Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales)

by Freda Warrington

“Good luck, yeah? From what Dan said, she sounds a bit scary.”

  The call over, Stevie put down the phone and wiped her greasy palm print from its casing. Any scrap of knowledge helped, but should she tell Adam?

  Next, she dived into the café to help cheery Ron and grumpy Alec for fifteen minutes. Gradually the place emptied out.

  In the exhibition room, Adam stood gazing at the triptych as if he hadn’t moved.

  Twilight was gathering outside, a gale whipping rain against the windows. “Sorry about that,” she said. “We have sudden influxes, and it’s all hands on deck. Winter; everyone wants hot drinks and huge amounts of cake. Well? What do you think?”

  No reaction. Then he gave a small start and turned to her. He appeared mesmerized, his eyes glassy.

  “I know this,” he said at last.

  “How do you mean?”

  He hesitated, then indicated the image of the auburn-haired goddess. Behind her, a translucent city hovered like flame on the mountainside. “I saw this on the website. But I don’t mean I know the paintings. I mean I recognize the actual scenes. The people. Everything. But it’s impossible.”

  Adam seemed shaken. Stevie paused, reserving judgment on whether he was, after all, deranged. “They look like fantasy scenes to me. What is Aurata promising, exactly?”

  “I really don’t know,” he said. “Did Daniel ever talk about his inspiration?”

  She sensed steel behind his unassuming manner. For whatever reason, he wasn’t going to let this go. “Not recently.” She took a breath. “When we were at college, he said his ideas came from me.”

  “In what way?”

  “He couldn’t explain. He said…” Long-ago conversations resurfaced, turning her warm with embarrassment. “He said I made him think of mermaids, and dryads dancing naked in the woods.” Oh god, did I say naked? she thought, wincing. “Erm, and pagan deities and pre-Raphaelite maidens … that sort of thing. But I’m sure those images were in his head without any help from me.”

  “Was his work similar in the early days?”

  “Yes, but it developed and changed, obviously … This is all too strange, Adam. I still don’t know who you are, or why you’re so interested.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s hard to explain and I seem to have lost the art of conversation.”

  “You’re doing okay,” Stevie said tartly. “Have you been in a monastery? That might account for you going all Da Vinci Code on me.”

  “All what?”

  “Oh, dear. That was a weak joke, but you talk as if you’ve been living on some remote island. You need to give me a clue, or we’ll never get anywhere.”

  He looked at her for a good five seconds. “I was in Scotland.”

  “Well, that explains everything.” Stevie rolled her eyes.

  She heard a stifled explosion of laughter from Fin in the gift shop. Stevie couldn’t blame her for listening in; she would have done the same. Every small sound echoed off the hard floors.

  Adam smiled too, lips pressed together, eyelids lowered. “I’m not trying to be difficult. If only I could ask Daniel in person…”

  “If only.”

  “If he knew Rufus, it would make sense. There’s no other way he could have heard about such scenes to paint them.”

  “Who is this Rufus?”

  “My brother.” Adam spoke very quietly. “I need to find him, but I don’t want him to find me.”

  “Huh?”

  His smile twisted. “I know. Madness. I should go, and not inflict my problems upon you.”

  “Is Rufus dangerous? I’m not sure I want to be involved with this. I might put the triptych in storage until Daniel eventually shows up to take it away.”

  “No. Let me buy it,” said Adam.

  Stevie coughed in surprise.

  “I can pay by credit card. How much? I’ll take the work away, and it won’t be your problem anymore.”

  “That’s not the point. Danny left no instructions to sell it. My problem isn’t his artwork, but what’s happened to him. And you, asking odd questions you can’t or won’t explain.”

  “I’ll go.” His tone was apologetic, but this wasn’t the response she’d hoped for. “You’re absolutely right, Stevie. Thank you for showing me the work, anyway. I’m very sorry to have troubled you.”

  A clamor of voices rose as the remaining visitors left. Fin called out, “I’m putting up the Closed sign, Stevie, okay? Filthy afternoon: no one else is going to come in now.”

  “Thanks, Fin,” Stevie answered. Turning back to Adam, she asked, “So, have you traveled up from London? What time’s your train back? You can get the light railway back into town and it’s only a short walk to New Street Station. Quicker than taxi.”

  “It’s all right.” Adam gave her a sad, enigmatic smile and turned to leave. “Goodbye, Stevie. It was nice to meet you.”

  No, don’t go yet, she thought helplessly. Damn.

  He glanced back as Fin let him out. Cold wind clawed through the gap, then sucked the door shut behind him. Stevie realized he was looking back for a last glimpse of Aurata’s Promise.

  * * *

  After he left the museum, Mist walked towards the center of Birmingham. Within a couple of blocks he’d left the Jewellery Quarter behind and was treading along dreary, wet streets lined with shuttered shops and offices. Sleet stung his face. The cold was nothing compared with his long trek in the north, but that experience now seemed unreal. The longer he spent in the surface world, the more sensitive he became to physical discomfort. Cars hissed through puddles, splashing him.

  He groped for the Dusklands, the first flimsy layer of the Otherworld, but there was nothing. The Duskland realm was patchy and capricious. In some places the Aetheric atmosphere lay as thick as honey; in others it was barely there, blown away like cobwebs.

  Mist understood now that, when he first rose from the sea in a golden sunset, he’d emerged into a warm Dusklands cocoon, protected from winter. Without that comfort, the real world was raw.

  He walked until his way was barred by a concrete river: the multiple lanes of a busy main road. Heavy traffic crawled in both directions. He could see his hotel on the far side, a bland modern building six stories high. Mist stopped on the curb and gazed up at the lighted windows, wondering how best to reach it without making a suicidal dash between vehicles. Needles of ice spiraled against the lights.

  He knew he had no choice but to take the pedestrian detour. He hurried through an underpass with graffiti-scrawled walls and the stench of a public toilet. Strange, he felt as jumpy as a human. If he encountered a gang of thieves, he was ill-equipped to defy them. He was unarmed, and had no special fighting skills. Vanishing into the Dusklands didn’t seem to be an option. And he knew he could die … The thought of another grueling journey through un-life and human pain to reach this point once more appalled him. So, for these few seconds, he felt very scared.

  At the end of the tunnel, a homeless man lay dozing. He uttered a grunt of surprise as Mist dropped a ten-pound note onto his chest. And Mist hurried away, feeling guilty that he was prepared to offer money, but nothing else.

  Reaching the other side, he entered the hotel where he’d taken a room for an indefinite period. He’d come here only because of Stevie and the tenuous link to a long-lost world. He had nowhere else, no other clues to follow.

  Juliana had told him to get a cell phone, but he hadn’t done so. It would be a spider-silk connection to her that he didn’t want, because—as much as he loved her—she could not walk into the treacherous unknown future with him.

  The hotel was pleasant enough: bland, modern and clean, used mostly by business travelers. Potted plants softened the atrium, and he could hear generic, soothing jazz issuing from the dimly lit bar. A handful of men and women made their way towards the restaurant, all dressed in crisp suits, with laptops grasped under their arms or small shiny phones in their hands. A chirpy blond receptionist was welcoming a young couple at the desk.

  Mis
t took the elevator to the fourth floor and entered the comfortable, clean, characterless room that he’d checked into a couple of days earlier. There were two queen-size beds, a table and chairs, a desk and several lamps. He’d never experienced a modern hotel. He was fascinated by this unfamiliar, curiously sterile environment with its television, coffee-making equipment, a handy folder detailing all the services the hotel offered, and a sign promising Wi-Fi access. He’d also been puzzled to find the Bible and two other religious texts in a bedside drawer. Mist couldn’t square the juxtaposition of startling new technology with a belief in supernatural agencies.

  There was something touching, he thought, in the way that humans could assimilate so many apparently incompatible ideas without blinking.

  Although he’d learned that his surroundings were typical of any hotel almost anywhere in the world, they were new to him. He’d spent some time in Juliana’s old-world Scottish manor after existing for many years between-worlds with Rufus, and before that, he’d lived a brief human life at the start of the twentieth century. Adam Montague’s time had been one of candlelight and breaking ice on the water pitcher before he could wash … of reading the Bible until he knew it by heart, of prayer and belief torn away in the trenches of the Somme, amid mud and shellfire and all his friends dying around him.

  Between then and now, the world had become an alien planet.

  Mist opened the minibar and took out a tiny bottle of brandy. Each day, a housekeeper he never saw would restock the bar and place clean glasses on a tray. He removed the paper cover from a tumbler and poured in the liquor. The taste reminded him of Juliana, who had a weakness for brandy and used to give him a shot when he—as Adam—had struggled with the tangle of madness and confusion caused by Rufus. The memory of her kindness steadied him.

  He stood at the window, watching traffic pouring along the road in rivers of white and red light. Double glazing reduced the sound to a muffled roar. On the far side, in the direction of the Jewellery Quarter, there were derelict buildings on overgrown plots, huge advertisements on billboards. Amid this ugliness, a handsome red-brick church stood proud, a remnant of the past that he, or rather Adam, remembered.

  Life out there looked dirty, hard-edged and desolate. Here he was, watching from a plain, anonymous room. He had no family, nowhere to call home. Surely other Vaethyr—Aetherials who chose to live on Earth—didn’t feel this sense of alienation from the mortal world? If they did, why did they stay?

  There seemed no way to survive except by partaking in the same drab slog as humans. Jobs, cars, credit cards. Alcohol to damp the pain. Everyone needed a home to live in and yet houses and even apartments, paradoxically, were virtually unaffordable. He certainly stood no chance of buying one himself, not even on Juliana’s platinum credit card.

  Why would any Vaethyr live here, when they had the Spiral?

  Yet when Mist thought of the Otherworld, he knew he had no home there, either. He’d never properly lived there. Boundry, a self-contained bubble on the edge of the Spiral, didn’t count, since it had been a sort of halfway place created by Rufus and his entourage in the Dusklands. A pleasant refuge for Rufus, but a prison for Mist.

  Thinking of Rufus, and the way he’d clung on to Adam for all those years, Mist wondered if his brother had simply been lonely. Afraid of being utterly alone in the bleak place that the human world had become?

  Mist laughed off the thought. Sentiment. Rufus, afraid? Never.

  There were pleasanter memories … the two of them strolling through the great cities of Europe during the time of the Renaissance as if they owned the world, their hostilities on hold. But Rufus had an unfortunate compulsion, the worst. An addiction to cruelty.

  “Where are you, you bastard?” he murmured. “Juliana’s right, I should forget you and walk away. And spend the rest of my existence looking over my shoulder? Cheers, Rufus.” He raised his glass to the night. “Apparently I’m as sad and demented as you are.”

  Something was happening, though. Portrayals of his parents and sister, of Azantios and an ancient sacred object, the Felixatus, did not appear for no reason. This was not Rufus’s modus operandi—but if not him, who was responsible?

  Mist lay down on the bed and thought about Stevie Silverwood.

  He knew he’d handled their meetings appallingly. She thought he was weird, mad or possibly dangerous; that had been clear in her eyes. In his place, Rufus would have spun a plausible tale and charmed her to pieces. Mist lacked that ability, didn’t even try. Any talents that Rufus possessed, Mist rejected. Still, he was shocked to find himself so rusty at the simple art of communication. His encounters with Stevie had been disastrous.

  She had asked a very good question about the triptych: What did the title mean? What was Aurata’s “promise”? He had no idea. Perhaps Stevie could have helped him to work it out.

  He wished she were lying on the bed beside him. But only to have someone to talk to … He pushed his hair off his forehead, rubbed his eyes. Who was he fooling? Yes, to talk, but he couldn’t ignore the heat of arousal he felt when he thought about her. He kept drifting into mental images of her quirky, strong-boned yet pretty face, her natural grace and the flowing sea-colored dresses she wore. There was a lot going on behind her blue-green, smoky eyes.

  Mist imagined the weight of her body gently shaping the mattress next to him, the amber ripples of her hair spread on the pillow, her warmth, and how sweet it would feel to touch her … He groaned.

  If he wanted company, he only had to sit in the hotel bar for an hour or two, and eventually some woman would approach him. Once or twice, he’d come to close to succumbing to temptation. Humans found him attractive, but he’d never ruthlessly exploited them as Rufus had. There had been a bored, married woman, alone on a business trip. There’d been a talkative, overgroomed beauty that he, in his naiveté, hadn’t realized was a call girl until she mentioned that she wouldn’t expect payment as she was “off-duty”—and that besides, he was safe as long as her “boyfriend” never found out.

  Mist made his excuses, and fled.

  He sighed. He was lonely, but not desperate. Such encounters would have been sordid, worse than being alone.

  Thinking back to Cairndonan, he remembered Gill, the young woman who’d helped Adam survive at his lowest ebb. Mist remembered her with deep fondness, but with no desire to seek her out. She had been Adam’s lover, not his. There was a difference. Although he contained Adam’s memories, becoming his Felynx self again had made Mist a changed individual. That aside, Gill and Adam had both acknowledged their encounter as sweet, healing, but short-lived.

  Before Gill … there had been Rufus’s wild mob of followers, who had pleasured themselves upon a confused, drugged, half-mad Adam until their attentions had become more torture than pleasure.

  He shut his eyes, pushing those memories away.

  Stevie was different. Was she Aetherial? It was hard to tell, because she seemed unaware of her own Aetheric radiance and apparently hadn’t noticed it in Mist, either. It was bad manners among Vaethyr, if you weren’t sure, to ask outright. He couldn’t say, “Are you Vaethyr?” any more than one mortal would ask another, “Are you human, or some other bipedal species?” You were supposed to know.

  For now, Stevie was an alluring mystery.

  If ever she showed a glimmer of interest in return, it would be all too easy for him to fall for her. And if ever Rufus found out—when he found out, as he was bound to eventually—he would find a way to destroy her, as he had Helena. Just for the sheer mischief of it.

  Helena. Mist shuddered. He couldn’t place Stevie in such danger. Couldn’t let it happen, ever again.

  “Mist … Mistangamesh…”

  He started awake, unaware that he’d fallen asleep. For a moment he thought there was someone in the room. No; the voice was calling him from a dream.

  The subconscious vision shocked him. It was a dream he’d often had before—but the last time was several hundred years ago. His siste
r Aurata was standing in the midpoint of a whirling black-and-white spiral, in a strange watery-blue space like a flooded mansion. Her head was thrown back and she was simply calling and calling … and every time, as now, he’d woken to the painful knowledge that even if her soul-essence still existed somewhere, he had no way to reach her.

  * * *

  Stevie liked the end of the day, when everyone had gone home and she could make her final checks in peace. Factory secure. Till empty, and money locked in the overnight safe. Shelves fully stocked in both gift shop and café; floors clean, all lights and equipment switched off. All that remained was to arm the alarm, lock up after herself and walk the short distance to her apartment.

  She paused to look at the triptych. In near-darkness Daniel’s images looked unnaturally bright. She could almost see them not as paintings, but as windows.

  She reached out, her fingertips hovering over the image of the flame-haired woman. If she reached any farther, surely her hand would pass through thin air and touch flesh. The idea gave her a shiver, thrilling but not altogether pleasant.

  Why was Adam Leith so eager to buy the triptych? His evasiveness was infuriating. Daniel had claimed to have a buyer for all his work. All of it? Incredible, but … could Adam be the mysterious buyer?

  Judging by the oddly impulsive way he’d made an offer, she doubted that he’d ever bought a painting in his whole life. Yet she could be wrong. Perhaps he had some kind of mental disorder.

  With a jolt she remembered that, upstairs, the contents of the trash bags she’d taken from Daniel’s digs lay in a sad pile on her bed, awaiting her attention. There was nothing unpleasant, just old clothes and a handful of store receipts. She would fold everything neatly and then—winter weather and Fin’s willingness to lend her car permitting—take the stuff to Frances Manifold.

  One last thing. She went to her workbench and switched on the lathe to check that Alec had made a proper job of replacing the motor. It seemed okay. She tidied the mess he’d left, putting her tools in their proper holders while resisting the temptation to sit down and reassemble the clock he’d been working on for weeks. She saw where every spindle and cog should nest, as naturally as a savant might recall facts and figures, so to leave it there unfinished was incredibly frustrating. Still, there was room for only one clock-repair genius, and if she completed his project for him, Alec would sulk for days.