He sat in his office for five days, useless and fuming. Even Brookland, his amiable assistant and only the other member of the department, had not been able to glean any but the vaguest of rumors, and the telephone on his desk was unremittingly silent. He pulled out his notes on his latest visit to the Palace and stared at them, sorted them, shuffled them and dealt them like a fortune teller’s cards, but they gave him insight into nothing but the depth of his own ignorance. On the third day he started in on Chesterford’s notes, wondering if the department’s last head had seen any clues to explain the girl’s presence in the Palace. On the fifth day, he shoved them aside and in despair thumbed through the slender booklet that contained the complete list of Ministry staff, from the Minister himself down to the humblest tea lady who served the boiler men in the basement.
Brookland came in a little later. He had been relegated to an unheated anteroom and was always wandering into Stonehouse’s office. “I say, sir,” he said.
Stonehouse grunted. “Did you know they’ve got us listed between the Department for the Maintenance of Railway Stations and the Department for the Maintenance of National Museums?”
“Oh, well,” said the cheerful Brookland, “everyone involved has been waiting around forever. But listen, sir—”
“Museums, railway stations, and the Palace of the King.”
“Yes, sir. But about your girl—”
“What the hell is the matter with these people?”
“It’s only that they seem to have lost her.”
Stonehouse blinked, then closed the booklet and set it on his blotter so that the bottom edge was parallel with the front of his desk. “I’m sorry, Brookland. Could you repeat that?”
Brookland grinned. “Special Branch. Your girl. Lost her.”
“Lost her.”
“Bloody incompetent so-and-so’s.”
“The Ministry’s Special Branch lost the King’s visitor.”
Brookland eased himself over to the steam register under the window. “The tale being told ‘round the tea trolley has it that they put her in a room here in the Ministry building to wait until they moved her somewhere else out of the city, only they went and forgot which room she was in and by the time they figured it out the door was open and she was gone.”
Stonehouse frowned. “I don’t believe it.”
“Well, you know how tea time can get the old imagination flowing. Speaking of which, I told the tea lady to bring some proper cakes with her this time, so if we’re lucky we might end up with a dusty biscuit or two.”
“Right,” Stonehouse said. He put his hands on his blotter and pushed himself to his feet. “Right!”
He strode for the door.
But it wasn’t so much that they lost her, the deputy under-minister rather thought, as it was that she wasn’t quite worth all the trouble of keeping her around.
Stonehouse sat across from the deputy under-minister’s polished walnut desk and wondered if he was going mad. After more than two decades of visits with the King, it was not outside the realm of possibility.
The realm of possibility!
“I beg your pardon,” he said politely. “Not worth all the trouble?”
“Listen, old man.” The deputy under-minister leaned benignly over his clasped hands. “Of course this girl represents a significant event to you lot—er, to you. But a vagrant wandering into an historical site is hardly worth Special Branch’s time, now is it? When you compare it with all the other matters they have to keep abreast of. I mean, it’s only been two weeks since the miners were rioting in the south. Three policemen killed. Consider their priorities.”
“I beg your pardon. Did you say, historical site?”
The deputy under-minister blinked. “Well, obviously, an extremely significant one. Obviously. It’d have to be to have its very own department to manage its affairs!” He chuckled.
Stonehouse cleared his throat. Something rather odd was happening in the region of his heart. He felt strangely like laughing. “You are aware.” He stopped to clear his throat again. “You are aware, aren’t you, that the King still resides in his Palace?”
“Oh, well,” the deputy under-minister said uneasily.
“Currently resides,” Stonehouse said. “Presently, as it were, rather than historically?”
“Heh, heh, heh,” said the deputy under-minister.
Stonehouse blinked into space. One of them must be mad. He forced himself to lean back in his chair and return the man’s smile. “Heh, heh, heh,” he said. “But in any event, the girl has been, er, released?”
“Shuffled off on Housekeeping,” the deputy under-minister said with brisk relief. “If I were you, I’d go and have a chat with Albert Snow on the fifth floor.”
Her eyes were still pale green. Like the ghost of jade, he thought. They were heavenly when she smiled.
“Edmund!” she said, standing in the door to her room.
He was flummoxed. When Snow had given him the scrap of paper with the address of this boarding house by the river, he’d been convinced it was a mistake. Either that, or some bizarre joke of the Special Branch people. Perhaps they had spirited her away and concocted the story of her “release” as a cover. But no. When the landlady had opened the front door and he’d stammered something barely coherent, she had said blandly, “Oh, yes, they said someone from the Ministry would be along. Third floor, second door on the left, and go quietly on the stairs, there’s a dear, we’ve had the carpet up for the termite man and Mrs. Heather has the headache from the fumes.”
And the girl was here, and her eyes were green, and she knew his name.
“How,” he said. “How.”
She laughed and took his hand.
She wanted to go out, regardless of the bitter cold. The Ministry had provided her with a good wool coat and sturdy boots, which would have astonished Stonehouse if he hadn’t had all the surprise knocked out of him already. They walked along the Esplanade in the terrible still air and listened to the sounds the river made as it froze. He felt calm, attentive, and mysteriously at ease.
“Tell me how you got into the Palace,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
They both spoke quietly, every word freezing to an ice cloud in the dusk.
“I don’t remember anything from before the Palace. It’s a mad place. Oh, well, you know.” She smiled at him. “Not mad, but—”
“Bewildering.”
“Bewildering. Wildering.” She nodded. “Yes.”
There was a skinny strip of park between the pavement where they walked and the trafficked road. The trees planted there were sad, puny things in the summer, but now, with the streetlamps coming on, they cast a webwork of shadow across the way. Below, the congealing river steamed.
“Do you know how long you were there?”
“No. I’m sorry. The other men asked me all these questions, you know, but I couldn’t tell them either.”
“I’m the one who should apologize, plaguing you again. It’s only that those men you talked to don’t, er, communicate much to other departments.”
“Oh, I don’t mind talking to you, Edmund. I’m happy to talk to you.”
“Now look,” he said. “How do you know my name?”
“That’s what He calls you. Haven’t I got it right?”
There was no question who He was.
“Yes, quite right. But you see, I don’t know what to call you. Have you got a name?”
“He calls me Ivy.” She paused. “Is that a proper name?”
“It’s a very nice name.” Stonehouse thought this sounded absurd, like an unaccustomed uncle speaking to his niece. He hurried on, stumbling a little over his words. “Did you, did you speak with him often? The King?”
“No. Not often. No. But he—don’t you find?—he speaks to you in his dreams.”
Stonehouse recalled the leaves turned to pages and nodded.
“Sometimes I felt as if he were showing me stories, or even expla
ining things to me, explaining his dreams with his dreams, or trying to teach me some of what he knows. I think he must know everything, don’t you?”
He nodded again, but more slowly. “What sort of things did he tell you?”
“Oh, I never understood them.” She laughed. “How could I comprehend the dreams of a god who has slept for a thousand years?”
“Not quite a god,” Stonehouse murmured, “and rather closer to four hundred.”
“I remember the bees, and the room that has a window on the sun. I remember the blue ghosts of mist and birds, and the spiral staircase that echoes the sea, and the sound of a spider creeping over bone.” She shivered. “I might be able to show you what they mean, but I could never tell you. I don’t think his sense is the kind that can be made to fit into words.”
She shivered again and Stonehouse realized she must be cold. He put his arm awkwardly around her shoulders, and as he turned her back toward the boarding house and her room he found he understood why Special Branch had let her go. To anyone who had never been inside the Palace she must sound entirely, though harmlessly, insane.
But the following morning Stonehouse began to suspect there was rather more to it than that. When he went upstairs to present his annual report to the Finance Committee, he found the deputy under-minister who had called the King’s Palace an “historical site” chatting with the accountants over tea.
Autumn has been invaded by the relics of an imagined history. Ivy, brown and sullen green, twines through huge blocks of (perhaps) machinery. The objects, some of them big as railway cars, are complex and have a sense of purpose, of movement stilled, but rust and dying vegetation obscure what details age might have spared. The light is flat and gray, the air hangs heavy with silence, there is a stale smell of fungus and bracken dust. Clinging remnants of vines give the appearance of cracks and incipient collapse to the distant walls. Stonehouse nearly bows under the apparent weight of time.
On his last visit, he was the Seeker. Today, he is the Wanderer. There is no path, only the shifting geography of the Palace and the dream. He becomes uneasy. It is too quiet, too still. How is it possible for the King—font of chaos, spinner of dreams—to encompass this entropy, this end of ends? Death, Stonehouse knows, is within the King’s province. He has been the Quarry. He has lived the hunt. The King’s death is a fury, a rendering, a celebration, even. Not this pitiless waning. It is neither cold nor warm, but Stonehouse is prickling with sweat and he sheds his overcoat and carries it over his arm. He feels as if he has been here for many dry hours, but there is still no sign that the King cares, or even knows, that he is here. He comes to a wide staircase strewn with ivy trash and bits of bone and wearily climbs.
Everywhere are the huge blunt remnants of this arcane machine. As he paces out the corridors, he begins to realize a kind of pattern to the objects’ placement. It is almost as if, within the matrix of the Palace’s architecture, they define the lines of another structure altogether. An interlocking marriage of the Palace with this broken, tumbled, purposeless thing. He does not understand, but he is stifled. He begins to forget what it is he hoped to discover here. How could it be possible that the King who dreams this dream should have an answer to any question that touches upon the futures of the living? Even this question falls flat in Stonehouse’s mind. The King has never spoken of things outside his dreams. Why has Stonehouse come? He is sure he had a reason—
Footsore and miserable with thirst, he finds the well. It is in the center of a courtyard or room, difficult to tell which. Hulking upright pieces crowd the walls and weave dead vines into a canopy that obscures the blank ceiling or sky. Stonehouse steps cautiously toward the wide mouth of blackness in the floor. The place is profoundly oppressive. The air is so dry it seems to spark as he moves, as he breathes. He shuffles through dead leaves to the edge and looks down.
He cannot judge the well’s depth. The mouth is wide enough to swallow his office entire, so the figure at the bottom is either huge or a long way down, as it spans the circular floor. Perspective, perception provide no clues.
Stonehouse does not understand the dread, the terror, the despair that come upon him now. His flesh has gone to morbid dust.
The figure is supine, stiff-limbed, and draped in a coverlet of pale cobwebs that seem to draw light into the well. Stonehouse’s vision falls, a strange ocular vertigo that plunges him into intimacy. Webs cling to hair and skin that can only be glimpsed between strand and dusty strand. The details paralyze with their clarity—brittle curve of eyelash, crease of knuckle, arch of rib—yet they cannot be bound together into a whole. Presence without identity. Stonehouse quivers, on the verge, on the brink. The King does not dream men, so this must be he—and yet Ivy was here—and yet, she is not a dream, so this must be the King, and yet, and yet, the King cannot be dead. The King cannot be dead. Whose dream could this be if it were not the King’s? And yet, the King does not dream of men.
Stonehouse shakes, he shudders, he gasps for air. The weight of time has become a pressure as of oceans and seas. Dry oceans, dry seas. The broken machine has resurrected its power, and its purpose is to drive Stonehouse down. Down his vision plummets and he sees the grain of the spider’s silk, he sees the infinitesimal mote of dust caught on the end of a hair, and choking on panic he runs, runs, leather soles sliding on polished marble, runs for the stairs.
The slam of the door broke a flat echo across the forecourt’s cobblestones, a shock of sound, of life, of cold that burned Stonehouse’s lungs and froze the chill sweat on his skin. He shivered convulsively, his body clenching around the last of his heat. He had lost his overcoat in his flight. The terrible winter air enveloped him as if it meant to consume him, but he did not move from the Palace doorstep. Not yet. He had to draw his mind back from the edge of that well of dust. He had to find his balance. He had to wake into the real world again.
The marks of the Ritual of Abrogation on the courtyard’s floor were vague beneath a crystalline dusting of hoarfrost. Beyond the timbered gate a car’s engine rumbled. He shuddered, coughing on the cold, and realized that if he waited until he was ready, he would be dead.
He was too preoccupied to take much notice of the stares and whispers that trailed him through the Ministry’s corridors, but when he arrived at his department Brookland, at the desk in his icebox of an anteroom, frankly gaped.
“Well?” Stonehouse gave his assistant a look that all but dared him to mention the state he was in.
“Yes, sir. That is to say, there’s a message from the Minister’s office.” Brookland glanced at Stonehouse’s hair and unconsciously smoothed a hand over his own. “The, er, the Minister requested your presence in his office at a quarter past two. That was,” he checked his wrist, “nearly two hours ago. His secretary keeps ringing to ask where you are.”
The Minister. Stonehouse was blank. To give himself a moment to think he pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket. A large gray wolf spider scampered across his thumb and dropped on a thread to the floor. After a moment, Stonehouse put the watch away without looking at the time and brushed off the silk.
“I see,” he said. “Any notion as to what the Minister wants?”
“No, sir. Only—” Brookland shifted his weight in his chair. “Only I ate lunch with Nobby Finch from personnel and he was asking me if I’d given any thought to what other departments I might,” he cleared his throat, “be interested in giving a go.”
Stonehouse met Brookland’s eyes. “I see,” he eventually said.
“Probably just idle curiosity, on Finch’s part, I mean, sir.”
“I should have said it sounds rather more like a warning from a friend.”
Brookland cleared his throat again.
“Well,” said Stonehouse. It was all dangerously unreal. “You might consider Customs and Excise. At least there you could see a bit of travel.”
“Actually, sir, my cousin says the force can always use another man with a degree. Even,” Brookland added with
an attempt at a grin, “a second in history.”
“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten you had a policeman in the family.”
“Yes, sir.”
“A detective, isn’t he?”
“Detective Inspector, yes, sir.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Well,” said Stonehouse again. “I suppose I’ve made the Minister wait long enough, don’t you think?”
“Look, sir—”
“Not to worry.” Stonehouse belatedly began combing his fingers through his hair and brushing down his suit. It was covered in dust and bits of leaf. “I’ve had a sort of a warning myself, truth to tell.”
“But they’re mad to do it, sir.”
“Oh, yes, quite mad.” said Stonehouse. “I’m sure there’ll be no end of trouble.”
“No end, sir.”
Stonehouse started out and then paused in the doorway. “As long as we’re still a department, Brookland, you might get on to Transport and wring an expenses chit out of them for a train ticket to Marblepool.”
Brookland reached for a memo pad and pen. “First class return?”
“Yes. And come to think of it, you might as well make it for two fares while you’re about it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stonehouse stepped into the corridor, but then stopped again. “And listen, Brookland. How’s your credit with your cousin the inspector? Is he likely to do you any favors?”
“If plied with a pint or two of stout, sir, yes, I should think he would.”
“Then get a description of the King’s visitor over to him and ask if it matches anyone listed as missing over the last several months.”
Brookland’s eyebrows crept up his forehead, but he just nodded and jotted another note. “Is it urgent, do you reckon, sir?”
“If you bought your cousin a pint tonight, it wouldn’t be too soon for me.”
“Right you are, sir.”
“Here.” Stonehouse reached into his pocket and fished out a coin. “Buy him one on me.”
He flipped the coin to his assistant, who was too startled by the small white moth that staggered in its wake to make a decent catch. The coin bounced off Brookland’s thumb and fell ringing to the floor.
In the Palace of Repose Page 2
