Glancing around the kitchen, Mab chuckled. “So, Harebrain was telling the truth. He really does have a maenad or harpy cook him breakfast.”
“Harpy!” Queen Agave snorted. “That mean old bird has no hands. All she does is terrorize the poor bwca into doing the work for her. Harpy cooking breakfast indeed!” She paused, reaching for a cutting board marred with deep scratches. “Speaking of the bwca . . .”
Agave scratched her nails across the board. Creamy milk ran from the scratches. She caught the milk in a bowl, then scratched the board once more. This time golden honey dripped down the marred wood. She let a few drops fall into the bowl and swirled the milk around.
“Put this by the fireplace in the big empty room upstairs, would you?”
Mab took the bowl carefully and started up the stairs. On the second step, he paused.
“Eh . . . either of you ladies know anything about a big, black, bat-winged guy with sapphire eyes and claws?”
“Who, us?” Agave’s expressive face was unnaturally blank. “No. I have never seen anything like that.”
“Me, neither.” The mermaid put on her headphones and began bopping to the music, the water rippling about her.
Mab turned and ascended the staircase without a comment. Once at the top and through the arch, he murmured, “She’s lying.”
“Obviously,” I agreed.
He growled, scrunching up his face. I could tell that he would have punched his palm, except his hands were full with bwca milk. “Bet I could pummel the truth out of her!”
The chamber with the great hearth contained only a few neat piles of gear and numerous pastel squares of paper. There was no pool, only a hardwood floor that creaked beneath our feet.
“Bwca, eh?” Mab put the bowl down beside the brick of the fireplace. “Welsh relative of the brownie. No wonder the place is spotless. Those fellows’ll clean anything for a little honey-laced milk.”
I slipped my hand into the pocket of my cashmere cloak, which I carried over one arm, my fingers seeking the supple leather of the little book. Several rooms back, I had spied a big comfortable chair, albeit one that was pushed up next to two smaller chairs. Still, it was beside a window with plenty of light. If I walked back there now, I might be able to read the entire book before dinner.
“Are we done?”
Mab shook his head. “If we’re going to get to the bottom of what is up with the Harebrain, we’ve got to unravel the clues he’s left all around us.” He glanced at the mostly empty hall. “I’m convinced there’s some method to this madness, and I intend to find it!”
“We’re wasting our time, Mab,” I snapped. “These messages are just notes my brother leaves to remind himself of things he’s forgotten.”
Mab stalked over to a pile of yellowed fencing gear leaning against the far side of the hearth. Following him, I saw jackets, helmets, two foils, and an epee. The note stuck to the wall above read: REMEMBER TO PRACTICE.
“Condemning evidence, that,” I mused. “It’s all clear now.”
Mab gave me a long, level look. “You want me to work or not, Ma’am? It’s your call.”
I waved a hand. “Carry on.”
Beyond, two cardboard boxes holding ribbons, wrapping paper, and a few children’s toys stood to either side of an empty closet. Scraps of tape and brightly colored paper were scattered about the floor. The notes stuck to the wall above the two boxes read: FOR E.D. and FOR T.C.
“This must be recent. The bwca hasn’t gotten to it yet.” Mab leaned over and sniffed the scraps of paper and tape. Straightening, he pulled out his notebook and copied down the messages. “Apparently, your brother was sending someone Christmas presents.”
Next to the closet sat a red trunk. Mab opened the lid and peered at the note attached to the inside.
“Creepy,” he muttered, jerking back. I leaned closer. The note stuck to the open lid read: MEMENTOES OF DEAD FRIENDS.
“What is it?” I pushed the lid back farther and looked in.
The chest held hundreds of little wooden figurines with jeweled eyes, primarily animals. I reached in and lifted my hand: dogs, elephants, boars, birds, an alligator, and a cheetah spilled from my palm. They clinked, ringing like wood chimes, as they rained back upon their fellows, the multicolored gems of their eyes sparkling.
“These were part of his staff once,” I guessed.
“From the Staff of Summoning?” asked Mab. “How so?”
“You’ve seen his staff, how it looks like a long narrow totem pole, with dozens of little figurines, one on top of another?”
“Like the one he tried to make of me back on the boat? The one we were just talking about?”
“Exactly.” I nodded. “Each figurine represents a different creature Mephisto can summon, a creature he has befriended or made a compact with. Most of them are supernatural, like the gryphon, the maenad, and the harpy, but some are ordinary animals Mephisto has trained, like that swallow and the falcon.
“Only having a figurine in the Staff of Summoning does not make the creature immortal. Sooner or later, the mundane animals die, and Mephisto has to train new ones to take their places.” I gestured at the trunk of discarded figurines. “Apparently, this is his graveyard for figurines of beasts that once belonged to his staff.”
Mab leaned over and sniffed the contents of the trunk. I sniffed, too, but could only pick up a faint odor of lemon-scented floor wax.
Mab straightened and scowled. “Ma’am, the spell to summon a spirit is not for the fainthearted. But to summon a physical entity, like a bird or a mermaid, yanking it to you through time and space? That’s one whopper of a spell! No ordinary magician could perform it. To pull it off, you need some kind of extraordinary magical authority. I’m not even sure the Lords of the Elven High Council could do it. How does the Harebrain manage it?”
“I don’t know, Mab.” I frowned. “In the old days, Father used to perform the actual spell for him—the part that made it so that when he tapped the figurine, the creature would be summoned. Father called upon the authority of the patron angel of the Orbis Suleimani.”
“That would do it,” Mab muttered. “Maybe your brother does it the same way.”
I shook my head. “Mephisto was thrown out of the Circle of Solomon after he lost his sanity. He does not have the authority to call upon that angel.”
“Perhaps . . .” Mab scowled. “Or perhaps, he’s calling upon the authority of Prince Mephistopheles of H . . . whatever H stands for. And I tell you, Ma’am, there’s only two places starting with H where the inhabitants have enough authority to cast the spell we’re talkin’ about, and I’ve never heard of a Prince of Heaven.”
I remembered the rambling story Mephisto had told us about how he lost his staff. “Maybe that’s what he uses Uriel for, when he’s not having the seraphim act as his valet.”
Mab shivered and pulled up the collar of his trench coat. “Either way, I don’t like it, Ma’am. Even calling on angels is bad business for mortals.”
“Enough, Mab.” I glanced about the nearly empty chamber and saw Mab with his nose pressed against a seemingly blank section of wall. “There’s nothing here.”
“There’s got to be, Ma’am! Harebrain’s too harebrained to cover all his clues. There’s got to be something.”
“No, Mab. He’s just a disorganized madman.”
“Look, Ma’am. Here’s another hidden door. If this one doesn’t produce anything of worth, I’ll call it a day.”
The hidden door opened into a chamber decorated in jungle décor. A foot below the ceiling, water pipes, wrapped in vines and palm fronds, crisscrossed the room. Heat radiated from them, making this room warmer than the surrounding house. Rubber trees had been painted onto the walls, and the furniture was upholstered in leopard and zebra skins.
The pool here was kidney shaped and tiled with a rain-forest fresco. Incorporated into the scheme were the mouths of the underwater tunnels leading into other parts of the house, which seemed to po
p up under giant tree roots or have odd-looking animals peering out of them, as if they were dens.
“What’s this room for?” Mab glanced around.
The windows were opaque with steam. Mab rubbed some of it away with his forearm, and we looked down upon a frozen lake. Pine trees bordered the shores and covered the surrounding hills. Beyond rose jagged snow-covered peaks, tall and majestic against the deep blue sky.
Nowhere were there any signs of mankind. A mammoth lumbered across the ice, however, and the chimera that had rescued us on St. Thomas’s charged to and fro in a snow-covered paddock, chasing a large boar. In the next paddock, a cockatrice strutted. Beyond that, the reindeer Donner nuzzled Pegasus beside a sturdy red barn. On top of the barn, the magnificent roc roosted.
Seeing Donner reminded me of the reindeer barn where Mephisto had kept Pegasus while we sojourned at the North Pole. An elf had given me a brief tour of it while Mephisto readied the winged horse for our departure. He had introduced me to all nine of the reindeer, each in his own stall with a brightly colored name plaque on his doors. One of the deer had eaten a slice of apple from my hand.
From the ceiling above us came a slithering and a flash of bronze and brown. Mab drew his lead pipe. I whipped out my moon-silver war fan and slid it silently open. Above, gazing down at us with beady black eyes, was a giant hamadryad. The thick coils of its long body looped repeatedly about the warm pipes. As its serpentine head peeked out from between two fronds, the back of its neck flattened, forming a wide hood.
“Trussst in me,” the cobra sang, swaying hypnotically.
“Can it, Kaa.” I closed my fan. “You’ll get no supper here.”
“Handmaiden Miranda. How sssplendid,” The cobra curled around another heated pipe and fixed his beady eyes on Mab. A loop of his coils began lowering themselves just above Mab’s head. “What’sss thisss? Can I eat it?”
“Certainly not, you overgrown pipe cleaner!” Mab huffed. His eyes focused on something beyond the serpent. “Hey . . . what’s this?”
“Maybe, you should not go there . . .” the hamadryad began.
Mab ignored him. He pushed aside some silk vines and peered at a section of wall, tracing the bark of the rubber tree with his finger and tapping on the painted plaster in several places. Something clicked, and a narrow door swung open, revealing a closet filled with ponchos of every kind, color, and description: Mexican ponchos, Hopi Indian ponchos, multicolored knitted ponchos, a white velvet poncho with pom poms, bright yellow rain ponchos, and a poncho made out of soda-pop bottle caps. Each hung from a hanger marked with a description of the garment. After pushing through them, Mab brought out a golden hanger and held it up so I could read the message embroidered onto its cloth covering.
THIS HANGER IS FOR MY CHAMELEON CLOAK, GIVEN TO ME BY (SEE MURAL HALL). REMEMBER TO HIDE IT FROM MY FAMILY. A second note, stuck to the hanger reads: DON’T FORGET THE ELEPHANT’S trunk! Stuck atop this at an angle was a third note scrawled in angry red letters. THAT DOPEY THEO!
“The massster will be angry.” Kaa withdrew up into the greenery and slithered away over the pipes, murmuring, “I wasssn’t here. I had nothing to do with thisss, and I will deny everything if anyone sssaysss otherwissse.”
Mab and I stared at each other glumly, the condemning hanger in Mab’s hand. Water dripped. The window that we had wiped clean grew steamy again.
“Pretty much answers that question,” Mab muttered finally. He put the golden hanger back and shut the secret door. “Now, we know your brother wasn’t just babbling back at St. Thomas. That accursed Unicorn Hunter’s cloak Mr. Theophrastus destroyed back in Vermont, the one we found at the thrift store? It really was the Harebrain’s.”
Despite the heat of the room, I felt chilled, as if I were again staked down to a stone bier during a thunderstorm while the Unicorn Hunters hid beneath their camouflage cloaks, waiting to ambush my Lady, when She came to rescue me.
“What’s it mean?” I whispered hoarsely. “Why would he own such a thing?”
“It means I was right. The Harebrain’s up to no good,” Mab replied. Grabbing my arm, he backed us both rapidly toward the door. “Let’s go, Ma’am. I just saw something bright fluttering near that flowering plant in the corner. Didn’t Harebrain say something about a poisonous butterfly?”
“Nicssse ssseeing you,” called the hamadryad as we retreated.
CHAPTER THREE
The Book of the Sibyl
“Whoa!” Mab cried, as he had stepped through the next archway. “By the West Wind! It’s the War between Heaven and the Elves!”
A vast, elaborate bas-relief spread across the black marble walls of an enormous ballroom. As I came through the arch and down the two steps that separated the ballroom from the chamber with the great hearth, Mab pointed up at the nearest figure on my left.
“There’s Metratron, Herald of the Big Guy! Jeepers! I can make out the individual constellations on all twelve pairs of his wings. This is some piece of work! Who carved this?”
“My brother Mephistopheles. I recognize his style.” I surveyed the wall. “This must be the Mural Hall the note on the golden hanger referred to.”
The sculpture began at the far left with the awesomely magnificent figure of the Metratron, Herald of God, towering above his angelic hosts. His halo, shaped like the spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, brushed the top border of the twenty-five-foot wall. Beneath him stretched the nine orders of angelic servants: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. My brother had portrayed each successive rank as shorter than its predecessor, so that while the Seraphim, with their nine pairs of wings, came to the shoulder of God’s Herald, the single-winged Angels reached only to the height of his waist. Yet, these last were taller still than the faery knights on their elvish steeds who engaged the angelic hosts in battle.
A parchment Post-It, stuck to Metratron’s wing, read: THIS IS A WALL I MADE TO REMIND ME OF STUFF. I CARVED IT FOR MY HOUSE IN ENGLAND LONG AGO AND HAD IT TRANSPORTED HERE TO CANADA ONE BLOCK AT A TIME BY OREADS. I PROMISED THE EARTH SPIRITS SOMETHING IN RETURN. DON’T REMEMBER WHAT, BUT I HOPE I KEPT MY WORD.
The bas-relief scrolled around the entire chamber. The War between Heaven and Faery was followed by a portrayal of the Faery Revel, the Ride of the Faeries on All Hallow’s Eve, and the Faery Tithe to Hell. The River Lethe ran down the very center of the back wall, dividing the celestial and terrestrial from the infernal.
To the right of the river, Lilith, Queen of Air and Darkness and the original despoiler of mankind, sat enthroned, reigning over an Orgy of Her Servants, the lilim, the ouphe, and the evil peri. This debauchery was followed by the horrors of the Nine Circles of Hell. Fanged barghests pursued the shades of Limbo. Incubi and succubi tortured carnal sinners, while gruesome bat-winged fiends whipped the Wrathful and Sullen. The Lord of the Flies gloated over Tantalus and other gluttons, while the slothful slept beneath the outstretched wings of drowsy Belphegor. Abbadon, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, fingered his dreadful Key, oblivious of the covetous wraiths of the envious who strived vainly to touch this treasure. Beyond these, Asmodeus and Lucifer sat enthroned, their infernal kingdoms separated by an awful curtain decorated with disembodied eyes.
Finally, on the far right, directly across from Metratron, towered another gigantic figure: Satan Entrapped in Ice, his three heads weeping rivers of pain, as hideous in his fall as he had once been beautiful in Heaven.
The final wall, above the door through which we had entered, was carved to represent storm clouds. At the very center, above the doors, the thunderheads had parted, torn by four jagged lightning bolts that radiated away from the break in the clouds. In the center, carved as if walking away through the opening in the storm, pausing to look back over her shoulder, was a dainty creature with four cloven hooves. A spiral horn rose from the center of her brow.
Mab took off his hat. “ ’Tis the Mother of Us All!”
“My Lady.” I curtse
yed reverently. Mephisto had done Eurynome justice. Seeing the gentle yet unshakable expression in Her eyes, one could believe She was both the Lady of Spiral Wisdom and the Bearer of the Lightning Bolt.
Mab put his hat back on and made another round of the room, admiring the walls. “Boy! Mr. Mephistopheles knew how to carve!” He whistled. Then, pointing with great excitement at a small figure among the Faery Revel, he exclaimed, “Hey, I think I see one of my . . . well, you’d call it a cousin!”
Smiling, I walked the length of the room and came to stand before the back wall. From here, I had a clear view of both Maeve, the Elf Queen, and Lilith, the Queen of Air and Darkness. Some bizarre whim had caused Mephisto to carve the two queens with identical faces.
“ ‘When the truth is known about the queen,’ ” I quoted softly.
“What’s that?” asked Mab.
“Hmm? Something I heard recently. I can’t remember where. Astreus said it, I think. No . . . Ferdinand, perhaps?” Mab just stared at me blankly. I gestured toward the wall. “I guess my brother was running low on beautiful faces. He gave both queens the same features.”
“That jerk! How dare he besmirch our lady Maeve,” Mab cried loyally, adding quickly, “Begging your pardon, Ma’am, I realize she wasn’t very nice to you, but that is only to be expected. Humans should not truck with elves—no one should, for that matter,” he muttered, perhaps recalling his unexplained night on the coat rack.
“It’s an understandable error.” I gestured toward the queens. “Various poets mistakenly refer to the Elf Queen by the title ‘Queen of Air and Darkness.’ My addle-brained brother might think they are the same person.”
“Humans!” Mab gave a snort of disgust. “Can’t tell elves from incubi!” Then, the humor died out of his eyes. “Weird thing is the Harebrain doesn’t show that kind of discernment problem elsewhere.” He gestured at the carvings depicting events in the Inferno. “I’ve never been Below, myself, but I used to have—well, you’d call ’em drinking buddies—who knew about such stuff. Your brother has lots of accurate details here in the way he’s depicted particular imps and demons, uncomfortably accurate. And that curtain with the eyes strung up on it?”
Prospero in Hell Page 4