Fall of Light (31 page)

Tobias crossed the lobby. He looked thin and tired and older than usual, though his thick white hair crowned his head like an energetic bush. He carried a small duffel bag and a jacket. “Oh, no,” he said, studying Opal and Phrixos, his face stretched with dismay.

The elevator dinged and the doors opened. “Come up,” she said, and she, Phrixos, and Tobias got into the car.

Opal's room had a deserted air, a little stuffy, the bed made up and everything hidden away. The air tasted sterile. Opal opened the curtains and then the window, which stopped after a two-inch gap. Damp, fresh, chilly air came in.

“There's a lot to tell you,” Opal said to Tobias, “but I need a shower first.”

“I'll wait.” Tobias settled in one of the chairs by the little round table, with his bag beside his feet.

Phrixos followed Opal into the bathroom, out of his robe, and on into the shower as soon as she got it going. His head brushed the ceiling even when he hunched over, and he took up so much space she could barely turn around, but she decided she didn't care; she was closer to the showerhead and the delicious stream of hot water than he was, and that was all she focused on, until he helped her soap up and scrub. At which point she leaned back against him, both of them steamy, soapy, slippery, comforting, with warm water pounding on them. She said, “Let me think.”

He closed his arms around her and stilled.

At last she had time to count her blessings. Hot water. The girls were safe. Tobias was here. She had enough power—

She closed her eyes and went inside herself, to the study. The fire—Flint's fire, augmented by some of her sifted power—burned in the fireplace. Her second self wasn't there.

She grabbed a poker and stooped before the fire. “Hey, you traitor,” she whispered to it, stirring it with the poker. “You deserted me and left me open to him.”

Open to a kind of mad transcendence she had never experienced before, a memory she wanted to consider and strengthen, even though it frightened her. “Let go,” Corvus or Phrixos or both of them had said, and for once in her life she had. He had not let her fall.

The fire sent apologetic flames to stroke her hand, then flooded through the air to wrap around her, but she said, “Wait,” and sent it back into the fireplace. It burned bright and comforting, the promise of protection.

Something outside her shifted, and she left her study. Phrixos's arm reached past her to turn off the water. She gasped and shivered as the warmth stopped, though they were both wrapped in steam, and he was warm against her back still, and her lower legs were also warm.

“Was that long enough?” he murmured. Water had gathered around their feet and calves, rising to the level of her knees, almost spilling over the edge of the tub; she had dropped a washcloth on the drain where he couldn't reach it, and it had acted like a plug.

She bent and pulled it loose. The water rushed away. “Is my hair clean?” She worked her fingers through it. She couldn't remember using shampoo.

“Clean enough,” he said. He pushed aside the curtain and grabbed towels from a shelf of metal bars above the toilet, shook one open and draped it over her, then scrubbed at his head with another.

She stepped out onto the linoleum and dried off. She hadn't brought any clothes into the bathroom except the white robe. It was tattered and stained from her passage through the forest. She wrapped a towel around her and went through the steam to the bedroom.

Tobias had the overhead light on and was studying various drafts of the script, which she had left lying on the table. Opal sighed and pulled a brown coverall out of the closet, grabbed some underwear, and went back into the bathroom to change.

Phrixos stood there, flushed from the heat, a towel wrapped around his waist. “I'm guessing you don't own anything in my size.” He had used her deodorant and smelled like hot male mixed with baby powder. He reached for the black robe he had hung on the hook on the back of the door.

“I can at least clean it for you.” She held the robe and sent a Cleaning Spell through it that left it soft, clean, and scented like lemons and wind-washed sunlight. He smiled at her and pulled on the robe.

They went out and sat on the bed, facing Tobias.

Tobias set aside the script. “I believe the nature of your trouble has changed?”

“Yes,” said Opal.

“When I threw the auguries last night, there was urgency implied, and a suggestion to prevent something from happening. My sense now is that I came too late to stop it.”

“What did they say? Was it a dire reading?”

“The reading was muddled and confusing. It wasn't dire enough to make me hurry. I was worried about you—there was a death threat—but here you are, alive, thank goodness.”

“A death threat!” Opal glared at Phrixos, who smiled and shrugged. She made a fist and tapped his bicep with it. “There was a death threat?”

“It depends on your definition of death,” he said.

“What does
that
mean?”

“There was a death, I think—”

“Who? What else happened while I was out of it? Someone died?”

“You,” he said.

She punched him again. “What? I'm a walking corpse?”

“For a time you were alive with your walls down. A state you thought of as death, and so, for you, a little death.”

“Uncle?” she asked, turning to Tobias.

“Niece, you haven't introduced us yet,” said Tobias.

“What?” She looked at Phrixos. Tobias had met Corvus on the
Dead Loss
set. But now he was speaking to a deeper reality. “My apologies, Uncle. This is—I am not sure, exactly. Some parts of him seem to be Corvus. A portion is an entity I call Phrixos, an agent for the local power that possessed Corvus. There's another part, I think, that is the actual local power speaking for itself through him. Phrixos is capable of deceit, so I don't know whether to believe him when he pretends to be Corvus. All of you inside the body of my boyfriend, this is my great-uncle Tobias, who has come to help me solve the problem you present.”

“To whom am I speaking?” Tobias said. Opal heard the undertone in his voice; he was asking a question with more than words.

Phrixos straightened, his gaze sharper, more alert, and then a level of character faded from his face, leaving him still sitting up, but different. Opal flattened her hand over his on his thigh. He flashed her a brief glance, then turned to Tobias. “Corvus Weather,” he said.

“Were you really here when Phrixos sounded like he was you?” Opal asked.

“Some of the time. It got complicated. He decided to bribe me instead of continually putting me to sleep.”

“Were you you while we—” She stopped, conscious of Tobias's regard.

“Bribe you with what?” Tobias asked.

“Presence.”

“Explain,” said Tobias.

“Phrixos tells me I invited him in, but I don't remember that. I was sleeping through my days while he walked around in my body and did my job. I woke up and time had passed. While I was asleep, he hurt my friends and colleagues, and used me to do it. I don't understand much about this, except that most of what I've believed all my life isn't true, and I have even less control over myself than I thought I did. Anyway, this visitor in my head figured out that Opal responds better to me than to him, so he lets me wake up for key parts of the day now. Sometimes he even tells me what he wants to do next, and gives me the chance to ask people for their cooperation, instead of him trying to force his plans on people.”

“Do you know what he wants and why?” Tobias asked.

“Sometimes I know a minute before he asks. I don't have the big picture.”

Opal squeezed his hand. “Not even a little part of the big picture?”

“Some of the outlines. But he's already told you some of that. They were asleep and they want to be awake, and now they have a bunch of people they can use to help them wake up.”

“Who are they?” Tobias asked. “The auguries—”

Corvus shook his head. “I don't know enough. He guards himself from me. Also, he's so different, even when I see some of his thoughts, I don't understand them. They're in a different language, or they happen at a different speed, or there's an extra dimension I don't grasp.”

“You get nothing at all?” asked Tobias.

Corvus bent his head. His hand turned upward under Opal's, and his fingers closed over hers. “There's a shine to it. It's too bright for me to look at.”

“Is it something that hurts people?” Opal asked.

“I don't know. I don't think so. It's—it might change people, but I'm not sure it's supposed to hurt them. I would hope I could stop them from jerking me around if I thought it was going to hurt people, but since it's unclear to me, I can't—stand against it.”

“Some part of you understands it on a deeper level,” Opal said.

He shook his head while saying, “Maybe.”

“You're not frightened of it.”

“I am, a little. But Opal—cliché, I know, but this gives me power beyond my wildest dreams. I had no idea any of this was possible. What you can do, and what they can do. I've been playing monsters for fifteen years, and I never believed in any of them except when I was being them. God.”

“What do you want power for?”

He hesitated, staring toward a wall. “I hit my growth spurt when I was around thirteen,” he said. “It didn't all happen at once, but it came before any of the other kids my age got that tall. By the time I was sixteen, I was seven two, and no one else was my size. Nothing fit—clothes, furniture, doorways, social situations. People didn't know how to respond to me, and I didn't know how to get my body to work. I tried basketball, because that was the best typecast I could think of, but back then, I had no coordination. I retreated into quiet, studying too much, exercising on the sly at three A.M., when I could count on being alone. Most of the teasing wasn't meant to be mean. The only girls interested in me, though, were looking for a freak, and that wasn't what I wanted to be.”

He frowned. “One of my friends from the nature club decided he wanted to be a moviemaker, and he asked me to be the monster. At first I was really mad at him, but then I thought, why not? I loved being a monster, because I could take off the costume and turn back into myself afterward, pretend I was normal. When I made the jump into real movies, things got much better. Everyone involved in this business is weird one way or another, so they can accept me the way I am, pretty much. There's still no way for me to step out into the regular world and not be noticed, and I—I can't help wondering what that would be like. Phrixos says—” His voice trailed off and he stared down at his feet.

“That's the bribe he offered you? He can make you shorter? I can make you look shorter, if that's what you want,” Opal said.

“Can you?”

“Illusion is my business,” she said. “I can make you look like whatever you want.”

“But you never would have told me that.”

“True. Probably. I don't know. If we got involved, I might have told you.”

“He offered first.”

Tobias opened his bag and pulled out a smaller bag, unzipped it to reveal compartments filled with different ingredients. “Maybe the auguries will tell me more, now that I'm in the presence of what's been warping them.”

Opal stood. “Can we do that after supper? We haven't eaten in hours.”

Tobias frowned. He opened one compartment, pulled out a pinch of yellow fragments, rubbed them between fingers and thumb, and tossed them into the air with a muttered phrase. An image formed and faded. “I guess it can wait,” he said.

“If you can make me look like anything,” said Corvus, “make me look like a normal guy now. Let me try having a meal as someone besides me or a monster.”

Opal closed her eyes, so deeply tired she wasn't sure she could handle anything demanding. She went to her study and checked her power reservoir. It held an assortment of shades of power. She held out a hand toward a streamer of blue that looked friendly and uncomplicated, and it rose from the array, touched her palm, slid into her. The blue power revived her, like three sips of water on a hot day—a temporary but convincing state.

She envisioned a Corvus shorter than the one she knew, shrank his features and his stature until he looked—strangely normal, almost nondescript. She decided to dress him in a brown sports jacket, pale blue shirt, dark slacks, and brown shoes. When she had the vision complete, she flicked it over the tall black-robed man in front of her and opened her eyes.

Corvus reduced: she wouldn't have looked twice, except he smiled, and his eyes lit up, and then he was present in a way she knew and loved, from the inside. “Done?” he asked.

“Done. I haven't changed your size, just how you look. You'll need to be careful moving around; you take up more room than it appears. Or did you want the complete transformation? I'm not sure I have enough energy for that right now.”

“You can do that?”

She smiled, shrugged with shoulders and eyebrows.

“Let me see.” He rose, stared into the mirror over the dresser. His eyes widened. “Heavens. Do you see what I see?” He turned to Tobias, eyebrows up.

“Opal is very good at what she does. You look like someone I would pass on the street without a second thought.”

His eyes danced. “Let's go out. I want to walk this one around. Possibly the most peculiar part I've ever played.”

In the elevator down, Opal tried to make sense of her impressions of Corvus. She was aware of the space he took up. He hovered over her, even though she looked at him and saw someone only an inch taller than she was, smiling at her. She refined the illusion to damp the space-taking vibes he was giving off. By the time the door opened on the lobby, she had made the transformed Corvus so convincing she believed his apparent size herself.