by Jeannette Ng
But the Lightbringer then, dragon and deceiver, he was but a shadow.
Perhaps I should not try to fathom Him. He’s so used to talking to Himself by now no one would think that there were many of Him, so many faces, so many names. We’re all born alone, a prisoner of our own skins, an island in our minds, a world of our own creating. Alone and incomplete, craving recognition from shadows of ourselves.
Lightbringer was cut free, cut out of the very mind that he was from. He carved himself from that madness, ripped voice and breath from his father in an act of war and spat as he left.
And I, I was cast out from the sight of God.
We huddled together, lost children of Elohim. It is better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. We are not the last to believe those words.
But were he and I hidden here in the hells beyond His knowledge, beyond the reach of His light, or did the Blind God simply turn away? We had to make our own world in that hollow darkness, far from the animating spark of the divine. He could set in motion an eternally changing world and force it to continue with his oppressive gaze. We did not have such scrutiny, such creation. Our patchwork world needed to be made piece by stolen piece.
Mankind demanded a new mate, one that was of his own flesh. Perhaps he, like his Creator, thought that that would stop betrayal, but he is simple and stupid. Those of one flesh are not of one mind and the shadows, well, did not the Lightbringer betray his master? Did not I abandon them both?
Translated from Enochian by Rev Laon Helstone and Catherine Helstone
A flustered Mr Benjamin was opening the door to a gaunt stranger.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Mr Benjamin. “A thousand apologies.”
Mist swirling around the capes of his greatcoat, the pallid stranger towered over Mr Benjamin. He was drenched to the skin, though it wasn’t raining outside. He regarded the gnome with a glowering face.
“Post,” said the stranger.
“Give then,” said the gnome.
“Not for your hands.”
Mr Benjamin took a step back and allowed the fae to come into the grand foyer.
I recognised him as the coachman who had driven Miss Davenport and myself to Gethsemane. His swollen eyes looked me up and down. The wet fabric of his collar clung to his neck, and he ran a finger between it and his skin to allow his wet gills to flare. “It’s not for you either, miss.”
“Who is it for, then?” I asked.
“Reverend Laon Helstone,” he said, showing me the letter.
“I’ll give it to him.”
“His hands, not yours, miss.”
Mr Benjamin went to fetch Laon, and I was left waiting with the coachman. I glanced over again at the letter in his hand and caught sight of the postmark.
“You took your time,” I said, sharply. It was from months and months ago. It had been sent just after I had left London.
He gave a languid shrug. “Shouldn’t trust shortcuts. Two true revelations and an epiphany took much, much longer than two painful memories and a daydream. It’s your fault, really.”
“I… I see.”
“Distances don’t work like they do where you were. In Arcadia it’s about the journey, and I thought I’d count yours instead of mine. But you were slow. And should’ve made sure those revelations be true,” he said. “Since fake ones don’t count. They just loop me right round, you know? Gets me real lost.”
“I don’t think I know at all.”
He scratched the tip of his flat, fishy slit of a nose with a webbed finger. “Knowin’s important ’nd all. Best count the twists and turns. Don’t want to get yourself lost.”
Laon appeared and took the letter from the coachman, politely commending his good work. Mr Benjamin hovered behind, jittering nervously, gnawing his own bottom lip.
“Done is done.” The fae tipped his hat and slouched off into the mist.
Laon read the letter in silence. His face was a mask when he put it down and asked, “Cathy, who sent you again?”
“Sent me?”
“From the Mission Society. The man you corresponded with.”
“It was Joseph Hale,” I said. “I still have his letters.”
“This is from him,” said Laon. “He… he claims otherwise.”
“What do you mean?”
Laon passed me the letter, and with shaking hands I read it.
The Society has recently received correspondence from your sister, Catherine Helstone, who appears to be under the impression that we both approve of and are financing her passage to Arcadia. This is not the case. We could but surmise that someone has been writing to her using our name. We have no idea why anyone would attempt such, but it is possible that they are trying to bring disrepute to the Society’s good name. We urge you to proceed with the utmost caution…
“I don’t understand,” I said, eyes passing over the passage again. “Why would anyone do that?”
“It can only be the fae.”
“Who?”
“The mysterious Them that has the Salamander so hemmed in by obligations to, that she avoids us completely. The Them that makes it so that what she can say she has to half stutter. The Them that wrote the geas. Mab. Her brothers and sisters. The things that live in the Hell of exile.”
“Geas aren’t real. They’re just tricks… it was in Roche’s journal.”
“But the Salamander,” said Laon. “And we were protected by it from her fire.”
“We were,” I said, shuddering at the memory of the sea of fire.
“We…” murmured Laon. He had turned from me. Arms crossed, he drummed his fingers against his lip in thought. “Blood binds blood. Blood knows blood.”
“Miss Davenport said that. She said that was why it protected me as well. Because–” I stopped.
And then all at once we both knew the terrible truth.
It shouldn’t matter after everything that had already happened. I myself had mocked Laon for thinking that it did, when my hands still reeked of blood and the conversion of Arcadia hung in the balance.
“No… that can’t be,” I said, shaking my head. My voice was breaking and so was my heart. Fingers wove together and clasped at my mouth, I was trying to hold it all in, to hold it back. “There just must have been another geas to protect me. I mean, Miss Davenport was also the one who told me I was a changeling. And so she must just have not known. She said she worked it out, that she had realised, she saw that the Pale Queen knew and, and…”
“They brought you here for a reason,” said Laon, a dark calm in his voice cutting through my panic. “Mirrors are terrible things. The Salamander said that. They are showing me my sin.”
“No, that can’t be,” I said. I knew I should feel revulsion and I knew that I should hate myself for my own sins. I knew all that and I wanted to think that the churning in the pits of my stomach was that. A human horror at my own actions. “I’m a changeling.”
“The two we met at the market, the ones who said we were like them.”
“No.” There was an acidic taste at the back of my throat, one I could not swallow away. Our love had been the last pure, real thing that I had clung to and it was slipping away.
“I said I wasn’t, that we weren’t like them. But this was what they meant.”
“No,” I repeated, more feebly this time, as weak as my resistance to him had ever been. Every kiss, every caress that had passed between us came to the fore of my mind, now tainted by new, old knowledge. It flooded my mind like the moths of the library.
“You’re crying,” he said.
My hands flew to my face. It was wet with tears and it smeared onto my hands. I looked at the mess with a detached wonder, breath broken and my heart a beating fist of pain in my chest.
“You never cry.”
“I don’t like you seeing me cry,” I said.
“Changelings can’t cry,” he said. “I read that once. It’s why the church used to say you should beat them, because they would laugh at the pain and shed
no tears…”
“No.” I dragged my tear-soaked sleeves across my face.
“And the tea, remember? The Salamander thought you didn’t take it with milk.”
“That’s nonsense…” I snapped, even as I remembered how milk was meant to spoil near a changeling. It was why Miss Davenport always avoided milk with her tea.
“She was silent after. She wanted to tell us something.”
“No, Laon, we – you and I – we can’t be…” I finally looked up from my shaking hands.
Our eyes met.
I feared the horror I would see there, feared the revulsion that would be in his eyes, the visceral rejection. I feared him flinch forever after at my touch and the intolerable distance that would stretch out between us.
But his eyes were but black and unreadable in this light, cold and distant.
“I never wanted you to look at me like this,” he said.
“Laon!” Tears were rolling sticky wet down my face. There was too much I wanted to say; it welled up inside me and I choked on it all. My mouth was a grave of words, each thought dying there and it was their rot that I tasted, that filled me with gut-wrenching revulsion.
He laughed, threw his head back and just laughed. His wide shoulders shook with his senseless mirth until his eyes too were filled with tears.
“I thought you were an apparition to tempt me.” His beautiful mouth twisted cruel. “I thought the mist spat you out to make me sin, to pull me down, to drag me to hell. I thought I could outrun myself, my own sins, my own sister. I thought–”
“Laon, no…” I wasn’t sure what I was objecting to, but I wanted him to stop. I wanted myself to stop.
“But they did better than that.”
I flung myself at him, covered his lips with mine. Tear-stained hands cupping his face, it was not a kiss so much as a hard, stubborn meeting of lips. It needed to stop. Everything needed to stop, to silence.
Gasping, he choked out, “You’re my sister.”
My cheeks were against his face and my tears were his. We were broken mirrors of one another.
“You’re my sister,” he said again.
He did not push me away.
Chapter 42
The Summons in the Night
But all in vain o’er young Ganora’s breast,
Guarded by prayer, the demon whisper stole;
Sorrow, not sin disturb’d that tranquil rest;
Yet ’gan her teeth to grind and eyes to roll,
As troublous visions shook her sleeping soul;
And scalding drops of agony bedew’d
Her feverish brow more hot than burning coal.
Whom with malignant smile the fairy viewed
And through the unopen’d door her nightly track pursued.
Like as that evil dame whose sullen spell,
To love dire omen, and to love’s delight,
(If all be sooth that ancient rabbins tell,)
With death and danger haunts the nuptial night,
Since Adam first her airy charms could slight;
Her Judah’s daughters scare with thrilling cry,
Lilith! fell Lilith! from her viewless flight,
What time with flowers their jetty locks they tye,
And swell the midnight dance with amorous harmony.
Reginald Heber, “Morte D’Arthur: A Fragment”, The Life of Sir Reginald Heber, D. D., Lord Bishop of Calcutta, by his Widow: With Selections from his Correspondence, Unpublished Poems, & Private Papers
That night, I dreamt.
I saw Mab enthroned in brass, seeming young while the earth was old. The wheels of the great clock turned around her, each creaking click echoing in the vast space.
“Rather magnificent, isn’t it?’ she said. “So much more impressive than the chariots.”
I knew myself to be in Pivot. This was where the clock of Arcadia was housed. From here did the pendulum sun stretch. For a moment I wondered if the wheels were simply measuring time or actually meting out it, creating it like everything else in this unnatural hellscape.
The Pale Queen was lost in thought for a moment, admiring the machinery around her. Her long, gold-tipped fingers played at her crimson lips.
My brother was by my side. He would not meet my gaze as he knelt.
“You should be kneeling too, Catherine Helstone,” said the Pale Queen, turning her attention back to us. “Your brother has learnt. You are in my domain.”
“Am I really here?”
She only smiled, gold talons raking contemplatively on her throat. She leaned forward and looked expectantly at me.
I knelt.
“Brother and sister, side by side,” she said, admiring us as though a portrait. Her appraising eyes looked upon us with an unwelcome pleasure. “Closer than you’ve ever been. It is good of you to finally leave the door open for me.”
“O-open?” I stuttered.
“Yes, one door leads to the castle and another door leads to me. How else can I stealth into your dreams?”
I remembered the strangely vivid dreams of my brother in the Pale Queen’s arms and of running with him through Arcadia. “That was you?”
“You were very diligent in keeping that door shut for some reason. Which is really no fun at all.” She heaved a sigh. “Still, it is only polite to thank me for your newfound closeness. Or have you not enjoyed my tricks?”
“Your tricks?” said Laon. “You mean–”
“My grand scheme.” She made a gesture towards the clockwork that framed her throne. “The sins that I have set in motion, the gift that I have given you. Had I not summoned you to Arcadia, would you have seen these wonders? Had I not placed into my own home, remade for your pleasure, would you have realised your love?”
“So it was all you…” muttered Laon. There was little defiance left in him, only a dark despair.
“I paid for your passage, Cathy, and arranged for Miss Davenport to meet you. I lied to her and let her leap to conclusions. Use a bird to catch a bird, after all. And if I had not forbidden you to read Roche’s journals, would you have read it? I made it all the sweeter for being forbidden fruit. I made you all the more curious.”
“But why?” said Laon. His fists clenched, and I glimpsed that passion I so loved. I longed to lay a soothing hand upon him, but I remembered the truth and I tasted bitterness. “Do you simply delight in tormenting us?”
“Has it truly been a torment?” The Pale Queen threw back her head and laughed long, pealing notes. “Should you not thank me? You will never be scorned and replaced by a rib of his.” She spat out the word rib with an almost incoherent disdain. “I have given you a new Eden, a new garden. Yours can be a perfect love.”
I nodded, biting my tongue, not wanting to anger the gloating queen.
“You have petitioned me for some time.” She smiled wide and indulgent. “Do you still wish to step foot into the heart of Elphane, Laon Helstone?”
He hesitated. He glanced over at me, that guilt heavy in his eyes.
“I wish it still.”
“Very well.”
She turned to me and, smiling too wide, possessing a secret only she knew, she said, “I grant you my protection within the bounds of Arcadia. Everything the light of this pendulum sun can see, everything that it may shine upon, none of it can harm you and yours, Catherine Helstone. By the bringer of light, I promise you this and I bind this to your blood.”
Chapter 43
The Road into Hell
I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.
I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?
<
br /> Song of Solomon 5:1-3
It was that hazy twilight when I woke up. Laon was not beside me, and I felt my want of him almost immediately so I went looking for him.
Lantern in hand, I drifted through the castle, numb from new knowledge: I was human. I was in love with my brother. I was in hell.
And one of those thoughts would have broken me, but here I was still standing.
The stone arches and vaulted ceilings of Gethsemane were a familiar sight. Roche could not have known, but its name was proving prophetic. Though perhaps he did think of himself as Christ within the garden, praying to his father and begging to be spared the cup of bitterness. The last sanctuary before the end.
There was more mercy in this castle’s imperfect pretence than mockery. The Salamander had called it a love letter to humanity, a portrait drawn by someone too besotted to understand what they saw.
My brother was in his own, neglected rooms that had been empty of him for so long. His dog was a black, unhappy heap among the pale linens of his bed. He did not turn to greet me when I entered, and continued to work mechanically, packing away his things. There was no trace of lingering sentiment as he folded away the shirts I made him.
“So,” I said. “You’re leaving?”
He was silent.
I watched him for a while, folding away his clothes and placing them each in his trunk with a trembling stoicism.
“But the summons,” I said. “The summons from Mab, or the Pale Queen, or Lilith or whatever her name is.”
Laon flinched.
I swallowed, wavering. I knew what I wanted to say and I also knew too well that we were not the indefatigable pioneers that the Missionary Society would have chosen. We had not the purity of ambition, the strength of spirit, the firmness of faith. Our minds would cloud and our hopes would waver.