Cold Angel Days (Dica Series Book 4)

by Clive S. Johnson

  Many a time she’d sat on Grayden’s harbour wall, lost to the water’s ever-changing patterns, her mind seeking respite from her nuptial ills. This was something else, something else entirely. Even deserted, as the place clearly was, how could such an enchanting wonder not be common knowledge? “Why’s no one ever mentioned this sight before, this ... this marvel?”

  “For t’is only recent, due the tower’s revived purpose, that be why, mine starry-eyed and obstructing maid.”

  Prescinda yelped, fell back a step and sat heavily on what turned out to be a long and low stone bench. This time her thick breeches served her well, withholding any bruising.

  “I am sorry, mine good lady,” the dark shape of a man reassured. “I meant no harm, nor indeed undue alarm.” He bowed low, sweeping an arm to one side, then peered up at her and smiled. “But thou art, thou see, in mine very own way.”

  As he straightened into the better light, she found someone of middling years, perhaps younger, a little thin on top and with an inordinately large nose, but otherwise quite presentable. His smile captivated, taking her attention from his rather pendulous ears and dolefully drab robes.

  Experience had taught her wariness when it came to men, but she’d long learnt to hide it, knowing that greater loss more often accrued from reticence. When she’d soon recovered herself, she saw in him a reassuringly gentle manner.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’d no idea I was blocking your way.” The idea seemed strange to her, given where they were. The portico had appeared to be nothing more than a decorative feature, a blind alcove, little to suggest a genuine entrance. She’d no cause to change her mind when she quickly peered around more closely.

  The rain had not eased, obliging her to press yet further into the shadows for the man to escape a drenching. He can’t have come far, his robes only jewelled not stained, their faded brown fabric hardly darkened. She noticed a bead of slate-grey rain skirt his same coloured eye, in the trail of which his skin now puckered to a smile.

  “Caught out?” he asked, the white of an eye revealed as he glanced aside at the rain. When she didn’t reply, he kept his gaze to the downpour but dropped his voice and leant a little closer, although not too close. “Strange place to be passing, me thinks,” and tapped the side of his long, bulbous nose.

  The rain brightened for a moment before a soft roll of thunder felt its way along the walls, dallying a short while in the darkened shelter of the portico. The rain, however, remained resolutely set in.

  “Excuse me,” he said as he leant past her, a loud click from behind Prescinda adding surprise. A warm draught briefly caressed the nape of her neck as the man slipped past and was gone to the shadows, leaving her once more alone in the grey light of the portico.

  The dull day didn’t help but however hard she felt around she could find no hint of a doorway, no knob or hinge, nor even a crack. The portico defiantly returned to being nothing more than a recess, leaving Prescinda wondering if she’d imagined it all.

  “He was good-looking, mind,” she mused, “in a sort of well-worn way. Struck me as being a bit younger than I first thought, although I reckon he’s had a hard life.” A dull affinity dared stir a longing deep within her, a forlorn hope of perhaps a kindred spirit found. As usual, though, she quickly dashed it to the ground.

  Her lonely outlook now seemed sadder, his short passing leaving a hint of a lingering smell of tobacco, of wine and wanton thoughts. Well, certainly the wine and tobacco.

  A trickle of water snaked its way from the avenue, across the portico’s flags, soon joined by another. Light again flooded in, thunder close on its heels. Prescinda drew her jacket more tightly about her and stared out into the rain.

  “This inclemency is likely to curse us until midnight,” and again she jumped at his voice, “and so it would be rather ill of me to leave thee without.”

  She spun around and stared into the gloom, just making out his eyes and his hand clasping a newly revealed doorjamb. The enticing smell of close-held warmth again accosted her, made her step forward a pace before she’d even thought.

  He stepped aside, almost vanishing, and she strode in - as her mother had always taught her never to do - into the dark embrace of a strange man’s private welcome.

  12 Vaster be such Vantage

  Once her eyes had adjusted, only the man’s silhouette held true darkness. By then he’d silently stridden away, sure steps assuming she’d follow, leading the way towards a pastel-grey depth, as though to the bottom of a moonlit sea. Instead of water, still air muffled Prescinda’s thoughts, filled them only with the beat of her heart.

  The chamber into which they came stretched high to a sharp-arched vault, the day’s rain-sodden light drifting in as a haze through the roof’s hidden slits. Wan, grey walls suggested metal, although fluted columns rose aloft like tree trunks seeking a long quenched sun.

  Through this etiolated copse, their silent footfall fell. It carried no vestige of an echo, no hint of fast-stepped progress towards the arch ahead, through which they swept like eels snatched to the grasp of a river-wet hand.

  The man stopped - Prescinda close behind - but they both moved forward still, not only forward but soon in descent. By the time she’d realised they were falling, they’d begun to move backwards, the man turning about to face her.

  The light improved enough for his nod to be noticed, to turn Prescinda around and so see its source. At the far end of a low tunnel, now rising to meet their descent, she saw the same panoply of swirling stars that had held her gaze without. Here, though, it seemed to fall and rise as though breathed in and out by some celestial being.

  When she didn’t move, the man spoke quietly, as though he were the very voice of those stars. “’Tis but an illusion, mine dear, a drawing of vision, as of a mirage upon the desert’s spread.”

  Her rapt gaze prompted him on. “Imagine thou art at the Scarra, staring from its gallery, there for the gilded cities and ethereal forests that shimmer so from the Plain of the far New Sun.”

  Prescinda finally got her voice back, although her eyes deigned not to give their leave. “What in the world is it?” she carefully measured.

  “What indeed. I have but only the foggiest idea despite being its cause.”

  Her eyes came free and she turned to him, revealing only confusion. Confusion and some alarm when he took her by the hand - gently yet firmly. He flicked his eyes towards the tunnel, to the breath of a seeming god, and slowly drew her on.

  “I suggest thou close thine eyes to save thee a fright,” but she couldn’t. Scared wide open, she beheld the streaking stars, the tumble of galaxies, the chaos of a night’s stellar births and deaths as they slid through her mind. Their exquisite detail, their plethora of hues and shapes and motions all sparkled and seared through her eyes, a tang as of wood-smoke filling the nose or the rake of a lover’s nails down a pleasure-strung back.

  Faintly, almost distantly, all that now filled her mind came as of the music of harps; the slide and pluck of delicate fingers, the vibration of strings to unsung words that seemed to say, “At least we don’t have to climb all the way today” - and then there were the butterflies.

  Prescinda remembered a time from childhood, stark and immediate, of arcing high into the cool shade of the Mayfly Field’s ancient oak canopy. The smooth, warm wood of the swing’s narrow seat against her cool, bare legs, the creak of rope against bark, then the twang and the jerk that soon summoned that bright host of butterflies.

  The ground and sky, and sky and ground again had all tumbled around her, as though she flew through syrup, as though the startled birds about her hung upon the very warmth of the summer’s air. Only the butterflies seemed unaffected by time’s slowed breath, still fluttering wildly against her heart.

  She had survived where the butterflies had not. The hard ground may have broken her arm, but at least it had quietened her heart as it stilled their wings.

  Now she blinked and blinked again but still nothing made sens
e, and this time the butterflies had stayed. No broken arm, she didn’t think, but couldn’t be sure, her mind too stunned to tell.

  What on earth was that flat, pastel haze? What was that blurred line of grey-white that wavered so indistinctly between the mottled grey expanse below and the blue-green seep to black above? And why couldn’t she hear a thing, not a thing beyond the press of blood in her ears?

  “Be thee now of surer mind, mine dear?” he asked, to which she gasped, scaring herself yet further when the sound came back at her in short order.

  The man let go her hand, not that she’d noticed its hold, and tapped smartly against the air before her face. It rang - dully.

  Without thinking, she reached forward and splayed her hands against the invisible barrier - strangely warm yet hard to the touch.

  “Crystal,” the man offered. “Thou art perfectly safe behind it. Thou cannot fall out.”

  Fall out? Fall? Prescinda realised she couldn’t swallow - her mouth too dry. Without being able to tear her eyes from the unfathomable sight, her hands seemed to explore the crystal of their own free will, denying her the compulsion to lean forward.

  “What ... what is it?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Looking at?”

  “Yes! Looking at!” She let her eyes drift towards the man’s voice. “What’s all this...”

  She screamed, her legs beginning to buckle as the jagged march of white-capped mountains filled her gaze. Her eyes widened as though to hold the very mass of rock, disbelief striking cold fear within their glint, denial deep beneath their black sea stare.

  “O Leiyatel preserve me!” She trembled, denying the sight of the Vale she now saw through a rent in the clouds. She trembled yet more when another gap fast drifted by, a fleeting flash of countless roofs all spread out so dizzyingly almost two thousand feet below.

  Her breeches this time failed in their task, let a bruise take seat within her own as she dropped like a stone to the floor.

  13 To a Room with No View

  “I am not standing up. I don’t care what you say, I’m staying here. The floor’s perfectly good enough for me, thank you very much.” The bright sunlight made everything seem so stark and sharp, and far too real. It made Prescinda feel as though she were in some kind of waking nightmare.

  “If I may at least see thee to a chair, somewhere a little more comfortable. I am sure...”

  “I am NOT standing up. Do you hear? I’m staying here.”

  “But for how long...”

  “I don’t give a stuff how long. It’s a bit academic, what when you’re shit-scared of heights!”

  “Ah,” the man conceded. “I knew not. Please, please do forgive me.”

  The good light revealed she’d been right to suspect he was younger, although his fraught eyes seemed to gaze at her from across the centuries. They also gazed at her from across the narrow, curved corridor in which she now sat, the great blue-yonder soaring above a low windowsill behind him, a white tiled wall to her back.

  “I’m ... I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “I can see you meant well, and you weren’t to know.” She tried to smile. “I’m not usually this weak, but I truly am frightened stiff by heights.”

  He slowly reached forward from the crouch he’d taken and patted her shoulder. It brought those eyes of his far too near, the ones that now stared at her from across the millennia.

  Prescinda swallowed. “I couldn’t even nerve myself to go up the apple-picking ladders when I was a kid. Silly, I know.”

  He patted her arm, leant back and stood up.

  “Can’t you just take me back down,” she asked, “if I close my eyes, you know, and you lead me?” Despite being unsettled, she still had enough presence of mind to see the man’s regret.

  “I am truly sorry, mine dear, but thou see, neither of us can leave, not for an hour or so at least. I think, though, that we must get thee away from this view. My study be near. If I guide thee, dost thou think thou couldst make the effort?”

  She knew too well that it wasn’t so much the seeing as the knowing. Even where she sat, with only clear blue sunlit sky in sight, she could still feel the drop beneath her leaden stomach. The thought alone made her ill.

  “Why can’t we go down?” she pleaded, like a tired child.

  The man sighed, looked from her to the dark blue sky above, to the almost black cap of only slightly flickering stars, and lowered his hand to hers. “Eyes tight closed, eh?”

  She nodded, closed them, set her mouth to a pained line and took his hand.

  Considerate, patient and with reassuring words, he led her from the bright sunlight into the flat white light of a chamber that hummed ever so softly to itself. Although he’d already said she could open her eyes, only when she finally sat did she do so.

  The armchair she found herself in, apart from being severely moth-eaten, placed her quite low down, low enough not to see much of what lay on the tables and desks crammed in about her. Some had slanting cupboards at their far sides, their doors ornamented with the strangest of patterns, much of it in deep relief.

  Still too tense to move, she watched the man slip from the room only to return with a mug which he offered her. Its charge of ruby-red wine caught her by surprise, making her choke and cough - distraction enough.

  “If,” she began to say, “if I ask what you do here, your answer wouldn’t need to touch on where we are, would it?” The hint of returning humour made the man smile.

  “What were thee about in such a deserted place as this, mine dear, eh? What hast brought thee to the Upper Reaches, and to mine own front door?”

  They each looked into the other’s eyes for quite a while before a chime rang out from a nearby desk, drawing his own eyes to flick towards a flashing lamp.

  “Excuse me a moment, if thou would.”

  He deftly passed his fingers over one of the cupboard doors - clicking sounds bringing forth yet more lights. “And by what name should I address thee, if I may ask?”

  “Name? Oh, err, well, I’m Prescinda, Prescinda Sodbuster.”

  “Pleased to make thine acquaintance, Miss Sodbuster.”

  “Mistress.”

  “Hmm?” The cupboard doors again stole his attention.

  “I’m married. It’s Mistress, Mistress ... well, if you don’t mind, I’ll stick with my maiden name, although you can call me Prescinda if you wish, makes no odds.”

  “Good. Yes. Very well,” he answered, clearly absorbed.

  When she began to feel absent, she ventured, “And you?”

  “Hmm? Sorry, what was that?”

  “Your name? What should I call you?”

  The man smiled, as though somewhere else, but then paused, wrote something down and finally turned to her.

  “Thou canst call me Nephril if thou like, Prescinda. It be preferable to some of the sobriquets I have earned in the past, or mine long defunct titles. Yes, Nephril alone be good enough these days.”

  Despite his attention returning to his task, Prescinda somehow felt reassured. “Nephril, eh?” She smiled more easily now. “A nice name, not one I’ve come across before, though, I don’t think. Where’s it from?”

  “From?” He suddenly looked short-sighted.

  “Yes, which part of Dica?”

  “Part? Oh, well, ‘tis an old Dican name, from the Dacc of Esna, but thou wouldst remember not the Dacc. Long before thy time.” As he turned back to the cupboards and his pen, he mumbled something not unlike, “Long before any now left,” and chuckled quietly to himself.

  After some more scribbling and tut-tutting, he added, “And to answer thy fair question, what I do here is help punch star holes in the sky. Tiny ones, mind, but even then very important ones.”

  14 A Wise Mariner’s Bequest

  “Would thee like to create a star thyself?”

  “A star?”

  “Aye, a pinprick in the firmament.”

  “You are having
me on ... aren’t you?”

  Nephril motioned her to wait whilst he attended to his tasks, then turned in his chair to face her, elbows on his knees and the side of an unevenly stubbled chin in one cupped hand. “Where to start,” he mumbled, “and why?”

  Prescinda tilted her head, only ever so slightly, but it made him smile.

  “I knew a remarkable man once,” he began, “until more than six years ago. The finest mariner Dica ever did see.”

  She watched the age-spanning depth of his eyes go shallow, fresher memories now floating there upon their own placid waters.

  “From whence their ships came in!” he little more than breathed, but then cut a sharp look at Prescinda. “An unschooled man he was, but a wise one. Self-taught by an eager mind. Laixac may have been the cat, but Steermaster Sconner died of the curiosity.”

  “I’m sorry, Nephril, I don’t follow.”

  “Ha. No matter. Suffice to say he had the good fortune of a death denied to others, but then, fortunately, a bequest not likewise forfeited.”

  When Prescinda only looked yet more confused, Nephril took pity and drew her into a rather obscure history.

  Steermaster Sconner had been a sea pilot, the best there’d ever been, but one with an unquenchable interest in old and ancient tales. He’d collected an inordinate number, and over his long life they’d become quite a sizeable library.

  “A book of mine own brought his downfall, though,” Nephril quietly confessed. “A book I had long thought, ironically enough, to be an ode to death. It was a tome I freely lent him, although of far greater worth than all the libraries of Dica put together. Had that I had held its value too great.”

  Prescinda saw a sorrow that had run its course of tears, although it still brought Nephril to a halt, his hand lifting to dab at an eye, now more through habit than need. A thin smile failed to lift his eyes but it moved his story on.

  It seemed that Steermaster Sconner had had something of a fixation about the Star Tower, had gathered together not just extensive writings about it but the beginnings of a theory.