubted my memory, my mental snapshot from the afternoon, which I had carried with me all day and now found impossible to reconcile. Flattering myself then, I had thought she might be pleased by the attentions of a younger man. Now there was no reason to think so: she wore her black hair pinned up to display her long neck, and the candlelight gleamed on her simple yet expensive necklace, the small rings in her ears. She no longer wore her gold-rimmed glasses, and her face seemed without flaw to me, combining maturity and long experience and age-old mocking wisdom with the freshness of youth—she had the skin of a teenager. Her wine-colored bodice, cut low over a pale shirt, seemed to combine the qualities of silk and velvet, and was shaped so tight over her small waist and breasts that I could see, when she laughed, the shudder of her lungs. I imagined under it she had no skin. Though her dress was out of date by a hundred or two hundred years, she did not look as if she were wearing a costume, and immediately by contrast I could see the small deficiencies in other people, especially the boys and girls who had come down from the movie, and whose clothing now appeared as what it was: clumsy, thrown-together, cheap, wrong in a dozen ways.

I could see her throat knot between her bird-like collarbones as she bent her lovely head toward her companion. It was he, now, who glanced up and recognized me, as I did him—vaguely—someone from the English Department where my mother had taught for twenty years.

His name was Shawn Rosenheim. He, like the woman, remembered me from the funeral. He stood up to introduce himself, while the woman favored me with a brief, brittle, irritated smile—how articulate her face was! I felt I knew everything she was thinking and feeling, and when she spoke, it was as if I had written the dialogue myself. She pursed her dark lips while he, effusive and welcoming, found a chair for me. “We were talking about your mother,” he said inevitably. “I was telling Lady Constance I thought the funeral itself was a dividing point, truly cathartic, which isn't always so. Often the things people say at events like that are so random and anecdotal. But this—it was like everyone's remarks built on all the others in an oddly literary way—did you plan that? And the music, and the poetry.”