Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  She hadn’t: the tree-lined street, with its two lines of parked cars and its neatly manicured front doors, was completely void of people. Kay spun round, but in the other direction, across the larger road, it was the same. She ran back to the intersection, furious with herself for letting the line slacken, and terrified that Kat would pop out behind her and put the chase back on the other foot. She whirled. A few cars raced past on the street, revving their engines menacingly, and an old man, nearly bumping into Kay as she reeled, stopped short in annoyance, then kept walking. Down, she thought – she had to get down, put her head down, keep her advantage. She crashed heavily into a corner beside some newspapers that lay stacked just outside a newsagent’s, and huddled there with her back against some aluminium screening. She watched the street frantically.

  She couldn’t have been luckier. A few doors down, the black hair swept out on to the street from a café, and Kat passed within a metre of Kay, taking the corner to the left from which Kay had just returned. She was carrying a piece of cake wrapped in paper, and taking slow, uneven strides as she ate. Kay counted to twenty, then another ten for good measure, and followed her. The cars would give her cover, she knew, and the emptiness of the street would work to her advantage, now that she was giving chase.

  From street to street Kay marked her: on to the boulevard, down a quarter of a mile, left along a park, through a pavilion dominated by weird cube sculptures, and through a maze of tiny back streets, partly cobbled. She made the most of the cover she found, but she hardly needed to worry: Kat had long since given up thinking about Kay, and seemed completely unaware that she was being tracked. When they came out on to the river, and the wraith began to make for a large bridge, Kay’s heart sank and soared at once, for just beyond the bridge was the obelisk she had watched earlier in the morning, but the ground between the bridge and the open plaza, where the obelisk stood, was completely open. No place to hide at all. There was no way she could risk following Kat across the water, though she felt sure that her father, Ell and the others could not be far. Instead, she squatted at a corner, half behind a post, and hoped for the best, watching the black duffel coat and glossy hair slowly disappear into the middle distance.

  When Kat had almost vanished on to the far side of the plaza, Kay threaded through the traffic of the busy street and struck out for the wall against which they had sat earlier that morning, hoping to hang as much as she could in its shadow. But she couldn’t make up the lost ground, and Kat crossed behind some traffic and turned in behind a bus; when the bus pulled away, she had gone. Kay wondered if she had boarded the bus itself, or had slipped behind it down one of two smaller lanes she could just make out from across the road, and she was just about to break into a run when a large arm grabbed her from the right, lifted her fully off the ground and practically hoisted her sideways across the pavement and into the opening door of a parked car.

  She might have screamed, but something stiff was shoved up against her mouth. Instead she kicked, and hard, but because she couldn’t see, her legs mostly met air, and her knees shook painfully beneath the caps. The car door slammed behind her, and after a severe bout of jostling and stamping she got her head free enough to see, and to scream.

  She stopped yelling almost as soon as she started, because the face staring into hers from the front was that of Phantastes himself. The arm still clasped warmly about her middle was Flip’s, and he gave her a gentle squeeze. ‘You’re a lot heavier than your sister, Kay,’ he said in a low voice, smiling. ‘Now get your heads down. Now!’

  Phantastes faced forward and slumped down in his seat. Judging from the sleeve she could see, Razzio sat behind the wheel, with a hood drawn over his head. Flip could hardly make himself as inconspicuous as either of them, but he slid down anyway, with his legs lying across the floor of the car, and hunkered as low as he was able.

  ‘We thought you were gone,’ Flip said. ‘Just after you walked off we were ambushed from the wall by about ten of Ghast’s most loyal acolytes. Somehow they must not have seen you, but they certainly saw us. We thought we might find some left-wraiths skulking about your father, but not in those numbers, and while we were prepared –’ he touched his palm to the long knife belted at his side – ‘well, we weren’t that prepared. We scattered. Will took your sister and your father. They ran towards the river. The three of us split up, heading back up the stairs and through the garden. They must have been after Will, because only two of them paid us any attention at all, and between the three of us we lost them. Well, we did more than lose them.’

  Kay raised her eyebrows. Flip clearly wanted to say more.

  ‘One of the advantages of being a clever left-wraith,’ he said, ‘is that a carefully plotted tale is not, in some circumstances, altogether different from a well-orchestrated rumble. They ought to remember very little of our little trap when they wake up from their concussions – eh, Phantastes?’

  ‘Boom,’ said Phantastes with a chuckle.

  ‘But Kat –’

  ‘Yes, we saw her. We certainly didn’t expect to see you following her, though! How did you find her?’

  ‘I didn’t. I just ran into her. Like a dream. At a bus stop. She tried to catch me, but I gave her the slip. Then I followed her back here. I thought she would lead me back to you.’

  ‘Smart. Kat’s been in Paris a lot, and knows it better than any of us. I’d guess she’s organizing Ghast’s wispers here, maybe everywhere – though not closely enough to recognize the car we borrowed from those two unfortunate goons of hers. Anyway, she’ll almost definitely have gone to Ghast’s Paris hide, up on the hill near Montmartre. I think she probably just wanted to take a little walk-through here to see if the place had been cleared.’

  ‘But why didn’t she recognize you, if she was looking for you? If she’s a left-wraith, shouldn’t she have figured all this out?’ Kay wriggled lower in the seat to take the stress off her back.

  ‘Sure – except that there is one thing the left-wraiths aren’t plotting for, and it’s throwing off all their thinking. If I’m right, it will be the reason why Will and your father and Ell got away on the river.’

  Kay raised her eyebrows but said nothing. The river.

  ‘They would never believe that the Bride has returned,’ said Flip, beaming, and he rubbed her head furiously. ‘You’re going to blow up in their faces like a bomb!’

  Razzio coughed from the front seat. ‘I might remind you, Flip, that you and I are both left-wraiths.’

  Flip’s smile broadened, if that were possible. ‘Kay, they’re going to love it. By the time you’re finished with them, Ghast won’t have the loyalty of the least tick crawling on that mangy pelt of his. When they find out that the Bride has returned! We’ll run him off the mountain. No, we’ll seal him in the mountain, and then we’ll leave him there. We’ll go back to Bithynia.’ Bithynia. A red light over Bithynia.

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to,’ said Razzio, sighing.

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to,’ echoed Phantastes, quietly guffawing.

  ‘And how are they going to find out?’ said Kay, blushing.

  ‘We’ll show them, of course. Razzio, drive.’

  He stood in the hall, where the banners had been hung according to his instructions. The hearth had been laid ready for the fire. On the dais at the west end the twelve thrones also stood ready, and before them, like a promise, his own chair of state. Before that, set by his servants into its ancient place in the floor, the iron wheel lay ready for the great consult. Eleven times he had turned it; only one night still remained.

  He walked the length of the hall and counted every step. He returned, and did it again. He would not yet sit on the throne, not in this place. The moment would be all.

  The other wraiths were sleeping. It was the dead of night. But he would leave nothing to chance, nothing to the improvisation that the imaginers claimed for an art, but which was no more than chance.

  There was one throne that would of course remain em
pty. He looked at it. It was, after all, a plain wooden chair, not broad, the carved arms low, the back gently curved and not high. It was fashioned of a dark wood – mahogany, he supposed – which gleamed in the light of his lamp as he held it close. It had been empty for as long as he could remember – in fact, one of his earliest memories of the Shuttle Hall was of staring at this chair with a mean eye that he came later to realize had been contempt. It was nothing special, granted; but it had been hers, and she had left it all the same. As a young man, he had stood almost where he stood now, staring at that chair while the others cried out in the throes of story, staring at the loose end, the void, the fault, the little wound.

  It was only later, when he was more mature and experienced, that he came to understand that the absence was only a symbol. The right-wraiths could have filled the place, had they wanted to do so. They did not. They preferred in their arrogance to let the chair sit empty, a goad to the left-wraiths, a breezy performance of their own careless self-assurance. How it had galled him to see the First Wraith kneel before that empty chair at every Twelfth Night and ask for guidance from a deserter!

  He turned to the left, walked the twenty-eight paces to the stalls and took his ancient place among the benches of the left-wraiths. He had not sat here for many years. In the gloom of middle night he could see no further than his lamp could show him, but he felt the old presence of the Shuttle Hall around him all the same, complete. He thought of his pride at first joining the Honourable Society, his anger at discovering how little his kind were esteemed within it, the revenge he had sworn when they called him ‘scrivener’.

  Of the twelve sources of story he knew all there was to know. Within quest, three branches; within love, alike three; within chronicle, three; and one each for discovery, for gain and for loss. He knew the character of heroes, the trials of lovers, the cunning of politicians and the strategies of generals. He knew the songs of bards and the idle games of shepherds, the laughter of tricksters and the venom of revengers. All forms of poetry he knew, and every kind of prose. Many of the greatest anthologies, the treasure books and mythologies that now stood in the library in the mountain, he had copied. He had seldom blotted a line, and bore the scars of that precision in the dullness of his eye and the thick mass of locked muscle in his neck. What he had done for the Honourable Society. What he had given.

  Although a left-wraith by name, he had never cared for the affectations of plotters, for their boards and stones, their talk of the thread and their reverence for their little collection of sacred instruments. He had endured the voice of the shuttle, the braying sandblast of the horn, the clack of the loom. Throughout his youth he had rolled his eyes in private at the talk of snakes and swords. He had said the words, though they almost stuck in his throat. He had tolerated Razzio’s hocus-pocus with the two modes. But his patience only went so far.

  He placed his hands on the bench beneath him and ran them along the cool grain of the old wood. Its furrows and ridges irritated him, as did the slight concavity where his own body had, over the years, hollowed out his place. These ridges and hollows had nothing to do with his clean copies. His copies had always been exact, and now, locked up in the mountain, they would stay exact forever. He had done everything exactly as he was told. They could never fault him for a single mark out of place.

  Ghast took up his lamp and made his way to the vestibule by the entrance. Once behind the curtain, he extinguished his light and stood in the empty silence. It was pure, void and true – untroubled by the ache of hearts, the pounding of fists, the cry of antagonists. It lay as quiet as a grave, ready for the blood that he would spill in it.

  The Loom

  The hall fell as silent as the huge oak beams that spanned it, and to the rhythm of their spanning Kay timed her breathing. She fought back a smile that lingered, aching, just behind her eyes, and counted the wooden stalls lined along the two walls to either side of her, and before them the long benches ranked five deep to the aisle the whole length of the hall – to the right the right-wraiths and to the left the left-wraiths. From one end to the other, Kay guessed, seven hundred or more wraiths sat gathered, murmuring expectantly – agitated, even. But why shouldn’t they be? The first Twelfth Night, the first Weave, for three hundred years? Kay threw back her head and, as the hair tressed and bowed over her shoulders, let the smile pour into the tiny diamond lights that studded the ceiling. To think we have come to Bithynia at last.

  Two days before it hadn’t seemed possible. Kay looked vacantly towards the far end where the dais stood with its twelve high thrones, and remembered the tumult of their arrival in Montmartre – how she and Flip and Razzio and Phantastes had tumbled out of the car in a tiny lane on the steep hillside over the city, and she had followed Flip through the low door into a pretty cobbled courtyard, where they heard, faintly, urgent voices – her father’s voice among them – passing an argument back and forth like a ticking charge. Up an external stair and into the warm wooden interior she had swept exhaustedly with a kind of bleak hope, dazzled by the thought that she was about to fall into the arms of the wraith who, hours before, had hunted her almost to an end. Her enemy. Their enemy. She had suddenly thought how difficult Flip and Will and Phantastes would find this – to confront, to make truce with, the wraith who had killed Rex.

  But perhaps the thrill of the plot had been carrying them, for when they pushed into the low-ceilinged, comfortable room they had found Will and Ned More seated before the hearth fire, drinking hot cider and arguing, if urgently, also animatedly, also respectfully, with Kat.

  All that gorgeous black hair. Those gripping eyes.

  Murderer, she had thought. Now she thought it again.

  Ell had been sitting in a cushioned window seat, ostensibly looking at a huge picture book but actually, over the top of the page, watching Kat intensely. The duffel coat she had shed, but her clothes beneath were black, too, and her hair was there in its piles of luxurious, gorgeous sheen. At once Kay had wanted both to lie in it and tear it out by the clump. All three adults (but not Ell) had looked up as the door opened, but they hadn’t paused for a moment in the conversation, and Kay and the others had taken seats where they could find them and had listened intently.

  ‘Ghast can’t stand against this – not after that happened in Rome – you know that even Foliot will fall from him at the return of the Bride,’ Will had said. ‘And with the horn, with the shuttle, with the hall nearly ready – Kat, we have time to hold the Weave this year – we can do it in two days.’

  ‘We can,’ said Ned.

  ‘Just about,’ said Flip.

  ‘Not without the loom,’ she had concluded flatly, quietly. ‘And only a muse may hew the wood whereof the loom is made – you know the old saying, Will. An instrument like that –’

  ‘We can do it without the loom, but we can’t do it without you.’ Kay suddenly realized that her father must have washed and changed his clothes at Kat’s house. As he courted Kat’s participation in the Weave, he seemed his old self – serious, assured and direct. ‘We need you to call in all the wispers. Bring them to Bithynia, Kat.’

  Kay had hated her only for that long moment before she answered; but who could hate a voice like hers that dropped like clumps of soft cream into your ears, its accent like a hot wash that burned the throat of your hearing, but so warmly, as if you couldn’t hear the words too slowly? ‘I don’t know,’ she had said. And then, ‘A few hours ago I would happily have accepted a tidy commendation from Ghast for bringing in that child; and now I’m to forget all that? Now I am to forget that Ghast is my master?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ned More had said. ‘Forget mastery altogether. Remember, rather, the thread. Take the girl, but take us, too. Call Ghast to Bithynia. Let him bring his armies, his bodyguards, his clerks, his private servants. Let them all come. All we need is an instant. Eloise will blow the horn, and Katharine will answer. The First Wraith will take to the loom, and then all the wraiths and phantasms in the Honourable Society w
ill see what we have seen.’ The fire had caught at all her father’s sharpest angles as he spoke, and his face had flickered with its flames. Kay shuddered to remember it. Two nights, she had thought.

  And she shuddered, too, to remember the messenger who had arrived just at that moment – a terrified, obsequious wraith with a letter in his hand, summoning Kat to a Weave on Ghast’s own authority, and commanding her to do exactly what Ned More had – only instants before – been urging her to do in defiance of her master – that is, to call the wispers in their hundreds to their ancient seat. How Kat had stared at them in wonder and confusion! How that messenger had looked at them, with fear and distrust! How his eyes had spoken of the horrors that, under Ghast’s authority, the whole Society suffered!

  But Kat had done it. She had called them all home – century on century of wispers, trailing on their secret paths wheresoever, had answered to their summonings. And from the mountain Ghast, with his armies, his bodyguards, his clerks and his private servants – somehow, beyond hope, they were there. Phantastes had roused the right-wraiths out of hiding – those that could be found – and from Rome Razzio recalled Oidos, Ontos, and the handful of causes who had somehow, miraculously, survived the fire. At the airport Kay and Ell had sat quietly with their father as Flip told a tale or two, and before long the flight crew had made them all at home at the front of a sparsely occupied service to Istanbul. The girls had slept all the way there and, though she’d had a headache as they stepped out into the smoky, dim light of the Turkish airport, Kay hadn’t failed to notice the odd tall figure rushing past them, or the odd cloak or robe among the suits and skirts of their fellow passengers. The next day they had rested in the country and made plans – called on favours, arranged for deliveries, and talked and talked as the girls ran wild in a fresh snowfall outside – but on the following morning they had set out again, now by car, for the hall. In a pouch at his waist Will had borne the shuttle. In the sack over his shoulder Phantastes had carried the horn. Flip and Razzio had driven the two cars down the winding, potholed roads. And then they were here.