Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  She was still staring at Will’s hands when Phantastes barged into the room, all strides and grand gestures.

  ‘Boys, Rex is back from the piers. We need to find Kat. Rex thinks he’s seen some wispers shadowing down by the harbour. He doesn’t think they’ve found us yet, but they’re definitely in the city. We don’t have long. We’ll have to move on, probably tonight.’

  Will was fully extended and active almost immediately. ‘Wait. How could they know we are here? How could they be in Pylos at all? No one could have followed us on that night crossing. And no one could have seen us come in through that storm.’ He looked jerkily around at all of them in turn. ‘No. This is too close, too fast. They found us here like they found us in Alexandria. This isn’t plotting. There’s something else going on.’

  ‘Spying?’ Phantastes said.

  ‘A leak,’ said Will.

  ‘But who?’ asked Flip, stepping fully into the now crowded small room and pulling the door shut behind him as he did so. He and Phantastes sat at the end of Kay’s bed.

  ‘We need clues,’ Will said. ‘We need to remember exactly what happened in Alexandria.’

  ‘Will, we’ve been over this,’ Flip said. ‘We’ve been over and over it. There’s no new information.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Phantastes, ‘before we make another move, we must know what’s going on. Unless we stay together, there is no hope of recovery.’

  ‘Recovery of what?’ interrupted Kay.

  ‘Of Bithynia, of course,’ said Phantastes. ‘So, again, once more, think back. If they didn’t track you through the air and they couldn’t have plotted your movement before you left, then how did they find us in Alexandria?’

  ‘But I didn’t see anything unusual,’ Will muttered. ‘No suspicious faces. No patterns in the street. No following noises. And there was no one at the house but Flip, Rex, Kat, me – and Kay, of course, and Eumnestes, Anamnestes and you.’

  ‘Kat –’ Kay pushed herself up on her elbow – ‘she was the one with the beautiful hair?’

  Will nodded.

  There was a bustle in the room beyond, the door cracked open and Rex leaned in his massy, leathered head, with his tousled white hair bobbing to one side. ‘I’m going out to find Kat down at the docks,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll take every precaution.’

  ‘See that you do,’ Phantastes replied. ‘See that you do.’

  Kay suddenly had an idea. ‘Rex –’ she said.

  The door had already closed behind him, but he cracked it open and leaned back in. ‘Hello, child. Long time no see. I hadn’t noticed you were up again.’

  ‘Hi.’ Kay felt awkward, but she covered it by speaking quickly. ‘Rex, if Kat is coming from the docks and the wispers are down there – well, they’ll be following her. She’s unmistakable, with that hair.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Phantastes. ‘Don’t come back up here – you’ll lead them right to us. Wait till nightfall, at least.’

  Rex nodded and was gone again in an instant. Will shifted his seat over to the window and drew the curtain slightly.

  Phantastes stood up and took to the door, running his hand absently round the frame as he lost himself in thought. ‘Are you sure she’s not a plotter?’ he said quietly, to no one in particular. But he glanced at Kay, and she knew he was talking about her. ‘Details, patterns.’ He faced the wall motionlessly for a moment, and then slapped his hand against it. ‘I can’t plot these situations, Will. Flip, think it through. Find the causes.’

  There was silence for a few minutes. Kay was afraid to break it, so deeply and anxiously were they absorbed in their memories and their analysis. Will’s and Flip’s hands were twitching as they picked through threads of consequence that led to the assassins, to Eumnestes’ fall, to the cool steel in Kay’s back. She could almost see the webs and branches opening up in the air before her as they thought, and she longed to pick through them with her fingers. Perhaps I am developing this plotting skill after all.

  Will was the first to break it.

  ‘No, it’s just the same. Everything is the same. Up until the fountain I saw and heard nothing that made me in the least suspicious; and after that it was a sealed house – nobody went in or out. Are you sure, Flip,’ he said, turning from the window, ‘that you haven’t forgotten something?’

  Flip shook his head. He looked uncertain, Kay thought, but still he shook his head.

  Will turned to her. ‘And you didn’t see anything, Kay? Nothing at the beach, nothing on the streets? Nothing in the sewers? Nothing in the house? Nothing on another terrace maybe? Nobody watching?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s so incredibly frustrating,’ Will said. ‘To be under the leaf at all is bad enough – but that integration was so hard, so painful. I wasn’t aware of anything at all except the pain. And then their timing: to come in like that, just at the end, when our concentration was most absorbed, when I was most engrossed and groggy – it was uncanny. It was like they were waiting for a cue or something.’

  Something was tapping Kay on the shoulder. She could feel some detail, some half-remembered observation, stirring in her memory. It was something important, she thought.

  But if it were something important, wouldn’t I remember it?

  Then it struck her: Kat. She leaped into the conversation so vigorously that she felt her back twinge.

  ‘Where do you get the leaves for the integration? When do you add them to the fountain?’ she asked.

  ‘You know where we get them,’ Phantastes said. ‘I showed you – on the table. That was my entire store, all that I have left. We add them to the fountain an hour or two before the integration so that the leaves can leach into the water. I readied the fountain as soon as we saw the plane.’

  Kay blew out a long breath. ‘Then what did I see Kat putting into the fountain while Will was … integrating? Is that what you were doing?’ She looked from one to the other of them. ‘When I first came on to the terrace, I saw her take something from her pocket, and as she dropped it in the pool, she looked right at me. She smiled at me.’ Phantastes raised his hand and was about to speak, but Kay cut him off. ‘It was small, dark, glassy – like a marble, or a – I don’t know. I couldn’t see over the edge of the fountain well enough, so I don’t know what happened to it, but it looked heavy when she dropped it. It certainly wasn’t a leaf.’

  Phantastes looked at Will. Will looked up. ‘Belladonna,’ he said.

  ‘The obvious poison,’ agreed Phantastes. He slumped now, but said – to Kay, though he might have been talking to himself, ‘The symptoms of belladonna poisoning are almost the same as the effects of the leaves – dilation of the pupils in the eyes, twitching of the hands and feet, lethargy and sleepiness, loss of speech – only it is fatal. We would never have suspected anything. Oh, it all fits: Will complained afterwards – while you were sick – of strange side-effects from the integration. The lethargy, the loss of his voice, the aches in his joints. But more importantly we know that Katalepsis is highly skilled at administering it; unfortunately she has done it for Ghast in the past. We just never thought she would do it to us.’

  Phantastes spun in front of the door, wedging his arms into the frame, and fixed a look of contempt on Flip, sitting at the foot of Kay’s bed. Flip simply dropped his head into his hands and said nothing. But it was Will who spoke – spoke, or groaned with words.

  ‘Flip. I don’t understand.’ Will held out his hands, together. ‘You know Kat was your call, your friend. You’ve known all along that she was playing us. How could you bring her here, let her do that?’ He stopped. Kay thought he was plotting for a moment, but then realized that his hands weren’t thinking – they were shaking. His body was sobbing, though his face looked completely clear, empty. ‘How much did you know, Flip? The assassins? The wispers? The little girl? Flip, what did you know? Why have you done this to us?’ He stared, but was not angry. Full of fear, Kay watched his stoniness and drew back gingerly into the corner of her
bed, taking up her knees under the blanket. ‘Flip, we could have died.’

  When Flip raised his head, Kay half expected to see his face covered in tears; but while he seemed rigid, there was no grief in him. He held his face level with Will’s and spoke only to him.

  ‘Of course I didn’t know what she would do. Of course I didn’t know what Ghast would do. I had his word …’ There he stumbled, and his eyelids dropped momentarily. ‘I thought I had his word.’

  ‘But whose word do we have, Philip?’ Phantastes was angry, almost shouting, boxing at the air with his teeth. ‘Whose word for us? What truth is in you? How can we call you friend now?’

  ‘You can’t, obviously,’ said Flip – evenly, quietly. ‘I know that. I knew that. Although you should, now above all. Although I have never been a better friend to you, Will, than I have been in this.’ His eyes raised Will’s, and the two friends regarded one another impassively. ‘You can’t know this now, but you will see it later. What I have done – everything – I have done it to protect you. Remember this, Will,’ he went on, still staring directly and unblinkingly at him, ‘remember that I told you here, now, that you would come to know not just what I have done, but how I have done it. Remember.’

  Flip sat rigidly, unmoving. He might have been a stone or a tree trunk. Not even an eye twitched as the two wraiths continued to stare at one another, their hands stilled, their breathing imperceptible, their arms now stiff and straight at their sides. Their friendship was passing between them, Kay thought, but she hardly cared. Traitor.

  Phantastes took two quick steps, threw back his head, and with a snap of his neck spat at Flip’s unflinching brow. ‘If you have any friendship in you, you will leave this place and us, and you will never return to the mountains, to Bithynia, to the company of other wraiths. If you have any friendship in you, you will not go to Ghast with this, or with any of our plans. Now get out.’

  Flip stood up painfully, as if his limbs ached, as if he were an old man. He drew out the sleeves of his gown and smoothed his front – but he never wiped his face. ‘As for you, Phantastes,’ he said slowly, ‘I have never given you cause to hate me, and I give you no cause now. I will wear this contempt, but not for my own shame. I will wear it for yours.’ And with a resolute and even step he let himself out of the white, still room, and the sound of his footsteps quieted and fell away.

  Kay sat up suddenly, like a shot, before she was even sure what she would say. She fumbled.

  Rex.

  ‘Will. Rex. The square. The window.’

  Will turned wearily to her, and all the rigidity and strength of his confrontation with Flip was gone. His mouth laboured words. ‘What? Kay?’

  She found her thread. ‘Kat doesn’t know that I’m up, right? If Rex tells Kat that I’m talking, that I’m awake, she’ll know she’s in danger. She saw that last look I gave her when the knife – He’s not safe, Will.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Phantastes – but they were all three of them already scrambling to the window. Kay winced and caught her breath, hard, as Will rattled the curtain down its rod. Through the pain she saw the alleyway, three or four storeys down, then the corner of a neighbouring building across the street. Then, beyond that, illuminated in bright sunshine, the central square of the city, with its flagstone pavements and low, rundown buildings. She could see almost the whole square, just as Phantastes had said earlier, and as it came further into focus and her eyes made the adjustment from fever and sleep, she saw people. At first she thought they were dancing, because they all seemed to be skipping to the centre of the square – twenty or thirty people, from all directions.

  ‘By the muses,’ Phantastes whispered like a knife.

  All those people had stopped in a ring, and within it Kay could just make out, over the top of someone’s head, a body lying on the ground, motionless.

  Rex.

  ‘She’s killed him,’ said Will quietly.

  As if cued by his words, a single figure pulled out of the crowd, walking without hurry but purposefully towards the far corner of the square. Just before she turned down a lane out of sight, she swept her hand through her mass of black hair.

  As he ranted, contorting and squeezing the muscles in his neck and shoulders in order to push every liquid ounce of available blood into his purple face, he wondered for a moment whether he was not in fact frightened. He certainly sounded it. His voice touched a high pitch of fury that could only be explained by fear. He saw that the assembled left-wraiths knew that. He watched them from behind his performance. And he watched his performance. He had practised it, then run it over in his mind for hours while the barge drifted down the river towards nightfall, so often and so thoroughly that it flowed from him now without effort. He was not frightened; but it was a measure of the quality of his performance that even he should doubt himself.

  He had killed. He would kill again. In the mines below the mountain, after all, he killed every day. Stories began; why should they not end? To kill was to tell the story of another’s end, nothing more. This did not trouble him. What is more, he was ready to accept his own end whenever it should come. He knew the common signs for which he should watch – the foreboding, the dwindling power, his own overreaching – and knew he would recognize them with pleasure when they appeared. That was as it should be. No, neither the thought of his own death nor that of anyone else troubled him.

  But improvisation. Improvisation troubled him. What that wild knife of a right-wraith might do. Might have done. Surely by now he was dead.

  He removed his thick woollen undercoat, hung it on the peg provided and began to unbutton the long cotton tunic he wore next to the skin of his arms. He always removed his tunic in the same manner, always noted that he did so, and always took pleasure in the observation. There were seven buttons, and thus several thousand distinct patterns in which he might attend to them. He had passed a great deal of time in his childhood experimenting with them until he found a sequence that pleased him. For his own reasons.

  The skin of his arms was sacred to him. No hand but his mother’s had ever touched it. She had been dead many years, but he still remembered her stroke sweeping over the downy light hairs of his arms, as if to start a story. With a single delicate motion he drew first one sleeve then the other down the length of his shoulder, past his elbow and at last off his forearm. The air in which he stood was freezing, and he watched with pleasure as the taut pores of his skin reacted to the suddenly dry, icy room. He closed his eyes and felt the stroke of cold passing down his arm to his wrist.

  No body could refuse that stroke. It made no difference what was in the mind, what vain imaginations frothed there. The body was mechanical, an instrument of cause and effect. Lying, dying on the stone somewhere, his blood leaching out into the earth, draining his corpse of its latest warmth – that was what the great improviser himself would have felt: the slow stroke of a cold hand passing along his arms, touching him lightly at the wrists and letting him go. He could not have resisted it. He did not resist it.

  The body was mechanical, an instrument of cause and effect. He smiled. It had taken two hundred wispers, another hundred wraiths, give or take a score, and the combined administrative might of the whole of the Bindery to do it, but he had done it: he had proven, and by experiment, that the much-vaunted imagination of a human child – the very bed and heart of what people naively called ‘humanity’ – was nothing more than a piece of clockwork. Flood it with sensations, and it would seem to flourish and create, for the play of imagination was nothing but the mechanical decay of past sensation – now remembered imperfectly, like images on a broken mirror, now dispersed, scattered, recombined and, in time, eventually lost. Deprive it of sensation, and the imagination would fail. Twist and batter it with ugliness, and it would grow deformed. Betray it utterly, and it would die, taking the whole body with it. The cold stroke of it, sweeping up the arm, which no one could resist.

  The journey down the river from the mountain to the s
ea was also pleasingly mechanical, and told a story of gathering necessity. Ghast took the heavy blankets one by one from the chest of drawers where they had been laid out for him, and gathered them around his squat frame until he stood like a king in his robes, alone in the centre of the dark room. The bed waited before him, a great carved stead that had borne the weight of countless imaginers, cradle to their fantastic dreams. Grotesques and gargoyle faces, a seemingly endless trailing vine of floral exuberance mingled with human, animal and other forms, caught the scant gleams from the windows. He knew it would be a sacrilege for him to sleep in this place, to defile with his murdering arms a seat of so much fabled power. For a left-wraith to sleep in the bed of dreams.

  He climbed into its hold. He knew he would not dream.

  The Kermes Book

  Kay climbed with clumsy, heavy feet into the back of the ancient sedan, squeezing into its spent springs as deeply as she could. She had been woken suddenly after a short, broken sleep, and now she fought her groggy head, trying to bring the whole situation back into focus. She knew it made sense. She knew she could pull it together.

  Rex is dead. But Razzio will help us.

  At first she couldn’t remember why. Surely he had made a pact with Ghast, and would want to stop rather than help them.

  But Will said Razzio would help us. To do something. And Razzio is in Rome. And so we will drive to the ferry. But why will Razzio help us, because surely –

  At that moment the driver finally succeeded in starting the engine, which coughed and choked its way into a slow and gravelly rumble all around them. Phantastes had hired the car to drive them to Patras, where they could catch a ferry to Brindisi and drive the rest of the way to Rome. Kay put the thoughts together carefully as her vision finally snapped into place. Phantases had assured her that the driver would think the three of them were English tourists. ‘It’s not that they cannot see us at all,’ he had explained; ‘it’s that they believe the stories we tell them.’ The smell of diesel and the violent shaking roar of the engine made Kay wish she really were an English tourist and, like the other tourists, asleep in her bed. Will had almost to shout so that she could hear him. She was surprised to realize she must have been thinking aloud, because Will seemed to be answering her.