At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  “But then—”

  “Is that,” he said, “a gamble you would take if you were me?”

  But Lucy’s mind was already skipping down another path of logic. She laughed, incredulous, stunned. “Why, then you are a god!”

  “No,” he said, an absolute negation.

  Lucy, not believing him, laid her fingers against her lips and stared.

  “No.” He rose, with the first restlessness she had seen in him, and then stood, self-restrained, as if pacing were too alien a concept—too human a concept—to pursue. “Believe me. Understand me. I am a tombstone, I am a closed door, nothing more.”

  “Keeping magic out of this world. Or . . . this other thing, this perfection.”

  “If they are not the same thing.”

  “If?” Lucy whispered, incredulous all over again. “If? Don’t you know?”

  “I have wondered,” he said, and stopped. “I have wondered, from time to time.”

  Lucy went cold, and then more than cold, thinking of what he implied. To take on such a mission, such a burden—not only the long years, not only the murders, the lies, the kings held under his sway, but the destruction, the erasing from history of the whole world he had been born to—and then to doubt. The chasm between them was deep, and filled with hell, and in that moment, terribly, terrifyingly real.

  “When one such as you comes along,” he said to her, “an open door yourself, with a mind prying at every door I have ever closed, digging up every spring I have ever paved over, I do wonder.”

  “No, I . . . ” Lucy’s voice trembled with tears. “I only . . . ”

  “Wondered?” A perfection of irony. “You were only curious, I know. But perhaps you understand my dilemma now. To release what my emperor summoned would be to allow the end of everything, the end of life, an end without ending, an end with no hope of beginning, an end without even the hope of death. And yet. And yet.”

  “And yet,” Lucy said—oh, to hear this man!—“And yet, what if what you are keeping out the world is life? ‘The fires of creation, the breath of the gods.’ ”

  “It is not such a terrible world, this world that I have made.”

  “No. It isn’t, no. No, but . . . ” Trembling on the edge of the abyss.

  “But could it be better? But could it be that without magic it is as dead as that other world would be, as dead as I am, could it be?”

  “But do you have the right to have made it anything at all?”

  He stood with his back to the window, looking down at her with his lightless eyes, and she felt again the weight of the sword in her hand.

  “No right,” he said at last. “Only the necessity to save . . . Do you understand, Miss Donne? It was the necessity of the moment, the desperate need to stop my emperor before he brought about the ruin of the world. And I have been stopping him ever since.”

  “But not knowing!” she cried, and was not sure if she was crying out in empathy or argument.

  “Ah, but you still do not understand me. He was an open door, once upon a time. Like any wizard. Like you, and all the other open doors I have closed. Even if it is magic that I have been keeping out of the world, to let it back in might be to let him come again, some time, in some form, when I am not there to stop it as I stopped him before.”

  “Do you mean his ghost or his idea?”

  “Either!” He turned away from her, and by that she knew.

  “If that sufficed to lay your doubts I’d be dead now.”

  “I am so tired!” His voice broke, he bent an arm across his chest as if to protect himself from further scars. “Gods give me aid, I am so tired.”

  Lucy hung on his silence, afraid, but it was the fear of awe at what he had given over into her hands. Finally she realized that the silence was hers. “What do you want me to do?”

  The black car conveyed him to an anonymous building that was, if one unwound the tangle of streets, not far from the royal palace. A small, un-numbered door let him into a corridor lit by bare electric bulbs, stark and dim. Graham could feel his courage fading like old wallpaper, and it didn’t help that his escort, a hulking young man with a face like a plowboy, moved him along by the simple expedient of stepping forward and assuming Graham would proceed to get out of his way. Graham proceeded, a wry internal voice telling him you’re in trouble now, mate even as the sweat came out on his palms. Anger guilt fear . . . and Lucy. Lucy very much on his mind.

  “Just here, Mr. Isles,” said the oversized plowboy, rattling open an accordion-fold lift door. They went up, the lift bobbing and swaying in its shaft, and exited into a corridor where there were new runners on the floor and the light bulbs had frosted glass shades. Coming up in the world. The plowboy knocked on a door and pushed it open without waiting for an answer.

  “Mr. Isles, you can’t know how glad I am—how relieved I am to make your acquaintance. Thank the Divine you’re here.” Not a tall man, but a bulky one, his body fronted by a robust belly and his face obscured by jowls. Neither handsome nor famous, but Graham knew who he was, at least, he had a vague notion that crystallized as the man drew him into the room. Barrimond, senior bureaucrat, quiet power in the Ministry of State. Releasing Graham he smoothed his hand over the glossy hair painted over his scalp and offered Graham a drink. Nothing to be offended by there, and in fact Graham could have used one, but he didn’t like the assumption that had the plowboy already clattering amongst a tray of decanters.

  “No,” Graham said with deliberate lack of courtesy. “Why am I here?”

  A small pause, a look of calculation in the fat man’s eyes. “Yes. Perhaps it is a trifle late for the amenities. I should apologize for sending an invitation you could not refuse—and yet—great heavens—here I am not even offering you a chair. Please.” He gestured.

  Graham sat where indicated. Barrimond sat behind his desk. The plowboy propped himself against the door. All in our stations, Graham thought.

  “I’m glad to see you’re a direct kind of man, Isles,” Barrimond said, “though I should say I’m not surprised, having read so much of your work—read and admired, I should hasten to say. I also believe—indeed, I am relying on it—that you are capable of discretion, a much rarer thing in a newspaperman. I take this evening’s article about poor Lucy Donne as an example in point, because you and I both know how much more you could have written.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Graham said, more or less automatically.

  Barrimond looked at him, then bent to haul open a drawer in his desk. “I suppose that if I want directness from you I should be honest myself. Always the best policy, really, though I’m afraid I owe you a kind of an apology. Or rather, since we are being driven by necessity, not so much an apology as an expression of regret. Your privacy and your person have been a little impinged upon, but I trust it will be made clear how important—and really, we could have done much worse and been justified . . . ” Having been talking with his hand in the open drawer, Barrimond now dragged out a heavy object and laid it on his desk. It was Lucy’s portfolio, stolen from Graham’s flat. “For example, we could have simply turned this, and you, over to the Marshal of Kallisfane. As I think you know.”

  There is something painfully ineffectual about sitting in the face of an outrage, so Graham stood, his pulse beating in his temple. But although he was angry—almost as angry as he was frightened—his thinking was clear and he knew he was only making a show. When the oversized plowboy stepped away from the door, Graham sat back down and raised his eyes from the portfolio to Barrimond’s face.

  “You might as well turn me over,” he said, fairly calm. “Why not let the old man do his own dirty work? He certainly doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “No, indeed,” said Barrimond, though the plowboy made a noise suggestive of irony or dissention. “But this is a rather unusual case. I take it you have in fact read . . . ?” He patted the portfolio.

  “Some of it,” Graham said, as if he could at this stage still hedge his bets.r />
  “A remarkable piece of work. Truly remarkable. Miss Donne must be an interesting young woman to know.”

  Graham felt his temperature rise, but he said nothing. He had no intention of discussing Lucy with this man. Barrimond, however, seemed bent on discussing Lucy with him.

  “A highly interesting young woman, and in other circumstances, in another field, no doubt an asset to us all. But in this particular instance . . . No, I’m afraid our Lucy has been stirring up some murky waters. Very murky—and to be frank, extremely dangerous. I wonder if you would be glad to know she is still alive?”

  Graham’s heart seemed to shrink, leaving a dizzy cavern in his core. He still said nothing, but he doubted his reaction went unseen. Barrimond went on finger-tapping Lucy’s portfolio, almost caressing it, but his eyes never left Graham’s face.

  “Yes. A relief to me too, of course, although something of a surprise. And I hope you understand me—it’s crucial that you understand me—that although the fact that Miss Lucy Donne is still alive is a great relief to all of us, the circumstances are a matter of extraordinary concern, and not only for Miss Donne’s sake—though she is not, I assure you, far from my thoughts at any time. No, the consequences for her . . . But then, you see, the consequences for us all . . . ”

  To Graham’s relief, Barrimond finally took his hand off Lucy’s portfolio, knotting his fingers together as if he physically captured his thoughts. “It occurs to me that I have skipped a crucial question. I asked you if you had read Miss Donne’s research. I did not ask you if you believe it. Really a crucial question, Mr. Isles. I wonder if you can answer it honestly.”

  “Do I believe in Lucy’s research?” Graham said, stalling for time.

  “No, Mr. Isles. Not, Do you believe in her research. Not, Do you believe in her. I want to know if you, having studied the evidence, agree with Miss Donne’s conclusions.”

  “I’ve read her notes, but without having verified her facts—”

  “They have been verified. You have my word on it. Factually, Miss Donne is in most respects entirely correct.”

  “Why would you verify that?” Graham said on a burst of skepticism. “Why aren’t you bending over backwards to convince me the other way? Why the hell are you bothering to try and convince me of anything at all?”

  “Because we need your help, Mr. Isles. We need your help very urgently—to head off unmitigated disaster—and to save Miss Lucy Donne.”

  But did Lucy want to be saved? She was aware of her perilous situation. The Marshal of Kallisfane had made it clear.

  “You held your hand from me once,” he said, “and if you failed that challenge, perhaps you won another, even so. I will grant you that. But it has only won you yet another challenge, and this one you may prefer to lose. For as you held your hand from me, so I will hold mine from you, to let you live and do as you will. Would you bring magic back into the world? Would you wake the old gods, the old dreamers and the ancient dreams? I will hold my hand in the hope that you might also summon the death that has long eluded me. And if you fail to open that door, no matter. You can serve me in other ways, in my house here. I have kept other scholars so. And so you might win your own life either way.

  “But do you open the door on that other world, on that dead and deathless perfection that made me what I am, it will be otherwise. I will destroy you and all of your blood unto the ninth degree, until even the name of Donne will be erased from the world.

  “I tell you plainly: this challenge, you might prefer to fail.”

  Yes. Indeed, yes. So a sensible woman might have hoped for rescue. An even more sensible woman might have given some thought to escape. But was Lucy a sensible woman? To live in his house, to plunder that library of stolen history, to plumb the depths of that ancient mind! The rewards of failure were rich, even if she would be a prisoner, dead to her family and her friends. Except perhaps for Graham Isles, who had inherited all the breadcrumbs that had marked her trail to this end. That was a thought to pull her up sharply. As far as Graham was concerned, she would not simply disappear.

  Did that matter? By his own declaration he would not pursue a story no one wants to hear. He would only know.

  And, a sinful inner voice added, he would never know that she had settled for failure. He would never know she had refused to try for the greater prize.

  So it must have been that voice, rather than the thought of Graham’s opinion, that roused in her a hot and prickly blush of shame.

  As it happened, Graham was also none too sanguine about the thought of a rescue. Or rather, he thought rescuing Lucy from the Marshal of Kallisfane sounded like a fine idea; he just wasn’t sure what role he was expected to play. Even after it was explained to him by Barrimond and the plowboy, it wasn’t clear in his mind. “Persuade her,” they said. “Make her listen to reason.” But surely the telling point was whether or not she was in the Revenant’s clutches? It seemed to him that the sensible order of proceeding was to extract her from her prison and then make her see reason. “We need to get her out quietly,” said the plowboy, “and for that we need her cooperation. And for that, we need you. Right?”

  Right, said Graham, though he said it with hidden irony, as if he could humor these men until they started to show some sense. Yet playing along had him riding in the back of the big black motorcar somewhere on the wrong side of midnight, dressed in imaginary armor and clutching a cardboard sword, on his way to rescue the princess before she could be sacrificed to the dragon. Though in fact, the idea seemed less absurd now, rushing through the cold, black night, than it had in the bureaucratic comfort of Barrimond’s office.

  “Sacrifice!” he had said. “Are you insane?”

  “No,” Barrimond had replied, “but the Marshal is.”

  “Well,” the plowboy said, “say he has his moments. He’s an old man, you know, and old men do have their moments. Most times he runs on the rails right enough.”

  “Yes,” Barrimond said, “and the point is to get him back on the rails as soon as possible before any damage is done.”

  “Remove Miss Donne,” said the plowboy, “and remove the temptation, like.”

  The temptation to do what? Suddenly there was no more time for explanations. It was down to the car and out in the night, and the sound of the engine droning back at them from the dark-windowed houses, and the quick sharp fire of the whiskey from the plowboy’s flask. And then the city fell away into the dark.

  Morning drew a mist out of the winter-wet ground. Lucy was out early enough to see the rising sun wrapped in a ball of foggy wool. She was weary, but a life-time habit of nervous energy won out over the condition of her heart—if its jackrabbit thumping was an injury and not just a symptom of her confusion. She walked out into the valley of Kallisfane without a thought for her health; but her walk was of necessity a thoughtful invalid’s stroll.

  Kallisfane Castle could be found on any map, though there were some odd discrepancies. Did the road cross the Fernsey River above Mimmenbrook or below? Was the castle on the southern spur of the Starsey Hills, or was it more southwesterly? But all the maps agreed there was no valley behind the castle, nothing but a blank space or a ripple as of hills. This morning the mist seemed to be conspiring with the mapmakers. A haze against the sky, a creeping whiteness against the ground, it erased colors, blurred edges, muted sound, as if this valley, the heart of the Marshal’s demesne, might in the next moment efface itself entirely from the world. Or perhaps it had already done so. Perhaps where Lucy walked was no-place, no-time, nothing but a memory in the Marshal’s skull. A fading memory, all that was left of the Empire-that-was.

  And yet the black mud sucked at her shoes. Puddles bright as mirrors cupped in worn paving stones reflected her face, the edge of a wall. The thrushes singing in the woods that guarded the hilltops sang like the first springtime in the world.

  In the valley lay a city. A city of white stone, all in ruins, though the mist filled in the gaps of fallen domes and tumbled w
alls, teasing the eye with long-lost grandeur. There had been a wide avenue here, palaces rising behind their colonnades, a statue, perhaps, on that great stone plinth that divided the way. Lucy sat there a moment to catch her breath and scrape the mud off her shoes. Her poor not-very-sensible shoes. They would never be the same again. Lucy sighed and pressed her hand over her heart, as if that could calm the queasy race and lag of her pulse. When she was walking the valley seemed perfectly quiet except for her own footsteps, the ring of distant birdsong chiming with the sunlight far above the fog, but now the silence was alive with hidden drips and scrapes and soft muddy sounds, as if the mist had grown feet to follow her with. But of course she likely was being followed by one of the Marshal’s men. Walking away was not one of the options he had offered her.

  Well, let them watch! she thought, a nice show of courage that did nothing to dispel the prickle creeping down her spine. She rose with a too-casual glance around and continued on. The ground mist was lifting above her head, hiding the sky and the tops of the surrounding hills, but here and there a shaft of milky sunlight broke through.

  And where is she going, our Lucy, strolling on a misty dawn in early spring? At the end of this long avenue, where once the legions paraded and the wizard-philosophers strolled, lies the imperial palace. The Emperor Caedemus’ palace, where one age was killed and another was erected on its grave. But she is only going there to appease her curiosity, to think . . . perhaps to decide . . .

  The black motorcar stopped at an iron gate and the plowboy got out to talk to the guard. Graham lowered the window on his side, hoping the shock of fresh air would rouse him from the stupefaction of the drive. It was dawn, damp and cold, and Graham started to shiver without feeling any more awake. The real world was hot coffee, a razor, his own bed. He could not fathom what he was doing here.

  The plowboy got back in and the motorcar pulled through the gate, wallowing in the ruts of the drive.

  “Where are we?” Graham said.

  “Kallisfane.” The answer was curt. The man himself was pale with sleeplessness, stubbled and grim, and Graham had to admit that he looked more soldier than plowboy.