The Revolutions (23 page)

He came to rest. When Atwood spoke behind him, Arthur concentrated with all his strength on the notion that he was
not
moving, he was not falling, he was still. He was twice Atwood’s size. Atwood could not bat him about like a cat with a mouse.

He was still.

He felt Atwood’s red-hot irritation.

He planted himself more firmly.

Hot winds buffeted him.

Atwood said, “Enough.”

*   *   *

At once they were back in Atwood’s library. There was no wind. They were both sitting at Atwood’s table, and Arthur was panting and holding the white
tattva
card in his hands so tightly that his fingers hurt. His heart beat as if he’d run to and from all those places he’d glimpsed in his vision.

For just a moment Atwood looked flustered, and sweaty.

“Well,” he said, smoothing his hair. “Not bad for a beginner. But you have a lot left to learn, Shaw.”

Atwood got up from the table. He went to the far side of the room and replaced the cards and the book on the shelf.

Arthur stole a dizzy glance upwards, and saw to his relief that the ceiling was real and solid. No stars were visible. He got to his feet. He touched his face, ran his hands across his scalp. He ached. His skin was raw, as if he’d stood out in a high wind for hours.

It occurred to him that he wasn’t really a raw beginner in this sort of thing. Certainly he’d never attempted magic before; but two months in Gracewell’s Engine was a solid foundation in the art of self-discipline.

He looked at Atwood, standing by the shelf, head bowed, as if studying the spines of the books. Infuriating, sinister; undeniably somewhat magnetic. A madman, perhaps, but not a fraud or a fool. He knew that he was being stared at, of course. Like an actor, he seemed to take it for granted.

At last Atwood sighed and said, “Josephine is far more remote. Adrift in utter darkness. She will not find her way home unaided.”

“I believe you. Good night, Atwood. I’m going to see that she’s comfortable.”

“That was a game. Our real goal is a thousand times more difficult and more remote. Past the moon and onwards. We cannot reach it without Gracewell.”

“Well, Atwood: in the morning we can plan again.”

Arthur was half-way up the winding stairs that led to the gallery when he heard a knocking noise. He stopped. It came again.

“Do you hear that, Atwood?”

Atwood had not moved from where he stood. He was watching the door in the corner of the room—the door that led to the little side library where he kept his rare books, and the native of the Spheres.

Something behind that door knocked and scratched and scraped.

Atwood slowly approached the door. Arthur went to stand beside him. If Atwood were brave enough to open the door, Arthur didn’t see how he could in good conscience do any less.

The knocking and scratching ceased.

Atwood took the key down from its hook. His eyes were bright with excitement and anticipation, and his hands shook as he unlocked the door. It stuck. “Shaw—help me. There’s something…” Arthur put his back into it and the door opened. The weight that had blocked it rolled over. It was the creature itself, slumped against the door, curled up on the floor. It was still alive; its mottled indigo hide rose and fell with soft fluttering breaths. There was an overpowering stench of dead flowers and stagnant water.

It leapt to its feet, faster than Arthur’s eye could follow, legs extending to their full impressive height. It began to flap its long arms about in rapid herky-jerky motions like a puppet being shaken. Perhaps it was trying to signal something, but Arthur had no idea what, and the flurry of motion lasted only instants before it charged. Arthur tried to block it, but it dodged around him with ease and then it was out into the library.

It leapt effortlessly up onto the table. It appeared frenzied, as if this was the last strength of its dying moments.

“Stop!” Atwood commanded. “This is my house. I bind you, creature of the Spheres, in the name of Earth, Terra Mater! I bind you in the name of the Sun! I bind you in the name of God! I bind you in the name of Mercury! I bind you in the name of…”

Arthur got a good look at its silvery eyes. He didn’t like what he saw. They seemed to him to be full of malice.

It leapt up off the table and into the air. Its legs were thin but they were long and springy, and it weighed very little, so it reached a good height—rather like a grasshopper. At the height of its jump it fanned out its wings with a noise like sails snapping full of wind. No question any more that they were wings, wide and blue and complex in their structure, but they found no purchase on the dusty air of Atwood’s library. The creature fell back onto the table and rolled onto the floor.

Arthur ran for the rifle. The creature didn’t try to stop him. Perhaps it didn’t know what a rifle was. It leapt again, caught the edge of the gallery with one long-fingered hand, and pulled itself up. It looked around. It didn’t seem to recognise the door as a means of escape. Arthur was terrified regardless, thinking of Josephine upstairs, Abby watching over her. God bless Abby, who seemed like a stalwart girl to have put up with all that she had put up with, but if that monster crashed through the door of the bedroom, there wouldn’t be much Abby could do to stop it …

He shot at it. He missed and hit books instead. Atwood kept up his chant, which seemed to leave the creature quite unimpressed. Arthur worked the rifle’s bolt. It was an old Lee-Metford, which was a stroke of rare good luck, because he’d once written about the Lee-Metford, free-lance for the
Military Recorder,
and had shot at tin cans with one or two. He wasn’t a wholly bad shot. He fired and missed again. The creature wouldn’t keep still.

It darted back and forth along the gallery, then climbed over the railing, stumbled, and fell back down to the floor of the library. Arthur was sure it had died. Atwood came and stood over it. Just as he said, “What a waste!” it lurched up and slashed his cheek with its wing. He cried out and fell.

The creature rose to its full height. It fanned out its wings, which began to change colour, rapidly and kaleidoscopically, while from their motions there arose a strange high thrum.

Arthur shot it.

It fell. The stench of dead flowers filled the room, and he gagged.

Atwood stood. Blood ran from his cheek down his collar. Good, Arthur thought; serves him right. He was mumbling unpleasantly, urgently, wetly—
what a waste
,
poor thing, imagine it, lost in our world!

Instead, Arthur imagined Josephine, lost in theirs. A horrible thought.

Good shot,
Atwood mumbled,
well done, still, what a waste.

“It was dying anyway, Atwood. I think it—it started to fall before I shot it. It was…”

Could it breathe on Earth? Could it fly? He tried to take into account the atmosphere of Mars, surely thinner than Earth’s, its gravity, the physical difficulties a native of Mars might experience here. He was too tired. Besides, was it from Mars? Or Venus? Or the Moon? Or none of those places, but from some other realm separated from London by more than mere distance? He didn’t know. He knew nothing, and understood nothing.

“It looked wild,” he said.

Atwood had found a little folding hand mirror, and was examining the gash on his cheek. He was mumbling still, swearing and venting his frustrations. Arthur didn’t give a damn. The wound in his side had started to hurt again. He supposed he’d probably torn something.

He went to the desk and put the rifle back on its hooks.

“I’m going to bed,” he said. “We can plan tomorrow. But I will not have Josephine spend another night in this God-forsaken house; do you hear?”

Chapter Seventeen

The Company maintained their learning in a dozen or more hand-written journals, which Arthur was permitted, under an oath of utter secrecy, to study. Jupiter referred to them as
the notes
, and Atwood called them the
Liber Ad Astra,
or
A.A.
for short, or the Book.

It was a hodge-podge of Masonry, Greek myth, Egyptian fantasy, debased Christianity, third-hand Hinduism, and modern and ancient astronomy, promiscuously and nonsensically mixed. Some of it was in Atwood’s handwriting, some of it in Jupiter’s. Parts of it were in Latin.
SAPERE AUDE
was written on the frontispiece:
DARE TO KNOW.
Atwood’s notes hinted that the parts of the Book that had been entrusted to Arthur were merely the
outer learning
, and that certain other books might contain higher and deeper and more exclusive principles, and the identities of the
Hidden Masters
from whom those principles derived. Arthur took that to be a sort of bluff. Josephine had told him the way this sort of odd little occult fraternity generally operated: the esoteric knowledge that was not shared with initiates and therefore could not be questioned; the rumour of hidden sages in Tibet or Russia or Paris or other places more interesting and romantic than the Edgware Road, or Bromley, or Surbiton, where the ancient knowledge had almost certainly been cobbled together last Tuesday.

The Book was riddled throughout with paradox, and absurdity, and contradiction. Thinking too long or too hard on it caused something like vertigo; it was as bad in its way as Gracewell’s Work. But after a week or two of study, Arthur began to enjoy it. He felt guilty about enjoying it, but he did. There was some satisfaction to be had in learning the secret rules that governed the universe. It was like being in a rather important and exclusive sort of club. He even developed a sneaking suspicion that he was rather good at it, despite what Atwood said. He supposed there were worse things to be good at.

I: SUN

First: the Company imagined a sort of Copernican cosmos of invisible concentric spheres, which carried the visible planets in their rotations through the heavens. Of course these spheres were not mechanical things—nothing so crude—but nor were they mere metaphors. They were made of something that was not quite like earthly matter, but not quite nothing either:
aether
. They were best understood as states of energy, or consciousness, or vibration, or perhaps
spirit
, whatever
spirit
meant. Atwood was fond of quoting Corinthians:
Not all flesh is alike … There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies, but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial another.
It was in their nature to move in endless, perfect circles.

The Sphere of the Sun stood at the centre and apex of Creation. It turned endlessly, and each atom of it was like a rose of ten thousand angels endlessly revolving—and yet it was unchanging. In the lesser spheres, Atwood believed, time was circular; the centre of things was timeless, or alternatively time moved so rapidly there that it might as well be timeless. If the Sun had an inhabitant it was God: singular, and self-sufficient, like the God of the Jews.

The Company had also discovered (or hallucinated) a complicated system of occult correspondences between the heavenly spheres and the things of the Earth. Among other things, the Sun corresponded to the colours gold and white; to fire, diamonds, musk, and the lion; and to the Ouroboros and Kether, the Crown of the Sephiroth. The manipulation of these signs and correspondences was at the heart of the Company’s magic.

The man who occupied the role of Sun refused to give Arthur any other name. One was enough, he liked to say. The Company sometimes called him
Mr
Sun, as if it were the name he’d been born with. He was stocky, white-haired and bearded, with dark intelligent eyes. He dressed in the English manner, in dark suits, but always with a touch of vivid aestheticism: a bright tie, a golden tie-stud, some fine fur. The golden ring on his index finger depicted the Ouroboros. He clearly knew some doctoring. He carried himself like a man with important business interests. He was muscular despite his age: wrists thick and powerful, hands callused and square. Atwood said that Sun was an importer of antiquities—he made it sound shady. At the Company’s meetings Sun spoke little, listening thoughtfully while Atwood and Jupiter argued and paced and argued again, and Thérèse Didot made sarcastic interjections. When he spoke, his deep voice startled everyone, and demanded attention.

He counselled patience. In matters of magic, your enemies will destroy themselves, he said, and storms will exhaust themselves on a strong roof, and if you wait long enough by a river the bodies of your enemies will float past you. Shorn of poetry, Arthur understood that to mean that Sun thought the Company should dig in, defend, and wait for its enemies to overreach themselves. Well, Arthur thought, that was all very well for Mr Sun. He didn’t have to feed and wash Josephine every night. He didn’t have to listen to her every heartbeat and breath, afraid that it might be her last.

II. MERCURY

As the nearest world to the Sun, Mercury was also the fastest-moving; for each second on Earth, a thousand years flashed past on that blazing star. If it boasted civilization, and it likely did, then it could be home only to the golden cities of angels. An Italian astronomer had discovered in recent years that one side of the world was always turned towards the Sun, and was always in light; what better home, Atwood argued, for angels? It was doubtful that any human spirit could survive there. If the heat and the light didn’t drive one mad, then surely the wit and beauty and insight of its inhabitants soon would.

Mercury corresponded to Hermes and to Nishubur, to the Archangel Gabriel, to elephant-headed Ganesh, to the eagle, to topaz, to the bow and arrow; to wit and laughter and pure reason. The hours governed by Mercury were favourable to rites of projection, seeking, and clairvoyance. Its symbol was “
,” which Arthur recognised from his time in Gracewell’s Engine. It stood for an open and a closed circle: receiving energy from above, ordering it for the benefit of the spheres below.