Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘The mirrors are fascinating, aren’t they?’ said Phantastes. He waved his own arm behind her head. ‘They show us a terrible reality; a reality in which we are trapped forever in repetition, as far as the eye can see. But they also show us something else.’ He carefully stepped into the centre of the hallway, and Kay stepped directly before him. Now they occupied all the mirror so completely that they utterly eclipsed the reflection from the other end. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘if you stand in the right place, all the myriads are unified, and then there is only one. Come.’ And he strode away straight down the centre of the hall, walking into his own image.

  Out through an open door on to a stone terrace, and for the first time since arriving in Alexandria Kay felt the full force of the sun. Immediately she noticed that it was directly overhead rather than off to one side, or even long on the horizon. This sun simply beat down on the scalp, like a continuous falling of heated hammers. Underground, in the temple, the light had seemed gentle, nurturing; here by contrast it felt like an open and boring eye, seeing into all of them with an arid look. Everything around them glared with the light and heat of it: the stone balustrade of the terrace, where she set her hands as she looked down over the rooftops to the sea; the pebbles and sandy grit under her feet; even the water of the large circular fountain in which, to her initial surprise as her eyes adjusted to the light, Will was sitting – with his clothes on.

  He looked sleepy – at least his eyelids were heavy and drooping, if not completely closed – and there were beads of sweat sitting proud on his forehead. The water poured out of one side of the fountain, and he sat in the pool up to his knees with his legs crossed before him. His hands hovered over the water, palms open and fingers extended, and seemed to be describing a slow, circular motion across the surface. At first Kay thought he was plotting, but this was something slightly different. And then his hands began to move in other ways, shaping through the air as if he were working with a soft stone or wax and forming, or deforming, the cut of a statue; but still his eyes never stirred, and the lids lay draped across them almost bashfully. His hands moved quickly before his body, now scooping up water from the pool and letting it pour very deliberately through the space before him; now pushing with great force down on some invisible shape being moulded, stamped and pressed.

  Eumnestes padded on to the terrace in his cotton slippers. He moved with silence and intent directly to Will’s side and, leaning over the wall of the fountain, whispered a few words into his ear. Phantastes let out a low whistle as Eumnestes stood back, watching the effect take hold.

  Looking around, Kay realized that several other people were also scrutinizing Will. Flip sat upright and poised on a low chair about three metres away, marking him closely and occasionally moving his own hands – involuntarily, she was sure – in the air at his side. To his right, a little closer to her, another man leaned against the balustrade, almost perched on its top. He was heavier than the two wraiths, and old; the hands gripping the stone behind him were gnarled and slightly empurpled; she felt that she had seen them before, recently, but it was not until she looked at his face that she recognized him as Rex, the porter from the Pitt. Kay tried to catch his eye, but he was watching Will intently and never looked her way, not even when she drew in closer to the little group and sat down on a low stone bench. To Flip’s other side, and on the far side of the fountain, someone else was squatting just over the edge of the pool. It was another wraith, a woman, and she had dark and glossy hair, almost purple in the sun, brushed back in tresses over her shoulders. Kay could not see her face well, but could anyway discern that she, too, had at least one eye on Will; and while she looked at her, trying, round the fountain’s stem, to get a full view of her face, Kay saw her do something very curious. She slowly reached into her pocket and drew out a dark black stone – no, perhaps a marble, for it was smooth, and gleamed like glass – but not glass, because she squeezed it easily, and it rained a kind of juice into the pool below before she rolled it between her fingers, and dropped it. Her actions were tiny and painfully slow, as if, with everyone’s eyes on Will, she were anxious to avoid observation. She squeezed and dropped another, then another; and as Kay craned her neck to see round the fountain, the woman just caught her eye and froze – and broke into a wide smile.

  But it was at that second that Will’s arms suddenly came to an abrupt halt in the air, his head lifted in a straight and decisive jerk, his eyelids shot up, and he stared straight at Kay. He said only two words, with perfect clarity and intensity, and then fainted, falling to his right into the pool. As he fell, everyone on the terrace scrambled to his side, except Kay; she sat there feeling nothing at all, the words reverberating in her head, the chilling, direct stare burning with a dark blaze into her memory.

  ‘Andrea Lessing.’

  No. Not again.

  She felt nothing – just a gaping, empty coldness.

  Not here. Not again.

  Everything seemed to move very slowly, soundlessly, and as if it were at a great distance: the hands pulling Will out of the water; a swarm of unfamiliar wraiths suddenly scaling the terrace from every direction; the body of Eumnestes falling from the second-storey window and crashing, mangled, on the stone before her feet; the cold, cold blade of the knife that, in the middle of that long moment, slid into the soft flesh of her right shoulder. Over the rooftops beyond the terrace, past the swaying tops of two glossy palms, she saw birds circling as she fell forward – circling, circling, but not landing.

  It had taken all the skill of forty of the greatest of the left-wraiths. They had plotted for weeks under Ghast’s supervision, composing the plan that would destroy his enemies once and for all. It had been a mighty effort; but then, it was the nature of stories, and of the feeble-minded wraiths who still told them, to make the simple look very difficult. From this vantage – that of the present – he considered the problems trivial, and the recent chain of events more or less inevitable. The once-great First Wraith could be relied upon for his incompetence. Having failed everyone around him again and again, he had made failure a kind of habit. He would fall easily into any trap laid for him if the bait were some promise of redemption. His companion Philip was of a subtler temper, but in that subtlety lay his vulnerability: believing himself to be too wise to be duped, he was after a manner duped by his own wisdom. The girl did not bear pondering: give her the slightest nudge, and she would move at a constant speed in whatever direction you chose, until you chose to alter or stop her course. She was so much water; one did but channel her. Ghast frowned. His enemies had proved weaker than he deserved.

  Soon his runner would reach the barge with news of his agents’ success in Alexandria. Already he had received his first report. Naturally his enemies had fallen like flies into the honey pot, exactly where Ghast had dropped them. With no friends left in the mountain, they sought out – and so betrayed – their last ally. It would be sweet to learn of the old imaginer’s death; he had compassed it so often in his imagination he half thought he had become half an imaginer himself.

  Now, having played his enemies, he would play his friends. Perhaps that would be more satisfying. In time to come, friend and foe would alike call him master.

  ‘What is it?’ he all but spat at his servant, who presumed to interrupt his reverie. The obsequious wraith winced to be acknowledged.

  The barge was making slow passage through a wide, mostly rocky mountain valley. It was late in the afternoon. To the right Ghast noticed two of the large vultures that breed in the area, circling low as if about to land on the rough weeds and low shrubs covering the valley floor. He watched them thrust forward and extend their claws as they dropped to the ground. Their wing feathers stood out black against the grey light. Still his minion did not answer.

  ‘I will tell you,’ he said, ‘what you cannot yourself contrive to say. You come to relay to me the news that the Builder, the man More, has been shaken off and left to beg for food in some ditch or alley at the end
of the earth.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the terrified eyes of a lesser right-wraith.

  ‘But you have worse news for me, too, and you fear to give it.’ He paused and stared hard into the quivering pupils of his victim. They contracted to terrified pinpricks. ‘The runner who came to you passed on this report and vanished, staking not his but your head on his message. And the message is that the little girl, More’s daughter, the worthless one, has escaped with her friends. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  The wraith nodded in a way that seemed to offer his head upon an imagined block. But Ghast had no more use for it than an overfed cat for a scrawny mouse. He did not even feel the urge to toy with him.

  The barge floated untroubled down this quiet, broad valley. Soon they would put ashore for the night at one of the prepared landings. The girl had escaped by his design, but he would dissemble that; if his enemies were determined to be so hapless, he would have to help them to put up a fight – for only a fight, or the appearance of one, would suit his ends now. Meanwhile he must rouse himself to the performance of a purple fury. Soon the time of ruses would be over.

  He longed for the ease of the vulture that never killed for itself.

  Flip

  For what seemed like years Kay lay with her face just beneath the surface of the cold water in the pool on Phantastes’ terrace. Beside her lay Will, his eyes turned towards her, unblinking – but not dead, for he smiled from time to time, and his mouth seemed to move in a way that might, out of the water, have been speech. The whole time she lay in the sun-slicing pool, Kay longed to understand these frustrated words, to hear what it was that Will was trying to tell her with his untiring gaze and his kind, slow, exaggerated smiles; but no sound came, and every time she opened her own mouth, the salty water flooded in, thick and viscous, like blood.

  Later, with faint surprise, she began to be aware that the world outside the pool was moving, and as time went by she could see it with ever greater clarity. She struggled to lift her head to find out what was going on, but always the exertion brought back the taste of that salt water, and still she could not find her arms or legs, with which she might have braced or pushed herself. Soon she began to hear what seemed to be words, only just beyond her hearing, as if spoken through a thick towel. In time, this drone resolved, and words themselves gradually emerged, then snatches of story, then longer pieces – pieces of knights, and priests, and bankers, and voyages, and precious stones, and unscalable cliffs, of courageous attempts and pitiable losses. Hour after hour she lay in the pool, watching passively as the blurred world above the water shifted by, struggling to hold on to the sense of the slurred words swirling around her ears and keep the taste of the salt at bay.

  It never occurred to her to wonder whether, or how, she was breathing. Her breath had poured out of her entirely, and there was only in her lungs and stomach a desperate need to resist the water that engulfed her. But despite her resolve she felt that she was failing, that it was seeping in at the cracks between her lips and at the corners of her mouth, that the pressure was massing at her nose and, when her eyes were open, upon her eyes. Slowly, drop by drop, the pool’s thick water forced its inevitable way into her mouth and down her burning throat. With every drop the pain became more severe and she grew more desperate. But in time – how much she never really knew – it became obvious that the water was slowly draining away; or, rather, she began to understand that it was in reality mere air. And as it drained into air, the sound of the voices around her changed from their droning to a more usual tone, and it was clear that the thick drops seeping down her throat were in fact her throat, and that what was forcing its way between her lips and pressing at her nostrils was not choking gulps of water, but essential, rhythmic gasps for breath.

  One thing that did not change was the frequent presence of Will’s face, less than a metre away, turned towards her. Often he laid his head, unspeaking, on the arm of a chair adjacent to her – she realized that she must also be lying down – but at other times he spoke. The stories, she realized, were – had been – his. When he saw that she was crying, he seemed at first to think it was the pain.

  ‘We’re safe now, Kay,’ he said. ‘You had concussion, and a very shallow wound to your shoulder. It’s healing. It will hurt less every day.’

  Kay couldn’t find her voice, but she managed to shake her head – very slowly, very weakly.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you a story?’ Will asked.

  Kay tried to shake her head again.

  ‘Do you want to know what’s going on?’

  She tried with every muscle in her body to push herself up, to speak. Ell. Dad. How long? Her eyes shouted at Will to hear her.

  ‘Six nights,’ he said. ‘Six nights, Kay.’ Her body collapsed back into the bed. Six nights left. From a great distance she could feel Will squeezing her arm.

  ‘It must have been Ghast. We’re not sure how he found Phantastes, the house, the library.’ He stopped for a while and turned to look at the ceiling. Then he began again, not looking back at her. She saw that the room they were in had plain white walls and a low ceiling. There must have been a window behind her, because it was very light. ‘After Flip and I lost you in the tunnels, we went up a rear chute into the house – it’s the way we always go, to avoid being seen on the street. We saw Phantastes, he told us to start the integration – you can guess the rest. I don’t know much about what happened once I was in the fountain. After you sit in a pool steeped with leaves, your mind tends to go blank a little – and you probably saw more of me and everything else than I did. But I know that Rex was there, and Flip. And Katalepsis was there. She’s a plotter, but one of ours. She used to fly with Flip.

  ‘According to Flip, that’s when everything went wrong. There must have been at least four of them – assassins – because someone pushed Eumnestes from the top floor of the library at about the same time as two of them came out on to the terrace. One of them put the knife in your back.’ Kay tensed to hear out loud what she had assumed already. ‘It’s going to be all right, Kay. Phantastes knows a lot of people in Alexandria, and we got you away quickly enough to make sure you were properly looked after. It turned out to be a lot less serious than we’d feared. Flip was hurt a little, too, in the leg. But he’s recovering well.’ Will looked straight at her and smiled. ‘He’s in the next room.

  ‘We left Alexandria the next night. Phantastes insisted. It was too dangerous to stay. Rex and Kat had gone on ahead, here, to Greece, and Phantastes hired a ferry for us to follow. We’ve been holed up in Pylos. It’s a nice house, just on the square – you’ll like it. The streets outside are all cobbled.’ He stopped, and Kay listened to her slow, quiet breathing for a long minute. ‘Don’t worry: we left Alexandria in the middle of the night, and no one could have followed us. We’ll stay here long enough to get you and Flip fit again, while Phantastes tries to figure out what happened and then make new plans for the integration.’ Will looked at her again. ‘We’ll find him, Kay. We’ll find both of them.’

  She lay there with questions pounding in her head. She wanted to hear about Ell. Did they know where she was? How would they find her? What could she possibly tell her mother? How could she explain that she had lost her little sister? Kay felt she could hardly, for weariness, move the muscles in her face, but she sobbed all the same, and huge tears, if they could not run down her cheeks, still they ripped through her body.

  Will came and went many times over what seemed like a whole long day. Although there was a shaded window in the room, she thought it had to be overhung by a tree or another building, because Kay couldn’t see any direct sunlight – just a grey veil lifting in the morning, becoming slowly but reliably lighter over the day, and then what seemed like a sudden pitch into evening. Kay slept in bursts: sometimes she lay for interminably long hours on the side to which Will had gently rolled her, facing either the window across the floor, or in the other direction the white, immediate surface of the wall running up behind
the bed. From beyond the window, which must have been open at least a crack, she thought – though no breeze ever ruffled the curtains – she could hear occasionally a snatch of something that might have been children crying. On the second day, feeling for the first time very alert, she realized that the crying children were gulls.

  Will strode into the room and smiled broadly. ‘Kay, I think you’re well enough to sit up. And if that goes well, we want to take you outside.’

  Kay clenched her teeth and put out her arms, feeling the tightness draw back between her shoulder blades and a dull pain in her upper back. ‘Will,’ she said quietly, ‘where is Ell?’

  ‘We’re working on that,’ he answered as he righted her gradually, shifting the weight on to her waist and reaching for some pillows to put behind her back. Her head swam. ‘We’ve tried to imagine a way out of this mess, and it didn’t work. We’re going to give plotting another go.’

  Shaking her head slightly as if clearing the water from her eyes, Kay tried to think why she didn’t know what Will was talking about. She pressed her hands into her lap, painfully. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Right,’ he said, taking a seat by the bed. ‘You understand plotting well enough, I take it – how it’s done?’ Kay nodded, more out of impatience than real understanding. ‘Most wraiths can do a little plotting, though some are better than others. There have been a few that had no knack for it at all – like Phantastes. He was never a plotter.’ Will looked right into Kay’s eyes and said in a whisper, ‘He doesn’t even have a board.’ Kay nodded – after her conversation with Phantastes in the Temple of Osiris, this didn’t surprise her at all. ‘A wraith who can’t plot can’t plot for one reason, and one reason only. A wraith who can’t plot is an imaginer.’