The House on Durrow Street

by Galen Beckett

  But there was a cause for why he had factored such thoughts and feelings away, was there not—why he had endeavored to tally them to null in the ledger of his life? He had only to read a little further in the Testament, and he was sure to find the reasons all ciphered out.…

  “Forgive me,” Dercy said, and he shook his head. “I shouldn’t have presumed …” He started to pull his hand away.

  Even as he did, Eldyn caught it in his own; it was smooth and surprisingly strong. A delightful warmth welled up inside him, and as it did his trepidations vanished like ink sanded from a page. Perhaps tomorrow, when he opened his copy of the Testament in the morning light, he would again suffer concern for the perfection of his immortal soul. But now, at that moment, it was only the transient tenderness of flesh that he could consider.

  Acting on an impulse, he brought Dercy’s hand to his lips. Then, once again, he looked into Dercy’s eyes. This time there was no regret to be seen there, only a brilliant light. For a moment the two of them were frozen, like actors in a tableau.

  Then Dercy leaned in to kiss him. His beard was warm and marvelously rough against Eldyn’s cheek. Their lips pressed together, suspending breath, as if that action granted them all the necessary stuff of life, so that mere air was no longer required. Eldyn gripped Dercy’s shoulders like a man drowning, yet he felt no distress, only a blissful warmth. He sank, and willingly.

  At last they parted. The expression on Dercy’s face was at once delighted and amused.

  “Good God, you act as if you’ve never kissed anyone before, Eldyn Garritt.”

  Eldyn felt his cheeks flush. Of course he had kissed others. Except he suspected Dercy would not count pecks against his sister’s cheek. True, there had been a few girls he had let himself be cornered by as a youth, and he had let them kiss him, but he had never kissed them in return.

  The only occasions he could remember that had been remotely like this had been the two times Westen had kissed him: once knowing him to be Eldyn, and once thinking him to be Sashie. However, for all that one of those kisses was mocking and the other lustful, there had been a violence to both. Each had been the act of one person seeking domination over another.

  Dercy’s kiss was different. The gesture had been freely given and received, and even now Eldyn could feel the force of it thrilling along his nerves like lightning along a wire.

  Dercy grinned. “So have you or haven’t you kissed someone before?”

  “I have now,” Eldyn said. And this time it was he who leaned in and brought them together.

  Never had he done such a thing in his life. Yet such is the wonder of instinct that it apprehends when knowledge does not. A salmon knows which way to swim, a bird to fly. Similarly, his lips, his hands, knew what to make of themselves. He drank of Dercy as he had drunk of the punch that night. A tone hummed in him, like a crystal glass struck just so, and a green light seemed to suffuse the air.

  Then, to his dismay, the other young man pulled away.

  “Look,” Dercy said softly, his eyes alight. “Look around you.”

  Eldyn did, and then wonder struck him. The room, the bed, the drab curtains were all gone. Instead, the two of them sat upon a flat stone in the midst of a forest glade. Great trees arched overhead, and fairy-lights drifted among their boughs.

  “Did you conjure this?” Eldyn said, trying to comprehend.

  “No, this is all from you. Don’t you see? The other morning you couldn’t make a tree—and now here’s a whole forest of them.” He gripped the back of Eldyn’s neck. “You did it, my friend.”

  Eldyn could only stare. It seemed impossible; he had never conjured more than the smallest glamour. Yet even as he thought that the trees should be taller, and that there should be more glittering lights, these things were made manifest. Eldyn let out a sound of delight. He had crafted an illusion—a real illusion.

  “Now what do I do?” he said, amazed.

  Dercy’s grin broadened. “Oh, I’ll show you that,” he said, pulling him forward and off balance. Eldyn gripped him in turn, and they both fell laughing to the green leaves that scattered the forest floor.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BESIDES THE INCIDENT at the cenotaph, the broadsheets had been starved for ill news of late. The morning after Brightday, they at last had some fresh misery to feast upon. Reports had come of an insurrection in County Dorn. This was in a remote region in the northwest of Altania: a poor and rock-strewn landscape where the population was still less than what it had been before the Plague Years centuries ago.

  That such a desolate location, so far from the influence of Invarel, would suffer throes of discontent could not entirely be a surprise. Ivy knew from her studies of history that the land that was the poorest for growing crops often proved the most fertile for sowing rebellion. All the same, the news of the violence at Dorn was shocking.

  Provoked for some unknown reason, the men of a number of villages had banded together and stormed several manor houses, looting as they went and turning out the landlords. Then the mob had marched upon the county seat, and there they had forced their way into the keep, seized the mayor—a known loyalist to the Crown—and dragged him into the town square, where they proceeded to pelt him with stones until he was dead.

  The few soldiers stationed at the keep had been unable to thwart the mob. Indeed, two of them were murdered along with the mayor, though several managed to escape, and thus reports of what had happened were brought to the south. At this point, the entire county was in a state of lawlessness, and there had been no more news. Whether more soldiers would be sent to control the situation was unknown. It had lately been the practice of the king to withdraw troops from the Outlands and station them nearer to Invarel; though whether this was seen as a prudent bolstering of the city’s defenses in uncertain times, or a reckless abandoning of the countryside, depended upon which newspaper one read.

  While it was always troubling to learn of awful news in distant places, once it was read and digested there was nothing to do but to go on with all the usual affairs of one’s day. That life should continue apace for one person when it was all in tumult for others seemed grossly unfair, but it was ever the state of the world. Besides, Ivy needed some activity to direct her attention toward, for otherwise she would find herself wanting to take out a map so she could count the miles between County Dorn and the region of the northlands where Mr. Quent had gone to perform his work. And there could be no useful purpose in that.

  With this in mind, Ivy decided to take the old rosewood clock to be repaired, for it was still off. Yesterday, it had marked the end of the lumenal eighteen minutes before the almanac predicted. True, when Ivy glanced out the window of the sitting room, the sky had already been getting dark by the time the black disk eclipsed the gold one on the right-hand face of the clock. However, the day had been generally cloudy. And anyway, because of the Crag looming to the west, Ivy could never get a good view of the sunset.

  But she had checked the timetables in the almanac twice, and had compared the time on the rosewood clock to others in the house, and so there could be no mistake about it—the clock had chimed the start of the umbral too early. Therefore, after breakfast, she wrapped it in cloth and took it to Coronet Street, to the shop of a clockmaker.

  Evidently there had been an epidemic of broken clocks in the city, for upon entering the shop she found it crowded with people. Each of them held a clock in their hands (or leaned against it if the clock was very large), and all the disparate noises of their ticking and chiming and cuckooing made for a jarring symphony.

  She waited for over an hour to be seen, and then it was not by the clockmaker but rather by his apprentice. After giving the workings of her clock only a brief examination, the young man pronounced that there was no mechanical problem that he could observe.

  “I will say that the workings of this clock are peculiar,” he said, his eyes large behind thick spectacles. “There are extra gears and other mechanisms whose function I cann
ot guess. I am sure my master would have seen their like before, if he had time himself to look at it, but he does not. Regardless, it is all in good working order.”

  “I’m sure that’s not the case,” Ivy protested. “I set it according to the almanac at the beginning of the last lumenal, yet by the end it was nearly twenty minutes behind.”

  “Then I suppose your almanac has a misprint in it,” the apprentice said, and shut the door on the back of the clock.

  Ivy had never known the almanac to be incorrect. She always used Sparley’s Yearbook, which had a reputation for being highly reliable. Yet she had to concede it was possible that there were mistakes in the almanac. After all, there were a great number of entries, and the typeface was very small.

  She left the shop, the heavy clock in her arms, and walked a short distance to a bookseller’s, where she bought the last copy of Gooding’s Altanian Almanac on the shelf. Then she went to hire a hack cab to take her back across the city. Her sisters had Lawden and the cabriolet, as Lily had wanted to go to Halworth Gardens again that day.

  The lumenal—which, if the new almanac was any more accurate than the old, was to be over eighteen hours long—was growing torrid by the time Ivy returned to Durrow Street. As she entered the front hall, she was greeted by a great racket emanating from upstairs. Evidently repairing a wall caused more of a disturbance than tearing one down.

  Ivy took her burdens to the sitting room and set them on the mantel. The carved eye in the center of the mantelpiece blinked at her, and she smiled. Any dread the eyes had given her the other day had been superseded by reason. The voices she had heard the other night could not have been made by the black storks, as Mr. Barbridge had informed her, which meant they must have been produced by her imagination instead. Besides, she could not believe that the eyes were anything other than benevolent.

  Ivy took up the old almanac, but she was uncertain what to do with it. It was hardly of use now, but she could not bring herself to throw away any sort of book. Instead, she took it to the shelf in the corner of the sitting room.

  The majority of her father’s library was stored away in crates, awaiting the completion of work on the house to be unpacked. However, as her father had often said when she was young, a house without books was like a body without a soul, and so she had brought out a few books and arranged them here. She slipped the almanac onto the shelf beside them.

  That task accomplished, Ivy considered how to occupy herself for the rest of the long morning. She supposed she should look at the household ledger. It had been some time since she had catalogued the receipts related to the restoration of the house, and she wanted to keep them in order for Mr. Quent to inspect upon his return.

  Or she could read a book.

  While it had long been Ivy’s custom to spend every free moment reading books from her father’s library—volumes about history, ancient mythology, and especially magick—it had been difficult to maintain the habit these last months. With her sisters gone, she had some rare time to herself.

  The receipts could wait; after all, Mr. Quent would not return for nearly half a month. Ivy ran a finger along the spines of the books on the shelf. None of them concerned the arcane or occult; she had not thought it appropriate to bring out such tomes when strangers were coming and going. However, there were several volumes regarding various scientific studies.

  Her finger came to a halt upon a book of astrography. Over the last few days, Ivy had thought a great deal about the article she had read in The Comet concerning the new planet. Further reflection had convinced her that her hypothesis was correct—that the place she had seen through the Eye of Ran-Yahgren was in fact the planet Cerephus.

  Though the long morning had grown hot, a shiver crept across Ivy’s arms and neck. She would never forget the lurid crimson glow that had welled forth from the crystalline orb in the secret room upstairs, or the dark shapes that had lurched across the queer landscape beyond.

  What the things were, Ivy didn’t know. Something alive, and ravenous. Whatever they were, the magicians had sought to use the artifact to open a door for them. They had thought to control the things, to use them for some unknown end. For power, she supposed. One glance through the orb was enough for Ivy to know that plan was madness. Indeed, merely gazing into the orb had driven the magicians mad.

  Using the spell left by her father, Mr. Rafferdy had restored the binding on the artifact, but the new planet was drawing ever closer. What if one day Cerephus drew so close that magick was no longer needed to open a door?

  Now she was intentionally horrifying herself. She had absolutely no evidence on which to base such a theory. For one thing, she had no idea how close Cerephus would approach, and she knew little about the movements of the planets.

  Which was why reading about astrography could only be to her benefit. Ivy pulled the book from the shelf and sat on the sofa. However, the noise of work continued to drone from above, and she knew if she tried to read in here she would soon get a headache. So she left the sitting room and instead went out into the garden behind the house.

  With its disheveled hedges, the great trees of New Ash which leaned at odd angles, and a collection of spindly chestnuts and hawthorns, this garden could not have been more different than the one where Lily and Rose had gone that morning. In Halworth Gardens, the greenery was no less precise in design than the carefully tended paths, while there was a wildness to this garden that made it seem as if it had not been planted at all, but rather had sprung up unbidden. Indeed, the garden seemed to have a life and will of its own, and had grown only more dense in the months since they had arrived, despite the constant efforts of Mr. Seenly.

  Book in hand, Ivy walked through the garden. There was a bench situated beneath one of the larger ashes, and so it would be protected from the heat of the long morning.

  The air seemed to grow greener as she went. Though the city lay just beyond the hedges, if she shut her eyes a little she could imagine she was miles from Invarel. She could picture herself out on the moorlands around Heathcrest Hall, where clouds scudded along the tops of the fells and ancient trees murmured in the wind, tangling behind an old stone wall.…

  Ivy blinked, and the shadows all around leaped ahead several inches from where they had been a moment ago. Before her was one of the stunted hawthorn trees. Unlike the ash trees, a number of dead brown leaves clung to its branches, in and among the green.

  Given its ragged appearance, she could not help being reminded of the stand of Wyrdwood on the ridge to the east of Heathcrest Hall. Like the little hawthorn, those trees had always been shedding their leaves, as if they did not understand that they were supposed to hold on to them. But the comparison could be no more than superficial. There were no Old Trees here in the city. It was only a want of trimming or more water that was causing the hawthorn to lose some of its leaves. She would tell Mrs. Seenly to have her husband see to it.

  The bench lay just ahead. Ivy started for it, then realized the book on astrography was no longer in her hand. She looked around and saw that it had fallen to the ground. She retrieved it, then went to the bench and opened the volume on her lap.

  “Ahoy, Ivy, there you are!” a voice called out when she had read no more than the introductory paragraph.

  Ivy looked up to see Lily tramping across the garden toward her, bonnet in hand, while Rose wandered behind.

  “We looked all over the house and couldn’t find you anywhere. We thought you’d gone. Then Rose looked out a window and saw you standing in front of a tree, staring at it as if it were somehow the most fascinating thing. What are you doing out here?”

  “Nothing,” Ivy said, and with a sigh shut the book. “I was merely escaping the noise of work.”

  Lily plopped herself on the bench. “Well, I can’t blame you for that. We couldn’t leave the house soon enough for Halworth Gardens.”

  “Yet you’re back very soon as well.”

  “I’m surprised we stayed as long as we did,” Li
ly exclaimed, picking at the ribbons of her bonnet. “The heat was beastly. The flowers were all wilting, and there was no one there, nor anywhere along the Promenade! Well, hardly anyone, at any rate. Certainly no one who was very handsome or dressed very well, though Rose kept telling me to look up every time some portly vicar or white-haired barrister strolled by.”

  “I didn’t know if you might find them handsome or not,” Rose said. She kicked off her slippers and picked up the hem of her gown as she walked through the grass.

  Lily rolled her eyes. “Well, there were hardly any homely gentlemen, let alone good-looking ones. It seemed as if everyone had abandoned the place for somewhere else. Which was not very good of them, as we had gone to all the trouble to go there. I wonder where they could all have gone.”

  Even as Lily said this, Ivy realized she already knew the answer to the mystery. Today was the opening day of Assembly—as she should have recalled. When they met the other lumenal, Mrs. Baydon had explained with delight how Mr. Rafferdy was to occupy Lord Rafferdy’s seat in the Hall of Magnates until his father was fit to travel to Invarel.

  The idea of Mr. Rafferdy sitting in Assembly was one that gave Ivy great amusement—even as she was certain it would provide him none. How dull he would find it all: a room of men in wigs debating resolutions and expounding on the actions of the Crown!

  All the same, she could not help thinking that, if he applied himself, he would make a very good politician. He certainly had the wit for it, if he could only find the patience. No doubt he would consider the notion unthinkable; but then, he had never thought he could be a magician either.

  That today was the opening day of Assembly would account for the absence of gentlemen in Halworth Gardens. Ivy explained this to her sisters. However, the clarification did little to mollify the youngest.