by James Bennet
“Why does this sound so familiar?” he asked. “These gods fell asleep like we do. Like Remnants.”
“Not quite the same. Your kind were lulled.” The envoy lifted his head, remembering, and then uttered some lines from a very old song.
The king’s harp shattered in three reforged then unmade a silver key a severed song the watcher’s keep locking the door of endless sleep.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ben said. “I know that old lullaby ad nauseam.”
Von Hart sighed. “The gods were the first Remnants, in a sense, their season inevitably fading. You’ll probably know them better as the First-Born, elemental beings of light and power, ultimately shaped by mortal belief. And eventually starved of it. But, as I said, something remains.”
“The Fay ancestors.” Ben’s gentle disdain lingered.
“In all likelihood.” And so did Hart’s ambiguity. “People get lost, so people fear. They reach out in the darkness. They reach out with prayers and promises. Blood vows and libations. And now and again, that something will hear them. Trouble usually follows.”
“Trouble like Queen Atiya.”
“Ja. Your Queen is one such echo. A goddess summoned from the dark.” Von Hart’s hands fluttered like doves, his bleached features intent on the cards, reading symbols and signs. He was drawing on Ben’s reflections, on the wisdom hidden in them. This was scrying. The world held everything, every thought, every feeling, every breath. It was all connected, all carried in time and the wind like fragments, echoes, leaves. Some had the eyes to see. “The history is scattered and vague,” the envoy continued. “I see an African queen from the fifteenth century BC. Or some figment, unearthly and older, that simply adopted Atiya as an aspect, a way to secure its essence in time.”
“Hold on a minute. Are you saying that she isn’t even real?”
Von Hart spared him a look of cold violet patience. “Mein Gott, Liebling. Why do you think we call them myths?” He clicked his tongue. “This particular one began in Africa. South of Egypt, to be precise. In a land called Punt.”
The name rang a bell. Hadn’t Winlock said that the ivory heqa, the Crook stolen by the Queen, held some connection with Punt? Yes…
The cards shifted and turned, clattering. Ink flowed smoothly across them, red and black dribbling into jagged coastlines and forgotten borders. The Dark Continent dissolved, reforming into a close-up map of the northern region, from the Horn of Africa up to the Mediterranean, the long eye of the Red Sea bordered by the Arabian peninsula.
Apparently Ben was in for a history lesson.
“We know very little about Punt. It seems to exist outside time, like Atlantis, Lyonesse or Mu.” Von Hart peered at the floating image. Obelisks and arches rose before him, the ephemera of lost cities and tribes, falling into ruin as he spoke. “Yes, I see it now. An account on crumbling papyrus, written during the reign of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut. An expedition sailed across the Red Sea, searching for materials for the Karnak temple.”
Hatshepsut. Another familiar name. Ben placed it from two nights ago, Winlock speaking onstage in the lecture theatre. Today was – what? – Friday? Thursday was lost to the murky confines of the underground car park. So much had happened since he’d entered the museum that his mind struggled to keep up. And academia wasn’t his bag. This reminder of his lack of erudition, his scholarship of hard knocks, scratched at him like a stray pin in a waistcoat pocket.
Better wise up. Rose is counting on you.
The cards moved, rolling like waves. A breeze slipped through the heavy air, carrying a salty tang and the strident cry of gulls. Club Zauber rocked slightly, swaying on unseen tides. Before the envoy, patterns eddied and broke into new configurations, floating free of the cards. Ben caught blurred impressions, golden shores and sun-kissed skin, shaven heads and blunt beards. White bifurcating kilts. Tall sails reared above him, ghostly in the imagined dust. The story, it seemed, was coming to life.
“Several days into the voyage,” Von Hart said, in the same chiming, hollow voice, “a sudden storm struck the vessel as it came within sight of land. The sky erupted with blue fire. The heaving waves resembled pyramids. Relentless and black, the storm smashed the ship into pieces, killing the hundred-strong crew…except for one man. Shipwrecked, this lone sailor washed up on a wasted shore, black as ash, where he was lucky to find a trickle of fresh water. For three days he rested under the blasted palm trees. He built a fire and prayed to his gods.
“Then the sailor writes, I heard the voice of the storm.” Ben noticed the sweat on Von Hart’s forehead, the scrying taking its toll. “Trees toppled. The earth shook. A raging wind approaching fast and…and alighting before him. When the sailor dropped his hands from his face, a great serpent darkened the shore.”
Ben was standing bolt upright. The envoy had his full attention.
“‘Who brought you to this land? This sacred land of Punt?’ the serpent demanded, his scales the colour of lapis lazuli, his golden eyes ablaze. “‘If you will not tell me, you will become as ash, as one who never was.’ And the sailor, flat on his belly in the great beast’s presence, shivered and gasped, for the name Punt was known to him. He had heard whispers of a faraway land of lost gods and untold riches. At once, he told the serpent about the expedition, how his crew had come sailing south. ‘A hundred of Egypt’s finest sailors perished in that storm,’ the man said. ‘And all of their hearts the hearts of lions.’
“The serpent grew thoughtful and sad. He told the sailor to have no fear. ‘Behold, for the gods have brought you to the land of the blessed.’ He looked even sadder. ‘What was once the land of the blessed…Soon, a ship will come and you will see your homeland again. You will hold your children and kiss your wife. Happy is he who lives to tell of the passing storm.’
“This caused joy in the sailor’s heart, but the serpent still looked sad. ‘The falling star boiled the waves and killed your crew, but know you are not alone in your grief. Before the storm, this land numbered seventy-five powerful serpents. When the star fell, all of them burned apart from my daughter and me. Now we rule as King and Queen of Punt.’”
Ben sucked in a breath, sensing the name at the heart of the mystery. Atiya, Queen of Punt. Von Hart studied the cards, his fingers trembling over the images, the shadow play hissing into new shapes.
“‘Oh great serpent,’ the sailor said, rising from his knees. ‘I will relate your tale to my Pharaoh. She will come to learn of your mercy. I will praise you as a god to the priests in my city! I will slaughter bulls in your honour! I will send you ships loaded with goods from every town in Egypt, as befits one who spares a stranded sailor!’ At this, the serpent laughed, for perhaps what the man said was foolishness to him. ‘Go home and grow wise,’ he told the man. ‘That shall be reward enough.’ And in time, a ship came as the King predicted and carried the sailor home, and some say that the sailor bore with him the myrrh that was native to that land, and on returning to Egypt, he planted the first tree of that kind outside the Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s temple.”
The cards churned, receding, reorganising. Von Hart stumbled backwards, released by the flux of the tale. Beads of sweat dripped from his brow. He leant against the catwalk, his breath sounding like a broken bellows. Somewhere, shadows moved, and Ben tensed, sensing company. In the corner of his eye he spied hunched, insectile shapes…
“Are you OK? You look paler than usual.”
The envoy managed a weak smile. “I can’t sustain the spell for long. And as you may have noticed, others sniff us out.”
Lurkers. Lurkers in the walls.
Von Hart barked a laugh, addressing the look on Ben’s face. “We have a little time. The wards will protect us a few minutes more.”
Ben observed the symbols on the walls. Apparently they weren’t just for show. Those DayGlo pentacles and solar squares were obviously in place to keep the envoy from becoming an astral hors d’oeuvre.
“A few minutes?”
Von Hart wasted no time offering co
mfort. He pulled himself to his full skinny height, brushed down his kimono and turned once more to the levitating cards.
“Like all myths, the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor holds a grain of truth. From these reliefs at Deir el-Bahari, we can see that the sailor’s story must have reached the Pharaoh’s ears. In the ninth year of her reign, Hatshepsut undertook a similar voyage – the furthest of its kind in three hundred years – sailing many leagues south on a mission of mercy.” The cards replicated worn temple walls, engraved ships borne on zigzag tides. The rustle of flax filled the club. Long oars splashed through water. “After weeks at sea, the ships alighted on strange new shores, and there the Pharaoh met Parahu and Atiya, the King and Queen of Punt. Rendered on limestone, both look human enough, this supposed tribal king and his daughter, though you’ll note Atiya’s strange physique, her large head, muscular arms and haunch-like legs. Compared to the slender forms of her people, it’s almost as if she suffered from some disease…”
“Or was undergoing a transformation.”
“Quite.”
Serpente in forma humana.
“The Pharaoh brought a retinue of priests, soldiers and slaves, and according to these glyphs, many, many gifts. She listened to all the tales, how Punt had once been a land of plenty, where none who walked her shores were untouched by her splendour. Moved by the kindness the King had shown to a lone sailor, Hatshepsut told her royal hosts that she had come to repay kindness to Punt. She offered a thousand rich and shining tributes, not just food and water, but gold, oil and all kinds of precious stones. Tusks of ivory. Staves of ebony. Leopard skins and ostrich feathers. She swore to heal this once great land, restore Punt to her former glory and thereby make a lasting alliance.”
With an envious twitch, Ben thought about the trove under his house, then quickly forgot it as the envoy threw a glance at the walls. Shadows swelled there, spiny, tentacular.
They had run out of time.
“For a while…all went well…” Von Hart forced the words through his teeth, the pressure building, ready to blow. “The two great nations were in accord. But clouds…gathered. Treachery…stirred. And something went wrong…”
An umbral claw reached out into Club Zauber. The symbols on the walls flashed. Von Hart cried out – Ben couldn’t make out the word – and the floating cards swirled into frenzy, clattering into a new ragged shape.
Midnight wings. Electric eyes. A tiara of twisting horns.
The shadow dragon swooped towards Ben, sizzling with imagined sparks.
FOURTEEN
Ben ducked, the illusion scattering over his head, cards raining down all around him.
If the fairy was amused by his trickery, he didn’t show it. “There are more of them now. The Lurkers.” Von Hart knelt by the catwalk, his chest heaving under star-spangled silk. His impeccable hair hung loose, gold tassels on snow. Sweat glazed his porcelain face. “The presence of sorcery draws them to the earth. They gather like nomads at an oasis. Like flies on shit.”
With the charm dispelled, the walls were simply walls again, neon-daubed, seedy and dim. It relieved Ben to see the shades dismissed, sent back to the nether where they belonged. The Lurkers walked between the worlds once more, their ever-brooding threat allayed.
For now.
“Egyptian sorcery. Puntite sorcery.”
“I think perhaps a mix of both. A chorus of forbidden rites, forgotten prayers. Benedictions to long-dead gods.”
“You mean gods that used to be dead.”
Von Hart nodded. “Empyreal entities like your Queen. The Lurkers hunger for her like urchins at a Christmas banquet. And yet they cannot touch her. Her borrowed flesh is tenuous. She is other-worldly. Other, like them.”
“And we’re still left sifting through shadows.”
Violet flashed in the envoy’s eyes, and Ben regretted his blunt tone. The fairy before him, as alien to this world as all his fickle kind, had taken several risks for him, wrenching him away from the CROWS and undertaking an obviously exhausting incantation. No, not only exhausting. Von Hart’s slumped shoulders, his forced breaths and enervated flesh – Ben had seen this look before. During his eight hundred and sixty years, he had seen it in Welsh lords over-fond of mead, Jacobite priests puffing tobacco, Victorian ladies willing to bare their breasts for opium…And of course, he had seen it when he looked in the mirror on certain mornings, hankering after his old friend Jack.
Magic, the parasite. Magic, the drug. The envoy coughed and wiped his forehead, his fingers playing an allegro of nerves. Von Hart wasn’t just exhausted; he was in withdrawal.
Ben walked over and helped him to his feet.
“At least now I know whose arse I’ll be kicking back into the Long Sleep.”
Bold words to cover his unease, that pervading sense of the bottom falling out of the world he knew. That the Sleep as he understood it went deeper, far deeper than what Remnants and humans had chosen to call it, this potentially limitless dimension where gods, dreams and old ghosts spun, discarded, forgotten, but not quite dead. No. Merely waiting for a spark of belief, a shred of faith to rouse them again, bring them crashing back into the real—
Von Hart coughed again, this time cynically. He didn’t buy it either.
“Poor Ben. You make it sound like that’s what you really want.”
Ben let go of Von Hart’s elbow. The envoy tottered back a step and leant against the catwalk. Ben didn’t need to ask him what he meant. It was plain in the envoy’s steady gaze. Were his feelings that transparent? Yes, he thought so, because here was another shade clinging to him like Scotch mist. It had clung to him since Insomniac City, since the Big Smoke. Since Mordiford. It haunted the empty rooms of number 9 Barrow Hill Road and lingered in every kiss he’d shared across the years. An ache he had always known was there, brought into focus by firm thighs pressed against his own and hot lips at his ear. Bestial heat that soothed the scar and answered the loneliness in him.
“A Remnant stands between two worlds,” the envoy said. Softer now, more cautious. “We are all that is left of the past, exiles in our own land. I mentioned how Man seeks to control the uncontrollable, put nature in a yoke and collar. Well, never forget that we are that nature, primal, mystic, elemental. If I’ve learnt one thing watching the ages turn, it’s that no law is strong enough to prevent change.”
“What are you getting at, Von Hart?”
“In two days, there will be an eclipse in Cairo. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. It’s all over the news.”
Ben knew all right. Bardolfe’s holiday. Miss Macha’s appointment. He had heard all about the syzygy. He hadn’t liked the sound of it then and he didn’t like it now.
“The term itself comes from the ancient Greek ékleipsis, which means ‘abandonment’ or ‘downfall’. It is a time of change, of occultation. Empires rise and empires fall. Kings become paupers and paupers kings. The living and the dead trade places. And some say that laws were made to be broken.”
“You’re starting to sound a lot like the CROWS.” A scowl crawled across Ben’s face. “You say that the wheel turns. Well it did turn eight hundred years ago. The Pact was exactly that: a treaty. An agreement. It may not be perfect but it’s better than extinction. Better than war. And we chose it, you know? Wasn’t much of a choice, but we did.”
“Ja. We chose to be alone.” Von Hart slicked his hair into place. “Always, forever alone.”
Ben wasn’t sure what to say to this. If the envoy believed that they were to blame for their own isolation in the modern age, for their inability to form communities, teach students, mate and breed, then it only stressed the price they’d paid in order to survive. Nevertheless, the doubt was there, nibbling away at him. The ache that would never ease. The bruise that would never fade. The scar that would not heal.
Unless…
He pushed the thought away. Von Hart’s stare, for all its dispassion, was unmistakably honest. Ben should have expected this, this subtle disdain, this pity under
lying their conversation. Was he the only one left who upheld the Lore? Who clung to the hope that the Fay would return, those precious grains falling through his hands? Fine, maybe he wasn’t content with the Pact – never that – but when he considered the alternatives – Babe Cathy’s threat on the Brooklyn Bridge, Fulk Fitzwarren’s vengeful sword, a hundred towns blazing in the past – it struck him as a necessary evil. A dam holding back a flood of chaos.
Now that dam had burst, leaving Ben to wonder whether his code – the decision he had taken and lived by – was due to his personal passion rather than cool objectivity. Centuries ago, a young girl had found and fed him. It was only natural he’d align his heart with her short-lived species, however different from his. But he didn’t like Von Hart reminding him of his attachment to humans. Rose was never far from his thoughts. Rose and the invisible worm, flying in the night, ready to devour her. He already knew the weight of his shame.
Like trying to catch the wind.
“I have to save her, Hart. All this alakazam aside, I have to save Rose.”
And part of him was married to the mystery. He had come too far to turn back now. The events since New York had awakened him, stirring the purpose that had long lain dormant inside him. He wanted to know what Atiya was after, the reason behind her thievery. He wanted to know what the CROWS were plotting, how they intended to spark revolution. He wanted to know what part Sir Bardolfe played and confront him for the set-up at the museum. Above all, he sensed that time was running out. The Cairo eclipse could signal the end of all he held dear. The end of the world he knew.
Von Hart was shaking his head. Openly feeling sorry for him now.
“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to do it alone.”
“What? This is your fight too.”
The envoy held up a hand. “I have seen too much. Camlann. The Hundred Years War. The Inquisition. Waterloo. Flanders Fields. Belsen. Iraq. Oceans of blood. Humans speeding each other towards an early grave. And for what? A fleeting grab at power. A brief superiority. Or maybe just a lust for death.” He let out a breath. “Humans are foolish. Humans are frail. Humans will not last.”