Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  From the sink wafted a cloud of steam and the scent of scorched spices. He grimaced, then went on. “Trevor’s calling ahead now to warn them—those two will be cut off before they reach the mountains. I wish I knew nothing about it.”

  This was the first time I had any real notion of how the rebels based in Cassandra were organized, or indeed that they were organized at all. “Was—was there any other news?” I asked tentatively.

  Giles shrugged, pushed the loose hair back from his face, and shook his head. He was pale and drawn with exhaustion; he must have been up all night, talking with the soldiers or else seeing to some secret business of his own. “Some. There have been more insurrections in the HORUS colonies. And elsewhere—rioting on hydrofarms in the Archipelago, an attack on the provisional government in Vancouver.”

  “It’s true, then,” breathed Miss Scarlet. Her black eyes widened as she turned to Fossa. “The Alliance really is taking control.”

  “Alliance?” Jane repeated suspiciously, and glanced at me. “What Alliance?”

  I looked at the game monitor in my lap. “It’s nothing,” I said.

  Jane frowned and turned to Giles. “Is this some kind of joke?” she demanded. “Or are you planning to turn us over to the next band of soldiers who shows up?”

  Giles flushed angrily, but before he could reply, Trevor appeared in the doorway, his face smudged with soot. “We need more wood,” he announced, wiping his forehead and leaving a black streak. “Giles and Jane, would you mind helping me?”

  Giles nodded and walked. Trevor followed, and finally Jane left slowly, looking back at Miss Scarlet and me with eyes full of hurt and anger. When she was gone, I stood and began clearing plates from the table, and pumped water into the skillet still hissing in the sink.

  “Not yet,” I heard Fossa say softly behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw him staring out the window, to where Jane and Trevor picked their away along a path in the snow to the woodpile. Beside him Miss Scarlet shifted on her stool, her eyes still wide and gleaming with a bright, nearly fanatical intensity. “Not till spring,” Fossa rumbled. His long tongue flicked at the spaces between his long yellow teeth. “But soon, soon: our time will come.”

  I said nothing. After a few minutes I joined the others outside.

  So the winter passed. Mornings when I watched Jane breasting through drifts to the barn gave way to days in March when the inn seemed to float in a still gray lake, so deep was the snowmelt around us. And then slowly the earth surrendered to spring. There were crocuses and aconite in the last snowy patches behind the house, where the sun fell late in the day. Trevor disappeared into the basement for hours, finally surfacing with sacks that he hauled into the barn. Harvesting his macabre fruits. I wondered who would get them.

  In the first weeks of April more Ascendant janissaries visited. When they left, the sacks went with them, carried to the tiny electrical jitney by the creaking server, Mazda, and heaped into its storage compartment until it was full. Trevor watched the vehicle jounce over the rutted road, swerving to avoid gullies left by frost heaves. He took off his enhancer and smiled, his optics sending fiery blue darts above his head. I stood at my vantage place on the landing and kneaded the suede panels of my beaded skirt. I recalled his pride in telling me of the mutations he had caused, the hallucinogenic mushrooms that caused death and madness, the truffles that induced fits of despair. Late that night I crept down to the kitchen for some chamomile tea to help me sleep, and found him crouched in front of the shortwave, whispering into its mouthpiece. Whom did he speak to—rebels in the City, in Cassandra or someplace so far away I had never heard of it, someplace in the stars? He was playing a dangerous game. Like Giles, I wished I knew nothing about it.

  Giles himself had more mundane harvests. He took Jane into the woods and returned with canvas sacks full of fiddleheads. We ate them cooked with mutton fat and morels; they tasted like the earth itself, mouthfuls of it, raw and rich and green. From the marshes that lay behind Trevor’s fields came the shrill touts of peepers and the tree toads: a sound that always made my neck prickle, seeming to hold in it somewhere a promise that I knew could not be kept. And finally, on a day when there was no longer any breath of chill in the air, the wild apple trees in the meadows began to bloom.

  “Well! The winter’s back is broken at last.”

  Trevor stood in front of an open window downstairs, looking deeply satisfied. I’d gone with him from room to room, yanking open casements and removing glass storm windows to let the warm air come streaming in. Flurries of white and pink petals blew from the meadows and drifted across the polished wood floors. I found a ladybug in my bedroom and breathed on it until its wings opened and it flew off into the bright blue sky.

  “You seem happier than you were a few months ago.”

  I shrugged at Trevor’s remark, cupped my hand over my nose. Where the ladybug had rested, a very faint odor remained, an acrid smell that reminded me of Trevor’s basement. “Not really.”

  Though in truth the spring had brought a sort of remission to my sorrow. I had never been with Justice in the spring, so the season became a template upon which I could place nothing but raw grief. No image of his laughing face, no touch of his hand upon my shaven skull; nothing but the grief itself. And with nothing to feed it, even grief dies eventually; and so the warmer days and clouds of apple blossom found me dreaming, as often as not, of nothing at all.

  “You can’t grieve forever,” Trevor said softly. He picked up a glass transformer from a shelf, tossed it from hand to hand until he dropped it and it shattered on the floor. “Oh, dear.”

  He gazed down as though surprised to see the blue-green shards there, then glanced at me. His voice was kind as he said, “Well, things happen in the spring, Wendy. Maybe something will happen to you.”

  Something did. It was a shining morning a month later, in the first fat weeks of summer. We had been at Seven Chimneys for half a year. An unspoken truce had fallen between all of us; a truce easy to keep, since we had gotten into the habit of going our separate ways. Jane had left early that morning to check on the lambs in the fields. Miss Scarlet lay on the living-room couch with Fossa, listening to a historical novel about Yll Peng-Si, the tyrant of the Mongolian Nuclear Republic. I sat in the kitchen with Trevor and Giles, drinking tea and fiddling with a packet of cigarettes. Behind me, on the shelf it shared with tins of dried herbs and dusty brown bottles filled with tinctures of valerian and skullcap, the shortwave hummed soothingly. When I asked him where the transmissions were coming from, Giles only smiled.

  “ ‘Far away pul-lay-sez,’ ” he sang in his reedy tenor—a bit of doggerel from that damn opera again. “ ‘Stars you only see in duh-ree-ums…’ ”

  Trevor smiled indulgently and I grinned as Giles bowed with a flourish. The radio began playing something else, a choral piece by Menton Barstein that Miss Scarlet had always been fond of. I glanced into the living room to see if she was listening, but her head was beside Fossa’s as they stared into the talking book. I sighed and slid a cigarette from the pack.

  “This here,” I said, pressing the ball of my thumb beneath the image of the pyramid and looking up at Trevor. “This thing—it reminds me of something I saw at HEL once….”

  Without warning the song coming from the radio cut off. The shortwave crackled and fizzed; then there was an ominous, hollow silence. With a frown Trevor stood and went over to it, bending until his ear was close to the little round box. He twisted a knob with infinite care, so slowly it scarcely seemed to move, until the static resolved into a long, breathless hissing. I could make out no words, nothing but that foreboding sibilance. In his chair Giles sat up very straight and stared at his partner, his face pale. Suddenly a string of words rang out. To me it sounded as thin and breathless and meaningless as that other sound, but Trevor listened tight-lipped. After a minute he looked up sharply.

  “Aviators,” he said. Abruptly the transmission ceased. There was only the gentle flapping
of the curtains in the morning breeze. “Two of them, from somewhere in the southwest. They are headed for the City of Trees on an errand for the new Aviator Imperator. They’ll be here around sunset.”

  Giles was silent. Finally he leaned across the table and took the package of cigarettes from my hand. For a long time he stared at it in silence: the strange cursive letters, the staring eye within its pyramid. Finally he said, “This is too dangerous, Trevor. You’ll get us all killed.”

  Trevor shook his head. “But this is what we’ve been waiting for! They’ll have news from HORUS, hopefully something about the war in the Archipelago.” Only the way he ran his hands across his scalp, crushing the white stubble there as though it were dried grain, showed how excited he really was. “We’re well-armed, if anything should happen.”

  Behind me I heard a soft tread on the creaking floorboards. I whirled to see Fossa silhouetted in the doorway. His ears stood up: small pointed ears, hairless, the skin so translucent that I could see the web of capillaries beneath and their delicate inner channels. Beside him stood Miss Scarlet, wearing only a plain crimson shift: the gargoyle’s goblin shadow.

  “News?” Fossa asked in his groaning voice.

  “Aviators,” Trevor began, when Giles slammed his hand on the table, crushing the cigarette pack. Before Trevor could say anything else, Giles stood and left the kitchen, the door slamming behind him.

  “Aviators,” Miss Scarlet repeated softly. She turned to me, her eyes wide. “Wendy, Aviators!”

  “I heard,” I said. I didn’t like the sound of this any more than Giles did. “Where’s Jane?”

  Trevor rubbed his chin. “Upstairs, I suppose.”

  “No, she’s not. I went by her room earlier—she’s not there.”

  “In the barn, then,” Trevor said impatiently. “Giles and I are going to be busy, getting things ready for them. I think you should make yourselves scarce—”

  “You said sunset,” I interrupted. “I’m not going anywhere now. I want to talk to Jane—”

  But Jane was gone. She wasn’t in the barn, or her room, or anywhere in the house; nor was she in the fields outside, where Fossa hunted for her. I even braved the basement again, peering under those rickety tables with their foul-smelling heaps of dung and offal; all for nothing.

  “We have to find her.”

  It was afternoon now, and I stood on the porch with Trevor, staring out to where the sun had just started to nick the tops of the distant mountains with gold. I smelled of dung and warm grass, from crawling around in the byre and hayricks inside the barn. My voice was hoarse from calling for Jane; I could not have told anyone, perhaps not even Jane herself, how her disappearance had upset me. I remembered that first night at Seven Chimneys: Jane’s cool hands smoothing my hair, pulling Cadence Mallory’s clothes over my feverish limbs; Jane’s mouth brushing my cheek, and how I had pushed her away. And since then I had pushed her away as well, acting as cold and churlish as when we first met in the City of Trees.

  But now, as the light deepened from amber to the deep fiery gold of late afternoon, I began to grow frightened. If she should be lost (but of course that was ridiculous; Jane knew her way around the woods and ruined roads of Seven Chimneys as well as she had known the maze of cages at the Zoo); if she should be found and captured by the Aviators…

  “I’m checking the woods again,” I said, and turned to run back across the overgrown lawn.

  “ No .” Trevor Mallory’s hand clapped down upon my shoulder. “It’s too dangerous now—they could arrive at any time. I want you and Miss Scarlet and Fossa out of sight.” For the first time since my first visit to the underground gardens of Seven Chimneys, I glimpsed that other Trevor Mallory, the one who had spoken in soft insinuating tones of murder and revolution. “The Aviators think there’s no one here except for Giles and me. Fossa they believe is our servant. I don’t want to think about what they would do to refugees from the City of Trees—you’re putting yourselves and all of us in danger.”

  “But we can’t just leave Jane,” I cried, yanking away From him. “What if they find her?—”

  “Where can she be?” Miss Scarlet appeared in the doorway of the house behind us, wringing her hands. “Oh, this is my fault, I’ve been ignoring her, but she just doesn’t understand —”

  “Go back inside, Miss Scarlet,” I ordered her, exasperated. “There’s nothing you can do—”

  “There’s nothing you can do, either, damn it!” Trevor’s face grew flushed and he pounded the edge of the porch railing. “We’ve been waiting all winter for a chance like this, to talk to someone who has real news—”

  “Wendy, please.” Giles’s gentle voice wafted out from where he towered above Miss Scarlet. “I’ll keep looking for her—it doesn’t matter if the Aviators know I’m here—and when I find her, I’ll make sure she gets upstairs safely.” His blue eyes gazed into mine beseechingly. He hated harsh words, any kind of disagreement: a true Saint-Alaban, and so much like Justice….

  “All right,” I said, defeated. I leaned on the porch rail and looked out one last time, to where the ruined road wound from the inn toward the faraway mountains. Dread pinched at my heart: had she left us, really gone on by herself, to die or be lost in the wilderness? For the first time all day I felt tears welling in my eyes, but before anyone could see, I whirled and fled inside, my feet echoing loudly on the stairs.

  A few minutes later Miss Scarlet and Fossa knocked on my door and let themselves in. We sat without talking, waiting, until at last another knock came and Giles entered.

  “I can’t find her,” he said. Panic clenched at me; I jumped to my feet and began pacing the room.

  “Are they—are the others here yet?” asked Miss Scarlet with wide, frightened eyes.

  “Not yet. But I think it’s too dangerous in this part of the house. I want Fossa to stay with you—no, Fossa, I’m not going to risk having you where they can see you. There’s another room—I want you all to come with me, now. Hurry—”

  We followed him down one hallway, then another, then up a flight of stairs into a part of Seven Chimneys where I had never been: a small bump-out that I had always assumed was a storage shed, but which proved to be larger than I had thought. Unused tables and armoires were shoved against walls webbed with mildew, and in the airless corridor creaky doors opened onto rooms without windows, some of them filled with more furniture, others empty of anything save festoons of cobwebs. I sneezed at the musty smell and wondered how long it had been since anyone had been back here. Years, it seemed; our feet left smudged impressions on warped planks thick with dust.

  At last Giles stopped at a small door, so low and narrow, he had to stoop to pry it open. Inside I glimpsed stacks of old clothes and hangers suspended from a crooked rod. Giles ducked inside, rattling the hangers and shoving aside heaps of camphor-smelling linens. A moment later he motioned for us to come after him, and we did, Fossa and Miss Scarlet and me jostling each other in the dark crowded space until we reached a second, even tinier door that Giles held open for us.

  “Welcome to the sanctuary,” he said in a low voice.

  It was a long narrow room, rambling beneath the eaves of the little shed addition. Pushed against the far wall beneath a steeply sloping roof were a pair of wobbling chairs, an iron bedstead, a monitor with cracked screen, a bad reproduction of a Second Ascension metal sleeping cabinet, and a small cabinet filled with moldering books. The air smelled of cold dust and mice. There was no fireplace, and only a single tiny window overlooking the barn, so caked with filth, it let in neither light nor view. Giles cracked it open, and the heady scent of warm clover crept inside, and the sound of the little creek burbling behind the house.

  “Here, now,” Giles said. He crossed back to the little doorway, nervously smoothing his hair from his forehead. He’s really frightened, I thought, and swallowed hard, thinking of Jane. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with some food. All of you just sit tight, and try not to talk very loudly—try no
t to talk at all, if you can. Fossa knows what to do, he’s been through this before.”

  “I hope they don’t stay long,” fretted Miss Scarlet. “Do you think they’ll be here past the morning?”

  In spite of his worry, Giles smiled. His face had grown worn over the years, with lines and sunspots a Paphian in the City would never have borne; but at that moment he seemed more beautiful than any number of young courtesans. “No, cousin. I don’t think so. Aviators are all business—these two have been sent out on some mission from one of the elÿon bases in the Gulf. They’ve been charged to stop everywhere within two hundred miles of the City and do a thorough search. They’ll take a look around downstairs and be gone before you know it.”

  Miss Scarlet blanched at the word search. “But won’t they find us—oh, I wish Jane—”

  “Hush! No, they won’t find you. Seven Chimneys is known and trusted as a favorite stopping point for members of the Autocracy. This is a mere formality, that’s all. Now be still and wait—I’ll be back soon.”

  We waited. Miss Scarlet fidgeted, pulling the end of her shift through her hands over and over again, until it grew creased and stiff. Fossa leaned against the wall, his head bent to accommodate the sloping roof, and stared at the floor, his yellow eyes narrowed and thoughtful. Giles had shut the window before he left, but I cracked it open again, peering through the little slit at the barn and thinking Jane, Jane…

  When the door creaked open again, we all jumped.

  “Only me. No sign of them yet,” Giles said with false heartiness. “Here’s supper.”

  “Jane?” Miss Scarlet asked in a quavering voice.

  Giles put down a small tray, tipped his head, and sighed. “Not yet. Probably she’s still in the woods somewhere, in which case she’ll be fine.”

  “As long as she stays there,” I said grimly.

  Giles was silent, finally said, “Yes. As long as she stays there.” Miss Scarlet and I stared after him with sinking hearts as he crept back out again and locked us in for the night.