The Last Guardian of Everness
Page 27
Wentworth said, “It’s not enough.”
“What’s not enough?”
“This country. This life. The way we live, in these days.”
“We live pretty good. Compared to, I dunno, Cuba. Even I got a cellphone.”
“If Napoleon were alive today, in America, what do you think he would be? Someone’s employee? That is all a politician is: the employee of the voters. And the press is like his nagging wife, a shrew he can never divorce and always must keep happy. Military brass work for the politicians. The rich man works for the tax man, really, if you think about it. Everyone bows to someone. And that is not enough.”
“What would be enough?” asked Angello. “I mean, for someone like you. Don’t you have, like, everything?”
Wentworth gave him a cool look and uttered a short sharp laugh. “Angello, do you believe in democracy? Well, I don’t. A mob that bites the hand that feeds it, spits on the warrior protecting it: that is all a democracy is. It’s not natural. There is supposed to be an order to the universe. The best should rule, and the rest should bow. I am very old-fashioned in that way.”
He raised a pair of binoculars and scanned the house in the distance.
“That house contains a door. A door to another world. A larger world than ours. Darker. Older. Less rational. There are things in that world who covet this world. Things that used to rule here. Things that ruled men back when men were toys in their hands, helpless. Well, I used to work for . . . call it an organization . . . that knew about those things. But the people I worked for lacked vision. They thought it would be better to keep the larger world out. But I, I found out that there was potential here. Potential for great things.
“The Gates of Everness were only guarded by one old man. Selkie had slipped past him, a handful, less than a dozen. I found them. They had talents useful to me. And they told me about Azrael.” Wentworth lowered his binoculars.
Angello said, “I found one, too. A seal-man. He ate my roommate. They like people like me, people no one will miss. He told me all sorts of stuff. He told me about HIM. D’you know, I saw HIM once. When I was out of my mind, back in the institution. When HE rises from the Deep, there is no reward coming for you. Only pain, endless pain, pain without death.”
Wentworth said, “The Warlock says he is preparing the way for a king, someone who will set this world in order. Someone strong enough to protect us from the other things in the Night-World. I intend to be on the best of terms in the new order.” He picked up his binoculars again, turning away from Angelo. “I was born to be a courtier. There is no place for me in this small world, among these foolish people.”
“And what if the Warlock lied, just the same way you lie to your men? Or what if the Warlock is dead?”
“Well, in that case, the door in that house will be my escape exit, won’t it? In either case, we have to take it. And then, once it is mine . . .I mean, once it is ours, of course . . .”
Angelo said to Wentworth, “You’re going to kill us both, first moment you get a chance, ain’t you? The Satan-priest and me, huh?”
Wentworth did not bother to contradict him.
V
“Uhhhnn . . . feel like shit. Where in hell am I?”
“Lay still, Peter,” came Raven’s voice. “You have bullet lodged in your shoulder, but bone is not broken. I find Doctor Lancelot’s bag hidden under bed, and I clean and dress the wound. Your blood pressure, it is steady; you would be losing blood pressure if there were massive internal bleeding, eh?”
“The punk was using a .22, wimpy-ass little shell. Hey—! Get that light out of my eyes.”
“You have had head trauma, but pupil response is normal.”
Peter pushed himself up on his elbows, saw his father lying on the bed next to him. “What’s that noise?”
“Hi there!” Wendy, standing behind Raven, was waving energetically and smiling.
Raven said, “Lie down! The statues have come to life and are fighting. Azrael de Gray fell into the sea. You are not well. Lie down!”
There was a noise from beyond the main doors, barking laughter, songs praising nightmares, darkness, and pain. It sounded as if a second group of seal-men had joined the first.
“Jesus! What the hell are those?” Peter was staring out the eastern windows, and his voice cracked.
Standing with their feet in the swirling ocean waves, silhouetted against clouds, now tinted pink and pearl-gray with the promise of coming dawn, rose two cloaked and hooded figures, huge, black and hideous, taller than the funnels of tornadoes. And their hooded faces were bowed, gazing down at the House and sea cliffs. One had a woman’s face made of iron, and she carried a flail; the other had a skull made of black ivory, and it carried a sickle. They loomed up in the eastern windows, as unnatural and huge as if dark constellations from some alien zodiac had sprung to life and stepped down from the sky.
“Down! You are not well,” said Raven.
Wendy held up her spiral ivory wand, capped with a point of silver. “This is the Silver Key. I wanted to heal you with it, but Raven wouldn’t let me. I think it’s magic! It makes the pictures in the house here talk. Do you know how to work it? Can’t we blast them with it?”
“Sorry, little lady. I slept that day in school. Galen could probably tell you the little poem I used to know. Tum de dum dum, the key of dreaming, something, something, gate of waking, gate of seeming . . . but. . . Galen’s gone, now . . .”
“No!” said Wendy. “That was Azrael!”
Peter shook himself. “Is that door barred? Good! There’s doors to the left and right, hidden behind those panels. You can’t lock them, but the rooms beyond have heavy doors . . .”
Raven said, “Lie down. Is all taken care of. We found the hidden doors. There are selkie in the north hallway too, beyond the room with the panels. South hall is better. Is one silver knight with bleeding sword in hallway beyond the atlas room, but hall is filling up with smoke. We locked doors in paneled room and atlas room. I think greenhouse in south wing burned down; fire spreading slowly. South still best way to escape, though, I think.”
Wendy said, “Let’s call the dream-colts and fly away!”
Peter looked out the east windows at the titanic robed figures, taller than mountains, that loomed there, motionless. “I ain’t laying down, and we ain’t gonna fall back while we can hold this position. I don’t know what happens if the enemy takes this House, but I think it’s something real bad, like the end of the world or something. There’s this trumpet we’re supposed to find and blow on. Calls down the wrath of God or something.”
“No,” said Wendy, “blowing the trumpet ends the world. I think we should fly away instead. It would be more fun. Besides, Lancelot flew away. On a horse. He was dead, and they took him away up into the stars.” And she sounded very sad when she said that.
“You said the statues came to life?” said Peter brusquely. “That’s the second defense of Everness. I just can’t remember what the final defense is. We got to wake up Dad. Touch him with the horn, Wendy! Apollo, Hyperion, Helion, Day!”
“I told you it was for curing things!” whispered Wendy to Raven, leaning over and lightly touching Lemuel with the white wand.
But Lemuel did not wake.
Raven showed Peter the little card and the message from the grandfather in Acheron.
Peter read it in silence. Then he said, “There’s a crown of laurel leaves hanging in the central rotunda behind the statue of Apollo. If we get that and say the whole rhyme, it might, I don’t know, have more power or something. Then we gotta send someone into the country of gold to search.”
Wendy said, “Little room in the south wing, next to a tapestry of a dragon? I just came from there. Couldn’t find any magic talismans.” She smiled and shrugged.
“Any pictures?”
“No. Not really. I mean, there were framed things on the walls, but. . .”
There came a roaring noise from the north, a crack, a scream, and the f
ragments of a broken lion statue were flung into view from around the garden wall. From around the corner, a giant, pale shadow, twice the height of a man, glided forward in a spreading pool of frost.
Behind the giant jogged men with guns, their breath steaming, their collars turned up against the cold.
Firelight was dancing through the southern windows. A cloud of hissing steam boiled up from the sea, lurid, and a great hand, clutching a torch, still burning like magnesium despite that it was drenched, came up over the seawall and caught a small tree in the crook of its huge elbow. A face angry beyond all sanity came up over the seawall, beard and mane like smoke, eyes like coals.
Peter said, “Get the pictures off the walls in the country of gold room, get the laurel garland off the wall behind Apollo, come back here.”
Raven said, “Who, me?”
A faint look of disgust came into Peter’s face “Okay, pal. Who’d you wanna send instead?”
Wendy said, “I’ll go!”
Raven had just begun to start to feel the tension in his neck and shoulders unwinding. Now it knotted up again, tightly, and he could feel the pulse pounding in his temples. He thought it odd that the fear of danger hadn’t bothered him when he was in danger, only now, when he had a moment’s breathing space to reflect on it.
“Of course I will go,” said Raven, taking a deep breath and straightening up.
“I want to come, too! I’ve got the magic wand!” exclaimed Wendy.
Raven took her hands in his, saying, “My wife, I ask you do this thing as a favor to me, and also because Peter need you. I can move in the dark, without noise like the wolf, as you know, and the seal-men think I am their king. This is not the time for you.”
“But what if you get hurt!”
Peter said, “My house. My call. He goes. You stay. Got it? No time to argue.”
“If that isn’t the most macho garbage I’ve ever had to listen too in my whole life, I don’t know what is! If you think . . .”
“Zip it, lady!” Peter shouted her down. Then, he continued, coldly. “I had to admit this morning that I wasn’t able to carry on. Wasn’t physically capable, you got me? Not something I like to admit. If you’re not man enough to admit the same thing, then you’re not man enough for this mission. Well? Use your brain, not your pride. Well?”
Wendy pouted, but nodded. She turned sadly to Raven, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on the cheek. “But I’ll miss you!”
Raven said to Peter, “You not talk to my wife that way again, you hear me?”
Peter said, “You can slap me later. But hand me one of those firearms first. No, the big carbine.”
Then, to Wendy, Raven said, “I will come back.” Raven tried to sound convincing. But he only sounded sad and scared.
21
The Lord
of
Light
I
Wendy tucked in Peter and Lemuel; then she made sure Peter had plenty of bullets for his gun, reloading his weapons out of the cartridges she had found in Peter’s shirt pockets; she folded the shirt and put it on the chair and was only just beginning to tell Peter about her father and the wonderful things Raven could do when she heard Raven’s voice shouting. The sound came through the south windows.
Wendy ran on rapid feet through the room that had all the maps on the walls, globes of the Earth and Mars, Venus and Midgard. The central pillar here was shaped like a tall, naked man, his face in pain, holding the ceiling on his shoulders, his arms flung out along the roofbeam. There was a small door hidden in the wall between maps of Pluto and Mt. Purgatory.
Even though Peter shouted at her not to, Wendy unbarred the door, opened it a crack, looked out.
Thin tendrils of smoke drifted chest high through the corridor, and the firelight leaping and dancing through the stained glass windows made the peris, angels, and lios-alfar figured in the glass seem to sway and bow.
At the far corner of the corridor, a knight in silver armor, a perfectly normal-looking man, had his face in his hands and was weeping softly. When he heard Raven’s shouts coming from around the corner, however, he put up his shield, which bore the emblem of a face swollen with smallpox, and drew his sword, which dripped black blood and flakes of pus.
Two men in purple robes came running around the corner. One was Raven, and he was carrying a sack over his shoulder; in his other hand was a pistol. His robe was short, and Wendy saw, when Raven turned his back, that it had split along the spinal seam, because of the broadness of Raven’s shoulders. The other man Wendy had never seen before. He was a blond, muscular, square-jawed man, and he was carrying a spear and a shield, both slightly dusty as if they had been ripped off some wall. The shield bore the emblem of a winged horse rearing over crossed keys.
Behind the men, from around the corner, came a roar of jeering calls, barking, laughter, and a snatch of angry songs.
Raven fired his pistol with a loud report. From around the corner came an answering explosion, then came barking shouts and the sound of many feet running, growing louder.
The blond man shouted. “Russkie! We got trouble up ahead!”
Wendy screamed, “Raven!”
The silver knight called out in a sad voice, “Life is but pain, and all wisdom is sorrow. Face me! Oblivion awaits!”
Raven tucked his pistol into his belt and picked up a small table standing in the corridor, letting the vase that had been sitting on it drop and shatter. He said, “Max, can we rush him?”
The blond man said, “Let’s go, Russkie. He can’t get both of us. How good can he be with that toad sticker?”
A dozen seal-men in white sailor suits and caps, waving cutlasses and belaying pins, came around the corner at a dead run. At their head was a fat, white, seal-faced man in a red coat, smoking flintlock in one hand. He took a stand and raised his other hand, which also held a flintlock. The seal-men parted like a wave to either side of him.
Raven and the blond man rushed the knight, screaming. The blond man stabbed with his spear, Raven swung the table by one hand like an oversized bludgeon. With the kind of easy motion that comes of long practice, the knight deflected the table with his shield, parried the spearhead, stepping inside the blond man’s guard, and reposted, burying his swordpoint in the center of the blond man’s chest.
The knight yanked the blade free and swung at Raven. Raven raised the table like a shield, but it shattered under the sword blow, and Raven fell, his arm broken, cut and bloody. Wendy heard the snap of Raven’s arm breaking. At the same moment, the seal-man captain fired his pistol, aiming for the back of Raven’s head. As Raven was falling, the pistol ball struck the knight in the head.
The knight was knocked backward by the impact of the pistol ball, and his neck lay at an impossible angle. The seal-captain had disappeared behind a cloud of black-powder smoke, and the knight was disappearing behind the surprising amount of blood fountaining up from the ghastly remains of his face.
The seal-sailors, who had paused to let their leader shoot, now ran forward.
Raven threw the bag to Wendy, grabbed the arm of the fallen blond man, and began running forward at an awkward lope, broken arm dangling, his face slick with sweat, his eyes bright with anger and determination.
Wendy threw the bag behind her, through the door into the other room where Peter lay. She pointed the ivory wand at the statue holding up the ceiling. “By theWhite Hart’s Horn, I command you to wake! Save my husband!”
Raven fell in through the door, still dragging the blond man, the seal- sailors half a step behind him raising their cutlasses and laughing, when the tall statue stirred to life, and, with a slow, huge shrug, began to pull the cracking roofbeam free of its fittings, the groaning ceiling out of its frame.
The seal-sailors paused in a moment of horror, looking upward. Wendy darted forward and grabbed Raven’s robe and tried to tug him to his feet. Raven lurched to his feet, pulled on the blond man’s arm, stumbled forward and fell in through the door to the bedroom.
The seal-men hesitated, all staring upward at the groaning ceiling, mesmerized with fear. One seal-sailor, eyes transfixed, said in a toneless voice, “Okay, mates, I have a plan. . .”
The statue pulled the ceiling down and toppled it onto the crowd of seal-sailors. The map room disappeared in an avalanche of brick and rubble, and chairs and divans from the room above fell down in clouds of dust. The doorway was filled with fallen beams and brick, and bricks spilled out into the bedroom in a wash of dust.
Raven staggered to his feet, face wild. “Wendy! Wendy! Great God in heaven!”
“Calm down, pal,” said Peter. “She’s right beside you. Hey! Don’t!”
They flung themselves into each other’s arms, then jumped apart when Raven keeled over, screaming, clutching his broken arm.
Peter barked out: “Wendy! Help get him over here where we can take a look at that arm. I think those guys’ blades are poisoned.”
Wendy said, “But Raven’s inoculated against smallpox.”
“Who knows? Might have saved his a,. . . his life. Get out Doctor Lancelot’s kit again.” And then, a moment later: “Damn. It’s a fracture, all right. Clean break, though. I’m going give you some morphine to dull the pain when I yank to straighten the bone. It may make you drowsy, but you can’t go to sleep. Wendy, get that stuff ready so we can splint his arm up after. Hang on to the bedpost there. Okay. Ready?”
Raven arched his back in agony, his face white, the cords in his neck standing out beneath his beard, but he did not scream.
Wendy had such nausea in her stomach that she could not speak or move. Watching her husband in pain was as terrible a thing as had ever happened to her.
Peter said, “You get the stuff ?”
Raven nodded toward the bag. It had spilled open. There were framed banknotes, the front and reverse of singles, twos, tens, twenties, and so on, and a rack of coins. Some of the glass had shattered. On top of the heap was a garland crown of laurel leaves, wound with gold ribbon, miraculously intact.