Legends of Australian Fantasy

by Jack

  ‘We should move,’ he said, ‘in case anything follows.’

  Adi coughed and spat. She had staggered off to find her own bearings, slowly recovering from the suddenness of their escape but still feeling a nag of worry. If anything, the nag was growing stronger, not weaker. She felt as though she had forgotten something important. The more she reached for it, the further it pulled away.

  ‘It took what it wanted,’ she said, understanding that much with certainty. ‘That’s why we were going to be dumped. It didn’t need us any more.’

  He nodded and put both hands to his temples. The exertion of opening the Way had left him dazed. He would recover, but until then his thoughts moved like slugs. ‘So much for what lay behind the damned curtain. Do you think she knew this was going to happen?’

  ‘How couldn’t she? It was a set-up, and we walked right into it.’ Adi was tired, more tired than she had ever been. ‘We’re idiots.’

  He had no humour in him, but attempted a joke anyway. ‘A perfect match.’

  She stared at him as though he had said something utterly incomprehensible.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, alarmed by a sudden, new intensity to her.

  ‘Quite the opposite, I think.’ She shook her head and looked away. ‘Ros, it’s gone.’

  ‘What’s gone.’

  ‘The spark. I don’t feel it any more. When I think of you ...’ Her eyes returned to his. ‘I feel ... nothing.’

  He took a step backwards, rocked as though from a physical blow. Her words pained him, stung even through the dense fog in his mind, but reaching into himself he found exactly the same yawning absence. What had been so strong and clear just moments before was now missing entirely. It had evaporated.

  ‘That thing,’ she said with dismay on her face. ‘It took it.’

  Ros shook his head, reaching through coldness like a drowning man at a rope.

  ‘Let’s not jump to any conclusions,’ he said.

  ‘What other conclusion could there be?’

  ‘I don’t know. But we can’t just give up.’

  ‘Do you think we can fix this?’

  Tears painted dark streaks through the white dust in her face.

  He had no answer for her.

  ‘I’ll see if I can flag someone down,’ she said, heading at hast for the thoroughfare. ‘If we’re quick, if we come to her in time, maybe we can get it back.’

  * * * *

  The cab was cramped but fast. Fuelled by a mixture of alcohol and the Change, the growl of its engine only added to the pounding in Ros’s head. The pain paled in comparison, however, to the feeling that his heart seemed to have died in his chest.

  They endured the journey in silence. Although they were crammed together on the back seat, they felt as distant from each other as they had at any point during the previous five years. Adi’s thoughts returned constantly to that moment when hope had turned to horror. How could neither of them have seen it coming?

  She was conscious, also, of the cab driver glancing at them in the mirror. It was well within reason that he should be curious about the dust-covered pair who had hailed him with such urgency, but it was more than that. Only midway through the journey did she realise that she had forgotten to replace her veil. The driver had clearly noted her Clan markings and, if not already certain as to the identity of his passengers, was at least speculating wildly.

  The only way to stop him talking was to keep him close by.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said when they pulled up outside Magda Van Haasteren’s dive. ‘We’ll need you afterwards.’

  The value of the coin she gave him was out of all proportion with the request. He understood immediately. ‘Of course, miss,’ he said. ‘I’ll not go anywhere.’

  They left the cab and warily approached the portal through which they had both entered earlier that night. The magnitude of the charm that had enveloped them boggled Ros’s mind. Not only had their paths crossed, but they had also come to this very place practically on top of each other. How was it possible that they had not noticed, that Magda Van Haasteren had talked to both of them simultaneously, that he had not seen her? He was angry at himself for letting the broader illusions distract him while a deeper treachery unfolded. That was a lesson he would not forget in a hurry.

  You feel it with your whole body and in all your thoughts, Adi was thinking as she stared at the door. It’s like a little bit of lightning, and it too can start a fire.

  Ros too was remembering what the seer had told him about the spark. They fare badly who try to draw on a power that isn’t there.

  The hovel was empty, but only recently so. That Magda Van Haasteren had fled in a hurry was left in no doubt by the cheroot still smoking in an overflowing ashtray, and the many possessions she had left behind. Even in the absence of candlelight they could make out the curtain still hanging on the wall before them.

  Ros tore it down and threw it aside. A featureless wall stared back at them.

  ‘She heard us coming,’ Adi said.

  Ros nodded. ‘We’ll never find her. She could be anywhere.’

  ‘So where to now?’

  Separately, they reviewed the path that had brought them here. It couldn’t have been entirely illusion, unless the entire city had fallen victim to it. Furthermore, man’kin weren’t easily influenced ...

  Ros pulled the business card from his pocket and held it up for Adi to see.

  * * * *

  Facing each other in the study two couples sat, one old, one new — if they were a couple at all — and on the floor between them rested the bust of the man’kin, Mawson.

  ‘You say he spoke?’ asked Jenfi Mierlo. ‘To both of you?’

  ‘Without question,’ Adi replied. ‘He told us both the same thing: to go to Magda Van Haasteren.’

  ‘You will go to Madam Van Haasteren,’ the bust obediently repeated, like a parrot.

  ‘You see?’

  Jenfi Mierlo gaped first at Adi, then at Mawson. Then she started coughing, and Ros thought would never stop.

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Samson when his wife’s fit had subsided, ‘that Mawson didn’t in fact tell you to go anywhere. He simply said you were going to.’

  ‘I hardly see the difference,’ Adi retorted. ‘We wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t brought it up.’

  ‘And therein lies the problem with man’kin. They don’t experience time the same way we do. They see it all at once, so as far as he’s concerned: you will go, you have gone, and you are already there — all at once. The notion of intentionality is quite foreign to him. Sometimes, dear, I think it’d be better if they never spoke at all.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ his wife said, tipping her birdlike frame to the right and then straightening again, ‘but we’re missing the point. Mawson isn’t the culprit. It’s that wretched Van Haasteren woman again.’

  ‘Again?’ Ros asked.

  The elder couple exchanged a look. It was clear that neither wanted to be the one to explain.

  ‘If we’d known who you were —’

  ‘If you’d told us about Mawson —’

  They cut each other off. Jenfi waved for her husband to continue.

  ‘I mean to say,’ he said, ‘that you fit her requirements perfectly. The pair of you, not as individuals. She of course knew your history. She had years to study you and to prepare the trap. First she lured you, Ros, to the city, thus ensuring that Adi would also come. Once you were both here, she redoubled her efforts. She took your feelings for each other and turned them around — and did so quite expertly, I must say. You were hopelessly entangled. There was no chance of seeing your way out of it.’

  ‘What he’s trying to say,’ said Jenfi, ‘is that she played on your worst fears: that you wouldn’t be recognised or respected for who you were. And of course you played along with those fears, albeit unwittingly: you were both hiding; you both had changed. All Van Haasteren had to do was set the ball rolling. You did the rest.’

  ‘But wh
y?’ asked Adi.

  ‘Why would she want to do something like this?’ Ros echoed. ‘To us?’

  ‘You mentioned the spark,’ said Samson, taking his wife’s hand in his. ‘That was what she wanted, as you have deduced, and everything she did was designed to magnify its existence. You enjoyed it in your youth, and you might have reawakened it naturally simply by being reunited — but the fact that you didn’t even recognise each other the first time you crossed paths suggests otherwise. Your spark therefore had to be nurtured — by anxiety, by doubt — and by hope too, for without that the spark never catches.’

  ‘She primed you for that meeting behind the curtain,’ Jenfi concluded. ‘For the moment in which you truly recognised each other. That was what she wanted. Not just a spark, but first-class ignition.’

  Ros and Adi remembered that moment well. What power their spark had had! Now it was harnessed by another, the value it might have had to them was irrelevant.

  ‘We would have warned you off,’ Jenfi repeated, ‘if only you’d told us.’

  ‘How could we have known?’ Adi rose suddenly to her feet. ‘You make it sound like it’s our fault. But it’s not.’

  ‘No one’s saying that. Are you?’ Ros asked the Mierlos.

  Adi didn’t wait for an answer. With fast, angry paces, she walked from the room.

  ‘Wait here, Ros.’ Jenfi Mierlo hurried after her.

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Samson Mierlo in a grave voice, leaning forward to look Ros in the eye. ‘There’s something else you both need to know.’

  * * * *

  They received much the same addendum in much the same words, Ros in the study and Adi at the front of the Mierlo mansion, where Jenfi had caught her before getting into the cab

  ‘Magda Van Haasteren doesn’t work alone,’ the Mierlos told them. ‘She’s in partnership with something else, a creature that’s named in the bestiaries but barely described. No one knows what form such creatures take or where they come from. No one knows where she found this one or why she tamed it. All we know is what it does.

  ‘Van Haasteren is the procurer in the arrangement. She finds the lovers and lures them into her trap, pair by pair as you were lured. At the heart of the trap lies the creature, which thrives on the offerings she brings. They are a meal to it, you see. It has no hunger for flesh and blood, for it isn’t a material thing itself. Like eats like. This being has no physical presence, and has a hunger to match.

  ‘It eats the spark. That’s all. And that’s how we know what it is. Stone Mages have examined a rash of deaths in recent years — all pairs, all mysterious. Their bodies showed death by falling, but there were other signs, hints of a more sinister rupture before death came to them. We followed the investigation, for it touched on our own interests; we noted its conclusion. The Stone Mages can’t convict Magda Van Haasteren of anything, for she herself has done nothing wrong. The lovers came to her of their own free will; her pet does the rest; and she is canny enough to leave no evidence. Since predators are not disallowed in the city — for if they were, the markets would be forced to close forever — all we can do is warn people away, and hope that they’ll listen.

  ‘But lovers rarely do. They’re caught in their own world. That’s the great tragedy of it all — that the situation wouldn’t be possible without desire and dreams, those things that normally make us flourish. The dark side of the spark, if you will.

  ‘The bait in the trap was set by you yourselves.’

  * * * *

  ‘Not all stories have the happy ending we desire,’ Samson said, putting an avuncular hand on Ros’s shoulder, ‘but that doesn’t make them bad stories.’

  Jenfi told Adi: ‘It’s not entirely hopeless. The Mages can tell when a Way opens up outside the city, so they’ll know if Van Haasteren is still here, somewhere.’

  Neither Ros nor Adi was soothed.

  ‘You said it has a name — the thing that ate our spark?’

  Jenfi and Samson Mierlo told them, knowing the value of naming an enemy even when the fight has been lost.

  ‘It’s a trystophage,’ said Samson.

  ‘It’s an amavore,’ said Jenfi.

  Both said, ‘Its common name is the Thrall.’

  * * * *

  ‘What now?’ Ros asked as they took their leave of the Mierlos, no happier but at least better informed.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Adi’s exhaustion was total. ‘Your things are back at the hostel, if you still want them.’

  He wasn’t sure, but said nonetheless: ‘Perhaps I can help you get rid of that doppelganger, while I’m there.’

  To the Lost Dolphin they went, where they found the hostel in a state of restrained panic. The doppelganger had dissolved in a shower of fiery arcs an hour ago, startling the maid and setting fire to the bed. The fire had been extinguished before serious damage resulted, but the place remained in an uproar. To this was now added the revelation that Lady Hakamu might be none other than Aditi Sabatino, judging by her Clan markings — for Adi had forgotten once again to replace her veil — and if that were the case, then the long-haired, scarred stranger could only be her legendary betrothed, Roslin of Geheb.

  The whispers as they surveyed the damaged room were impossible to ignore. Adi knew she wouldn’t be able to bribe the entire staff, as she hoped she had silenced the cab driver when they finally let him go.

  ‘Just give me one night,’ she begged the manager and the staff. ‘That’s all I ask. Then I’ll release you. Tell the world then, if you must.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell, anyway,’ said Ros, misunderstanding the situation completely.

  ‘If you do it for us,’ Adi added more persuasively, ‘you will become part of the story. You’ll have given us sanctuary when we most needed it.’

  The hostel’s manager, sensing an opportunity for free publicity, took the matter into his hands. He swore that the staff would be discreet, on penalty of his own job. Threats were issued to all in his presence and solemn oaths undertaken. Furthermore, he said, the hostel’s other guests would be moved elsewhere — the smell of smoke had given them the jitters anyway — and new arrivals would be carefully vetted before gaining access to the building.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Adi. Ros echoed the sentiment wholeheartedly.

  And so the room was cleared.

  * * * *

  They checked their belongings without talking. It didn’t seem to Ros that any kind of words were possible between them now. The Thrall had taken them too. There was just emotion, raw and red, too painful to pick at.

  Among Adi’s scattered effects, none of which appeared to have been burned, she found the broken charm. The wave of grief she felt then was so powerful that she lost all strength in her legs. She let herself fall into a chair and cradled the charm in her hands. What good had following it brought her? All those dreams, all those hopes, shattered like workings of the charm itself.

  Ros walked past her, and the crystal flared bright red.

  They both stared at it in surprise. Had it fixed itself somehow? Had it too been afflicted by Van Haasteren’s web of deceit?

  More likely, they both realised, it had been working all along. When Ros had brushed past Adi by the doss-house, he had gone from being in front of her to behind her. If she’d turned and pointed the charm his way, it would have glowed as normal. But she didn’t. Instead she saw the doppelganger and thought she’d reached the end of her quest. She stopped looking.

  The pain on Adi’s face was awful to behold. Ros assumed his looked much the same.

  ‘I guess I should leave,’ he said, hefting the pack he’d thought lost forever.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not sending you back to that horrible place.’

  The suite was far more comfortable than the doss-house, even with the scorch marks on the bed. Ros appreciated the offer.

  ‘I can sleep on the floor.’

  ‘No. You take the bed.’

  Fresh linen had been left, but neit
her of them made a move towards it.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive. You need it more than me, and honestly, I could sleep anywhere.’

  ‘Well, all right.’

  Ros replaced the sheets while Adi arranged cushions in one corner, diagonally opposite from the bed. They didn’t look at each other as they undressed. They didn’t talk, not even to say goodnight. The light was extinguished, and they lay for an eternity, listening to each other breathe.