Everbright

by Ken Altabef

  The fiddler’s pace increased, the notes coming now in a blistering assault on the senses.

  Simms upended the table with a crash, sending playing cards and cups of ale flying. “Frommer! Take a look from the window!”

  Frommer stepped cautiously forward. He crouched beside the window and peeked through the shutter. “Nothing! There’s nothing out there, Lieutenant.”

  The fiddling abruptly stopped. The veil of confusion slowly lifted from Simms’ mind. “Get your weapons. Everyone! Bayonets!”

  The door burst open and madness poured into the room. At the head of the mob was a huge creature as big as a bear, its fur deep green, its snout as long and toothy as any monster out of ancient myth. The beast stomped forward on two feet like a man, leaving its clawed hands free to slash and rake at the disorganized jumble of soldiers. It lowered its horned head and gored Frommer through the belly with one of its antlers. With a shake of its massive head it flung the screaming soldier to the side. And then it was upon them in a wild rush. The beast seemed concerned with only one thing—spilling as much blood as it could as rapidly as possible. It didn’t pause to finish off any of its victims but dashed madly from throat to throat, ripping and tearing.

  “Bayonets!” Simms screamed, realizing he had forgotten to take his own advice. He was unarmed.

  The bear-like monster was followed by several others—weird woodland creatures that defied description, being part wolf, part wild boar, and part men. The rest of the soldiers came rushing from their bunk room and fired a barrage of rifle shots into the horde of attackers. One of the beasts lunged at Simms just as the top of its head blew off.

  He scrambled under its sweeping claw and barely avoided the bulk of the monster landing atop him. His ankle was pinned for a moment under the shaggy thing until he wrenched it away. The men had no time to reload but drew sword and sabre and formed into as much of a defensive line as the confined space of the common room would allow. Simms watched in amazement as their foes readily shifted shapes, transforming into a squad of faery warriors similarly armed. The clash of steel on steel was accompanied by blistering lights that flashed and sparked among the combatants. Several men screamed, momentarily believing they had caught fire, only to realize it had all been illusion, and sigh in relief just in time to receive a sabre thrust through the neck.

  Simms could take no more of this madness. He crawled along the blood-slicked floor, backing his way out into the hall. There was only one chance that he could conceive—the storage cellar. He grabbed a slim Scottish fighting sword from where it rested against the wall and circled round the kitchen. He brushed away the nagging thought that he, as commanding officer, should not desert his men in the midst of battle. Having armed himself, it was his duty to go forth—oh hell! Not against that horrific mob!

  He flung open the trap door to the cellar and stumbled down the short wooden stair. The storage room smelled comfortingly of coffee and salted meat. Simms threw himself on the floor, scurried into a corner like a frightened crab. Frightened? Damn right he was frightened.

  He pushed backward until his spine was quite comfortingly pressed up against the wall and pulled a half-empty crate of apricots in front of him. A pile of spare linens and a tarnished tea-service went atop the crate and Simms huddled down, the Scottish sword forgotten, hands clamped tight against his ears. He pressed them as hard as he could but still was unable to completely shut out the screams and death-cries of the rest of his men.

  Chapter 52

  In the faeries’ healing room, tucked away deep beneath the great ash tree, James could not witness the events above, nor bask directly in the light of Mother Moon.

  Nonetheless he felt the power of Midsummer’s Eve just as distinctly, or perhaps given his sensitive nature, even more so than anyone else. He felt Wild Tyme coursing through his veins like a thick green sap, bursting with life and potential. It threatened to change his shape, over and above any will of his own. It wanted him to sprout horns from his head, wings from his back, to spray his seed across the room, to shatter his mind into a thousand living fragments and scatter them on the wind, still conscious, to see and feel everything.

  James struggled against these urges. Over the past few weeks he’d been learning by slow degrees to contain the wild faery energies he’d absorbed from the Changed Men in exchange for restoring them to full humanity. He was not sure how much more he could handle.

  Gregory Hardison lay on the pallet, staring up at the rocky ceiling. His owl-like eyes were incapable of closing all the way, even in sleep. James had held off on healing this Changed Man until the last for he knew it would be an especially difficult case. Midsummer’s Eve was the time for it, with the Moon huge in the sky and the wild energies of the dance in the air. He positioned himself on a wooden stool at the head of the cot. He placed the fingertips of both hands on either side of Hardison’s face. He no longer needed the spiked ball and the commingling of blood to work his cures. He was well acquainted with the Wild Tyme now. He knew how to sense its weird vibrations, how to call it to him, to draw it out even through the skin of his fingertips. After all, it wanted to come to him.

  “Ready Gregory?”

  The Changed Man’s head twitched, nearly shaking off James’ grip. “It’s going to hurt,” he said. “It’s going to hurt too much.”

  “It won’t hurt at all,” said James, “I promise. Did the others tell you it hurt?”

  “I’m not like them. It—it’s gone too far. It’s changed my soul.”

  “Surely the Vicar tells you otherwise. Don’t you believe him?”

  “He’s not… he’s not like me. He’s not a bird!”

  “You’re not a bird Gregory.”

  Hardison’s head twitched again and he let out a truly disturbing squawk.

  “You want to stay like this?”

  “No. No, no! Certainly not! It’s a living hell! I feel— I can’t control—"

  “Just calm down, Gregory. Once I take the Wild Tyme from you, you’ll be able to go home again. You have a wife, a daughter? You’ll be with them again. Isn’t that what you really want?”

  Hardison nodded vigorously, and James readjusted his hands. “Very good.” He took a deep breath and settled into the quiet state of contemplation required to make the exchange. Emptying his mind of all worldly cares and concerns was like descending a staircase. He pictured himself going down, down, lower and lower, deeper and deeper into a state of non-being. There at the bottom, in an empty white room, he would call to the Wild Tyme. And, if Hardison would allow it, the Wild Tyme would answer.

  “Open yourself to me Gregory, and be restored.”

  Some of Hardison’s erratic thoughts began to seep into the white room. Mostly it was a mad jumble. Green shoots and branches striving for the sunlight. Lightning in various pastel colors, accompanied by crashes of thunder that resembled snippets of a symphony by Boccherini. His wife, his daughter. A spate of discordant taste sensations filled James’ mouth again—soft-shell crab, seaweed, green tea, cappuccino, raw horse meat, pancakes, squid ink. A strange mixture of mint and raw carrots. Hardison’s wife. His daughter. One image was dominant—an owl soaring across an open plain, its eyes focused on the ground below, searching for any signs of movement, for any indication of its prey. It wanted to swoop down. The trouble was, Hardison enjoyed being the owl, the pleasure of flight had captivated his soul, the feeling of power, of strength, knowing that he could swoop down and kill. The expectation of the impending kill was enticing to him, creating a state bordering on ecstasy. He wanted to keep it.

  “You are not a bird,” James said, “You are a man. Remember that.”

  Hardison shook him off. “I want to fly! I want to hunt! Sassafras!”

  “Don’t fight it, Gregory. Let our hearts connect. Find the harmony between us, feel the beautiful silver web that unites us. Join with me.”

  He’d known this healing would be a particularly difficult one. For this reason alone, he had saved it for this ni
ght, under this particular moon. With so much Wild Tyme coursing through his veins James had become particularly receptive to moonlight, though he still had never been able to contact Mother Moon directly.

  But Hardison had other ideas. He wanted only to fly and to hunt. He would not settle down. James imagined himself in the air alongside him, as he continued striving to synchronize their thoughts.

  James felt for himself the exhilaration of soaring through the air, dipping and circling with only the slightest exertion of feathered wing. Recalling the image of Hardison at their Sunday dinner, a dead mouse dangling from his bloodied lips, he scanned the rippling plain for any sign of prey.

  “There it is!” he shouted above the whipping currents of the air. He indicated a tiny flutter of movement below. Hardison took the bait, swallowing James’ illusion and swerving to the side, banking lower and lower. He extended his talons out front, thinking to snatch a rabbit from the plain below.

  As soon as Hardison swung into range James readjusted his illusion. This was no fluffy white hare juttering along the plains, it was a little girl—Hardison’s own daughter in a white summer dress—skipping along as she hummed a nursery rhyme.

  Hardison pulled back, retracting the claws at the last moment, his mind flooding with images of his dear child. “Beatrice!”

  Now reminded of what he truly desired, Hardison realized the only way to achieve his true goal, to hold his daughter in his arms again, was not through a vicious aerial assault, but through a surrender, a release. It was so easy.

  James felt the Wild Tyme flooding into him. The head rush was incredible. For a moment he was totally lost, dragged under by a flood tide, into an ocean of heightened sensation. The white room expanded, bursting with color and light, new tastes and smells, an ever-expanding kaleidoscope of experience.

  This sudden highly receptive state felt like being submerged in a great ocean of the collective unconscious. For an instant he connected with all of Everbright, with the dancers in the park, the lovers in their various stages of ecstasy, even with Dresdemona on her levitating platform urging the crowd on. He saw Pox and the others transformed by their own bestial urges, reveling in slaughter as they murdered the men at the barracks. He saw Gryfflet, her dark ravaged soul, standing over the corpse of Willowvine.

  It was too much. James broke contact. He staggered backward off the stool. Hardison sat up on his pallet, appearing as a normal man once again and James took heart. He’d done it. He pressed his fingers, now covered in dark purple skin, to his own aching forehead and felt two antlers growing there. His eyes saw things differently now. Everything was glazed with purple and green.

  Hardison came around toward him.

  The door burst open.

  Moonshadow entered, carrying a body in her arms.

  James shrank back, still disoriented, still seeing purple and green.

  Hardison jumped in to help and the two of them lowered the unconscious woman onto the pallet.

  “It’s your mother James. She’s been poisoned!”

  Doakes wandered down Oak Street. He felt dizzy and weak. He’d had enough. He only wanted to return to the army barracks. But he dare not approach from the park side. He’d tarried there too long and begun suffering strange visions that intruded upon his thoughts. Naked women, dancers in Rue Morgret, showing frilly pantaloons. There was a back way to the barracks, he knew, going along Glitternight Street, but these damn streets kept shifting positions every few days. He was lost and kept having to cross the street to avoid faeries fornicating shamelessly by the side of the road. Their heavy sighs and animal grunts, their squeals of delight, it was all maddening. And the streets seemed to be tilting as well. Was that part of their faery magic too?

  He took stock of his location. One street looked much like another. Worse yet, the city seemed to be spinning slowly around him. Great trees grew between the buildings, stretching out across the avenues, blocking out the moonlight. Pools of shadow everywhere. Oak Street. Evergreen Street. The cobblestones sloped down before him like a child’s slide. Another few steps and he would tumble into the bizarre architecture, as if crashing down a rabbit hole. He turned around and went back up the street, his legs working hard to climb upward on what should have been a level surface. He was breathing heavy, smelling heady perfume. Jasmine, honeysuckle, lavender. He ducked into a random alley. Down the other side. That was it. Glitternight Street. He could make out the sharp outline of the barracks just ahead.

  A woman blocked his way. She seemed to appear cut from the gloomy night itself. Moonlight played off the perfect contours of her face—the full lips, the strong chin, the soft eyes. Doakes could not keep his eyes on her face. She was wearing little more than a whisper of silk, draped around her waist and ample bosom, a silvery web that was so transparent he could distinctly make out the dark curves of her nipples.

  “Away, woman!” He forced himself to speak, though the words sounded like garbled nonsense to him. “I’ve had enough faery tricks this night.”

  “No trick, good sir,” she said and suddenly she was standing close to him, too close. He could feel her warm breath on his cheek and neck, her dizzying sweet perfume. She reached up and touched his face. Passion burned within him at her caress.

  She licked smiling lips. “Take a wood wife to bed, sir? I can give you pleasures beyond your wildest dreams…”

  She pressed closer, such wet lips, the pink tip of a tongue. “How about a kiss?”

  “How about a quick poke?” he rasped.

  “Sounds good.”

  Doakes thrust his dagger into her belly, muffling her scream with the cup of his hand. She struggled against him but he held her fast, twisting the knife to one side and then another. She bit his hand and he yanked it away. Her features ran like melted wax, changing, contorting into something distinctly less beautiful than before. He levered the knife upward, carving skin and anything else in the way until the blade was blocked by a rib. She spat in his face. He threw her to the ground. She was a bony mound, elbows and knees jutting out at weird angles. He stomped on her chest once, twice, three times, until she could speak no more. He bent down and withdrew his blade, dripping with violet faery blood.

  Glitternight Street. He shook off the bloodlust and gathered his senses. Then he took off running down the lane.

  There was no guard at the rear of the military barracks. The back door hung open, a dark gaping mouth trailing a line of thin gray smoke from within. Something terrible had happened here. The smell of blood and offal stung his nostrils. Doakes went inside, stepping over the dead body lying in his way. It was one of the foot soldiers, his face beaten beyond recognition, his eyes gouged out of their sockets.

  Chapter 53

  Dawn broke over the faery city of Everbright.

  “Attention! Attention!” shouted Pox. “Get up and pay attention!”

  He hovered above the park, shouting down at the remnants of the party. Lovers lay scattered everywhere, naked and exhausted. Torn fragments of paper lanterns drifted here and there on the wind. Tiny faery lights fizzled and popped at random, discharging the last of their spent energies.

  “Listen!” he said. “An important announcement from the Dark Queen.”

  Dark Queen? Moonshadow looked up from her early-morning meditation. Had Dresdemona grown so bold as to use that nick-name again? This could not be good.

  And yet it was effective. Whispers and shouts passed along down the line and a substantial crowd of people soon gathered all round. Dresdemona lowered herself on her hovering platform, coming down, it appeared, as if descending from the clouds themselves. Meadowlark, naked and filthy, crouched by her side. Her raven hair flying free, dressed in a crimson gown, with the breaking dawn behind her casting an amber glow across her face, she looked almost like a goddess let alone a queen.

  She always knows how to make an entrance, Moonshadow thought. How can I compete with that? Perhaps I should take a few lessons in stagecraft from Nora Grayson.

  Dr
esdemona raised one elegant arm to the sky. “Everbright!” she said, savoring the name like candy. She said it as if she had crafted the name herself. Moonshadow remembered when had she and Theodora had settled on that name for the city when they had first envisioned the place.

  “Everbright!” Dresdemona said again. As if she owned it. “The City of Everlasting Change. Everbright shall be a place of exquisite delight, a place where the lusty are ravished, where all thirsts are evenly slaked until all—each and every faery within its walls—lay exhausted and blissfully sated.” She laughed coquettishly. “We’ve had a taste of that now, haven’t we? Was it good?”

  An exhausted cheer rang out as more people flooded the area.

  “And we did it in plain sight! Unabashed and unashamed. Those few soldiers who tried to stop our revels have been dealt with! They will trouble us no more.” She gave a salute to Pox, whose bare chest was still spattered with blood, red blood, the blood of men.

  “There will be more!” someone in the crowd shouted. “And what then?”

  “They will be dealt with!” she answered, supremely confident.

  Moonshadow’s head spun. What? What had happened? The soldiers tried to stop them? There was some sort of a battle? This was the first she’d heard of it.

  “And more I can promise you,” Dresdemona went on, the platform drifting lower to achieve a more intimate rapport with the people, while still sitting somewhat above them. “I shall bring Avalon to Everbright! It shall be a place where golden flowers blaze and shining trees sing. And the music! Such music as none here have ever experienced. This shall be the future of Everbright.”

  Enthusiasm from the crowd.

  Dresdemona’s elegant features took on a somber expression of mock-reflection. “But Everbright needs a leader. A true leader who is up to the tasks ahead.” She reached down and picked something up, held it high. Moonshadow couldn’t see it clearly at her distance but it seemed to be a crown of some sort. A ring of white crystal that glowed with silvery light as if it had been made of moonlight itself. “The Crown of Joy Eternal.”