Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) (25 page)

“Look, it’s here!” said Oliver. “
Aurata’s Promise
. Finally!”

Daniel couldn’t speak. He felt blood drain from his head, churning through his veins like cold acid.

“What’s wrong?” Oliver still grinned, but his warmth turned to feral menace. “You’ve gone white. Would you care to explain why you shipped this work to a friend of yours, and not to me?”

*   *   *

Mist brought Stevie to a square box of a hotel beside the expressway—or distressway, as the locals termed it—that encircled the city center. She must have passed the hotel scores of times without noticing. It was a prosaic setting for a creature of glamorous, mystical descent … yet what had she expected? Unless he melted literally to mist each night, he must be staying somewhere.

She felt disoriented. It seemed so wrong, going to his room as if they’d met in a bar and were heading for an awkward one-night stand. Neither spoke as they took the elevator and emerged to walk along a carpeted corridor to his door. The room was spacious, with two queen-size beds and a small breakfast table. Stevie went to the window and looked out at a river of cars, brought to a standstill by the modest snowfall.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“I’m glad you are,” he answered. “I mean—not glad you lost your job. I feel it’s my fault. But speaking from a purely selfish point of view, I’m glad you’re here.” He added quickly, “I’ll book you a separate room. I’m sure the hotel’s not full.”

“Oh—thank you. I’ll pay for it myself, of course. But can we sort it out later? I can’t think straight.”

“You look frozen,” said Mist. He adjusted a control on a heating unit and she felt warm air blowing around her. “Sit down and rest. I can make coffee, or order room service?”

“Anything hot is fine. Or something stronger, I must admit.”

She removed her coat, while Mist got the coffeemaker going. When she turned around, he was placing several miniature bottles on the table.

“Oh my god, don’t take stuff from the minibar!” she exclaimed. “It costs a fortune. So they say, not that I’ve spent much time in hotels. They completely rip you off.”

He half-smiled, unconcerned. “I know. It doesn’t matter. My expenses all go on Dame Juliana’s credit card.”

Taken aback, she glared disapprovingly until he added with a rueful smile, “I know how that sounds, but one day, when I’m a position to pay her back, it won’t be the end of the world that a drink has cost me six pounds instead of three. Don’t worry.”

Mist brought her a mug of coffee and tipped brandy into it. She sat with her hands wrapped around the mug, thawing out. “This world is virtually impossible to live in if you have no identity,” she said. “I should know.”

“I suppose there are ways to fake it without human help, but I’m out of touch,” he said. “There are networks of Vaethyr living among humans. Perhaps I should have sought them out, but I was afraid Rufus might find me.” Removing his walking boots, he sat on one of the beds and leaned against the headboard. Stevie sipped her fiery coffee. Neither of them was inclined to make conversation for the sake of it, and this felt comforting.

Within minutes, she felt the brandy reaching her head. She went to the other bed and reclined on the quilt, propped up by fat pillows. “I was looking at the triptych, just before it was stolen. While I was standing in the street this evening, it came to me that some of the symbols carved on the pillars were
arrows
. As in pointers, not weapons.”

“Meaning what?” Mist looked intrigued.

“All I can make of it is this. Aurata’s standing there with her orb, pointing at a molten crack in the Earth. The arrows seem to indicate that this not just something that happened in the past. It will happen again in the future.”

“Great goddess of the Cauldron, I hope that’s not true,” Mist exclaimed in soft astonishment. She left him in thought for a while, then prompted him to go on.

“You got as far as the earthquake,” she said. “Can you tell me more? I’ve been writing it all on my laptop; I hope you don’t mind.”

He laughed and shrugged. “I’d rather know more about you.” He rested with a hand in his disarrayed blue-black hair. He had the carved disk under his hand and was tracing the carvings with one finger. Stevie saw trails of color following his fingertip like fish in a pond.

“Everything I told Frances, that’s all there is.”

Mist looked at her with clear disbelief, but didn’t press her. “All right.”

“So you carry on … if it’s not too difficult?”

“You’re easy to talk to and the pain is very well-worn, so I’ll try.”

*   *   *

He was in the chamber with nine others arrayed in a circle, the tenfold web a cat’s cradle of green fire streaking between their hands. In the middle glowed the Felixatus, emitting a hum like a mass groan of pain. Aurata’s face was dust-streaked and bore a look of stony fear he’d never seen before. But there was strength there, too. Like their mother, Aurata was a powerful web-weaver who kept her talents quiet.

“This is the beginning, not the end,” Veropardus kept saying, glaring straight at Aurata across the circle. The energy lines deformed the fabric of the Dusklands until it began to tear apart, pulling reality itself out of shape.

He hadn’t known how powerful Aurata was, until this moment. Then the combined force of his parents’ energy surged in like a fireball, turning the web to dazzling gold.

He cried out, knowing they were dead.

The ground trembled, rising like the backbone of a huge beast shouldering its way out of the earth. He tasted dust and sulfur. Everywhere, the towers of Azantios were toppling, the air shuddering with thunder and with human screams.

Mist screamed too. The tenfold web broke apart and vaporized. Its creators fled. He yelled but they didn’t hear him. He saw Aurata brought down by a pillar, saw Veropardus racing away through clouds of dust and falling rubble until the ground itself crumpled beneath them.

Mist fell and fell, as if down a long shaft full of smoke, until debris buried him. His hand closed on something cold and smooth, like glass. Then the universe shut down into blackness.

“I don’t know why I survived to crawl out, when the others did not,” he told Stevie. “I came round with part of the Felixatus in my hand, the lens from the top. I assumed the rest was destroyed; it’s incredible that Professor Manifold found the base. Anyway, Rufus and I were in such deep shock that we did little but survive like wild cats for countless years. Ice ages carved the land into different shapes, humans began to migrate and develop settlements. Aetherials came out of hibernation. We began to find each other. That was when Rufus and I discovered we’d been born too late for the
truly
golden age of the Aelyr, a time before Malikala arose, and when the Earth and Spiral were more closely entwined, porous to each other.”

“And dinosaurs roamed the Earth?” said Stevie.

He laughed. “Never saw a dinosaur. My guess is that our ancestors were still in primal energy forms that far back. Now the Felynx and other lost peoples are only remembered in fragments of folklore. We disdained violence, so we were bad at fighting. No wonder we lost our grasp on the world. The long, stretched-out lives we lead, versus the hot, aggressive energies of humans and their sheer overwhelming numbers: we stood no chance. So we gradually slipped away into myth.

“Still, Aetherials always continue in one form or another. When Rufus and I finally found a way into the Otherworld, we learned there had been changes. Malikala’s rule was over. Azantios was not the only city to have fallen to humans. Many displaced Vaethyr formed an army to invade the Spiral, led by one Jharag the Red, and there was quite a battle between Vaethyr and the Aelyr who didn’t want the Earth dwellers back. A peace agreement was reached, but to stop any future conflict, all portals between Earth and Otherworld were concealed and put under the control of the Great Gates. We could pass in and out but it wasn’t easy, and it was near-impossible for humans. Ironically, for all Rufus’s rage, we found we preferred life on Vaeth. It was what we were used to.”

“Did you really manage to forgive him about Azantios?” Stevie asked.

“No. That was too great a disaster for anyone to forgive. We fought and separated more times than I can count. Still, humans were becoming interesting and we were drawn to them out of sheer curiosity. We changed physically, to fit in among them … I could tell endless stories of Uruk, Egypt, Rome, India, Renaissance Europe, but let me just say that a pattern emerged. The Felynx doesn’t change its stripes, and Rufus entertained himself by stirring up all the chaos and misery he possibly could.”

“Trying to control him can’t have been much fun.”

“Sometimes it was,” Mist said darkly. “I’m ashamed to admit it, because my last promise to Poectilictis was that I’d stop Rufus. But I’m not the paragon my father seemed to think I was. I should have destroyed Rufus, but I couldn’t.”

Stevie bit her lower lip. “And now you don’t want to confront Rufus, because he … killed you?”

“Not by his own hand, but effectively, yes. Not only me, but a woman I loved. It was her death I can’t forgive.”

“What was her name?”

“Helena.”

“Helena,” she echoed softly. “She sounds like a goddess.”

“She was human. No chance of rebirth.”

“Some humans believe in reincarnation…” She exhaled. “Sorry, that verged on flippant. Can you talk about it? If not, say so and I’ll shut up.”

Mist lay back with one arm under his head. Stevie was a motionless shadow on the other bed, reclining on her side with her hair falling beautifully around her. Her blue and green dress was a patchwork of tie-dye print and lace panels, elegantly outlining her long, curvy body. The handkerchief-points of the hem revealed her bare feet and ankles. Only her eyes were animated: gleaming with interest, reacting to everything he said.

“We were in Amsterdam, Rufus and I, in the mid-seventeenth century. The Dutch Golden Age, as they called it later. It was a time of incredible change and energy, and Rufus always had to be at the heart of things. It was a tolerant city for its time, wealthy and no longer subservient to religious restrictions. Have you been there?”

Stevie looked mildly surprised to be asked. “No, but I’ve seen it in lots of photos and films. A very handsome, quirky city, isn’t it? I expect it’s changed hugely since your day.”

“Have they filled in the canals with concrete or knocked down the beautiful houses?”

“Of course not. You’d recognize the older areas. I’m trying to imagine what you saw, the streets full of traders instead of tourists. Their clothing. I’m seeing paintings by Breughel and Vermeer, lots of gloomy hues. Was everything tastefully grey and sepia in those days?”

Her tone made Mist laugh. “I remember a bright place. Many of the buildings were brand-new.”

He described barges plying the Amstel river, great ships bringing cargoes of spice from the East Indies. When he closed his eyes, the scenes came to life. Magnificent churches and lavish new houses, canals everywhere like curves of shimmering green silk.

“Those were wonderful years. We weren’t forever fighting each other, don’t think that, but we were always outsiders. Other Aetherials blend in with humans. Rufus and I, though, because we came from the early days, we stayed on the fringes, playacting at being part of life. Which is a shame, because the mortal world is so fascinating, always changing.”

“It sounds as if Rufus played a bit too hard, to compensate.”

“And my attempts to reason with him only egged him on. Often I’d give up and walk away for a while. I still had the Felixatus lens. Amsterdam was full of scientists and I wondered if someone could help me discover what the lens actually was. There was a man called Jaap de Witt who’d made a fortune from trade and now devoted his time to experimenting with microscopes and telescopes. So I went to his house with the lens to ask for his opinion.”

“Wasn’t Aelyr scientific knowledge more advanced?” Stevie opened two more brandies, tipped one into his glass and the other into her coffee mug.

“Not really, no. Why bother inventing the Archimedes screw, or penicillin, or electricity, when we could spin what we needed from the fabric of the Spiral itself? We interact differently with the universe, without putting names and labels on everything. There’s no real need for technology in the Spiral. The ancient skills still work, so our priorities are different.

“Science fascinated me, because humans evolved knowing nothing. Instead they had to find out for themselves, describe and explain the world through painstaking experiments. Often they got it wrong, but when they got it right—I can’t describe the exhilaration.”

“You sound like a seventeenth-century geek.” There was a smile in her voice.

Mist responded with a soft laugh. “I don’t know where I’ve heard the term ‘geek’ before, but it doesn’t sound like a compliment. I wanted to
learn
, rather than rollick around seducing people and upending their lives, like Rufus. Aetherials think they know everything—maybe some do—but humans don’t, so they take the trouble to find out. Jaap de Witt was part of that early movement.”

Mist tasted the atmosphere, as if he were still there. Jaap de Witt’s house was in the Grachtengordel, part of the new ring of canals and streets built for wealthy merchants. He made his way through Dam Square past the Nieuwe Kerk, threading between crowds of traders and citizens, then walking cobbled paths beside the canals. Rows of tall, grand houses rose on either side.

Young elm trees lined the bank. Fashionable couples were promenading; a coach-and-pair passed over a bridge, their reflection rippling in the water. Mist found the house of Jaap de Witt and looked up at its large windows set into pale brown brick. The neck gable that surmounted the roof was tall and curvaceous, embellished with carved dolphins and seashells.

Mist rang the doorbell and waited, feeling the hard smooth curve of the lens through the silk pouch that contained it. The last surviving part of the Felixatus. The day was warm, spring sunlight glistening. Presently a housekeeper with her hair tucked under a white cap answered, and led him inside to a reception room. Narrow at the front, these Dutch houses were cavernous inside, all treacly wood and luxurious furnishings.