Chasing Embers

by James Bennet

  Bardolfe set his glass down on the desk. He smoothed the front of his dressing gown.

  “Come on, Maurice, your little Rotary Club must know something.”

  But Ben could see that the old man was shaken. His hands fluttered at his sides like restless pigeons. Bardolfe might be rich and the Guild powerful, in its covert, venerable way, but the man before him was only human, and staring down the barrel of a thankless grave after years serving as chair. Ben almost felt sympathetic.

  “The Star of Eebe, you say?” The old man cleared his throat. “I don’t know about this breach in the Lore, but I do know a thing or two about antiques. I’m practically one myself.” He attempted a laugh, abandoning it as he glanced at Ben’s face. “The name rings a bell, anyway. The Star of Eebe. An African gem, I think. Or whatever was there before Africa. Come with me.”

  Bardolfe shuffled out the door and down an adjacent corridor. They wove deeper into the mansion, fraying rugs and thick walls muffling their footsteps, the only sound in the still. Ben found the peace surprising. He realised that no alarms had sounded when he’d crashed into the hall. No guards had come running from the gatehouse. Bardolfe could surely afford such measures. Only the dogs had challenged him, and what good were they? The knight must have felt so safe in his little castle, so sure that no Remnant would ever dare to come here, that security at the Court had grown a little lax. He bet Bardolfe regretted that now.

  The old man tottered down some steps and under an archway, a mahogany mouth of carved roses, emerging at one end of a long gallery. Moonlight glowed behind a tall row of windows, an Edwardian addition to the house. Objets d’art and dusty antiques lined the panelled walls. Bardolfe flicked a switch, gentle lamps winking on, and walked over to a nearby painting. He stood regarding it with obvious reverence.

  It was another dragon, this one blue and loop-tailed, falling under the sword of a mounted knight. The battle was taking place in a village meadow, the crude medieval rendering giving no thought to scale or size. Blade and fangs were impossibly long. Blood and fire garishly red. The peasants in one corner of the painting were taller than their cramped thatched hovels.

  Under the painting, embossed on a small brass plaque, Ben leant forward and read:

  Ther reigned at a toune called Wormesgay a dragon in a field that venomed men and bestes with his aire; Sir Hugh on a weddings day did fight with thys dragon and slew him, and toke his heade, and beare it to the kynge and gave it hym, and the kynge for slaying of the dragon put to his name this word dolfe, and did call him afterwards Bardolfe.

  Ben rolled his eyes, and not at the grammar.

  “Much has changed since the old days, eh?” Bardolfe the umpteenth descendant said. “Since the gaunt wolf and winged serpent held dominion o’er the vale. Men knew how to settle scores back then.”

  “You think so? Thousands died. I’d hardly call those times idyllic.”

  The old man pursed his lips, his expression suggesting that the matter was debatable. Then he shook himself from his reverie and proceeded up the gallery, passing other portraits, flags and shields, Ben a looming presence at his side.

  “The Old Lands faded from Britain like a dream.” Bardolfe spoke as if to himself, lost in the forest of his thoughts. “It was like the Rapture, I suppose. An apocalypse in fairyland. Of course, they left you lot behind. The Fay are notoriously fickle.”

  “Some might say cruel.” Ben conceded the point grudgingly; he didn’t want to give the knight anything.

  “The Fay created you. All of you…creatures.” Ben sensed that this wasn’t the word Bardolfe would’ve chosen in different company, but the old man moved swiftly on. “Why? Their reasons, as ever, remain inscrutable.” He flapped a hand, frustrated by the mystery. “Pets? Servants? A hierarchy of fabulous beasts, whole dynasties of spell-born magic users, and spirits tangled with wood and stone…” His eyes slipped sideways at Ben. He knew he was pushing it. “Then your masters upped and abandoned you. You Remnants…remained.”

  “Yeah, well, I hear Camlann was kind of messy. No wonder the Fay flew the coop.”

  Betrayal. Incest. Murder. War. Ben had read the legends of Arthur and his fall, the stories of his draconic lineage that fifteen hundred years later were fairy tales even to him.

  Fairy tales. They sprang up wherever the Fay set foot, like forest vines trailing in their wake, surrounding them in mystery. Some said that the ancient spirits had been gods once, the First-Born lords at the dawn of Creation. Others that the Fay were mere children of gods, running wild in the playground of the world. Either way, what most tales agreed on was that some kind of cataclysm had taken place, some grievous shift in the cosmic order, way back where the reach of history ran out and all was fog and speculation. The gods, some said, had perished. Or rather, lost all sanity and self-control, become a potent soup of chaotic force summoned and shaped by human belief, each god simply a facet of the whole, wearing a face to mirror the needs of the faithful. And in the chaos, the First-Born had fallen, become the Fay, choosing an enchanted form of flesh and mortality rather than embrace cosmic madness, forever bound to the fractured planes of existence, wandering the gulfs of the nether from dreaming world to world…

  The reasons why the Fay had decamped from this world were well documented – in the right circles, at least. After centuries of counselling and guiding humans (and some of them befuddling and leading folk astray), the Fay gave up in disgust and returned to the nether whence they came. Most Remnants lived in hope of their return. When the Fay returned, the Long Sleep would end. Ben guessed that it was something to live for, a hope on which to hang. Although he often scorned himself for it, begrudging his own naïvety, wasn’t that why he clung to the Pact where so many others had grown bitter? Well, that and his private affection for humans, a species that played into his natural desire to protect…Peace, the cynical part of him told him, was a lot to hope for, a nigh-on impossible dream. The battle of Camlann had severed two worlds. One had withered like a dead branch on a tree and become myth, become laughable, childish stories. As the centuries stretched on, desperation had set in. He was well aware that among the Remnant leaders, the ones still walking the earth, he was perhaps the least jaded – but his faith was wearing thin. No Remnant was living the life they had envisioned under the sheltering Lore. Had the Fay really left them to die?

  Messy? No, messy didn’t quite cover it. Ben rubbed his hands. The admission felt weak. An excuse he made for his makers that he didn’t really believe.

  “Might’ve helped if people had left us alone.” Did he sound surly? He wished he could come across as less childish. “Humans. Do you realise how noisy you are? Back then, it was feasts and battles, chiselled stone and chopped trees. These days, it’s planes, trains and automobiles. You never, ever shut up.”

  “Progress, my friend. It’s called progress.”

  Ben came to a halt, arrested by a suit of armour in an alcove on his left. It stood there guarding the gloom, a steel scarecrow with pointed helmet, curved pauldrons, dented breastplate and scarred greaves. And spikes. Lots and lots of spikes. Spikes protruded from every available space, sticking out of hinged elbows, collar and cuisse. The helmet was an evil star in the lamplight, the sieve-like visor bristling with blades. Someone had recently polished the suit, and as Ben paused to inspect it, trying to ignore the ghost of hatred haunting its hollow, vulturine beak, he saw his horror reflected back at him.

  “Where the hell did you get this junk? Should’ve been scrapped long ago.”

  “Oh, it arrived a couple of weeks back.” Bardolfe seemed happy to explain. “One of our wards sent it as a gift. A collector of occult memorabilia and military souvenirs. Would you believe they had the thing in their cellar? The Guild were happy to take it off their hands.”

  “I’ll bet.” Ben scowled.

  “Come now. Lambton was a very long time ago.” Bardolfe sniffed, moving on from the grim suit of armour. “I believe there were casualties on both sides. Far too many
to start laying blame.”

  “Oh yeah?” And now his cynicism was breaking through. “There are – what? – twenty of us left on British shores. A few scattered in other lands. You lot are everywhere, breeding like it’s going out of fashion. Just what sacrifice did you make? What did you give up for the Lore?”

  Bardolfe looked at him. For a moment, the old man’s stare was disbelieving, then it softened into something approaching sympathy.

  “Why, magic, of course.”

  Ben found that he couldn’t argue with this. There were countless tales of humans using magic before the Pact and few of them had ended happily. He dropped his gaze, glaring at the suit. He recalled the story behind it. A northern squire, Lord John, had gone out fishing on the Sabbath and a witch had dropped down from a tree to warn the young sir that no good could come of it, to get himself to church. Typically, John ignored the witch and, rod over shoulder, continued on his way. Later, having caught no fish, he went hunting along the banks of the River Wear, and there he found a strange nest, a tangled mess of stones, twigs and shells. He plucked out a bright green snakelike creature. In disgust, he threw the thing into a nearby well and went whistling back to hearth and hall.

  Seven years later, John returned home from the crusades to find a giant wyrm wrapped around Penshaw Hill on his father’s estate.

  The story didn’t exactly have a happy ending either. Not for the wyrm, at any rate. But Ben knew that such folk tales were mostly down to bravado. He called it the St George Syndrome. Men destroyed what they didn’t understand and then liked to call themselves heroes. Looking at the suit, the Iron Maiden also came to mind. He might have reminded Bardolfe that for all human growth and advancement, sometimes they turned the spikes inward too…

  These thoughts made him notice just how many weapons lined the walls. Battleaxes and morning stars. Scimitars, halberds, pikes and clubs. Chain mail hung above a row of Norman helmets like warlike washing on a clothes line, and as Ben traipsed after the knight, leaving those chilling spikes behind, modern weapons crept into the mix: Jacobite grenades, flintlock pistols and Napoleonic muskets. Hell, there was even a Gatling gun. When it came down to hurting each other, there seemed no end to human ingenuity. All the same, he conceded Bardolfe’s point. Remnants had been at fault just as much as humans. There were many aggressors among his own kind, those who had fought the expanse of the cities tooth and claw, and thwarted scientific advance with countless confusing enchantments. Some, like Mauntgraul, the White Dog, had even taken pleasure in resistance, razing towns and demanding virgins, giving the rest of them a bad name.

  “King John and the barons had to do something,” Bardolfe said, appearing to reach some inner conclusion. “Things couldn’t carry on as they were. Surely you have to accept that the Pact saved the Remnants from extinction? There were so few of you left…”

  Yes. Something had to be done about it. The King had summoned his advisers. By royal decree, John had founded the Curia Occultus, the Hidden Court. The high council was comprised of three divisions, military, ecclesiastical and – temporarily – magical. The administration of the Lore had fallen to the Guild, of course. The military arm. The knights. The descendant of whom, Sir Maurice Bardolfe, had just stopped before another painting.

  This one was larger, grander, than the ancestral dragon slaying. The painting looked out on a midsummer’s night – Uffington, 1215. The moon picked out a spindly horse etched in chalk atop a hillside – except it wasn’t a horse, was it? Merely a crude but clever sketch of a winged beast that used to haunt those parts, long ago…Ben looked at the long table set up in the Manger, the lush dell that stretched below White Horse Hill. He looked at the scroll unfurled there, the quill in the knight’s hand as he leant over it. Some of the gathered men wore tunic and hose, their casual attire signs of their faith. Others wore armour, the mistrust of fools…

  One of the men had red hair. He stood among the others, a snake among apes, and whatever his qualms at the time, the artist’s brush had swept them from his face, replacing them with a confident smile. The quill in his hand dripped with ink. The picture screamed accord and not reluctance.

  The St George Syndrome again. It was so familiar, Ben almost laughed.

  “The Magna Carta was not the only contract the King sealed that year.” The pride was back on Bardolfe’s face, a fire in wrinkled folds. “At least he put his seal to this one willingly. As agents of the King, my ancestors were right there at the heart of things, deliberating with the Remnant leaders. You argued for months, calling for all manner of amendments. In some cases, Remnants mounted a resistance and battles took place. Eventually, all of the leaders signed, including you. Lackland might not have complied with the Carta, but at least the Remnants have with the Pact.”

  “What choice did we have?” The shadows deepened on Ben’s brow. “You said it yourself. In the end, we chose to survive.”

  Where they could, the Remnant leaders had commanded, cajoled and pleaded with the other members of their magical tribes to heed the wisdom of the proposal, to make peace and obey the Pact. And, weary of war and wanting to believe in the greater good, many had done just that. Witches put away their brooms. Wizards handed in their wands. Trolls stopped skulking under bridges. The Remnant leaders had stayed among humans, one representative from each tribe, sheltered by the Lore as long as the Fay’s forsaken children pledged to keep the peace and live out their days in secrecy. Those who could agreed to exist in human form. Those who couldn’t went into the wilderness, the Himalayas, the Rockies – even a Scottish loch. The rest had gone into the Long Sleep.

  Ben was practically glaring now. “Hundreds of others were lulled. Sedated. Banished. Robbed of their place in history till such as a time as Remnants and humans could live in peace. Isn’t that what the Pact states?” Bardolfe didn’t answer, leaving Ben to snort. “The impossible future. Meanwhile, the Guild made busy turning us into myths. Don’t make it sound so bloody heroic.”

  “Oh but it was.” The old man shot a glance at Ben. “What is it you think we do here? Type up newsletters? Sit around playing bridge? With the Pact signed, it became our duty to uphold it, and that meant the monumental task of erasing you from history. In the Middle Ages, we spread tales and songs, the more unlikely the better. Throughout the Enlightenment, we cast doubt on your existence, put it all down to superstition, ignorant reactions to storms, comets, the aurora borealis. We flooded the markets with Jenny Hanivers, stitching frog heads, snake tails and bat wings together and pickling them in jars, which merchants claimed were proof of dragons. We gave them narwhal horns as proof of unicorns. Skate fins as proof of mermaids. No matter how cunningly made, whenever people exposed them as fakes – as they invariably did – the doubt would deepen and spread.” Flecks of spit at the corner of his mouth revealed Bardolfe’s passion. He shook his head, catching his breath. “Our work at the Court is tireless, but still incidents occur. Why, only this morning I read a report about mass hysteria in New York. A hundred-odd people swore blind that they saw a monster on the Brooklyn Bridge…” Reaching the end of the gallery, Bardolfe halted in the shadow of a bookcase and turned to Ben with a pointed look. “This devil is not as black as you paint him. The Guild is hardly House Fitzwarren. We, at least, tolerate your existence.”

  Ben shrugged that off, homing in on mention of the report. “So you have heard something.”

  Bardolfe smiled. “Fingers and pies, Mr Garston. Fingers and pies.”

  Ben was thinking of the jagged mouth in the face of the Javits Center, that sixty-foot-wide shattered grin that had worn police tape like lipstick. A mouth that kissed the Hudson dark, blowing no smoke, breathing no fire…

  “Do you know why the CROWS tried to kill me?” He moved closer to the bookcase, crowding the old man against it. “Do you even care? You know, it would’ve been nice of you to ask.”

  “Well now, I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “Fulk said that the Pact was broken.” The Pact is n
ull and void, Garston. You’re not the only one any more. “Babe Cathy agreed with him. And we both know there’s only one way that could happen…”

  He let this sink in, watching puzzlement weave across Bardolfe’s face. Then the old man laughed, husky echoes bouncing off the books.

  “Preposterous. You think that the Guild wouldn’t have known? A disturbance in the Long Sleep? The Lore so dramatically breached?” The echoes fell to the floor like leaves. “Fulk Fitzwarren is wrong, old boy. His lust for vengeance has made him desperate. The CROWS, I imagine, are just trying to scare you.”

  “Hmm.” Ben was not convinced. “And the Star of Eebe? The heist? I came here hoping for information.”

  “Ah yes, your African gem. Well, if it’s information you’re after, then information you shall have.”

  The bookcase was a rosewood giant soaring up to the cobwebbed heights, a narrow ladder propped against it. As Ben looked on, the elderly knight climbed a few rungs, wheezing and scuffing dust to the floor. His mottled hands caressed the shelves, brushing copies of the Historia Regum, the Gutenberg Bible, a gilded edition of Le Morte d’Arthur. The rows resembled a different kind of grin, a bared rictus of knowledge.

  “I’m sure we kept a copy of The Lost Jewels of Alkebulan.” Bardolfe gave a tut, his fingers straying over a missing tooth. “It was a first edition, one of a hundred printed on hand-made paper. Now where in buggery has that got to?”

  “Do I look like a librarian?”

  Bardolfe ignored him, his crabby expression descending from the gloom.

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s all we have on old African artefacts,” he said. “It looks like we’re fumbling in the dark.”

  “So you’re saying you can’t help me?”

  The knight met Ben’s gaze, tapping his lips for a moment. Then a light came on behind his eyes and he clicked his clothes-peg fingers.