Orphans of Chaos tcc-1

by John C. Wright

  I put on my nightgown. Supine once more, I could see the snake of the iron links reaching up to the staple in the ceiling. There was something odd about it.

  Miss Daw swung the grate shut and locked it.

  I said, “Can you douse the light?”

  She did.

  It went dark. Into the dark, I called, “What about my friends?”

  Miss Daw knew exactly what I meant by the question, for she said, “None of them has been treated as badly as you. Mrs. Wren put the handle of the axe Mr. mac FirBolg used to attack her under his bed, and that stole the power from his limbs. Dr. Fell gave Mr. Nemo an injection. I introduced a disjunction into the nervous system of Mr. Triumph, so that he cannot activate the sections of his brain that control his mattermanipulation abilities. Mrs. Wren and I cooperated, to set up blocks to prevent Miss Fair from activating her attention-energy gathering faculty, from which her tesseract-creation power springs.”

  I said, “Vanity can tell when people are looking at her. When she finds an area of space-time where no one is looking, such as inside a wall, she can fold space, and negate the distance, create a shortcut. Space is merely the interval measuring the energy needed to cross it: when the energy level is unknown or undetermined, the space-interval is not fixed. Isn’t it?”

  “That is basically correct, Miss Windrose.”

  “But some intelligence must act to fill in the details, to make walls and floors that preserve visual continuity, that fit in to the general picture of the surrounding space—something like Descartes’ demiurge: a spirit. That is why you need the help of a witch to stop the Phaeacian power. You don’t really understand what Vanity does, and can’t understand, because it is not your paradigm. Am I right?”

  “You were always a very clever student, Miss Windrose. Perhaps too clever. I can see why the Headmaster had Mr. Glum come by to enforce your security.”

  Her footsteps receded in the dark.

  5.

  Then I noticed what was different. The strangling weight that had kept me half-awake with fear and coughing was now gone.

  The collar. It didn’t hurt anymore.

  I touched the collar with my fingers, but I could not see it, even had there been a light, without a mirror. But it felt lighter and stronger in my hand. It did not chafe, and my sores were gone.

  Glum’s fantasies about harem girls did not admit of the slave collars hurting them.

  It put me in the first good mood I had known since imprisonment.

  At about the time when the moon came up, my mood rose even higher. I realized what it was Miss Daw had told me. She had given me the secrets of all the powers that kept us here. She had told me who stopped whom.

  Well, that thought was pleasant enough to allow me to fall asleep. I had not slept a full night in a long time.

  21

  The Seventh Day

  1.

  Miss Daw did get permission to take me to Chapel in the morning. She brought my Sunday uniform on a hanger. Dr. Fell came by, once I was dressed, to help escort me.

  Miss Daw unlocked the chain from the ring at my neck and then toyed with the key and lock under my ear (where I could not see) for several moments.

  She said to Fell, “Grendel altered reality. I cannot get the collar off. Can you dissolve it?”

  His third eye opened in his forehead, glistening and metal-blue. I saw it only inches away.

  It seemed to consist of nested concentric spheres of semi-transparent substance, hard and shining. There was something like a pupil, or at least an aperture, one in each sphere. By lining up the different pupils in the different spheres he seemed to get a stronger or weaker ray. When enough apertures opened, I could see down a tiny well of clear holes, to a hidden spark of incandescence at the center, a starlike pinpoint of fuel in the tiniest, innermost chamber. Perhaps the different spheres had differing filters or augmentations for different effects. It did not look organic at all. It was clearly a machine thing; hard, finely-tooled, insensitive.

  He said, “It has clearly shrunk somewhat, and seems to be made of a lighter, more bluish-white metal. The atomic latticework has been replaced with continuous substance. It is the Aristotelian paradigm, and outside of my competence. It is no longer made of iron, but of a ratio of earth essences with fire essences. I can remove it, but it might hurt the girl.”

  The center of his eye turned red and an aiming beam came out. The various apertures began to slide together. I smelled ozone…

  “Um!” I said, “It’s OK! It doesn’t hurt! Really!”

  With a dizzying, chameleon eye-like optic motion, Dr. Fell rotated certain middle spheres to thicken the number of layers blocking the inner chamber. The metal eye dimmed, as if idling on standby. “Move your hands out of the way, girl.”

  Miss Daw said, “Where is Mrs. Wren?”

  Dr. Fell frowned slightly. By some intuition, I knew that he did not like to hear her saying, in front of me, any hint of whose power stopped whose. He said curtly, “She is unavailable at this time.”

  That was what Dr. Fell usually said when Mrs. Wren was drunk.

  Fell said, “Should I continue? You have primary responsibility for this subject.”

  Miss Daw said, “It is unforgivable that a girl should be forced to wear such a cruel thing in the House of the Lord.”

  I admired her for saying that.

  “…What would people think?”

  My admiration dimmed.

  Fell said, “Is that permission to proceed…?” His eye lit up again.

  I screamed and jumped back (hey, it was really, really nice not to have that big chain hanging there). “Get a hacksaw! Don’t let him blow my head off!”

  Miss Daw said, “Let us not alarm the child, Ananias.” She looked pensive, and said, half to herself, “It does seem much smaller than before. Perhaps people will think it is jewelry.”

  2.

  No one else was there. Not Victor, not Colin, not Quentin, not Vanity. This one week I had gone longer without seeing them than I had my whole life previously.

  Even the other members of the staff and administration were not there. I was hoping to see Taffy ap Cymru, and blackmail him into letting me go, or getting a message to his boss, Hermes. But the Chapel was deserted except for the vicar, the altar boy, and us.

  Miss Daw sat on my right side, her beautiful face glowing as if with an inner light. Dr. Fell on my left. Fell had an indifference to religion that went beyond contempt. During the service he sat with a checkbook and a pocket calculator, doing sums.

  Our services were given by a vicar named Dr. Foster, a tall, dim-eyed, white-haired man, thin as a rail, who muttered and murmured mildly for his sermons, and who managed to make even the most interesting Bible stories into boring digressions into abstract theology or Trinitarian speculations. He was the only person I knew who used the word “consubstantiality.” At other times, instead of Bible lessons, his sermons somehow led down twisting paths to end up as descriptions of the metaphysical disputes he had against his friend, the Rev. James Spensley, from Mumbles, who was a Wesleyan; or the Rev. Price, from the Dissenter’s Church at Llangennith, who dared to be, of all things, a Calvinist.

  I owe much of my agnosticism to Dr. Foster and his somnolent, sonorous sermons.

  As horrible as this sounds, it was not until that day that I ever thought to wonder what denomination we were. I had always assumed we were High Church because our ceremonies were elaborate and beautiful. But were we? We said our Sunday prayers in English, from the Common Book, so I knew that we were not Roman Catholics (or “Reprobate Papists” as Dr. Foster liked to call them). Although Vanity and I had, when we were young, said our prayers at night in Latin.

  Or, at least, we had been saying something in Latin. Maybe Mrs. Wren (who was, after all—let’s face it—a witch) was not telling us true prayers.

  Our Chapel had both icons and stained glass windows, so I knew we weren’t Lutherans, and we had saints, but we were instructed to revere them
without prayer to them per se. And Miss Daw and I went to the altar rail to kneel and accept the Host, which Dr. Foster blessed, and an altar boy, whose name was Jack Jingle, held the salver beneath my lips as I knelt and took the wafer.

  Dr. Foster, as sometimes happened, stood at the lectern, blinking, having forgotten what part of the ceremony he was in. Miss Daw and I continued to kneel at the rail, and she took the opportunity to lower her eyes in silent prayer.

  I wondered what would happen if I ran up to Dr. Foster or Jack the altar boy and begged for sanctuary, like Esmeralda in Notre Dame de Paris.

  I looked over at Jack speculatively. He looked younger than me, and he always had, a boy who had not yet grown hair. I am no judge of ages. Eight? Ten? Six? He was young. In his hands he held the silver plate that carried the Host, and he was looking at Dr. Foster with some worry, and polishing the salver with his long, flowing robe sleeve.

  I was reminded of something Quentin once told me. He said that the purpose of holding a mirrored surface beneath the mouth of someone taking Communion was to discover whether any vampires had infiltrated into the body of the Holy Church. The altar boys were supposed to pour the Holy Wine over their head, should that happen, whereupon it would instantly turn into the blood of Christ, and burn the vampire to a crisp. That was Quentin’s theory.

  Once, long ago, after services, I had asked Dr. Foster about the question of vampires. He blinked at me and told me the essence of the wine was transfigured, but not transubstantiated, while remaining substantially the same, and that it was done by the grace of Christ, rather than by the authority of the priest.

  I could not imagine Foster being able to understand that I was a prisoner.

  I could imagine, very clearly, if Foster did get the idea that I was in trouble, demanding an explanation from Dr. Fell, or calling for him to bring a telephone (at once!) so that he could summon the police. I could also imagine Dr. Fell, a bored look in his thin, gray face, opening his third eye and burning Foster to a crisp. Or—why be so crude?—stunning him with a jolt and injecting him with something to erase short-term memory.

  And the little altar boy? Because he did not seem to age, I wondered if he, like Lelaps the dog, or Sister Twitchett, was one of their creatures, disguised as a human boy and here as part of the stage scenery. After all, I never saw Jack except on Sundays, and he did not seem to live in Abertwyi. The local children didn’t know him. Maybe he was a homonculus, and was kept in a box during the week in Dr. Fell’s lab.

  I did not tell them I was a prisoner. Instead, I knelt and prayed.

  Yes, I prayed. Why not? The advantage of being an agnostic over being an atheist is that I always had the possibility of being wrong, and could still entertain the hope that the universe was better organized than it appeared to be.

  But I did not know to whom to pray.

  What if Henry Tudor had been wrong and God was Catholic and not Anglican at all? What if Paul had been wrong, and God was Jewish just like He had been in the Old Testament, and hadn’t repealed any of the Old Covenant Law after all? People always said that God did not care about denominations. Everything in His Holy Book said that He cared about denominations very much. What were the Pharisees, so earnestly and bitterly criticized by Christ himself, if not a denomination? Why spend page after boring page describing the vestments, dietary restrictions, and sacrificial animals sacred to the Chosen People, if these things were trivial? Why kill the guy—I forget his name—who was trying to straighten out the Ark of the Covenant when it fell over?

  Well, I wanted to pray, and I did not think it right to pray to Archangel Gabriel, not this time. It was time to pick a God.

  For a while, I thought I really ought to pray to the God of the Koran, and become Mohammedan. For one thing, the Koran was written after the New Testament, the same way the New Testament was written after the Bible, so it might be a more developed form. Also, the Mohammedans seemed to be more devoted to a simple and severe form of worship, and did not clutter up their monotheism with saints or trinities.

  Two things stopped me. First, I had no idea which direction Mecca was in from Wales. South and East, I assumed. Second, I did not know if women were allowed to pray.

  Even as I was kneeling and thinking all these flippant thoughts, a prayer rose up in me as if of its own accord. I whispered very softly what was in my heart.

  “God of Abraham, who led the Israelites out of bondage, and freed the slaves from the cruelty of the Pharaoh, free me. Free my friends. Lead us from this Lion’s Den, and let us find our home, our families, our friends. Lead us from this alien land to a place where we belong. I beg you. You saved Moses and his people. Save me. Amen.”

  It was not as if I can take credit for making up what I said. It came out more or less without any effort on my part. Nonetheless, afterwards, I actually thought it had been a pretty clever thing to say. I mean, the God of the Christians and the Jews and the Mohammedans, whichever one He is, all of them are the God who saved the Israelites from Egypt. Right?

  Miss Daw was watching me. I saw her eyes focused in a direction I could not see, and saw the slight frown crease the perfect whiteness of her alabaster brow.

  3.

  Dr. Foster, as it turned out, simply raised his hands and began the closing benedictions. “May the Lord make His face to shine upon you, and give you peace…”

  We had skipped one or two hymns that were posted on the notice board, the recitation of the Nicene Creed, and the part of the service where we call responses to the prayer. I do not know what that part is called, but it was my favorite part when I was much younger.

  Anyway, what Colin used to call the “crapshoot of the Foster Amnesia” sometimes led us to go through two services in a row, if Foster lost his place late on, and started again from the top. At other times, the “crapshoot” cut the service time in half, as it had done today.

  Fell and Daw ordered me to walk ahead of them down the path, around the corner, and to the door beneath the bell tower. The entrance to the cell was less than a dozen steps from the main Chapel door. The cell was part of the same building, which may have been one reason why I had been allowed out.

  There was still snow on the ground, but it was patchy. Apparently the weather for the week I had missed had turned mild. It was chill, but it was a crisp, refreshing chill. A week ago the early winter had seemed late winter, and December days were getting February weather. Now, early winter seemed like late autumn, and December air had an October feel to it. Like the realization that I had never missed my friends for so long a time, I realized that I had never gone for so long without seeing the weather in my life, either.

  The trees had no leaves on them but, after my long confinement underground, they seemed as bright as any trees in spring. The clouds were few, and very white, and the sky was high and cool and blue.

  I walked slowly, thinking that my prayer had not only not been answered, but that the service, by being cut short, had sped my trip back into the gray brick cube of my cell.

  I tried to look in the fourth dimension. My visions and senses were still utterly blocked, as they had been from the moment yesterday when Glum had come to drool on me. I could not even remember what hyperspace looked like. I was a girl, an entirely ordinary girl, wearing an iron collar I could not take off, because that was the way Glum wanted it, and his desires could change reality in a way I could not sense or resist.

  A tall black man, either a Negro or a Pakistani (I had never seen either in real life, and was not sure which was which) came suddenly around the corner. His hair was loose and lay along his shoulders like a girl’s, instead of being wiry, so perhaps he was a Pakistani. His face was more handsome than the face of a statue. He wore a long powder-blue coat, with blue trousers and black boots beneath it, and he walked with his head hunched down, as if he (in this fine weather) were cold, and his hands made deep fists in his pockets.

  We bumped directly into each other, and he brought up both his hands to catch me by the
shoulders before I fell off the path.

  “A thousand pardons, Miss,” he started.

  If he had just had his hands in an oven, they could not have been warmer. It felt good on my arms.

  I grabbed the metal collar around my neck with both my hands and tugged on it, trying to show him it wouldn’t come off. I said, “Help me! Please! Call the police!”

  He looked a little startled. Without letting go of my shoulders, he looked up and said, “Telemus, is this one of yours? This is Phaethusa?”

  Dr. Fell said, “This is Miss Windrose. She is not my responsibility. I did not take her out of her cell. And that is not the name I use here, thank you.”

  My heart started sinking.

  The black man looked at Miss Daw, “You, then, Thelxiepia?”

  Miss Daw stepped forward, her gloved hands folded at her waist, clutching the tiniest possible pocketbook, her high-heeled pumps clacking on the pathway. “I will thank you to unhand the young woman. Proprieties must be observed.”

  He said, “You keep her in the cell? That cell? The one Corus and I are cleaning?”

  Miss Daw did not answer, but gave him a stiff look, as he still had not released me.

  I said, “I don’t know who you are, but I didn’t do anything wrong. I am not whatever they told you I was. I’m just a girl. I’m really nice, once you get to know me. I’m not a monster and I don’t like being locked up, and won’t you please help me? I’ve never done anything to you. If you ever got caught by our side, and I could get you out of a cell, I’d do it! What’s your name? I’m Amelia! I really am a person, just like you!”

  “Notus. We are called Notus.” To Miss Daw, he said, “My brother is being unduly cruel. What a wonder of cruelty! That cell is clearly cursed with a cur…” (or maybe he said “ker”) “…and it cannot be healthy for a woman of this most tender age. The Great Lady Cyprian, I am thinking her happiness will not be a great thing, hearing of this.”