At the Edge of Waking (20 page)

Right, said Graham, though he said it with hidden irony, as if he could humor these men until they started to show some sense. Yet playing along had him riding in the back of the big black motorcar somewhere on the wrong side of midnight, dressed in imaginary armor and clutching a cardboard sword, on his way to rescue the princess before she could be sacrificed to the dragon. Though in fact, the idea seemed less absurd now, rushing through the cold, black night, than it had in the bureaucratic comfort of Barrimond’s office.

“Sacrifice!” he had said. “Are you insane?”

“No,” Barrimond had replied, “but the Marshal is.”

“Well,” the plowboy said, “say he has his moments. He’s an old man, you know, and old men do have their moments. Most times he runs on the rails right enough.”

“Yes,” Barrimond said, “and the point is to get him back on the rails as soon as possible before any damage is done.”

“Remove Miss Donne,” said the plowboy, “and remove the temptation, like.”

The temptation to do what? Suddenly there was no more time for explanations. It was down to the car and out in the night, and the sound of the engine droning back at them from the dark-windowed houses, and the quick sharp fire of the whiskey from the plowboy’s flask. And then the city fell away into the dark.

Morning drew a mist out of the winter-wet ground. Lucy was out early enough to see the rising sun wrapped in a ball of foggy wool. She was weary, but a life-time habit of nervous energy won out over the condition of her heart—if its jackrabbit thumping was an injury and not just a symptom of her confusion. She walked out into the valley of Kallisfane without a thought for her health; but her walk was of necessity a thoughtful invalid’s stroll.

Kallisfane Castle could be found on any map, though there were some odd discrepancies. Did the road cross the Fernsey River above Mimmenbrook or below? Was the castle on the southern spur of the Starsey Hills, or was it more southwesterly? But all the maps agreed there was no valley behind the castle, nothing but a blank space or a ripple as of hills. This morning the mist seemed to be conspiring with the mapmakers. A haze against the sky, a creeping whiteness against the ground, it erased colors, blurred edges, muted sound, as if this valley, the heart of the Marshal’s demesne, might in the next moment efface itself entirely from the world. Or perhaps it had already done so. Perhaps where Lucy walked was no-place, no-time, nothing but a memory in the Marshal’s skull. A fading memory, all that was left of the Empire-that-was.

And yet the black mud sucked at her shoes. Puddles bright as mirrors cupped in worn paving stones reflected her face, the edge of a wall. The thrushes singing in the woods that guarded the hilltops sang like the first springtime in the world.

In the valley lay a city. A city of white stone, all in ruins, though the mist filled in the gaps of fallen domes and tumbled walls, teasing the eye with long-lost grandeur. There had been a wide avenue here, palaces rising behind their colonnades, a statue, perhaps, on that great stone plinth that divided the way. Lucy sat there a moment to catch her breath and scrape the mud off her shoes. Her poor not-very-sensible shoes. They would never be the same again. Lucy sighed and pressed her hand over her heart, as if that could calm the queasy race and lag of her pulse. When she was walking the valley seemed perfectly quiet except for her own footsteps, the ring of distant birdsong chiming with the sunlight far above the fog, but now the silence was alive with hidden drips and scrapes and soft muddy sounds, as if the mist had grown feet to follow her with. But of course she likely was being followed by one of the Marshal’s men. Walking away was not one of the options he had offered her.

Well, let them watch! she thought, a nice show of courage that did nothing to dispel the prickle creeping down her spine. She rose with a too-casual glance around and continued on. The ground mist was lifting above her head, hiding the sky and the tops of the surrounding hills, but here and there a shaft of milky sunlight broke through.

And where is she going, our Lucy, strolling on a misty dawn in early spring? At the end of this long avenue, where once the legions paraded and the wizard-philosophers strolled, lies the imperial palace. The Emperor Caedemus’ palace, where one age was killed and another was erected on its grave. But she is only going there to appease her curiosity, to think . . . perhaps to decide . . .

The black motorcar stopped at an iron gate and the plowboy got out to talk to the guard. Graham lowered the window on his side, hoping the shock of fresh air would rouse him from the stupefaction of the drive. It was dawn, damp and cold, and Graham started to shiver without feeling any more awake. The real world was hot coffee, a razor, his own bed. He could not fathom what he was doing here.

The plowboy got back in and the motorcar pulled through the gate, wallowing in the ruts of the drive.

“Where are we?” Graham said.

“Kallisfane.” The answer was curt. The man himself was pale with sleeplessness, stubbled and grim, and Graham had to admit that he looked more soldier than plowboy.

“You’re one of the Nameless Regiment, aren’t you? One of the Marshal’s own.”

The big man grunted what was probably an affirmative.

“None too loyal, then, are you?” Graham’s mild tone took the edge off the provocation.

“We’re sworn to serve the Crown, same as any other regiment. And we serve the Marshal, too, believe me. He’s his own worst enemy, when he gets to thinking on the past.”

“How so?”

“Feels the weight of the years, like. The burden of his responsibilities. Well, you can imagine it, can’t you, after all this time? Wanting to let it all go?”

“Yes. But I don’t see what that has to do with Lucy Donne.”

The plowboy-soldier kept his eyes on the road past the driver’s shoulder, but Graham had the sense of an intelligence working behind that homely face.

“We reckon he thinks he can use Miss Donne to bring us all back to the way things used to be. Bring us all back to the days when he was an ordinary man, d’you see? Return the world to the way it was, and maybe return himself to the way
he
was . . . ”

“But
how
will he use her? Use her how?”

“They was grim and bloody times—” He interrupted himself to say to the driver, “Take the east fork.” The car turned. Graham caught a glimpse of the castle rearing up to their left, already falling behind. Where were they going? Graham started to ask, but the plowboy was talking again.

“People don’t know what it was like in those days. They have these romantic notions that it was all storybook adventures and poetry and folksongs—people like Miss Donne, who think the Marshal’s a hard man doing a bloody job. Well so he is, and a good thing, too. Do you have the least notion of what this world would come to if he left his post? It’d be chaos. Your worst nightmares can’t even touch what it would be to let the old gods walk again.”

Graham was not immune to direful predictions, not when they echoed the fears that Lucy’s work had raised, but still he persisted. “You haven’t said what part Lucy has to play in all this.”

“She’s the sacrifice, man! Haven’t you been listening? She’s the life that opens the door the Marshal has been keeping shut all these years. She’s the bloody key. Here,” he said to the driver in the same rough tone, “park here, we’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot.”

“What—” Graham began.

“Right,” the plowboy said, all soldier now. “We may just have a chance to take her away with no one the wiser until we’re gone. The aim is to get her to come quietly back to the car, and that’s your job. Say anything you need to—she’s in danger, you’re here to take her home—be a hero to her—”

“But—”

“Wake up, will you? We’re saving the girl. We’re saving the damn world!”

“But
why me
?”

The plowboy leaned to put his big face in Graham’s. “You know the background, you know the girl, and I don’t have time for arguments with men who don’t know where their loyalties should lie. All right? There’s men here who serve the Marshal before the Crown, and I can’t take them all on, not if we’re going to keep this quiet. You cooperate with me, you get the girl to cooperate with me, and we just drive away, no fuss, end of story. All right?”

The big man swung himself out of the car. After the briefest hesitation, Graham followed suit. But in that half-second pause, he had time to wonder what would happen to them after he had persuaded Lucy to cooperate. Were they going to be sent home and trusted to keep their mouths shut? Graham thought of Lucy’s portfolio, all the stories no one wanted to hear. He climbed from the car into the misty morning. Birds were singing somewhere in the fog.

The palace was roofed with mist, walled with air. Grand steps of once-white marble were broken and half buried by the fallen columns of the portico, but Lucy found she could pick her way between the disarticulated pillars, up the shattered stair. For the first time, as she scuffed her muddy shoes through the mold of windblown leaves, it struck her as odd, how lifeless the ancient Fane was. No moss to blur the carvings on the broken capitals, no grass to carpet the stairs, no bird-flitting or mouse-scurrying nearer than the treed battlements of the enclosing hills.
The end of everything,
he had said,
the end of life, an end without ending, an end with no hope of beginning, an end without even the hope of death
. . . As if everything could just stop, Lucy thought. Stop, freeze into crystal, her breath and blood, the air, the mist and the birds in the trees and the trees themselves. Like a book, she thought, a story captured between the covers, beginning and end all there, simultaneous, undifferentiated, a beginning never begun, an ending that never ended, the perfect story, unread, ideal. Yes. She did not at all understand what the Marshal had said about doing magic, or being magic, or the difference between them, but this she understood, the perfect, the completed world.

But the blood moved through her limping heart, the air moved into her lungs and out again, warm enough to make steam. She breathed out again, a deliberate puff, for the pleasure of seeing it hang for an instant in the milky brightness, and then went on into the palace. Her footsteps echoed around her, hinting, with the mist, of companionable ghosts.

Did he ever come here, the self-named Marshal of this place?
He
would have ghosts. In these rubble-mounds he would see the shape of rooms he had known, the fountained courts and lucent tiles and stone-filigree walls. Or would he? How long had he lived here as a mortal man, a soldier and then a captain of soldiers? Twenty years? Thirty? A scant handful of decades to set against the long centuries of ruin. Perhaps he wondered, as she did, which were the rooms of state, which the private apartments, which the emperor’s own room where he had been stopped in the very act of summoning the end of time. Where he had been betrayed, killed by a trusted hand.

Here, where a pillared arch still stood, though the room beyond was adrift with shattered roof tiles and the pale stones of the further wall?

Here, where the broken roots of columns still marked out the line of a shady cloister?

Here, where a fountain’s bowl fell into petal-shards like a teacup dropped just so in the center of the yard?

Here, where footsteps echoed, pat-patter-pattering even though Lucy was standing still.

Or maybe it was her heart, she thought, with the hum of invisible bees in her ears. She lowered herself to the flat top of a column’s tumbled capital. Its leafy carvings sloughed away a skin of rotten stone under her fingers, crumbs of past beauty sifted into the dirt beneath her feet. The walls were mostly intact here, giving a shape and a sense of enclosure to the small courtyard, but the misty ceiling was lifting away, thinning against the blue sky. Sunlight, still diffused by damp, brightened the many shades of white of all the naked stone, walls, flagstones, fallen columns, broken bowl. There was even a ghost of color on the walls, rose and blue and ocher, scabrous as lichen if lichen could have grown in this place.

This dead place . . . save for the drift of the air, the far birdsong, the dripping of condensed mist from the many lips of stone. And the footsteps. Lucy was almost sure, despite a long silence that conjured up again the humming in her ears. The blood seemed to shrink away beneath her skin, leaving it tingling and cold. But of course, she knew she was being watched.

Yes, there, the unmistakable grit of shoe leather over dirty stone.

Sunlight found its way through clouds and mist to sparkle in the rainwater cupped by the shards of the fountain. Warmth pressed through the damp tweed of Lucy’s jacket, and as though the sun confirmed something she already guessed, she was abruptly convinced that there was no magic here, neither in the place nor in her, and that all this morning held for her was an early walk and a mild sort of farce, grown men sneaking about in the wake of her curiosity. Rather like the new parlourmaid who hovers outside the drawing room door, holding her breath and fidgeting in her shoes, unsure whether she should go in to fetch the tea tray if there was still someone in the room. So Lucy thought, and she called out a cheerful, “Hullo!” which startled her in spite of herself, it had been so quiet before she spoke.

The silence itself seemed to be startled. Then an answering, “Lucy?” came cold and clear through the stony maze, and more footsteps, forthright ones, and then—she was dumbfounded, having refused to believe the familiarity of the voice—Graham Isles appeared in the archway on the sunny side of the court. He peered against the brightness, pale, stubbled, thoroughly disheveled, and said her name again, in as questioning a tone as before.

“Lucy?”

“Graham! But what—How on earth—” But then she remembered the portfolio, left for him a thousand years ago in the Left Luggage Office of Skillyham Station, and was silenced by a rush of guilt.

Graham glanced behind him before he crossed to where she sat. “I’ve lost him, I think. Or he’s lost me. Listen—”

“Who?”

“Can you come? Right now? Right away? The driver’s still with the car at the foot of the valley, but I think, if we climbed the hills, they don’t seem very steep, we might manage to go very quietly all on our own.”