The Book of Transformations (31 page)

‘It must have been quite something to live with,’ Fulcrom said.

‘You have no idea.’ Lan went on to describe how difficult her upbringing had been, but spoke always with a wry smile. ‘It’s easier for me if I forgive people, if I think about their needs, make excuses for them. I believe we’re all still like children, just grown a little older. We still blunder around making mistakes, judging people based on our own limited experiences, lashing out at what we fear. We’re all still scared of something. If I think of us all like that, it’s easier to forgive.’

Lan was bewitching, holding his attention for longer than any woman in a long time, and he found her increasingly difficult to resist. It seemed those ghosts of his were growing fainter by the heartbeat.

*

Lan paid for the meal and drinks. She said she earned more than enough being a Knight, and she didn’t quite know what to do with all the money. Begrudgingly, Fulcrom permitted her the gesture. Afterwards they took a walk along one of the bridges across the city – not one of the massive ones that horses trudged across daily, dragging wares from iren to iren and rattling the stonework to dust. This was one of the daintier, more ethereal structures, with tall arches and wooden trusses. Fulcrom tried to ignore the bitter winds and the plummeting temperature, instead dwelling on the things he’d not really had time for before: the stars, the way the moonlight skimmed across the slate tops of houses, the graceful arcs of hunting pterodettes, the deep black tundra beyond the city walls.

The tenderness of a hand in his own.

He’d offered his cloak to Lan, but she said she couldn’t feel the cold since she had become a Knight. The fact was he found her remarkably attractive. He always had a thing for human women: their softness, their gentleness. Their vulnerability brought out his protective side, and a bunch of psychologies he didn’t care to analyse.

In hushed and broken conversation they discovered a little more about each other. Then they remained in silence for a while longer, looking out across the city, growing used to the feeling that they were alongside each other. Only once did he see how scared she was, too, a look in her eye, a nervous laugh, a shaking hand. Fulcrom had concluded that it didn’t matter who she had been – it had all served to present her as she was: as a beautiful woman, standing by his side.

Later, Lan walked Fulcrom home, an irony that wasn’t lost on him. She kept on jumping up the sides of buildings, showing off, a little excited by alcohol perhaps, but he liked her sudden childlike tendencies, a playfulness.

Outside his building, they held each other’s gaze and hands. She was in control now. She knew that he liked her, and she was enjoying the moment. It impressed him, to see her so confident. Gently, they moved their faces closer together, and she kept her lips slightly away from his own, so he could feel her breath on his face. It had been so long since he’d felt like this, been so long that he’d almost forgotten how to do it.

Lan kissed him with such a softness that it sent a warm shudder through him, and then applied passion, pushing him back against the cold wall of his building.

She removed her lips as quickly as she had placed them on his, and smiled saucily. ‘Want to see what else I can do?’ she asked.

They kissed again and she seemed to vibrate, and suddenly whatever powers she had activated slipped into him, fizzing down every nerve in his body like a static shock. She began to laugh. After a peck on his jaw she turned to walk down the street. A moment later he saw her running up the side of a limestone hotel, and up onto a bridge, vanishing into the night.

He headed inside, up the stairs, into his empty apartment.

Alone, he got changed into thick nightwear and folded his clothes neatly on the chair by his bed. His tired, beatific mind didn’t want to shut off, and he lay there for a few moments staring at the ceiling, and he couldn’t stop smiling.

Suddenly, a wind gusted into his apartment, and for some fathomless reason, he felt he wasn’t alone.

A voice, definitely female and coming in a whisper, was calling out his name. It seemed to linger in the air like a plume of smoke, slowly repeating itself, and then, much harder, in the centre of his mind: ‘I saw your new fancy woman.’

‘Who’s there?’ Fulcrom lurched out of his bed and stumbled bleary-eyed around the room, trying to find his way around in the dark. A beam of moonlight pierced his curtains, scattering shine on the glossy objects in his room – the polished wood, his boots, the picture frames. He stood with his hands out wide, ready to grapple with his intruder. His tail darted back and forth in anticipation beneath his nightshirt, and through the echoes of sleep he tried to remember where he kept his spare blades.

The voice, a blur, came from all sides: ‘What, you don’t remember me?’

‘What the fuck is going on?’ he spluttered. ‘Where are you? Who are you?’

‘I’m insulted,’ the voice said, and laughed. ‘I’m in the bathroom.’

Fulcrom stumbled across his room, guided more by memory than vision. He could feel his pulse racing. He placed his shoulder to the door frame, and glanced around for an object: there, on the shelf, the candlestick. He cautiously lifted the heavy brass object and brought it in front of him.

Tentatively, he eased the door open . . .

Even in this small room, Fulcrom could see no presence, no figure, just the metal bath and a small white cupboard. The grey and red tiles were cold underfoot. A chill went through him.

‘I . . . I can’t see anyone.’

‘Try the mirror, sugar.’ Another chill, this one deep in his core. He recognized this voice, or at least he thought he did.
It’s not possible
. . . For a long while he didn’t turn around.

Eventually he forced himself to look and there, in the wide, circular mirror a person stared back at him – and not just any person.

It was Adena, his dead wife.

Dumbly, Fulcrom dropped the candlestick, and it smashed one of the tiles, but he wasn’t distracted from gaping at the image in the mirror. ‘You’re . . . you died.’

Almost completely white-skinned, with lank black hair and a heavy fringe, and with a wound at her neck that must have come from the crossbow bolt that had hit her on the day she was killed, Adena didn’t look particularly alive. Seeing her now confirmed just how much Adena looked like Lan – or would have done if Adena was, in fact, alive.

‘I did,’ Adena said.

‘So how come . . .’ Fulcrom gestured wildly at the mirror. ‘How come you’re here? Is this still a dream?’

‘For you? I don’t think so. For me, I have no idea. It kind of feels like I’ve woken up from a really long dream though.’

Fulcrom struggled to believe what was happening. He stormed out of the room, flung open a window to let the bitterly cold air wake him even further. Clouds of his own heavy breath drifted away into the evening. After a moment he turned and walked hesitantly back into the bathroom, confident that the phantasm in the mirror would be gone.

Adena was still there, smiling meekly. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Still here.’

Fulcrom snapped into full analytical mode.

On a closer inspection, she was glowing, ever so slightly, as if washed in moonlight. She wore thin white rags, and her skin seemed a little blue and unhealthy. There was nothing behind her save the reflection of some items in his own bathroom. She was just there, in the mirror – an apparition. He questioned whether or not he was dreaming, whether or not he had been drugged or taken hallucinogens, but he didn’t think so.

‘She seems nice, the new girl,’ Adena declared. ‘I like her.’

‘Lan?’ Fulcrom spluttered, feeling a sudden and irrational bout of guilt. ‘How could you
possibly
know about her?’

‘Oh, well . . . You can kind of see stuff when you’re in this state. But, I guess you are allowed to see other women. I mean, I am
dead
after all.’

‘How did you get here, in the mirror?’

‘The priest set us free. I don’t know what he did exactly, but after the priest’s visit, some of us seemed to be able to get out of there.’ She gestured down below. ‘Though, it has to be said, most couldn’t be bothered – they’d had enough of the living – it was those who just wanted to come back with unfinished business, that kind of thing. You’re looking well by the way, sugar.’

‘The priest,’ Fulcrom said.

‘Yes, Ulryk,’ Adena replied. ‘Nice man, if a little silly when he gets excited. He means well though.’

Ulryk . . . how is he behind this?
‘I don’t understand. You were killed, not put in some gaol – so how could he
free
you?’

‘I wasn’t burned, remember?’ Adena said. ‘The authorities thought I was a criminal. They thought I was in on that robbery and refused to burn me. They buried me – you must have watched them lower my corpse into the ground? Don’t you remember?’

‘Well, yes, I . . .’ Fulcrom perched on a stool and pressed his face into his hands, recalling the faces of the mourners and the rain splashing on the mud as her coffin was lowered into the earth. After a moment he looked up again. ‘I did try to explain to them that it was a misunderstanding – even tried to pull strings behind the scenes.’

‘I know, my love.’ Adena’s face was serene, if a little ethereal. Very faintly the texture of her skin altered, tiny patterns moving just beneath the surface.

‘What happened after that?’ Fulcrom asked.

‘My soul was trapped beneath the city, just like every other soul who wasn’t burned on a pyre and set free.’ She chuckled. ‘I suppose it means the Jorsalir priests were right about something. And you know what, there are a surprising number of us down there, and not just criminals who aren’t allowed to have their souls freed – although even most of them say they were innocent anyway. So we are all there, underneath Villjamur, doing what we’ve done for as long as any of us can remember, and Ulryk manages to gain entrance to wherever it is we were . . . I want to say living, but that’s not quite right, is it?’

Fulcrom was amazed at how light-hearted she was taking all this. She never did take anything seriously, even when she was still alive –
Snap out of it, idiot. This doesn’t prove anything.

Adena continued. ‘Ulryk gave his best religious mumbo-jumbo to set us free, but I think he meant to some kind of heaven. He did some spells, I think, from a book which he was carrying, and I’m not sure what happened, but we all just followed him right out of the underworld and through some strange passageways and up to the city. It took us a while, but previously we’d never been able to leave the underworld. All of us were trapped there, somewhere under Villjamur.’

Fulcrom tried to process all of this, trying not to laugh at how ridiculous it all sounded. Worst of all was that he was inclined to believe her.

‘I came straight to see you,’ Adena said, ‘though at the moment I only appear in mirrors. Some of the others are able to move about the streets – I’m hoping maybe I can, too. So then, tell me all about Lan.’

Fulcrom turned away. ‘I don’t want to talk about Lan.’

‘Why not? She’s important to you, and you’re important to me.’

‘I just don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Oh, come on, I don’t want us to argue on my first night back. That’s all we used to do towards the end.’

Fulcrom was hurt. ‘We did not.’

‘You probably don’t remember, burying yourself in your work. My memories are preserved, once they returned to me. They say, in the underworld, that the living have a habit of killing reality. As soon as something’s happened, it’s distorted from what it used to be.’

Maybe she was right. He was always forgiving her for something or other, always letting her get away with whatever she wanted. He was a pushover, and he remembered now.

‘Are you just stuck there, in the mirror?’

‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘For now I can’t go any further than this. You don’t just appear back in this world, apparently – you make slow transitions. Perhaps I can take more of a physical form soon.’

‘And who exactly gives you such information?’ Fulcrom asked, exasperated. ‘Is there a clinic you all go to where you have a nice chat about coming back to life?’

‘Now don’t be sarcastic, sugar. You were always a perfect gent when I was alive.’

Again a sigh, again staring at the floor, the wall, anywhere but at the girl he’d tried hard to let go of for all these years. Eventually he faced her only to say, ‘I need to sleep.’

‘Of course you do – you go ahead, and I’ll be back soon.’

‘Knock before you do,’ he replied, but her image was already beginning to ebb away. The room suddenly lost one chill when he noticed another from the window by his bed – and he walked over to close it. But, just before he did, he swore he could see a couple of pale-glowing figures progressing across the bridges.

He couldn’t be bothered to explore that. He was tired, upset, and he was struggling to suppress his memories.

*

Lan lay awake on her side, glancing out of her bedroom window. Huge columns of snow drifted across the sea, like white banners floating in the breeze, and behind that slate-grey skies extended into the distance.