Tygo seemed confused for a split second. A shadow darted across his eyes but he covered it quickly. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a mirror?”
John smirked. “Such objects are strictly for priests and magicians of the highest order. Did you not say you hated magic?”
Tygo nodded. “But I thought I made it clear that my conversation with the angels was an accident. I never called them. I wouldn’t know how to begin scrying, or whatever you call it. I abhor the utensils of your profession, I told you.”
John continued to smirk. “All the same, you are now in my employ, and it seems prudent to get to the bottom of this matter as quickly as possible. We did tell Alyson that we would report to her tomorrow with additional knowledge, did we not? Are you not looking forward to that?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me if we see her or not. She was the one who requested the meeting. But I guess we have to tell her something. Maybe I’ll see something.” He paused. “Stranger things have happened to me. Since I arrived here I’ve done so many things I never thought I would do. What’s one more?”
It was a curious thing to say. What had he done that he never thought he would do? But John let it go, and led the other man to his office, where he peevishly lit a whole host of candles that spat their trembling shadows onto the walls. John kept his chip of the Sky Mirror on an intricate holder he’d commissioned some years back. Draped over it, however, was a plain cloth—a dust rag, really. Old and stained from handling. He withdrew the cloth and presented the palm-sized mirror as though showing off a finely crafted art object. He couldn’t help himself—he had gone to such lengths to steal it and hide it all these years.
Tygo snickered, but quickly tightened his mouth over his lips in an effort not to offend. John was offended. He used the underside of the cloth to briefly shine the black granite. Tygo came up to the mirror and hunched over it, peering over its flat surface and blinking. He glanced at John, scrutinizing his face for instruction. John frowned meanly. He had no intention of helping. At last Tygo placed his fingers on the rock’s shining surface and John audibly laughed. “That’s not how it’s done, man.”
Tygo tipped his chin up. “Well, you were probably doing it wrong, that’s why you never saw anything.”
“How do you know I never saw anything?”
“If you had, you wouldn’t be so desperate for me to look.” He paused. “What are we looking for, again?”
John roughly pushed him away from the chip. “My god, man! We’re looking for confirmation.”
“From … the angels?”
He tossed up his hands. “Look, in my career, I’ve written an entire reinterpretation of our cosmology. I’ve scoured records from a thousand years ago! I’ve spent twenty years and more at this task, I’m in midlife now and only just realizing that everything I’ve believed was likely based on faulty math and my own hubris and some gross condition of the world which had convinced me until now that magic … that it mattered. Bah!” He shook his head. “We’re looking for the Sublime! What did you think we were looking for? Why do you think you’ve kept your head this long? You said you could see things. So see them!”
Tygo nodded and rolled his sleeves up. “Right. I’m sorry. I’ll scry for you.” He hesitated still, then placed a palm on John’s shoulder. “I did have a vision. I promise you. I know your work may be have been misguided. But it hasn’t been in vain.”
“Bah.” John said again. “Did you see the shuttles returning in your vision? Did the angels tell you they were returning?”
“What I saw can’t be communicated in words.”
John rolled his eyes. “How convenient. You know, I regret listening to you at all.”
“Don’t say that.”
“No, I believe I’ve been taken in by some scheme. I’m sure I’ll be punished soon enough for it. And when that happens, I won’t forget you. You will pay for tricking me.”
Tygo shook his head. “You have it all wrong. I’m not tricking you. I need you. You, specifically. To help me understand my vision. I’ve told you, I’m not skilled in astronomics. I have no idea what anything I saw might mean.” He spoke more softly. “What I’m trying to tell you is that this may be the Return. It may really be.”
“Why then did you advise Alyson that it definitely was?”
Tygo spread his hands. “I only said it may be.”
“I don’t think that’s what she heard. It’s not what I heard. You have confessed to me you are a liar.”
“I’m not lying, Lord Astronomer.”
John folded his arms calmly over his chest. “Then prove it. Scry for me.”
Tygo nodded again. “Well. That was part of the bargain, after all.”
“It was the whole point of the bargain!” John snapped.
Tygo gathered his wits and took his place again at the mirror, and, taking a bit of his own sleeve, wiped the rock absently a few times. “Can’t you cut off my shackles?”
“Not even on my mind, my man. It hasn’t crossed my mind.”
Then John waited. Nothing happened. Finally Tygo said, “You may as well take a seat, I can’t promise you’ll see anything yourself. It was just me at the mirror, that first time. And … I think I mentioned that when it occurred, I’d been somewhat at the drink.”
John raised his eyebrows.
“It was a habit I’d gotten into. Regrettable. But … when it happened before I’d had … O, several or three glasses of wine. Do you … have any?”
John stormed through the manor house, into the kitchens, and removed a bottle of citrus liqueur from the storeroom—used for flavoring, he assumed—and without checking the glasses for dust he poured two hasty cupfuls of the stuff and brought it all back balanced upon one of Mizar’s many inlaid trays. The bottle, too. He thrust the assortment at Tygo, who lifted the bottle and inspected it, wrinkling his nose. But he said nothing, raised his glass, and took the entire drink in a single draught, and waited until John had done the same, although John had to take two swallows, as he was unaccustomed to swilling strong liquids.
After that first gulp, his chest and gut seemed to catch like a fire. He teetered on his feet. Tygo held up his glass as if for more, and John supplied it, and then he too took another cupful, and then he felt like sitting down, which he did on the chaise longue at the other end of the room. Tygo closed his eyes like a child concentrating, and then went back to the mirror, cracked his knuckles, gazed at his own reflection in the black opalescent stone, and steadied himself as though for a duel.
Then John waited. They both waited, for what seemed like an Age, in their respective positions—John on the sofa and Tygo across the room, standing unmoving over the mirror. John eventually slid into a slumber, for when he lurched awake the candles were much lower and Tygo was still standing, stock-still, at the mirror, his black pigtail hanging lank on his skull. John realized he was damp and chilled and saw the fireplace, empty. A bubble of irritation burst within him, and he creaked to his feet, intending to fetch Mizar and reprimand him for not making the fire. One evening duty! Was it so much to ask?
The bottle of yellow liqueur winked merrily at him from the side table, and John discovered himself pouring another drink before he managed to leave the room. He sipped it this time instead of gulping. He somewhat enjoyed the warm feeling of the fluid sliding down his innards. Tygo had yet to move, but his cup was empty. John went to refill it, but when he approached the other man, he saw Tygo was not asleep, not awake, but open-eyed and vacant with his mouth half-agape. The pupils of the eyes hugely dilated.
John tripped backward in a startle, dropping the liqueur glasses. They smashed on the granite floor.
Like some blind bird, Tygo turned slowly to John, his face dead-looking, mercury gray. Around them the air pulsed with motion, as though spinning through fan blades. A pleasant breeze. But John noted in a slight panic that the window was not open. Even if it had been, it was November and the wind could not possibly be so warm.
&nbs
p; He gripped Tygo’s shoulder and shook him. Tygo continued to face him with that horrible expression. John grew more and more alarmed. He lifted his hand and actually slapped Tygo across the face. No response. He yanked back his hand, shocked at himself. It was as though he had been driven to do it: he had not even known what he was doing.
Tygo loomed above the mirror, the black surface reflecting back nothingness. Where had his reflection gone? John choked. The small star tattoos on Tygo’s temples stood out, almost raised, like the hair of a hissing cat.
Suddenly Tygo began to speak in a bizarre language. Words John had never heard and could not understand. Each word seemed to be longer than the last. Quite a few had escaped the other man’s lips before John had the wherewithal to leap to his desk and pull out a pad and begin transcribing. They were strange to the ear and ungainly to write; he could not tell when one word ended and the next began. Frantic, he scribbled, setting down sound after sound, writing as phonetically as he could manage, and this continued for some amount of time, John was not sure how long, enraptured and terrified as he was to be receiving anything that even resembled a miracle.
It occurred to him momentarily that Tygo was playing him for the worst kind of fool, but he let this suspicion out of his mind as one might let a hound into the garden knowing full well it may dig up the flowers. This relinquishment oddly satisfying. Some time later, minutes or hours, John had no idea, Tygo’s words ran dry and he was himself again, alight with excitement and confusion.
He still stood at the mirror, drenched now in sweat. The first thing he did was wipe his brow with his sleeve. Then he sank to the floor and began, improbably, to laugh. John thrust his papers up to the candlelight and poked at them. “What is this?”
Tygo continued to laugh. “Angel language. I don’t know. You tell me.”
“But what did you see? You looked ghastly, like a corpse someone dug up! You must tell me. I’ve never seen anything like that. Were you putting me on? How did you do it?”
Tygo sighed happily and put his hands to his face. “I—I don’t know. It just … happened. Like before. For a long time nothing happened, I was just standing there feeling stupid. Then I was seeing these strange grids, one atop the other, with small portions of the grids laid out backwards. But after a while the squares on the grids flipped over and then I was seeing a whole idea, a whole world, and I could exist in angelic time. Inside an event maybe…” He trailed off, seeing John’s expression. He shook his head. “See, I told you before. It’s like explaining a dream.”
“No, no, explain. You have to explain,” John said, brandishing the paper maniacally. “I wrote down everything you said. I copied out the sounds of the language. We can figure it out. If you can recall any of the physical visions—perhaps we can match them to the words. I’ve spent my life studying arcane nonsense.” He laughed bitterly. “Did you … is this the Return?”
They peered at the papers together. The pages were awash with impenetrable syllables, each more inexplicable than the last. Stunned by the sheer unreadableness, they sat side by side in silence for some moments. Beyond them shards of glass sparkled in the weak light—the broken cups. At last John remarked in a mild voice, “You can’t know how it feels to watch a person truly experience the Sublime. I’ve waited all my life to … to see a miracle.”
Tygo nodded.
“If you are a con-man, I damn you, and you should be hung off the walls of the palace as a bounty for the seagulls. But if you are a visionary…” He exhaled. “I have never witnessed anything like that.”
Tygo nodded.
“Is this the Return?” he asked again.
Tygo pinched his temples with his fingers. “I don’t know.”
“What did you see?”
“I think we’ll need to do a very thorough study of these angelic words and how they correspond to the data you’ve collected so far—”
“That will take weeks. What did you see?”
Tygo met John’s eyes. “I saw what I saw before.” He took the papers and held them once more to the light, pointing to a scribble near the end of the transcription. “That word there. You haven’t written it right, but you got the general idea. I remember that word. I saw it in the first vision, too. That word is important. ‘Tellochvovin.’”
“What does it mean?”
Tygo shrugged. “That’s what you’re supposed to figure out.” He hesitated. “I do know what it means, technically. But not what it means, cosmically. If that makes sense.”
John frowned at him.
“‘Tellochvovin.’” The other man frowned back. “It means ‘falling death.’”
Thereafter, elated but also peculiarly overcome, they each drank more of the citrus liqueur. They took turns at the bottle, enough to stuff their heads with pleasantness and wonder at what had just transpired, and it was altogether confusing but mostly agreeable, until Mizar inserted himself into the room and began fretfully to sweep up the glass, reminding John of how he never took drink and shouldn’t he think of his health? John was then seized by an unreasonable aggravation and spent minutes lecturing the poor man on his negligence in regard to the matter of the unlit fire, until Mizar hung his head, which was as much of an apology as Mizar ever issued. By then John felt depressed by his own tantrum and unsteady on his feet. Tygo had passed out on the chaise longue.
It was with a heavy heart that John allowed Mizar to lug him off to his chamber and place him in bed. Beside him on the night table Mizar filled a blue crystal glass with water and instructed John to drink all of it before he slept, but John drank none.
CHAPTER 14
THE UNICURSAL HEXAGRAM
On her wedding night she thought of her brothers. Argento, of course, there was always Argento. But also she wondered about her other brother, William, who had been driven from her mother’s settlement for thievery before she was born. Her mother said William had run off to be a con-man, a swindler who posed as a Walking Doctor. Could he have been in that crowd of onlookers? Was one of those faces his? If so, she wouldn’t have known him.
She thought of them both as she walked hand in hand with her new husband back to the tent. Now she had a husband. He would protect her from men like them. Men who could hurt her. Mr. Capulatio had said The difference is I’ll only hurt you on the inside. She remembered Argento’s broken body, before Mr. Capulatio cut off his head. Argento had kept his courage in the end. The girl’s hate for him had transformed, and her pity as well, and now she wondered how she had ever been afraid of him. He seemed so far away. He could not touch her.
When the wedding dance ended and they came back to the tent, Mr. Capulatio sat across from her on the carpets. There had been laughing and singing and dancing, and then cups had appeared and folk had begun a raucous revel. Mr. Capulatio had stolen her away, back here to the soft pillowed ground. The quiet. Then, slowly, as her head cleared, she found herself trying to transform her husband’s face into her brother’s. There were no wrinkles on Mr. Capulatio’s forehead, but she remembered Argento’s thick and somewhat scarred skin so fully in that instant that she couldn’t believe he wasn’t here, that she wasn’t there, back in his musty tent beneath mildewed blankets. If she tried, she could see in Mr. Capulatio some likeness of Argento. If she looked hard enough. Their eyes, for instance, were nearly the same color. And their hair was not that different. Maybe they looked like brothers. Suddenly she couldn’t tell. She wondered if she had drunk too much.
She searched for something on his face that didn’t remind her of her brother, and it was a long while before she realized that they hardly looked similar at all—they looked nothing alike! Her brother had been tall, very tall. She remembered that well. But Mr. Capulatio was of an average height. Was she disappointed by that? How shallow. She wondered if she was also of an average height; Orchid was a woman, and taller than the girl, and there was no one else to compare herself to.
She felt her eyes closing. But he still wanted to sit there in silence. What was
he doing? Now she felt sad that there had been no one she knew to witness her marriage and tell her if she’d looked happy. There had been no one to tell the girl if she looked beautiful. Had she looked beautiful? Had she been happy? She couldn’t tell. She thought she should feel different, now that they were married. But she didn’t know if she did.
And in that instant the dam of emptiness burst within her. She did miss Argento. He had burned the unicursal hexagram into her thigh and dragged her through blood-spattered fields on her knees and never spoken to her with any kindness at all, but she missed him. He was her brother. The only one she had ever known. She wanted to hold Cosmas, the Head he’d made her, Cosmas the Uncrusher, but Mr. Capulatio had hidden it high up in one of his boxes. She began to sob.
Mr. Capulatio studied her as though this were no great thing. They continued to sit across from one another while she cried, him with his legs crossed beneath him and she with her knees drawn up to her chest. At first she sobbed loudly, with heaving breaths, but finally they slowed and Mr. Capulatio extended a hand to her and caressed the bulb of her knee. His fingers were gentle. He pulled her forward by her leg and kissed her forehead. He whispered, “Did you not like the wedding?” He kissed her again. “I think other people liked it. I’m sorry about Orchid. She acted very badly.” He shrugged. “But the wedding was still nice.”
She said nothing.
“Do you know what today is?”
She shook her head.
“It’s November fourteenth, your wedding day. We’ve been together now for seven months.”
She began to cry again. She couldn’t help it; all the moments of the life she’d lived with her oldest brother rushed back to her at once. It was a torture she could not will from her mind. She remembered the horse Argento had let her ride—a broken down palomino that he cursed and said was no good for pulling their wagon anymore. Where was that horse now? Surely dead, like everyone else. And also the way at night Argento had crept into her tent with his bottle of foul-smelling drink clutched like a baby to his breast, and how he would take long voracious gulps while barely sitting up, and sometimes he would choke, and she was forced to slap him on the back to clear the fluid from his windpipe and how he stared at her with watery eyes and smiled—something he never did when he wasn’t drinking. And how he looked when he slept: so compressed and uncomfortable on his bedroll. How she had, at times, re-covered his feet when she thought he was cold. But when he woke up, all those moments were forgotten and his cruelty returned. Mr. Capulatio hugged her and whispered, “It’s all right, Aurora.”
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