At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  If magic is real. And if that’s what the Marshal of Kallisfane has been doing: keeping magic out of the world all these years.

  And if you’re not just being a coward, Graham Isles, Mister Newspaperman.

  My hero, here is the story that will destroy your life, your career, your every cherished illusion about yourself . . .

  He bundled her papers back into the portfolio. Shaved, changed his shirt. Went to work.

  He was not surprised to find a message waiting for him, directing him to his editor’s office. Even if last night’s dispute had not spawned fresh points of attack, he was late. He was surprised to find one of the crime reporters lying in ambush outside the editor’s door.

  “Just remember, Isles, you talk to me before you go anywhere.”

  “What?” Graham’s attention was still more on Lucy than the world. “Go where?”

  “Nowhere, until you talk to me.”

  Graham shut the office door in the man’s anxious face.

  “You took your time,” his editor said. “Drowning your sorrows?”

  “Research,” Graham said shortly.

  “Well, I’ve a bit more for you to do. Lucy Donne. You’ve heard, I suppose?”

  Graham experienced the curious sensation of blood leaving his face as he went pale. A tightening, a cooling. “Heard what?”

  “She went missing two nights ago. The family was keeping it quiet, figuring she’d turn up on her own, I suppose, but now the police have issued a bulletin. We’ve got a friend in CID who will tell us what comes of it—a dog’s breakfast of bus conductors and ticket sellers so far—but no one’s getting in to see the family. But you worked with her quite a bit, didn’t you? Something in the way of being friends?”

  “Something in the way.” Graham worked his tongue in his dry mouth. “Do they think . . . What do they think?”

  “Reserving their opinions for the moment, but you can suppose they lie somewhere between scandalous and dead. What do you think? You know her. Inside information will win your employer’s approval, affection, and possibly a wee bonus on the side.”

  Graham saw that last scribbled line. My train is leaving, I must fly—Had she just played into the Revenant’s hands, leaving everyone a trail that went nowhere? Or had she successfully escaped his notice—and gone where?

  He shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t have a clue. Actually,” he added with perfect honesty, “I’m stunned.”

  “No boyfriends that you know of? No fights with the family? Storming off to leave them stewing and make the papers who cried havoc look like silly chumps when she comes home in perfect health?”

  “That, no. I think she has a very high regard for her family, in her way.” In her off-hand, defended, too-sensitive way.

  “And no, er, lover’s quarrel?”

  His editor’s feeble attempt at delicacy told Graham volumes about the rumors circulating in the newsroom this morning.

  “Not a chance.”

  “No coppers here, son.”

  “I’ve bought her a drink or two, but that’s as far as it ever went. Look,” he said, a little desperate in the face of skepticism, “the last time I saw her she told me a story about the Marshal of Kallisfane. I mean . . . ” He shrugged, put out his hands.

  “A funny story?”

  “Not particularly.”

  His editor nodded, accepting this as proof of the absence of romance. “Well, if you think of anything. In the meantime, what about getting in to see the family? As a friend and colleague, I mean. Offer them the resources at your disposal.”

  “Do you mean the paper’s resources?”

  “Well, we wouldn’t mind posting notice of a reward for information received, especially if it came with an exclusive interview with the mother. That might open the door for you. Also keeping in mind that she did work for us, even if she was freelance and, well, an amateur. We owe her our support.” This was said, not with self-righteousness, but with the tone of a newsman trying a subhead out loud.

  Graham felt a quickening, the conception of an idea. “If I had a note on the publisher’s letterhead?”

  His editor scratched his chin and said he would see what he could do.

  “Are there any more questions, Mr. Isles?”

  Sir Roger Donne picked up the paper knife on his blotter and set it a little to one side. It was the ninth time he had made that gesture in the course of the interview and it was starting to obsess Graham. He made a mark beside eight other marks in his notebook.

  “Sir Roger, you have been very forthcoming.”

  Though in fact, Lucy’s grandfather had not said any more than a hundred other anxious relatives Graham had interviewed over the years. She’s a good girl, really. She’d never stay away if she could come home. And sometimes they were right, and sometimes they were wrong, and the one was as likely to crush a loving family as the other. We’re just praying she’s all right, wherever she is.

  “Then if that is all.” Sir Roger put his hands on the edge of his desk, preparatory to rising.

  “There is one other thing.” Graham hesitated, as he had been hesitating all along. He felt a flash of empathy for Lucy, remembering again their last conversation: her tentative opening, his scorn.

  Sir Roger frowned into the pause. “I hope, Mr. Isles, that you and your superiors are sincere in your offer of help. It would add enormously to the pain and distress of Lucy’s mother if old scandals are raked up out of the past, and it would do no good whatsoever. I’m sure I can rely on you in this matter.”

  “No, it isn’t that. I mean, yes, sir, you can rely on us to be discreet.” Although if the old man thought the tabloids weren’t going to disinter the scandal of Lucy’s fatherless state, he was more naïve than Graham supposed.

  “What, then?”

  “Are you aware of the nature of Lucy—of Miss Donne’s research?”

  Sir Roger’s scowl deepened. “I was under the impression, Mr. Isles, that my granddaughter was providing background material for your newspaper articles. Are you suggesting that her work for you put her in some kind of danger?”

  “No! Absolutely not. I was referring to her own private research.”

  “Lucy is an amateur historian. An intelligent and erudite young woman. And I can assure you, sir, that her ‘private research’ has no bearing the case whatsoever. She reads books, sir! No young woman has ever disappeared because of reading books.”

  “Even if the books she reads lead her into a pursuit of the Marshal of Kallisfane?” Graham kept his eyes on his notebook, as if was just one more question to make a note of, but eventually he had to look up into Sir Roger’s silence.

  For the first time Graham saw some family resemblance between Lucy and her grandfather, a ghost of her fragility and pallor, a reflection of her steady, unreadable stare. Sir Roger lifted a hand, touched the paper knife. Pushed himself away from the desk and stood.

  “Come with me.”

  Sir Roger took him to the library, and it was a long walk through grand rooms, useless unless you were giving a party for three hundred friends. The library would have seemed just the same, as empty as a stage between shows, except that Graham had seen Lucy handle books, had seen how they spoke to her hands as well as her mind. Thousands of volumes, and any one of them might have come alive to her touch, her fingers slipping through their pages as if paper were fur, as if books could purr. For every window bay they passed he felt a jolt of anticipation, as if she might be standing there perusing the shelves, but she never was. Her absence persisted all the way down the room.

  The table at the end bore a desk lamp, a blotter pad, a box of paper, and a neat stack of books. This tidy set-up obviously had nothing to do with the mad profusion of Lucy’s papers and Graham gave it no more than a glance. He turned to Sir Roger, waiting for him to explain, but Lucy’s grandfather gestured at the table.

  “Here is my granddaughter’s research, Mr. Isles. A perfectly unexceptional genealogical study of her grandmother’s fam
ily. Please, have a look.”

  Graham picked up a book from the pile. It was a ledger, a handwritten parish register, a record of births and deaths. He gave the pages a desultory ruffle with a distinct feeling of heat growing beneath his collar.

  “Take your time,” Sir Roger said. “There are some notes there, too, which you are welcome to read. You see, I want you to be absolutely satisfied on this point, Mr. Isles, because when your article appears in the newspaper, I want there to be no doubt in anyone’s mind that my granddaughter is a perfectly innocent young woman. Which you should already know as well as I, if your claims of friendship have not been grossly exaggerated for the sake of this intrusion into our private affairs.”

  The heat rose into Graham’s face. “Are you suggesting that research into the Marshal of Kallisfane would not be innocent?”

  Sir Roger rocked back on his heels. “I am telling you that this is all there is. Lucy did nothing to deserve her fate.”

  “What fate?” Graham said, anger giving his reporter self full rein. “Do you know what has happened to her? Do you know where she is?”

  “No! Of course—”

  “So what fate do you think she would deserve if she had been studying the Marshal of Kallisfane?”

  Sir Roger’s face was as red as Graham’s. “This is an outrage! I let you into my home only because your superiors assured me of their desire to help us find Lucy—”

  “Do you want to find Lucy?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then why are you lying?”

  “Get out!”

  “Why are you covering up for the Revenant?”

  “Get out before I throw you out!”

  The story about Lucy’s disappearance ran without any mention of the Marshal of Kallisfane. Not because of any interference from on high, but because Graham had written it that way. It had seemed the only reasonable thing to do. His editor would never have agreed to print unfounded allegations of a public figure, and to found the allegations on Lucy’s research, unconfirmed as it was, would have been at best premature. There is still time to tell that story, he said to himself. But it was harder to say it to Lucy as she stared at him from the printed page. The paper had copied a studio portrait that made her look like a woodland fawn.

  Graham paid for an uneaten meal and took the paper home with him; another early night, though he made no resolutions about the whiskey waiting for him in his flat. He was turning his key in the lock of the street door when a friendly voice said, “Mr. Isles? I wonder if you could give us a moment of your time?”

  He turned, his keys in his hand, just in time to see the black motorcar pulling up to the curb.

  In the Castle of Kallisfane the silence persisted. It was impossible not to be conscious of it, of the way a footfall or a word only threw it into sharper relief. Impossible, too, not to think of museums, mausoleums, tombstones, tombs. And so Lucy did think of them, but they were not gloomy thoughts. She felt as light as a hummingbird among the mourning wreaths, a petal on the breeze. The fact that her heart skipped and bounded like a puppy tumbling down a flight of stairs, the fact that her breath came in sips and gasps, the fact that her hands were icy and her lips were halfway numb: these facts were simply irrelevant. She was alive, alive in the Marshal’s stronghold, alive and on her way to talk to him again.

  She had to sit on the stairs to rest halfway down. Her guide, the thin balding man who, in her other life, had taken her arm in a train station and warned her not to make a fuss, waited patiently, cleaning under his fingernails with the thumbnail on the opposite hand.

  The castle was disappointing at first, as the oldest castles tend to be, being small and cramped and dim. But age exerts a subtle fascination, most of all in the ancient place that is still inhabited. Lucy the historian thought of the famous men, the legendary men, who had trod these floors, who had passed through these doors, who had ridden out from these walls to impose a new order on their collapsing world.

  The Marshal’s order, Lucy, don’t forget. The Marshal’s chaos, too.

  The Marshal’s library was a pokey warren of badly lit rooms, old castle offices knocked together with shelves built to fit the awkward walls, and books and papers crammed in every which way to fill the shelves. Lucy the book hound was drawn like a nail to a magnet, but the scholar in her was shocked, even offended. Did the Marshal of Kallisfane, the embodiment of living history, have so little respect . . . ? But then she remembered the dead and vanished scholars, herself included, and felt a little pulse in her gut that had nothing to do with her damaged heart. Of course he had no respect. Respect, for history and for historians, was the very last thing he would have.

  He met her in the largest room.

  “Sit there,” he said, gesturing to a chair by the door. “It would be better for you if you don’t come too close.”

  Lucy had to believe him, with her blood scampering through her veins, but it didn’t trouble her. He took all her attention. Was this what it would be like to be in love? The shape of him, the glance of light across his shaven cheek, the arch of his brow. The movement of his chest beneath the shirt and jacket and tie. The lightless eyes that woke a tremor in her skin. Not love—fear, in fact—and yet . . . Was there something of desire, some kind of desire, here? Or was it only that deceptive intimacy of being here with him, of knowing the scars that lay behind the armor of his suit?

  “I wish I knew your name,” Lucy said, breathless and fey.

  “That isn’t necessary.” He was dismissive, faintly ironic. For some reason it made her laugh.

  “No, I’m just curious. But I do wonder why I’m still alive?” She had lost the rhythm of breathing and had to snatch after air when her words failed. “But maybe that doesn’t matter either. Maybe I’m only curious, a curious ghost, you must know so many.”

  The Marshal of Kallisfane looked at her a moment, his eyes black in shadow, then pulled a chair away from the desk under the window and sat down facing her from across the room. (The room darkly walled in books, with a too-small rug on the stone floor, a window cut through thick walls, a paraffin heater exuding its peculiar oily smell. Lucy would only notice these things later, when their memory cast a shadow on her mind.)

  “You said a thing to me last night,” the Marshal said. “You said magic was life and I was its death, keeping it out of the world. I wonder why you think you know this? I wonder how you could know.”

  “Then you’re curious, too. Such curious hauntings . . . ” More air, and a stab at humility: “I don’t, of course,” except she spoiled it with a shrug and a coiling gesture with her hand. “Well, maybe it came to me in a dream.”

  “Magic was life and death, once. We used to say, the fires of creation, the breath of the gods. They did, the wizards and the priests. I was only a soldier, of course, I made my sacrifices and held to my oaths, no more than that. Most of us were like that. Magic was part of the mysteries, part of the world. The Cold Hounds of Breadon How were no different than the ice storms that blow out of the mountains in the north. They were the same. Their victims were the same. Living and dying was what humans did. Life and death was a matter for the gods.”

  It was like love. Lucy lay back in her chair, pinning her pulse with a thumb on her wrist, watching his dry, spare mouth shape his words. Oh, to say you to this man. Oh, to hear him say we and I.

  “Caedemus was insane, but only in the manner of his kind. Wizard, priest, emperor’s son: the godfire was in him—like a disease, you would say now, but then it was expected, desired even, it was the mark that made him heir. Not that he had powers,” the Marshal added distastefully. “He had nothing, none of them did. They were not gods, only men . . . and women, some of them, like you. You need to know this. You will need to understand.”

  Oh, to hear this man say you. Lucy’s heart found its rhythm as it quickened.

  “They had nothing—he—had nothing,” the Marshal said, speaking still of the emperor he betrayed. “He was no more than a door throug
h which magic could sometimes step into the world. And he knew it. Being a little madder than the rest, he saw it clear. And being a little madder than the rest, he sought to change that fact, to change himself, to change the world. To become magic. To transform the human world of living and dying into the world of the gods where life and death stand still, where life and death are one . . . The perfect world, he called it. I was a soldier. He was what he was: a wizard, an emperor, insane. I have never understood what he desired. But what he tried to bring into the world. What he tried to make of the world . . . ”

  Lucy was nothing but the sight of him, the sound of his voice. She hung suspended over his hesitation as if it were a chasm in the earth.

  “I know what it would have made of the world, because I know what it made of me when I killed him. Death and life: death in life. Perfection. The tombstone you saw in your dreams. And that is what I have been keeping out of the world these endless years. That is what I have been keeping out of the human world. Myself, writ large.”

  She thought of him as he had been without his armor. She thought of him in the chapel, on his knees, her hand on the warm scars over his heart.

  She thought of her studies. She thought of her letter to Graham. She thought of herself, and dared to ask, “The dreaming spring of Galburgh? The prophetic seals of Belmouth? Is that lifeless, deathless perfection?”

  “It is magic.”