At the Edge of Waking (16 page)

A woman swaying down the corridor to the end of the carriage excused herself as she bumped into Lucy. Lucy pressed herself aside, and through the window of the compartment’s glass door she caught the eye of the large young man with the book, who was watching her as patiently and unfeelingly as the fox watches the brush pile, waiting for the hare.

My hero,

Here is the story no one wants to know:

218 years ago, the Marshal of Kallisfane founded Madrigal College’s Chair of Imperial Studies, the only one in that subject in the university. Since the founding, there have been twenty-nine Fellows, as compared to an average of sixteen Fellows in the same period of time across all other subjects. Of those twenty-nine Fellows, only six in 218 years have died peacefully of old age. Three have simply disappeared—the rest have died of suicide, unexplained accident, or outright murder. Check the university records and local police blotters: this is fact. Also ask yourself: Why is there only one fellowship in Imperial History, when we are, today, living in the ruins of that empire? In the university, it is because every time another such fellowship has been proposed—even when the proposal includes generous funding—the University Council has declined. The only reason ever offered: such a chair already exists. Never mind that six different colleges sport research chairs in Modern History. There shall only ever be one chair in Imperial History, and the scholars who hold that chair are more likely to die violently than if they joined the army or worked in a mine . . .

They waited until she stepped off the train in Palton.

The large young man, with his book in his coat pocket, followed her onto the platform and was joined by an older man, thin enough to hide in his shadow, who materialized out of the engine’s steam.

“Please, Miss Donne,” said the older man as he took her elbow, “let’s not have a fuss.”

They didn’t have a fuss. It was exactly as though she had been met by friends. The large young man took her pocket book and rifled through it, but he did it so calmly no one seemed to notice. The ticket collector took Lucy’s ticket from his hand without a flicker and they walked out into the astonishing freshness of the spring evening. There was the cobbled street of the country town, the sketch of chimney pots against the violet sky. The air was impossibly sweet after the stuffiness of the train. Instinct made Lucy look up, but clouds hid the stars. Looking down she saw the massive shape of the long black car pulling up to the station door. There was something inevitable about that car, about the dusk, about the country quiet pouring in around the wail of the departing train. She drew a long breath with a strange kind of eagerness. Whatever else happened, she was going to
know.

“That’s right, Miss Donne,” said the older man as he opened the rear door. “Nothing to be frightened of here.”

. . . But it isn’t only scholars he is keeping under his thumb. Seventy-two years ago the village of Galburgh in South Pevenshire was digging up a section of the commons at the edge of the village to widen a carriage road. In the course of the work they uncovered a stretch of old paving which, when it was taken up, proved to cover a spring that drained into the Macklebrook via an underground channel. There was some debate, reported in the parish records, as to whether to cover the spring and carry on with the road or to leave it uncovered and put it to some use. In the meantime, however, workmen who drank from the spring complained of dreams of such terrible import that one man joined an overseas missionary society and another committed suicide. The parish priest called upon the bishop for advice, but no church action was ever taken, for the simple reason that that was the month in which the Crown passed the Commons Development Act which allowed, and still allows, the sale of common land by parish councils for the “creation or development of such industries, enterprises, public buildings, etc, to the benefit of the township.” The commons was bought, the spring was paved over, and a new village police station built on the spot. According to the Pevenshire newspapers of the time, the Marshal of Kallisfane was on hand for the new station’s official opening.

Graham, the king overturned a common-use law of centuries’ standing so that the Revenant could pave over a spring and put it under guard. And that is one of the most harmless stories that comes to mind . . .

The motorcar slid down narrow country roads, carrying Lucy into the night. Lucy’s companion from the train shared the back seat with her, but with the darkness to hide his watchful gaze he was just the shy young man abashed by his own size, and then even less than that, as if he were absorbed into the car itself, just one more shade of dark. The air was chill, whistling with drafts, but it smelled warmly of tobacco and leather, leaf-mold and aging upholstery. Lucy was reminded of being chauffeured from school to her grandfather’s country house, always knowing that the man behind the wheel reckoned she was no more than an excuse to take the new car, hand-built in her grandfather’s own stable, out for a drive. She had never minded that feeling. It had been the real holiday between the heated friendships and rivalries of school and the equally perilous attentions of her mother, her cousins, her aunts. Tonight, as the wind whined in around the windows and the chill soaked through her sensible tweed, she felt as though she were wrapped in a ghost of that comfort. But while she acknowledged that ghost, she did not let it fool her. In the end, she thought, it was just the calm certainty of doom.

. . . for he is rarely inclined to hold his hand. Consider the fishers of Belmouth, who only two years ago complained of seals with human voices wrecking their nets and stealing their fish, but paying for their plunder with prophecy and song. The Marshal of Kallisfane, according to your very own newspaper, was granted use of the royal yacht for a late-autumn cruise ending in Belmouth harbor. Captain Ellerby, master of the king’s yacht, reported cloudless skies, light breezes, and an easy sail. That same day, the entire fishing fleet of Belmouth was lost in a freak storm. We will never know if it was because those fishermen were telling stories of talking seals, or if it was because of what those seals were saying. Every man off those boats is presumed drowned. Fifty-seven men . . .

The black motorcar of the Unnamed Regiment paused just long enough for an iron gate to swing open. They eased past a saluting sentry and onto a drive. It was late. They had traveled much further than Denbreath. Trees flickered in the edge of the headlamps’ glow, then fell away into blackness and an impression of rough ground. The car’s note deepened as it began to climb. Then even the ground fell away, and Lucy’s heart stopped for an instant of disoriented terror—but they were not flying, only following the back of a ridge, its steep slope invisible in the dark. That moment of fear lingered, a quickening in her belly and a tightening in her flesh, prelude to the shock of arrival.

. . . And if even the list of the dead is still not enough to make anyone care—and Graham, I know
hundreds
of these stories—then consider our history. Consider the holy wars in which the ancient pantheon and its temples were thrown down. Thousands of priests hanged or burned, their congregations killed, persecuted, scattered, an entire faith relegated to a footnote in the history books, because we
have
no ancient history, no memory, and no way to know what those priests once knew about the world or the magic the Revenant claims to have killed a thousand years ago.

He isn’t a joke, Graham, he isn’t a scarecrow stuffed with straw. He isn’t even a walking corpse. He is a tombstone, and he has spent the last thousand years keeping magic in its grave.

My train is leaving, I must fly—

Lucy

Perhaps it was the starless night they had traveled through, perhaps it was the chill and the wood-rot smell of age, but Lucy was exquisitely aware of the stony weight of the castle that swallowed her up. She felt as if she had been eaten by a mountain, as if the dark were the perfect and immutable dark of a mine. And there was the silence, too, a deep, conscious, listening silence. Even her escorts seemed reluctant to intrude; they stepped softly, spoke in undertones to the men at the door.

What must it be like to work for the Undying, to run his bloody errands, to keep his house?

They ushered her through the great hall, shadowy as a cathedral, and down a back-eddy of a corridor to a chapel. In the corridors there were electric lights strung along the plastered walls, but in the chapel there were only banks of candles burning with a honey smell. Light and warmth hovered in the narrow room, complimenting rather than banishing the cold and dark. The high white walls were decked with brass memorial plaques, mirrors for the ranks of flame burning in their corner stands, and there were more plaques set in the floor. There were no pews, only a plain altar stone and the candles, and the Sacred Flame hanging on the end wall, a tapered silver oval like the point of a spear.

The room was so quiet Lucy could hear the rustle of the many candleflames, and the footsteps coming down the hall.

He still wore his overcoat, buttoned to show only his trouser hems and the neat square knot of his tie. His head was bare, his thick dark hair neatly combed, his face expressionless, lifeless . . . dead. Lucy thought his eyes were dark, but she found it impossible to meet them. She did not want to see them or be seen by them. Her heart beat with a trapped flutter, remembering the bird in her dream.

“Miss Donne,” he said, “do you know why you are here?”

His voice shocked her: an ordinary baritone, a little rough, but without menace. No sullen echo of the grave.

“I dreamed . . . ”

He waited for her to finish, as patient as the walls. The pause was so long it finally seemed that Lucy’s fear had peaked, that she had breasted some steep rise and found herself still standing. She took what felt like her first breath since he entered the room and said, laying her cards on the table or throwing them to the wind,

“I have been studying you. I have researched you, I have learned . . . I have learned some of what you are . . . ” Lucy tailed off again, this time with a blush. How childish that sounded! And how intimate, with an unwarranted, uninvited intimacy.

“And you dreamed,” he said, inflectionless.

“I did not dream you outside my house,” she said.
You.
That was the intimacy: saying not
him,
but
you.
You.

Lucy, is it only fear that makes your heart race?

He had stepped further into the chapel without her noticing. She drifted away from his advance.

“You looked for me. You found me.” He began to unbutton his overcoat, standing before the altar, and Lucy realized there was something lying on the stone as if for consecration. She tore her gaze away, desperate not to have seen what she saw. The Marshal of Kallisfane shrugged his coat from his shoulders and bent to lay it on the floor, and Lucy closed her eyes, trembling in every bone.

This was beyond fear. This was the end of her life.

“Me, and some of what I am,” he went on. “Tell me what you think you know.”

And there it was, still, the magic of intimacy; of talking with him, her whole treasure store of knowledge rising in her mind. Who he was, who she was.

Lucy opened her eyes and accepted what she saw: the sword on the altar, the Marshal of Kallisfane laying his suit jacket, neatly folded, next to his coat on the floor. He looked smaller in his shirtsleeves, but she could see the muscles in his arms as he began to unknot his tie.

She was very conscious of her trembling body, her stuttering heart, the dizzying lack of air.

“I know that magic did not die with the Empire.”

“True.” He slipped his tie from his collar.

“I know . . . ” Breath failed her. Her chest hurt, a widening pain from her breastbone to her shoulder blade, and for the first time she began to wonder if this was only fear. It felt as though he crowded all the air out of the room, pressed the blood out of her heart. Even the candles seemed to be growing dim. “I know you have been fighting all this time to keep magic out of the world. I know you have lied to us, and killed us, and led us by the nose.”

“Go on.” The tie went into one trouser pocket, cuff links into another. He began to roll up his sleeves, revealing powerful wrists and forearms shadowed with dark hair.

Lucy leaned against the wall. The pain pried into her shoulder, her wrist. I’m going to die, she thought, before he gets a chance to kill me.

“I know the worst lie you’ve ever told,” she said.

“Tell me.” He unbuttoned his collar and tossed it onto his coat. He looked completely human now, and Lucy could hardly bear to look at him.

“That you have no magic of your own.”

He was finally still. “Why is that the worst lie?”

“Because you betray . . . you betray magic. The world, the gods, the Divine. You betray
us.
You lie . . . ” She had no air left. The pain grew like a tree through her chest, down her arm.

“What do you imagine magic is, that you think I’ve done wrong in betraying it?”

“Life,” she whispered. “You’re the tombstone. You’re the paving over the well.”

“You know nothing of magic.”

She looked at him past the sparkling darkness in her eyes and for an instant she was entirely
Lucy,
as if she had regained the fear-scattered pieces of herself just in time for the end. Her hand described a fluttering moth’s circle in the air and she said faintly, lightly,

“Dying gives one a certain insight. So does living, I suppose. Perhaps I know something you don’t.”

“I have always considered the possibility,” he said. He turned to the altar and with a movement devoid of ceremony he picked up the sword. Steel rang gently off the stone; light slid like water off the steel. “Tell me, Miss Donne. What did you hope to accomplish in Palton this afternoon?”

Palton? This afternoon? A lifetime ago.