“I might take you up on that. Thanks.”
Stevie gathered her coat, tucking the sketchbook inside. She guessed she wouldn’t get much further, but she made one a last try. “You must have spoken to Daniel most days?”
“Only in passing. Everyone’s busy. Artists who stand around chatting don’t get anything made or sold. Daniel rarely came in. He was a sweet guy, but preoccupied.”
“Did you see his work?” Adam put in.
“Oh, yeah. Some of it was stunning. Like those old Eastern Orthodox icons, but when you look closely, it’s something else. The figures were like pagan gods, with animal heads and all sorts of weird things. Played with your mind. Very cool.”
Stevie persisted, “Did he seem depressed, or worried? Not his usual self?”
Jan laughed. “His usual self was crazy enough. We’re all workaholics here, but he took it to another level. Or should that be paintaholic? You probably know that the police were here. All they found was a letter for his mother.”
“I know,” said Stevie. “I tried to reassure her, but she’s worried it’s a suicide note.”
“God, I hope not,” Jan said softly. “Honestly, I’m not being obstructive. All I can say for sure is that he fell out with management because his opening hours were so erratic. I mean, he’d be here working, but he’d lock himself in and not let the public browse around. If you refuse to open, you don’t sell any work, right? And you can’t pay your way. The answer is usually the most obvious one.”
“All right, well…” Stevie looked firmly at Adam, giving him a clear cue to leave. Once they were on the walkway, Jan flicked off the light and shut the door. Stevie gave her a business card for the museum. “If you hear anything, please, will you let me know?”
“Absolutely I will. It’s been great meeting you, Stevie. Circumstances aside.”
A few minutes later, Stevie stood outside with her strange new friend, Adam, not knowing what to say to him, or how to shake him off. The wind blew sideways around the factory, stinging her face with darts of ice. She still didn’t know who he was, but thanks to Jan Lindeman, he now knew her address.
His face was half-lit by streetlights, and specks of snow gleamed on his hair. On a very base level, she would have been more than happy to take him home … The impulse felt downright disturbing, so she quashed it. Again.
“I’ll report back to his mother,” she said. “No news is good news, I suppose. And I’ll give her the sketchbook, since it’s rightfully hers until he comes back.”
“I do apologize for trying to take it,” he sighed.
“Thanks for being honest, anyway,” she said coolly.
She began to turn away, but he said, “Stevie, if you do find Daniel, will you let me know?”
Again she silently wondered what business it was of his. “How? Have you got email?”
His mouth twitched. She wondered why he found this funny. “No.”
“Phone number?”
Looking sheepish, he shook his head. “I really should get around to buying a phone.”
“Well, if you can’t be contacted, how can I? I won’t in any case, because I don’t know you. It’s a private family matter.”
“I understand,” he said. Before she could ask anything else, Adam was gone, melting away into the darkness through a swirl of fine, wet snow.
Stevie’s last stop was Daniel’s address, a couple of streets away. The tall, dilapidated Victorian town house appeared to be a shabby lodging house for students. There was a Room to Let sign in front. Having pictured him in a nice apartment, she felt shocked and sad to think that he’d been living in a single rented room. How lonely. She saw a scruffy-looking man, aged around seventy, dragging two full black garbage bags down a short flight of stone steps from the front door to the street. A dirty grey sweater strained over his beer gut.
“Excuse me,” she began. “Does Daniel Manifold live here?”
The man gave her a look of sneering disgust. “He owes me three weeks’ rent. Haven’t seen him for days.”
“He’s gone missing.”
“You’re telling me.”
“I’d like to take a look around his room.”
“Fergeddit,” growled the landlord. “After the police finished nosing around, I changed the lock. Everything he left behind is in these bags.”
“Can I take them?”
His bushy white brows jumped halfway up his forehead. “Yeah, do what you like, darlin’. It’s only rubbish. Believe me, if he’d left anything valuable, I’d have taken it. Not a sausage.”
“Any personal papers?” Stevie shivered in the snowy air.
“I dunno. It’s all in there, the crap he left behind.”
Impulsively she took a twenty-pound note from her purse and pushed it into his hand, realizing too late it was all she had left to pay for a taxi back to Euston Station. “Did he say where he was going? Did he have any visitors?”
He looked at the note and emitted a grunt. “He owed me a lot more than twenty quid.”
“I’m not paying his rent for him,” Stevie retorted. “I was hoping you’d tell me something. Did he have a girlfriend?”
“Never saw one. There was some bloke he used to kick around with.”
“What did he look like? A slim man with long brown hair?”
The landlord sniffed. “Nah. White hair up in spikes and an overcoat, like some old punk rocker. Called him Ollie, Oliver? That’s all I know.”
“Can’t you think of anything else?”
“Sorry, darlin’.” He pocketed the money and went stiff-legged up the steps to his front door. “Nothin’ else to tell.”
* * *
Rufus and Aurata spent two days amid the ruins, helping rescue teams haul survivors and corpses from fallen buildings, assisting in the medical tent, comforting children when the ground shuddered with aftershocks.
Rufus was not helping out of compassion. He was doing so entirely to be with his sister: to watch her, to learn what she’d become by imitating her. He felt like a phony, but this didn’t disturb him. He’d always been an illusionist.
More television crews arrived. Helicopters buzzed in and out, dropping supplies. Troops arrived to protect the aid workers—probably, he thought, from the tribesmen in the hills, whom Rufus had so lavishly equipped with weapons a few days earlier.
During her rest breaks, Aurata was out with her camera, recording the rifts that split the landscape. Or she’d rejoin her team of seismologists to examine data. Rufus kept out of that, since he had no interest in squiggles on graph paper.
How strange to find Aurata had become a scientist. She seemed so human and yet—when they were alone in her tent at night—she was still the beautiful creature he’d lost so many thousands of years ago. Her languid body language invited a resumption of their deliciously sordid, incestuous union … yet, although it half-killed him to hold back, he still dared not touch her.
An incredible stretch of time had passed; thirty thousand years, at the most conservative estimate. And he’d committed the vast and terrible crime of turning against his own family and civilization, and leading an army to crush their city, Azantios.
Had she lost her memory? Surely not; she was too sharp. So why didn’t she raise the subject? Was she leading him on while secretly planning to slit his throat in his sleep? What was she playing at?
Finally, on the second night, he broke the silence. “There’s a rock song that could have been written for me, Aurata. ‘Bad to the Bone’—that’s me. I caused the downfall of Azantios.”
“I know,” she said evenly. She lay close, her head propped on one hand, her auburn hair flowing over her burnished shoulders.
“So what are you doing with me? Stringing me along until you can deliver me to the ghastly punishment I deserve?”
“Is that what you think? No, Rufus.” She laughed, softly and without smiling. “That would be a waste. I have other plans.”
“What plans?”
“Wait and s
ee.”
“But why aren’t you blazing with fury? Why didn’t you spit in my face, the moment you recognized me? You’re acting as if nothing ever happened, but you can’t have forgiven me. No one ever could.”
She lowered her feline gaze. “True. What happened was far beyond forgiveness. But we have to set it aside, because … the truth is that the destruction of Azantios was as much my doing as yours.”
Her words threw him. “I heard tales … afterwards. That the Felynx finished the job themselves rather than let my mob of proto-human savages defile the city. But that’s not in the same league as my treachery.”
“Isn’t it? Can we please let this rest, and talk of it another time?” She touched his cheekbone. “All I ask is that you trust me.”
“This will be a leap into the unknown.” He grinned. “I’ve never trusted you, my fiery sister. But you know I’m yours, body and soul.”
On the third day, Aurata announced that it was time for the two of them to leave. With her belongings in a small rucksack, she led Rufus to a waiting helicopter. Soon the devastated brown landscape was dwindling beneath them. They landed at a dusty airstrip and transferred to a small plane that took them to Lahore airport. Amid seething crowds and sweltering heat, Aurata used her credit card to buy both of them plane tickets and new clothes.
“I don’t understand,” said Rufus. “Can you just walk away like that?”
“I can do whatever I like.”
“But you were working before the earthquake struck. What about your human colleagues?”
“My work with them was only ever a means to an end. It was our destiny to meet again, Rufus. The fact that you’re finally here is my sacred sign to move onward.”
“Sacred?” He laughed. “What if I don’t stick around, Dr. Connelly?”
Aurata gave him a look. “Oh, you will.”
She was right. The moment he’d seen her, everything else ceased to matter. She’d become his sole reason to live again. “Where are we going?”
“I’d love to keep it secret until we arrive,” she replied. “However, unless you consent to wear a blindfold and earplugs for a day, you are going to know as soon as our flight is announced.”
Venice.
He’d visited before—there were few places on Earth he hadn’t seen—but a fresh enchantment lay over the city as they arrived. Pale mist hung over the lagoon, backlit by sunlight. Everywhere was white and gold, the Doges’ Palace standing proud like a gigantic Rococo wedding cake. Aurata led Rufus away from the main thoroughfares, over bridges, down ever-narrower streets, crossing canals where water lapped between buildings in dank, fetid chasms.
VIALE DEI BELLI SEGRETI. He saw the sign bearing the name of the alley and translated it to himself. Avenue of Beautiful Secrets.
“What are the beautiful secrets?” asked Rufus.
“Now if I told you, they wouldn’t be secrets, would they?”
He felt a subtle shift of atmosphere, colors becoming more intense. “Ah. A Dusklands place. So only Aetherials know of its existence, only Aetherials live here?”
“Others, by invitation only,” she answered with a smile.
Her house had a facade of flaking grandeur. The creamy walls were decorated with gold and lapis lazuli, the tall windows framed by ornate carving. She opened the front door to reveal a grand, oval hall with a double staircase sweeping up the curved walls. Soft blue-green light filled the space. The floor was tiled with black and white marble in a familiar pattern; a single giant spiral, the most potent symbol of the Otherworld.
Rufus could imagine ghostly Aetherial guests at a masquerade, could almost hear the whisper of their skirt hems across the tiles. Or something more serious: a ritual for the warping of reality? He tasted subtle energies in the air, like ozone.
Aurata led him upstairs to a salon lined with gilt-framed mirrors. Crossing to the window, Rufus looked out at a row of houses facing him across the canal. Their pastel walls were stained with age, by algae and waterweed where the water sucked at their foundations. Water taxis plowed the turbid surface. The scene had a foggy look, as if a fine muslin scrim were stretched tight in front of it. Could the boat passengers see him at the window? Or was it some other house they saw as they glanced upwards, an Earth-bound construction occupying the same space as Aurata’s hidden Dusklands mansion?
“Do you live here alone?”
“For the time being. My people are elsewhere.”
“You have ‘people’?” He laughed.
“Friends.”
“No, you mean worshippers. Naturally. So did I.”
“Of course you did, Rufus.”
“We always were so alike.”
“Were we?” She blinked. “On the surface, perhaps.” Her words stung a little. For a few seconds, she seemed aloof: a scientist with mysterious plans, while he was just the same irresponsible reprobate he’d always been.
Aurata excused herself, and returned with a tray bearing food and a bottle of ice-cold white wine. If she had servants, he wasn’t interested; such mundane matters would have spoiled the dream feeling. They sat in the salon in gilded chairs and refreshed themselves with olives, ciabatta bread and soft cheese.
Haphazard fragments of their stories came out. They spoke of living disguised within human civilizations; some of Rufus’s tales were real and some fabricated. He avoided mentioning Mist, which left large gaps in his narrative. He told her he’d been a stage illusionist in the 1920s and 1930s: that was true. He claimed to have flown as a fighter pilot in the Second World War, a complete lie. And his latest, incredible claim, to have forced the British government to call a general election, also happened to be the truth. Aurata listened with a look of serene amusement.
“I’ve done everything and nothing,” said Rufus. “Mainly, I’ve amused myself with humans. Seduced them, poisoned them against each other. Withheld knowledge, or let slip a little too much. I like to think I’ve changed the course of history, in some small way.”
Aurata gave an ostentatious sigh. “And it never occurred to you to do something more constructive?”
He raised his eyebrows. “What for? I had Mist for that. He was the good guy, so I had to play the baddie. That was the role in which our father cast me. I had a reputation to live up to.”
“Wait,” she said sharply. “Mistangamesh was with you?”
He kicked himself for the slip; he’d meant to tell her in his own time. “Not all the time. Some of it, yes.”
“So he survived Azantios?” She rose and paced about restlessly. “I knew you were hiding something! I was wondering when you’d admit it.”
“And I can’t hide anything from you, can I?” He grimaced. “When I behaved particularly badly, Mist felt the need to rein me in.”
“But where is he now?” Her whisper echoed in the big, bare room. “What happened to him?”
Rufus swallowed hard. “He did what humans do,” he said brusquely. “He died.”
* * *
Later, they lay naked and entwined on a huge bed, curtains wafting gently at the windows, a breeze bringing in the sulfur smell of the canal and the noise of water traffic. Night drew in. Candles glowed, spinning a golden web around them. Aurata was no longer “Dr. Connelly,” but the gilded feline angel he remembered. Despite his wariness, rekindling their passion had proved as natural and divinely sweet as if they’d never been apart. He’d given a ragged outline of the Adam story, and even of the Mist and Helena disaster, and afterwards she had soothed him until the pain faded.
“We thought you were dead, too,” said Rufus.
“Did you grieve?”
“That’s a feeble word for what I felt. There isn’t much I care about, but I’ll admit to one weakness. You and Mistangamesh, and our beloved mother, are the only three people I’ve ever truly loved. My grievance was against Poectilictis, never against you.”
“And yet you were angry enough with Father to forget who else you were harming?” When he didn’t answer, she added, �
�Would you go back and change the past?”
“That’s a redundant question. Give me a time machine powered by hindsight, and I’ll give you an answer! We can’t change what happened. But this…” He cupped her face between his palms. “This matters, doesn’t it? Not the past. The present.”
“And the future, my sweet, unrepentant brother. Yes, we’ve lost Mist, but we’ve found each other.”
“We could have been great, you and I,” Rufus sighed. He kissed her neck. “Ah, the alchemy of siblings.”
“We still could.” Aurata was quiet for a time. Then she said softly, “So, you know what happened after your army invaded and began to cut down hundreds of defenseless Felynx in the streets?”
“Yes. Mist told me.” Darkness stirred inside Rufus: an uneasy remnant of conscience. From afar, he’d watched his primitive warrior horde flood the city—ants swarming a pale honeycomb—eager for the riches he’d promised them. When flames caught the delicate spires of Azantios, he’d only sneered. This was his perfect revenge against their ruler, his own father.
But then the land began to shake. The scarlet mountain reared and shook the golden-white palaces of Azantios off its spine. The city crumbled and burned, swallowing the proto-humans in its own death throes. Soon it was as if Azantios had never been.
“You remember Veropardus, the Custodian of the Felixatus?” said Aurata.
“That pompous misery,” said Rufus. “What did you ever see in him?”
“Useful secrets.” She half-smiled. “There was always a plan in place, in the unlikely event of an attack, but it went wrong.”
“Wrong, how? You did a perfectly good job of self-destruction, as far as I could see.” Rufus’s voice sounded hoarse. “Mist told me, days later when he crawled out of the ruins. He said you were dead, that everyone was dead. Suicide before surrender.”
“Yes, that was the official plan. However, Veropardus and I had other ideas: we hoped to use the power of the Felixatus to shift Azantios right through the barriers and into the Otherworld. But we failed, and the Felixatus was destroyed.”
Astonished, Rufus struggled for a response. Eventually he said, “I thought we were close, you and I, yet you never told me a word of these schemes!”
Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) Page 10
