All Night Awake (72 page)

Together, they went into the darkened streets of Southwark, and night long they searched, amid bawds and gamers, drunkards and cutpurses.

It wasn’t till dawn tinged the horizon pink that they came upon Sylvanus’s handiwork, in an alley, away from human traffic. It had been a young girl, barely a woman. Now it was nothing but a bundle of blood-soaked rags and a few bones, glimmering white where the flesh had been devoured.

No crowd gathered around her yet, Will and Ariel having been first on the scene.

Will backed away, in horror, at the sight.

But Ariel stood still, staring, eyes wide open, “It is the wolf’s work,” she said. “But it has my lord’s power prints upon it, also.” She fainted dead away, and only Will’s quick dive and ready arms prevented her dirtying her dainty page costume with the bloodied mud of the foul alley.

With the faerie queen unconscious in his harms, Will first thought that this was becoming an habit, elves losing their senses around him.

But irreverence was soon driven out by shock. What could Ariel mean that this had her lord’s traces? Had Quicksilver himself been taken by the wolf?

And all because Will had turned him out. Looking at Ariel’s eyes, as they fluttered open, Will felt more heartily sorry of that than he’d ever been of anything.

Scene Twenty Eight

Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Again, he lies on his bed, on his stomach, and he and the bed are covered in blood.

K
it Marlowe didn’t startle at the way he stuck to the covers, nor at the reek of blood on his nostrils, nor at the dull ache behind his eyes, nor at the feeling that something horrible had happened the night before, something that made the world a black place and his earth a hell.

He woke with a curse upon his lips, and opened his eyes to the dull throb of headache and the grey light of an overcast day coming in through the diamond-shaped panes of his window.

Damn the world and the light and the blood, and his headache too.

He rolled over slowly, bringing the blanket with him, stuck to him by a dark substance that smelled pungently of blood and that Kit didn’t even attempt to tell himself wasn’t just that.

He pulled the blanket away from his body -- he appeared to have lain a-bed naked -- and amazed himself only with how calm he felt, how collected.

Horror experienced once is horror indeed: marvelous, strange and terrifying. Horror experienced twice is dim and dull, an occurrence expected if not welcomed, a nuisance where there should be screaming awe.

Thus, step by step, he thought, do humans become used to their own sins.

Thus had be become used to the idea of betraying friends and strangers to the secret service -- first out of fear, then out of monetary need and finally, finally, out of convenience, of expediency, almost out of boredom, ignoring the lives consumed to his casualness, the very real deaths he caused on the gallows, on the rack, or out of sheer despair, at the victim’s own hand.

Would he, thus, get used to the foul taste of raw flesh in his mouth, to the dried blood covering him?

He dragged himself up, out of the bed, and set his feet firmly on the floor. His clothes were by the door, in a blood-soaked heap. Another suit ruined.

Walking like a drunkard, or one only half awakened, Kit tripped to his basin, and poured in the cool clear water, from the jar, dipped his hands in it, and watched it turn red. He realized, with a sob caught in the throat and suffocating his emotions, that the desperate revulsion of the day before was not gone. It had turned, instead, to an aching despair.

Standing there, Kit felt for the wolf in his mind, and found a wall -- a diamond-strong wall, black and unyielding. Pushing at that wall, behind which Kit felt that the wolf’s thoughts hid, Kit knew his battle was lost before he drew his weapon.

There might be, true, some way to circumvent the curse, some way to pierce the wall, or look beneath it, but what mattered it? Kit was not likely to find it. Not on his own.

Some knowledge, some thought of Silver tickled at his mind, but he could no more hold it than a child’s hands can hold the fluttering butterfly.

He might kill himself. But he didn’t wish to kill himself. All the things he’d done, to avoid death, and now he’d play the roman fool and fall upon his own dagger? Not likely. No. It was useless. Kit was damned, and he might as well learn to live with his damnation.

“I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as going over,” he told himself, reasonably, while staring at his hands submerged in the red liquid in the white porcelain basin. “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand; which must be acted ere they may be scanned.”

He rinsed his hands with prosaic calm, and, opening his window, poured the bloodied water out.

A man, passing underneath the window, jumped away and shook his fist at Kit.

What land was this London that a man may pour blood from his window, early morning, and draw from it no more censure than if he poured the nightly wastes from his chamberpot?

Bemused, Kit returned the basin atop its stand, and poured fresh water into it, then cupped his washed hands with fresh water to wash his face.

It was when his hands touched his face that he remembered.

As if out of a dream, he saw Quicksilver smile, and touch Kit’s face, and tell him not to worry, that all would be well and that, between them, they could conquer the foul fiend who threatened Quicksilver’s reign and the world of men.

He heard Quicksilver’s sweet, confiding voice, smelled the lilac perfume of the elf lord, felt that white hand -- just like Silver’s -- caress his cheek.

Kit straightened. The red from his face dripped from his beard onto the basin, like drops of fresh blood.

Quicksilver. Was this a dream? A horrible illusion? Or had Quicksilver come to him, in this his dream? Or was it true?

All of his senses told him it was true, mind and heart and speeding breath. All of them. All.

Quicksilver had come to Kit and, all unsuspecting, had sought Kit’s help.

Oh, cursed fate, that thus would deliver Kit’s love to his hate.

And what had happened? What had Kit done? Had he done aught? Or was this deception? Vain delusion of a mind too strained?

But he remembered walking by the river and he remembered Quicksilver taking him to a tavern, and sharing a drink with him and telling him—

He couldn’t remember what Quicksilver had told him, or what might have happened to Quicksilver after.

Kit leaned forward, so his fevered forehead touched his cool plastered wall.

He prodded at his memory but still found it divided by that black, impenetrable partition. So were the two parts of Kit divided, like a child that, once separated from the mother, becomes lost in the multitudinous world, never to be found again.

He stared at the basin, with mute horror, contemplating anew this red horror that stained the white porcelain.

Was some of that blood, fresh again upon the touch of water, Quicksilver’s immortal blood?

The thought froze the blood in Kit’s own veins. Had he then committed that ultimate betrayal, and tore his love to pieces?

Had he -- had the wolf in Kit, using Kit’s body -- feasted upon the flesh of the king of elves?

Sickness, horrible sickness overpowered Kit’s reasoning, and he swallowed hard, and leaned against the wall, too weak to move, while tears gathered in his eyes and his breath came in sobs.

Kit remembered Quicksilver with painful clarity. He remembered Quicksilver standing beside him, asking his help. Quicksilver’s moss-green eyes filled with sweet appeal he’d never before shown Kit.

And all the while, deaf-mute, unable to express his fear and his warning, Kit had felt himself pushed down and down into the black room of his mind and out of the way.

Oh, curse Kit’s intemperate heart, his quick jealousy and boiling blood that had led him into the clutches of the wolf.

His mind in turmoil, Kit sank to his knees on the floor, holding his wet hands to his bloodied face.

Had he killed Quicksilver? And Silver also, withal? Had his hand, his mouth, his own body put an end to that dear body that should have lasted all eternity and the world beyond?

Kit heard a sob as from a long way off, and realized he cried. What had been a calm acceptance of his murder of innocents, turned now in his mind and heart to raging storm, the waves of blood turned against himself. If that blood was Quicksilver’s also, then Kit did not wish to live. If Quicksilver was dead, then let the world dissolve, for what was the gross substance of the Earth, compared to Silver’s body, to Quicksilver’s wit, to the substance and light of Kit’s elven love?

He trembled as if with a cold wind. If Quicksilver was dead, the world
would
dissolve. For how much more fodder would the rebellious dark elf need than that magical life?

If Quicksilver was dead, the world was dead withal and, amid the shard and ruin of this Earth would Kit ramp and the wolf reign in blood and terror.

In despair, Kit let his hands fall. They fell upon the cold iron of the stand that held up his porcelain basin.

A flare of light, blue and white, and Kit felt a burn upon the flesh of his palms, and smelled the scorch upon the air.

Yet he scant noticed the pain that smarted along his hands. Unminding, he took his right hand to his mouth, touched it to his lips.

What had happened in his mind interested him more, for there, for a moment, the black wall had parted like a curtain. It had closed again, almost immediately. But it had parted long enough for Kit to glimpse....

A memory crossed the black wall within Kit’s mind, a memory of stalking life, smelling it bright, hot, appetizing. He remembered bringing humans down and tearing them, and feeding, not so much on the flesh and blood, but on the suffering and agony of the victim.

The memory froze him as though ice, creeping in at his finger tips, at his toe tips, climbed his limbs through accustomed route, bringing numbness and insensitivity with it.

Shaking with cold, Kit heard himself still sobbing, and could no more stop it than he could stop shivering, or stop mourning for his elven love whom he had killed.

Or had he killed Quicksilver? Did the wolf have that much power? Kit would imagine that if the wolf still needed, with craving hunger and necessary cruelty, to slay humans for his sustenance, so that he might grow strong enough for his aim, he, perforce, did not have enough power to dethrone the very king of elves.

Or did he now? Were the murders just cruelty in action? Were they no more than an exercise of that active want of heart that Kit himself had known in himself now and then?

Oh, no denying it, nor would Kit try it, that the wolf had come to Kit because of their likeness. Something of Kit’s unsoundness resonated with the wolf’s evil, both like a bell tuned to the same note, and in that note, they’d recognized each other, and the wolf had found entrance into Kit’s mind.

But yet, the stalking and the craving felt like hunger.

Kit must know. He must know what had become of his love.

Taking a deep breath, he set his injured hands again to the cold iron, and, writhing in silent agony, half-mad with the pain, looked within, to see the curtain part once more.

Behind that wall turned curtain the wolf cowered, cringing from the pain, more than even Kit did.

What came at Kit from the wolf’s own mind was a sense that Sylvanus, the wolf, needed that life, needed that power that he so craved, so he could -- dethrone another dark monarch, his superior, and thus become ruler, sole ruler of human and elfland. But he didn’t have that power yet.

The knowledge spread like a balm from Kit’s heart to soothe his lips contorted in spasm. Little by little, sobs quit emerging, of their own, from his tortured chest.

Holding his hands onto the iron, not caring if he lost his hands wherewithal, if his capacity to write plays was gone when this was done, Kit felt a mad rush of energy tremble through his limbs, a mad need to do something, anything, to match the inner frenzy of his search for what he had lost.

In a rush, he let go of the stand. In a rush, he stood, and threw cold water over his face, his hair, wringing bloody stain from them, and pouring the water out, and then again, pouring more water on the basin, and washing as much as he could from himself, before -- inevitably -- calling for the landlady to bring him more water.

While his hands washed at the blood, he approached the black wall in his mind. A stealthy agent was what was needed, and Kit had been stealthy enough in the past, and often spied on others, so why shouldn’t he -- now -- spy upon the invader in his soul.

His heart pounding, from the frenetic activity of his hands, as much as from his inner search, his inner fear, Kit approached the wall in his mind.

He poured fresh water into the basin and washed himself, the attenuated red color in the basin, still showing blood but less of it.

Again he set his hands to the iron, their pain somewhat eased by the cold water. Again he set a mental ear to his mind, and reached mental fingers to the needed knowledge.