“One. There is not going to be a war unless he starts it.
“Two. If he moves troops or taloi in the vicinity of Mount Olympus, dons purple, dons a coronet, or attempts to wield the lightning, or claims the throne in any other way, that will start the war.
“Three. He will lose any war he fights with me. Do you understand the message?”
Her voice was demure. “Yes, my Lord, I understand.” I moved my head so I could see her again. She had lowered her eyelashes, and turned her head to one side, so that she looked dream-caught, breathtakingly lovely. There was a blush rising in her cheeks.
I knew what she was thinking, which I don’t think any guy, listening to her, would have known: she liked having Mavors give her orders.
Mavors was staring at her profile, trying to keep his face a mask. But I could see, even from here, the wonder in his eyes. He was dumbstruck at her beauty.
He squinted, and spoke again. “You can tell him one other thing. The Uranians are not going to wait forever. I am not going to wait forever. All he has to do is foreswear his claim to the throne, and vow fealty to me. I get the world; he gets you. I think it’s an even trade. You tell him that.”
He turned and, with a swirl and flap of his long coat, strode from the room.
8
The Azure Light
1.
Things began to go wrong at that point.
Boggin and some of the others wanted to continue the meeting. The Lady Cyprian listened to the school business with growing absentmindedness, toying with her mirror, chatting with her handmaidens, giggling while other people were talking.
Mr. ap Cymru made a motion to put a topic on the agenda: Miss Daw (who was the physics teacher as well as being the music teacher) wanted funds to renovate the lab. “It is her opinion that a time will come when the hostages will occupy positions of strength and sovereignty if ever they are returned to their own people. She says…” (and now he read from a note) “ ‘Whether these Orphans of Chaos will regard us with hatred and contempt, or with respect and esteem relies entirely on how well we raise and educate them. A proper schooling in grammar and gymnastic being the foundation for the growth of virtue and character in the young, and knowledge of music, astronomy, and natural philosophy having a moderating effect on the appetitive passions of youth, it is the considered opinion of the servants of the Hippocrene Springs that proper equipment for a physics lab will allow such instruction to take place…’ Ah. And she goes on in like vein.”
The Satyr, Pherespondus, said, “She has been playing the role of a teacher for so long, now she thinks she is one!”
Mr. Sprat mentioned briefly another item he wanted put on the agenda: the property tax owed, the possibility of selling certain school property to raise funds, or using enchantment to hypnotize the Talbot family into paying.
Apparently some of the people and creatures sitting on the Lady Cyprian’s side of the table actually were Governors of the school. The metal men, the women in Greek togas, and the man with the metal eye, Brontes, were clearly her servants and hers alone. The headless man was a guest, but he spoke about donations from someone he called “the Lord of Wealth.” He was a Visitor, then, since he was here to inspect how things were going; and he apparently had some control of school funds.
The man from Atlantis, Mestor, said he wanted to discuss the issue of the slip rental from the local marina, for the school’s boats, and difficulty with the new provisions of Crown regulation; this led me to believe he was clearly a Governor of the school.
One of the foxes—the white one—asked about discussing the question of easements through the wood to the south of the school, and saying there had been “impositions” and “slips” between the human and the “Arcadian” version of reality. I had been assuming the two foxes were in the same group, but the second one, the brown one, made a reference to his status as an emissary between the Lord of Smiths and the Nemeian Lion.
I could not tell which of the others were officers of the school, or not. My overall impression was that relations between these groups or factions or whoever they represented were even more complex than what had seemed at first.
As they were voting on the order of the agenda for the discussion, the Lady Cyprian stood and expressed the desire to have the dance, now. “I’ve come all this way,” she said. “And dances are so romantic!”
Only Boggin had the nerve to speak back to her. “My Lady, how can we hold a dance? Nothing has been prepared. The Boundary Stone Table occupies the Hall; there is no music; and Milord Mavors has marred the floor.”
She stood up, with an expression filled with nothing but kindness. “I have expressed my wish. It is said I am capricious; nothing could be further from the truth; although, alas, the nature of my domain renders it impossible for me to tell those who will enjoy my favor or disfavor what Fate has in keeping for them. It is not for my own pleasure that I speak.”
I knew what she meant. I saw it immediately. She was the goddess of love. Someone’s True Love was in this room, but he would not meet her, or realize that she was the one and only meant for him, unless the formal atmosphere of the meeting gave way to the more relaxed festivities of something like a dance.
Nor could she, Cyprian, merely point her fingers at the two people involved and say, “You are matched with her!” Nothing could be less romantic than that. It would be worse than having your mother pick your dates for you.
The two nymphs and the three Graces were thinking the same thing I was. They were looking at the men around the table speculatively, wondering whom the Lady had in mind. I could see the girl with the bow, Euphrosyne, looked especially doubtful. I saw her glance at the headless man, the man made out of wood, and the Satyr.
Of the men, it was the two in business suits who seemed to catch on the quickest to what was being implied.
The one with the cell phone said, “I move a temporary adjournment, Mr. Chairman. We can resume once a little bit of festive… ah… festivity has cleared the air of lingering doubts.”
The Atlantian, Mestor, was looking speculatively at the Graces in the flowing togas, the nymphs in their nudity. He spoke up, “I second the motion.”
Without waiting for a vote or any sign of consent, the other man in a business suit, the one who had been typing on his laptop computer, stood and said, “I can clear the Boundary Stone Table out of the way. I cannot manifest my true shape in this paradigm, but I am sure the table will allow my powers to work, here.”
He opened his coat and a billow of opaque mist flowed out from his chest. A stream of smoke arched across the table. Other little puffs of smoke separated from the main mass and moved to positions at various points around the circumference.
I nudged Quentin, whispering, “Look at this.”
Hands came out of the cloud: first ten, then a score, then more. The many arms were all dressed as the man’s original pair, with a foot of pressed blue pinstripe coat sleeve showing, and an inch of white cuff, gold cufflinks and all. Most of the left hands wore rings, but not all. Many of the right hands wore expensive gold watches of various makes and models.
The hands reached down and grabbed the table at half a hundred points around the circumference. People and creatures rose with alarm from their seats and backed away as the hands tensed. The man in the suit braced his feet and grunted.
The giant table, which had taken workmen with pulleys and dollies hours to haul into place, was picked up by the sixty or seventy disembodied hands, lifted lightly into the air, and set on its side against one wall.
Quentin whispered, “He is sending the animal humors and motive spirits out from his arms and forming eidolons in midair to impersonate his hands, which he moves by virtue of those humors.”
I whispered back, “We are seeing a polydimensional effect. The real creature is four-dimensional; he is merely rotating more of his body into this time-space.”
The wooden man, meanwhile, stalked over to where the floorboards had been pie
rced by the javelin of the Soldier, stooped and ran his knotty twiggy fingers across the whole. When he rose, the splinters were mended back together, the floorboards were solid.
The Lady Cyprian said, “Music! Where is the Siren who played so lovingly when we first arrived? Where is Thelxiepia?”
Ap Cymru bowed toward her. “With your permission, Madame, I shall fetch her.”
The Lady turned to the headless man (who had tucked his head carefully under one arm when the table was yanked away), saying, “And will you favor us also with a song, master of all bards, sage of mysteries? I see you brought your instrument; surely, surely fate has treated you cruelly, but it was not I who treated you cruelly. You have no reason to scorn my plea.”
The severed head, riding in the crook of an elbow, looked wry. “Madame, it was love who enabled me to walk alive out of Hell; and, once I knew the secret pathways back to the world of daylight, even my murderesses could not keep me buried. My every song is devoted to you, now and ever. You, only you, make sorrows possible to bear.”
With his other hand he reached up and unslung his guitar.
I was curious to see how he would manage to strum and to finger a guitar while at the same time holding his head, but at that moment, the Lady Cyprian gestured upward, and I thought she was pointing straight at us.
Quentin and I shrank back. But all she said was: “Lights! The chandelier is too low for cavorting, especially should good Pherespondus jump and skip!”
The man in the blue robe floated up to the level of the balcony, light as a thistledown, his hair and shining cloak weightless and rippling in midair. Wings of azure were unfolding from his back, each feather the color of the summer sky, but apparently they were just for show, as he did not flap them but merely spread them out, like an eagle on a heraldic emblem.
By some miracle, he came up to the far side of the balcony, facing away from us and toward the pulley mechanism that controlled the chandelier chain. A cloud of opaque white smoke also billowed up from underfoot, and a dozen arms (clad in impeccable blue pinstriped suit sleeves with white cuffs) reached out of the smoke to give him a hand.
We crawled backward as quickly as silence allowed, and were in the alcove and up a dozen stairs before the winged man turned his head. At that point, there were tatters of cloud between him and us.
I say “crawled” but it was more like one long, carpet-hugging leap. The whole journey seemed to take only the moment between heartbeats and, considering how my heart was hammering at that time, that moment must have been a short one indeed.
We sat there, not breathing, waiting to hear if the winged man would raise the alarm. But the only noise that came was the rattling and groaning of the chandelier chain, as the massive iron frame of the lights was hauled upward.
2.
Quentin looked at me, then nodded toward the top of the stair, where the roof exit was. I nodded back. It was time to retreat.
He crept quietly up the stairs, gesturing for me to stay back.
I was furious when I saw him wave his hand behind his back at me. Me, two or three years his senior! It was somewhat patronizing of him to assume that, because I was the girl, I had to go second; and I knew he probably picked this moment because we dared not talk, so I could not question his silent order. He had also turned his head toward the exit above, so as not to notice my rude gesture by which I answered him.
And I wasn’t going to push past him on the narrow stair; that might make a noise, too.
He squinted out into the night, looked around carefully. He actually—I am not kidding—he actually raised his walking stick like a periscope, and turned the little brass jackal head this way and that.
Then, satisfied, he rose to his feet and stepped out onto the roof.
Immediately, he seemed to explode with light. I blinked, dazzled. It was only a flashlight beam, but it had caught him from the knees up. From the angle, it looked as if the beam were coming from below, over the edge of the roof.
Quentin’s back and his left hand were still in shadow. He was blinking and raising his right hand to shield his eyes.
He extended his left hand toward me and dropped his walking stick. I caught it before it clattered on the stairs. Then with his now-empty left hand, Quentin pointed at me, and made a thumb gesture like a hitchhiker. Go back. Get away.
Dr. Fell’s voice came up from over the edge of the roof. “Well, well, if it is not our young Mr. Nemo. I was told to expect someone else, but I suppose you will do. Come down, young man! I am to take anyone I find to Headmaster Boggin’s office, but I suppose, since he is occupied, we may have time to visit the infirmary and discover from whence comes your amazing resistance to your medication. You are the last person I would expect to be able to negate my effects. I see certain magnetic anomalies around your person: these are merely material effects which material science has long since learned how to comprehend and negate. Observe.”
A beam of blue light from the ground came up over the edge of the roof. Quentin stood goggle-eyed at what he was seeing; the source of the blue light, I assume. There seemed to be little sparks or flickers of smaller particles flicking forward through the light, like dust motes. The beam played back and forth over Quentin.
By that point, one very quiet stair at a time, I had reached the bottom of the alcove again. There was a nook behind the potted plant where even someone standing on the balcony would not be able to see me.
I sat down there with my head down, clutching Quentin’s walking stick. I felt glad that I hadn’t been caught. That thought made me feel like a miserable coward.
I huddled into a smaller ball when, some minutes later (though it seemed like hours), I heard the happy talk and laughter from below give way to charming music of violin and guitar.
3.
Time seemed to stop when I heard that music, and all my grief fled away, as if a light shone through my heart, and no darkness could be there.
The music seemed eternal to me, as if it came from a higher, finer sphere, and made all this, what we call “reality,” seem flat.
A type of numbness came over me then, not of any limb or organ I could name or point to. I had a sense that there was a part of me that was being squeezed or strangled. I cannot explain it any clearer than that.
It is not as if I had not heard Miss Daw play before. I had, every day, and twice on Sundays. I knew her hand on the violin; I knew she could bring emotion out of the inanimate wood and catgut that infused and inspired every soul in earshot.
But this was different. Perhaps it was because this type of cheerful, voluptuous music was not normally what she played. Perhaps she was playing more strongly than was her wont, for an audience with stronger spirits than mine, and she let appear a strength and a magic in her songs she kept cloaked when around us. Perhaps when she played for me in class there was a deliberate policy guiding what she exposed me to, how quickly or slowly she allowed her influence to seep into the haunting songs.
Or perhaps it was because she was in duet with the headless man. His guitar notes floated up, and, above and behind the melody and harmony, his soul seemed expressed in song; and his soul spoke of escape, of release, of flight to the light beyond the dark places of the world.
For whatever reason, I was now aware of a quality in her music that I had never noticed before, not consciously. It was like ice. It stunned something in me, made it numb.
I tucked the walking stick under one arm and put my fingers into my ears. It did not help. I had to get away, and quickly.
4.
I am sure the wisest direction to flee would have been straight up stairs to the roof. From there, I could go down by the scaffolding.
I had two reasons against it. First, I did not know where the scaffolding was in relation to the windows of the Great Hall. I might be plainly visible walking down the workmen’s scaffold. Second, even though I should assume Dr. Fell left his post to go do something horrible to Quentin—Quentin whom I had abandoned to his fate�
�I could not shake the eerie feeling that the door to the roof was still being watched.
I had been in this building before, on several occasions, despite that it was never used for classes. The balcony went in a circle around the base of the dome and opened up into two corridors opposite each other, which ran the main length of the building. At the end of either corridor was a staircase. In both cases, the foot of the stair ended in an antechamber, which also held the main doors outside. Unfortunately, in both cases, the antechambers opened via a short corridor through an archway directly into what was now a ballroom, with no doors blocking the way. If only for a moment, I would be visible to the people in the room.
I decided to make for the Eastern corridor. Anything else required walking or crawling around 180 degrees of the balcony, in plain view (now that the chandelier light shone full upon it) of anyone below who happened to look up.
So down the corridor I went, softly, still half-benumbed by the music. There were tall doors to my left and right, offices of the School Administration, I supposed, or perhaps the living quarters of the Talbot family, should they ever return to their estate.
I took the stairs two at a time, for now the music had segued into a foxtrot or jig of some sort, and many feet were galloping on the floor, and I could not keep still, hearing it.
I was at the second landing, where the stairs switchbacked, before I heard, over the noise which was masking my descent, the sound of several feet ascending the stair I was about to step around the corner onto.
I was on the second floor. It was quicker to open the door and slip through it than it was to run back up the stairs.
I slipped into the darkened room, pushed the door shut (quickly but softly), and stood with my hand on the door, listening, trying to control my breathing.
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