Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  “Out of fucking nowhere is how,” Grisaille said, coming to a stop and folding his arms. “He was fine, we were having fun, we were having a lot of fun, in fact, and then two days ago he woke up with a nasty headache and it just got worse and worse. He kept trying to tell me it was just migraines, that he got them every now and then, but if this is just a migraine, I am the president of Burundi.”

  Varney nodded. “It’s certainly not like any I’ve ever seen,” he said. “But you were—just getting on with your holiday, not doing anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Not a damn thing,” said Grisaille. “I thought it might be someone he’d eaten but we basically shared the same people most nights and I’m absolutely fine.”

  Something was kicking his brain, something about Rome, about the Spanish Steps; he reached for it, but just then the door opened and Greta Helsing came in, looking—drained, Grisaille thought. Etiolated. Oh God. What was she going to say—

  “It’s not a tumor and it’s not subarachnoid hemorrhage,” she told them, holding up a hand. “The scans are completely clear. There is nothing visibly wrong inside his head at all.”

  She sounded almost angry about it. “That’s… good, right?” Grisaille said after a moment.

  “On the one hand, yes, nobody needs to go rent an emergency neurosurgeon who bills by the hour. On the other, it is very bad indeed because it means I don’t know what’s wrong with him, and therefore I can’t fix it, which is a problem I seem to be having a lot of right now.”

  “I have to see him,” Grisaille said. “Is he… conscious?”

  “Mostly. Not comfortable, but conscious. I have managed to knock the pain down a bit by giving him an amount of morphine which I will not disclose, and he’s profoundly stoned. Come on.”

  She looked from him to Varney; silently, the vampyre followed her, and a moment later Grisaille caught up. “You’re sure about the scans?” he asked as they walked.

  “I’m very sure. I did both T1- and T2-weighted MRI and spiral CT and he comes up green across the board. There’s nothing in his head that should not be there,” she said, taking them into a long ward corridor. Most of the rooms seemed to be empty; Greta led them to one of the few closed doors and pushed it open. Ruthven lay in a high-sided hospital bed with the head raised, covered with blankets, surrounded by stacks of monitors and equipment. A thin tube ran from a drip bag into one arm; wires stuck to his chest connected to one of the machines.

  Grisaille had just about time to think oh my God he looks so small before he was across the room and taking Ruthven’s hand.

  He did look better; still pinched and shock-grey, but in less visible pain. His hand in Grisaille’s was cool, no longer slick with sweat; when he blinked slowly up at Grisaille, his pupils were tiny black pinpoints, contracted all the way. The effect was both hypnotic and slightly horrible.

  Grisaille tried to smile, squeezing his hand. “Hey,” he said softly. “How are you doing?”

  “The universe,” said Ruthven in a faint, drowsy rasp, “is hilarious right now. Did you know that? You should probably know that.”

  “Good God,” said Varney quietly, and then gave a faint sound as if somebody had jabbed him with an elbow. Grisaille didn’t turn around to look.

  “The universe has a pretty fucked-up sense of humor,” he said. “That far I’ll go. Oh, love, I don’t know what to do…”

  He didn’t know what to do with the fact that he was now apparently the kind of person who said love as a matter of course, either; it was still new and strange and frightening, if undeniable. He’d never loved anything in his life before, except perhaps the pleasure of complicated thievery; never even known what it really felt like, and it had happened to him all at once, a dizzying landslide carrying Grisaille with it regardless of his intentions. He had already begun to fall even before the final and terrible battle underneath Paris, months ago; by the time he’d recovered from the consequent knife through his lung, Grisaille was helplessly in the grip of an entirely new kind of gravity, one that currently ached.

  His fingers tightened around Ruthven’s. Behind him he heard the door close as Greta and Varney gave them some privacy. Ruthven squeezed his hand back weakly.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m… fine, right now. Just fine.”

  “You are on enough drugs to run a small cartel for a week,” said Grisaille, and found himself horribly close to tears. “Dr. Helsing says your scans look… normal. I don’t understand.”

  “Neither does she,” Ruthven said. “About me, or about her mummies. Not understanding has always bothered her, poor girl. She… resents it. Which is also hilarious at the moment.”

  Grisaille reached down to relocate the lock of Ruthven’s hair that always fell over his left eye; cupped his palm to Ruthven’s face for a moment, tracing the line of his cheekbone with his thumb. The unnerving silver eyes closed slowly, reopened. His lashes were thick and very black, resting in a delicate curve against the bruised stains underneath each eye; Grisaille couldn’t help being struck all over again by how lovely he was, even now, even in this condition.

  This untenable condition. They had to fix him somehow. They had to. It wasn’t anything growing inside his head; okay. So—

  “Something else has to be wrong,” he said. “Something that doesn’t… show on her scans. You don’t have a fever, it’s not an infection—”

  He heard voices outside in the corridor, in rapid conversation, and straightened up, still holding Ruthven’s hand. The door opened to admit Greta, Varney, and… okay, that was a mummy. That was certainly a mummy. Holding a clipboard.

  “It’s not somatic,” Greta said, sounding more brisk than she had. “We know that much, at least. Physiologically you’re just fine, Edmund. Your BP is a little off, but nothing spectacular now that I’ve gotten the pain down a bit; your heart rate’s back to low normal for a classic draculine, temp is fine, sats look good, respiratory rate’s settled down. Your blood tests came back perfectly unremarkable for your species. I’d do a lumbar puncture to get a CSF pressure, but I am completely sure it would be normal too. You haven’t sustained traumatic brain injury of any kind, nor do you have anything inside your skull that shouldn’t be there. I can’t find a single thing physically wrong with you that can explain these symptoms.”

  “Which means,” said the mummy in a British accent, “that there appears to be something metaphysically wrong, which is a different problem altogether.”

  “Metaphysically?” Grisaille repeated, squeezing Ruthven’s hand. “This is magic?”

  “I think it has to be,” said Varney quietly. Grisaille noticed he had his arm around Greta’s waist, and that her left hand was in the pocket of her white coat. “And since none of us are any good at magic except Mr. Tefnakhte here—”

  “—and I’m only useful in terms of ancient Egyptian magic, which is a very narrow specialization—”

  “—we need assistance from someone lower down, as it were. It’s time to contact Hell.”

  Standing outside Ruthven’s room with Greta while Grisaille and Ruthven talked, Varney had simply opened with, “This is the worst possible time in the world to be doing this, but I’m not quite sure when we’ll have another chance,” and taken a small box out of his pocket. At the sight of it, a spike of adrenaline lifted the little hairs on Greta’s arms and legs: glass-clear excitement in the midst of chaos.

  She took the box with hands that shook ever so slightly, and opened it, not sure what she’d see—and drew her breath in with a gasp.

  The ring had no protruding claw settings to snag on her exam gloves. It was a narrow band of white metal with a row of oval gems channel-set down the center; she took it out and turned it between her fingers, trying to identify the jewels. They were all in shades of blue and green save one single white diamond, and there didn’t seem to be a pattern.

  “One of the last times I was in the world,” Varney said, “there was a fashion for something called a regards ring,
” and suddenly she understood, all at once, and looked more closely at the sequence of jewels. He smiled, that smile that lit his face, transformed him almost into a living man.

  “It helps,” he said, “if you know that aquamarine is a form of beryl.”

  Beryl, emerald, lapis, opal, something green that presumably started with a V, emerald, diamond. Greta slipped the ring onto her finger, and had to gasp again when it shrank to fit her, the entire object contracting in a way that was simply not possible—

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I had it made,” he said. “At a jeweler’s on Plutus Boulevard—” And got no further, because Greta had flung her arms around him and was holding on very tight.

  “That’s why you went to Hell,” she said, muffled in his shoulder, “for me?”

  “And the grand gesture, while well meant, is unfortunately somewhat overshadowed by the current situation,” he said, rueful, stroking her hair. “But I wanted you to have it sooner rather than later.”

  “You went to Hell for me,” Greta repeated, looking into his face. “I am so incredibly jealous—”

  Someone behind them cleared his throat very dryly indeed, a papery sound. Greta turned to see Tefnakhte standing there with a clipboard in one bandaged hand.

  “I hate to interrupt,” he said, “but I think you’re going to have to call for backup on this one, Dr. Helsing. The test results are absolutely conclusive.”

  He handed her the clipboard, and she flicked through the printouts. “This makes no sense,” she said, almost to herself. “None of it makes sense. It can’t be.”

  “What can’t?” Varney asked.

  “The tests are as clean as the scans.” Greta looked up at him, all her excitement gone, sunk into a miserable crawling sense of not understanding. “Nothing came up whatsoever. All his readings are clear. I’m… completely at a loss, except—”

  She straightened up a little. “Except Clarke.”

  “Clarke?” Tefnakhte asked.

  “Arthur C. He once said, memorably, that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; I was just thinking of it the other day. If I can’t find a scientific reason for Ruthven’s symptoms, there must be an unscientific reason. I don’t suppose your version of magic might—let you see what’s going on, if you asked it nicely?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he said. “Mine is very specific to a particular religion, a culture, that no longer exists outside the mummy community. It’s like asking a specialist in ancient diseases to diagnose something that’s only been around for a few years.”

  Greta sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that. I need a witch.”

  “There might be a better option than witches,” said Varney slowly. “Remember I told you when I was in Hell, very briefly, I was given a tour of the medical facility—”

  “Right,” she said as the obvious answer dawned. “Where there’s a lot of advanced magical diagnostic equipment. I’m an idiot. I should have thought of that first thing. We debrief the patient, and then we ring up Hell.”

  “I could do the—the summoning thing,” Varney said, tentative. “I have the pronunciation correct now, I believe.”

  Greta’s distant mental link with the demon Fastitocalon meant that if she sent a sufficiently powerful message, he’d respond at once, but she looked at Varney, the unfamiliar heaviness of the ring on her left hand very much at the forefront of her awareness, and had to smile. “Yes,” she said. “You could. It would be very much appreciated.”

  He smiled back. “All right.”

  The amount of morphine Greta had pumped into Ruthven was not precisely controlling the pain, just—masking it. He had read somewhere a description of pain like a jagged piling jutting from a beach, and the drugs simply bringing in the tide to cover it; when the tide began to recede, there was the pain again, a black rotten thing like a croggled tooth that had never gone away at all.

  In the beginning he really had thought it was a migraine: the socket of his right eye had filled up with a familiar squeezing relentless kind of agony that felt as if it should be visible, lines of poisonous light shining through his skin, and the nausea and photophobia were just as familiar, if no more welcome. And it had gone away. Mostly.

  It was when it came back that he began to be frightened, because it came back worse than before, much worse—he’d barely made it to the bathroom before being convulsed with vicious retching, each heave sending bolts of monstrous, astonishing pain through his skull; in the middle of it he’d been sure he was having a stroke—could vampires have strokes?—and then out of the fizzing blackness, cool hands steadying him, Grisaille’s voice, and the awful realization that he was frightening Grisaille and could not stop—

  —and after that he had lost track of time. Lying here half-listening to them talk, he had no idea how long it had been; hours, days, weeks, each felt as plausible as the other.

  I am going to die of this, he thought, hazy, beyond the morphine. I am going to die of this without ever knowing why—and a slow moment later, I hope it won’t take long.

  Grisaille was still holding his hand, cool fingers curled around Ruthven’s. The worst of this was knowing, knowing perfectly well, what it was doing to Grisaille, and being completely unable to make it stop.

  They were saying something about magic. He could make out Varney’s voice, and couldn’t quite remember when the vampyre had joined the festivities. There had been—an airplane, and then night air around him, and voices, and another enclosed space, Greta Helsing out of nowhere, bending over him. Ruthven made an effort to think through the drugs, to pay attention. Varney was—chanting something, which made little sense, but then not much else was making sense just at the moment—

  —and another voice, just as familiar, more impatient than Ruthven could remember hearing it: “… Sir Francis. What is it this time? I’m afraid I’m in the middle of something—”

  Varney, cutting him off. “Fastitocalon, we need your help. Edmund needs your help.”

  A pause, and then he could feel a faint pressure-wave, as if a door had suddenly shut. Opening his eyes was terrible, but Ruthven did it, anyway, and out of the general painful brightness could make out a tall figure bending over him.

  “… Fass?” he managed.

  “Yes, it’s me—what the hell’s going on? Greta?”

  “We were hoping you could possibly tell us that.” Greta’s voice, her clinical briskness. “Presented with acute and worsening migraine-like symptoms that refused to respond to triptans—onset, what, Grisaille? Two days? Three?—we got him in the scanner as soon as he arrived and every single test comes up completely clear. No physiological cause I can find, and believe me, I’ve tried.”

  “Mm,” said Fastitocalon, and rested a cool hand on Ruthven’s forehead—and snatched it away again with a rapid sequence of what sounded like invective in a language Ruthven had never heard. It wasn’t exactly reassuring.

  And the morphine was wearing off. Ruthven could feel it, feel the black jagged tips of the pain-pilings beginning to emerge. “… what?” he asked. “What is it?”

  “It’s very certainly not physiological,” said Fastitocalon, sounding shaken, taking a step back from the bed. Ruthven closed his eyes again, shutting out the increasingly painful light. “It’s a curse. Some kind of curse. I don’t know enough to tell you what kind, or how, or why. He needs to see Faust right away, Greta.”

  “Can they fix this in Hell?” she demanded.

  “You certainly can’t fix it here,” he said, which wasn’t a yes. Grisaille squeezed Ruthven’s hand, and he squeezed back, weakly, the tide falling faster and faster now, exposing more of the rotten blackness of the pain.

  “What do you mean, Hell,” Grisaille asked on a rising note. “You’re not taking him to Hell. Nobody is going to Hell.”

  “They’re good with curses,” said Varney, a little way away. “It’s all right, Grisaille. I’ve seen their medical facilities myself; it’s quite impres
sive.”

  “He’ll be perfectly safe,” said Greta. “And if anyone can help him, they can. Erebus General is probably the most advanced medical facility on any of the planes at the moment.”

  “I know it’s an alarming prospect,” said Fastitocalon, gentler now. “Believe me. But they’re very good, and curses are absolutely a thing Hell’s got experience dealing with—and I can tell you now that no matter how brilliant they are or what equipment they have access to, no human physician is going to be able to fix this.”

  “Can you do anything?” That was a different voice, one Ruthven didn’t recognize: papery-dry. “I mean, you’re—”

  “A demon,” said Fastitocalon. “One who spent rather a long time not quite being one, until fairly recently. I don’t know. I—”

  “Try,” said Grisaille, and the ragged unhappiness in his voice hurt Ruthven even through the hugeness of the pain.

  Fastitocalon said nothing, but that cool hand was back on Ruthven’s forehead—wonderfully cool, he felt like stone, like dark water—and a moment later something a little like another of those pressure-waves touched Ruthven’s face, and with it a shock-front of spreading chill raced through him. It was over so quickly he scarcely had time to register the sensation—and after the chill an astonishing, ringing numbness, blank and stopped. The shock of it was enough to jar his tenuous grip on consciousness loose, and the last thing he thought before going away entirely was oh God I’d forgotten how not to hurt.

  After Fass had done whatever it was he’d just done—Greta wasn’t sure, but it seemed to have put Ruthven under anesthesia—he pulled out one of the grey glass rectangles she remembered from Paris as interplanar communications devices, memorably termed hellphones by Grisaille, and made a call. She was again struck by how much better he was than he’d been in London, how completely in control, although he had the faint preoccupied line between his eyebrows that meant he was either worried or in pain or both.

  “Decarabia? Yes, it’s me. Can you ring up Erebus General and let them know I’m going to be arriving shortly with a vampire—classic draculine, not lunar sensitive—who’s got himself some sort of extremely nasty curse and will need immediate attention.”