“And then one day I woke up, and Mrs. Cook was there, and Pat… another girl they took from the Orphan House, before me. And my hands were burned.”
She looked up suddenly, meeting Huss’s eyes with terrible urgency. “I lost everything the day John and Mary died,” she said. “I lost my heart. Paradise was stolen from me. But I recovered… I survived, because people loved me and I knew how to love them back, because of what Mary had taught me.” Tears stung her eyes and she blinked them away, leaning forward.
“This may sound strange, Professor Huss, but I have always felt that there was something more that I was supposed to learn from Mary. And from John. I feel as though I was on a path when I lived with them, and when I went back to Londren, the path was lost and I never found it again. I know that doesn’t make sense. But maybe I’m here trying to find the path again?”
Huss was listening with an odd glow on his face, but Maggie hardly noticed it.
“And then Old Dan came, and he and Mrs. Cook said that John and Mary’s death wasn’t an accident. They said it was murder; that Evelyn killed them. I want to know why, Professor. I want to know who Evelyn is, and what the Council for Worlds Unseen was, and why the people I loved most had to die.”
A sudden picture came into Maggie’s head, a parable that Mary had once shown her. The mental image was strong, unblurred by the tears in her eyes. “Have you ever seen the underside of a cross-stitch, Professor?”
“I haven’t,” Jarin Huss answered, obviously surprised.
“It looks like a mess,” Maggie told him. “A lot of threads and unconnected bits of this and that, strewn around. But if you turn it over, you can see that all of that mess has made a beautiful picture on the other side. My life so far has been a lot of threads and unconnected bits. I want to see the picture.”
“To bring cosmos out of chaos,” Huss said with a smile. “I understand completely. Though I don’t know how much help I can be to you, I will try to bring at least a little order into the unconnected bits of your life. Unfortunately, you will have to sit and listen to me talk for a good while, and I am sure you will need plenty of patience.”
Maggie smiled. “Mrs. Cook used to say I had more patience than was good for me.”
“Very well, then,” Huss said, but his eyes grew solemn. He stood and paced as he talked. “I am not surprised to know that John and Mary are dead, although I am exceedingly sorry to hear it. Evelyn had threatened Mary… perhaps Mrs. Cook told you?”
Maggie nodded. “She told me a little.”
“I have long pondered the mystery of Evelyn,” said Huss, “and I believe that I know now who she is. She is an important piece of a puzzle I have been studying for forty years. You see, I have been trying to bring my own cosmos out of chaos. In my life I have run down many a false trail, but I do think I have found the truth of the thing at last. I met Evelyn first through the Council for Exploration Into Worlds Unseen, forty years ago.
“I was in the Isle of Bryllan, in Cranburgh of the Highlands, for a conference of scholars. The conference was dry and dull, even for a such a dull young man as I was—all brains, and books. Nothing else mattered to me. Still, I was young—even I hungered for entertainment at times. There was a festival in Cranburgh at the time, and one day I skipped out of the conference and wandered in the streets.
“In the midst of the acrobats and jugglers and freakish human beings, a young Highland gentleman was holding a group of listeners spellbound with some very strange tales—tales he took quite seriously. His name was Lord Robert Sinclair, and he claimed to be the founder of a new branch of study: a study of what he called the ‘other side of reality,’ the Worlds Unseen.
“His theories were a delightful patchwork of history and folk tales and imagination, but they gripped me somehow. I talked with him for hours. In the end he invited me to come to his estate, Angslie, and help him carry on his new science. I went with him, though I have never been sure why. And others did, as well, most of them visitors to Cranburgh just as I was. There were six of us: myself, Lord Robert, Eva Brown, your guardian, Mary Grant and John Davies, who fell in love in those days, Daniel Seaton, and a dashing young fellow called Lucas Barrington.
“We all lived together in Angslie and studied, if you could call it that. We read stories and spun tapestries out of their many threads. Lord Robert had an impressive collection of ancient documents, the kind you can be arrested for owning, and I was able to read them—you see, Maggie, much as the Empire wishes the ancient languages extinct, they are not. There are some who can still read them and understand, and I am such a one. We hunted down other documents; we tracked down stories; and we drowned ourselves in wonder and fear. We pieced together a history of the world much different than what we are taught under the Emperor’s rule… and you understand, my dear, if the history of something is not what we think it is, the future of that thing is also not what we think.”
He stopped a moment, and began again.
“It seems to me as though those days were spent in another time and another world. Sometimes Mary would sing and play her harp. Stories and legends with words like fire, that caught all of our hearts aflame. Her songs were alive, and somehow ancient, and she never claimed to write them—she told me once that she sang what she heard. I can’t quite describe the way they sounded.”
“I know,” Maggie interjected quietly. “She sang to me, too. Sometimes I think her songs are in me, somewhere—if only I could hear them.”
Huss looked at Maggie strangely for a moment before continuing. “And then one day, Evelyn came. She was a young, beautiful woman. The laird had met her while he was in Cranburgh on business. He was fascinated with her, all the more because she seemed to have knowledge of the other world. She spoke sometimes of visions and strange powers, and claimed that miracles had been done at her hands.” He grimaced as he said the word “miracles”; Maggie could see the distaste he felt for it. “It was the laird’s dream come true—that we might find some way to bring the Otherworld into our own.
“Lord Robert wanted her to join the council, but there was something in her that the rest of us could not trust. Mary, especially, was opposed to Evelyn. At first she was quiet about it. She managed to discover where Evelyn came from, and then she left us for a few days. When she came back, she stood up in the council and denounced Evelyn as a witch. Mary claimed that she had gone to Evelyn’s hometown, and found that the people of the village were deathly afraid of her. Rumour said—and Mary believed every word of it—that Evelyn had grown angry with two young men in the village and publicly cursed them. Later that same day, both young men came down with strange and horrible diseases. They were dead in less than three days.”
A vision of Old Dan dying in Mrs. Cook’s guest room assailed Maggie, and she shivered.
“That meeting was the undoing of the council,” Huss continued. “Lord Robert took Evelyn’s part—blind fool that he was. The rest of us were divided. Accusations began to fly between us all, until at last it was hopeless to think of working together anymore. In less than three days the council was no more. Evelyn, in that meeting, swore to kill Mary someday. Even then, Lord Robert could not see what she was.
“And that is all there is to tell of the Council for Worlds Unseen. I came back to Pravik, nearly crippled by the shattering of a dream that had become more to me than I knew. But just as you recovered after the death of your foster parents, so I recovered after the death of my vision. I became a teacher, carrying on the work here in Pravik, keeping true history alive and out of the clutches of the Empire. I teach ancient languages, and legends, and dreams, but I teach only those who are worthy to learn.”
He drew himself up as he spoke till he looked taller and somehow older than before.
“I keep the memory of freedom alive in men’s hearts,” he said. “It is an extremely important work, and I am the only one left to do it. The old masters are dead, and I alone have taken up their mantle. To most of the world I am an eccentric old te
acher of history, but to a few, like Jerome and Libuse, I am the single Professor of the Underground University of Pravik.”
For a moment he stood, carried off by his own thoughts, and then he seemed to snap. His shoulders stooped back into their normal posture, and he smiled a little.
“Listen to me,” he said. “So caught up in my own importance I’ve forgotten what I meant to say.”
Very little order had appeared to Maggie in what Jarin Huss had said, and the pieces of her questions remained unconnected. But she said, “Tell me about the scroll. What does it have to do with everything?”
“Yes, the scroll,” Huss muttered. He sat back down at the table abruptly. “The scroll is the sort of artifact that our council would have been very glad to get our hands on in the old days in Angslie. It dates back to the first year of the Empire, and contains the signature, written, I think, in blood, of Lucius Morel himself.”
Maggie sat back in her chair. She caught her breath to think that she had carried something so old. She shook her head in disbelief as she remembered all the scroll had come through, amazed that the thing hadn’t crumbled to dust in her hands.
“You can read it,” Maggie said. “What does it say?”
Huss’s face became clouded, and his voice low. “It is a covenant,” he said. “A promise of power to the Morel family in return for an empire.”
Maggie did not understand. “A covenant with who?” she asked, her own voice unconsciously lowering.
“With a creature whose name will not be familiar to you,” Huss answered. “According to the scroll, his power must be passed to the Morels through a mediator—or rather, through a body of mediators. Mediators who have found what Lord Robert always sought—a way to bring the Otherworld into connection with our own.”
He stood to his feet again, pacing. “I have known of this body for some time but did not completely understand their relationship to the Morels until you brought me the scroll. You have shed light on a most unpleasant secret, Maggie Sheffield. Even so, it is better to see it in the light than to fear it in the darkness. They are known as the Order of the Spider. I believe Evelyn is one of them.”
Maggie felt a creeping sensation on the back of her neck. Huss had stopped pacing, but he did not seem about to say anything more. There was a long and uncomfortable silence.
Maggie mustered up enough courage to say, “I don’t think I understand.”
Huss looked at her as though he had forgotten she was there.
“Do you believe in legends?” he asked, and smiled at Maggie’s puzzled expression. He sat down and leaned forward so that their heads were close together.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a king who ruled over all the world, a good king, and a just one. Under his reign the earth flourished, and its people were at peace and happy.
“But among the King’s advisers was one who grew dissatisfied with his position in life. He envied his master, and he began to whisper in the ears of human beings, who were never inclined to be very strong, or very faithful. They listened, along with other beings who were not human—beings much like the discontented adviser himself.
“There was a war. The adviser and his followers, human and otherwise, attempted to overthrow the King, and in the end, they succeeded. He went into exile, taking many of his followers with him.
“The adviser, whose name was Morning Star, prepared to take the lordship of the Seventh World upon his own shoulders. But before he could, a Veil fell over the world—dividing that which was human and earthly from that which was not. Morning Star and his fellow creatures were cut off from humanity, and man was left to rebuild his world on his own—free from good and evil lords alike.
“Thus began the Tribal Age, the beginning of history as we know it. Men divided into a thousand little factions and fought each other and starved, until Lucius Morel gathered an army and conquered them all. So now we have an Empire.”
“The last part of your legend is history,” Maggie said, remembering her few lessons at the Orphan House, and their mention of the Tribal Age and the way that Lucius Morel had heroically united the world.
“It is all history,” Professor Huss said, “though many would disagree with me, even call me a fool. It is history gathered from the ancient folk tales of the people of this world, stories long forgotten to most, but long remembered in the Underground University. But you are right: for centuries the teachers of our secret school treated the King as a legend only. His tale is nothing but a dream.”
“But you don’t believe that,” Maggie said.
“No,” Huss said, the smallest of smiles on his lips. “I do not. I believe that there was a king once, and I believe in the rebellion of Morning Star, and of the falling of the Veil. It was Lord Robert who first showed me that our university legends could be true.”
Maggie cocked her head in question.
“Lord Robert believed in another side of reality—the other side of the Veil, Maggie, though he did not know the old stories. Beyond the Veil there are things too wonderful to imagine, but there is also a great Blackness.”
“Morning Star,” Maggie said.
“Yes,” Huss answered. He drew the scroll out from his robes and laid it on the table, pushing remnants of breakfast aside to make room for it.
Huss’s long fingers tapped the parchment. “It is Morning Star’s name that is signed here along with Lucius Morel’s. Somehow the Order of the Spider is able to draw power from beyond the Veil, from Morning Star himself. That power has kept the Seventh World under the thumb of the Morel family for five hundred years.”
Maggie’s throat had gone dry, and she licked her lips. “But you said that the power was in exchange for an Empire,” she said.
“Yes.” Huss nodded. The smile had vanished from his face. “Morning Star intends to come back and claim the world he won in battle long ago.”
“He can’t come through the Veil,” Maggie said.
“The Veil is wearing thin,” Huss said. “Creatures have come through it. And there are other signs that the end is near.”
Maggie shut her eyes as thoughts of the unearthly hound and the ravens washed over her. She wanted to deny that what Huss said was true; she wanted to make it only a legend and forget it. But she could not, for she had seen evidence of his words with her own eyes, roaming the forests and cities of the continent.
“What can we do?” she asked at last.
“Absolutely nothing,” Huss answered. Then a smile began to appear on his wizened old face once more, and he said, “But he can.”
Maggie felt that Huss meant something very significant, but it was quite beyond her reach. He continued.
“Lord Robert had one ancient piece of writing that held particular fascination for me,” he said. “It was a very old journal, and the language was nearly beyond even my abilities to decipher. The laird acquired it only a few short weeks before the council split up, in our third month together, so I had little time to translate from it. I did manage to render one poem into our modern language. I can still remember the words of it, though the journal is still in Angslie.”
Jarin Huss closed his eyes and intoned,
“When they see beyond the sky,
When they know beyond the mind,
When they hear the song of the Burning Light;
Take these gifts of My Outstretched Hand,
Weave them together,
I shall come.”
Maggie shook her head, frustrated at her own inability to understand, but Huss went on.
“It is a prophecy,” he said. “There are other such hints in the folklore and legends of the world… ‘I shall come.’ The words of the King, unless I am greatly mistaken.”
Strange words came to Maggie’s mind, and she spoke them without thinking. “He is the sun-king, and the moon-king, and all-the-stars king, and he shines like them all together.” In her mind she saw Marja in the vivid firelight, and the smoke from Peter the Pipe-Smoker’s pipe rising earl
y in the frigid morning. She blushed at the realization that Huss was looking at her with a very odd expression on his face, and she hastened to explain, “I heard a Gypsy girl say it. She told a story about a man who went with the birds to meet the King, only… he didn’t come.”
“The Gypsies remember a great deal that the rest of the world has forgotten,” Huss said. “In a way they are the last remnant of the Tribal Age. Yet, it is doubtful that your friend the Gypsy thinks of her story as anything more than a fairy tale.”
“I suppose not,” Maggie said, and was glad to say no more. Huss began once again to talk.
“The prophecy I quoted you was written before even the scroll,” he said. “I believe it foretells the coming of the King to this land. But it also gives a sign of his coming… the advent of the Gifted.”
“The what?” Maggie asked.
“The Gifted,” Huss repeated. “‘When they see beyond the sky; When they know beyond the mind; When they hear the song of the burning light…’ People with gifts of sight, of hearing, of healing, of knowing… of song.” He smiled tenderly. “Mary was Gifted, Maggie.”
She looked at his piercing eyes, and could almost hear the songs that poured from Mary’s harp and soul… the songs that seemed to be within her still, just out of reach. Gifted. Yes.
“In the council we were aware of Gifting,” Huss said, “although we did not know what it was, or how it was connected to the King. Lord Robert thought Evelyn was Gifted, and she may well have been. It only shows what blind fools we were that we never saw the Gift in Mary. John did, I think. And I know now, too late.”
“The King is coming back,” Maggie said, just to feel the words on her tongue. It seemed as though they had to be spoken aloud; as though her voice had to say them. She shook her head suddenly. “How is that possible?” she asked. “He must have died centuries ago.”
“You would be right, if he were human,” Huss said. “But he is no more human than Morning Star is… than a star is, or a sunrise, or the wind.” He reached down and touched the scroll. “Let us hope he returns before Morning Star does.”
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