Skip-sterns whipped past. Pilings did, and shadow came over them, Fishmarket's underside.
"Ye all right?" Jones yelled at him.
He was holding onto somebody who was holding onto him. He remembered it was a scared twelve year old. He looked at Jones in shock.
"Ye make a damn lot of noise!" Jones yelled over the engine-sound. They came into open night again, and the skip whipped into a turn. "Ye all right, f Lord's sake?"
"I'm fine!" he yelled back, and shivered the way the kid was shivering, with the wind going over him.
The walls of old Foundry going past as the skip leveled out.
Not Anastasi, he told himself, no way that Anastasi had reason to set on him now. Just a little problem Anastasi could straighten out—dropping a few words into Boregy's ear.
He believed that. He believed it because he had to believe it, because Anastasi, by the evidences he had given, could more afford to believe him than he could the Boregys. Honor was only a commodity, in the circles of the powerful. Lives could be bought as well as sold.
And for the meanwhile, —by some miracle involving Jones or the Angel who loved fools, —he was going home.
A DAY IN THE LIFE
by Lynn Abbey
Greening: a celebration of the triumph of spring over winter. Its origins went deep into human history, seemed rooted in life itself, even in Merovingen where the only plants grew in pots. Budded branches from the nearby manor-estates and hothouse flowers from the Chattelen had been brought to the city, coaxed into bloom, and draped from every available window and banister. The pace of life palpably quickened. Friendships were renewed and social obligations, which had been ignored in the wretched months, were remembered with lavish entertainments.
As in all things, House Kamat put on a proper show for the season—not too ostentatious, but certainly not miserly either. The wainscotting in all the public rooms was nearly hidden behind living draperies. A profligate number of candles recreated the warm reflections of a summer's twilight. In the dining-room a mountain of marzipan flowers was the centerpiece for a buffet of gargantuan proportions. Lively music came down from the grand stairway where a hired orchestra provided entertainment. Two hundred people were dancing, eating, laughing, and celebrating the end of a salt-air winter.
Andromeda Casserer Garin, allied with Kamat through a voluntary, exclusive marriage contract, and hostess of this affair, steered a course through the public rooms, exchanging pleasantries with her guests, and inspecting every detail with a commander's critical eye. She was radiant, gracious, and truly satisfied with the fruits of her labors. Everyone in Kamat had responsibilities, and she was the m'sera Kamat. Domestic regulation was her purview and evenings like this were the epitome of her achievement.
The orchestra began a ceremonial piece long associated with the Greening festival, and, more specifically, the consummation of the holiday feast. Guests migrated toward the atrium while liveried servants hastened to either side of the closed dining-room doors.
Like any other mercantile establishment of a certain size or reputation, the residence was riddled with private corridors. Members of the household and other initiates could move quickly and invisibly from one part to another, circumventing not only the public rooms, but also the shops, apartments and workrooms that did not participate in any of its rituals, but merely rented space. Thus the Kamats, who had been mingling with their guests, literally vanished into the woodwork in order to take their appropriate positions beside the candied violets, daffodils and baby-blue-eyes when the doors were opened.
Andromeda entered the by-ways from the parlor. Her path led over the atrium and past a dozen or more spyholes, each equipped with a focusing lens. Other, half-running footsteps echoed along side and above her, but she was the first to arrive and had a moment to contemplate her handiwork before other family members arrived.
It was an especial triumph. After twenty-five years of estrangement from the Garins and Casserers, her Nev Hettek families had accepted Kamat's invitation.
Nemesis Garin would never forgive her for a marriage which strengthened her husband's interest at the expense of her father's. But her mother and aunt, Folly and Dolor Casserer, had made the downriver journey. It was a token presence, yet it was also the vindication of Andromeda's adult life.
Richard and Marina arrived next. Richard was the image of her husband, and—perhaps because there was not room for two such men in her life—an enigma to her. Marina, though, could have passed for her younger sister. The girl had been a trial and a challenge, and confidant. Patrik Kamat, her husband's younger brother, and his three children were breathing hard as they emerged from the stairway. Finally, just as the orchestra was concluding the coda, Andromeda heard the sound of her beloved Nikolay's tread on the creaking boards.
The horns pealed the final chord. The glassware vibrated and the guests, on the far side still, broke into applause. Andromeda turned to face the doors, never for a instant doubting that her husband would manage to get to his place in time. It was the high point of her evening, of her year, of her life—and yet it was somehow terribly wrong.
The wide-eyed astonishment on her guests' faces did not focus on the sumptuous beauty of the feast, but on something well behind the laden tables. Andromeda turned slowly, feeling the movement of air against her face, the blood in her heart. Her eyes saw the tumbled-down shadow emerging from the private stairway.
Chaos erupted. Weights attached themselves to her arms. She struggled free and clawed her way into the dark wall between herself and her husband. The air itself called her name and held her back, but she was m'sera and her orders were finally obeyed.
The dark wall parted. A halo of painful brilliance surrounded the doorway obscuring that which she wanted desperately to see, to join. Within her desperation, an absurdly calm voice spoke from the back of Andromeda's mind.
This cannot be. This is mine. I have planned it. I have lived it before; perfected it. But it is not right.... Her eyes became accustomed to the brilliance. There were three figures posed for a religious tableau—one recumbent, one kneeling, and one holding a sword; Nikolay, Folly and Dolor; her husband, her mother, and her aunt.
"Nikky!" She heard a shrill, hysterical voice, but did not recognize it for her own. "Nikky!" She lunged toward him, but her feet were rooted in the carpet and did not obey. "Dear God, its happening again! Let me through! I must join Nikky!" It would be all right, if only she could reach his side before the steel descended. If she could... but she could not and the sword pierced his skin. Crimson cascaded from the wound, hiding her husband and her family until there was only herself, the blood, and Dolor's skeletal face.
"Wake up, m'sera!" Alpha Morgan threw back the bed curtains and grabbed her mistress's flailing arms. "It's a nightmare, m'sera!" She squeezed hard, hard enough, or so she hoped to rouse the sweat-drenched woman, but though Andromeda's eyes opened, they did not see beyond the dream.
Other servants bustled into the bedroom, awakened by screams that echoed throughout the upper stories of the house.
"Get cold water," someone commanded. "Get some brandy," came the immediate correction. "Get enough for us all." "And wake Doctor Jonathan—if he's not awake already."
Morgan heard, but did not listen. She had been Andromeda's nurse long before she'd been her maid; she had no other children. She called Andromeda's name and slapped her hard enough that a bruise would rise. One could be dismissed for striking the dowager of a Merovingen House, but one's fate would be much worse if she sank into complete insanity.
A bowl of cold compresses appeared at Morgan's elbow. She laid one across Andromeda's forehead. The wide, black pupils contracted from the shock. Tears mixed with dribbles from the compress.
"It was not right," the widow sobbed as she became aware of her surroundings. "He should not have gone like that. Not with Dolor. Not with the sword. He should not have gone without me."
Morgan's lips whitened. She gathered her adult child to her bre
ast and rocked her gently. "It was a nightmare m'sera, just a dream,"—though she had ample reason to suspect it was no such simple thing.
"How is she?" Andromeda's daughter, Marina, made room for herself at her mother's bedside.
There were some voices which must be both heard and listened to. "She's had a nightmare," the elderly woman whispered.
"Angel in heaven, I thought she'd gotten over them—"
"It's a year next week," Morgan snapped. "She remembers, even if you don't."
Marina gaped and the servants standing around the bed held their collective breath. The House heiress was not noted for her ability to withstand Morgan's acid scoldings with any grace at all. If there was a common thought in their minds, it was heartfelt regret that Richard was downcoast inspecting storm damage at one of the indigo estates and wasn't expected back for a week or more. Young, but solid, he would have brought peace to the room by his simple presence.
"How dare you... How dare you speak to me that way? How dare you say that I don't love and remember my father?"
Alpha Morgan said nothing further. What she'd said was largely true, though hardly fair to Marina or anyone else. To say more would acknowledge the un-healthiness of Andromeda's dreaming. The unhealthiness that had caused Richard to send his mother away last summer and which even Morgan had thought things of the past.
A young valet appeared carrying a crystal glass of brandy on a silver-gilt tray. Morgan transferred her ire to this new example of Merovingen's Revenantist moral decay. In Nev Hettek, virile youths did not, under any circumstances, enter a lady's bedchamber after dinner. But she took the brandy with her free hand and tilted it toward Andromeda's lips.
The room was shadowy with the light from a half dozen candles. Nothing showed its true color or texture, yet something made the old woman pause to examine the liquid more closely. She swirled it, sniffed it, sipped it—but spat it back rather than swallow.
"Where did this come from!"
Marina understood. "Deathangel!" she exploded at the expressionless valet, then froze. "You— You—" She threatened him with the glass she had wrested from Morgan's grasp.
The valet would bear her wrath in silence, but not Andromeda who caught her daughter's sleeve with a clawlike hand. "Please, Ree, Kidd gets it for me because it is what I want. It does me no harm... and it makes the nights bearable."
"Bearable!" Marina drew away from the bed as if they were all mad. "Bearable? How bearable when you wake screaming? Deathangel dreams become real, mother. You could have spent eternity in that nightmare!"
Andromeda shook her head as she tugged on the glass. "One nightmare. One nightmare—a small price to pay for all the other times we have been together. I have you, Dickon and my memories of your father, and if I must choose, I choose my memories. Love is stronger than family, you know that yourself."
Marina's fingers relaxed involuntarily, and her mother drained the glass in two swallows. Kidd caught her eye and it seemed that he smiled swiftly and slyly at her. Kidd, the stranger, the man who appeared and made himself invaluable... The servant who located Thomas Mondragon and who poled her boat each time she went trysting. She looked away and clutched her night-robe tight around her neck.
"I did not know," Morgan said quietly, though no one thought she had and no one—not even Marina— was blaming her.
The glass slipped from Andromeda's fingers. It rolled across the quilt without leaving a mark. A faint smile settled on her lips and she whispered her husband's name.
The room fell silent and remained that way until old doctor Jonathan appeared in the doorway. They made room for him gratefully and he began his examination, though it was clear what was wrong. He moved his candle in slow patterns before her eyes, and frowned as the wide pupils failed to move.
"How long has this been going on?" He demanded, but those who were willing to answer did not know, and the one who could had somehow disappeared.
"The brandy was here... in the room," a helpful, hesitant voice offered anonymously from the darkness.
"Get rid of it!" the doctor commanded, venting his frustration on the servants rather than Andromeda who had not yet acknowledged his presence. "And those who have no business here, back to your quarters."
The offending carafe was placed on the tray beside the empty glass and whisked from sight and temptation. Only Morgan, Marina and the doctor remained in the room, and both Marina and Morgan were wrapped in their own thoughts.
Doctor Jonathan sat on the mattress. Grimacing, he pressed his finger against the nerve-bundle above Andromeda's wrist. "Enough of this, m'sera Andi," he said with gruff friendliness. "Enough of drinking deathangel brandy and looking for Nikolay in your dreams. You've gotten nightmares—just as you knew you would, sooner or later, just as you did before. There's no excuse for this, m'sera."
Andromeda's tears flowed freely. "I want to die— don't you understand that?" She looked at the physician, but she spoke to the other women. "Don't you think I know what deathangel is? He's there in my dreams. We'll be together when I die."
Doctor Jonathan scraped his fingers over his stubbled chin. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the m'sera was talking both Revenantist and Adventist heresy. No one on Merovin was allowed a personal nostalgia; religious dogma of all kinds positively stipulated that the karmic wheel moved forward and away from this world, or it did not move at all. Not surprisingly, there were some neurotic patterns facing Doctor Jonathan and his contemporaries which had no precedent in their carefully preserved Pre-Scouring texts.
Deathangel deathwish was a problem for physicians and theologians alike. The drug had demonstrated paranormal properties. It provided evidence for reincarnation and prophecy which could withstand any doubts launched by Merovin's crippled scientific community. But could it, as Andromeda Kamat was claiming, weave an alternate, enduring reality—a private reality where the addict's ego set the limits of what could be and what was forbidden?
The theologians evaded the question beneath the umbrella of heresy; and the physicians lamented that their patients were invariably dead by the time the question could be answered.
"I don't want to come back, Jonathan." Her pupils were huge and throbbing. She dug her fingernails into his arm and shook it with unexpecting strength. "I love Nikolay. I have always loved him. I will always love him. Death will not keep us apart."
Doctor Jonathan—who had been with House Kamat far longer than she—listened, nodded, smiled, grumbled politely, and refused her. "We've been through this before. Hiding here behind your curtains, living for deathangel dreams isn't anything that Nikolay would have tolerated, and you know perfectly well that Nikolay—the real Nikolay—wouldn't be waiting in some drug addict's world. We are not going to let you slip away, m'sera. We will see that you get restful sleep, sunlight, and hard, healthy work."
The widow looked past them all, then buried her face against the pillow. "You have no right to do this," she whispered, then was silent.
Doctor Jonathan released her wrist, allowing her to slip into deathangel dreams again. "Send for milk with tryptoph powder. Rouse her as you've seen me do, and give her a glass every six hours. I'll send to the College for the extract in the morning, but we'll keep her asleep until the worst's over."
Morgan sniffed. She didn't approve of fighting one drug with another, but she'd do as she was told—and be secretly grateful that her mistress wasn't suffering the torture of withdrawal. The dysmutase extract was expensive and tightly controlled by the College. Acquiring it was an admission of addiction, which the cardinals took quite seriously (not that House Kamat would honestly admit who within its walls had succumbed), and they made certain the cure was as unpleasant as it was effective.
The doctor misunderstood her reaction. "Don't blame yourself," he assured her. "Andi has wanted dependence and dreams since the day he died. But I think something happened tonight that was terrifying enough that a part of her, at least, wants to be helped. We'll have her back on her feet before
Richard gets back."
Morgan nodded. It would be just as well if Richard never learned what had precipitated the nightmare— never knew what had happened to his great aunt. Indeed, she would rather not know herself, but Andromeda had read her Nemesis Garin's letter the previous afternoon.
Marina's nightgown billowed furiously as she stomped out of the room. The doctor had no words of wisdom for her, no neat precription to tell her how to deal with the collapse of her ideals and fantasies. In her mind there could be only one explanation for the whole sordid mess; if Kidd was getting deathangel powder, he was getting it from her lover, Thomas Mondragon. How else could her mother have located the elusive Nev Hetteker?
"Children," the doctor muttered indulgently, unable to remember that he was already employed here when he'd turned twenty-five.
"Love," Morgan responded, well aware that the heiress was armpit deep in her first affair, though unaware of her lover's identity. The combination of Merovingen's loose morals and romantic novels imported from Nev Hettek were ruining the daughter as surely as they'd overwhelmed her mother.
* * *
The heavy draperies which had kept the sunlight from Andromeda's bedroom for very nearly a year were tied back by the time she woke up again of her own volition. Her first glance was to the serving table where the carafe should be. She was in a rage before her heart had beat twice.
Her feet were freezing, her hands trembled, and her mouth had the taste of swamp water in it. She wanted the brandy, even though she knew it wouldn't work even if she had it. The cardinals' extract left its victims with remarkably intact memories of their ordeal. Andromeda knew she had been cured, and knew, as well, that she would see her husband again. The extract would linger in her blood, ever ready to interact with deathangel toxin; ever ready to destroy it and her in dreamless agony.
She grabbed the bedpost, hauling herself upright with willpower alone and resisting the servant bell with the same strength. Her gut rolled. She took two staggering steps toward the washbasin as the acid rose in her throat. There was nothing in her stomach— nothing but the undigestable dregs of useless deathangel toxin. Little blue threads that would not dissolve in the water she poured from the pitcher.