Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  “I wouldn’t blame you,” Nadezhda said. “On the other hand, we’re in Hell, and they’re throwing a three-day party: if anywhere’s a good time and place to go mad, this might fit.”

  “I haven’t had a proper debauch in ages,” said Ruthven, smiling. “Go with it. Let us condole the knight—”

  Greta remembered a sitting room in the Savoy, in another world, after a completely different kind of fight, and finished the quote for him: “for, lambkins, we will live.”

  “Or at least drown in a fountain full of vintage Krug,” said Ruthven, “which is a perfectly demonic way to go. Where’d I put my glass?”

  It turned out human—or vampire—laughter was indistinguishable from that of demons, even in a vast and noisy crowd.

  In a white-and-gold office with a ceiling painted deep blue with gilded stars, Amitiel and Zophiel stood before a desk and tried not to anxiously ruffle their feathers.

  The angel behind the desk had a pencil tucked behind its ear, startlingly ordinary, and a ledger lay open before it. Zophiel watched it running a fingertip down the columns until it came to two entries made simply out of asterisks.

  “There we are,” it said. The nameplate on its desk read PRAVUIL; when they had been taken into the citadel and told they must see the recording angel, Zophiel had immediately feared the worst. This Pravuil was not actually very terrible at all.

  Yet.

  “Two entities that aren’t on the list. Two visitors,” it—he—said. “I’m assuming you’re from the, ah, other side. We need to ask you a few questions.”

  “We didn’t mean to,” Amitiel blurted out, and then huddled against Zophiel’s shoulder. Zophiel put an arm around him. He wasn’t sure that was allowed, but Pravuil didn’t seem to be paying much attention to inappropriate physical behavior; he closed the ledger, folded his hands upon it, and looked at them with blank and golden eyes.

  “Didn’t mean to do what?” he asked.

  “To—make all this happen, to—break things, to make angels dead,” Amitiel managed, beginning to sniffle. “Well, I mean, we did, that was what we were sent to do, but—”

  “But we didn’t understand what we were doing,” said Zophiel miserably. “It’s still our fault. We caused reality to become extremely fragile on purpose, so that our armies could—invade and destroy the, um, the false Heaven—we were sent to this Earth to prepare the way—”

  He thought he was going to be sick again; guilt rose in his throat and he held Amitiel close, waiting for Pravuil to tell them what punishment this world’s God decreed for creatures such as themselves. The angel’s eyes had widened, but narrowed again, and he said, “Sit down before you fall down, both of you, and start from the beginning. I think you’d better tell me everything.”

  It was a Hell of a party.

  Greta thought she could remember seeing multiple otherwise-respectable individuals dancing on tables with lampshades on their heads, but her recollection was definitely hazy. It was still going on a day later when Ruthven went in for a scan to determine if he was still carrying the curse; they had to fight their way through a writhing mass of happy drunken demons to get to the hospital, and even inside, the noise of music and raised voices was still audible.

  She was accompanying him both as his doctor and as a fascinated observer; the mirabilic resonance scanner was one of the things she’d wanted desperately to see ever since she’d heard of it, and Faust was willing to let her have a look. The imaging center was on another floor of the tower from the emergency room.

  “You’ll have to remove all jewelry,” said the tech who met them at the front desk. “Enchanted or otherwise.”

  “I know,” said Ruthven. “I vividly remember the last time I did this. Let’s get it over with?”

  “Of course,” said the tech, and led them into the back. Greta was expecting something like an ordinary MRI, possibly sleeker, but the thing awaiting them was both bizarre and gorgeous, a raised horizontal cylinder of totally transparent material, clear as glass. She could see right through it to the other side of the room.

  “This won’t take long,” said Faust at the controls. “We’re not doing diagnostics, just checking his signature for interference. I have a feeling it’s been reset with everything else, since all the damage seems to have been undone, but I want to make sure.”

  Greta nodded, and went to look over his shoulder as Ruthven, in a hospital gown that he somehow managed to make stylish, lay down on the machine’s couch and slowly slid inside the cylinder. They could see him close his eyes. “Does it hurt?” she asked Faust.

  “Nope. Feels a bit tingly, that’s all, and it makes some noise.” He entered a series of commands, and Greta stared as the transparent cylinder of the scanner lit up with a moving pattern of light. It looked a little bit like the grey glass communication devices Fass had used to collimate his magic back in Paris, with faint holographic color hovering inside the glass itself.

  On the screens an image was beginning to form as the light pattern shifted and moved down the bore of the cylinder from Ruthven’s head to his feet. The image looked a little like a wire-frame model of Ruthven himself, with something like magnetic field lines surrounding it. “Mm,” said Faust. “Good. Looks fine to me so far.”

  “What are those lines?”

  “Mirabilic fields. I can show you his earlier scans, they were a mess, but this is nice and clear, no sign of any residual curse damage. I think he’ll be fine to return to Earth.” Faust did some more typing, and the light patterns shifted and made their way back up the cylinder before cutting out altogether. Inside it, Ruthven turned his head to look at them through the observation window, eyebrow raised, and Greta gave him a thumbs-up; the relief on his face was very clear even through the slight distortion of the scanner’s wall. It was relief she shared.

  “One day,” she said, watching as the couch slid back out of the scanner, “I will actually understand how this stuff works, but this is not that day.”

  “I can give you some reading material,” said Faust. “Did Fastitocalon tell you about mirabilics?”

  “Not much. I mean I sort of get the idea, magic’s like physics, but beyond that, I’m pretty much lost.”

  “I’d start you off with the intro texts,” he said. “You can take them with you and expand your mind in all your copious free time.”

  Greta laughed. “I have so much of it. I wonder what’s been happening up there.”

  “Probably business as usual,” said Faust. “It looks to our surface ops like everything’s back the way it was before this whole mess happened. No one on top seems to have much if any memory of the entire sequence, which is to be encouraged. Your patients should be fine.”

  “I can’t wait to get back to it,” she said. “I’ve had enough emergency surgery to last me the rest of my life. I want to go back to repairing people in a less dramatic fashion.”

  “You did a bang-up job,” said Faust. “Under extreme conditions. I was impressed, or at least I was afterward when I had the ability to think. You and your friends.”

  “I was happy to,” she said, meaning it. “But I’m glad I don’t have to do that again.”

  “Do what?” Ruthven said, rejoining them, tying his tie. He had gone shopping with Nadezhda and Hippolyta and Grisaille up and down the famous Plutus Boulevard, and was currently arrayed in a new and very nice grey suit with a faint shimmer to it. Greta was still wearing the clothes she’d arrived in, although they had been cleaned while she slept off the party in a hotel room.

  “Staple bits of angels together,” she said. “You’re good to go, apparently.”

  “I am so pleased to hear it,” said Ruthven. “Um. How do we get home?”

  “Someone’ll flip you,” said Faust. “Sam will probably want to say good-bye, and he can arrange it. Off you go.”

  “Thank you,” said Greta simply, and took the hand he offered her. “Thank you so much. For everything.”

  “Just doing my job,” said Faust
, and gave her his rare and narrow smile.

  They had arranged to meet up with the others in the lobby, and the look of relief on Grisaille’s face when he saw Ruthven smiling was almost comical. “Can we go home?”

  “We can,” said Ruthven, and nearly lost his balance when Grisaille launched himself into a thoroughly enthusiastic hug. “I want to spend a hundred years not leaving London. I’ve had enough of travel for a while.”

  “Fuck traveling,” said Grisaille. “In fact, fuck everything except your house. I like your house and plan to stay in it like a hermit crab inside its shell for the foreseeable future.”

  “Good to have plans,” said Greta. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Samael did, in fact, want to see them before they left. He spoke to them individually. Varney was last; he spent the time while the others talked wandering slowly around the Devil’s enormous office, which was all in shades of white. Even the books on the shelves were bound in white; it was a little hard on the eyes after a while. From here the view out over the lake was outstanding, however, and Varney watched tiny sailboats, miniaturized by distance, scudding back and forth through the dancing flames.

  “Sir Francis?” said Samael. Varney turned from the window, came back over to his desk, half an acre of white carpet away.

  “How may I be of assistance?” he said.

  “So far we haven’t been able to determine exactly what was the catalyst which prompted divine intervention. I’m trying to find out if anyone has any information that might be of use in tracking it down.”

  Varney could feel his face heat up ever so slightly in a faint flush. He had deliberately been avoiding the subject, trying not to think about it: he didn’t know if what he had done in daring to pray for the first time in centuries had actually been the triggering factor that undid Armageddon, but—

  “Sir Francis?” said Samael, head tilted. The blue eyes were hypnotic, hard to look away from. Not for the first time he thought that the Devil had his own version of thrall.

  He’s going to find out, somehow, eventually, Varney thought, and closed his eyes for a moment. “My lord,” he said, “it might be simpler if you had a look yourself, instead of relying on my limited powers of description.”

  “That’s not ominous,” said Samael. “All right. Hold still, this won’t be fun but I’ll try to be quick.”

  Varney opened his eyes, nodded, and was almost prepared for it when the feeling of Samael inside his head slammed into him: a searchlight looking through his eyes into the thoughts behind them, brilliant and glaring and merciless. His recent memories were called up, flipped through the way a man might flip through a book searching for a particular passage, back, back, further back, until he was once more in the bar with desperation thick in the air, closing his eyes, reaching inside himself for that small quiet emptiness he had not touched for so many centuries, beginning to pray, daring to try despite the fear, because of the fear, how it had turned into almost a nonsensical chant before that strange, impossible feeling of listening began—how he had asked the question, is this what you want, and received an answer—

  The searchlight cut off; Varney steadied himself on the edge of the desk, blinking. Samael was looking at him with a completely unreadable expression.

  “I think,” Samael said after a long moment, “that we all may possibly owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. None of us thought of that. At all. Didn’t even occur to us to try, because—well, we were all so damned sure that nothing out there would hear it. That Himself was out of range, or out of interest, that we were on our own.”

  “It was the only thing I could think of to do,” said Varney, remembering again Tefnakhte and the stela, sending out his request for information, for assistance. “I—expected to be punished for daring, but it seemed as if I would be punished, anyway, with everybody else.”

  “Which seems eminently reasonable,” said Samael. “Thank you is inadequate. Ask me for anything you like, and it will be yours.”

  “I want to go home,” said Varney, “and marry my fiancée, and repair my roof and care for our monsters and—no offense, your lordship—try to forget this ever happened.”

  “None taken,” said Samael with a wry smile. “Forgetfulness, at least, I can grant. I have a whole river’s worth of it at my disposal.” He held out his hand, palm upward, and a small blue glass bottle appeared in it.

  Varney stared. The fluid inside was heavy, syrupy, and looked a bit like liquid pearl. “Is that—” he began.

  “Pure Lethe,” said Samael. “One drop of this will fade recent memory; three will remove it; five will remove farther back. Use with caution.” He held out the bottle. After a moment Varney took it, not surprised at how heavy it felt despite its size, and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I—appreciate it.”

  “The very least that I could do,” said Samael. “And now I will have somebody escort you home, or wherever on the skin of the world you choose to go, at your command.”

  “Dark Heart,” he said. “No one calls it Ratford Abbey; it’s Dark Heart House.”

  Samael nodded and got up, gesturing for Varney to precede him. The others were waiting outside the office with a couple of Samael’s staff. Greta took Varney’s hand, and he squeezed her fingers gently, not sure what he wanted to do with the bottle, not sure of very much at all except that he was very tired of magic and adventure and peril, and wanted to be home.

  “Thank you,” Samael said to all of them, “and good luck,” and the staffer demons took their hands and the world twisted into the sideways disorienting whiteness of translocation and this time Varney welcomed it with all his heart.

  CHAPTER 18

  Greta had never in her life been so utterly glad it was raining.

  You didn’t really notice the lack of a proper sky in Hell—the mind sort of bounced off it, a protective reaction to limit the shock—but, oh, it was so lovely to look up and see clouds, to feel the rain on her face, feel the movement of air again. To smell it, the scent of wet earth, green things growing, alive and real and blessedly ordinary.

  They were standing hand in hand on the terrace of Dark Heart House, its pale stone darkened with the rain. The demon who had brought them had said polite good-byes and popped out of existence again—nobody seemed to be particularly worried about translocation destabilizing anything, which was a nice change—and they were still standing here getting wet, and she didn’t know what to do with how glad she was to be back.

  Varney didn’t seem to mind the rain, either, standing with his face turned up and his eyes half-closed, smiling his infrequent but rather lovely smile. They might have stayed there indefinitely had Emily not come out onto the terrace and demanded to know what they were doing there, weren’t they supposed to be in France, why were they standing in the rain—and a moment later her questions were cut off because Greta was hugging her very tight.

  “Come inside,” Emily said when she got her breath back, “you’re soaked, c’mon, I made tea a minute ago,” and when Greta let her go, led them through the French doors into the blue drawing room.

  It had not been all that long since Greta had visited Dark Heart, but every time, she was struck anew by how beautiful the great old house was becoming under Varney’s reawakened care. How beautiful it once had been, its lovely bones, and how his refurbishment was bringing that latent grace and style back to the surface after decades of near-abandonment. This room had been completely gutted, the ruins of the silk wallpaper drooping in long tatters, the marble mantelpiece cracked, the ceiling plaster damp and bubbled, and now it was simply, elegantly appointed in a way that was not identical to the original but an evolution thereof. The clutter of Emily’s veterinary textbooks and notes didn’t subtract from the elegance; they made it feel more like home.

  Greta drifted over to the new banded-fluorite fireplace, blue and violet and white, and held out her hands to warm them over the comfortably dying fire. A couple of hairmonsters
were sprawled on their sides in front of the fire like hunting dogs, and wuffled at her when she bent down to stroke them. She couldn’t stop smiling. Varney was watching her—she could feel the weight of his eyes, a pleasant touch—and she thought again how right he and this house were for each other. He fit here.

  Reality was still there, waiting for her, when she straightened up. She’d have to call the spa and tell them she’d be returning to continue her job in—a few days, she thought, please, I want a few days of this, of here, before I go back to work—I was called away on an emergency, like I told Brigitte, that much was true, I hope they can cope without me a little longer—

  “Why didn’t you call and tell me you guys were coming back?” Emily asked, returning with a tea tray. “I mean, not that I was having crazy house parties while you were away, I was studying, but I could have got stuff ready for you—wait, did something happen?”

  The question was entirely reasonable given the circumstances, but Greta looked away from the fireplace to look at Varney for a moment before bursting into laughter. Did something happen, she thought. Varney was laughing, too, helplessly, and half-fell into a chair, a hand over his eyes. Emily stared at him, and then at Greta, and back at Varney.

  “What?” she demanded. “What’s so funny?”

  “Did something happen,” Varney managed, “yes, I think it’s safe to say that,” and dissolved into mirth again. Emily scowled at him, hands on her hips, and blew a strand of hair out of her face.

  “Okay, whatever, you’re both apparently nuts,” she said. “Do you want tea?”

  In the Embankment house, Ruthven and Grisaille had said their own good-byes, to the demon and to Nadezhda and the others, and were in agreement that the house had way too many stairs; they had just negotiated the staircase and achieved their bedroom. Grisaille let go of Ruthven and flopped face downward onto the duvet, with a creak of springs.

  “I am never leaving this bed again,” he said, muffled by the covers. “I am amalgamated with this bed. This bed and I have achieved spiritual oneness. I am it and it is me.”