Icarus Descending (11 page)

Trevor turned to me, his enhancer glinting softly in the firelight. “Would you like something hot to drink? Tea, or we could heat some wine. Or there’s brandy—not very good, but it doesn’t seem to have killed your friend yet.”

Miss Scarlet smiled somewhat nervously and raised her glass. “It’s
very
good, I recommend it.”

I asked for brandy. Giles passed me on his way to the liquor cabinet. The smell of his sweat cut through that of wood-smoke; but there was another scent as well, something like lemons but more pungent. In a moment it was gone, swallowed by the smoke.

Jane refused anything and asked after her clothes and pistol.

“They’re drying in the kitchen,” Trevor explained. “Your gun’s there, too—it’s safe, we’ve got quite enough of our own, thank you.”

Jane frowned but said nothing. Trevor yawned noisily, then settled into a large armchair near the fire. Its torn leather arms had been patched with plastic tape, but he fit comfortably in it and sighed as he leaned back, adjusting his enhancer. “Now: who goes first? You or us?”

“Oh, them, I think,” Giles said airily. He grinned and handed me a brandy snifter. I took a sip and winced. The liquor was raw but powerful, and had a pleasantly woodsy aftertaste. “We put it up ourselves, but that was before the grapes were blighted—what was it, ten years ago?—a viral strike
right here,
the very first if you can believe it, we’ve been
so
lucky. The animals were all right but the plants died. They’ve still never come back as they were before.” He turned to me, his blue eyes wide. “But you—where did
you
all come from?”

I hesitated, wondering if it was wise to betray our history. But it seemed we had no choice, and certainly our hosts appeared friendly. Even the aardman on the floor sat calmly, staring up at me with sharp foxy eyes.

So we told them, Miss Scarlet and I interrupting each other at first, Jane gradually cutting in with her own details of the fall of the City of Trees: the Mad Aviator who had commandeered the armory in the Cathedral; the bloody rituals he had devised there, setting up my twin, Raphael Miramar, as some kind of dark god; the murder of so many innocent Paphians and other revelers during the feast of Winterlong. And finally, what had seemed to be the revelation of some true god on Saint Alaban’s Hill, where the Aviator had died.

“We left the City then,” Miss Scarlet finished. She tilted her head and sighed. “We have no idea, really, what we left behind us. When we looked back, it seemed the City was in flames—”

“Ascendant janissaries,” Jane said darkly. Despite refusing the brandy, she had warmed enough to our hosts to move her chair closer to the little circle gathered in front of the fire. “We saw them—fougas and other airships. Gryphons, I think—Wendy recognized them from HEL—”

“HEL?” Giles said sharply. He and Trevor exchanged glances, and Fossa’s ears pricked up. “The Human Engineering Laboratory?”

I glared at Jane, then nodded reluctantly. The men looked at me with new interest, Giles frowning a little. When after a minute they still said nothing, I pulled the hair back from my temples to display the scars left from the experimental surgery I had been subjected to by Dr. Harrow.

“You were interned there?” Trevor asked. I knew there were no human eyes behind that enhancer, but still I could feel his gaze on me, a heat that was almost painful.

“Ye-es.”

Hesitantly, I explained something of my history to them. My autism and the terrible price I had paid for its “cure”; my participation as a subject in the so-called Harrow Effect. Emma Harrow had been my teacher at HEL. She had reclaimed my mind from the shadow-world of autism. She had also made me into a monster, one of a battalion of children whose minds were manipulated for the Ascendant Autocracy’s own ends. I spoke of Dr. Harrow’s dream research, her work in deliberately inducing multiple personalities in children, and how I had been used as a neural conduit through which patients relived certain traumas in hopes of overcoming their effects. But I said nothing of the suicides I had provoked in my patients. Nor did I mention Dr. Harrow’s suicide, or the demonic image of the Boy in the Tree, the hypostate I had somehow been imprinted with during Dr. Harrow’s own forbidden experiments with me. I did not know if they would believe me. I remembered Justice’s dubious expression when I first told him how the Boy had come to me: a sinister occult figure thousands of years old, the living dream-image of Death that haunted my dreams and waking alike, and which seemed to want to use me as a channel for loosing some ancient darkness upon the City.

But the Boy had fled me at the Engulfed Cathedral. I believed he was dead, if such a thing can die; or that he had returned to whatever infernal place had spawned him. I still did not understand that such dark gods do not die; that they only wait in the cold spaces between the stars, and take as hosts those beings, human or otherwise, who are careless enough to welcome them.

If only I had told Giles and Trevor then what I knew! But I was afraid and weary with grief, and anxious to end my tale. When at last I finished, the room remained silent for some time. Miss Scarlet sighed deeply. Curled in a chair beside her, Jane bit her fingernails and frowned at the aardman. A cold draft cut through the heavy air. The fire snapped; more smoke filled the room. Giles stood, coughing. He adjusted the damper, then poured himself another brandy.

Alone in his armchair, Trevor removed his enhancer and sat with his head tilted back. Set within the ruined hollows of his eyes, the two gleaming optics sent motes of blue flickering across the ceiling. He tapped the enhancer on the edge of his chair absently, his mouth set in a half-smile. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking, but there was something strange about that smile; something fanatical, almost demonic. I was grateful he had no human eyes. I don’t know if I could have borne gazing into them and seeing what fires lit his mind.

In front of the hearth the aardman Fossa yawned, long pink tongue unfurling, and covered his mouth with one great misshapen hand. Giles finished his brandy and set the empty glass on a table. Turning to his partner, he said, “Margalis Tast’annin. The one she calls the Aviator. It must be the same man.”

Trevor nodded, still silent. Fossa growled softly. The man leaned forward, replacing the enhancer and turning its blank gaze upon me.

“Well. This is all very interesting. You see, I have also had some experience in HEL.”

He laughed at my expression. “Oh yes! Other people besides you have escaped and lived to tell the tale. I was a neurosurgeon there for many years—their finest surgeon, if I may say so. As a matter of fact, I am quite familiar with what you refer to as the Harrow Effect. I was one of the researchers involved with the earliest stages of the project. This was many,
many
years before your time.”

“But—how could you?” I stammered. Trevor shook a finger at me and smiled.

“The world is smaller than you think, Wendy. Over the centuries so many people have died, and those of us who remain—well, if you achieve a certain level of proficiency, a certain
radiance,
if you will—why then, you will meet the others like yourself. Everything that rises must converge.”

He paused, his mouth twitching into an odd smile. “Oh, yes, I knew all about your project. Even before Emma Harrow and the other NASNA people were brought into it. I had left the facility, but they recalled me, to help screen possible subjects during the selection process. Then Emma and I had a falling out over her methodology.

“Good god! They were sending janissaries into the wilderness searching for likely children to kidnap. Buying them from prostitutes in the capital. Dragging infants from their mothers, dragging the mothers along too, when they could.” He scowled, and I sank a little deeper into my chair. “Like with the geneslaves—this horrible notion that everything in the world exists solely for the Autocracy’s pleasure. People and animals mere toys for them to take apart and reassemble at will! I’ve never gotten used to their research methods, and I’m too old now to change my ideas about things like that. I prefer trying to reverse the surgical efforts of the Ascendancy, or working with the brains of those who are peacefully deceased. So I—
retired,
for good—and returned here. My family home: over six hundred years worth of Mallorys have lived at Seven Chimneys.”

I shook my head. “But—that’s incredible! When were you at HEL?”

“A long time ago. Before you were born. I met Giles shortly after I left.”

“They let you go?”

Trevor smiled grimly. “Oh, they weren’t very happy about it. Researchers for the Autocracy are like military personnel; one doesn’t just quit.”

“They were afraid of him,” Giles broke in. “They didn’t dare try to make him stay—”

I glanced over at Jane and Miss Scarlet. The chimpanzee had crawled from her chair and into her old Keeper’s lap, and huddled there in her tartan like a child’s toy. “Why—why were they afraid of you?” she asked.

Trevor smiled at the quaver in Miss Scarlet’s voice. “I daresay some people were afraid of your friend Wendy here when
she
left,” he said lightly. As he turned toward me, a cobalt gleam escaped from beneath his enhancer’s silvery rim. It gave him the look of some ancient cycladic statue, with his eyeless face and smooth skin. “But I held a certain amount of—well, you might call it seniority—and I had contacts with the Prime Ascendancy in Wichita, and the peons at HEL didn’t really want to cross
them.
And you know, of course, that there was trouble at HEL—?”

I shrugged uneasily. “I knew the Ascendants took over for Dr. Harrow.”

“That’s right—but not for very long. The NASNA force brought geneslaves with them—some energumens, the usual contingent of sexslaves and aardmen. This started rumors at the facility, that the energumens were going to be used instead of human subjects, and that the remaining human subjects would be killed. The energumens rioted. Several empaths and even some of the staff fled, but many of them sided with the geneslaves. They were all executed when Ascendant troops were called in. Only a skeleton staff remains there now, under protection of a janissary guard.

“But you understand, this is merely a single indicator of the changes that are happening everywhere now. There have been other rebellions, in other facilities around the world. The Ascendants are losing control of their territories. Those who remain at places like the Human Engineering Laboratory are desperate to keep some semblance of order. At HEL I know they work to redeem the work begun by Emma Harrow and her associates.”

He fell silent. A brooding expression clouded his face. I leaned back, stunned. Energumens and geneslaves at HEL? I remembered my friend Anna, one of the other empaths who had fled into the City with Gligor and Dr. Silverthorn. Had she known of this rebellion? Is that why she had risked leaving HEL? I shifted in my chair and pulled my blanket close to me. The room was starting to take on the contours of a place in a nightmare. The backdrop of smoke and leaping flames; Trevor’s impassive face beneath its enhancer; the faces of my friends pinched with exhaustion. There was a strange dreamlike clarity to all of this; and to Giles’s peculiar calm, and the snow beating relentlessly at the windows, and Fossa crouched on his haunches like the effigy of some half-human god.

Miss Scarlet broke the silence, turning to Trevor and smiling anxiously. “And so you retired from medicine and started an inn,” she exclaimed. “How nice!”

Trevor looked surprised, then nodded. “Well, er, yes. Of course, that’s exactly what I did.”

Giles gazed fondly at his partner. “This place has been an inn forever,” he said. “It’s almost as though the Mallorys just pass through so there’ll be someone to keep it company. Sometimes I think the house would go on even if we weren’t here to mind things.”

“But who
comes
here?” Jane shook her head, pointing at the fireplace, the ancient but well-kept video monitor, the chairs and tables beneath their linen shrouds. “It just—well, it all seems out of place. You can’t get much traffic—even in the City we seldom saw visitors.”

Giles shrugged, but his mouth seemed drawn as he replied, “Oh, you would be surprised. Ascendants pass through here more often than you’d think—business with HEL, and there was some trade with the City.”

“Those soldiers, then,” said Jane. “The ones we saw as we were leaving the City. Did they—did they come from here?”

Trevor shook his head. “We don’t accommodate troops. Commanders stay here. Special Agents, Imperators. Ascendant Governors, if they have the need to.”

I shuddered. Had we walked into a trap, then—a house whose owners were in collusion with the very people we were trying to flee? Ascendant Governors.
Commanders…

People like the Mad Aviator.

But then why had Trevor told us about the geneslave rebellion at HEL? If Trevor and Giles didn’t share our terror of the Ascendants, neither did they show any support for them. Trevor had worked at HEL, but he had disapproved of its methods and left. And I couldn’t believe that a Paphian—particularly a Saint-Alaban—would ever be in collusion with the Ascendants.

And then I remembered rumors I had heard about the Mad Aviator. It was my first day in the City of Trees. Justice and I were at the house of Lalagé Saint-Alaban; he was begging her for gossip, any news of what had befallen those in the City while he had been an Aide at HEL—

“There was trouble, Justice. A new Governor was sent here
—
but the Governors will never hear from him again…
.”

That Governor had been Tast’annin. The Curators had learned of his coming, somehow, and had been ready to betray him when he arrived in the City. Who told them? I glanced at Giles, who leaned against the mantel with arms crossed, a thoughtful expression on his amiable face. Then I looked aside at Trevor Mallory, whose family had owned this inn for centuries. I’d seen nothing else standing between here and the City of Trees. Where else would Tast’annin have stayed?

I swallowed, my mouth dry. The thought that they had betrayed him was more unsettling than the notion that they had not. You would have to be very brave, or very powerful, to set yourself against the Ascendant Autocracy. You would have to be
insane
to go up against Margalis Tast’annin. I took a long sip from my brandy and stared at the floor.