Gloaming

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘I am sleeping,’ said the voice.

  Margot tried for a cheerful note in her reply. ‘You seem to me to be awake enough for speech, Seigneur, and for the present that is all I ask.’

  There came not a wink of light, but somehow her eyes discerned movement anyway: a stirring of the shadows some way to her left, as of layers of darkness shifting and rearranging themselves.

  Night proved to be very tall.

  ‘I d-do apologise for disturbing your rest,’ stammered Margot, staring up in growing horror at the imposing figure now looming over her. Everything of him was darkness, from his skin to his long, long hair that writhed and wriggled like shadow itself. He had stars for eyes, and moths nested in his robes. He did not make her any reply, only tilted his head and perused her with faint curiosity.

  ‘I have not seen you before,’ he said, and then: ‘You are not of this Arganthael, I think.’

  ‘Correct!’ said Margot, relieved to arrive at something like normal conversation with such a being. And she told him the tale of her presence at Laendricourt, as briefly as she could, for what might become of the woman who managed to bore the Night?

  But he seemed interested, for he asked her a number of questions on some few points of detail; and when she got to the part about the mirrors, and Thandrian, and the sundering of their two worlds, she sensed that she had his attention.

  It was not too difficult, after that, to persuade him into joining in their scheme. ‘For,’ he said, ‘the bringing of night to Argantel is so dreary a duty, I have long left it to my deputies among the shadows. And they complain of it to me constantly.’

  Margot was a little mortified to hear this indictment of her home, but she would not argue with it. She wondered only what a true night might be like, were it brought by darkness itself, and no mere shadow. Perhaps she would soon find out.

  There was no sign of Ghislain in the passage, but a girl stood there, about six years old in appearance. She was wan and sickly-looking, though obviously hale enough, for she bounced forward to meet the Night with a becoming merriment. Stars drifted in the unearthly glow of her hair, and she wore a pale suit that looked like moonlight on clear water. ‘Adventure offers!’ she said with charming vagueness, and beamed an irresistible entreaty at the Night. ‘Father, say we may go!’

  To the delight of Moon, the Night agreed. ‘You must bring your toys along,’ he ordered.

  Moon gaped. ‘Toys! But this is an adventure!’

  ‘Yes, and for this particular adventure we will need your toys.’

  Moon sighed deeply, exasperated with the bizarre ideas of the Night. But she did as she was told, and when, presently, Margot returned upstairs attended by the Night and the Moon, they had also two mirrors in tow, the Moon handling both with the casual skill of a juggler.

  Oriane

  Walkelin was pleased to see Oriane.

  She was pleased, too, though perhaps more by the fact that she had succeeded in finding him at all. The neckcloth had been of some help, for it appeared to know its way back to its creator and master far better than Oriane. More than once she was prevented from turning the wrong way, by an odd tug upon her neck, or a faint, admonitory tightening around her throat. She was back in Walkelin’s presence sooner than she would have imagined possible, though to her disappointment he was alone; there was no sign of Mistral.

  ‘I come to return your neckcloth,’ she told him. ‘It has been most unhappy to be separated from you, I believe.’

  Walkelin accepted it with gratitude, handling it far more gently than either Oriane or Florian had. Oriane wondered guiltily whether it was more fragile even than it looked, and whether she had managed to return it in an inferior state.

  Walkelin saw nothing amiss, however, for he smiled upon it, and settled it back around his own neck with something like relief. It suited him better than it had her, though she thought that Florian had worn it with a certain rakish style that could not but appeal.

  The weaver was sharp, though, and sensed that Oriane’s explanation was insufficient. He watched her with an anticipatory smile, all attention.

  ‘Well,’ she said apologetically. ‘There is one other thing.’

  ‘Do, please, tell it all to me,’ he invited, and she did. She lingered longer than she ought on certain points of the tale — those relating to Pharamond and Thandrian, for example — and felt foolish, hurrying herself hastily on; but Walkelin’s regard only grew kinder, and he listened in attentive silence until she had finished.

  ‘Why, I shall be delighted to help you release poor Thandrian,’ he said then. ‘It is sometimes lonely up here by myself, with only my clouds for company. I shall be glad of an outing.’

  Oriane wondered whether he had misheard, or whether she had failed to properly explain her errand. ‘We shall be very glad of your aid, of course,’ she said politely. ‘But I was sent here expressly to entreat your assistance in summoning the Sky. The Elements, you see, are the only ones who seem to be able to handle the mirrors anymore—’ She broke off, for Walkelin rendered the rest of her speech unnecessary. He closed his blue eye, leaving only the opaque, pearly one open, and winked this second eye at her.

  And there was a mirror floating in mid-air, a round sheet of glass that rippled like rain. It got away from him at once, writhing like an eel, but he soon had hold of it again. Little could long withstand the stare of that eye, least of all Oriane.

  ‘You are the Sky,’ she breathed, mortified. ‘Great goodness, I am sorry!’

  He opened the blue eye again, and the pressure of his gaze eased. ‘I try to keep it quiet,’ he explained. ‘Or they might not let me Fashion as much as I like. We Elements are not meant to busy ourselves with what they consider the “mundane”, you see. What am I to do all day, otherwise? It is all very well to recline upon my clouds, drinking mist-tea and supping upon raindrop-ices, but it does grow wearisome.’

  He said all this with a twinkle, and Oriane did not know whether he was telling her the truth, or teasing her. If the latter, she had doubtless deserved it. She was pink at the cheek, but since the Sky did not seem to be offended with her, she ventured on.

  ‘You are… do you have any more of those mirrors to hand?’

  ‘They are never to hand,’ said Walkelin, looking vaguely about as though one might be seen at any moment. ‘But they are often somewhere underfoot. I imagine we will soon discover more, if I put my mind to it.’

  ‘Or your eye,’ Oriane murmured.

  His smile widened. ‘That, as well.’

  Oriane found it difficult to meet Pharamond’s eye, upon her return to the ballroom. She was glad that Walkelin was disposed to talk. He greeted Pharamond as an old friend — which indeed they were, she soon realised. She heard enough in a short time to learn that Pharamond, too, had been a Fashioner in his Arganthael days, and to suspect that he was in the secret of Walkelin’s real identity already.

  He tried twice to speak to her, but she busied herself with keeping her eye on the mirrors, and was not obliged to hear. Several mirrors followed in Walkelin’s wake, in a state of great protest; Walkelin had to turn about, and fix them with a quelling glare from his milk-white eye, before they would settle down for a time, and glide along in some semblance of obedience.

  ‘If you are ready?’ said Pharamond. ‘Everyone else is already gone back, and so we will go in together.’

  He had secured a corner of the ballroom for his own use during their absence. The dancers had drifted away, and aside from a few scattered knots of revellers still engaged in conversation, the great room was empty.

  Pharamond’s mirror was pinned like a butterfly to the wall, writhing in protest. Walkelin silenced it with a look, though it continued to quiver in outrage. A moment’s work with the painting was enough to flood its surface with a vision of Thandrian’s clock room, and Oriane was encouraged to go first.

  In she went.

  The room was crowded. She bumped into Florian the moment she emerged from the mirror,
and someone else immediately jostled her from behind — Walkelin, perhaps, or Pharamond. She got out of the way as fast as she could, and let her eye run around the room, taking note of everyone who was there. She saw Margot and Ghislain and Sylvaine, and had no difficulty in discerning which of the various Elements there assembled were the Sun, the Rain, the Moon and the Night. Rozebaiel was there, and Mistral.

  They had formed a tight circle around the clock, and each faced outwards. The walls were covered in mirrors again, though they had not taken up their old positions with any glad spirit; they twitched and shuddered, writhed and muttered, and did their level best to jump off the walls again and slither away. It took the combined efforts of all the Elements to keep them in place.

  Walkelin’s several — augmented further by the one they had just come through themselves — slunk away to fill the remaining empty spaces upon the walls, and there! The mirror-chamber was itself again, bright with brittle glass.

  It did not take long for a feeling of great energy to build in the room, and the mirrors did not like that either. They babbled and twittered, and one of them cracked in half.

  ‘Quickly, now!’ Pharamond’s voice rose above the noise that the mirrors made. ‘This is most unstable, and will not hold for long.’

  Oriane was unsure what was meant to happen next, and so was everyone else, for nobody moved or spoke, until at last Walkelin did. He spoke to Oriane alone, in an undertone she was convinced no one else was meant to hear.

  ‘Thandrian will need help,’ he said, ‘and I think it had better be you. You are the one she summoned, are you not?’

  But Sylvaine had already stepped forward, slipping between Night and Moon in order to reach the clock. She placed both hands against it. ‘I do not know what you need of me, Mother, but anything I may do for you will be done in an instant.’

  The clock chimed.

  Sylvaine said, through gritted teeth, ‘I insist.’

  Then she flickered, and was gone.

  Pharamond gave a cry of horror, and leapt forward, but too late. No sign remained of his daughter; she was gone into the clock, like her mother before her.

  Oriane gathered her resolve. ‘I shall go, too,’ she said, and before anybody could stop her — or decline even to try, her mind insisted on whispering — she did. She needed only to press her fingers to the clock’s smooth, polished wood, and the mirror-room vanished. She was somewhere else.

  Thandrian had grown older.

  The vision of herself she had shown to Oriane was as she had been prior to her imprisonment. She was older than Oriane now, her dark hair liberally sprinkled with white, her face lined with years and cares. She sat alone in the centre of another room much like the mirror-chamber, only this one was so cluttered its shapes or proportions were difficult to guess at. Furniture was stacked up in all the corners, gilded velvet chairs lying crooked under side-tables, or balanced precariously atop chests-of-drawers with half the handles missing. The floor was covered in too many rugs all piled up atop one another, their many colours clashing. Lights glimmered from sconces upon the walls, and lamps hung from the ceiling, but only some of these were functional; many had gone dark.

  Thandrian sat atop a towering stack of threadbare carpets as though it were a throne, her back very straight, her chin high. She had all the grace of a queen, though there was a tightness about her mouth and a hard glitter about her eyes. When she looked upon her daughter for the first time in decades, she sat straighter still, and became outright imperious.

  ‘This is the last place of all that I should wish to see you!’ she cried.

  ‘And it is the last of all places I should wish to see you,’ retorted Sylvaine, uncowed. ‘Father thinks the same, and how are we to get you out if we all refuse to come in?’

  ‘I am long since resigned to my fate! I only wish to reverse yours, and your father’s. Help me in that, and then go away.’

  Sylvaine folded her arms. ‘What a pretty display of martyrdom! But it will not do.’

  Thandrian swelled with rage, and opened her mouth to make some blistering retort. But Oriane judged it best to intervene.

  ‘Pray excuse me,’ she said, as mildly but as firmly as she could. ‘Had we not better hurry on with mending Argantel, and then decide upon the rest later? The Elements are outside, and they are having no easy time with the mirrors.’

  Thandrian deflated again, though reluctantly. She narrowed her eyes at Sylvaine, but let pass whatever she had planned to say. ‘The matter ought to be simple,’ she said. ‘But somehow I cannot get the right thread, or the needle will not properly obey me. I can’t think how it is, but I have never managed to stitch up the rift.’

  Something about the room had struck Oriane as odd, but it took her until that moment to realise what it was. One half of the room was a near perfect reflection of the other, divided upon a neat line down the middle. The reflection was not exact, for the jumbles of chairs in the corners were not quite the same on each side, and the rugs sported varying patterns and colours across the divide. But that, she realised, was not a bad representation of Argantel and Arganthael themselves.

  The rift Thandrian spoke of was a long, straight line cut through all the rugs. It ran under Thandrian’s carpet-throne, and it had been messily darned with thick, clumsy stitches.

  ‘What is this place?’ said Oriane.

  ‘It is my refuge,’ said Thandrian.

  Oriane thought she understood. Thandrian had built this room for herself; it was a product of her own mind, in some odd way, and represented her visualisation of the problem. When something was broken, it must be mended, and perhaps she had been handy with a needle, once.

  But the solution she had chosen was either misapplied, or she indeed lacked the power to carry it off.

  Oriane was still perusing the badly-mended tear in the carpets when Pharamond appeared.

  ‘Oh!’ said Thandrian in exasperation. ‘That is just what was needed!’

  Sylvaine was not more pleased to see her father. ‘You should have done this about thirty years ago,’ she told him.

  Pharamond looked from daughter to wife in silence, unable, apparently, to speak.

  Oriane took pity on him.

  ‘Pharamond,’ she said. ‘You must come and look at this, if you please. It is a clever idea, but I do not think it will answer. Do you?’

  Quietly, Pharamond joined Oriane. He needed only one glance at his wife’s intricate labours to agree with Oriane’s assessment of it. ‘No, indeed. Even supposing the tear could be properly mended—’ and he ignored Thandrian’s noise of indignant protest — ‘there would always be a split here, and the two halves would only ever be joined together, not made whole.’ He straightened again, and looked upon Thandrian with wonder tinged with perplexity. ‘Is that how you managed the Gloaming, my love? Stitched everything together at the edges, and left the mirrors to it?’

  ‘I hoped it would one day suffice,’ said Thandrian, no longer angry; all the rage had gone out of her, leaving her drooping with exhaustion. ‘If they must reflect, well then, let them reflect some of each land back upon the other! I had hoped it might all balance itself out somehow, even if the rift could not be mended.’

  ‘All this had better come out,’ said Oriane, and began to unlace the stitches. Sylvaine helped, and soon the carpets lay once again neatly sundered.

  ‘Perhaps if you did not think of it as carpets,’ Oriane suggested to Thandrian. ‘Something more easily made whole?’

  The carpets dribbled away into the floor, and instead a map appeared, a precise drawing inked upon wood. It was split into two halves by a river that ran down the middle, and it seemed to Oriane that the river — only ink and wood though it was — sparked briefly with the same brittle brilliance as the mirrors. They made a hostile line down the centre of what had once been only Arganthael, reflecting bits of each divided half back upon the other, if imperfectly: light into shadow and vice versa, magic upon the magicless. Far from deriding Thandrian’
s efforts, she was moved to applaud her. How had she managed to so far regulate this effect as to confine it to a specific hour of the day? She had not been strong enough to make everything right, but that by no means made her weak.

  ‘Water!’ said Oriane. ‘A thing easily tamed and directed. We might remove it with hardly an effort, I think.’

  But though Thandrian had now three supporters to draw upon, as well as the magics mustered by the Elements and their mirrors outside, she could not coax away the water. It ran on, heedless of her wishes, and the two halves remained sundered by it.

  The waters filled Oriane’s mind, glinting maliciously, and a mirror wriggled in the depths.

  ‘The mirrors,’ said Sylvaine. ‘They aren’t a help. They are in the way. Is there… Mama, is there something wrong with them?’

  ‘They did change,’ said Thandrian, frowning. ‘After the… accident. They became recalcitrant. They fought me, all the time! It has been terribly hard to keep them in any order, and I know they have done things they ought not. Things behind my back, that I never instructed.’

  ‘Dragging people over the divide and swapping them about,’ said Oriane. ‘Like Pharamond and Ghislain.’

  ‘And lately Oriane and Rozebaiel,’ said Sylvaine. ‘Florian and Mistral.’

  Thandrian growled something. ‘I strengthened the bonds, after… after Pharamond. And it worked, for a time. But then I… well, I grew tired.’

  ‘Thirty years,’ whispered Sylvaine. ‘No wonder you did.’

  ‘Has it been thirty?’ Thandrian blinked vaguely at her husband’s face, and then her adult daughter’s, and her own face fell. ‘Yes. I see that it has.’

  Oriane remembered winding up the clock, and saw the act in a new light. ‘They got away from you again, did they not?’ she said. ‘The mirrors. They’ve been tangling everything up more and more, like… like a knotted ball of yarn.’

  An appalling thought occurred to her, and apparently, in the same moment, to Sylvaine. Their eyes met, Sylvie’s wide with horror. For a moment, Oriane could not speak.