Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  There must be twelve of these rooms on either side of the front door, each alike.

  Taking the apple, and neglecting now to close the doors behind her, she strode from room to high-ceilinged room, finding it exactly as she had thought – each the same shape, each decorated, although sparely, in a different way, making an entirely different impression on the senses. In one she found nothing but ten grand paintings hung in ornate gilt frames, and for a moment she thought perhaps she was in a museum. In the next she almost stumbled as she entered, tripping over dice – innumerable dice of every colour and size and material – strewn across the wooden floor in every direction. She picked her way through them, trying to dodge the thousands of paper butterflies strung from the ceiling on lightly elasticated cords, so airy and insubstantial that her very being caused them all to shiver and flutter, and the wind of her breath and her passing sent them gyrating and fluttering in rippling waves of chaos all around her. In the last of the twelve rooms – a corner room – the great windows stood to the right, and again on the far wall; she turned the offered corner, taking a door to her left, and continued resolutely on, passing through space after space, each one different, each one the same.

  And then everything changed. As Kay opened the third or fourth door on this new row, the eager and intrepid spirit with which she had raced through the house, the wonder with which she had encountered its novelties and oddities, vanished. Before her, as the chiming of an antique clock tolled in her ears, sat an old wraith on a carved wooden throne – bulky, gnarled, taut; in places twisted, formidable and severe. Her hair, a blend of wax and ash, rushed around her face, drawing in the eye, drawing Kay to her as the door slipped softly on to its latch. Each of her knowing eyes lay nested in a dense tangle of creases and hatchwork, lines texturing her haggard, hard skin, but cutting deeper, too, as if her skin, her lips, her eyes, had been hewn from bone. She wore a simple grey robe that covered her long, folded body. Its hood lay massed behind her broad shoulders, and from its wide sleeves the wraith’s tendons, clothed in rough amber skin flecked like a snake’s with age, reached to grip the arms of the throne she sat on.

  Kay found herself walking towards this wraith, this throne. This throne: the high arms tooled with hammered gold; ridges and veins of wood circled those of gold, and together they arced and darted into the forms of eyes, suns, snakes, arrows and swords. Kay, whose own eye was about level with one of these turned arms, felt her stomach give way a little as she caught sight of a gold sword cutting down through a mass of serpentine carving. Some thought was pressing at the back of her mind, but she had no time to attend to it, because she was too near, because the old woman suddenly leaned forward and, with both knotty but slender hands, took hold of Kay’s head.

  ‘Girl, do you know who I am?’

  ‘You are one of the two modes,’ Kay answered limply. Whatever that even means.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ she repeated – only it was not a repetition, because this time Kay heard the question differently, in the same way that, if you lie quietly, listening to your regular heartbeat or a watch tick, you begin to hear a rhythm of stresses. The stresses were screaming in Kay’s head.

  What am I doing in this place?

  ‘Yes.’

  The old woman’s eyes, staring down at Kay, never softened, but she let Kay’s head drop and returned to her previous posture. With unhurried and deliberate gravity she laid her arms along the arms of the chair. In the long silence Kay shuffled backwards a little, all the while looking closely at those hands resting on the pommels; they reminded her of the hands of someone she had seen recently – but where? As she tried to think back over the confusion of the last days, her eyes drifted to the chair’s inlaid carvings, and the two thoughts suddenly merged in her head.

  ‘Oh,’ she said aloud. ‘Rex. You have the same hands, and the same symbol of a snake entwined with a sword.’

  ‘You did not realize how much you knew,’ said the mode. ‘How much else do you know, without knowing that you know it?’

  ‘I know a lot about how little I know,’ Kay said. ‘Especially when it comes to the last few days.’

  All I want to know is what I’m supposed to do. All I want to know is how to get my family back. All I want to know is how to go home.

  The old wraith said nothing. She was looking, Kay noticed, at her own hands. After a few moments her right hand crossed to her left, and she began, very self-consciously, to rub the large grey-blue veins standing proud behind the angular ridge of her knuckles. Kay thought of the scratches on her own hands, and hid them.

  ‘Rex was my brother,’ said the mode. Her voice lay as quiet in the room as a woven mat lies upon the floor, and as still. ‘Rex and Oidos, twins in body, twins in thought, two children of the same heart, each the home of the other – till Ghast destroyed him.’

  In the afternoon of a searing summer day the heat will sometimes hang thickest and most oppressively long after the sun has reached and passed its height. Here, Kay thought, was pain without glare, a long afternoon of sorrow.

  ‘Has Phantastes been, then, to tell you about what happened?’ Kay said, still timid before this enthroned old queen.

  Oidos looked up from her hands to Kay’s face. Her expression was almost kindly. ‘No, child. Ghast destroyed Rex many years ago. What happened in Pylos we all foresaw: the inevitable roll of a distant thunder. But the crack that made that thunder, it is long gone. Ghast is shedding what he thinks is the corrupted blood of a diseased body. He hopes to purify the present by freeing it from the contamination of the past, enlarging it from the prison of its own history.’ She stopped, and her right hand seemed to hover and draw like a magnet to cup Kay’s cheek. ‘I did not think you would be so beautiful, Katharine. Razzio and Ontos promised a pearl, but I think you have more of the diamond about you.’

  Kay would have flushed at the praise had she not been so confused. First Will and Flip had thought her what it turned out, in her stead, Ell was – the author. It was Ell who would join the wraiths; she could not. But now Oidos was talking as if she mattered; and she wanted to matter, wanted it more than anything else she could think of.

  Who am I?

  But she didn’t dare think about it.

  ‘This is his room, you know.’

  ‘His room?’

  ‘Rex’s room. Stand beside me, and see what I see.’

  Kay took a place to the left of the high throne, and turned. Looking back towards the door through which she had entered, she saw a wall lined with statues: on the left, standing in the corner, a giant form cut from white marble – goat below, from the torso a rippling, towering man, his great beard parting on a godlike face, its roaring smile breaking like the sun from a storm. Rearing on his hind legs, with the two forward hoofs splayed as if readied for battle, he seemed at once startled, fierce, proud and potent. By his waist in his right hand he gripped a horn, carved with such delicacy and precision that it seemed for a second as if he might lift it to his lips and call them both to the hunt. Kay almost stepped back.

  ‘Sylvanus,’ said Oidos. ‘The first form taken by the Primary Fury. In the early days of the Honourable Society, when the world was young and the Society’s members combined in orgiastic mysteries under the pregnant moon, it was Sylvanus who heralded the beginning of our sacred rites. On his horn he blew the peal that razed the mind and dissolved the limits between us, the eternal dissonance that shivers and erodes all boundaries, flowing like excess itself across thought, feeling, person, perspective. In the hearing of that music, we came together as one; we were unified in a single chorus as elemental as the earth, as potent as the sea, quick as the flame and boundless as the air. Those were the days of blood ritual and sacrifice, when battles raced upon the face of the nations and stories were sung in the war-camps and in the mead-halls, when the bards were kings and their verses spun richer than gold.’

  Kay shook, whether from fear or excitement she wasn’t sure. The white marble form seemed not blank bu
t imminent, as if it might instantly bloom with colour, burst into motion and plunge them back into its wooded, moonlit, violent world.

  ‘Look again,’ said Oidos, extending her right hand to point towards the door through which Kay had come.

  Above it – again, carved in white stone – she saw another form, this one a form she knew. Standing not in the porter’s uniform of black wool in which she had first met him, but in the long robe that Oidos herself now wore, his arms hanging not limp but ready at his sides, and his face not quite as old as she had known it, but right and still ruddy, square-set and solid like the trunk of a tree, it was Rex. In his right hand he carried a ring from which dangled a collection of keys; keys she recognized, each one a distinct shape – square, circular, triangular, with various tines and edges cut against their several shanks. She tried to study his face, the face in which the sculptor had captured him, but whether it was an effect of the white marble, or something true to his form and likeness, she found her eye incapable of lingering on his cheek, or nose, or mouth, but was drawn inexorably into his gaze, into the blank, white, wide portals of his eyes, as open and encompassing as the level stare into which Oidos had, moments before, also drawn her.

  ‘The Wraith of Keys, my brother, Pyrexis,’ murmured Oidos. There was no mistaking the grounded affection in her voice, that soft tenderness with which love reverently handles its beloved. ‘Pyrexis, fury, the fever in which the horn is sounded, that like Joshua at the walls of Jericho bursts the doors from their frames and lays open every heart.’

  ‘And the third statue?’ Kay pointed to the right corner of the room, where what seemed to be another work in stone stood draped with a heavy white sheet.

  ‘Sylvanus was the first form, Rex the second. The past stands behind and open to us, the present is the door through which we come and go, but the future remains shrouded in its own darkness. Time may or may not reveal what lies beneath that shroud. Rex himself never knew.’

  ‘Did he come here?’

  ‘Yes, my child. Here in the place of pure knowing, in the House of the Two Modes, all wraiths come to find themselves, to read their own story. This is Rex’s room, and it was to this room that he often resorted for contemplation and for self-study.’

  ‘And are these his things?’ Kay turned, searching the room. In addition to the three statues, she saw – at the room’s other end – a tall, elegant, circular table on which stood an hourglass, the sand heaped at its base, and a large but fine-toothed comb, carved perhaps of some kind of bone; beneath their feet a woven carpet covered most of the huge room, its dominant colours purple, blue, red and white, so that it pulsed in rich arteries of hue that burst, here and there, into pools of dense, throbbing intensity. It mesmerized the eye. There was the throne, and beside it a lamp. On the wall hung four large paintings, two to either side of a huge, empty hearth. On the mantel stood several small objects: a gilt book, an empty silver candlestick and a little ball about the size of Kay’s fist, covered in a silver netting or lattice, within which, reflecting in the light, was what looked like pure gold.

  ‘Each room in the place of pure knowing contains a collection of twenty objects and elements. Each wing of the house contains –’

  ‘Twenty-five rooms, counting the lobby,’ Kay said.

  Oidos smiled. ‘Very good, child. Very good. But in addition to the front of the house, there is another set of rooms in the rear. There is also another storey following the same plan, and a single room in the eaves.’

  ‘So, for every one of these rooms, there are –’ Kay mapped it in her mind, as if she were counting on her fingers – ‘four other rooms, behind and above? So,’ she said triumphantly, ‘Razzio’s house has a hundred and twenty-five rooms!’

  ‘I think you turned a corner to reach me?’

  Kay paused. She remembered the corner room. But –

  ‘The House of the Two Modes is arranged in a square, child.’

  Kay stepped sharply away from the throne, suddenly aware of the vastness of the palace around her.

  But that’s five hundred rooms. And if each room has twenty objects, then that’s –

  ‘Ten thousand things.’

  A house of ten thousand things.

  ‘And each one of these ten thousand things has its meaning, and those meanings hold the secret of a wraith’s identity, or in most cases the identity of several wraiths – for many things have more than one meaning.’

  Kay shook her head as if erasing everything from her mind. ‘I didn’t count twenty in this room,’ she said. I counted seventeen. Including the carpet.

  Kay met Oidos’ eyes, and from within the deep, hard sadness of her face the wraith seemed to smile. She lifted one of her hands off the arm of her throne – Rex’s throne – and from within her robe withdrew something and opened her palm.

  Upon it were two minutely carved pieces of stone, almost as small as jewellery, but worked with such precision that Kay thought she would never tire of peering at them. Black as obsidian or the night, they gleamed in Oidos’ open hand where they caught the light from above. One was a miniature sword, with a slender blade rising from a decorated, two-handed hilt. The grip had been carved with such care that tiny lozenges reflecting the light seemed to spangle like diamonds, while the blade – though not more than a few centimetres long – bore a tiny cursive inscription. The second piece was a sort of double helix formed of two snakes writhing against one another, their bodies so intricately and flawlessly combined, so exact in every particular, that Kay felt tears start in her eyes. She knew without looking that the blade of the sword would slide easily and completely into the helical void around which the bodies of the snakes turned.

  ‘They’re so beautiful,’ she said. ‘Do they have a meaning?’

  ‘There is nothing in this world that does not have a meaning, because everything in this world is either caused or causing.’

  ‘Then what does it mean?’ Kay pushed the sword in Oidos’ palm, trying to make out the inscription against the light.

  ‘As I have said, everything is either causing or caused: what you see as the blade of the sword is the space where you do not see the snake, while what you see as the snake is that which is revealed by the blade around which it twines. Both these things exist: the sword that signifies action, and the snake that signifies thought. But we would know nothing of one without the other.’

  ‘So this symbol is about thoughts and actions? It means that you can’t have one without the other?’

  ‘It means that you cannot know one without the other. An action is defined by the thoughts that guide it and make sense of it; similarly, a thought is only expressed and made real by an action.’

  ‘Why do only some of the wraiths carry things with this symbol? Rex had it on some keys, and Will and Flip had it when they took my father from his office. That woman in his rooms at St Nick’s – she had it, too.’

  ‘They all carry the badge of the left-wraiths because they are all left-wraiths. That is, they are all left-wraiths now.’

  ‘You mean Will.’

  ‘Yes, child. He was not always a left-wraith – or, to be more exact, he was not always treated as a left-wraith. Really he is no more a left-wraith than you –’ Oidos broke off abruptly. The roots of Kay’s hair suddenly burned, as if each of them were an ear straining after a distant voice. The old woman stroked her left hand again purposefully, and then went on. ‘But, child, this is beside the point. Ask me the questions you have come to Rome to have answered.’

  ‘I want to know how to find my father and my sister. I want us all to go home. Will you help me?’

  Oidos closed her palm tightly over the black stone ornaments and stowed them inside her robe again. She grasped the arms of the throne and turned her head to face the door. Kay thought for a moment that the old wraith might now refuse to speak at all. But her face was not set, and her eyes looked not severe but pensive.

  ‘You must go out into the garden,’ said Oidos at last. ‘You m
ust be yourself, my daughter, before you can know yourself. Go out into the garden and, when you are ready, return, and I will help you.’ With a great effort that was not frailty but, it seemed, exhaustion, she got to her feet and took Kay’s hand. Together they walked through the room, through the door, and another door, and another, until soon they stood in a lobby very like the one through which Kay had first entered the house. Here Oidos turned, leading Kay into the back, to another grand hall that opened through enormous glassed doors into the garden beyond. Kay glimpsed a vast court, paved in places with stone and cobbled paths, in other places covered with vines or grass. Wraiths swarmed everywhere.

  ‘If you return, I will show you what you need to see,’ said Oidos, putting her hand to the door that led to the garden. ‘For you, too, have a room in the place of pure knowing.’

  With those words she opened the door, and a wave of noise and life and exuberance and pleasure flooded into the room, so thick and warm and irresistible that Kay hardly needed Oidos’ gentle push, but tumbled over the threshold into the garden, and spun and spun and spun in wonder at the tumult and pace and sudden overwhelming vitality that surrounded her. At first she had simply impressions: a glowing magnolia light, punctuated at swift intervals by a painfully brilliant beam of glaring white; a whirling of outsized motion, as if rhinoceroses were dancing all around her on roller skates; the hot, moist air, like the soggy humidity before a summer storm, billowing upon her face; a carnival noise of horns; and a soft pile beneath her feet which, looking down, she saw was grass.

  She was still blinking and dumbfounded when a body slammed into her from the side, sending her stumbling. She might have fallen but for the arms that caught her in their warm embrace – half laughing, half apologetic, it was Will.

  ‘What is this place?’ Kay shouted back, drilling her eyes as seriously as she could directly into Will’s chin.

  He had been grinning like an oaf, and the words seemed to burst through his smile without making any impression on his face at all.