Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  But Cyrus feared that was exactly what she would do. She’d tell her brother only what Cyrus had done, not why he did it, or the experiment’s final result. She was going to say that Mr. Zarene grabbed on to her and held her still in a cloud of angry bees, and Sholto Mochrie would rush off and fetch a deputy from Massenfer—again.

  Cyrus put the tin lid back on the open hive and replaced the rock that weighed it down. He walked back to his house, holding his head in both hands as if to stop his skull from flying apart. “What a calamity,” he thought.

  Indoors, he made himself some tea, but he didn’t ice his stings. He accepted his pain as penance for his stupidity.

  Once he was sitting down with his cup of tea, he felt less frightened, but no less amazed. What was amazing wasn’t that the girl had watched him, understood what he was doing, and copied him. That was just asking. Asking was only part of the magic. Any clever person could pick up a spell, given time. So, asking was one thing, being answered quite another. When Agnes Mochrie’s dark fingers flashed, the bees calmed and time itself seemed to slow till the late afternoon sunlight was as thick, lucent, and golden as honey.

  Zarenes, perhaps half of them, once they had a grasp of the Alphabet in its Basic and Tabular forms, would be able to ask something of the magic and have it reply, “Oh, all right,” grudgingly. To some it said, plainly, “Yes.” To very few, it answered, “Yes, I will!” joyous, like a bride or groom. It had sometimes said, “Yes! I will!” to Cyrus. And always to Ghislain—the magic had doted on Ghislain like it was his mother and father. But now and then, throughout the centuries, it would do more. It would consolidate itself and say, like the genie of stories, “Your wish is my command.” And when the bees sank out of the air and a balm fell over the afternoon, it had said that to Agnes Mochrie.

  Cyrus was sitting over his empty cup with his head in his hands, when he heard a back step creak. Agnes Mochrie came in the door. Her hair was sopping and stuck to her, and her shorts were soaked. Her shirt was only blotted with water—she must have taken it off before going into the river to cool her bee stings. She glared at Cyrus, and then her gaze moved to the bench and the bottles of mead. “You owe me,” she said savagely.

  “I could give you the mead then walk you back to the guesthouse. I think we should both have a talk with Iris—”

  “I’m not talking to any of you!”

  He got up, and she backed off. He picked up one slender bottle and offered it to her.

  “Put it down on the end of the table,” she said.

  He did, and stepped back.

  She darted forward, snatched the bottle, and ran from the room.

  * * *

  CANNY SNEAKED INTO THE GUESTHOUSE and put on her slacks and a cardigan. She knotted a scarf around her neck and checked herself in the mirror. Most of her stings were covered.

  She took the bottle of mead to Sholto and Susan, who were sitting on the porch swing. They were very pleased by her gift, and touched. Susan went to find a corkscrew and three glasses, and they opened the bottle. Canny had a little. The mead was sweet and fragrant, and the small buzz she got from it was a distraction. Discomfort was taking up most of her attention. Her consciousness seemed to be running a relay race from sting to sting, pausing at each and then carrying amplified pain along to the next.

  At dinner she was silent and droopy. Susan and Sholto didn’t notice. They were flirting, leaning together and laughing. Canny watched their behavior and realized that the way she saw it had changed. It no longer looked embarrassing and exclusive, but kind of sweet. They were tipsy, and funny. There were new guests—a family with two children, one five, the other two. The two-year-old was being fussed over by Iris’s older girls, who were serving that night. The parents were clearly charmed by the fussing, by Susan and Sholto’s laughter, and the way they were showing one another off in conversation. The five-year-old was perky and kept saying smart things to get attention, and was getting plenty. The food was excellent, as always, and everyone at the table seemed comfortable and content.

  Canny didn’t feel left out. She didn’t feel like a leper. Her arms and legs and neck were smarting, and she felt light-headed, but she had plans, and she liked her plans and knew where she wanted them to take her.

  * * *

  THE GUESTHOUSE WAS QUIET BY TEN P.M. Everyone had retired, including Iris Zarene, who slept in a room off the first-floor landing. It was the only room on that level, and its window was a gable above the front porch. Because she was wary of Iris, Canny decided to go out her bedroom window and edge along the porch roof to the fire escape. She was pretty sure the two children were in the room beside hers. She’d only have to pass their window, and they’d be fast asleep. Canny was very tired. She’d been up since six-thirty, with only one decent night’s sleep in the five days before that. She’d rather stay in bed but felt that, before she got upset and ran away from Ghislain, she’d promised him she’d be back.

  As she plaited her hair, which was so long and thick that it was still damp with river water, she thought, “I can always go to sleep once I get there.” The idea seemed natural. If she was with Ghislain she wouldn’t have to worry about being prevented from being with Ghislain, at the heart of the magic. Ghislain would teach her. When Ghislain talked to her, he was talking to the real—secret—Canny. It was exciting, and also strangely restful. He wasn’t really trustworthy—after all he’d tied her up—but yet somehow she trusted him.

  Canny trimmed the lamp and opened the window. She was ready to leave, but for a moment she stood, as if in a trance, remembering how, when Ghislain helped her from the veranda roof, he’d had his arms around her. At the time she’d been surprised and alarmed (and puzzled by the strange absence of odor in the air around him), but looking back now she could see she’d been quite safe, possibly safer than she’d ever been in her life.

  Canny came to and practically floated through the window. She slid the sash closed and walked nimbly along the porch roof to the corner and the painted timber ladder fixed to the wall of the house. She clambered down it and made for the river path.

  13

  THE GIRL TURNED UP at around eleven, in time to see him prying dribbles of lead sign from the clay tiles. He’d left the window open for her. The lights were on, and although it was summer, he never had to bother about moths. Insects respected the spell and wouldn’t usually cross any of the house’s thresholds. The girl did though. She came in blinking, her eyes already half-mast. She settled in an armchair near the hearth and watched him work at detaching the ideograms from the dried clay, then peeling the remaining ripples of melted lead from his quartz crucible. When he was done Ghislain turned to her and saw that she hadn’t moved. She was slumped and knock-kneed, and her face was soft with sleepiness. “Hey,” he said.

  She made a friendly, throaty questioning noise.

  “The thing I want you to see—you have to pay attention to the preliminaries.”

  Again that little purring noise.

  He went to the kitchen and took a couple of plates from the cupboard. He stopped in the front hall and only leaned through the parlor door to say, “This should wake you up.” He raised one plate over his head. Her eyes moved to follow it and, when he smashed it on the hall rug, she flinched. He smashed the second plate. One fragment of porcelain lodged in the floorboards.

  The girl got up and joined him. She said, “Why are you making a mess?”

  He pulled the shard out of the floorboard and ran his finger over the white scar it had left. “Come and sit with me on the stairs,” he said. He took her hand. It was fine, but not small. She wasn’t small, she was tall and lean and strong. Ghislain moved closer to her to check their relative heights. He tilted his chin and rested it on top of her head. He was tall, but she must be something like five foot ten.

  She suddenly leaned against him and sighed. He put his arms around her and they stood that way for a time. Ghislain could feel her shaking off sleep—or simply shaking and waking up. He put
his hands into her hair, covered her ears, and raised her face to his. Her hair was dry but smelled of river water. Her dark skin was flushed, her mouth a rosy bruise.

  Ghislain had never kissed anyone before. He’d imagined it would be exciting to kiss a girl, but not that it would be like breaking free. He pressed his lips to Canny’s and seemed to pass through her, and be faraway, and yet at the same time he was still there, touching her. For days he’d been thinking about her, wondering who she was—and now, near to her, he couldn’t get past her surfaces. Her hair, her skin, the long wands of her forearms, her high cheekbones, her throat, her smooth, firm upper arms. Her skin was silky and supple, like his own, but it wasn’t his own. How strange that was. Ghislain lifted her shirt a little and put his hand on her ribs. He felt them expand and shrink. She was taking deep breaths. Her mouth tasted of toothpaste and apple crumble—apple, sugar, cinnamon.

  A number of minutes went by, then Ghislain felt the midnight, like a slack tide about to turn. He didn’t want to let Canny go, but knew he must. The girl would go, not at midnight, like Cinderella, but sometime, sooner than he wanted.

  Ghislain hardly ever had visitors, and he only ever had visitors. No one stayed. No one was his to keep. Snatching a moment like this—it wasn’t enough for him. His young body might be shouting, “Now!” Demanding, “Right now!” But his old heart was telling him that to give in to what he wanted would only bring him pain. “You can’t do this,” he counseled himself. “You can’t stand it.”

  Ghislain took Canny by her shoulders and turned her. “Look,” he said.

  The shards of crockery lay scattered on the rug, glowing in the soft gaslight. Then it was as if there was a breeze in the hallway, a wind stirring the smallest splinters. It wasn’t a breeze from one direction, but from all points of the compass, and the patch of broken plates was a compass rose. The splinters stirred, then twitched and skidded inward. Then, with a stealthy tinkle, all the shards slid together, turning themselves over or around, to fit back together and seal seamlessly. The plates were whole again. If there was ever any dust that settled on furniture, books, window ledges, it too was whipped away. The dried clay slip splattered on the desk in the parlor lost its cohesion and flew away as fine dust, and the cloud of dust posted itself out under the front door. The bright brass doorsill grew momentarily dull as the dust, dirt, crumbs of food, and a few long black hairs gathered together and went out over it.

  Midnight was past. The waiting stillness gone, and replaced by an accomplished peace. The house seemed pleased with itself.

  “Oh,” said Canny, then, old-fashioned, “In all my born days!”

  “Yes,” said Ghislain, pleased too. Then he offered to show her what he was making.

  * * *

  THE HIDDEN HOUSE HAD A LOCKED ROOM. Ghislain unlocked the door and pushed it open. Canny stopped before the black oblong of darkness while Ghislain went on in to turn up the gas. Canny heard the flint strikers spitting, and the light came, at first burning blue.

  Canny thought of the locked rooms in fairy tales and what those rooms held—a little man at a spinning wheel, spinning straw into gold; or just the spinning wheel and a spindle with its wicked point, waiting for a cursed princess; or the bodies of Bluebeard’s former wives hanging from hooks like sides of lamb in a meat locker.

  “Why are you standing there?” said Ghislain. “Come on in.”

  The floorboards were bare. There were no curtains on the bay window. The windowpanes were all rippled glass, so that no one would be able to see in. There was a long window seat in the bay. There was a fireplace with an empty grate, and in the center of the room, a roughly man-size form draped with a sheet.

  Canny’s footsteps echoed. So did Ghislain’s voice. “Mind the rope,” he said.

  She stopped. A rope was coiled at her feet. It had a hook at one end and a loop at the other.

  Ghislain pointed up at the ceiling. “There’s supposed to be a sturdy hook up there, for the loop, but I have to keep drilling a hole for it over and over. Midnight mends it. The rope is actually too big for the job anyway. But now that I have you”—he laughed—“I thought perhaps we might unravel one of your sweaters and plait a wool cord. Something lighter.”

  Canny could see that Ghislain’s “sturdy hook” was supposed to fit into the hub of fanning spokes of ceiling beams. The beams were all intricately carved with ideogrammatic sign. They were too big for the room. “Is that structural?” she said.

  “Magically structural? Or structural in terms of engineering?”

  “I suppose it must be magical,” Canny said.

  “It’s the final phrase of the Great Spell.”

  “The spell that keeps the house perfect? Or the one that hides it and keeps you prisoner?” Canny asked.

  “The first—the builders’ spell, which keeps the house perfect. There are four foundation stones—two matched pairs. They’re underground. The Great Spell is founded on them. Most of the carving and stained glass only refine the terms of the spell.” He gestured at the joined beams. “But this and the clock in the library are a bit more important.”

  Ghislain carefully lifted the sheet on the shrouded form and let it fall to the floor. The revealed object was a kind of cage—one cage inside another. Both were entirely made of lead filigree, thousands of Ghislain’s melted toy soldier ideograms, soldered together to make two forms with dimensions similar to those of a dressmaker’s dummies, one inside the other. But, unlike dressmakers’ dummies, these shapes went all the way to the floor.

  Canny couldn’t read the spell, or spells, because her eyes weren’t able to separate the two layers. It was like looking through two pieces of overlapping lace and trying to distinguish a pattern. She said, “There’s a way into this, right?”

  Ghislain produced some pliers from his pocket and used them to bend back several flanges of lead. The outer cage split and opened. The second cage was already unfastened. On the floor of the inner cage was an inverted bowl of lead filigree. Canny saw that this cap thing was meant to go on top of the outer cage, that there was a smooth open ring around its top that the cap was meant to slot into. The inner cage was already closed on top. There was a lead loop jutting from the center of the cap where a hook could latch on, the hook tied to the rope.

  “That’s the crown,” Ghislain said. “It’s still missing several sections. Once it’s lowered into place it closes the outer cage. The crown will activate the spell.”

  It had been this crown Ghislain was working on. Every sign forming the outer cage was the same. They all said: “Go now.” They were meant to be read from the inside, Canny saw. The “Go now” faced inward, which was why the dust sheet draping the cages hadn’t torn itself to shreds.

  “Is the crown like an on switch?” Canny said.

  “Yes.”

  “This is all one spell?”

  Ghislain nodded.

  Canny’s eyes roamed. There was so much language on the inner cage—minutely detailed instructions. She couldn’t see how it could be only one spell. She glanced at Ghislain. She must have looked nervous, because he took her hand. “I don’t understand this,” she said.

  “But you can read it?”

  “Bits of it,” she said. “The words are facing inward. It’s like trying to read the writing on a shop window from inside the shop.”

  “Harder than that, I think.”

  He was right. It was like trying to make one picture from the pieces of thirty different jigsaw puzzles all thrown together in a pile.

  “It’s an exhaustive list of what I don’t mean when I say ‘Go now,’” Ghislain said. “It’s like all the ‘Quiet Please’ and ‘No Smoking’ and ‘Wrong Way’ signs in the whole world. You know how in grammar there are words called ‘qualifiers’ that modify adjectives? For example: ‘you are quite tall, and very pretty’?”

  Canny blushed.

  Ghislain touched the gleaming gray lacework of the inner cage. “This is a bunch of qualifiers.”

&nbs
p; “So, someone gets in the cage. Then what happens?”

  “Someone climbs into the inner cage, closes the outer cage, then the inner, and then unties the cord knotted near their hand and lowers the crown into place. Then the spell does its work.”

  She looked up and into his face. “You get in the cage?”

  He nodded.

  “The inner cage says what not to do?”

  “Where not to go.”

  “And the outer cage says ‘Go.’”

  He nodded.

  “The inner cage says, ‘Not here, or there, or that other place.’”

  “Et cetera, ad infinitum. But the outer cage doesn’t just say ‘Go now,’” Ghislain said, then his chin lifted and he added softly, but with terrible pride, “It says: ‘Go from now.’”

  “What? Like, ‘Keep going from now on’?”

  He shook his head.

  Canny had a moment of innocent confusion, then the realization came—and it was as if someone had pumped her head full of water, till it felt cold and full. Tears leaked out of her eyes. “Go from this time?”

  * * *

  GHISLAIN LEFT HIS CONTRAPTION uncovered and the door to the room open. He took Canny into the kitchen. The range was still warm from when he’d cooked his dinner. He made lemon mint tea (herbs he could grow), and offered her some pie (it was made of last year’s preserved apples and crumbly cornmeal pie crust. He’d grown and ground the corn). He folded the girl’s hands around her warm cup and held them there. “You’re shaking,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re so upset.”

  “People can’t travel through time.”

  “Are you upset because the idea is offensive to you? I don’t know why. Do you think people can refuse to travel through time? You’re a time traveler. You were living in last year, and now you’re living in this year.”