The Poison Master

by Liz Williams

  Alivet watched, breathless. She had never been so close to one before. The Lord stood nine feet high, its armored head drifting from side to side. It seemed to be formed from a mass of shadows: planes of ebony, indigo, and storm-cloud gray, yet its face was more human than many of the Lords of Night: Alivet saw bulbous eyes and a pursed mouth. Its antennae exuded a faint and musty fragrance. Movement rustled beneath its robes; the Lord's body seemed to coil and shift. Alivet remembered Ghairen's remark: Perhaps the Lords are not entirely as they appear…

  The Lord moved with ponderous, swinging slowness down the hall, and in its wake the air seemed suddenly thinner and darker, as though it breathed in health and light and gave out nothing. Another shadowy form followed through the double doors. Alivet caught sight of the long out-thrust jaw and the slotted vertebrae of its throat beneath its hood. It placed a delicately jointed foot on the thick carpet and teetered forward, past the Enbonded boys and girl.

  The Lord brushed against one boy as it tottered by. He stepped back at once, but the platter that he carried fell to the floor. Alivet saw a black and glistening lump fall from beneath the cover and creep away. The Lord gave a whistling cry. A jointed hand flicked out and caught the boy by the shoulders. His mouth opened, but he made no sound. The Lord spun the boy around and Alivet saw a tiny hole open in the air. She could not see what was beyond it. Ghairen's arm was like steel around her waist. The girl and the other two boys continued on their stilted progress along the hall, as if nothing had happened.

  The circle hovered, a disc of unlight, silhouetted against the velvet curtains that hung upon the opposite wall. The Lord, with pats and pinches, compelled the boy to look through. Alivet saw with horror that the boy's eyes were squeezed tightly shut, his face screwed into the citric sourness of terrified resolution. She could hear him panting and she tried to break free of Ghairen's arm.

  Ghairen's response was to clasp her more firmly. The Lord's fingers crept around the sides of the boy's face and tapped once beneath his eyelids. The boy's eyes flew open. He stared into the circle of unlight and his face took on an expression of entranced numbness. He leaned forward, peering into the hole and angling his head to see more clearly. Alivet saw the expression drain out of his face like water, leaving it slack and blank. The circle was gone. The boy slumped to the floor and lay there, quivering. The Lord veered away, stepping over him and continuing on its unsteady journey. More Enbonded retainers rushed forward, picked up the boy, and carried him away through the curtains. Alivet saw a trickle of blood coming from the boy's right eye, and her heart grew heavy and cold.

  “Wait until they have gone,” Ghairen whispered into her ear. She could feel his breath on her face and thought of death, but she waited until the Lords and the Enbonded retainers had disappeared from view. She scanned the faces of the Enbonded; they were all male. Yet she knew that the Unpriests prized girls: what happened to them? Alivet believed she knew the answer to that, but it did not bear thinking about. She had reached that conclusion years before, when the thought of her sister in the clammy embrace of an Unpriest had been almost enough to drive her out into the city and knife the first one she came across. That, however, would have helped no one, and Inki least of all.

  Ghairen stepped out from their hiding place and reached out a beckoning hand to Alivet. Together, they crept along the hallway to the double doors at the end. Surely Ghairen was not planning to stroll through the doors themselves— but then Alivet saw a small chamber to her left. Ghairen slipped soundlessly through the entrance. Alivet followed and found that they were in a round room. Here, the walls were black and made of some smooth crystalline substance, yet crusty patches marred their surface, as though the walls had been wounded and scabbed. She reached up a hand to touch the wall, but Ghairen wheeled around and knocked her arm away. He shook his head, put a finger to his lips. Alivet nodded understanding. She gazed up at the curved ceiling of the chamber, and realized that she could see through it. Claws tapped on the ceiling, far above her head, and with a cold shock Alivet recognized a Lord, seen from below. She tugged at Ghairen's sleeve and pointed upward. Ghairen's eyes narrowed. He motioned Alivet to move to the edges of the room, mouthing, “Slowly.” If the Lord should look down and see figures below… Perhaps it would assume they were Enbonded servants. Or perhaps not.

  Ghairen was resting his gloved palm against the wall; she could see the glow of the lights on the glove. With excruciating slowness, the wall melted away. Ghairen and Alivet hurried through into a second long hallway. As she stepped through the wall, Alivet turned and looked up. Beyond the translucent ceiling of the chamber, there was a sudden flurry of robes, like watching a fish dive into the mud.

  The Lord had seen them.

  Chapter VIII

  THE PALACE OF NIGHT

  Alivet seized Ghairen by the shoulder and pointed frantically back. The Poison Master's face registered alarm. He gestured to the end of the hallway. “Run.”

  Alivet did not need prompting. Something was coming through the chamber behind her. There was a palpable wave of an inimical presence: emotions so powerful that they rushed over her like a sudden wave—anger, sorrow, and a sense of outrage, an all-encompassing incomprehension that anyone could enter the Palace, defy the Lords, act of their own free will. And after that came a refined, anticipatory cruelty; she saw what the Lord intended for her, a long slow draining of her mind that would leave her empty and mad. It was the only glimpse that Alivet had ever had into the mind of a Lord and it horrified her. She picked up her skirts and bolted down the hallway.

  “Ghairen? Where are we going?”

  “Not far now,” Ghairen called back, but the hallway was spinning around her, dissolving into shards of red frost like the falling leaves in the Month of Dragonflies. She felt the touch of the Lord's mind on her own. A great cold whisper of air breathed down the hallway. Someone sprang into Alivet's path: a young man dressed in black, his face distorted with fury or fear. Alivet pushed him aside, but there were more of them—the hallway spun again and a hand gripped her wrist. Alivet realized that it was not the Lord who was creating the mental confusion, but Ghairen himself. She could taste poison, fizzing like metallic sherbet on her tongue. Ahead, a hole opened in the air. Alivet, remembering the Enbonded boy who had looked through such a hole not long before and been struck blind, pulled back, but Ghairen cried, “No! We're going through.”

  The hole grew wider, forming a portal of nothingness in the air. She could not see beyond it. Another young man sprang in front of her. He carried a weapon of brass from which a pale fire was flickering. Ghairen stepped forward and threw a handful of dust. The young man dropped the weapon and fell to his knees, clawing at his face. The hole widened like a pursing mouth.

  “What is it?” Alivet cried, but hands were clasping at her, pulling her away from Ghairen. An Enbonded girl had seized her arm in both hands. Alivet looked down into a peaked face, the left eye puckered into a seamless scar beneath a fringe of dark hair. But the other eye widened with recognition.

  “Inki!”

  Inkirietta's mouth fell open. She took a swift glance over her shoulder and Alivet saw that the Lord was gliding up the hallway.

  “Inki, come with me—”

  But Ghairen cried, “Alivet! There's no time.”

  Alivet saw her sister swallow and nod.

  “Just go,” Inki said, and then she turned and pushed Alivet away, so hard that she stumbled against the edge of the hole in the air. Inki, the Enbonded, the Lord, and the Palace of Night: all were gone, whisked to a pinpoint vision, and Alivet was falling through nowhere.

  ASCENSION

  How oft do they their silver bowers leave

  To come to succour us that succour want;

  How oft do they with golden pinions cleave

  The flitting skies like flying pursuivant

  Against foul fiends to aid us militant.

  They for us fight, they watch and duly ward

  And their bright squadron
s round us plant;

  And all for love and nothing for reward.

  Oh, why should heavenly love to men have such regard?

  EDMUND SPENSER, The Faerie Queene

  Chapter I

  LONDON 1555

  There is,” the warder said, “a second charge, that has recently been made.” Dee peered up at him through the bars of the cell. The warder smelled of grease and old smoke, and the reek of cheap ale. Still, the stink spoke of the outside world, and as such, was an improvement upon dead rats.

  “What, then?” Dee asked, warily. “Was not simple witchcraft good reason enough for a necklace of gunpowder?”

  “The charge is that you have endeavored by enchantments to destroy Queen Mary.”

  Dee snorted. “Who told them that?”

  “I cannot say,” the warder said. He stared uneasily down at Dee, who wondered if it was worth trying to intimidate the man. Almost certainly not. Bishop Bonner's men might be mad, but they were neither cowards nor fools.

  “It was Pridaux, I would warrant—he's an informer of yours, is he not? Or was it George Ferrers, the king of misrule?” Ferrers had disliked him on sight, and Dee's unfeigned mirth during Ferrers' Christmas entertainment at court had not gone unnoticed by the lawyer. Unfortunately, Dee's mirth had been for all the wrong reasons, since Ferrers was corpulent and remarkably unsuited to satin. It seemed little enough on which to notify the authorities that one's enemy had been practicing witchcraft, but little enough was sufficient, these days.

  He should never have left the Low Countries, Dee reflected with bitterness, once the warder had gone and he was left alone to crouch in the rat-ridden cell. There, he'd had a position and prospects; here, he was nothing more than a heretic awaiting the fire. But all the mighty seemed swift to fall these days, beneath the fanatical scourge of Bishop “Bloody” Bonner.

  Dee grimaced, reflecting on past glories. It had all been going so well. He had been the pearl in the oyster of Europe. There had been the packed lectures on geometry in Paris, the ambassadorial dinners in Brussels. There had been the friends whom now he might never set eyes on again—Mercator, that wise and clever man; Frisius and Ortelius, fellow cartographers and mathematicians; the celebrated navigator Núñez, whom Dee now counted among his closest colleagues. All planets in the firmament of Europe, spiraling around the world that was Dee himself.

  And no less than five offers from the Christian emperors, court positions that Dee had turned down to come home to England, seeking a place closer to home. But unless he could talk his way out of it, England would repay his loyalty with the flames.

  Dee shuffled back against the wall and closed his eyes. The chains were uncomfortable and the cell stank, but the worst thing of all was the tedium. He had not realized how much he had come to depend on his books for company—and when the men had come from the Court of Wards to arrest him, Dee had been right in the middle of a set of calculations that he could not now recapture without the aid of a parchment and quill, no matter how hard he tried. But even this was a trifle compared to the impact upon his family. His father had, of course, already been tried and escaped with financial ruin rather than loss of life, but the arrest of her son would surely send his mother into a further decline. At least his wife was there to look after them both, but her health had suffered in recent months; an excess of black bile that produced a melancholy, seeming to draw her deeper and deeper into herself. He had given her a necklace of garnets to keep the sorrow from her, but the remedy had failed.

  Mercator had been right, Dee mused now. The Church had called him a heretic, but not because of any unwise speculation about life on other worlds or, indeed, as a result of his religious practices as such. No, what Bishop Bonner objected to was the dark art of mathematics. Calculating, conjuring, and witchcraft. Dee recited the dismal litany beneath his breath. Those were the charges, based upon the accusation that he had drawn up horoscopes for those in power and out of it: Mary the Queen, and the princess Elizabeth, and Philip. True enough, Dee reflected, ruefully. The rising sign at Mary's nuptials had been Libra, ruled by gentle Venus, and a good omen, one would have thought—but not for Dee.

  Later, standing before the Bishop, Dee could almost smell death emanating from the man, as though the skeletal figure itself stood behind his shoulder with its antic grin. Bonner was a large man, meaty as a Smithfield hog. But if Bonner has his way, Dee reminded himself, you'll be that hog, spitted on a Smithfield pyre.

  “Dr. Dee,” Bonner said, beaming as though Dee had merely chanced by for a cup of wine and a chat. “Please, do sit down.” He waved expansively at the nearest chair. Warily, Dee took it.

  “You know,” Bonner said, leaning forward and glancing toward the door, “I am most certain that your arrest has been nothing more than the grossest error, and I promise I mean you no more hurt than I do to my own person. But,” and here Bonner sighed, “the court must need be satisfied that I have done my duty. I will, therefore, ask you no more than a few trifling questions.”

  Dee, who until now had been anxious, felt himself grow afraid. Bonner spoke sweet, mincing reason, but the light eyes, glittering in the florid expanse of the Bishop's face, looked upon Dee as a starving man looks upon a banquet. It did not need great sensitivity to realize that Bonner was a man requiring a daily feed of pain and blood.

  “But you must be weary,” Bonner said, and beckoned to the guard at the door. “Wine, for Dr. Dee.”

  The man came back with a glass of claret, gleaming thick and red in the firelight. Dee looked at it and thought immediately of poison, but in his estimation Bonner was both grosser and more subtle than that.

  “Tell me,” Bishop Bonner said, leaning back in his chair. “St. Cyprian informs us that there must be one high priest, whom the residue must obey. What do you say to this?”

  A reference to the Pope, Dee thought, though one might argue that St. Cyprian was discussing his own position as patriarch of Africa. But one would have to be most careful how one argued theology with Bonner.

  “St. Cyprian has these words: ‘That upon Peter was builded the church, as upon the first beginning of unity.’ ” He did not add: For myself, I believe in God and his angels, and all else is petty squabbling. He remembered Elizabeth's words, uttered in his hearing only a week ago: “There is only one Jesus Christ, Dr. Dee. The rest is dispute over trifles.”

  And that is why he would continue to work for her, Dee told himself. For of them all save perhaps Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth took the longest view. She would make a good queen, if any of them lived to see it.

  Meanwhile, however, it would be necessary to dissemble. If Bonner wanted to prove him a Catholic, then a Catholic he would be. He had work to do, here on Earth and in the wider spheres of the universe, but for now he could see only as far as the fires.

  The theological cat-and-mouse continued for over an hour. Dee, watching the flames burn down, answered as glibly as he could, but his fears continued to grow. Bonner was a contradictory man: gross in appetite, refined in intellect—the opposite of the run of the aristocracy. Dee did not find it a reassuring combination. He felt as though a crowd pressed behind him, urging him to answer wisely for their sakes. It seemed to him that he could glimpse his mother's drawn face in the uncertain, flickering light; his father, defeated by recent woes. His wife's visage fluttered before his mind's eye and it was as though she already slipped toward the grave, veiled by her melancholy as with a shroud. But the face that returned with most frequency, that grave countenance with its cold, sad eyes, was that of Elizabeth.

  “This small matter,” Bonner said now, toying with a ragged quill and speaking idly, as a man might comment upon a passing shower of rain. “This trifling question of conjuration. Speak to me of this.” He glanced up, eyes bright, lips pursed as if anticipating sweetmeats, and Dee realized that everything that had passed over the course of the previous hour was nothing more than a prelude to this apparently final question. Bonner wanted to see a sorcerer burn, bursti
ng in the flames like a toy stuffed with gunpowder. And with the avidity of a child who has been denied, he would make sure that he got his wish. It would matter little what Dee now told him.

  “I have no interest in witchcraft,” Dee said. “It is a matter for old wives and cunning men, not for the learned. I have applied myself to the art of mathematics, which as you will well know, is taught in all the universities these days.”

  “Yes, I know this. And one such is the University of Louvain, is it not?”

  “That is so.”

  “The Low Countries. I have heard that many theories pass through the Low Countries upon a daily basis, as commonly as flocks of geese.” The Bishop raised an eyebrow.

  “That is also so. There is much intertraffic of the mind.”

  “And one might say that such a place is low not only in geography, but also in sympathies.” Bonner grinned at his own wordplay. “Louvain is reputed to be a seat of Protestant fervency; the inhabitants of the University are said to have dangerous ideas. Gerardus Mercator echoes the Copernican heresy, I have heard, and Frisius himself is known for certain peculiar practices.”

  “I should hardly call trigonometry a peculiar practice,” Dee said mildly. “It reflects God's work, nothing more.”

  “As do your own mathematical arts? Making dung beetles fly through the heavens?” Bonner leaned forward and the mask fell away. “For what purpose other than to mock God?”

  “I did not—”

  “And the making of waxen effigies? The lewd and vain practices of calculing and conjuring? You have been charged once already, Dr. Dee.”

  “In that instance Lord Broke concluded that the charges could not be substantiated and moreover—”