The Tower of the Forgotten (3 page)

"Straddling
worlds? A foolish gambit I thought would pay off. A ritual, too many years ago,
under a foreign sky. I was young and stupid, with ambition that outweighed my
good sense. Ah, well, but we all make the most of our mistakes, don’t we?"

"This
wasn’t a mistake," Portia told her,
gravely. "Far from it."

She clucked her tongue. "Forgive me,
please. I meant no offence. Perhaps…perhaps we all make the most out of our
situations
,
then?"

Portia allowed herself a smile and nodded.
"Indeed we do. So, what do they call you?"

"Aseneth,
you know, like Cleopatra’s sister?"

"My
name’s Portia."

"Not
what I expected."

"I
wasn’t born this way. I had parents; mundane,
ordinary parents."

"The
old woman raised a greying eyebrow. "Obviously not that
mundane. But that’s for another time.
Come, I need to ask you about this tower."

Aseneth
led the slow way into the circus grounds, and Portia looked upon her residence
for the first time. Her tent stood away from the others with a separate ticket
taker’s stand before it. A crude wooden fence had been
put up around the back of it, blocking the view of whatever lay beyond. The
small courtyard they entered was flanked by two large tents, one with a
brightly painted sign indicating elephants and clowns. The other, taller and
slightly narrower, had a trapeze hanging from the doorway like a shop’s shingle. On the far side sat a row of squat tents and
boxcars arranged in a semi-circle with a single barker’s stage and ticket counter blocking the way in. Beside that,
a wide walkway flanked with concessions stands led down the slight slope to the
midway.

Between
the circle of small tents and the concessions stood a narrow structure that
looked to Portia like a converted outhouse. The roof had been raised into a
faux gable and extended to each side. The side walls were not wood, but heavy
canvas, painted with moons and stars and hung from the overhang of the roof.
The door was what gave it away, oddly-shaped with a telltale crescent moon
carved through it.

Aseneth
opened the door. "Welcome," she said with gravity. "I am honored to have you
as my guest."

Inside,
it was quite comfortable, with thick carpets layered over the dirt floor and
strewn with plush pillows. At the center was a round table holding a dusty
crystal ball and an intricately carved wooden box, about a hand’s span in length. A large cabinet dominated one corner and a
curtain the other. Ignoring the table and the rest, Aseneth pushed back the
shot-silk curtain to reveal a cot, a wobbly-looking washstand, a battered
folding table, and two chairs.

"Please,
sit." She shuffled off to the only other thing in the
room—an enormous steamer chest along the far side of
the bed—and opened it. She brought out a loaf of
bread, some cheese, and a corked bottle.

"I haven’t been hungry,"
Portia told her.

"Nonsense, you just didn’t feel like eating.
Although this is meager fare, I know you’ll enjoy it. Sourdough!" She waved the baguette under Portia’s nose. "And a nice merlot from
the vineyards north of Penemue. You must know the ones."

"I’ve heard of them."

"It
would taste better out of crystal, but what can you do?" She grabbed two glazed porcelain mugs from the washstand
and dropped them onto the table, then poured for two before Portia could object.

"To you, my dear, Portia." She held her cup aloft
and drank noisily.

Portia
sipped at the wine. It was actually quite good, but she put the cup down. "Thank you for your hospitality."

"I can hear what you want," she sighed. "All right, business then. Do you mind if I eat?"

"Go right ahead."

Aseneth
tore off the heel of the bread and pressed a hunk of cheese into the soft
interior with her thumb before biting off a sizable piece and proceeding to
talk with her mouth full.

"I was here, of course, when the tower appeared,"
she said through a spray of crumbs. "Halford came to me, at once. He isn’t as stupid, or
oblivious, as you might want to think. He knows what I am, and he knows what
you are. Well, maybe not what precisely, but he knows you’re no hoax. Anyway," she swallowed and dove
in for another bite right away. "He asked me to examine the place. He even paid me for it, so I knew he was serious."

"What did you see?"

"What I saw and what I told him aren’t exactly in accord.
Some things regular folk aren’t meant to know. I mean
about the holes in the sky and the call from within, tugging on the spirits
caught between worlds. I used to have five guides, you know. This one had a
daughter." She jabbed a thumb toward the woman in
red, who shrank in on herself. "We went to the island
and looked at the place up close. I think he can smell them or something,
because he knew right off. He knew and he called to them. They wouldn’t budge, so he sent down a slough of pretty maids all in
white to try and take them from me. Poor, foolish Bess never listened to her
mother in life, and continued that bad habit in death. So like some sad repeat
of history, she was swept away from us. Although, this time her mother didn’t go in after her. She couldn’t—it all happened so fast. Too fast. He strikes like an adder,
your brother."

"He isn’t my brother."

Aseneth licked the crumbles of cheese from her thumb. "Just
because you hate a fact doesn’t make it untrue." She tapped the sagging flesh beneath her clouded eye. "What’s blind to the living
sees perfectly well into the spirit. And if there were ever two children of
that old cad, Zepar, it’s the two of you. Like I’ve never seen a Nephilim before and like they aren’t half of them Zepar’s offspring!" She laughed until she coughed, plucking a handkerchief from
the front of her blouse and covering her mouth.

"Enough." Portia stood, but Aseneth caught her sleeve and tugged it.

"Now, now, I don’t mean to upset you." Her voice grated with phlegm. "You came from that tower, didn’t
you? I thought maybe you needed to get back to it."

"I need to get back to Penemue. Because I don’t intend to do this on
my own."

Aseneth
looked up, straight through the wall behind Portia. Her blind eye moved a
little of its own accord, different from the motion of its neighbor. The
spirits in the room retreated a step and huddled together into a single mass.

Outside,
it sounded like the wind picked up, rattling the temporary structures around
them, moaning into the empty stalls and booths. It buffeted the little
fortune-teller’s hut, causing the old wood to creak loudly.

"I don’t think you have a choice."

"Like hell I don’t!"

Portia stood, knocking her chair backward, and followed Aseneth’s gaze. She could see the tower, like a hazy double
exposure, through the wall. With newfound confidence, she walked out of the
hut, through a half-dozen food and drink booths, and down the rolling hillside
to the beach below.

The sanctuary tower of Salus rose from a jutting of rock that did not match the
color of the others and had not one barnacle clinging fast to it. The water,
too, was strange, eddying in currents that ran counter to the flow of the
waves. A glint of light flickered beneath the surface here and there, and she
could make out the sound of an engine beneath the grumble of the waves.

From behind her, she heard Aseneth’s wheezing approach. Her
spirits were not with her.

"Do you know what Halford and Quentin want with this place?" Portia turned to look at the old woman.

"Do you know what Avernus is, girl?"

Portia
thought a moment, scouring her memory for where she had heard that word before.
For she knew it, she had learned it in school. When it came to her, it chilled
her to the marrow.

"Yes," she whispered. "It is the name for one
of the gates to the underworld."

"So, that answers your question, doesn’t it?"

"Hadrian
Magister," Portia mused. "Mysterious benefactor. I think I know what that means as
well."

"Oh?"

"Hadrian
means ‘black.’"

"So
it does. The Black Magician, then?"

"More
than that. There’s someone I know whose
name also means ‘black’ and whose surname means ‘magician.’ "

Aseneth
shook her head. "You’ve lost me, dear."

Portia
looked up toward the balcony near the top of the tower. "Nigel Aldias."

The sea wind blew cold and it smelled
strange. Underlying the tang of salt and seaweed, Portia caught a scent she
knew too well: lilies.

—
3
—

PORTIA PACED THE TENT, not noticing when she strode straight
through the cage or the canvas sides. It would be dawn soon, and the tourists
would come; they would board the zeppelin and they would circle the tower and
marvel. Somehow it played into his plans, but he was not acting alone. Portia
did not know who he had helping him on the living side. Halford and Quentin
were certainly in on it, but neither of them had the brains to conceive of such
a scheme on their own, of that she felt certain.

A tingle in the air alerted her to someone
nearby. Peeking out across the courtyard, beyond the low tents of the sideshow
freaks, she saw a thin plume of dust in the silvery pre-dawn light. A carriage
approached, a fine one at that, given she heard not a sound from it beyond the
jingle of the horses’ tack. She could not see the small portable office
building the two men used, and squinting through the spirit world brought her
little more data until the carriage door opened. The reflections of the horses
were soft and blurry; the noble spirits of the beasts were not the type to
linger in that twilight world, and so it had no hold on them. But the man who
stepped into her view glowed. She recognized him at once and knew also that he
could see her just as clearly should he choose to glance her way.

No ordinary Nephilim, indeed
.
Portia stepped back into the cage and settled herself, looking sidelong toward
the pale spirits of the two circus partners and the blazing bright form of Lord
Alaric Regalii.

 He shimmered in the way she thought she
must, with a star-bright glow that clung to her flesh and wings and left faint
traceries in the air around her when she moved or breathed. She watched his
colors warm and spike, sending meteoric streaks into the blurry half-world. He
was angry, she sensed, and she shuttered her awareness as the reddening force
came toward her.

Alaric
threw open the tent flap and strode in, his face upturned but his eyes sweeping
disdainfully across the enclosure—the cage and Portia
alike. The two partners came in his wake, shoulders slumped and heads bowed as
if sleepwalking.

Alaric
snapped his fingers and sighed loudly. "Gentleman, you’ve pussy-footed about for too long. I’ll have the new enclosure finished in three days’ time and I insist you move her there, immediately."

Halford
perked up, but only slightly. "We fear her nearness to
the tower," he said in a slurring voice.

"You
have nothing to fear from that, I assure you."

Quentin
nodded and parroted what Alaric had said. "Nothing to fear."

Alaric
smiled to reassure them, but it drove chills through Portia’s flesh. So sinister were the underpinnings of that smile,
and so familiar. It put her in mind of Lady Analise.

She
probed the memory, reaching around the sharp edges of the other events back in
the convent. Alaric’s neck stiffened and his
head tilted toward her, subtly but unmistakably. Portia backed off, clearing
her head with a sigh and settling back against the painted plywood clouds that
flanked the small cot.

Now,
gentlemen, off with you." Alaric made a shooing
motion with his hands, and Halford and Quentin wandered off, heading back
toward their office, chattering animatedly about their plans for completing the
pavilion by the end of the week.

Alaric
turned his attention to Portia, sauntering to the edge of the cage. "Thinking fondly on my dear, departed sister?"

"Thinking,
yes. Fondly, that may be debated." She did not comment
about their relationship.

He
smiled. "She was ruthless. She’d have made a fine leader, but she made a damn brilliant
Aldias. Took Vedma training, too, for years." He reached through the
bars and stroked one of her feathers with a disturbing sort of admiration. "Although I am not sure I’d like the wings and the
rest," he gestured at Portia’s eyes and hair, "I am happy with what I
have."

"What
do you want here, my lord?"

"I
can let you out of here, or I can make sure you stay here until you rot, no
matter how long that takes. Don’t you toy with the
Primacy, girl. We can and will break you."

"Do
you know why my sister wanted you?"

"Yes.
She knew who my father was. And my brother." She glanced toward the
unseen tower. "She knew her hideous
grafting would work on me, but only after exhausting her resources at the
convent."

"Great
minds often learn more from failure than success, don’t they, Mistress Gyony?" He gave her a glimpse
of Imogen, watery and pale, the memory of a ghost.

"It
doesn’t excuse her for the horrors she perpetrated on
those children."

"They’re coming along fine, just fine. In fact, I should share the
regards of Kendrick and Radinka, the most promising of the survivors. I have
taken a personal interest in their schooling. Never did trust the Edulica not
to spare the rod—it makes for spoilt
children: temperamental, stubborn, unwilling to do what they are told."

"Do
you not see me in this cage, my lord?" Her temper flared and
she gritted her teeth, refusing to be baited by him. "The good Lady Hester cannot have failed in that regard, don’t you think?"