The High House

by James Stoddard

  “Then if the word of a Steward has any meaning, tell those who would sell you wood and stone that I request fair dealings and more,” Carter said. “Veth is but the first to falter before the Bobby’s forces; all the White Circle must work together to restore the peace.”

  “If I could I would prepare a banquet for you, in gratitude for what you have done,” Mélusine said. “But half my people are hungry and homeless. I cannot feast while they famish.”

  “If you can point us toward Arkalen, that will be gratitude enough,” Carter said. “We are in some haste. But if you require shelter, there is much room in Kitinthim, and I don’t think Spridel of the Guild of Dusters and Burnishers would refuse those in need.”

  “That is a good thought,” Mélusine said. “I will contact him. But as for your journey, if you could remain with us the rest of the day, so the people might see you, I would be grateful. If you leave too soon, they will misdoubt all that has occurred here. Tomorrow, guides will lead you to the Arkalen door.”

  Carter hesitated, torn by his desire to complete his mission, but Duskin said, “We can stay the day, but no more.” He gave Carter a significant look, and the Steward nodded.

  “Wonderful!” the duchess said.

  They spent the afternoon accompanying Mélusine through her duchy, and Carter learned much from watching her deal with her countrymen. If men were hungry, she found food, if weary, a place to rest; if angry, she calmed them; if sorrowing, she comforted them. She was a woman of the people, and it was clear they loved her, though they had forgotten for a time under Rooko’s persuasion. And always, wherever they went, the people treated Carter with awed wonder, as if he were one risen from the grave, or a great king of old. He spoke to them, and tousled the hair of their children, and though he promised them nothing and made no speeches, it was as Mélusine had said, that he brought them hope. And he saw how wise Duskin had been, to make them stay.

  A girl of about eight, brown-haired and blue-eyed, came to him during the afternoon, and looking up solemn and sad, said, “Are you really the Master?”

  Because she was a child who would not understand the difference between Master and Steward, he said, “I am.”

  “Will you find my lost brother, sir?”

  He looked at the duchess, but Mélusine shook her head. “Her brother, Nicholas, was in the rooms nearest the fire. He hasn’t been seen.”

  “Please, sir, you are the Master.”

  Carter knelt beside her, speechless before those innocent eyes. But before he could think of what to say, a lad of twelve rushed up to her, and taking her hand, cried, “Penelope, he’s been found! Nicholas has been found! He hid beneath the wreckage and he’s all right. Come quickly!”

  She gave the reassured smile of a child, looked at Carter gratefully, and said, “Thank you, sir. I knew you would.”

  Then she was gone, while Carter still knelt, dumbfounded.

  But Mélusine laughed heartily. “Good news! And that was good fortune indeed! Forever after, she will think the Master returned her brother to her.”

  “Yes,” Carter said, but his face was pale. “And what would I have done if he hadn’t arrived when he did?”

  They slept in Petite Hall that night, brightly lit apartments with low-beamed ceilings, Morris patterns in every shade, blue and white china lamps, plates, and vases, and stained-glass windows with sunflowers in every square. Mélusine’s husband had died fifteen years before, and the chambers held the cheerful look only a woman living alone can bring to such dwellings. The rebels, who had occupied the hall for a time, had done surprisingly little damage, further evidence that they respected their duchess more than even they had known. Those larders not empty the duchess distributed among the needy, so supper was not elegant, but adequate. They ate late, then the brothers went almost immediately to the room they were to share, for the day had been long, and the duchess appeared exhausted. They fell asleep on feather beds, too weary to talk.

  Mélusine woke them early the next morning, and they breakfasted together. Someone had found eggs and day-old biscuits, but there was enough, and the men were satisfied. They spoke to the duchess of friendships and alliances, and she promised to do what she could to help the White Circle once order was restored. Midway through the meal, two tall, slender men appeared, bearing the insignia and blue mail of soldiers of Veth, ready to lead Carter and Duskin to Arkalen as Mélusine had promised. The Porcelain Duchess had a kingdom to put to rights, so they did not tarry, but bowed to her and departed.

  Their guides seemed to hold the pair in awe, for they were extremely polite, and said nothing unless questioned. As the brothers followed them through the burnt, disfigured halls, Duskin said, “I never got a chance to ask, but I’m curious—what Word of Power did you use on the bridge, that disarmed the rebels and kept them from cutting us all down?”

  Carter chuckled, but spoke softly so their guides could not overhear. “It was the Word of Secret Ways. I didn’t know if they would shoot us or not, but I knew the use of any of the Words of Power could shake the house. It was an effect, nothing more, and it provided no defense. They could have killed us all on the bridge. I gambled that even Rooko’s followers were shocked by the burning of Veth, and that they held to him only from pride. They couldn’t have thought the duchess would torch her own kingdom; one need only look at her to know otherwise. All they needed was an excuse to desert the villain.”

  Duskin was silent a moment. Then, finally, he spoke, “You say you are only the Steward, but yesterday I think you were the Master, whether you wished it or not.”

  “Does that make you angry?”

  The young man looked pensive. “No, though once it would have. I’m no coward, but I wouldn’t have led those men across the bridge.”

  Carter gripped his arm. “Yet you followed me, which was brave enough, and I won’t forget. I acted on behalf of the Master, but I am still only the Steward. We will find Father and bring him home.”

  * * *

  The guides brought them to lower levels that revealed an increasing neglect, for they led to the back door of Veth, a way none ever took. Neither did anyone live nearby, for the door to Arkalen had an evil reputation—it was said its people had been destroyed by a mysterious catastrophe. The guards grew more anxious with every step, even as the stairs and corridors narrowed to single file, as if seeking to enfold them.

  At last they came to an ebony door, not even wide as a man’s shoulders, carved with scowling devil faces. One of the guides produced a rusted skeleton key; the lock turned after great effort, and the door creaked open only when the soldiers pulled together.

  “This is the way,” one of the men said. “We know nothing of the passage beyond. The old tales say marauders used to come here, and perhaps will again, so I will lock the door behind you. Certainly no good comes from this witchy place.”

  “Fair enough,” Carter said. “Thank you for your service.”

  “Don’t thank us until you have passed beyond Arkalen’s borders. Then you will know if we did well or ill.”

  The men stepped through the door into a gloomy stone corridor, illuminated by spears of light cast from small squares cut in the right-hand wall. The door shut behind them with a groan, the lock turned, and they heard fleeing footfalls.

  “They wasted no time,” Duskin said. “What ancient fear drives them?”

  “Perhaps none, or a terror of the unknown. Glis told me Arkalen was accursed, its inhabitants destroyed because they committed a great evil now forgotten.”

  Duskin peered down the corridor. “It looks grim enough.”

  Upon the walls and stone doors were carved symbols in heavy ocher paint, of vultures and wolves, beetles and spiders, handprints and hunting men, and writing in dead tongues. The skulls of bulls hung in the corners, the sharpness of their short horns gradually flaking away to dull ends. Carter was reminded at once of pictures of archaeological digs in Turkey and Iraq—these tokens had that same primitive quality. He suddenly f
elt as if he stood in a prehistoric cave, as if he had stepped backward into a primitive age. A shiver ran along his spine.

  They spent the afternoon and early evening following the corridor, which had neither intersections, nor doors to either side. This inevitable course they counted as blessing, since the passage was not on their maps. They passed unhindered, meeting no one, but as the day crawled on and the sunlight gradually deserted the portals, the dimness brought with it a preternatural foreboding, for there was a liquidity about the shadows, a flowing beyond any trick of the eye.

  Before the last light had fled they reached an iron door standing half-opened, rusted into position. They lit a lantern and squeezed through the gap into a room at the bottom of a stone stair. Carter gave a gasp, for the whole chamber seemed to be moving. He raised the lantern. The walls, floor, and back of the stairs were covered with moths, large as men’s hands, which rose in a cloud, surging toward the flame, flapping into the brothers’ faces, leaving the taste and smell of rotten wool, while the men battered the velvet assailants in frightened disgust. The brothers fled up the stairs, but the moths followed, and more descended from the heights, until the air swarmed and danced with them. The companions halted at the second landing, checked by the pelting.

  “Douse the light!” Duskin cried. “Before we drown in them.”

  Carter did so, which made things worse for a time, the moths landing all over them, fluttering in their faces like bats, climbing up their legs, leaving the men blindly kicking them away, a futile task since they swarmed across the stones.

  “This is ridiculous!” Duskin said. “What do we do now? We can’t lie down to sleep, nor relight the lamp. Defeated by giant moths?”

  Carter gave a weary laugh. “It would be funny, if I weren’t so tired. We either stand where we are, or continue without light.”

  “Either way we get no sleep. Let’s try the climb.”

  “I agree. I never like to wait,” Carter said.

  He went first, feeling his way along the wall to his right, which was sticky and covered with the insects. He crushed dozens with every step. Duskin kept one hand on his back for guidance. A landing lay every twelve steps, and the stair zigzagged from side to side, a repetition the men soon found comforting. Still, to Carter, it was little better than crawling through the rubble of the Fallen Way; he felt like a child, feeling his way in the dark, never knowing when evil might strike, being constantly startled by the repulsive touch of the insects.

  They had reached the sixth landing when Duskin tugged at Carter’s arm and whispered, “Did you hear something?”

  Carter stood frozen, listening, perceiving only the fluttering of the wings against the stones. But then there came a whisper, so soft he could not understand the words at first. He strained to hear. Go back.

  Carter drew his revolver. He could see nothing.

  Go back, the voice said again. It seemed to emanate from the steps above them, and there was a familiar quality about it. Pistol raised, he crossed the landing and placed his foot on the first step.

  You will die here.

  Carter kept silent, but continued climbing. At the third step the voice spoke again, softer, as if it had retreated a pace. Go back.

  Step by step, his brother behind him, Carter ascended to the next landing. Still the voice threatened, but he thought he recognized it now. “I know you,” he said, trying to keep his tone level. “You are the Thin Man.”

  A heavy object whizzed by Carter’s head and bounced down the stone steps, the noise of its fall like a thunderburst in the silence. You think I don’t mean it? Flee, or I will slay you.

  Carter kept as close to the wall as possible, brushing the moths away with his shoulder, climbing while the stranger threatened and retreated. No more objects were thrown, and the voice changed, becoming suddenly wheedling. Don’t make me harm you. I will, you know.

  “I don’t doubt you can,” Carter replied, his own voice quaking, hating the dark, the moths, the harsh stones, most of all hating his own fear. He wanted to fire at the unseen assailant, but he could not, because the Thin Man had aided him in the past. And there was something else, something just beyond his grasp, that restrained him.

  “Who are you?” Carter asked. “What do you want?”

  I want you to go back. Leave this place.

  “Why?”

  You must depart.

  So it went, as they ascended, yet never did the threatened attack come. And finally, though he did not know how he knew, Carter felt certain the Thin Man would never harm him.

  There rose a surge of light, a brilliance that subsided quickly to a golden glow tinged with prismatic color, as the Thin Man drew a jagged sword from its scabbard. The moths did not seek its light, as if they could not see it, and Carter stood dumbfounded in its radiance, for it was the Lightning Sword of his father.

  The planes of the Thin Man’s face, which Carter had seen only in shadow before, stood defined by that brilliance, the flash of the eyes, the line of the jaw, the slight lift of the lips. Then Carter knew why the voice, cloaked in hoarse whispers, had always seemed familiar.

  “Father?” Carter gasped.

  “Leave this house,” the Thin Man said. “It is too dangerous. Don’t force me to stop you.”

  “Are you our father?” Carter cried again.

  The figure turned, fled up the final landing, and vanished through a half-opened door, slamming it shut behind him. With the sword gone, the men were plunged again into darkness. They stumbled after him, but reached the door and found it locked.

  Beside the

  Rainbow Sea

  They slept that night with their backs against the locked door, a fitful slumber distressed by moths’ hooked feet and their own troubled deliberations on the Thin Man. They kept to their own thoughts, as do those confronted with the prospect of pain. To Carter, it was dreadful thinking of his father as a tattered vagabond, a phantom, wandering the boundless halls of Evenmere. And to what purpose? He could not banish the remembrance of the flash of light, those clear features made bare, wonderful, and terrifying at once, his own father’s face, but haggard, and hardened, bereft of hope. It was nothing as he had imagined their meeting.

  The new morning came with a rush—as pink light paled through an overhead portal the moths departed, swarming like slow bats, sullying forth to moth-jousts in fields of honeysuckle and clover. For half an hour they darkened the single window, while Duskin and Carter sheltered their faces with their coats. At last, when only a few stragglers flitted along the ceiling, they arose, exhausted but unwilling to stay.

  The locked door remained adamant, but they soon found another beside the second landing, overlooked in the night, which led through a passage to a parallel stair. After some winding, they came to the top floor and the other side of the locked door, to corridors beamed in dark oak, with baseboards covered in brass, purple carpets spun in wool, wallpaper embellished with gold leaf, but dust thick all around.

  Ardently, they yearned to pursue the Thin Man, but knowing nothing of his direction, they elected to follow their own course. “He has always managed to find us,” Carter said. “And if he is truly Father, perhaps under some curse or spell, he will be drawn to us.”

  Arkalen’s former splendor still stretched down the hall, in oil paintings bordered in gilt frames, ebony panels inlaid with lapis, and jade carvings of mantis circling the silver lamps.

  “Do you smell the scent of the ocean?” Carter asked, breathing deeply. “We are close now.”

  Whatever destruction had come upon its inhabitants, Arkalen seemed hardly cursed, but rather, the ornate quarters of kings, whose subjects had spent the languid hours reading and making sport among its tranquil chambers. Save for the dust, the rooms remained oddly pristine; thieves had not looted the golden tapers on the walls, or the silver shields in the high-vaulted chamber where delicate bells tinkled with the rising breeze.

  They saw no one, and they remained pensive, their thoughts ever upon th
e previous night, so that Carter scarcely heeded their approach toward stained-glass doors at the end of a wide hallway until the companions stood directly before them. Then he saw how bright the light shone through them, how clouds, made multihued by the stained glass, floated behind the pane, and with them, white crests and thundering waves.

  They opened the doors together and stepped out onto a wide, white marble porch. Sunlight, diffused through heavy clouds, blinded them, leaving them blinking solemnly like owls. As their sight returned, they saw that the stained-glass colors had not been an illusion, for the cumulus formations and the sky beyond reflected prismatic hues—jade, crimson, azure, and gold—upon a bright green sea flecked with orange fire. Gushing winds troubled the waves; a storm hovered far beyond the shore, casting forks of tangerine lightning down upon the swells. The white-foamed breakers, like tiny fingers, clutched vainly toward the coast.

  There was a power in that ocean; a calling that gripped Carter’s heart, and he stared, mouth agape, wanting only to sail upon her. Scarce wonder his father had fantasized of finding his perished love across her boundless ways; surely some shore of heaven lay beyond that vermilion horizon, a strip of land leading to the Everlasting. He restrained himself from kicking his shoes away, bolting down the beach, and flinging himself into the depths. For an instant he struggled, feeling the urge wound him even as he triumphed.

  “The Sea No Man Can Sail,” he said, mouth dry. “The sea Father mentioned.”

  Beach began where the porch ended, gray sand fine as powder, with diamond slivers reflecting the sun. The outlines of Evenmere followed the shore in either direction, curving backward for miles, finally lost from sight. In places the coast was wide; at others the water nearly lapped the stone walls.

  They strode together across the sand, and on that beach were neither gulls nor terns, but the most wondrous sea spawn lay washed upon the shore, iridescent spider crabs, bright blue prawns, silver anemones, rainbow jellyfish—and other creatures more mysterious and unique, as if these waters bred with a variety lost to mortal seas. They marched or flowed across the sand, depending on the number and kind of their legs, over seashells deep and rich of bloom, dazzling as gemstones. Duskin scooped up one of the shells, a sea mussel red and translucent as a ruby, its ridges fine as a child’s comb. He examined it, then slipped it into his pocket.