The Last Rune 6: The First Stone

by Mark Anthony

  I felt much attention upon me as the doorman led me through the tavern. There were many patrons, though it was difficult to get a proper look at them, for they sat in dusky corners, and all I saw were their eyes, glinting like jewels in the dark. At last the small man brought me to an alcove, its floor strewn with cushions, and he indicated I should sit. I did, and only then did I see her.

  “Thank you, Arion,” the woman said to the doorman. “You should return to your post now.”

  The doorman frowned. Clearly he would rather have stayed, but he bowed and retreated into the gloom.

  “You came for this, Marius, did you not?” the woman said. She held out a clay vessel, stopped with a cork.

  It was difficult to gaze upon her. She was bright amid the dimness, and I had to raise a hand to shield my eyes. At first glance she was young, her skin as lustrous as a pearl, her lips coral, her lovely face framed by raven-dark hair. But as my eyes adjusted, and I lowered my hand, I saw the wisdom of long years in her gray eyes. Shadows gathered in the hollows of her cheeks, and I knew even in sunlight they would remain, for I had seen such shadows in Alis’s own visage.

  “You’re dying,” I said, too filled with sadness not to speak the words.

  “We all must die, Marius. And I have endured longer than many do. I shall not protest when it is my time. Besides, it is another that must concern you now.” She placed the jar in my hands.

  “Alis,” I said. “You know her.”

  The woman nodded. “Her parents, at least. When she was born, they sensed the Light was strong in her.”

  “The Light,” I murmured. “Like the light in you. It hurts you, doesn’t it, to live on this world?”

  Her green eyes seemed to pierce me. “It hurts all like us, Marius—though some more than others. Alis’s parents believed that dwelling in the outside world might force her to become strong, to gain resistance to its ill effects. Most of us disagreed with them. We felt it was best for the child to stay here, protected. But there were . . . others, from outside, who convinced them to try. When the infant of a noble lord and lady was still-born, the midwife—who was one of our own—spirited Alis into the cradle instead, unbeknownst to the mundane parents.”

  “A changeling,” I murmured. “You mean Alis is a changeling.”

  The woman nodded, and understanding glimmered in me. Alis’s parents had sent her out into the mortal world in the hope that confronting the source of her pain and suffering would give her some mastery over it. Only that hope had been in vain.

  “It didn’t work,” I said. “Living out there didn’t make her strong. It’s killing her. Who were these people who convinced Alis’s parents to send her out there?” I clenched my hands into fists. “Who were they?”

  The fairy-woman shook her head. “Time grows short,” she said, and I did not know if she meant for Alis or for herself. “Take this as well.” She handed me a small book, bound in frayed leather.

  “What is it?”

  “It was his.” Her gaze moved past me, to the arch of stone through which I had passed. “Go to her, Marius. You are her only hope.”

  Yes, I had to go. I rose and hurried back toward the door. As I neared the stone arch, I saw a shape on the floor.

  It was Byron. He lay with his hands clasped around a sprig of holly, his head on a pillow. His eyes were closed, and he seemed asleep, a look of peace on his face, only I knew he was dead.

  “His kind cannot enter here without great peril.” Arion said. The small man stood in the archway, his blue eyes sad.

  I stared at him. “But how . . . ?”

  “Your skill with shadow is not so great as you thought. He must have followed you here, slipping in while I was away from the door.” Arion sighed. “I fear he was lost before I could return and protect him.”

  I staggered back. What was this place? Why had Byron perished while I had survived?

  Arion urged me forward. “Go, Marius. There is nothing you can do for him now, and dawn comes. You cannot leave here while it is day out.”

  These words made no sense. It was only just dusk when I found the tavern. I had been there but a few minutes. However, before I could protest, Arion pushed me through the door, and I stumbled out into the street.

  Rose-colored light welled up from the eastern horizon. I heard a door slam behind me, but when I turned I saw a blank brick wall. There was no red door, no green sign. However, the jar and the book were hard and real in my hands. I started to turn away, and that was when I saw him. Byron’s corpse slumped against the wall, his face white, drained of life. He still clutched the holly sprig.

  I felt I should do something, but I knew the Seekers would find him, that they would take care of their own. I slipped the book and the jar inside my coat and lurched down the street.

  By the time I reached the Faraday estate it was midmorning. I feared I would be accosted at the gate again, and I was ready to strike down any who stood in my way, no matter their number. However, as I approached the gate, I saw only Rebecca. She wore a black gown.

  “Marius,” she said, reaching for me, and for a moment it seemed sorrow shone in her eyes, only when I looked again they were hard as stones, and she had pulled her hand back.

  “Do not try to stop me,” I said.

  She stepped aside. “I will not stand in your way. There is no need. Did not Byron find you last night? Did he not tell you?”

  “Byron,” I said, choking on the word.

  She drew close to me, her face hard. “What has happened? Where is Byron?”

  I shook my head, then moved past her, through the gate, and ran down the long avenue of trees toward the manor. I had to go to her. I had to see Alis. I reached inside my coat, gripping the clay jar, knowing the fluid within would restore her. She would not live forever; none of us did. She would fade, like the beautiful, nameless woman at the tavern. But not before she and I shared many glorious years together, not before—

  I halted at the top of the steps. A black ribbon had been tied to the handle of the door. It fluttered in the breeze, and at last I understood why Byron had come looking for me, why Rebecca had let me pass.

  The clay jar slipped from my fingers and shattered against the steps. Green fluid oozed over the stones, and a soft sigh escaped me, like the last breath of a dying man.

  I believe I went mad for a time after that, for there is little of the days and weeks that followed that I can now recall.

  I drank much, that I do know. Returning to my habits of old, I would drain a flask of whiskey, fall into a stupor, and when I woke, head throbbing, I would slink out in search of another bottle. On more than one occasion I was found drunk on the grounds of the new St. Paul’s, calling out for Alis, and the king’s soldiers would haul me back to my house, or once—failing to recognize me as a nobleman—to a pauper’s jail, where I spent five days and nights shivering in a filthy cell, and did not bother to beat back the rats when they crept forth to gnaw at my legs.

  Rebecca retrieved me from the jail, that much I do recall through the haze, and she took me back to my house. I remember her asking questions about Byron as well. The Seekers had found him dead in the village of Brixistane, south of the river. He had been sent to follow me, she said; surely I was the last to see him alive, and she wanted to know the reason he had died when there wasn’t a mark on his body. Only I couldn’t have answered her if I had wanted to. Nothing that had happened that night in the tavern dwelled in the realm of reason, and the only words I spoke to Rebecca were to ask her for more whiskey. She left in rage and disgust.

  March gave way to green April. In rare, lucid moments it occurred to me that I should pay a visit to Lord and Lady Faraday, only I would take a drink first to steel my nerves, then another, then I would wake on the floor, my head feeling as if someone had taken a hammer to my temples. I considered returning to Scotland as well. Letters had begun to arrive again from Madstone Hall, piling up on my table. I determined to read them, but always the drink required to clear m
y mind led to many more that fogged it, and the letters remained unopened. Richard Mayburn came to speak to me, and Rebecca again, and though I did not turn them away I had nothing to say to them. Finally they ceased coming altogether.

  I believe, left to myself, I would have drunk myself to death; it was what I wished for. Only there was something that kept me from surrendering altogether—something I had to do. Then, on the first day of May, I happened to pick up a crumpled broadsheet lying in the gutter as I stumbled out in search of more grog. My eyes fell upon a small printed notice, and I knew at last what I had been waiting for: to say good-bye.

  I reached Westminster Abbey at midday. The sun was bright, and its rays pierced my skull, stabbing at my brain. A drink would have succored me, but I had not stopped on the way to buy any whiskey, and I had not had a drink since the night before, which was longer than I had gone in many weeks. However, as I entered the cathedral, the quiet and dimness were like a balm to my mind. The pain grew more bearable, if not diminished.

  It took me an hour to find her tomb. The little article in the broadsheet had not said in which part of the abbey she had been laid, only that she had been buried there as an act of kindness to Lord Faraday, who had served the kingdom so well in Parliament. I wandered through the nave and sanctuary, and the two transepts, peering in every corner, looking for a stone that was newer than those around it.

  At last I found it, in the place where I should have looked first: on the edge of the Cloisters, not far from Sir Talbot and Lady Ackroyd. The stone was small and plain, with only her name and the dates of her birth and passing upon it. I knelt, but I had no paper and charcoal to make a rubbing with, and so I pressed my hands against the stone, as if to etch the words into my flesh instead.

  “Hello, my love,” I murmured, and I wondered if by some strange workings, like those in the Whispering Gallery, she might hear my words. “It’s your Marius. Please, dearest—you must not forgive me for what I have done. Only bid me good-bye. For surely you and I will never meet, as I belong in no heaven that might house the likes of you.”

  I meant to go then. My head, though in pain, was clear of the haze of whiskey for the first time in weeks, and at last I apprehended in full the knowledge I had been masking with drink all this time.

  It was my fault Alis had died.

  “Is that so?” spoke a soft voice behind me. “Is it truly your fault?”

  Had I spoken my anguish aloud? I turned and saw a woman standing above me. She was clad in the flowing black gown of a mourner. Though her lithe figure lent her an air of youth, she leaned upon a cane, and a veil concealed her face.

  “Did you know her?” I said, though it was hard to speak.

  “Not as you knew her, Marius.”

  She lifted her veil. Her face was as pale and luminous as it had been that night at the tavern, though the shadows that gathered in her cheeks were darker than before.

  “Why do you blame yourself, Marius?” the fairy-woman said.

  I turned away. “I did not tell her.” Grief tore the words out of me in hoarse sobs. “I did not tell her who she really was. My mission was to watch her, to see if she learned of her true nature on her own. Only she didn’t, and now she’s gone.”

  A rustling of cloth behind me. “We all must pass in time, Marius. Her kind, our kind. You could not have changed that.”

  “But it did not need to be so soon! I might have taken her to the tavern. You could have helped her. She could have endured for many years.”

  The woman sighed. “Perhaps she could have endured. Endured in suffering, and in sorrow. For she had thought herself a child of Lord and Lady Faraday, not something other—a changeling, a thing of legend. Perhaps knowing what she truly was would have given her woe rather than comfort. And even if not, why do you place all this blame upon yourself. Did not those you serve know of her true nature before you did?”

  A sliver of ice seemed to pierce my heart. Yes, they had known all along what she was, but they had only wanted to watch her as she failed, not to help her. The Philosophers. And how was it they had known Alis was a changeling in the first place?

  But there were . . . others, from outside, who convinced them to try. . . .

  I hardly saw as something soft was pressed into my hands. “Dry your tears, Marius.” The woman’s voice was hard and clear as glass now. “It will do Alis no honor to cast away your life. If you would serve her now, then do not forget the gift we gave you. . . .”

  Her gown fluttered. Like a passing shadow she was gone, and I knew that I would never see her again. I looked down. In my hands was the silver cloth I had taken from my mother, and which I had given to Alis at St. Paul’s. As always, it was unmarked with stain or rent. With it, I brushed the dust from her tomb. Then I stood and ran through the cathedral.

  I reached my house an hour later, breathless, and it took me some time to find it amid the chaos and squalor, for the servants had abandoned me weeks ago for want of their wages. At last I found it beneath a table: a small book, bound in frayed leather. In my grief I had forgotten it. I took it now and sat at the table. My hands trembled, and a strong temptation for a drink came upon me—it would have steadied me—but I dismissed it and opened the book.

  It was a journal.

  The author’s name was one Thomas Atwater, according to the title page, and the journal was begun in the year 1619.

  I begin this record even as I begin a new life, the author wrote. For on this day I have joined a newly established order of men and women who call themselves Seekers. Clever, they are, and curious and bold. They were alchemists once, but have since put such frivolous pursuits behind them, and instead search out the source of deeper and truer magicks. I am of great cheer as I write this, for at last I have found a hope of helping myself and those who are like me. . . .

  A thrill came over me as I read these words, for the slanted hand in which they were written was entirely familiar to me. There could be no doubt: The author of this journal was one and the same with the writer of the letters I had found in the vaults beneath the Charterhouse. Thomas Atwater had been one of the tavern folk.

  And he had been a Seeker as well.

  I read on, page after page, eschewing drink or food, only stopping to light several candles as night stole over the city outside. The journal seemed to contain more pages than possible given its size, recording the events of several years, and it was only as the light of dawn touched the windows that I finally reached the end. I set down the book, staring out the window at the new day beginning, and I knew that, once again in my life, I was just beginning as well. For what I had read in the journal had changed me completely and forever.

  Atwater’s writings had contained many revelations, but one above all others burned in my brain. And it was simply this: Everything which the Seekers stood for was a lie.

  I thumbed again through the journal, trying to absorb all the knowledge contained within its pages. The author of those first happy lines had been utterly different than the sober and vengeful man who wrote the last pages. Atwater had joined the Seekers, as he had said, out of hope—a hope that their investigation into otherworldly magicks might reveal a way to help his kindred at the tavern, the folk of fairy descent, to ease their suffering at dwelling on this world.

  It did not end that way.

  Thomas was born to a maid who worked at the tavern, a woman who was badly used by a mortal man—a young lord who promised to give her a new life, then cast her into the gutter once he successfully deflowered her. She died, crushed by the weight of this world as the tavern folk often were, and Atwater was raised by the tavern’s owner, Quincy Greenfellow, father to Sadie and her brothers.

  Quincy Greenfellow’s father had founded the tavern, in the village of Brixistane, south of London, as a haven and refuge for those who were like him—those who found the burden of this world heavy to bear. Over time, through whisper and rumor, folk similar to Greenfellow heard of the tavern, and as they came together there,
they began to piece together just why it was they were different. They did not know their full history, but they knew they were descended from beings who were something other than human—beings other people called fairies.

  In its early days, there were others who were attracted to the tavern besides those of more than mortal extraction. It became a favored haunt for would-be wizards as well, for those who trod down the dark, secret, and smoky paths of alchemy.

  Chief among these alchemists who frequented the tavern was John Dee. At the time, Dee was widely known as Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, though he had long researched in secret the art of alchemy. In time, Dee’s work led him into disfavor, poverty, and madness. But before the end, he made a discovery that greatly animated him, and which he brought to the tavern to show Greenfellow. It was an ancient scroll that Dee claimed was written by the legendary alchemist Hermes Trismegistus himself, and which he said contained writings about a tomb lost beneath the ruined palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete—a tomb that held the answer to the greatest mystery of magic the alchemists sought to unlock: the mystery of transmutation.

  Dee never journeyed to Crete, for he fell ill and perished soon after this. But the scroll fell into the hands of some of the other alchemists who frequented the tavern, lesser magicians who had hoped to learn secrets of the craft from Dee. They vanished from the tavern and were not seen again for some years.

  Then, one day, several of these alchemists did return to the tavern, and they were much changed. They were clad all in black, and their eyes were gold, and an aura of power cloaked them, as tangible to the folk of the tavern as the dark garments they wore. They called themselves Philosophers now, for they claimed to have learned the ultimate secret of the alchemists: the magic of transmutation and perfection.

  These Philosophers, as they styled themselves, did not speak of what they had found on Crete, or what had changed them, but they brought several artifacts with them. Chief among these was a keystone taken from a doorway. They claimed there was a magic in the keystone, one that if they could fathom how to work it would open a door to another world—a world in which the folk of the tavern, those with the blood of fairykind in their veins, would know no pain, no suffering.