Neverland's Library: Fantasy Anthology Page 33

  Of course the backers were not pleased. Two newspaper accounts mentioned it as a “cursed” concert – but it was back page news given the state of the world.

  It was nearly two weeks later as he walked down the street to buy bread that he noticed he was humming. He went home, opened his straight razor and slit his throat. He left no note, and his landlady had no idea that he was once a respected scholar.

  Two weeks after that and the Archduke was assassinated. No one thought of the concert. Except for a few Jewish musicians who one by one went mad. The frequency of madness in Jewish musicians of Berlin attracted a few scholarly papers, but it was a small concern. A few deformed births occurred and were duly recorded by the late thirties as example of Nazi racial correctness.

  The last of the remaining musicians—mad eyed old men—were gathered by the Nazis and the Witch’s Song was played a few times while the workers of Auschwitz changed their shifts. If they dreamed of the purple sky, it was surely better than where they were. The death camps removed the last living traces of the Witch’s Song from the Earth. However a single bundle of sheet music hidden in a Paris garret made its way to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas with many other odds and ends in 1966.

  #

  John didn’t finish his dissertation. His friends, who were few in number, said he was overcome with depression. His enemies, even fewer in number, claimed that drug abuse had caught up with him. His suicide note was melodramatic, and literary mis-quoting Dickens from A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do now than I have ever done, it is a far, far worse place I go than I have ever gone.” He left a second note to his ex-roommate Chand Ghei. “Hey man, I hope you didn’t listen to me. I’m really sorry.”

  The later note drew the attention of the Austin Police. They tracked Chand down, which was easy enough. He was a famous designer on his way up in the gaming industry, working for Electric Anvil in Austin.

  “I have no idea what he meant. He was shit to live with those last few months. All of the time humming some spooky ditty – I think it had to do with his research. He stopped bathing, just lay around the apartment and stopped forking over his share of the rent. I had to split.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with him after I moved out. I tried calling his Mom, a drunk that lives in San Diego. I told her he had flipped out. She said it wasn’t her problem. You know I didn’t realize it at the time but that tune he hummed really got under my skin. I ended up putting it in my Master’s project, I’m sure you’ve played it. It’s the spooky song you hear when you’re in the second level of Planet Revenge. That game got me this job. It’s the hot item this Christmas.”

  “My moods? Well I’ve been preoccupied since I heard of John’s death. Maybe I could have done more, you know? I’ve been working on Planet Revenge II—it’s about this other world with a dark purple sky where you fight monsters in pits. It uses John’s song more fully—kind of my memorial to him. So I guess his music will wind up in thousands of households.”

  For Dan Clore, fellow Lovecraftian

  An Equity in Dust

  R.S. Belcher

  DURING THE EARLY HOURS of Shallow the watch discovered the Duke of White Rapture burning on the catwalk, his hot ashes drifting downward to join the skulls and dust.

  His murderer leered at me through the crumbling outer walls of the Hive. Bloated and red, it straddled the terminal between dark earth and bruise-blue sky.

  Things weren’t fixed out here anymore unless decay threatened the Hive’s core. It made people uneasy. Most haunted places do. Angry victims of the Bug had died cursing as they beat their bloody fists against the seals, begging to be allowed inside the inner dome.

  My magistrates, fifteen strong, were with me. Led by Wren, they fanned out at his silent signal and began to secure the scene of the crime. Wren spoke to the guards who had made the discovery.

  Guardsmen also called to the scene stood sullen watch, their radios occasionally crackling with police chatter. They did nothing. They knew better than to interfere in attendant politics.

  Knoris’ magistrates, attired in the tan and gold of their patron, grudgingly gave ground to my people who, like Wren and myself, bore the Halloween livery of our Duke—haystack yellows, jack-o’-lantern oranges, and fire-ember reds upon night-pure jet.

  Galia and Knoris were engaged in hushed conversation, appropriately choreographed, with their backs to my approach. My fellow high attendants grew silent. They turned to greet me hidden behind masks of sheet-white kabuki paint and smiles that held all the sincerity of jackals baring their teeth.

  “Ah, there you are Finch,” Knoris said. He was tall and wide, once with muscle but now creeping to fat. His head was shaved and he wore his duke’s mark across his forehead in black tattoo. “Good Shallow to you. We wondered what was keeping you.”

  “It would appear an error was made in the instructions the watch were given about notifying me first,” I said.

  “Well you really can’t blame the watch,” Knoris said, smiling. “For over a century I’ve been the one they reported to in such distasteful matters. It’s only natural they would have some difficulty in adapting to the new arrangement.”

  “I don’t blame the watch. It’s easy to understand their forgetfulness,” I said. “As I’m sure your attendants have also forgotten that they now no longer bear the magisterial authority to disturb this crime scene.”

  Knoris darkened beneath his pale paint. I saw the minute constriction of his pupils, watched his body give off twelve of the twenty-seven signs of increased distress we had been trained to notice and conceal in the temple. I felt a mild disgust that he had allowed himself to become so easily read.

  As shaven acolytes in the Temple of the Servant, we were always instructed to treat attendants of the Beloved with all of the respect and politeness we would to the Beloved themselves also, but with none of the deference.

  “I’m sure that too was merely an omission in orders.” I made the slightest bow of my head, then showed my own jackal smile.

  “Of course, Finch,” Galia said, her voice like oiled leather. “We merely came to provide our patrons with any relevant information they should know about Duke Kolvino’s demise.”

  Her pale hand opened like a bloom to reveal the silver signet ring with a large eye of yellowed ivory. It was Kolvino’s.

  “Knoris’ second found it among the ashes of the Duke’s remains,” she said.

  The anger poured into me but I remained cool stone and inscrutable smoke; no outward sign betrayed my core. I remembered my lessons.

  Was it real? Had they planted it and, if so, why? I didn’t have time for this nonsense. It was time for quick answers and Knoris had already showed me the easiest way to get them.

  “How fortuitous you found it,” I said. “But I must inquire why the high attendants of the Duchess of the Iridium Mask and the Duke of Hounds were out in the fringes at such hours? My people tell me you beat the watchmen here.”

  I let the accusation hang in the air, a crippled thing waiting to be made whole by their reaction. Sadly, Knoris took the bait. He couldn’t help himself.

  “You go too far, Finch! You dare to include the names of our Patrons in this scandalous affair? Be assured this slight will be redressed!”

  “And be sure,” I interjected, “your interference in this inquiry, which I must assume was undertaken with your patrons’ knowledge, shall be reported to my Duke and will figure prominently in his own report to the Queen’s Court.”

  Knoris was hot under his sizeable collar, but mention of Her Dark Majesty doused his fire quickly. He had raised the stakes by threatening to enter the Beloved into this, I merely upped the ante.

  Galia, the smarter of the two, quickly stepped in to try to minimize the damage done.

  “Finch, Knoris misspoke himself. No one questions your Duke’s authority in this inquiry, or your service in this matter. What say you, we provide you with the sig
net and any other knowledge our people have gathered and we retire and leave you to your work? It shall be as if we were never here, yes?”

  “Of course.” I plucked the signet from Galia’s palm and showed them my back as I walked away. “Good Shallow.”

  They retreated from the walkway quickly, with their entourage in tow.

  Wren, who had been watching the exchange with some amusement, approached. He signaled the watchmen to step in to finish the search of the walkway and to cover the ashes and blackened skeleton of Duke Kolvino.

  “Sir,” he asked, “do you believe they had anything to do with this?”

  “If they had been involved, they would not have been here when we arrived.”

  Galia and Knoris’ patrons were allies of Kolvino in the High Court and I doubted this was the result of a split within their alliance. They were here without their Patrons’ knowledge, searching for scraps of information to curry favor. “No, Knoris’ reaction proved to my satisfaction that they had no hand in the Duke’s demise,” I said. “I think they were here to see just how far they could push me.”

  Wren snorted. “Not very far, it would seem. I have sent for Duke Kolvino’s High Attendant, Perin,” Wren said as he watched the last of Knoris’ agents disappear down the iron stairs.

  “Perin? He’s Kolvino’s consort as well?”

  “Yes sir, I believe he is,” Wren said as he jotted a note in his small notebook. “They were quite the item some time back, as I recall. Quite the scandal, I hear. Some kind of gift or title the Duke wanted to bestow upon Perin that was forbidden for a high attendant, or some such,” he said and waited for me to fill in the remainder of the Court gossip to which he had not been privy.

  I smiled at his long, bland face, a face I had come to count on over the last thirty years.

  “You should spend less time culling scraps of idle chatter from old ladies in the Basement Quarter. It was not that scandalous a matter. It was rare for one of them to think so highly of one of us to risk royal censure just to bestow a gift on a consort.”

  “Must have been true love,” Wren said flatly.

  I shrugged and began the work at hand.

  #

  The Hive is home to over three and a half million human beings and a handful of the Beloved. Like the sprawling human cities I remembered from childhood, just before the Bug, the Hive never truly sleeps, is never truly silent. It constantly moves and moans like a fever patient, tangled in damp sheets and mazes made of dream.

  I made my way down Aktic Street. It was lit by strings of small electric plastic lanterns hanging between the wood and canvas dwellings, plywood kiosks and nylon dome tents that lined the narrow winding way.

  If I had revealed the crest upon my leather tunic under my long coat, people would have given me a wide berth out of fear and respect. I kept it hidden. I did not need fear and respect. I needed to be jostled and shoved. I wanted to smell stale sweat and pungent hash smoke. I craved to hear laughter and shouts of anger, to be a part of the river of humanity all about me.

  The endless night under the great dome was filled with the whispers of lovers, the cries of babies and the barking of dogs. Music from battery-powered radios mixed with the babble of a dozen languages.

  Faces of all colors and ages drifted past in the shadows of the dwellings. My own face had changed very little since I had began taking the sacrament on my twenty-fifth birthday; the Beloved’s grace kept me young, but inside I felt my age.

  Kolvino’s spire, Pale Gnosis, was a column of shimmering, white marble with a great, ivory-veined staircase spiraling upward from its base. Terraces, large and small, intersected with the winding carved stairs, far above me.

  Wren and a small party of my men confronted a group of Kolvino’s attendants outside the large glass doors to the spire’s lobby. Perin wasn’t among them.

  “Your master has perished. This dwelling is no longer under the protection of royal rules of domain. I am Prefect of the Queen’s Justice Minister. My magistrates and I are investigating the Duke’s demise, as required under royal edict, and you will provide us with full access to this building. Now”

  The eldest of Kolvino’s attendants frowned for a moment then nodded, more to his fellows than to me. “Of course, Prefect,” he said.

  As we entered the spire, I took the elder aside.

  “Where is High Attendant Perin?” I asked him softly.

  “He…has been gone since yesterday’s deep. I do not know where he is.”

  “Show me his quarters.”

  I had sent Wren and the others to examine Kolvino’s quarters and the sacrament hall. After all this time there was still only one of the Beloved that I claimed to comprehend at all. I would learn nothing from the god, so I decided to spend my time with the servant; someone with whom I had infinitely more in common.

  Perin’s apartment was similar to my own at Raven’s Spur. I drifted from bedroom to closet to library, but found only shrill order.

  An irregularly shaped tablet of ancient clay hung suspended from wires, dividing two rooms. It was covered with wedge-shaped columns of alien symbols. They had been pressed into the moist clay when even the Beloved were still young.

  I stepped past it, into Perin’s studio.

  Decades ago, I had flirted with the arts but found I had neither the ability nor the patience for it, so I dropped the notion of creating beauty and stuck to hunting facts.

  Perin had none of my flaws. His work, mostly in oils and charcoal, was subtle and powerful, a soul attempting to understand the infinite, trying to understand them.

  The only other item of interest was a small number of older paintings, less accomplished, almost juvenile. Their subject was an older woman and two young girls. From the looks of the women they were residents of the Basement Quarter. The paintings held a place of reverence on a low stone table in Perin’s bedroom, almost like a shrine. I picked one up, remembered my father, and slipped it into my pocket.

  #

  Raven’s Spur is an obsidian wing of dark glass and black metal, almost stabbing the dark dome that was the sky of the Hive; an eternal starless night.

  As I ascended in the glass elevator towards the aviary, I saw the worn granite column that was the spire of Knoris’ Patron, the Duke of Hounds, vaulting upward from his Quarter of the Hive miles away. To my left, far in the distance I could see the massive figure hewn of marble the color of dried blood - the spire of the Duchess of the Red Miracle.

  The elevator lurched and stopped. Vast black swarms of birds swirled about the spire in ever-shifting patterns like living Rorschach blots. Even through the heavy glass of the elevator’s walls I could hear their shrill cries.

  The aviary was cool stone, shadow and babbling water. A rotunda opened to the Hive’s skyline through massive windows in the domed ceiling allowed the birds access in and out of the Spire. Statuary and gurgling fountains crouched in dark alcoves all around the room.

  At the center of the Aviary was a wide, low dais surrounded by a sparse stand of sycamores and a few marble benches. White light fell down in a ring upon the dais from spotlights mounted in the ceiling.

  A statue of shimmering alabaster with bronze wings like an angel’s stood upon the platform; all smooth stone and pooled shadow. Birds lighted upon its outstretched arms and shoulders, oblivious to my entry into the hall.

  I waited quietly at the dais’ edge for over an hour, listening to the night song of the birds echoing. One hour turned into two, then three.

  At last, the statue moved, drawing its “wings”, a scalloped cloak, about its pale, perfect body. The birds scattered with startled cries of alarm, dark motes flying upward as if carried by their own screams.

  The Duke of Dying Leaves turned his eons-old eyes upon me.

  “They don’t know,” The Duke said with all the earnest wonder of a child. “They have no comprehension within their brittle shell of awareness, what they sound like to one outside their simple universe of need. To them it is nothin
g but a process, like breathing, or eating, no concept of the beauty. How sad and how wonderful,”

  I remained silent, letting his vast consciousness envelop my mind. It often reminded me of a dim childhood memory of an ocean wave crashing over me, too big to be jumped. He went on forever in all directions.

  “How goes the inquiry into poor Kolvino’s demise Finch?”

  “Disturbing, my Duke,” I said. His physical dimensions seemed to diminish to something my mind could contain as he descended the dais. “The Duke’s High Attendant, Perin, is unable to be located at present. I fear that whoever slew the Duke may also have killed Perin.”

  “You dismiss the notion that Perin may be your criminal and has fled?” The Duke asked as we began to wander the Aviary.

  “I…find that highly unlikely, my Duke.”

  “And why is that?”

  “He was Kolvino’s consort and more importantly, his High Attendant. We are incapable of such disloyalty.”

  This answer amused the Duke. He paused and turned his gaze full upon me.

  “Because you could not betray me, Perin could not do the same? Oh, Finch, have you learned so little about your kind even after all this time?”

  “I do not speak of what human beings are capable of. Perin is an Attendant; we are a breed apart. No Attendant would do that to one of the Beloved. We care for you as you care for our people”

  The Duke smiled. It was a thing of dark stains and sharp bone. It rippled through the illusion of his ethereal beauty like a stone breaking the tranquility of a pool.

  “You are correct,” the Duke said. “In the long history of my kind, a human raised to the position of Attendant has never betrayed our trust. You are of our blood through the sacrament. You share in our power and the promise of eternal life through faithful service, but never before in history have we lived so openly among you as we do now, never in such a confined geography. Familiarity breeds contempt.

  “At any rate, the Royal Court demands answers as to what happened. See to it.”