"Nonsense! She isn’t going anywhere. Especially if you build a nice and sturdy pavilion!" He snatched one of the rolls from Quentin and stretched it out before him. "Besides, I have been in contact with Mr. Hadrian Magister, who has certain interests staked in the tower, and he assures me that we will have no troubles whatsoever; he knows precisely how to handle all of this. And he is willing to pay top dollar to have her new setup placed there as soon as possible."
It was Quentin’s turn to seethe, but he hid it poorly. "And just who is this generous benefactor that is going to graciously assist us in our quest to make money?"
"Oh, now, now dear chum, don’t be so coy. I have no intentions of replacing you as partner, but I did need to seek some outside influence. Besides, he was some excellent methods for dealing with our occasionally problematic habitué."
They both turned and laid their stares onto Portia. She gazed back, unmoved. Halford handed one side of the scroll to Quentin and ran his fingers across the topographic drawings of the coastline. The tower had been hastily sketched in, Portia saw, as well as an image of a grand pavilion nestled amid the rocky cliffs facing the sea.
"You see, Quentin, this is the moment we’ve been waiting for. We can forget this two-bit freak show and enter the world of bona fide attractions! The Circus Avernus!"
Quentin sighed and took the sheet of vellum back from his partner. "We shall see, Hal. But mark my words, I do not like this." He tucked the architectural plans beneath his arm and huffed, stalking out of the tent.
Halford watched him go and clucked his tongue. "He’ll come around, my treasure," he murmured to Portia, idly stroking her cage. "I have been waiting for you, waiting for this…for so long. And we’re going to make the best of it. Together." He slid his arm between the bars, knocking loose a few of the paste pearls, and reached for Portia. She shuffled back away from his hand and his fingers fell upon the hem of her gown instead. He clenched the heavy satin and gave it a nearly playful tug. "We’ll go far together, you and I. You shouldn’t fear me, my plum." He blew her a kiss and strolled out of the tent, leaving the flap open to the chilly night wind.
"Perhaps, you should fear me," Portia growled. Halford did not return.
* * * *
"What do we have here?" The creaking voice seemed to come from nowhere, but as Portia squinted, she could see a stooped figure in the shadows behind the still-open tent flap. "Surprised that you’re still here, girl. Thought you’d have long ago flown the coop."
She did not sense any menace from the individual, only a certain wry amusement. She cautiously came to toward the bars, but remained out of arm’s reach. "Who are you?"
"Me? I’m nobody." Coming forward, the speaker coughed with a wracking, rattling wetness. "Just an old woman come to look upon things no mortal should ever have caged."
In the dim light, Portia could see her better. Dressed in brightly patched rags, she wore a purple paisley headscarf with long fringes that trailed into her pale eyes. One was the faintest blue and the other a milky white. She titled her head to one side, then alternated, closing each eye, looking at Portia through each of them several times.
Nodding, she hobbled closer to the bars, gripping them with gnarled, long-fingered hands that looked surprisingly strong.
"You are far too trusting."
"Madame, please…"
"And obviously trusting of the wrong sort! What do you see when you look at me, girl?"
Portia opened her mouth to object, but the movement behind the crone caught her attention. As if through a sheer curtain, she could see them: four wraiths hovering at the woman’s shoulders. If she focused on them, they became clearer. Two men of middling age, one dressed in a soldier’s uniform, the other in a suit many decades out of date. A child stood at the second man’s side, a boy, she thought, but could not be certain, as the child wore a full skirt and had brown ringlets yet wore a sailor cap. The last was a woman, standing apart from the others, her red dress hanging provocatively off one shoulder but in a way that made Portia think it had been torn and fallen there, rather than worn that way to entice.
"Who are they?"
"My guides. Can’t run a fortune-telling operation without them, at least, not an honest one, in my opinion."
"What do you want from me?"
She laughed, bringing on another fit of coughing. "Want? Me? God, darling, I don’t want to offend, but there isn’t anything you could offer me that I’d want. Well, nothing that I’d be willing to pay for, anyway."
"So, why are you here?"
"Wanted to see for m’self. And really see. Because I couldn’t believe what the little Bat-Boy was telling me, even though the Bearded Lady backed him up on it."
Portia shook her head, not understanding.
"You aren’t all there. Or at least all here."
"What?"
"Come over here and I’ll show you."
Portia glanced around the cage for the gate and turned toward it.
"Not that way, you foolish girl. Just come here."
"Listen, grandmother, you’re beginning to—"
"Get over here!"
The air between them rippled, subtly and momentarily. This woman had power and had long ago learned how to wield it well. While it did not command Portia, it impressed her.
And she saw what the woman was trying to show her.
When she concentrated on the tent and the cage in the same way that she had focused on the woman’s ghost companions, her surroundings changed. The bars looked flimsy, flickering almost, as if they were made of water, not iron. The woman smiled and took her hands off the cage and passed her fingers through the bars.
"So, grandmother, you aren’t all here, either."
"You may, in fact, turn out to be smarter than you look." She chuckled.
Portia stepped down onto the floor of the tent, wishing she had known about this trick yesterday. She would have hugged Imogen with all her might, which was considerable.
"Peace, peace," the fortune-teller patted Portia’s arm. "You’re far too hard on yourself. Things like these, they don’t come with instructions. And not all of us are lucky enough to have experienced friends." She winked at her guides, who remained still and silent behind her.
"And how did you come to this, grandmother?"
"Straddling worlds? A foolish gambit I thought would pay off. A ritual, too many years ago, under a foreign sky. I was young and stupid, with ambition that outweighed my good sense. Ah, well, but we all make the most of our mistakes, don’t we?"
"This wasn’t a mistake," Portia told her, gravely. "Far from it."
She clucked her tongue. "Forgive me, please. I meant no offence. Perhaps…perhaps we all make the most out of our situations, then?"
Portia allowed herself a smile and nodded. "Indeed we do. So, what do they call you?"
"Aseneth, you know, like Cleopatra’s sister?"
"My name’s Portia."
"Not what I expected."
"I wasn’t born this way. I had parents; mundane, ordinary parents."
"The old woman raised a greying eyebrow. "Obviously not that mundane. But that’s for another time. Come, I need to ask you about this tower."
Aseneth led the slow way into the circus grounds, and Portia looked upon her residence for the first time. Her tent stood away from the others with a separate ticket taker’s stand before it. A crude wooden fence had been put up around the back of it, blocking the view of whatever lay beyond. The small courtyard they entered was flanked by two large tents, one with a brightly painted sign indicating elephants and clowns. The other, taller and slightly narrower, had a trapeze hanging from the doorway like a shop’s shingle. On the far side sat a row of squat tents and boxcars arranged in a semi-circle with a single barker’s stage and ticket counter blocking the way in. Beside that, a wide walkway flanked with concessions stands led down the slight slope to the midway.
Between the circle of small tents and the concessions stood a narrow structure that lo
oked to Portia like a converted outhouse. The roof had been raised into a faux gable and extended to each side. The side walls were not wood, but heavy canvas, painted with moons and stars and hung from the overhang of the roof. The door was what gave it away, oddly-shaped with a telltale crescent moon carved through it.
Aseneth opened the door. "Welcome," she said with gravity. "I am honored to have you as my guest."
Inside, it was quite comfortable, with thick carpets layered over the dirt floor and strewn with plush pillows. At the center was a round table holding a dusty crystal ball and an intricately carved wooden box, about a hand’s span in length. A large cabinet dominated one corner and a curtain the other. Ignoring the table and the rest, Aseneth pushed back the shot-silk curtain to reveal a cot, a wobbly-looking washstand, a battered folding table, and two chairs.
"Please, sit." She shuffled off to the only other thing in the room—an enormous steamer chest along the far side of the bed—and opened it. She brought out a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a corked bottle.
"I haven’t been hungry," Portia told her.
"Nonsense, you just didn’t feel like eating. Although this is meager fare, I know you’ll enjoy it. Sourdough!" She waved the baguette under Portia’s nose. "And a nice merlot from the vineyards north of Penemue. You must know the ones."
"I’ve heard of them."
"It would taste better out of crystal, but what can you do?" She grabbed two glazed porcelain mugs from the washstand and dropped them onto the table, then poured for two before Portia could object.
"To you, my dear, Portia." She held her cup aloft and drank noisily.
Portia sipped at the wine. It was actually quite good, but she put the cup down. "Thank you for your hospitality."
"I can hear what you want," she sighed. "All right, business then. Do you mind if I eat?"
"Go right ahead."
Aseneth tore off the heel of the bread and pressed a hunk of cheese into the soft interior with her thumb before biting off a sizable piece and proceeding to talk with her mouth full.
"I was here, of course, when the tower appeared," she said through a spray of crumbs. "Halford came to me, at once. He isn’t as stupid, or oblivious, as you might want to think. He knows what I am, and he knows what you are. Well, maybe not what precisely, but he knows you’re no hoax. Anyway," she swallowed and dove in for another bite right away. "He asked me to examine the place. He even paid me for it, so I knew he was serious."
"What did you see?"
"What I saw and what I told him aren’t exactly in accord. Some things regular folk aren’t meant to know. I mean about the holes in the sky and the call from within, tugging on the spirits caught between worlds. I used to have five guides, you know. This one had a daughter." She jabbed a thumb toward the woman in red, who shrank in on herself. "We went to the island and looked at the place up close. I think he can smell them or something, because he knew right off. He knew and he called to them. They wouldn’t budge, so he sent down a slough of pretty maids all in white to try and take them from me. Poor, foolish Bess never listened to her mother in life, and continued that bad habit in death. So like some sad repeat of history, she was swept away from us. Although, this time her mother didn’t go in after her. She couldn’t—it all happened so fast. Too fast. He strikes like an adder, your brother."
"He isn’t my brother."
Aseneth licked the crumbles of cheese from her thumb. "Just because you hate a fact doesn’t make it untrue." She tapped the sagging flesh beneath her clouded eye. "What’s blind to the living sees perfectly well into the spirit. And if there were ever two children of that old cad, Zepar, it’s the two of you. Like I’ve never seen a Nephilim before and like they aren’t half of them Zepar’s offspring!" She laughed until she coughed, plucking a handkerchief from the front of her blouse and covering her mouth.
"Enough." Portia stood, but Aseneth caught her sleeve and tugged it.
"Now, now, I don’t mean to upset you." Her voice grated with phlegm. "You came from that tower, didn’t you? I thought maybe you needed to get back to it."
"I need to get back to Penemue. Because I don’t intend to do this on my own."
Aseneth looked up, straight through the wall behind Portia. Her blind eye moved a little of its own accord, different from the motion of its neighbor. The spirits in the room retreated a step and huddled together into a single mass.
Outside, it sounded like the wind picked up, rattling the temporary structures around them, moaning into the empty stalls and booths. It buffeted the little fortune-teller’s hut, causing the old wood to creak loudly.
"I don’t think you have a choice."
"Like hell I don’t!"
Portia stood, knocking her chair backward, and followed Aseneth’s gaze. She could see the tower, like a hazy double exposure, through the wall. With newfound confidence, she walked out of the hut, through a half-dozen food and drink booths, and down the rolling hillside to the beach below.
The sanctuary tower of Salus rose from a jutting of rock that did not match the color of the others and had not one barnacle clinging fast to it. The water, too, was strange, eddying in currents that ran counter to the flow of the waves. A glint of light flickered beneath the surface here and there, and she could make out the sound of an engine beneath the grumble of the waves.
From behind her, she heard Aseneth’s wheezing approach. Her spirits were not with her.
"Do you know what Halford and Quentin want with this place?" Portia turned to look at the old woman.
"Do you know what Avernus is, girl?"
Portia thought a moment, scouring her memory for where she had heard that word before. For she knew it, she had learned it in school. When it came to her, it chilled her to the marrow.
"Yes," she whispered. "It is the name for one of the gates to the underworld."
"So, that answers your question, doesn’t it?"
"Hadrian Magister," Portia mused. "Mysterious benefactor. I think I know what that means as well."
"Oh?"
"Hadrian means ‘black.’"
"So it does. The Black Magician, then?"
"More than that. There’s someone I know whose name also means ‘black’ and whose surname means ‘magician.’ "
Aseneth shook her head. "You’ve lost me, dear."
Portia looked up toward the balcony near the top of the tower. "Nigel Aldias."
The sea wind blew cold and it smelled strange. Underlying the tang of salt and seaweed, Portia caught a scent she knew too well: lilies.
—3—
PORTIA PACED THE TENT, not noticing when she strode straight through the cage or the canvas sides. It would be dawn soon, and the tourists would come; they would board the zeppelin and they would circle the tower and marvel. Somehow it played into his plans, but he was not acting alone. Portia did not know who he had helping him on the living side. Halford and Quentin were certainly in on it, but neither of them had the brains to conceive of such a scheme on their own, of that she felt certain.
A tingle in the air alerted her to someone nearby. Peeking out across the courtyard, beyond the low tents of the sideshow freaks, she saw a thin plume of dust in the silvery pre-dawn light. A carriage approached, a fine one at that, given she heard not a sound from it beyond the jingle of the horses’ tack. She could not see the small portable office building the two men used, and squinting through the spirit world brought her little more data until the carriage door opened. The reflections of the horses were soft and blurry; the noble spirits of the beasts were not the type to linger in that twilight world, and so it had no hold on them. But the man who stepped into her view glowed. She recognized him at once and knew also that he could see her just as clearly should he choose to glance her way.
No ordinary Nephilim, indeed. Portia stepped back into the cage and settled herself, looking sidelong toward the pale spirits of the two circus partners and the blazing bright form of Lord Alaric Regalii.
He shimmered in the
way she thought she must, with a star-bright glow that clung to her flesh and wings and left faint traceries in the air around her when she moved or breathed. She watched his colors warm and spike, sending meteoric streaks into the blurry half-world. He was angry, she sensed, and she shuttered her awareness as the reddening force came toward her.
Alaric threw open the tent flap and strode in, his face upturned but his eyes sweeping disdainfully across the enclosure—the cage and Portia alike. The two partners came in his wake, shoulders slumped and heads bowed as if sleepwalking.
Alaric snapped his fingers and sighed loudly. "Gentleman, you’ve pussy-footed about for too long. I’ll have the new enclosure finished in three days’ time and I insist you move her there, immediately."
Halford perked up, but only slightly. "We fear her nearness to the tower," he said in a slurring voice.
"You have nothing to fear from that, I assure you."
Quentin nodded and parroted what Alaric had said. "Nothing to fear."
Alaric smiled to reassure them, but it drove chills through Portia’s flesh. So sinister were the underpinnings of that smile, and so familiar. It put her in mind of Lady Analise.
She probed the memory, reaching around the sharp edges of the other events back in the convent. Alaric’s neck stiffened and his head tilted toward her, subtly but unmistakably. Portia backed off, clearing her head with a sigh and settling back against the painted plywood clouds that flanked the small cot.
Now, gentlemen, off with you." Alaric made a shooing motion with his hands, and Halford and Quentin wandered off, heading back toward their office, chattering animatedly about their plans for completing the pavilion by the end of the week.
Alaric turned his attention to Portia, sauntering to the edge of the cage. "Thinking fondly on my dear, departed sister?"
"Thinking, yes. Fondly, that may be debated." She did not comment about their relationship.
The Tower of the Forgotten Page 2
