“Nutcases!” Fin exclaimed, making her start.
She leaned over Fin’s shoulder and saw a busy website with news stories down the center, ad banners flashing at the sides.
“That doesn’t look like a spreadsheet,” said Stevie.
“I’ve finished the figures,” said Fin. “Checked our email, got distracted by the news headlines.”
“Who are the nutcases?”
Fin waved a contemptuous hand at the screen. “It’s a summary of all this year’s natural disasters. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and so on. And they’ve included a statement by some idiot claiming that it’s divine punishment on the human race!”
“For what?”
“Oh, the usual. For being gay, following the wrong religion, listening to the wrong music or daring to have some harmless fun.” Fin gave an exasperated huff. “You’d think that ten minutes of scientific education would teach these crazies that it’s nature, weather systems, the Earth’s crust shifting around. But no.” She threw her hands in the air. “Earthquakes are caused by human sin!”
Stevie grimaced. “Maybe they’re being ironic.”
“Nah. It’s only irony if it’s funny.”
“Can I draw your attention to about a hundred comments underneath agreeing with you?” Stevie smiled, glad to be distracted by Fin’s righteous indignation.
“Yes, thank goodness. I was going to add one, but I don’t think all the effing and blinding would have got past the moderator.” Fin closed the site. “You need the computer?”
“No, you can shut it down,” said Stevie. “While we’re quiet, I want to put Daniel’s artwork on display. By the way, where’s Alec?”
“Ah.” Fin pulled a face. “He went home early in a huff. Don’t know how to tell you this, but he’s managed to burn out the motor on your bench lathe.”
“Oh, great. Never mind, I’ll sort it.”
“The thing is, though, he tried to blame it on you.”
Stevie’s mouth fell open. “How is it my fault?”
“He was grumbling a load of rubbish about women damaging delicate equipment because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
“What? Alec’s the one who punishes the tools, my tools, and I haven’t even touched the lathe in three months, because he’s always on it. The nerve!”
“I know,” said Fin. “So I gave him both barrels, and he went home in a huge grump. Sorry, I’m not diplomatic like you.”
“Fantastic.” Stevie pulled off her scarf, shook out her damp hair. “Never mind. If Alec doesn’t come back, we’ll cope—but he will. He always does. As I was saying, we can put the triptych on a table, because it’s freestanding. People will see it as they enter the exhibition room.”
“So is Daniel’s mother okay about that? How did it go?”
“Awful,” said Stevie, leaning on the counter. “Sad. Weird. Heartbreaking.”
Fin’s expression turned sober. “And did you find out if he…”
“That’s the worst thing. We don’t know. He vanished, leaving a mysterious letter. The police haven’t traced him so far. His mother’s devastated. She puts on a brave front, but I’m really worried about her.”
As they carried the triptych into the larger room and positioned it on a narrow side table, Stevie gave a brief account of the visit.
“Part of the reason Daniel and I split up was that his mother never liked me. She thinks I led her darling son astray. But I always did like her, in the perverse way that some people like sour lemons. I wanted her to trust me, and now she’s obliged to.”
“You need a drink,” Fin said firmly, putting a hand on Stevie’s shoulder. “Honestly, you look drained.”
“Thanks.” Stevie pressed her forefingers under her eyes, as if to press away the shadows.
She studied the trio of images, seeing a mass of detail she hadn’t noticed before.
First the central panel, the auburn-haired goddess against a blazing white-gold background, one hand holding up a glass orb to the stars, the other pointing at a fiery fissure in the ground. What she’d taken for mountains in the background now appeared to be an evanescent city of transparent, crumbling, smoking towers. She picked out the words inscribed on the frame, AURATA’S PROMISE.
The left-hand panel showed a lofty hall of pillars, dominated by a pair of gigantic statues on twin thrones. A god and goddess, enthroned. Their faces were black and feline, possibly masked. The heights of the hall vanished into vague darkness that created a sense of desertion. Every pillar was covered in elaborate carving: decoration, or language? Some were broken stumps. Shafts of light fell through holes in the roof.
She looked more closely and saw what appeared to be number of dead bodies around the base of the thrones, half-buried by rubble.
In the right-hand panel, behind an exquisitely detailed armillary sphere, there was a rush of indistinct silvery creatures on all fours like hunting cheetahs. Not entirely cat-like, they possessed some disturbingly human qualities: a wild eye here, a human foot there. The sense of movement was intense, a race of life or death so ferocious that Stevie could almost feel the creatures’ hot breath, smell their sweat.
The only still points of the image were the sphere itself, and the priest-like figure standing to one side.
Ron could be heard whistling as he swept the floor in the café. Fin spoke thoughtfully. “They’re good. Do you think they’re good? You’re the art expert, not me.”
“Hardly an expert. Striking, but very odd. That was Danny, though. A crazy genius.”
“What’s it meant to mean?”
“I wish I knew. Apparently these scenes were inspired by me,” said Stevie. Her throat felt raw from too much talking, and the wintry air. “Don’t ask me how that works.”
Fin said, “Whatever your ‘Danifold’ has done, it’s not down to you. I know you’ll do everything possible to find him, and I’ll help if I can.”
Stevie grinned, grateful for her practicality. “Yes, what more can we do?”
“The very fact that his work is here might mean that Daniel turns up to reclaim it.”
“It’s possible.” Stevie hesitated. “His mother thinks he’s on drugs, delusional and even paranoid. He claimed some mystery buyer wanted all his work, because it’s too dangerous for the world to see.”
“Ah,” said Fin. “That does sound a bit … loopy.”
“But what if it’s true? He might have made an enemy of someone for any number of reasons, and vanished because he’s scared.”
Fin mulled this over for a minute. “You’re right, you can’t rule out anything. Are you worried this putative enemy might turn up here?”
“It’s a risk.” Stevie folded her arms, recalling the unease she’d felt in the Manifold house, the impression of dark shadows circling her. A nebulous yet powerful fear squeezed her throat. She couldn’t put her foreboding into words. “We might attract the very person Danny was frightened of.”
“Then this is bait,” said Fin, her eyes suddenly shining.
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Aren’t you curious to see if anyone turns up and shows an interest? Someone who might know what actually happened to Daniel?”
4
Light Through the Dust
Rufus woke, deep in the night, startled by a rumbling sound that began far away and rolled closer like a giant train. He tried to get up. The ground dropped beneath him, then bucked, throwing him against the wall of his tent.
“What the hell—?”
Earth tremor. Great. Rufus Dionys Ephenaestus looked up at a roof of sagging brown canvas a couple of feet above his nose. Through his thin sleeping bag, he felt the hard dusty earth and several hundred sharp stones digging into his back. What now? Go back to sleep as if nothing had happened? No point in panicking. There was nothing outside but the mountains of a dreary brown no-man’s-land near the borders of Pakistan. Pulling open the tent flap, he looked up at the stars. No light pollution dimmed their magnificence. Bu
t he’d had thousands of years to gaze up at those stars and wasn’t impressed.
It was also bloody freezing.
Warlords might come upon him, armed with the guns he’d sold them earlier, to steal back their money and leave him for dead. Surely someone would take his Jeep, leaving him in an even worse mess. Any sensible trader would be long gone, whisked back to civilization by a private plane or helicopter. Not Rufus. He couldn’t find the energy to care.
He worked alone. He made himself an open target, took mad risks, sold consignments of rifles, machine guns and rocket launchers, yet didn’t keep even a handgun to defend himself. Everyone he met thought he was insane, yet he survived. He knew why.
They were afraid of him.
That was useful, but the novelty had worn off. In the quiet of the night—whether he was in an African war zone, a Middle Eastern desert or the barren immensity of the Hindu Kush—he thought about his lost brother, Mistangamesh.
Another tremor came, disturbing, but not enough to push away his thoughts.
Beautiful, infuriating Mist, who’d accidentally “died” several hundred years ago. Ever since—echoing the legend of Estel the Eternal, who searched tirelessly for the scattered parts of her lover—Rufus had tried to find him, to restore him to life.
They were Aetherials, undying Aelyr. Mist had to be out there somewhere …
The tremor began again and the ground reared beneath him. This time the quake meant business, rumbling like a fleet of tanks towards his tent. Rufus tried to grab something solid for support. There was nothing. The Earth itself was rising and falling like the sea.
Somehow he clawed his way out of the tent, like a drunk negotiating the moving floors of a funhouse. It took forever. The struggle struck him as so ludicrous that he started to laugh hysterically. He couldn’t even shift into the Dusklands, where the world might have been calmer. The earthquake was shuddering through every dimension.
He emerged on all fours into the open, in time to see his Jeep tumbling into a chasm that had opened in the ground. The vehicle slid from view with a crunch of breaking glass and buckling metal. Rocks and ground lurched violently, torn apart. The sound was overwhelming, deafening. Rufus flung himself to the convulsing earth and lay with his hands over his ears. He was afraid. How thrilling it felt to be afraid for once!
Presently it stopped.
He rose to his feet and stared around him, dumbstruck. The air was full of dust. The landscape, already bleak, looked as if it had been kicked around by a bored god.
In a daze, he started walking.
His mind was numb, so the inevitable thoughts of Mistangamesh trickled into the void. Rufus let them flow. Where was I?
At one point, Rufus was sure he’d found him in the form of a young man, shell-shocked and damaged by the Great War: the very image of his brother. Same flawless yet haunted face, thick dark hair shading his moody eyes. A tormented war poet; that was how he appeared. So Rufus had kidnapped him and spent ninety years trying to convince him that he was not Adam Montague, the scion of a wealthy British dynasty, but actually an immortal Aelyr, son of the ruling house Ephenaestus of the Felynx.
Rufus had failed.
Adam refused to “wake up.” All the sultry beauty of the Otherworld, the sensual temptations of Rufus’s followers, a good spell of sensory deprivation, even renaming him Leith to help sever his human ties—none of it had brought Mist back.
In the end, Adam had stupidly died, as he’d stupidly lived—a dumb human.
Rufus had lost his mind for a few days. Then he’d pulled his tattered self together, stolen the flashiest sports car he’d ever seen and roared towards the future. Free of Mist, free of false hope.
He’d headed for London and almost made it, crashing the Lamborghini with the police in full pursuit after he’d refueled and driven off without paying. The memory made him smile. Scrambling though fields and woods, a police helicopter hovering overhead unable to locate him because he moved through the Dusklands—the first layer of the Aetheric realms—thus foxing their infrared cameras.
It was a shame about the car, though.
Arriving in London, Rufus tried to lose himself in pleasure. He hung out in trendy nightclubs, befriended ugly politicians and overpaid footballers, sleek socialites, models and actors and all their hangers-on. He wasn’t fussy. At their expense, he got drunk, imbibed an array of drugs, charmed every half-decent-looking human he met. In the morning he would be gone with their money, credit cards and jewelry before they woke up.
It was so easy, because he had an angel’s beauty and knew how to work it.
The lifestyle was fun for a while, but … he’d done it all before, and for centuries. He was bored.
The truth was that nothing filled the void in his soul where his brother Mistangamesh should have been. Nothing ever would. He’d never doubted that Adam’s eyes, clouded by animal fear, would light up with recognition and love. Probably with hate and rage, too, but he could have handled that.
It had never happened.
Finally Rufus was forced to admit that Adam was, after all, only a vessel of flesh. The physical resemblance to Mist, so poignant, had duped him. Now he resigned himself to being alone.
After all, he was used to it. For long centuries he’d been regarded as a pariah among Aetherials, a traitor on an epic scale. A long list of kidnappings, troublemaking and even murder, both on Earth and in the Otherworld, was the least of it. First and greatest was his alleged destruction of the legendary Aetherial city Azantios.
The Spiral Court—the pompous idiots—had tried to place him on trial, only to produce not one scrap of evidence against him. Rufus had been scared out of his wits for a while, but now the memory amused him. The ordeal had almost been worth it, to see the white face of his prosecutor, the puritanical Lord Albin of Sibeyla, set in frustrated rage.
One day Rufus realized why a life of hedonism and petty theft was so unsatisfying.
Don’t be evil was the slogan of a huge Internet company. And Rufus had responded to himself, Why the hell not?
If his enemies wanted crime, he’d give them crime. He would plunge into the nastiest, shadiest, most dangerous career on the planet, so wicked it was a caricature, a veritable parody of evil.
One contact led to another and he found himself at glamorous charity balls, surrounded by world leaders and celebrity fund-raisers for good causes of every kind. Champagne flowed, light glittered on diamonds, pledges to end world poverty were made.
Soon he found himself on a darkened balcony at such an event, with a self-styled philanthropist—a short, unassuming man who resembled a schoolteacher—whispering into his ear. Offering an assignment.
Rufus wasn’t naive, but this was confirmation that a few of these generous folk had perhaps not earned their millions through honest hard work. Illegal arms trading was shockingly lucrative. Also dangerous, grueling, raw and seedy, cynical, brutal, fatal. No one worked the raw edge of the actual handover unless they were crazy.
Rufus loved it.
He adored the hypocrisy, the corruption, the faux glamour of arms fairs, the shady deals laced with drugs and blood diamonds. He loved traveling to godforsaken regions of the world and selling weapons to desperate brutes, then venturing a little farther and selling more to their enemies.
At first, he was part of a team, dealing within the relative safety of an armed escort. That didn’t last long. He was indiscreet and reckless, putting his colleagues’ lives at risk. It was a miracle no one murdered him, not for want of trying.
Instead, he went freelance.
That worked for him. With each new deal, his arrival was greeted with consternation, awe and superstitious fear. How could someone as outrageously handsome as Rufus—with long burnished-brown ripples of hair, looking no older than his late twenties, as willowy as an angel walking the earth—how could such a man avoid kidnap, murder or worse? In fact he was as wily and tough as the most hardened bandit, untouchable and fearless, if not actually i
nsane.
In the course of his travels, he worked his way through a series of lovers, male and female. Upsetting his customers by seducing their wives, daughters or sisters was not the safest way of life among the lawless yet brutally strict tribal zones he frequented, but Rufus was past caring. More than once, bullets ripped through his body and he simply stood there laughing. That tended to earn the healthy respect of warlords.
If he were to die, he assumed that his soul-essence would find its way into the Otherworld and along the Causeway of Souls to the Mirror Pool at the heart of Asru. Or perhaps it would, like a dryad, attach itself to some thorny tree. Whatever the case, he knew that in time he would be reborn. Perhaps, in his next incarnation, he would remember none of this. Then he might find peace at last.
But in thirty thousand years, no one had yet succeeded in killing him.
* * *
Dawn was breaking as he reached the edge of a town. Even Rufus felt a frisson of shock. The main road was torn in half by a long ragged chasm. Baked-mud houses had collapsed into the abyss, and the whole area resembled a scrapyard of torn concrete, corrugated metal and rubble. Wailing filled the air. The sun shone through a pall of dust, softening the scene with an ocher haze. Survivors wandered through the haze; he saw men in long pale garments, and women in saris that were incongruously bright against the ruins, lemon and blue and scarlet.
With no particular plan, Rufus wandered along the edge of the town, detached from the suffering around him. What was he supposed to do? Although he could see that this raw human anguish was horrible, heartbreaking, he felt nothing but bemused shock.
He spotted a vehicle with a red cross on the side. There were others, too, of military green. He saw dark-skinned soldiers, and Westerners in khaki fatigues. Rescue teams were here already, the ruined streets frantic with activity. A few individuals stood holding up cell phones to film the scene. There was even a television crew.
Rufus halted. Sweat was dripping from him. He simply stood and watched the carnage, not knowing what to do or feel. Oh dear, not another earthquake. Mother Earth shudders and casts down another civilization into the dirt: great or small, she doesn’t care.
Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) Page 7
