said, “except the slightest bit of revenge, a mere trifle
compared to the harm you have done me. Follow me.”
Eyebrows raised, still disbelieving he might cheat death,
Carter paced after the brute to the nearest corner of the attic.
“See what I did to your friend.”
Carter staggered as the lantern light revealed a tangled
mass of flesh and bone on the floor. The face and body were
unrecognizable, but the coat and hat he knew well.
“Jonathan,” he whispered, the blood draining from his
face. He averted his eyes, feeling faint.
“The person formerly known as Jonathan, yes. He was
always nothing; I simply made his outward form conform to
his true image. Shall I tell you of his agonized screams when
his flesh was seared; shall I relate the details of his bloody
wounds; shall I tell of his rasping, final breaths?”
Carter trembled, struggling, as the tears rolled down his
cheeks, to keep from being sick. Yet even through his shock
and sorrow, he was still the Master. He had a duty for the good
of Evenmere to understand what had occurred. He drew a deep
breath, steeling himself. “The third question. Why did you kill
him?”
“Because he displeased me.”
“That is an evasion! I am the Master of Evenmere and you
must answer!”
Jormungand stamped a massive foot, making Carter and
the attic boards jump.
“He sacrificed himself to seal me into this accursed
prison.”
Carter bowed his head, his hand over his eyes. “I want to
take his body for proper burial.”
“No. The prey of Jormungand is not to be touched. You
have won, though I defeated you at every turn. I would have
made the entire universe a place of undying conflict, the slain
rising like the Vikings in Valhalla to battle again. It would
have been despair beyond imagining, glorious beyond hope.”
Carter drew a deep breath. “He was a hero to the end. I
should have known.”
“He was a fly buzzing around the face of a god. If his sting
momentarily annoyed me, it makes no difference. Someday I
will free myself again and have my way. Now get out. And
keep in mind, you worm, that you who were never anything
but a diversion for me have become my enemy; and
Jormungand will have his vengeance.”
Carter’s voice turned deadly cold. “You’ll have nothing of
the sort. You are the incarnation of Hate, and cannot despise
me any more than you already do. You are imprisoned again
and your threats are the empty bluster of a schoolyard bully.”
His three questions spent, Lord Anderson would learn no
more. Heartsick, knowing it was forever beyond his power to
avenge his friend, he turned his back on the dinosaur and
headed toward the stair, while Jormungand roared in fury
behind him, his flames lighting the whole attic.
Evenmere
The
memorial
service
for
Jonathan
Thaddeus
Bartholomew was the largest funeral gathering in the High
House in many years. For two weeks, a line of mourners
stretched down the Long Corridor, as thousands came to pay
their respects before the empty casket. The service was filled
to overflowing. The grand rulers of Evenmere attended, but
there were even more bee-keepers and burnishers, blacksmiths
and housemaids, constables and firemen, the everyday people
of the great house, whom Storyteller had touched.
Following the service, the Anderson family, accompanied
by William Hope, gathered in the drawing room of the Inner
Chambers. A fly buzzed among the seraphs and flowering
festoons; Jason played with his wooden soldiers beneath the
French mirrored console. Duskin, sitting beside Lizbeth,
stroked her injured hand. Since her return from Deep Machine,
he had kept scarcely a foot from her. The windows were open
and the air was still.
Carter had experienced his share of sorrow, but had
forgotten, as mortals always hasten to forget, the sheer pain of
grief—the knot in the belly, the rising pressure, the need to be
alone to weep. He had known Jonathan only a short time; the
depth of the loss surprised him.
“I am astonished by the stories told of him,” Sarah said,
seated in a high-backed chair, sipping tea from a porcelain
cup. “Not just from the podium. He must have been a great
man. I wish I had met him. I certainly misjudged him.”
“We had only hearsay to go by,” Mr. Hope said, “and what
I read in the records. He was so long-lived. His passing is a
great loss.”
“He saved my life,” Carter said. “He saved us all.”
“He was a steady rock,” Lizbeth said. “A lighthouse in the
midst of the sea. His voice was deep and wonderful—you
should have heard him speak.”
“And his stories,” Duskin said. “The way he encouraged
the men in the Tower of Astronomy.”
“One thing still troubles me,” Mr. Hope said. “I can’t
understand how the life of even so beloved a person could re-
imprison the dinosaur. Could I, for instance, have offered
myself with the same result?” The butler shivered. “It gives
me cold chills, just thinking of walking up those steps.”
“It’s one of the many mysteries of Evenmere, I suppose,”
Carter said. “Sometimes I worry that this is another of
Jormungand’s deceptions; that he isn’t really bound and is
biding his time before rising to do more mischief.”
Together, the company spoke of the ordeal they had faced,
of the poets and the anarchists, the Black Beast and the Circle
of Servants, the postman and the great mechanism that runs
the world. Most of all, they talked of the goodness and grace
of the man who had been Storyteller.
It was a wearing day, and toward evening Carter wandered
into the Yard seeking peace. As the sun set through ragged
clouds fired with purple and orange, he strolled back and forth,
pondering. So much had happened, much of it
incomprehensible.
As the sky darkened to that point where sight becomes
vague and shadows grow thick with meaning, he strolled to the
northwest corner. Atop the wall, as on each of the four corners,
stood a statue of an angel with a drawn longbow. Carter
watched the first stars appear. He spied Venus in the east, and
thought of the telescopes of Edwin Phra.
After a time, a soft humming came to his ears. He turned
back toward the Yard, straining his eyes to see. The sound
seemed to emanate from the porch. Was that dark shape
beneath the shadows of the eaves the figure of a man?
Instinctively, he reached for his Lightning Sword before
remembering it was gone. He raised a Word of Power to his
mind and stepped forward. As he drew near, he realized the
form was a statue of Jonathan, carved from a stone the color of
bronze.
He hesitated. The resemblance was imp
eccable.
The stone minstrel raised his head and looked at Carter
with topaz eyes. “Good evening, Master Anderson.”
Carter drew back, startled. “Jonathan?”
“I have been called that.” Storyteller’s voice, resonating
from his rock chest, was even deeper than before.
“Is it really you? Jormungand said—I saw the body. I—”
“That’s right. I am very glad you escaped the old dragon’s
wiles. I would have warned you, but I wasn’t quite myself
before you reached the attic. Jormungand’s entertainments are
not comfortable. Not comfortable at all.”
“Did you—did he really—”
“Kill me? With great deliberation. Now don’t you stand
there with that hangdog look, Master Anderson. We have been
friends, haven’t we? I’m just a little changed, a little more
durable. Come shake my hand.”
Laughing, half-weeping, half-afraid, Carter did so.
Jonathan’s stone palm felt smooth and warm. But as he gazed
into the minstrel’s eyes, Carter shivered at the way they never
blinked.
“We have been friends,” Carter said. “Good friends, I
think. You a better friend to me. Is the dinosaur truly caged
again?”
“He is,” Jonathan’s old smile broke through his stone
features. “He most surely is.”
“But how? And who are you, really. More than a traveling
minstrel. I’ve always known that. The Face we saw at Deep
Machine?”
“No, that was someone else. It is impossible for me to go
through the Eye Gate into the next realm. Lizbeth had to tell
me what happened there. My guess is the one you saw is a
servant just like us, you—who are called Master—me, Chant,
Enoch, the lively Mr. Hope, the members of the Servants’
Circle.”
Carter stared, trying to fathom, but Jonathan laughed, a
sound like laughter reflecting off canyon walls.
“Let’s rest our feet awhile,” Jonathan said, beckoning the
Master to a bench beside the stone well in the midst of the
Yard.
Carter hesitated, caution overcoming his astonishment. If
this were some sort of trick, the creature was strong enough to
crush him bare-handed. As they sat together in the dusk, he
kept the Word Which Manifests close to his lips.
“I came because you need to understand what happened,”
the minstrel said, “because it might help you some time in the
future. Besides, I didn’t want to leave you hanging without
knowing the rest of the story. I do so love to tell stories.”
That, at least, sounded like the old Jonathan. “Go on,”
Carter said.
“Do you remember the tale I told about the beginning of
the High House? How Evenmere woke into a universe filled
with nothing but gray mist? How time began and the earth
formed beneath its foundations? How the animals and people
appeared? But the house couldn’t speak to them?”
“I remember.”
“Do you remember what you said?”
“I said the story must be false, because if the house
couldn’t speak, it couldn’t tell us the tale.”
“And you were exactly right. But there is more to that
story, Master Anderson. You see, it made the old house mighty
sad to be so silent. It was all boards and stone beneath sleepy
rafters. Evenmere wanted to speak. It wanted to understand the
people living under its eaves.
“One day, a messenger came to the house, one such as the
Face you saw, who knew how to talk to the house in a way
both could understand. Evenmere’s silent request had been
heard, and it was granted a marvelous gift. A form of flesh and
blood that could speak, that could go running around inside
that grand mansion, walking inside itself, clicking his heels
and talking to everybody, learning what he could about his
inhabitants, giving encouragement where he might. And he
learned to tell stories, Lord Anderson, stories that see into the
heart.”
Carter flushed. “Are you saying that you—”
Jonathan ran his hand along the edge of the well. “I have
been called Storyteller, and Minstrel, and Old Vagabond, the
Wanderer, Runemaker, and the Singer. But the name least used
that describes me best … is Evenmere.”
Carter stared into the statue’s open, honest face. “I don’t
understand. A metaphor …”
“I am Evenmere, Master Anderson. I am the High House.
You have heard the house chooses its Masters, though you
haven’t always believed it. Well, I was the one who chose you,
as I did your father before you. I was the one who shifted my
walls to guide you to the Eye Gate.”
Carter struggled to marshal his thoughts. “How can a man
be a house?”
“You are both a father and a son, a husband and a brother,
Master of Evenmere, and a child orphaned into the world for
fourteen years. I was both the house and the man. A wandering
minstrel and the mansion that serves as the mechanism to
regulate the universe. It is simple enough.”
Carter gave an acrid laugh. “Nothing is simple! Why, if
what you say is true, why couldn’t you have prevented
everything that happened—controlled the anarchists,
destroyed the poets?”
“I am not all-powerful. I control very little. I am a house. I
do what I can to protect those within my keeping, but am
limited by a strict moral code. I never kill, not even to protect
my own existence. I try never to cause harm, though that is
more difficult. Every action has ramifications.”
“You were the one who gave Lizbeth access to the Book of
Forgotten Things,” Carter said. “Hope told me the door was
found unlocked.”
“Just as I previously rearranged my passages to bring her
to the Inner Chambers, where I thought she might be most
needed. I feared you wouldn’t survive, and at this time Lizbeth
is my choice for your replacement. She is, as I told you, a
remarkable woman. Whether she will become Mistress of
Evenmere, only time and circumstances will tell.”
“We couldn’t have won through without her.”
“She was my one hope for the Inner Chambers when it
vanished,” Jonathan said. “That was a terrible ordeal for me.
Changing my passages causes me great physical pain, and I
only do so in direst need. To have a part torn from me is like
you having an arm cut off.”
“Why didn’t you lead me to Deep Machine earlier? You
must have known.”
Storyteller shook his head. “I did not know. Mine was a
dual mind, not an infinite one. There were the thoughts of
Jonathan Bartholomew and those of Evenmere. As the house, I
can shift my focus from one place to another, but can
concentrate on only one thing at a time, just like you. I hear
much that goes on within me, but not everything. Think of it
this way, Master Anderson: if your elbow itches, you notice it.
But a thousand things happen in your flesh and bones without
/>
your knowing. I have the advantage of being able to look into
my own veins—my halls and passageways—but most of my
thoughts are those of a house, all creaking boards and fading
paint.
“As for Deep Machine, I didn’t know anything about it,
not even its name, until I read of it within The Book of Lore .
Myriad are my doors and portals and I can no more know
every one of them than you can name the cells of your body.
Besides, people are always changing the names of things, so I
didn’t recognize the name of the Eye Gate. The book gave me
enough clues to allow me to find it. There are many doors
within me that lead Out, beyond myself. To me, they are only
exits. I cannot pass through them and never know where they
go.”
“When did you have the chance to read The Book of Lore
?”
“As I once told you, it seemed strange that I had never
heard of a volume that had supposedly been around for
centuries. My house-self began searching for it. When at last I
found it, I realized I needed to examine it more closely with
my human faculties. That portion of me which is a house has a
wholly different sense of vision and touch, and no perception
of smell; Evenmere could not see the book the same way as
Storyteller. That was why I left you so abruptly at Opo. The
moment I saw it, I knew Jormungand was behind it—it reeked
of that wily lizard. It told how Deep Machine could be used to
change reality. I had never thought even the old dragon could
be that ambitious, but I knew that must be his final goal.”
“But you did know Jormungand was behind it,” Carter
insisted. “You discouraged me from visiting him. Why, you
blocked the halls and prevented my going!”
“At that point I only suspected. This had the marks of that
old bag of bones. Still, I couldn’t quite wrap my verandas
around it until I actually saw the book. As Storyteller, I could
only travel as fast as any other man, and was too far away to
guide you to the Eye Gate—time was short; the Black Beast
and the doctor were nearly there, so I changed my halls to lead
you to it. Jormungand can never succeed forever, but had he
managed to alter the nature of the universe, other, greater
sacrifices would have been required at levels beyond our
understanding to make it right. That would have taken time—
Evenmere (The Evenmere Chronicles Book 3) Page 43
