Aspects, p.20
Aspects, page 20
It was a bright day, and the halls were sun-warmed. The second-floor breakfast room was flooded with light; it was empty, though she could smell hot bacon. The two double doors to the terrace were open.
Birch appeared in a doorway, a great black silhouette in his plain black gown. “Goddess’s morning to you, Longlight. And it is Her own day out there. Will you please to join us?”
The terrace was built on top of the bay window of the great hall. A waist-high stone railing ran around the outer edges, and wooden poles supported a canvas sunshade, though it was rolled back now and the sun was in glory. A table was set out, with a silver tea service and a partly covered basket of muffins. Strange, in a dark red gown, sat at the breakfast table; Dany, who wore a loose golden robe, was wiping what seemed to be a bit of honey from Strange’s sleeve. A covered service cart was to one side; Birch lifted the lid. “We still have some kippers and bacon, and plenty of muffins. Would you like eggs?”
“Yes.”
Birch leaned through the door. “Gaily, dear,” he called, and a moment later a tall, thin woman in a white apron appeared. She seemed to be floating above the floor; she was almost frighteningly animated. “Morning, morning, Lady. So it’s eggs, then? How shall they be?”
“Just shirred would be fine.”
“No cheese? No mushrooms? And there’s a lovely bit of salmon.”
“The salmon, thank you.”
“And then surely a little green onion.” Gaily’s smile and tone made green onion seem a treasure from afar.
“I leave it to you,” Longlight said.
Gaily laughed aloud. “Leave it to me, now really. Well, I’ll wrestle it out as I can, thank you, milady.” She floated away.
Strange said, “The story is that, as a baby, she was named Grace, in hope. Then for her first half year she never smiled nor giggled. I think her parents were too worried to notice if she was developing any graces or not. The priest said, ‘Call her Gaily. It can’t harm, and if she doesn’t laugh by her first birthday, we’ll try Grace again.’ You can see the result.”
Birch pulled back a chair for Longlight. “Naming babies is a more daunting prospect than most people imagine. I’ve been asked only twice.”
Longlight said, “How did it go?”
“Oh, one’s eyes made him a Bluely for certain, and the other seemed to like Pineblossom. Fortunately I’m a country priest. If people want a Quercian name, or Pandekt, or something from literature, they usually manage on their own.” He paused, thoughtful. “Strange, is there one of those Ancient Names and Their Meanings books around somewhere?”
“That should be in the downstairs annex. Or else upper west. Black or green tea, Longlight?”
“Black, please. No milk. Is there honey?”
“Certainly. And we still have muffins with bacon, apricot, and—no, the brown bread are gone.”
“Oh.…”
“One of each, then. We probably won’t have a formal lunch today. Hard to say when anyone else will be awake.”
“I’m not the last one up, then.”
Strange laughed. “Reccan’s about somewhere; she hardly needs sleep at all. But certainly not Varic or Winterhill. Edaire and Silvern, well—I don’t expect to see them before dinner, and possibly not until tomorrow.” Strange’s smile made the point without any hint of the improper.
Dany passed the butter and honey. A breeze rustled the canvas shade, and somewhere a bird sang. Across the courtyard, in the lake, as predicted, Agate’s ice sculpture was entirely gone.
Gaily danced onto the terrace, bearing a covered platter. She whisked away the lid, and a cloud of scent, sharp and delicate, drifted up from the eggs with salmon. They glistened and shivered on the plate, rosy and golden.
Birch held his breath, said, “Thunder and boom. Dany, give me a muffin quick, before—”
“The hens won’t miss them,” Gaily said, “and the salmon’s past caring.”
“Oh—I suppose if you would, Gaily—”
Gaily said to Longlight, “You can give him a taste if he starts to pace and fret, but don’t you wait him, or yours’ll go cold, and he’ll wait your seconds, and we’ll be up to our eyes in cold fish and eggs.” And she was gone again.
Longlight said to Birch, “Would you like some?”
“It would … be good for me to wait.”
Strange was laughing silently, rocking in his chair, holding Dany’s hand.
Longlight tasted her breakfast. It was, for just a moment, disappointing; nothing short of transcendence could have followed that presentation. But it was good beyond any question, the onion unobtrusive below the smoky-sharp fish. Bread crumbs, soft without being mushy, gave it texture, and there were at least two more ingredients she didn’t wish to stop and identify.
Next to her, Birch ate a bacon muffin without any butter, sitting up straight in his chair. His eyes gave him away, though.
Longlight saw him, then, as he must have been when young: a big, happy boy, from a happy world where his size and gentleness did not mark him out as a fool or worse. Perhaps he had been scraped a little by the inevitable, meaningless cruelties of childhood, but not scarred by them.
As Gaily delivered Birch’s plate, Strange said, “Longlight, do you still wish to play battleboard at four?”
“Of course.”
“Then I will see you then if not before. Remember that the House and grounds are yours: if there’s anything you desire, ask, and someone will find someone who’ll try to remember where to find it.” Dany pushed him back into the House.
Birch said, “I need to get some things from the Dark Room, for tomorrow. It would be nice to have someone else along. Would you care to come with me?”
“The Dark Room? Why—yes, I will.”
“I will appreciate it. Do finish your breakfast. There’s no hurry.”
So they had more tea, and shared the last apricot muffin. Gaily did come back to check that more eggs weren’t needed; told no, she rolled the serving cart away, singing something about an Ironway motive, with a great deal of “Huff, huff, chuff!” on the chorus.
Birch said, “Shall we go?”
They walked down the central stairs, the ones circling the lift—Birch said, “I prefer to leave the car wherever Strange did”—to the lowest level, and went through the door that did not lead to the arenetto. It opened onto a short corridor, lit adequately by glasswicks. Birch opened the first door on the right, held it for Longlight. As she passed, he produced a large bronze ring with three keys. Two were large but conventional finger bones; the third was about a span long, with a complex, slotted web.
Beyond the door was a rather small room, a little larger than one of the apartment parlors upstairs. It was lined with maple bookcases, from just above knee height to the low ceiling. Below the books was a bronze band, deeply cut with a knot pattern, and below that old, dark leather wainscoting. On the far wall, a glass case held a collection of coins displayed on plum-colored velvet. In the middle of the room were a large, soft chair and footrest covered in green plush, with a little bronze side table and a standing lamp.
It was a cozy little study, but it certainly was no Dark Room. Unless—Longlight looked closely at some of the books: masonry, gardening, history of arms and armor.
Birch said, “This is the annex library. Remind me to look for that names book when we come back out.”
“Out?”
Birch grinned, a boy full of mischief, and knelt by the left-hand wall. He ran his fingers along the metal band, then took out the large key. Its web fit into a bit of the engraved pattern. Birch pushed it into the slot, turned it firmly. Within the wall, there was a series of muffled ratchetings, like a clock winding up to strike. Then came a sort of brazen groan. Birch withdrew the key, hooked his fingertips beneath the bookcase, and swung a section of the wall outward.
Longlight said, “I think I’m impressed.”
Birch grinned broader yet. “It’s something of a joke. There are a number of secret places and trick panels in the House, but none of them are very sinister. No peepholes in the bedrooms and baths, I assure you. Strange calls it the House’s sense of humor. This way.”
A shelf just inside the hidden door held some small lanterns and a box of phosphors. Birch struck a fire and lit two lamps, giving one to Longlight.
They were at the end of a hallway not much more than a step wide and barely higher than Birch’s head. The walls were rough mortared stone; every few steps there was a wooden arch with an iron lamp hook. The floor was smooth concrete. The air was quite cool and fresh, with a faint draft in their faces.
Longlight said, “Are there set traps?”
Birch laughed. “No. But mind how you go; the walls scrape hard, as I’ve reason to know.”
Longlight counted thirty of her own paces, just over twenty-five steps of measure, and four of the wooden arches. Then the hall turned right and ended in an alcove housing a large iron door that looked stout enough for the National Treasury.
Birch put a hand against the iron door, turned the heavy key ring over in his big hand. “Has Strange told you about this place? Not the Room, I mean, but the place it occupies?”
“No.”
“When the House was being built, the crew digging the foundation broke into an underground chamber. The entrance had caved in, and there were two skeletons inside. It had been a sacred place, and a Seer’s Seat. Eventually the local records were located—this was two hundred years ago, of course, and Corons weren’t answerable to Parliament for this sort of thing—and it was worked out that the occupants were a priest and acolyte who’d disappeared about four hundred fifty years before the picks opened things up. The papers are in the House, if that sort of thing interests you.”
“Is it still a Seat?”
“No. The lines of power are long broken. And the temple,” he said, his voice even and calm and serious, “was one of those old faiths that any conscientious priest counsels against and the law sometimes has to forbid. However: I know of no danger within, physical or sorcerous.”
“I see,” she said, feeling a very small chill.
“I’ve been thinking on this ever since you asked about traps. Spiritual danger is harder to define than a crossbow and trip wire, but I don’t think you’re either weak of spirit or lightly suggestible. I tell you this because you ought to know it, not because there’s anything you should fear.”
“My own house has a Dark Room,” she said. She did not say that it was at the center of a dank stone maze, purpose-built by her ancestors, and that a duty of every Coron of her line was to design a new scheme of death traps around the Room.
Birch nodded. “Usually Strange keeps the keys, of course. In Dany’s country they have something like our Rooms, a house in every town, called the end house. But only a priest may go there, and afterward, the priest has to walk around town for half a day, so that any Demons following will lose interest. Our ways are hard for her, sometimes; it’s her duty, as she sees it, to be with Strange, but when he goes to the Dark Room, well, that’s the End House and she can’t enter.
“But things fit together, in their own ways. In Nisimene, a very wise person may have the status of a priest, though the sage—they’re called Sky’s-Bridges—never claim such status, if you follow that. Agate pointed out to Dany that Strange was without question a Sky’s-Bridge, and that put everything in place.”
He put one of the smaller keys into a hole central on the iron door. There was a click, loud, but rather anticlimactic. He pushed the door open, with a visible effort. “Go in; the door is sprung to close.”
She did so. Her lantern lit up a dancing skeleton, and she caught her breath. It was a painting on the wall, in colors that must once have been very bright. One bony hand held a jester’s taddelix, shaking the clappers; the other pointed the way ahead. The bones were followed by flesh, a long line of people dancing after. Their clothes were of the earliest Midreigns and represented the whole world: nobles and beggars, bailiffs and thieves, priests and dung-rakers, a sorcerer wreathed in thunderheads and a child clutching a toy horse. Longlight moved her light, following the mural procession halfway around the room. They were all the living, of course, on their way to the end. When the march was staged for festivals, the people in costume were called Mori dancers.
The dancing-master Death was wrapped in a white ribbon with an inscription: the letters were antique and faded past legibility, but Longlight knew what it said:
Who or why or when or whether,
You and I shall dance together.
The door closed with a boom and a click. Birch held up the two small keys on the ring. “One to enter, the other to leave. So you know.” She nodded. In her memory, the traps in her own house had never caught anyone, but they were lethal enough. A Dark Room was the spiritual drain of its house, the place where rage and terror, all the nightside emotions, collected. If one believed there to be any reality to that, the Room had to be guarded by real force.
Birch set his lantern into a polished metal bowl, filling the room with hazy light. The chamber was an imprecise circle six or seven steps across. About half the circumference was plastered, with the Mori mural painted on; the rest was raw stone, with alcoves and ledges holding idols of stone and metal and ancient wood. At the center of the room was a stone chair with a low back, carved and pierced over its whole surface. Soft metal had been hammered into the grooves. It was a kind of work old before the Quercians had developed any thought of building an empire; before they had learned to build boats.
Birch bent before a heavy wooden cabinet, opened the doors. Inside were shelves, holding at least ten objects wrapped in velvet. He carefully drew out two of them, placed them on the top of the box. One was flat, the other narrow. The cloth wrapping them was old, though not seriously worn; it had faded to a dusty rose color, from either crimson or purple.
Birch closed the cabinet doors. “Take a look,” he said. “I won’t unwrap them again until tomorrow in the Bright Room.”
He folded back the velvet from the flat object. It was a disk of metal, with inlays of wood and stone veneer around the edge. At the center, a circle of the underlying metal had been polished to what must once have been mirror brightness, though now it was gray and hazy. The long wrapper contained a tray displaying a short sword, no longer than Birch’s forearm. It had a broad, double-edged blade with a triangular point, in dull gray metal that was glass-smooth, a crude design executed with great smithing skill. The hilt was in the same fashion: a heavy metal T that would have been hopelessly clumsy to hold in a fight, but was crisply and carefully worked, with unfaceted gems, like fat drops of colored water, set precisely into the metal.
“When I was twelve,” Birch said, “some people from another town brought my father one like this; it had been damaged, I don’t know how. They may never have said.”
“He must have been a very fine smith.”
“No, he wasn’t. He was a good worker, you understand, but he was just an ordinary ironsmith, never did jewelry work, nor even weapons, beyond sharpening a soldier’s bayonet or little knives like mine. But they insisted, and left it with him. He stood in the smithy, looking at it, and said—I was there with him, but he wasn’t talking to me—‘I don’t even know how to pray for the mending.’ And I said—something said—‘It is a work for Coris, because the sword is no longer a thing of mortals, but of Nature.’
“He called Coris to guide him at the forge, and he mended the sword. He said later, ‘They won’t break it again, I’m sure of that.’ We didn’t talk about it for almost three years.” He wrapped the cloth around the sword again, folding and tucking it with care. “Twelve to fifteen is a long time not to talk about a thing like that.”
Longlight said, “Did it happen again? The—”
He looked down at the scroll box. “Yes. She spoke to me again. And when I was fifteen, we went to talk to our priest—her name was Enolesia, which if your Pandekt won’t stretch, I won’t explain—and, well, now I am bound for Capel Storrow.”
“What does the Imagery’s name mean?” she said, hearing her voice echo off the stone walls.
“Oh, it was ‘Sorrow’ originally. A few hundred years ago, someone tried to soften it with a hard sound.”
His voice was hollow and ringing as well. Longlight looked up from his hands, lightly resting on the sword tray, to his eyes. For a moment they seemed to flash. She thought of Varic’s eyes, in the whip of lights past the train window. The skin of her palms felt tight, and she thought of dark rooms, of mazes and set traps. She could hear the bowstring snap. She could feel the trip weight fall, its cord running in the sheave—
Suddenly Birch had his arm around her, holding her up. The sword and mirror were wrapped and tucked under his left arm. “It’s all right,” he said. “It happens. We’ll go now.”
When the lamp was removed from the reflector, the Dark Room was suddenly very black indeed. The iron door closed behind them, and they went back up the tunnel, followed by shadow.
They emerged into the book-lined room. Reccan was curled up snug in the green chair; the lamp threw a bright circle on the book in her lap. Another half dozen books were stacked in easy reach. She turned pages carefully, but with remarkable speed, gobbling down words by the plateful.
As Birch shut the concealed door, Reccan turned to smile at them. She held up a finger, pointed at a spot along the shelves, moved her hand in Dr. Soonest’s sign, and then went back to her furious reading.
Birch went to the indicated spot, counted books. “Twelve, thirteen—ah. Thank you, Reccan.” She waved without looking up, as Birch pulled Names: Their Voices from the shelf. Without further sound, they left the annex.
As they climbed the stairs, Longlight said, “I suppose she’s only recently learned to read.”
“That is so. Did Varic tell you?”
