At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  “You’re one of the Nameless Regiment, aren’t you? One of the Marshal’s own.”

  The big man grunted what was probably an affirmative.

  “None too loyal, then, are you?” Graham’s mild tone took the edge off the provocation.

  “We’re sworn to serve the Crown, same as any other regiment. And we serve the Marshal, too, believe me. He’s his own worst enemy, when he gets to thinking on the past.”

  “How so?”

  “Feels the weight of the years, like. The burden of his responsibilities. Well, you can imagine it, can’t you, after all this time? Wanting to let it all go?”

  “Yes. But I don’t see what that has to do with Lucy Donne.”

  The plowboy-soldier kept his eyes on the road past the driver’s shoulder, but Graham had the sense of an intelligence working behind that homely face.

  “We reckon he thinks he can use Miss Donne to bring us all back to the way things used to be. Bring us all back to the days when he was an ordinary man, d’you see? Return the world to the way it was, and maybe return himself to the way he was . . . ”

  “But how will he use her? Use her how?”

  “They was grim and bloody times—” He interrupted himself to say to the driver, “Take the east fork.” The car turned. Graham caught a glimpse of the castle rearing up to their left, already falling behind. Where were they going? Graham started to ask, but the plowboy was talking again.

  “People don’t know what it was like in those days. They have these romantic notions that it was all storybook adventures and poetry and folksongs—people like Miss Donne, who think the Marshal’s a hard man doing a bloody job. Well so he is, and a good thing, too. Do you have the least notion of what this world would come to if he left his post? It’d be chaos. Your worst nightmares can’t even touch what it would be to let the old gods walk again.”

  Graham was not immune to direful predictions, not when they echoed the fears that Lucy’s work had raised, but still he persisted. “You haven’t said what part Lucy has to play in all this.”

  “She’s the sacrifice, man! Haven’t you been listening? She’s the life that opens the door the Marshal has been keeping shut all these years. She’s the bloody key. Here,” he said to the driver in the same rough tone, “park here, we’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot.”

  “What—” Graham began.

  “Right,” the plowboy said, all soldier now. “We may just have a chance to take her away with no one the wiser until we’re gone. The aim is to get her to come quietly back to the car, and that’s your job. Say anything you need to—she’s in danger, you’re here to take her home—be a hero to her—”

  “But—”

  “Wake up, will you? We’re saving the girl. We’re saving the damn world!”

  “But why me?”

  The plowboy leaned to put his big face in Graham’s. “You know the background, you know the girl, and I don’t have time for arguments with men who don’t know where their loyalties should lie. All right? There’s men here who serve the Marshal before the Crown, and I can’t take them all on, not if we’re going to keep this quiet. You cooperate with me, you get the girl to cooperate with me, and we just drive away, no fuss, end of story. All right?”

  The big man swung himself out of the car. After the briefest hesitation, Graham followed suit. But in that half-second pause, he had time to wonder what would happen to them after he had persuaded Lucy to cooperate. Were they going to be sent home and trusted to keep their mouths shut? Graham thought of Lucy’s portfolio, all the stories no one wanted to hear. He climbed from the car into the misty morning. Birds were singing somewhere in the fog.

  The palace was roofed with mist, walled with air. Grand steps of once-white marble were broken and half buried by the fallen columns of the portico, but Lucy found she could pick her way between the disarticulated pillars, up the shattered stair. For the first time, as she scuffed her muddy shoes through the mold of windblown leaves, it struck her as odd, how lifeless the ancient Fane was. No moss to blur the carvings on the broken capitals, no grass to carpet the stairs, no bird-flitting or mouse-scurrying nearer than the treed battlements of the enclosing hills. The end of everything, he had said, the end of life, an end without ending, an end with no hope of beginning, an end without even the hope of death . . . As if everything could just stop, Lucy thought. Stop, freeze into crystal, her breath and blood, the air, the mist and the birds in the trees and the trees themselves. Like a book, she thought, a story captured between the covers, beginning and end all there, simultaneous, undifferentiated, a beginning never begun, an ending that never ended, the perfect story, unread, ideal. Yes. She did not at all understand what the Marshal had said about doing magic, or being magic, or the difference between them, but this she understood, the perfect, the completed world.

  But the blood moved through her limping heart, the air moved into her lungs and out again, warm enough to make steam. She breathed out again, a deliberate puff, for the pleasure of seeing it hang for an instant in the milky brightness, and then went on into the palace. Her footsteps echoed around her, hinting, with the mist, of companionable ghosts.

  Did he ever come here, the self-named Marshal of this place? He would have ghosts. In these rubble-mounds he would see the shape of rooms he had known, the fountained courts and lucent tiles and stone-filigree walls. Or would he? How long had he lived here as a mortal man, a soldier and then a captain of soldiers? Twenty years? Thirty? A scant handful of decades to set against the long centuries of ruin. Perhaps he wondered, as she did, which were the rooms of state, which the private apartments, which the emperor’s own room where he had been stopped in the very act of summoning the end of time. Where he had been betrayed, killed by a trusted hand.

  Here, where a pillared arch still stood, though the room beyond was adrift with shattered roof tiles and the pale stones of the further wall?

  Here, where the broken roots of columns still marked out the line of a shady cloister?

  Here, where a fountain’s bowl fell into petal-shards like a teacup dropped just so in the center of the yard?

  Here, where footsteps echoed, pat-patter-pattering even though Lucy was standing still.

  Or maybe it was her heart, she thought, with the hum of invisible bees in her ears. She lowered herself to the flat top of a column’s tumbled capital. Its leafy carvings sloughed away a skin of rotten stone under her fingers, crumbs of past beauty sifted into the dirt beneath her feet. The walls were mostly intact here, giving a shape and a sense of enclosure to the small courtyard, but the misty ceiling was lifting away, thinning against the blue sky. Sunlight, still diffused by damp, brightened the many shades of white of all the naked stone, walls, flagstones, fallen columns, broken bowl. There was even a ghost of color on the walls, rose and blue and ocher, scabrous as lichen if lichen could have grown in this place.

  This dead place . . . save for the drift of the air, the far birdsong, the dripping of condensed mist from the many lips of stone. And the footsteps. Lucy was almost sure, despite a long silence that conjured up again the humming in her ears. The blood seemed to shrink away beneath her skin, leaving it tingling and cold. But of course, she knew she was being watched.

  Yes, there, the unmistakable grit of shoe leather over dirty stone.

  Sunlight found its way through clouds and mist to sparkle in the rainwater cupped by the shards of the fountain. Warmth pressed through the damp tweed of Lucy’s jacket, and as though the sun confirmed something she already guessed, she was abruptly convinced that there was no magic here, neither in the place nor in her, and that all this morning held for her was an early walk and a mild sort of farce, grown men sneaking about in the wake of her curiosity. Rather like the new parlourmaid who hovers outside the drawing room door, holding her breath and fidgeting in her shoes, unsure whether she should go in to fetch the tea tray if there was still someone in the room. So Lucy thought, and she called out a cheerful, “Hullo!” which startled he
r in spite of herself, it had been so quiet before she spoke.

  The silence itself seemed to be startled. Then an answering, “Lucy?” came cold and clear through the stony maze, and more footsteps, forthright ones, and then—she was dumbfounded, having refused to believe the familiarity of the voice—Graham Isles appeared in the archway on the sunny side of the court. He peered against the brightness, pale, stubbled, thoroughly disheveled, and said her name again, in as questioning a tone as before.

  “Lucy?”

  “Graham! But what—How on earth—” But then she remembered the portfolio, left for him a thousand years ago in the Left Luggage Office of Skillyham Station, and was silenced by a rush of guilt.

  Graham glanced behind him before he crossed to where she sat. “I’ve lost him, I think. Or he’s lost me. Listen—”

  “Who?”

  “Can you come? Right now? Right away? The driver’s still with the car at the foot of the valley, but I think, if we climbed the hills, they don’t seem very steep, we might manage to go very quietly all on our own.”

  He was looking around him as if he expected policemen with whistles, huntsmen with dogs. He was out of breath, and his shoes were even muddier than hers.

  “Graham.” She caught one of his hands, hot and damp with sweat. “Stop a moment. Please explain. Where have you come from, who are you talking about, where to you want me to go?”

  “There’s no time,” he said, but his hand closed around hers and he hunkered down beside her where she sat on her carved and crumbling stone. “Are you all right? I didn’t expect to find you wandering about on your own. You look awfully pale.”

  So did Graham, but in the sunlight his eyes were the same dark amber as his favorite beer. A lovely color, in fact, which Lucy had never noticed before. He was otherwise entirely himself, and wonderfully alive and real in this—now that he was here she could think it—dreary graveyard of a place.

  “Not exactly on my own,” Lucy said, “but on a long leash, I think. Graham, I know why I’m here, but I haven’t a clue where you come into it. Did they find out about the notes I left for you? Was it the Marshal’s men who brought you here?”

  “Yes, but not on his orders. Listen, they seem to think there’s something dangerous about you being here. I mean, not just dangerous for you, but for everyone. Damn!” He looked around again, his hand tightening on hers. “There’s really no time. I’m supposed to help get you away from him, but I’m not sure I like our chances much better once I have, so I thought, if we could slip away without them . . . We should just go, Lucy, and save the talk for later.”

  “But I don’t—” —want to. She bit off the end, but her hand had gone limp in his grasp and the telepathy of touch must have told him. He stared up at her.

  “They said he’s going to sacrifice you. To raise the old gods. To bring the world back to the way it was.”

  “They’re wrong!” she said fiercely, and twisted her hand out of his. “Whoever ‘they’ are. They’re completely wrong. It’s the other way round, it’s exactly the other way . . . ” She balked, catching a glimpse of something she hadn’t quite seen before.

  “Which other way?” Graham said, impatient.

  “He . . . ” Lucy balked again.

  “Listen.” Graham reclaimed her hand. “Lucy. I think we should just go. We should just get out of this, this whole thing, whatever it is, just get the hell out and—”

  “And let everything go on as it has been.”

  “Yes! Holy fires and all, Lucy, do you hate this world so much you want to bring it crashing down around our ears?”

  “No!” Lucy was shocked.

  “Do you want to die for that?”

  “But I’m not the one—And it’s change, it’s not—”

  “Let’s just go.” Graham stood, pulling Lucy to her feet. “Lucy. Please. Let’s just go.”

  She was caught, by the desperate pleading in his voice as much as by the hard grip of his hand, and it seemed as though that instant was the deciding one, as though, if she had not hesitated, if she had just moved, or spoken—but it was only a seeming. She could have changed nothing in that moment. It was only a pause before all the rest that was going to happen, happened. She looked up at him, at Graham, who was burning with impatience and determination, and then someone stepped into the archway on the sunny side of the courtyard. They looked. One of the Marshal’s men, the big young man who had escorted Lucy off the train.

  “Oh dear,” Lucy said, feeling a guilty lick of humor at being caught.

  “Oh damn,” Graham said, in another tone entirely, and he pulled at Lucy’s hand, turning, trying to move her, put her behind him, she wasn’t sure. In any case, she stumbled against the fallen masonry she had been sitting on, and it broke, or something did, a crack that shook the air, and Graham was pulling her, very clumsily, so they both half-fell to the ground.

  “Damn!” Graham said on a gasp. “Lucy. Go. If you can.” But his hand was still holding hard to hers, and somehow, perhaps through that same telepathy, she realized he was shot, he had been shot by the large young man who carried not a book, but a gun.

  Lucy looked up at him, but he was already dead. The Marshal of Kallisfane withdrew his sword with a meaty sound, and the large young man, looking stupid in his dead man’s surprise, fell in a heap to the ground.

  “Treachery,” the Marshal said in his ordinary voice. “This is a good place for it.”

  Graham was falling, too, a slow continuation of the motion that had put them on their knees. His mouth was open as he fought for air. He still held Lucy’s left hand very hard in his right. She used her free hand to grope under his jacket until she found the small hot hole in his side. His breath seemed to be stopped wetly in his throat, but still he managed to speak.

  “I loved you,” he said. “I never said. I never said.”

  His grasp weakened. Lucy clutched his hand hard, as hard as she could, pressing it with both her hands against her side, but still he let go, he let her go. She leaned over him to catch his gaze, but she could not, he was gone.

  She was very conscious, in the silence, of the beating of her heart. If she had stopped the world, one minute ago, five minutes ago, an hour ago, he would be alive, forever and always. Graham. Who had loved her. If she had. If she had only known how.

  “Perhaps now you are ready to try again,” the Marshal said. His sword was smeared with blood—not dripping, only smeared, like her hand.

  Would she say no because Graham who had died for her would want her to? No. She would say yes, yes, because only yes would end the deadlock of a thousand years, the deadlock that had killed him and all the untold others. Yes.

  She was very slow, but he was patient. It was hard to let go of Graham, but it was really time she wanted to hold, and she could not, the moment was past. She stood, and looked at the Marshal, and wondered what he had really stopped, what impulse had died in the last emperor’s brain. He tried to hand her his sword over Graham’s body and she waved him brusquely away, back toward the broken fountain. But when she had followed him there she took the warm hilt again in her hand.

  Her heart pounded out a fierce and primitive rhythm. If there had been words for it, they would have run something like, you won’t stop me, you won’t bury me, I won’t let you end me here. The great weight of the Marshal’s presence could not stifle it. She did not know what it was. Not magic. Perhaps only life in the face of death.

  He knelt, as he had in the chapel, his eyes narrowed against the sun. Looking down, as she had looked down at Graham, Lucy saw his eyes were not black but brown, a dark tea-colored brown without red or gold to lighten them. He opened his shooting coat and shirt to bear his scarred breast. Lucy set the sword’s point there and stopped, seeing how her heartbeat trembled in her hands.

  “Tell me your name,” she said.

  He told her. She drove the sword home.

  He choked once, as Graham had, and died.

  The world changed.


  Virgin of the Sands

  Neil came out of the desert leaving most of his men dead behind him. He debriefed, he bathed, he dressed in a borrowed uniform, and without food, without rest, though he needed both, he went to see the girl.

  The army had found her rooms in a shambling mud-brick compound shaded by palms. She was young, God knew, too young, but her rooms had a private entrance, and there was no guard to watch who came and went. Who would disturb Special Recon’s witch? Neil left the motor pool driver at the east side of the market and walked through the labyrinth of goats, cotton, chickens, oranges, dates, to her door. The afternoon was amber with heat, the air a stinking resin caught with flies. Nothing like the dry furnace blast of the wadi where his squad had been ambushed and killed. He knocked, stupid with thirst, and wondered if she was home.

  She was.

  Tentative, always, their first touch: her fingertips on his bare arm, her mouth as heavy with grief as with desire. She knew, then. He bent his face to hers and felt the dampness of a recent bath. She smelled of well water and ancient spice. They hung a moment, barely touching, mingled breath and her fingers against his skin, and then he took her mouth, and drank.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, after.

  He lay across her bed, bound to exhaustion, awaiting release. “We walked right into them,” he said, eyes closed. “Walked right into their guns.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She sounded so unhappy. He reached for her with a blind hand. “Not your fault. The dead can’t tell you everything.”

  She laid her palm across his, her touch still cool despite the sweat that soaked her sheets. “I know.”

  “They expect too much of you.” By they he meant the generals. When she said nothing he turned his head and looked at her. She knelt beside him on the bed, barred with light from the rattan blind. Her dark hair was loose around her face, her dark eyes shadowed with worry. So young she broke his heart. He said, “You expect too much of yourself.”