17. “Against all the will of the world”
Chapter 17
“Against all the will of the world”
“How did Absolon appear to you?”
Victor’s voice, low and rather quiet though now it was, roused me from my reverie. After a brief abstraction, induced by the inconceivability of the apparent transformation taken place before me, I found myself focused on the rhythmic rise and fall of Victor’s chest against my back: his breathing was slow and even, unperturbed, a comforting sensation of the human world of flesh and blood.
“I know that I startled, and I thought I saw something worthy of causing that effect in me, but now—now I’m not certain I know, sir.”
“What did you see? And what did you think that you saw?”
“A figure in black, at first—in your cloak and robes, or something very much like them, and I wondered for a fleeting moment whether it was you somehow, or your phantom. When he drew back his hood to reveal himself, I thought that his hands were—well, something like the clawed forefeet of a mole, and his face that of a gargoyle, with wide, staring red eyes and something between the small horns on his forehead that I took at first for an old wound.”
“This is the vision that startled you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And yet, despite the vivid power of this impression—a vision so visceral it created sensation in your body, overmastering for the moment even your will—something begins to erode your conviction in the sight of my assistant’s face.”
“After you gave him leave to depart, I glanced away from him for no more than a second, because the sudden darkness of the candle burning out drew my eye. I looked back to him again, and though I caught him only just before he turned away, I thought that I saw instead an ordinary man of about thirty years with a birthmark between his eyebrows. And then I questioned all that I had seen since the time that I thought I had awakened—all of it—and I wonder even now whether there is such a man as Absolon, and whether I have only dreamed one of his faces, or both of them. I think of Greycliff, sir, when he awakened from your spell inside the circle and spoke to me of his ill feeling and his nightmares.”
“And have you any such sense of illness since awakening, Elizabeth? Any nightmares, beyond your suspicion of this one?”
“No, sir,” I said quietly, slowly, giving myself time to ensure whether I truly wished to speak the next of my words: “I’ve been quite comfortable.” I paused, waiting to feel some sign from him: a change in his shadow, some small sound in his throat, a shift in the rhythm of his heart. But I dared then wait no longer. “A bit faint is all. A little feverish at first, though it’s all but passed now.”
“Nightmares, so the rumor goes, are apparently a popular experience after exposure to my art. A positive sign that you have had none—no lingering sense of aversion, at least?—even now.”
“None, sir. And Absolon, then, was no nightmare either?”
“No—neither version of him. The mole-like beast-man is his truest form, and your description of it agrees almost precisely with how that form appears to me. The young man with the birthmark in place of a Cartesian eye is an appearance he wears on such rare occasions as it suits his preference, and when I ask it of him. Though I required him to wear this more mundane shape in your presence, I thought a slim chance remained that the beast-man might appear to you regardless—the image of the true form is always available to one with the Sight.”
“How did I see him as a monster, then? And why did his appearance change?”
“I do not know for certain. And, therefore, I mean to find out. You may have the Sight latently—has this happened to you prior to the night we met at Witch’s Corner? An eldritch vision, vivid at the time, which you assure yourself thereafter was only a dream or passing madness?”
“I don’t believe so, sir. The next morning, yes—a vision of you in the dark corner of my chamber—but before that night, nothing that I remember.”
“Then I suspect that exposure to sorcery, whether mine or your own, has begun to stir it in you. Yet from the timing of your observations, it seems also possible that the presence of my art in your body triggered your vision of Absolon’s true form, and that as my art fades from your veins, so too fades the Sight. Unusual,” he seemed to muse, nearly to himself, “if it were to be so.”
“Unusual how? It seems logical enough.”
“You would be the first,” he grunted. “And so I desire to test it: another experiment, provided you are willing.”
“I am likely to be, sir,” I replied, allowing a mild edge of sarcasm into my voice, “though I should prefer to recover first from the previous one.”
“Unsurprising.” I felt his low, ominous chuckle against my back as he leaned slowly forward, his left arm still holding me fast as his right hand reached for the silver goblet on the table. “Drink. It will help.” He must have sensed my moment’s hesitation as I took the vessel from his hand. “Only water. Clean water, at that—something of a luxury in this city.”
“From Absolon?”
“I commanded him to bring it for you, and tested it myself while you slept. If he harms you,” Victor’s voice darkened, “his contract is void.”
The loss of a work contract seemed a small penalty beside the possibility of my being poisoned, but I said nothing, trusting in Victor’s claim of testing the water as I pressed the goblet to my lips and took a drink. It tasted like clean water, at least—indeed something of a rarity in much of London—and though it was little less warm than the room, it still felt refreshingly cool as it slipped down my throat.
“You do not understand the gravity of a void contract in this world.”
“No, sir.”
“Among disprites who deal in contracts,” Victor began as I took another drink, “the void contract is damning. Quite literally so. Sometimes the breach terms are set out meticulously in the contract; sometimes they are not specified, and the latter is often worse, as the injured party then has room to seek a particularly creative and unpleasant revenge. One way or another the terms are traditionally harsh, and often to the disadvantage of the party which has the most to lose. Yet, contracts are supposedly never forced—a bargain or exchange of mutual benefit is, of course, permitted, though a contract becomes invalid if proven to have been unduly coerced.”
“It sounds something like the old tales about selling one’s soul.”
“A phrase more evocative than precisely true—but true enough, in an abstract sense. I have not purchased a stake in some eternized version of Absolon, but should he break contract in some way I find especially egregious,” Victor’s voice grew harsh and grim, and I was reminded of the way he spoke to me of Forsythe, “I am well within my rights to arrange for a torture-pit to be opened in the underworld with his name on it.”
“You are a fierce man, sir,” I said to him quietly—I found that I was neither frightened nor revolted, though convention would hold that I should have been. Even the black shadow of sorcery that emanated from within him seemed not to perturb me anymore with its touch, if indeed it touched me at all: I was so close to him now—inside his cloak, inside his shadow—that I felt rather as if I were with him in the eye of a storm, watching his tempest lash the world without.
His strong arm around my midsection remained where it always had been, and I became aware more than ever that he held me just below where my corset restrained the swell of my breasts.
“Perhaps. One must be strong in this world, and fierce when need arises. But you will find that I am not a particularly cruel man—I do not wish to need to exercise the right of retribution, but I reserve it nonetheless—and my contract with Absolon is not severe by the standards of his people. Rather lenient, in fact, considering that he initially tried to kill me. Foolish,” he added with a certain pride, almost a cocksureness, and I wondered if I had tensed in my surprise at this new information, “but we had only just met, and he did not know me yet.”
“You entrust him with your home and possessions, even after he made an attempt on your life?”
“Because I believe that he of all people has the least motive to do so again, now that we have reached an understanding,” he continued, his voice softening somewhat. “If I thought him a danger, whether to me or to you, I would not retain him—but I find him ultimately more discreet and reliable than most men I have met. Should I trust—should I allow down my stone stair at all—a man who is na?ve to sorcery? Who would sell my secrets, and invite the town with their torches and pitchforks, if he managed to keep his paltry wits intact? Or should I trust rather a fellow mortal sorcerer, full of will and desire, not to secretly endeavor to overthrow me? Yet, time and again Absolon has proven true, and we are friends, though at professional distance. He is not bad company once he trusts you.”
“Then there is one thing, above all, which I do not understand.” One thing, indeed, which weighed now upon my mind—a terrible thought, suddenly awakened, that would not sleep.
He kept his silence, though I sensed his expectation.
“Why do you need an apprentice, sir, when you have Absolon, whose magia intrinseca is so powerful that he can grow his own eyes? Couldn’t he,” I heard my own voice begin to falter, “be the second party for your two-person spell?”
“Do you ask because you regret?” His voice was in my mind again—I felt nothing in his chest but his breath and his heart. “Or for peace of mind?”
“I regret nothing, sir.” I did not speak my reply: I formed the words by thought, focused upon the remembered sensation of his shadow slipping into the back of my brain, and by the force of my will attempted to press my mind into his own. It was audacious, rash, and it may well be that I did not even know my danger—but in that moment, it was to me necessary. I had to try something. I had to prove myself. If I was indeed in competition with Absolon, as I feared, I could not but take this wild chance.
I heard a quiet, guttural sound in the back of Victor’s throat—I felt a mild tension in his body, a faint frisson of surprise that released as he exhaled.
And then I heard his own words in my mind—“You regret nothing, do you?”—and I sighed in relief, and smiled.
“Then do not begin now,” he continued, the amusement in his tone swiftly fading. “Absolon could perform the spell with me, but he does not desire to do so—he will not use his art to directly aid mortals against his fellow disprites. And the sorcerous arts cannot be forced: a spell cast against one’s will defeats itself, and has no power. There is some hope, in theory, of changing his mind, or pressing him to desire to cast such a spell—that is a tempter’s art, or a salesman’s—but in matters both of time and principle, I prefer an ally whose will is entirely her own.
“Enough of Absolon, for now. Once you are rested—tomorrow, or the day after—I mean to take you abroad in the upper world: to test your Sight, and to prepare you further for magia evocatoria . You have met one disprite so far, plus what you sensed of Balnock, and of Walker’s associate Malavros. But London is quite haunted—perhaps now more than ever.”
Again I willed my words into his mind, though this second effort was somewhat taxing. “Tomorrow then, sir.”
Had I not known better, I should have thought that, behind the steel mask, I felt him smile.
“The sense of fever has passed?” He spoke aloud this time, though quietly.
I finished the water and handed him his silver goblet; he set it down again on the table and leaned back into his throne, though he did not force me or pull me down with him, and the small space between us seemed a loss somehow.
He was right that his art was fading from me. His shadow that had so filled me, so thrilled and engulfed my senses, I felt now slowly slip away. I was not yet sure whether I felt better or worse—whether I was more myself, or less.
But the fever had passed—I knew that much—and I nodded with a simple “yes, sir” as I allowed myself to lean back and lightly settle against him, into his warmth, as if it were the most natural action in the world.
“Any remaining sense of faintness? Lightness of the head?”
“Passing, sir. I expect it won’t be much longer.”
“As we did with Greycliff,” he mumbled as he showed me the first two fingers of his right hand and then reached toward my neck.
As we did with Greycliff , perhaps, but Greycliff he had left lying senseless on the stone floor. He had not been gentle as he felt for Greycliff’s pulse, nor was he overly gentle with me now. But I thought that his hand slowed a little as his warm skin met mine. This harsh, brooding man who consorted and contracted with demons, and who was not averse to condemning his own servant to the torments of Hell—but I could not complete my train of thought: his firm fingers sank slowly deeper against the side of my throat, just below the soft hollow under my jaw.
I do not think he could have known that I closed my eyes at his touch.
I kept my breathing steady, even as I felt my pulse throb against his fingertips.
Even as I felt it begin to quicken again.
Natural instinct , I attempted to assure myself. His hand is on your throat. It is the animal instinct for survival, and nothing more.
“Little of my art left,” I heard his low voice through his mask as he drew his hand away, nothing in his tone betraying whether this was to him a relief, a regret—or a simple fact of my recovery, not to be dwelt upon.
“I thought as much.”
“You may be able to stand, provided your newfound experimentation in thought-transference has not exhausted you further.”
“Not terribly, sir.” I knew him well enough now to understand that I was not to apologize, not to second-guess. “I should say it was worth the effort.”
I felt him nod in approval as I began to rise carefully to my feet, and he drew back his cloak and his protecting arm to allow me to go free. I was newly cold, despite the warmth of the infernal fire in his hearth; as I held one carven armrest of his throne to ensure my balance, I realized how accustomed I had grown to feeling him behind me: his strength, his heat, the deep voice behind the mask speaking quietly beside my ear.
Even here with him in his hall, standing beside his throne as he too rose from it, I was a little more alone than a moment ago.
But I could not think of such things now. I distracted myself, thinking instead of my loosened hair hanging long down my back—improper, indeed closer to indecent, by the conventions of the world above—and the unlikelihood of recovering the set of hairpins that had fallen from what used to be a bun. I did not ask after them. What matter was unbound hair, after all, when I was spending time alone with a man who was most assuredly not my husband?
When I had, strange circumstances aside, already lain in his arms?
And I had never seen a ring on his finger, and even when I spoke of my husband, he never spoke of a wife?—
I stopped myself again, squeezing shut my eyes.
No sooner had I done so than I felt his iron grip close suddenly around my upper arm. My eyes opened and flew at once to seek his: he was standing before me, looking down at my face, his dark gaze fixed and intent.
“Your equilibrium is steady?”
“Quite steady, sir,” I said with some mild chagrin. I felt his grip slacken, his hand release me. “Not a swoon this time. Only a?—”
“A perturbing thought, perhaps.”
I smiled inwardly in relief at his rescue, though allowed no emotion to color my voice. “Yes, sir. No more than that.”
“To be expected.”
Could he have known, or guessed? Could he have sensed this sea-change of the private tempest in the soul that still—still—I dared not name, not even now, not even to myself?
But how could he have not?
He, for whom the arcane arts were as vital and natural as breath, as certain as the nightly rising of the moon—how could he not sense my heart, whose sorcery had surged through my veins?
But he said nothing of it, and I said no more.
“I have another question, sir.”
“One question only. Then you will return to your bed, and rest until tomorrow afternoon—with meals, and water, as you desire them.”
“Very well, then. The spell which requires a second party—the one for which you need an apprentice—given my talent and my progress, I should like to know precisely what it entails.”
I prepared myself for the distinct possibility of deferral: some sagely enigmatic performance of you will understand when the time comes , as I imagined was the general wont of secret societies of the occult, and not entirely unlike what he said even to me when first I became apprenticed to him.
But he did nothing of the sort. He locked me in the fearsome gravity of his gaze, and when I did not shiver nor quail before him, he nodded with a subtle sound somewhere between his black-shrouded chest and the steel armor of his throat (for armor it surely appeared to be, having now seen it up close)—something like a faint growl of satisfaction. “How many days do you estimate it has been since first you asked me?”
“I don’t truly know anymore, sir: time moves strangely for me now.”
“Then you sense some secondhand taste of faerie-nature,” he replied, and from his voice I thought that he slipped into some dark reverie, “or the limit of my art: time is for me the last, vast frontier—the great unconquered country, though I prowl its border like a wolf at a gated sheep-fold.” His right hand curled slowly into a fist; his eyes turned sidelong to the Hellmouth and flickered in its light—but then he shook his head, chuckling grimly to himself. “But that was not your question—the question that I have been waiting , Elizabeth, for you to ask again. Your ability to perceive the world has expanded, swiftly and powerfully, since first you inquired, and so—while I promise to provide you a proper response—I ask you first: what now do you sense is the answer?”
To clear some fog, as it were , he had replied to me, cryptically, that day I became his apprentice. I requested from him now a moment to contemplate, closed my eyes, and felt pieces of it fall into place: to clear some fog , the ash and the dissipating mist of the vanquished Balnock, the candle igniting before us, his dire dealings with Absolon?—
“You need me to perform some manner of magia intrinseca with you—my art together somehow with your own,” I paused, and my words slowed, “to banish a disprite whom, I am given to assume, cannot be dispatched in any more convenient way.”
He nodded gravely, deeply, but not without (so I sensed) a certain pleasure.
I knew my danger—I had known it by instinct, by his protection of me in the tunnel beneath Witch’s Corner, by his rumored reputation on the lips of all who dared speak the dreaded name of Doctor D’Arco—but in that moment I cared for it not at all. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that I drank it in: in its risk, it seemed to me an act of defiance against the order of the mundane world, a feat of hope and will over what once seemed fate, and above all a great adventure.
And in spite of the terror of Victor D’Arco—no, perhaps because of it—when he was with me I felt that all the strange, teeming mysteries of the wild world lay waiting before us.
I felt alive.
I pressed my lips together into a small, tight smile, and watched his dark eyes: I did not wish to miss that flash of fiery pride. “I suspect, sir, that you mean to void a contract.”
I was in large part correct, and he told me as much, as promised, and provided me with certain details: I was to develop endurance to the effects of his art, and he to the effects of mine, as the spell was to be cast facing one another with the target between us; the target, he assured me, was not Absolon, and far exceeded Absolon or Balnock in power; the operation was delicate, though not a danger to either of us providing all were to go as planned; success hinged upon my abilities in magia intrinseca and magia evocatoria , as well as our alignment or affinity with one another’s sorcery, but I was not to assume the full weight of responsibility: my burden, he said, was only to do my honest best to fulfill the promise of my talent, and his part as my professor was to shoulder all the rest.
Leaving Absolon to watch the dungeon fortress, Victor escorted me to my chamber in Lord Hargrave’s great house: I had recovered well, he said, though ought not yet to go alone. We walked in silence but for the heavy footfalls of his long, determined stride; the towering darkness of his form loomed a half step behind me, blotting out the light of each candle that we passed.
But all of that was hours ago. Hours ago we parted ways at my bedroom door, with a brief exchange about meeting the next day in time enough before the setting of the sun—I thanked him, he replied with a solemn bow of the head, and I watched as his great black shape slowly vanished down the hallway, listened until I could no longer hear the creaking of the old floorboards beneath his Hessian boots.
And for hours now I had lain in bed, alone but for my racing thoughts, unable to sleep.
Some vestige of his art still lingered in me, I imagined, for me to be so restless. I wondered if I still could feel his sorcery—the cold fire at the tips of the awakened nerves, tingling like a faint thrill of lightning—the vague sense of vertigo spreading from the shadows of the mind.
If I focused, I could feel him still. The trace of his scent lingered in my hair.
But the warmth of him was long gone.
I reached a hand under my pillow, and as I touched the rough pages of his old grimoire, I felt the sudden heat of a lone tear slide unbidden down my cheek.
Sheer exhaustion, I told myself with a sigh: the exertion of the mind and the will, the overstimulation of his art through my body, the disruption of the constitution occasioned by a long swoon, the mental shock of my first witness of a disprite in the flesh, the soul-weariness of enduring the hours of so agitating a vexation as?—
As what?
I wiped my cheek on the back of my hand, shifting onto my back beneath the bedclothes to gaze up into the darkness.
I had never been poor with secrets. But never had a secret so rattled the bars of its cage, so tormented me with its confinement.
Because—I realized with a second, heavier sigh—not until today had I endeavored to keep a secret from myself.
Today? I chid myself, briefly closing my eyes. Yesterday. Yesterday, at least. Or earlier still: I did not care now to measure the length of my dissimulation, who had never before been dishonest with myself. Not even about matters unfit for a woman, much less for a lady , as my husband would have said.
Not even about my revenge.
My revenge? Ha! Forgotten, forgotten. Had I given it a single thought since the sight of Balnock’s fog and soot? Had it for days—weeks—had it for perhaps even a month or more all but slipped my mind, after occupying my imaginings for over a year?
And why was that?
And what name should I give in my thoughts to this thing that replaced even my revenge, should the art of my mind and my words bring to life this nameless, fathomless feeling that usurped my senses?
I could call it madness , or foolishness were I feeling kind, and I would not be wrong.
He was my elder by some fifteen years, if I judged his age aright in guessing him to be forty, or a little more; but my husband had not been very much younger, and I was no ingenue, no stranger to the body nor the marital bed. Of all my follies, a difference in age was of the least consequence.
He was a dark sorcerer, a summoner of demons; soon, it is true, I would be the same, but that would not resolve his mysteries: the steel mask, the soaring hall hidden underground, the unspoken rumors of a dreadful past that haunted and veiled him like his shadow. His transgressions , as he called them, whatever they may have been. The terror of him in the voices and eyes of nearly all who spoke his name.
He was my professor, and my master besides—the man to whom I was apprenticed, though he never used such a title with me—and if he were not desperate, or mad himself, he would cast me from his class, and from my apprenticeship; and Hargrave would deny my place in the Order, and my room and board, and again I would have nothing.
A poor end, one way or another, to my life of magic—perhaps to my life itself.
And beyond all, above all, I had promised Victor celibacy—utter celibacy—not merely of action, but of desire. At the risk of my life, and his, my passions were to be for magic alone.
Had he not implied that he must endure the same? I imagined him in his lair: in his library, perhaps, searching for some ancient scrap of theory in a battered old tome; or in some corridor or hidden cavern I had never seen, touching the great twisted root of a tree where it delved through the earth—and Absolon looking on with his red unseeing stare, the eye-like organ on his forehead discerning forms from shifting candlelight. Perhaps Victor would prepare for the next class, or take a meal, or consort with some spirit summoned into his parlor. Would he emerge, before the strike of the midnight hour, from the deep bosom of the earth to behold the stars, and stand alone in the silver shadows of the moon? Or was his world illumined only by the fiery glow of hearth and candles underground?
Would he hear another human voice before I descended his stone stair again?
And then, at some unknown hour, he would sleep—he must sleep, I thought to myself, if he is indeed as human as he felt to me only hours before. He would remove, at last, the cruel metal mask and the great black cloak, set aside the iron dagger, and lie down in bed as a mortal man. I wondered if he would say a prayer to some forgotten deity, or cast the night’s last spell, or merely watch a bedside candle burn for a while before snuffing it out—with his scarred fingers, or his sheer will.
And then he, too, would be alone in the cooling darkness.
It was a foolish surge of sentiment brought on by my exhaustion, I told myself, no more, but despite all the power of his art I wondered if ever he grew lonely, and another hot tear stung the corner of my eye.
And did I presume, in my overtired state, that this solitary, saturnine man would be moved by my touch? That he would find comfort, even pleasure in holding me against him, as had?—
What began as another sigh caught in my chest as a dry sob. I had no strength anymore to wage war against my own heart.
As had I —I surrendered at last, unbeknownst to any but myself, and allowed myself to finish the thought— as had I found such comfort in his arms. As had I felt the early stirrings of pleasure awaken at his touch, like the first green of an early spring opening its leaves for the sun.
But it was impossible. All of it. A savage misfire of the winged archer’s fatal bow.
This thing in my heart would die unnamed, because it could not be. With all the will that was left in me I cursed the damned name of circumstance: whatever fate, whatever man or god or disprite, whatever indifferent force of nature had drawn for me this hopeless card, rolled for me these loaded dice?—
A power rose in me—like a shadow returning, a black tide gathering back into the midnight sea—and I stopped, and let it pass with my silent tears, because it felt too much like him.
I could not risk summoning his phantom to me now; I could not in a thousand lifetimes allow him the sight of these lamentations of a lunatic. He was my professor, the deathly Doctor D’Arco, and I imperiled even now my vow as his apprentice. But cold logic melted in the fire of my heart and my mind, and when I closed my eyes I saw only him, standing alone on the sea-cliff of a foreign shore, the impossible abyss of an ill-starred fate widening between us like a black chasm, a rift in the earth. If only I could call to him—speak his name thrice?—
No. A half-dream. A nightmare. The abyss and the sea-cliff faded, but I could not tell anymore my cold sweat from my tears.
And I knew then, for good or for evil, that I could not go on thus—this thing inside me, haunting me, must now have the dignity of a name.
The night would pass, I knew, and my mind surpass this madness, and my strength return. But while the night endured, before sleep made me forget, I would exhume Truth from her burial within my heart, and breathe into her a part of my soul, and allow her for an hour to live:
Against all the will of the world?—
All the will of the world but my own. Beneath the bedclothes in the dark I clutched his water-stained grimoire against the beating of my heart, the warmth of my breasts, and the small, convulsive sobs that racked my body.
Against all the will of the world, I was falling in love with Victor D’Arco.