16. The Face of Absolon
Chapter 16
The Face of Absolon
I knew first only that I was warm, and that I had dreamt of Victor again.
I discerned that I was in my bed, the intensity and effort of the day’s class leaving me so worn I could scarcely recall how it ended—but no matter. I knew the old grimoire was under my pillow: I could still breathe in the scent of him, feel the touch of his sorcery. In the solitary seclusion of my half-sleeping mind I could indulge for a time in the forbidden comfort of their familiarity, and leave my misgivings for the morning.
On the verge of slipping into another dream, I realized I had caught myself: I thought that I could feel once more the rise and fall of his chest, perhaps hear even the beating of that dark heart, now and again, through the crackle of the fire. But as consciousness returned, these sensations did not fade. They sharpened—became more tangible somehow—became, had I not known better, more real.
I opened my eyes slowly, struggling to focus; I do not know how long, in my state between sleeping and waking, between waves of exhausted comfort and the tingling thrill of the uncanny that pricked now and again at my spine—I do not know how long I lay unmoving, trying to understand what I saw—what I felt.
Before my eyes was metal, its hue shifting in the light, consuming nearly my entire field of vision. Not a blade—this should have been some relief, but in my state it was a mere thought out of the many drifting through my mind, and no more. The subtle pattern engraved on its flickering surface was dimly familiar somehow, though I could not place it: twisting, leafy vines, fine work in an old style. Tracing it with my eyes, I became aware of some manner of joint, perhaps a hinge.
“Absolon. Bring me water.” This was Victor’s voice, though the words were nonsense: some dialogue out of a dream, out of sequence, corresponding to nothing. But it was certainly his voice, replicated in my mind with great accuracy: the depth and resonance of it, the grim tone, the vaguely foreign accent, the hint of a muffling echo behind his steel mask.
His mask.
His mask, with—I remembered now, to my dread—that subtle engraving of vines.
All sleep left me, as if I were stricken by a sudden shock of thunder.
I dared not move a single sinew—I dared not alter the rhythm of my breath. But as quickly as I could, remaining utterly still, I took inventory of myself, my position, and my state. I did not know whether my heart leapt, or sank; whether I should bolt upright or close my eyes again, not wishing yet to awaken from this dream—if dream it ever had been. But I knew that steel, I knew that flicker of firelight, I knew this heat, and this scent, and the pressure of his chest against my spine: I was seated on a hard surface with Victor behind me, all of my weight leaned back into the support of his strong body, my right cheek resting on his shoulder and my eyes toward the side of his armored throat. I felt the pressure of his muscular arm where it lay across my midsection, as if to protect me from a fall, and the warmth of his great black cloak around us both—perhaps to chase away the mild, feverish chill I felt dampen my skin beneath my dress.
But for the latter, however, I was (so far as I could tell) uninjured: I felt no pain, no illness or disquiet that could not be attributed to the sensation of Victor’s sorcery. Indeed, I wondered even if the feeling of his shadow still so perturbed me as it had: I could not yet remember all that had happened—I could reconstruct no path to where I now found myself—but I remembered the surge of his uncanny art through my body, the deep swoon of it flooding my head, yet any terror of the event melted into the pleasurable indolence of awakening in his arms.
In the arms of my professor.
In the shadow and the eldritch grip of the notorious Doctor D’Arco.
Even in my strange comfort, the notion still released the faint shudder I had until now successfully restrained, and as it slipped down my spine I felt my breath catch in my throat.
Whether or not he had known I was awake, he knew now: I could feel him shift against me, the flex of his muscles as his heavy arm tightened around my body.
“Victor…” I let my first word to him be simply his name, and nothing more.
“Do not rise suddenly.”
“I won’t, sir.” I paused, waiting to see if he would speak again, but the fire in his hearth and the slow, quiet drip of a stalactite were the only sounds. We were still in his hall—of that much I was certain. The rest I did not know. “How long have I been—” I could scarcely think of a way to ask that did not embarrass me, or make me sound weak— “like this?”
“Not long. Half an hour, perhaps.” His deep voice was calm, unconcerned, as if all of this were no more than a matter of course. I might have been disappointed, I suppose, by his nonchalance, but I found myself grateful: he made my condition no more awkward than it needed to be, and the strange intimacy of our position began to feel a little more natural. In his lack of maudlin solicitude, he did not condescend to me, nor treat me as a helpless creature to be coddled—he made me his equal. “You did well, Elizabeth. A success, all in all.”
It occurred to me at last to wonder about that success, and in an instant I grew eager to know if, in the moments before the dark vertigo of his shadow overpowered me, I had only dreamed that exhilarating burst of blue flame. “The candle?”
I thought I heard a hint of pride in his voice. “Still burning.”
I raised myself to look—the great table lay before us, the candle on the skull down to a crooked wax stub; its flame was strong, though orange now—but I felt my head grow light again, and with a sigh I let myself lay back down against his shoulder.
I could no longer feel the pressure of the neat bun I always wore on the back of my head, and while I thought that I remembered it loosening, it became apparent to me that it must have come all the way undone somehow—but more vital to me now was to ascertain my location. It took me a moment to process and orient myself to the rest of what I had seen along with the flame: the table, but no grand carven chair, no infernal hearth behind the candle—only the smaller student chairs, and those were in disarray. I did not think I saw the black sockets of Friar Bacon’s eyes.
This chair in which we sat was not mine. We were on the opposite side of the table— his side of the table.
I was with him in his throne.
“Take your time. You recall the sequence of events?”
“Most of it, sir. You kept me after class—asked me what I had done with the candle on Forsythe’s turn—proposed an experiment to expedite my progress in magia intrinseca . I confirmed that this was indeed my will, and we began. You stood behind me—put us wrist to wrist—I suppose our pulses matched well enough, eventually—I felt your art through me; I focused on the candle, saw the blue flame—and that was all. I don’t know what happened after that.”
“I caught you.”
“And then you carried me here?”
“Correct.”
I paused, first trying to recall, then persuading myself to believe that I should be glad I could not remember how it felt to be lifted and carried in his arms, my senses still drowned in the deep midnight of his shadow—assuring myself that I did not care to remember him leaning me back to rest against his muscular body, my long reddish-brown hair loosening from its pins to spill over his shoulder as he enwrapped me in the darkness of his great black cloak.
A strange fiction, that.
But I could not dwell on it, nor let time pass—I could not afford now this heating of my skin, this quickening of my pulse. I was grateful to him, genuinely grateful, and since he spoke to me as if all that had happened was no great matter for concern, so, I thought, ought I to make myself speak to him.
Indeed, in my state—as I endeavored to banish again my imaginings of the memories I missed—a few simple words of gratitude were the best I could do. “Thank you, Victor.”
He grunted in reply. I do not know whether it was a vaguely softer, warmer sound, or whether I was merely unused to how it sounded with my ear so close to his chest and his throat.
“As I willed my art through you,” he explained, his deep voice low and even, “so too can I will its excess to drain from you, and draw back into me. Proximity expedites the process—more efficient than waiting hours for its natural dissipation.”
I would have let myself linger, listening to the sound of his voice—closed my eyes again, perhaps, if only for a moment more —but some creeping hesitation unsettled my mind. I began to develop an unaccountable notion that I ought to look to the table again. I dismissed it at first: some lingering effect of Victor’s sorcery, surely, and nothing more. But the impression crept gradually deeper, and temptation grew in me to look—for the comfort of my own tired mind, at least, if nothing more. I raised my head slowly from Victor’s shoulder, turning back toward the candle?—
And then I felt my eyes grow wide.
I blinked to clear my vision of lingering dreams, my head of the lightness that still threatened to overwhelm my brain.
I blinked again.
But the thing I saw did not disappear.
The things , rather, though one was of little consequence beside the other. There was a goblet or chalice on the table, near Victor’s right hand, though I wondered if I had merely missed it before.
But I could not have missed the other: before us, amid the student chairs on the opposite side of the table, stood a silent figure, motionless, clad in Victor’s black robes and black, deep-hooded cloak.
Instinct made me recoil, wrenching me closer against Victor’s body, and I am not ashamed to say that I grabbed for his hand—as much for reassurance as to confirm that he was himself, that he was the true Victor D’Arco, and that this figure before me across the table was no more than his phantom—or a ghost, a vision, an imposter. My stomach sank at the awful alternative: that the imposter was instead the one behind me—that the real Victor had arrived only now, observing my predicament, and that I was captive in the arms of some unknown creature of the night.
No—no, it could not be so. No steel flashed from the black shadows of the figure’s hood. I felt the now-familiar scars of Victor’s hand beneath my fingertips.
The stranger before me was not nearly Victor’s height, after all, to measure him beside the chair; he was sturdy of build and broad of shoulder, but rounded somewhat forward, without Victor’s proud carriage. I thought that his arms were thick and short, but it was difficult to know for certain: they were folded before him, both hands hidden beneath the black sleeves and cloak.
I thought of the black-cloaked figure at the Selection Ceremony, and the consternation of the Order when that hooded stranger entered with my selection envelope.
“Victor,” I breathed, my eyes never turning from the dark, silent figure standing utterly still before me, “we’re being watched.”
“For the moment.” I must have heard Victor in the back of my mind—I felt no rumble of his voice against my body. “This is my assistant, Absolon.”
“Is he an apprentice?”
“No. A paid servant, under a voluntary contract of mutual benefit. The butler,” I thought I detected a twist of wry amusement in Victor’s voice, “if you will. Or would be, if there were any more to my household.”
I mouthed the name Absolon silently to myself—as if it would make this figure any less ominous, the circumstances any less surreal.
“He chose the name,” Victor replied as if I had spoken aloud, “after his favorite character from the Canterbury Tales . He has a rather medieval sense of humor.”
It was not apparent that this bleak, silent witness had any sense of humor at all.
“Why does he hide himself so?” I whispered. “He does not speak. I cannot see even his eyes, or his hands?—”
“At my instruction. Upon the rare double-chance that your paths would cross, and that you are already possessed of the Sight to discern his true form, I would not have you see that which you may be unprepared to see. Absolon is a disprite of the earth—one of the several varieties of elf commonly described as a demon .”
“Whatever he may be, it doesn’t seem right, sir. He shouldn’t have to hide himself away on my account.”
“You deem yourself ready?”
“I assure you that your warnings serve only to make me more curious, and to set more firmly my mind.”
He said nothing, but I felt him exhale, his strong body relaxing somewhat, and I thought that something in my words must have pleased him.
“It is my will to see him,” I added, my words quiet but certain.
“As you will,” he replied, and his next words took the half-firmness of a casual command: “Absolon, reveal yourself to my apprentice.”
I watched, my attention rapt, as a pair of misshapen hands rose from the folds of the figure’s cloak to clutch the sides of his hood: broad, pale hands on sturdy wrists, with bristling black hair and wide, fleshy palms; what I took at first for human fingers were revealed by the firelight to be thick stumps terminating in long, heavy claws. He began to draw back his hood so unhurriedly that I wondered if he had some manner of affliction, or was reluctant to show himself, or whether he enjoyed the drama of my anticipation.
The last, surely: before the shadows revealed so much as his chin, he flipped the hood back all at once—and though I did not mean to, my body tensed with a sudden start against Victor’s chest, and I heard the gasping hiss of my own astonished breath.
“You can see him?” Victor asked intently, his steel mask close to my ear and his voice low.
“Yes,” I regained my breath, recovering from the initial shock of Absolon unhooded. “Yes, sir.”
“No doubt he is as pleased to meet you as you are to meet him. Not fond of our kind. I cannot fault him, after what he has experienced and endured.”
“I’m sorry for my start. Has he been here all along?”
“Yes, though never until now in your presence, and only seldom in the society of any of the others. The timing of your awakening was quite fortunate: a moment more and you would have missed him. He dwells here underground—a part of his contract with me—but prefers to avoid human presence, other than my own.”
I said nothing, but raised my eyes from Absolon’s black robes back to his face. He looked as if one of Victor’s gargoyles had come to life: an inhuman, unnatural face, neither entirely man nor entirely animal, vaguely amphibian in aspect though bearishly hairy about the temples and head. His ears were small and pointed, like the cropped ears of a fighting dog; he had nostrils, but little by way of a nose; his mouth was broad, his thin lips not entirely covering the tips of the small tusks that jutted upward at its corners. At the center of his forehead was a round patch of naked, uneven flesh that looked like a strange growth or a poorly healed scar, flanked by a short pair of half-broken horns.
But the most remarkable, most unsettling part of him was his eyes: immense, staring, unblinking eyes—blind eyes, I thought to myself—their wide irises a vivid red and their unmoving pupils horizontal black slits, like the eyes of a goat or a toad.
“Can he see us?”
“The eyes are new—he began to grow them within the past few years, and has nearly completed them, though I do not think he has vision through them yet. But he can sense light, darkness, spirit, magic, and all physical forms through the pineal organ on his forehead, often with impressive clarity. Quite less blind than the average mortal man.”
“Why does he care to have new eyes, then?”
“To read, and to observe our artists’ works. He can detect surfaces, but cannot see the markings on a flat plane: the writing on a page, or the paint on a canvas. Sculpture is, of course, of interest to him—he can discern the contours and textures of a statue at least as well as can I—and in answer to his avowed misanthropy I advised him that he cannot judge the heart and mind of man without at least our poetry. And so with his own art, his magia intrinseca , he wills his eyes into being, and waits: partially in the true spirit of inquiry, I think, but more in hope of passing an informed and therefore vindicated condemnation of our evils.”
“But how does he read Chaucer, if he can’t see the printing in the book?”
“I have read it to him. An addendum I allowed to our agreement, once he discovered (to his interest and surprise) that my library is not merely a repository for blank sheets of paper and vellum: for each task assigned to him, above and beyond our initial arrangement, he accepts in trade the reading of a passage to help satisfy his morbid curiosity about our kind.”
So you have a heart, after all , I thought to myself, to indulge the wants of this servant-creature—or else you are simply fellow misanthropes, and find natural affinity in each other’s inhumanity.
“May I speak to him?”
I felt Victor shrug, or settle deeper into the chair: I was not certain which. “If it suits you.”
“Your eyes are impressive, Absolon.” I was unsure whether to look him in the staring slits of his animal pupils or the scar-like mark on his forehead.
He bowed—somewhat grudgingly, I thought—and when he finished, though his pupils did not move, his head turned back toward Victor and me with remarkable precision. The patch of bare flesh between his horns—surely his pineal organ, as Victor had called it—seemed slightly to engorge, something like a bulging eye.
“Any more?” His voice was at once harsh and hushed, like the dry chafe of sandpaper over wood, the words enunciated with an odd clarity.
“No more at this time,” Victor replied. “You are free to depart.”
The candle on Friar Bacon’s skull burnt out of its own accord, the end of the wick and the pooling wax extinguishing the flame into a rising wisp of smoke: the movement caught my eye, distracting me from Absolon for a moment.
And then I wondered whether I had awakened at all, or was still in the depths of a strange fainting dream. My gaze returned to the nightmare creature before me, and found no creature at all: I saw him for only a second before he bowed and turned to leave, but I was certain that standing before me had been not a monster but a perfectly ordinary young man, notable only for the somewhat vacant look in his eyes, the birthmark between them, and the fleshiness of the hands that pulled up the hood of his black cloak.
I was too disoriented by the change to think of watching the iron-clad doors of Victor’s hall, as I should have done—to know whether the doors opened and closed for this being, or whether he passed through like a ghost. I began to collect my senses soon enough, but the doors were closed, and Absolon was gone.