Prospero in Hell

by L. Jagi Lamplighter

  Following so soon after the loss of the truck carrying phoenix dust, less than two weeks earlier, even Mab admitted there might be some truth to the suspicions of foul play voiced by my familiar, Tybalt, Prince of Cats—and Mab hated to agree with anything “espoused by the furball.” These suspicions grew stronger when the burnt remains of what might be a saboteur were found at the damaged building. Two of Mab’s assistants were already on site examining the situation, but Mab did not trust them to do a thorough job. He headed off to Michigan himself, while I arranged for the replacement of the lost inventory. Luckily, this warehouse had stored only mundane goods.

  Once that matter was in hand, I checked on the Great Hall, to see how the renovations were coming. Oreads and other spirits of the earth had repaired the damage Seir of the Shadows had done to the mansion when he attacked in early December. They had also restored about half of the statues of my siblings that had stood in the hall’s alcoves. Alas, the rest of the statues were beyond repair. As I had feared, the joyous face of Theo’s statue was among those that had been ruined.

  Returning to the Lesser Hall, I sat down and read the Book of the Sibyl through several more times, contemplating each word carefully. Some of it was familiar to me, such as Eurynome’s history, or made obvious sense, such as the description of how to open locks. Had I a Sibyl mark upon my forehead, it would be an easy enough matter to bend down and touch it to a lock I wished to open. Other descriptions, however, baffled me. Love the water? Where a Sibyl disdains, Life flees? What did these things mean? I frowned and rubbed my bare forehead where no Sibyl mark yet rested.

  The matter of Astreus and Mephisto weighed heavily on my mind—so much so that I could not bring myself to start on the embroidery I had promised Astreus as the prize for his winning our wager over whether or not I would accept his gift. Using the excuse that there were more pressing issues, I put his heraldry aside and returned to the matter of the Three Shadowed Ones, the main threat to our family.

  My family was clearly in danger. The demons had already attacked several times. I was beginning to wonder if warning my siblings, as Father had requested, was not going to be enough. In the old days, we would have banded together and done something to eliminate the threat. It was a shame that option was no longer open to us. We were so much more effective when we worked together.

  Currently, I had no method to directly discover the demons’ plans, but I felt that the key to all this lay in discovering what my father had been doing when he visited Gregor’s grave last September. Poring over Father’s most recent journals, I had examined his treatises—terrifying things that they were—and unraveled his poems, thanks to my familiar, Tybalt, Prince of Cats, who recognized them as translations of odes written by the ancient Greek hero, Orpheus, for the Eleusinian Mysteries.

  The only avenue of inquiry I had not yet exhausted was Father’s horticulture project. According to Tybalt, this project was located in the Wintergarden, here in Prospero’s Mansion.

  In my father’s house were many mansions, making for some very long hallways. Walking from one wing to another was out of the question, unless one had the time for a week’s outing. So, to hasten my trip to the Wintergarden, I borrowed Father’s magical Turkish throw rug.

  The flying carpet floated down the hallway. Piloting it was Caurus, another of the three incarnated Northerlies. He sat cross-legged atop the flying rug, his merry blue eyes twinkling. Beneath a long scarf patterned with snow crystals, which trailed behind him in the breeze, Caurus wore a white and blue Icelandic sweater, seal-skin breeches, and long knitted socks. Over his shoulder, he had slung a pair of ice skates. A hornpipe protruded from his belt like a sword.

  Caurus halted the carpet. I carefully climbed aboard and settled myself, my flute lying across my lap. The flying rug smelt musty, but a scent like a brisk snowy day blew about Caurus. I leaned close to him, breathing the fresher air and we took off, swooping rapidly through the long corridors, toward the spiral staircase that led to the underground passages.

  Caurus was a good-natured fellow with straw-colored hair, a long narrow nose, and a pointed chin. He spoke with a Scandinavian accent. There was a pleasant, almost musical, rhythm to his speech.

  “So,” he said, leaping cheerfully into the latest gossip, “I hear you’ve been seen all round and about, Milady. As far north as North Pole and as far south as the West Indies.”

  “I’ve been visiting family.”

  “Ja, and I hear Mr. Mephistopheles retrieved his staff.”

  “Yes, that is so.”

  “Ah, I hear you saw our father.”

  “Your father?”

  “As much as we Aerie Ones have parents, Dawn, with her rosy-colored fingers, is accorded our mother. Our father is held to be He Who Is Crowned with Stars.”

  It took me a moment to realize to whom he referred.

  “Astreus Stormwind! I thought your father was a Titan?”

  He gave me a cheerful grin. “Is it our fault you humans cannot tell elves from Titans?”

  I gave no reply but thought: No wonder Mab was dismayed by Astreus’s betrayal! Did Mab think of Astreus as his father?

  Meanwhile, Caurus was saying, “I dreamt such a lovely dream last night, Milady. I dreamt I was free to come and go as I pleased. I could sleep or gust as the mood took me, and no man was my master, nor maid either. Wasn’t that just a beautiful dream?”

  I turned to glance back at Caurus. As his merry blue eyes met mine, I felt such sympathy for the Aerie Ones in their quest for freedom, as could hardly be put into words. Then, the moment passed. I felt more myself again.

  I gripped the flying carpet and stared straight forward, shaken. Strange moments of sympathy, such as this, had been overtaking me ever since I watched an elderly woman cross an overpass in Chicago. When they first began, I feared I might be under some sort of supernatural attack. Now, a more sinister explanation occurred to me.

  Perhaps, these experiences were not attacks, but a purely human phenomenon known as empathy, a phenomenon I had often heard tell of, but had seldom experienced for myself, having spent so much of my life in solitude and quiet contemplation of my Lady’s will. While empathizing with others was not a bad thing in itself, I could think of no reason why I would suddenly start doing so now, unless Theo was right.

  Could Father have cast some spell upon me, which was beginning to wear off in his absence?

  “Yes. It is a beautiful dream,” I replied softly, still haunted by the ghostly memory of that tremendous desire to be free that had possessed me when I met Caurus’s gaze. “Someday it will be true, Caurus. Someday . . . but not today.”

  Caurus shrugged. “Dreams are what keep us going. We must have beautiful dreams, or we would wake up one day and realize we have nothing.”

  We had come to the spiral staircase and now soared down, whipping about the tight turns. I held on to both the carpet and my flute, while praying my stomach would stay in my body, rather than continue on its present course and fly out of my mouth. Eventually, we reached the bottom and, after a heart-wrenchingly close encounter with the wall, zipped down the underground passage toward the Vault.

  “Caurus,” I asked presently, when my internal organs had settled back into their proper spots, “if I ask you something, will you keep it to yourself?”

  Caurus laughed. “No, Milady, that is quite beyond my ability. It is the nature of winds to gossip and spread rumors. I could not keep myself from doing so if I wished to, which I do not.”

  “An honest answer,” I replied, amused.

  “I am accorded an honest fellow.”

  “I’ve heard you called a thief,” I teased.

  He laughed merrily. “Not my fault if people don’t secure their things, and they get swept along as I blow through!”

  I laughed, too. We had known each other a long time, Caurus and I, and something about his good humor always brought out my lighter side. Maybe it was because he had been my friend and companion when I was but a tiny chi
ld. Ariel had always been Father’s personal servant, constantly at his beck and call, and the lesser sylphs, such as Gooseberry and Peaseblossom, were often about tasks of Father’s devising. Caliban was my playmate, too, in those early days, but he was brutish and ignorant, and Mab did not come to work for us until over two hundred years later. Even then, I did not know him well until he incarnated into a body, which was during the first half of the 1940s.

  Back in my childhood, Father had not yet bound Caurus. He was free to blow and gust where he willed; yet he came of his own accord to play with me: ruffling my hair, whispering me tales from foreign lands, and singing me lullabies as I drifted off to sleep. During the later years, after we left the island, I saw less of him. By then, Father had bound him, and he, too, had tasks to perform. Yet, when we did meet, he was always as kind and cheerful as ever. Even if a hundred years had passed since last he watched by my bedside, he never failed to sing me a lullaby before he departed.

  “Caurus, as you are an honest fellow,” I asked seriously, “answer me truly. If I were to set all you Aerie Ones free, could you keep your people from harming mankind?”

  Caurus was silent for a long time. Finally, he replied, “No. I doubt I could. I understand now, about humans. Their bodies are so fragile, they tear so easily. But my people, my sylphs and Aerie Spirits, they do not understand this.”

  “If your people, all your sylphs and spirits and elementals, had a stint in a body such as you have had . . . would that help?” I recalled Mab’s conversation with Mephisto’s maenad. “Would you remember afterward?”

  “Ja,” Caurus replied slowly. “We think differently outside these fleshy shells, but we do not forget. All those of us who have lived as men are changed—except Boreas, and even he is not as fierce as he once was. We are wiser in unexpected and uncanny ways.”

  Hearing Caurus’s answer, I again admired my father’s foresight in incarnating the troublesome Northerlies, but my veneration was tainted by an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach. Whose side was my father on? What was he really up to?

  I had been certain that none of us would ever traffic with dark powers—after all that we had seen! Apparently, I had been wrong about Mephisto. Could I have been wrong about Father, too? But Father was the one who set the standard for the rest of us. If he favored the infernal powers, why teach us to loathe them?

  More than ever, I wished I knew what he had been doing when he accidentally released the Three Shadowed Ones. Was he attempting to revive Gregor? If so, where was Gregor’s body?

  To reach the Wintergarden, we had to pass through the Vault. Father has since agreed this was a design flaw. His original idea had been to secure the doorway that led toward Fairyland with all the other magic talismans and guard them simultaneously. In theory, this was not a bad thought. In practice, however, it meant we had to open the Vault doors every time we needed to go to the Wintergarden.

  Every time we opened the door of the Vault, we weakened its wards and made it more likely that something might break in. Just walking around in the Vault could disturb who-knows-how-many things that should be left dormant. It would have been better to put the gateway to Fairyland elsewhere and guard it separately.

  Also, in retrospect, it would have been wiser to have the Vault as far from the entrance from Fairyland as possible, just in case something ever made it through the heavy door coming the other way. Father had compiled a list of improvements he hoped to add next time we rebuilt, including a supernatural “airlock,” to make it easier to come and go and a separate facility for the gates to Fairyland, but for now, we were stuck with what we had.

  It took us fifteen minutes of hard work to open the huge wrought-iron door. There were locks requiring keys, bolts to be slid, combination locks to be spun, and magical protections to be carefully removed. All of this had to be accomplished in the correct order. Worst of all, every second the door remained open, the magic gathered within the Vault lit up the supernatural world like a beacon, broadcasting to any and all spirits within thousands of miles that here lay a stockpile of eldritch power.

  Remembering the lesson of the Great Hall, where Mab and I had the door open while we were inside, and this had allowed the incubus Seir of the Shadows to enter, I was determined not to make that mistake again. The moment we were within, we repeated the various steps to lock the door and secure the wards—this time with us inside. Hopefully, we had acted quickly enough.

  Within, the Vault was organized into four wings or chambers, laid out like an X, with a rotunda at the center. Phoenix lamps crackled on the ceiling; each burning feather provided light to a section while scenting the otherwise stale air with its pleasant cinnamon odor. Of the five feathers, one had recently crumbled into ash and had not yet rejuvenated itself. This cast one arm of the X into darkness. Luckily, the dark chamber was not the one we needed.

  When the great wrought-iron door was secured once again, I headed to the Treasure Chamber, which housed the doorway that led to Fairyland and to the far portions of Father’s mansions. It stood toward the back, covered by a silk curtain. As I drew back the curtain, revealing a threshold plated in ivory, I heard the echo of Caurus’s footsteps as he wandered off, exploring a different wing.

  His voice floated back to me. “Oh ja! What a treasure trove! This sword is fascinating! It is supported by rainbows!”

  “That would be Kusanagi,” I called back. “Do hurry, Caurus, we still have a while to go. There can be time shifts once we go through the Fey Threshold. I want to be back in time to meet Mab when he returns.”

  When he did not answer immediately, I went back to find him in the Weapons Chamber, surrounded on three sides by swords and other arcane weapons, each in its own glass case. He stood before a case containing an elegant katana wrapped in silk. Where a slim portion of the shining blade was visible near the hilt, a tiny rainbow arced beneath it. Caurus gazed at it in rapt adoration.

  “It is beautiful! I love rainbows. What did you call it?”

  “Kusanagi, the Grasscutter. It is one of the three hereditary treasures of Japan, given to the Japanese people by Amaterasu, their sun goddess and the ancestress of their emperors.”

  “Ja!” He stroked his pointed chin. “If it is so important to them, why is it here?”

  “During the battle of Dannouru in 1185, the losers threw it into the sea rather than surrender it to the winners. Father had Mephisto’s mermaid fish it out.”

  “You should rename it the Bifrost Blade. That would be more fitting for such a fine sword! And this one? Ugh!” Caurus had turned to peer into a smaller glass box containing a knife. A drain leading from the box to the floor below carried away the blood that oozed constantly from the corroded blade.

  “That’s the knife that stabbed Julius Caesar.” I stepped up beside Caurus to see it more closely and then winced and drew back. The blade was unpleasant to the eye and exuded a menacing air.

  Caurus halted before his hands touched the next case. A biting cold radiated from it, and its glass was misty with frost.

  “This one is cold!”

  “Laevateinn.” I spoke the name with a certain amount of reverence. I had seen what it could do.

  “The Wounding Wand! Here?” Caurus whistled and swore in some language I did not know. “This is the sword the god Loki forged upon the gates of Niflheim? How did you come to own it?”

  “In some tales, it is Laevateinn rather than Twilight that Surtur wields at Ragnarok. Father thought it best to take it out of circulation, just in case.” I paused, shivered, and added, my voice low, “Erasmus used to fight with it.”

  Caurus goggled, amazed. “How could he, a mortal, pick it up without perishing?”

  “With his Urim gauntlet.”

  “Oh. Ja.” Turning, his gaze fell on a tall spear with runes carved in its battered shaft. “By Thor! It’s Gungnir!”

  “Shouldn’t you say, ‘By Odin, it’s Gungnir,’ ” I teased, but Caurus was too awestruck to notice. Reaching out tentativel
y, he touched the tip of a single finger to the rune-carved shaft and quickly yanked it away again.

  “This is a mighty spear,” he cried. “It cannot miss its mark, so long as the wielder names his target!”

  My smile faltered, and I examined the spear more closely. “We didn’t have Gungnir last time I was here. Where did it come from?”

  I looked around the armory and saw many pieces I did not recognize. Some of them I knew from legend, such as Gungnir and the sword Durandel, but they had not been here last time I visited, back in the mid 1960s. Where had they come from? With Gregor dead, Theo retired, Mephisto mad, Cornelius blinded, and Titus seldom traveling, who was bringing Father new talismans?

  I began prowling around the other chambers of the Vault. The second arm, the one that was currently dark, was known as the Elemental Chamber. Within it, barely visible in the dim light from the central rotunda, stood four pedestals. Three of them had large copper pots topped with lead that bore the mark of the Seal of Solomon. The fourth had been empty as long as I could remember. Each pedestal was surrounded by pentagrams and other arcane symbols of protection. Along the wall, a shelf held vials, rings, and lamps containing djinn, efretes, and genies bound either by Solomon or by my brother, Gregor. I peeked around a bit, but saw nothing that was obviously new.

  Caurus, who had followed me in, saw the copper pots and took a careful step backward.

  “The Kings of the Elements,” he whispered softly, his eyes widening almost comically. “The kings trapped by Solomon!”

  “Only three of them: Iblis, King of Flame; Makosh, Queen of the Earth; and Triton, King of Water.”

  “Where is our liege?”