Nocturne

by Louise Cooper

  Her heart started to thump erratically with excitement. She should have realized it before, long before, when the demon first greeted them in the decaying hall and flung in her face the two images which named her sister. For where could it have drawn those images, but from her own mind? Not, as she’d believed then, from her memory; but from another, far deeper part of her. From her soul.

  Oh, yes. She could do what needed to be done. She had achieved it once; it could be so again. All it took was the understanding that would trigger her will, and now that understanding had come to her.

  She knew, without needing to turn her head, that the Brabazons were waiting in trepidation. She was aware of their confusion, but there was no time to stop and warn them of what she meant to do. The demon had inadvertently placed a weapon in her hands—she must use it.

  She returned her full attention to the hovering shadow. It might have been easy to pity it; this pathetic, unreal thing that was neither truly alive nor truly dead. But to pity was to feed the illusion and give it strength. In its own right the demon had no strength: so, surely, it had no true power? Only the power which its victims unwittingly granted it, by believing in the force of the illusions it created—and thus believing in the demon itself.

  Indigo smiled again, and said: “We have one last entertainment for you, my ever-hungry friend. A dance. We call it Bruhome’s Return.”

  The shadow flickered, as though some emotion had moved it. “An amusing title,” the insubstantial voice said, and this time there was no mistaking the uneasy edge. “Your ability to jest at such a time does you credit.”

  “I’m glad you think so. For the jest will be at your expense.” She took a pace back. “Will you step up on the stage and dance with us, demon?”

  Behind her, Stead hissed, “Indigo, what in the Mother’s name are you doing?” but she waved one hand in a quick, negative gesture. The shadow was motionless. Indigo’s smile became less pleasant. “Or shall I find you a more apt dancing partner?”

  She could feel the energy building in her, as it had done with Grimya. The distance was so much greater; she didn’t know if she could succeed, if she could summon the will—no, don’t think that! You have the power! You are the power!

  Blinding light erupted from beneath the stage—and in the heart of the light, where an instant before Indigo had been, stood the tall, graceful figure of the Emissary. The being raised one arm in a commanding movement, and out of the night, from somewhere beyond the square’s confines, the thin strains of a hurdy-gurdy shimmered on the air.

  Esty uttered a cry of anguished longing. “Cour! It’s Cour’s tune!”

  Yes, Indigo thought wildly, hold to that, call them all—Cour and Rance and Honi and Pi—all of them, all of them! Lost within the churning chaos of her own mind, swamped by the image she’d created, she focused the burning core of her will into her invocation.

  Flute and pipe and tambour joined in with the hurdy-gurdy, and the tune coalesced into a lively march. The sound swelled, drawing nearer, nearer, and now it seemed to be all around them, as though an entire army of musicians were dancing through the unlit streets and alleys, converging inexorably on the square and the stage. Forth, his eyes wild with excitement, snatched up his own pipe, and Esty, a tambourine in her hand, cried out to Stead, “Da, play the fiddle! You can, you can, if you’ll only will it!”

  The shadow had fallen back as the light and the Emissary’s form blasted into being, but now, recovering, it surged towards the stage, elongating, stretching out its phantom hands as though to snatch the shimmering vision and shatter it. But a golden arm rose again, and pointed towards the door of the Apple Barrel inn.

  “Dance, demon! Dance with the Brabazon Fairplayers! Dance with the living folk of Bruhome!”

  Two flamboys burst into life in the sconces that overhung the tavern door, and the door itself crashed open. On the threshold stood a solitary figure, and the flaring torches lit a crown of shining auburn hair—

  Esty shrieked at the top of her voice, “Chari!!”

  Stead whipped round, and the hectic color drained from his skin. The demon, too, turned, hissing furiously, and the black shadow’s outline distorted as it saw what was afoot.

  “Your spell is broken!” The awesome form of the Emissary flashed out of existence and there was Indigo, disheveled, screaming in hatred and triumph at the vampire. “You have no power over us—we are masters of the revels now!” She whirled. “Stead, bring Chari! Bring her to us!”

  Howling his daughter’s name, Stead leaped from the boards and raced away over the cobbles. Chari had seen him and was stumbling from the doorway, reaching for him; they met, and Stead swung her up into his arms, kissing her face and her hair as he turned and ran back towards the stage. The demon watched his progress, then suddenly turned to face Indigo once more. She felt the venom in its mind, the gathering strength, the mounting rage—and then a hideous, fiery mouth opened in the silhouetted head, as though the door of a furnace had been flung wide, and she rocked back on her heels as a single, terrible note emanated from the mouth, a malevolent booming that drowned the swelling music and shook the stage. The torch flames leaped high in protest: then every light in the square went out, and silence crashed down as the appalling note swallowed all other sound, and ceased.

  Stead skidded to a halt, and Forth and Esty, who had been scrambling to the edge of the platform to help him, froze in mid-movement. The shadow had changed. Now a thunderous purple aura, shot through with tongues of flickering silver, pulsed about it like the slow beating of some malignant heart. It exhaled a slow, harsh breath that seemed to go on and on and on, and Indigo felt her skin prickle as the air turned ice-cold. In a voice that carried all the bleak, deadly fury of an arctic storm, the demon said:

  “Ah, Indigo. Now you have made me angry.”

  The platform began to shake. Forth lost his balance and fell, while Esty clutched at the curtain, almost bringing it down on herself, and Grimya, still dazed from shock, backed whimpering into a corner. But Indigo felt the flexing boards beneath her feet, heard the protesting creak of wood, and smiled.

  “No, demon. You can’t destroy what we have created. What we have created is real, and reality is beyond your power to control.”

  The entity laughed softly. “Reality, perhaps. But not illusion. And I believe you still have a lesson to learn.”

  The platform stopped shaking. For a moment there was total silence; and then a sound that went beyond sound thundered through the square. The pewter sky turned pitch-black, and constellations sprang from the blackness to glare coldly down on the scene. The shattering noise died away, and a wind began to rise, an arctic blast that moaned over the rooftops and hurled a flurry of snow against Indigo’s face. And then out of the dark, out of the polar night, she heard the first titanic footfall of something approaching.

  A terror bred into her through centuries of legend sank diamond claws into Indigo’s stomach. The Nameless—stalking out of the titanic ice ramparts and driving the huge winter gales before it—she felt herself beginning to shake as the blindness of panic swelled in her; and her eyes were being drawn up, up to the black heavens, where among the constellations she knew she would see the twin stars that were not stars but the remote and glittering eyes of the formless harbinger that heralded the falling of the sky—

  Illusion! The howling cry burst on her mind like fire, and something hurled itself against her, throwing her down. She struck the hard reality of the stage, shouting out as the thundering tread of the Nameless dinned in her ears.

  Illusion, Indigo! Illusion! Grimya’s teeth were locked on the shoulder of her shirt and the she-wolf writhed with the effort of trying to drag her to her feet. Indigo rolled, sprawled, screaming as the ghastly footfalls sound again, again, closer—

  “H-elp me!” Grimya twisted about, releasing her hold on Indigo and barking the desperate words at the stunned Brabazons. Esty was transfixed, too shocked to move—but Forth reacted. He snatched up his p
ipe again, and a cascade of notes—anything, any melody, it didn’t matter—shrilled out across the stage, slicing through the dire noise of the Nameless’s approach. The music acted on Esty like a physical blow: she reeled, and intelligence snapped back into her eyes as she realized what Forth was trying to do.

  “Da!” She shouted to Stead who was hunched against the platform’s edge with Chari clutched tight in his arms. “Da, play! Play—Forth can’t do it alone!” She stretched out, trying to wrest Chari from him and pull her up on to the stage. “Help us!”

  Chari sprawled on the boards, Stead scrambling behind her. Grimya had dragged Indigo into a sitting position, and she was shaking her head dazedly. Music—Forth was playing, he was driving the Nameless away, and the Nameless was only a myth, a phantom, an illusion—but the snow still stung her cheeks, and the wind was howling like a thousand lost souls—

  “Chari, dance with me!” Esty shrieked at her sister over the gale’s moaning, and shook her as though she was a rag doll. Chari’s head rolled on her shoulders; she gasped, clutched Esty’s arms. “Dance!” Esty shouted again. “We’re in Bruhome! The Revels, Chari, the Autumn Revels! Dance with me!”

  Forth, hearing her frantic exhortation, struck up an eight-hand reel called Merry Maidens, in which traditionally Chari and Esty always led their audience. His foot stamped the beat ferociously, and Chari blinked her glazed eyes. “Ohh …”

  “Dance!” Esty screeched, and yanked on her sister’s arms, spinning her around and forcing her to skip to keep her balance. Suddenly Chari’s body, if not her mind, seemed to comprehend, and next moment she and Esty were whirling into the dance-figures. Stead, who thus far had been too stunned to do anything but gape, shook his head violently and clapped both hands to his skull as though struggling to blot out the scream of the wind and the pounding of the Nameless’s footfalls. The demon was laughing at him, laughing—he would not be laughed at! He would not be mocked! And Indigo needed his help. Indigo had saved Chari, and now she needed him!

  He flexed his broad hands, and without conscious control his fingers curled into a familiar pattern before his face. Wood and resin; and the bow in his hand, and the strings vibrating under his fingers—

  Stead yelled aloud in shocked triumph as the fiddle, his own fiddle, battered and pocked and precious, materialized in his hands and he heard its voice soar and mingle with Forth’s pipe.

  “Louder!” Carried away with his own success, he roared to Forth. “Come on, boy, where’s your breath? Louder, and faster! Dance, my lasses—dance that whorespawn to dust!”

  Light blazed out suddenly as the two flamboys nearest the stage, galvanized by Forth and Esty, leaped into life again, hurling brilliant illumination across Indigo’s face. Fire battled with ice for a single instant, and then the snow, the illusion, flicked out of existence, and awareness came jolting back. The Nameless—but no, it was gone, it had never existed—

  Indigo, get up! Get up! We must help Stead! Grimya was bounding around her in a tight circle, ears flat and fangs bared in agitation. Half blinded by the torchlight Indigo groped for balance, pushed herself upright, swayed.

  The music—Stead and Forth, their fingers flying over their instruments while Esty and Chari whirled with manic, dervish energy. And the demon—

  The demon was a black whirlwind, a towering column of rage rising before the stage. For a frozen instant Indigo stared at it, and then without warning her vision slipped into another dimension, another spectrum, and she saw into it, through the smoke and the shadow to its heart. There was nothing there. Nothing but a vacuum, a vortex, an empty space without life or meaning.

  “DAMN YOU!” Her voice shrieked above the wild dance and the stamping, tramping of the Brabazons’ feet. “YOU DON’T EXIST!”

  Grimya yelped and fell back as, like a tree bursting into flames, Indigo’s form lit with a blinding rainbow radiance. Silver hair streamed over her shoulders, golden eyes glared from her skull, and she was demon-child and goddess-figure and virgin and mother and hag, and flawed, embattled human.

  The demon shrieked. Over the rooftops of Bruhome’s market square came twenty huge, skeletal reptiles, hopping and shrieking and flapping their membranous wings as they scrabbled and slithered down the tiles. Indigo’s burning eyes turned on them, and they exploded in flames. As the blazing shards fell to the cobblestones and dissolved, the chimneys of five houses began to smoke …

  The demon howled again. In an alleyway, a vast shadow moved. And the Brown Walker, hooting, swinging his great club, loomed out of the dark with a hundred Scatterers screeching and yammering around his single monstrous foot.

  Indigo said: “NO.” And where the Brown Walker had been, lanterns glowed in four upper windows, and a ghostly snatch of cheerful laughter echoed from a distant tavern as the Scatterers vanished into nothing.

  The whirlwind that the demon-shadow had become began to spin faster, elongating and darkening to a black so intense that it seemed to suck in all light around it. Now it was wailing, a high, thin, lethal note that seared through the music, trying to sever and shatter it. Indigo turned, and the voice of the Emissary sang out, drowning the devilish shrieking.

  “Cour! Rance!”

  Stead heard his sons’ names cried above the demon’s din, and a wild, uncontrollable excitement took hold of him. “Cour!” he bawled. “Rance! Where are you, you idle braggarts? Play! If you value your hides, PLAY!”

  Shadowy forms leaped at the edge of the stage, and a second pipe and a hurdy-gurdy added their eldritch voices to the dance. Cour, freckled and grinning, was crouched over his instrument, Rance, tossing sweat-soaked hair from his face, had his eyes tight-shut as he piped. They were solidifying; they were real—and as they took form, Indigo saw through eyes that were blue-violet and gold and silver all at once, saw the demon writhing, heard its scream of fury, of frustration, of burgeoning and horrified fear.

  She swung round, and her shimmering stare focused on the Apple Barrel tavern. Light leaped in the ground floor windows, and from the gaping door came the sound of talk and laughter, while shadows—human, mortal shadows—moved across the glass. She turned again: and over the balcony of the Brewmasters’ Hall three Bruhome guild banners appeared: a scythe crossed with a sheepherder’s crook, a pyramid of casks wreathed in hop-garlands, a scarlet apple emblazoned on a green field. She looked up: and the sky, which had returned to featureless pewter night, was suddenly ablaze with stars; the familiar, kindly constellations of the southwest.

  And in the distance, a dog barked enthusiastically for the sheer joy of its own existence.

  “BRUHOME!” It was Indigo’s voice and yet a hundred, a thousand voices together. “BRUHOME!”

  “Bruhome!” The Brabazons took up the cry, and Esty yodeled her shrill, triumphant exuberance. She and Chari broke apart, and suddenly there was Honi, and there was Gen, and there was Piety, joining with them, skirts and hair flying. Indigo flung her head back, laughing, and a golden hand pointed.

  The sisters shrieked, and, hands clasped, sprang from the stage and on to the cobbles of the square. They formed a ring around the whirling black column, jumping, dancing, mocking the demon as it strove to break through their ranks. And all around them, faint as phantoms but growing stronger with every moment, a crowd was growing out of the night as more and more flamboys flared to light the scene. Drinkers and dancers and lovers and gawpers—the boiling tides of living, reveling humanity. New lights were appearing all over the square, in windows and over doorways decked out with garlands. Flowers and bunting sprang out of emptiness to bob and swing in the torchlight; doors were flung open, laughing figures more substantial than ghosts emerged from their homes to join in the celebration—

  Bruhome was returning. Not the cruel mockery of a town of phantom memories, but the thriving and bustling reality, celebrating their harvest, celebrating their Goddess, celebrating life itself. And Stead, Forth, Cour, and Rance were playing, and Esty and Chari and Honi and Gen and Pi whirled faster and still
faster, their hair a wheel of fire, their skirts a glorious kaleidoscope of color as they circled the screaming, panicking shadow: as color and solidity and reality came powering into the demon world to tear its illusory fabric apart and cast it away into the limbo whence it came.

  A huge, shuddering sensation powered up through Indigo, as though she were a tree with its roots buried deep in the life giving Earth. The demon was dying! The sensation swamped her, filling her body, her mind, her soul, and she flung her arms skyward, her voice rising in a singing, shattering cry of joy and triumph. One last great willing. One, the final one—

  Her hands came together like a diver soaring from a cliff, and her eyes burned molten as her arms came down, down, bringing down the sun and the moon, the power screaming through her, life, life—

  The black column that twisted and writhed in the circle of dancing sisters uttered a howl that blasted to the stars. There was unbearable agony in the howl, and defeat, and misery, and at the very last a shrieking, dying spear of futile hatred, as, smashed by reality, hurled to utter oblivion, the last shreds of the demon’s being scattered and fled from the world.

  Fled from the world …

  Fled …

  There was silence, and there was stillness. She was held rigid, mind and body locked by a force she couldn’t comprehend and couldn’t control. The golden-eyed Emissary was gone. She was Indigo; only Indigo. And the demon was dead, and she-She raised her head, and it felt as though her body belonged not to her but to someone—something—alien, unknown. The stage: she was on her knees on the stage, in Bruhome, at the Autumn Revels. Behind her were Stead and Forth and Cour and Rance; but their instruments were silent; they watched her, uncomprehending. Waiting. And down below the stage, among the motionless crowd; the girls, their dance arrested. Watching her …