Beneath Ceaseless Skies #54 Read online

  “Of course,” I said, trying to be gallant, and was rewarded with a smile.

  “Good. Someplace in here, according to my uncle, there are three books that tell of the earliest history of the House, and how the Popinjay Society began learning their magics. They are The Chronicles of the Mad Russian, and they are where we will begin.”

  I eyed the library dubiously, and said nothing.

  She frowned, apparently struck by a thought. “Ghost, can you read?”

  “Who would teach me? We were poor, my parents and sisters and I. Before I was brought here, I shoveled coal for two pence a day. My words to the Master weren’t an idle observation, Miss Selworth.”

  She sighed, and I realized I had disappointed her again, but this time the fault was not mine and that made me angry. “Well, you speak well enough to have fooled me, so I suppose you can be educated.... If I write something out for you, can you match the shapes on the marks on the spines of the books, and bring me what you find? I’ll wait here on the stair.”

  I flinched inside, knowing that I would surely disappoint her again many times, but only said, “Certainly, Miss Selworth.”

  Then she won my loyalty past a thousand cutting remarks by adding, “And then we’ll see about making certain that you can read them for yourself in the future.”

  * * *

  I spent the rest of that morning—and all the mornings following—ferreting out books for Magdalena. The afternoons were spent drilling me on my letters, struggling to embed them in my memory and then learning how to string them together to make words. However, Magdalena’s patience had notable limits, and when she tired of teaching me, she would declare that I must be weary of my labors and leave me to my own devices while she read in silence.

  Whenever that happened, or after we were finished with dinner, I would leave Magdalena to gain what rest she could and turn my attentions to my book. The first words I read alone were its title: The Book of Doors. I almost told Magdalena.

  Instead, I kept reading.

  The initial page was titled, “On the Virtue of Expectation.” It took me almost an hour to string together the letters and sound out the words. After that, I got used to the handwriting, and things went a little faster. Staring at the glyphs of the Book for hours on end, and eavesdropping on the Popinjays as well, turned out to have been a good idea. With the words’ help, I was able to quickly piece together many of the missing pieces I had lacked in my understanding of how the House doors worked. Though the script was crabbed and difficult, I felt I was making very good progress, and that in a month or perhaps two, I might be able to free myself—and once I was outside, there were likely Doors that I could open that would free Miss Selworth as well.

  I wasn’t given the month, however. Three days after my optimistic prediction to myself, little Theresa decided it was time to put in her appearance, a bare forty days after Miss Selworth had been locked in the House.

  * * *

  Her tapping on my door was ragged and somewhat frantic, but it was her gasp and moan that woke me more than the knocking. “Miss Selworth?” I said, as I opened the door. She grabbed hold of my shoulders with convulsing hands and nearly collapsed. I braced myself, trying to take her weight.

  “Baby,” she gasped out. “They’re coming too close together to hope... that I’m not... and... I shall be trapped here forever!”

  My mind went blank for a moment, and then Miss Selworth burst into tears of frustration and fear. I pushed my panic aside. I had no idea how to birth a baby, but after she had taught me to read, I was damned if I would abandon her to her fate. “Miss Selworth—calm down, please—it will be all right.”

  She could not seem to stop sobbing, but another gasp and clutch at my shirt told me that I had better get her someplace where she could lie down, quickly. I swung her into my arms, taking that liberty, and carried her back to her room. She lay back against the pillows sobbing as I glanced out the window. False dawn was lightening the sky, and the staff would be at their jobs in a few hours. I dared not leave her long, but I penned a hasty note in crooked, awkward letters—”MYD WYFE. 3 UP BAK.—G” and raced down to the kitchen, praying that Cook would find someone who could read my dreadful handwriting and that Miss Selworth would hold out long enough for me to get back to her.

  Both women did, but in between, there was only interminable waiting. For over an hour I fretted and waited for the staff to arrive and see my note. With no one in the House to ask for aid, there was nothing I could do but hold Miss Selworth’s hand when the convulsions wracked her.

  I have never been more relieved in my life to hear footsteps in the stairwell. Cook bustled into the room, followed by another woman I had never seen in my life. “Ah, she’s far gone,” the woman said, and glanced at me. “Go boil some water.”

  I found myself evicted from Miss Selworth’s side. I wanted to think that she would have protested, but by that point, I really had no idea what she thought of me, and she was in so much pain that I don’t believe she cared who was holding her hand.

  I paced for a time, but then my legs gave out on me and I simply collapsed on the top stair, brooding over how helpless I felt and how much I despised feeling helpless, and how frustrated I was at my own slowness in mastering magic.

  A baby’s scream sometime near dusk startled me out of my nervous reverie. A few minutes later, Cook came to the head of the stairs. I managed to choke out, “Is she—?”

  Cook tsked softly. “She’s fine. Just worn out. What’ve you been doing with that woman, I wonder?”

  “She’s teaching me to read,” I said, managing an exhausted smile.

  “Really?” Cook’s expression gradually settled into something akin to smug relief. “Good! I’ll go make up something strengthening for the lady there. You can come fetch it in an hour or so. But you won’t be learning much reading from her for a while, I think.”

  I clambered upright as Cook went by and sketched a small, ironic bow after her before I cautiously peered through Miss Selworth’s still-open door. The midwife seemed to be packing her things, but when I cleared my throat, she looked up.

  “Is she...,” I asked again, because Miss Selworth looked nearly dead with exhaustion, and I could see a pile of bloodied linen on the floor next to the bed.

  The midwife crossed the distance to the door quickly, and pulled it partially closed behind her. “She is very weak, and will be so for some time—the child is a large baby, and Mistress Selworth is not a large woman. She’s in no immediate danger, so long as she does not exert herself, but it will be your task, young Master, to make certain that she does not. And that the demands of her daughter do not cause her to do so for at least a month.”

  I blinked. “A daughter?” I whispered.

  The midwife smiled. “A fine daughter, with red hair, just like yours.” She waved at the stubble on my chin, where I’d only recently begun to shave it. I thought about correcting her misapprehensions, then decided it really didn’t matter. “She called her ‘Theresa’ just before she fell asleep.”

  “Theresa.” I smiled at the sound of it. “May I... may I sit with them?”

  “Heh. You’d do better to sleep in the chair, young Master, and catch your rest as you can. You will be very busy from now on.”

  * * *

  Babies, as everyone but me apparently knew, are a terrific amount of work. I had only a nebulous idea of just how much work they are, having been only three when my sisters were born.

  I would say that I didn’t mind in the slightest, but I would be lying. However, I didn’t mind nearly enough for it to matter. Miss Selworth’s time was no longer restricted by our need to get her out of the House quickly, now that she was just as trapped I was, and she tired too easily to waste her effort sharpening her tongue on me. So I was pleased to spend my time on both her and increasingly on Theresa, who was almost certainly trapped for life.

  Miss Selworth seemed to mind her daughter’s demands far more, as she passed the baby off to
me as frequently as she could, immersing herself in the books with an increasingly fervid obsession as her energy returned.

  I was far more interested in the miracle I was watching unfold, but the Book of Doors saved me quite a lot of running up and down stairs just the same. The first secret the Book had given me was one I had already learned with the Unexpected Door. A door with that glyph on it never led where one expected it to go, while one without the glyph could be encouraged to take me anywhere—which for me was most frequently the kitchen. The symbols were a means of enforcing that expectation, each one a different sort of enforcement, but a true magician could manage without the markings, if his will was strong enough.

  I quickly found that a screaming baby with a dirty diaper had a remarkable means of empowering one’s will.

  * * *

  By the end of her prescribed month, Magdalena was more than recovered; the shine was back in her smile, an the sharpness in her expectations. She was, however, quite startled when I altered her bedroom door to let her reach the lounge off the front hall, where I could open the windows to let her smell the garden in bloom while she rested.

  I left her lounging there while I went to the kitchen to collect more diapers. I was walking back, humming to myself and wondering when we would be graced with a repeat of Theresa’s first smile and whether Magdalena would get to see it this time, when I heard her shriek of rage from the lounge, followed by Theresa’s startled howl.

  My heart nearly stopped, but my feet did not—I was running before I even consciously registered that I should hurry. I don’t think I could have reached the front door any faster even if I’d used the doors.

  Magdalena was struggling furiously in the grasp of a man I did not know, her eyes sparkling with fury as they fought. Theresa lay on the floor across the room, bawling her lungs out, in a tangle of blanket from her half-unwrapped swaddling. A bruise purpled the side of her face.

  “Ghost!” Magdalena shrieked when she saw me standing there. “Help me!”

  Taking advantage of her distraction, the man twisted Magdalena’s arm up behind her, then spared a glance to the doorway where I stood gaping. “The door be sealed against you!” he yelled, flinging his free hand up in one of the gestures I had seen the Popinjays use in their rituals. “The way be blocked, the portal be shut!”

  There was no door in that particular arch, but the doorway itself seized around me, holding me fast. Every muscle in my body screamed with strain; I couldn’t move an inch. Even breathing was a strain.

  Magdalena sagged limply, in defeat or sudden exhaustion I could not tell, while the man behind her shifted his grip to keep her from falling, unconcerned with the bruises he was leaving on her arms. After a moment of scrutinizing me, or perhaps the doorway around me, he nodded, looking both pleased and thoughtful as he mused, “Excellent. The power in the Selworth remains, though this generation it’s produced a Source instead of a Magus. Of course, I can make much better use of that power than you, dear Maggie. All you can manage is charming hapless young men to your whim, while with your strength, I can bind them to a doorway for as long as I like.”

  “You’re despicable, Francis. Let go of me!”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Now that you’re divested of that inconvenient child, I can deal with that rebellious streak of yours.” He began shoving her toward the front door, which still stood open. “We’ll just have to wait until later to see if your daughter has inherited her mother’s spirit or her power—but no matter. I can be patient.”

  I paid only cursory attention to their argument, far more worried about his threat to Theresa. I suddenly wanted the two of them both far, far away from us, and ideally from each other, where neither of them could make a second wreck of my life, just as I had begun to rebuild it.

  “You’ve forgotten the House,” Magdalena snarled, struggling to get him to turn toward her. “I can’t leave, after all—unless you propose to rape me here in the foyer and get me pregnant again. Even Her Majesty wouldn’t stand for that if I told her—let go of me, Francis!”

  In my mind, I called up the glyphs I had drawn so many times over the doors in the attic, focusing on superimposing them on the front archway where the door stood open to the street. Beyond them, instead of cobbled streets and passing people I imagined the windswept, heathered moor that I had seen outside my kitchen window for the first seven years of my life. No longer home, it was also nowhere nearby.

  Master Ramond only laughed. “Maggie my dear, you can’t possibly think you know more about the House than I do? You’ve had less than two months to comprehend what I’ve spent my whole life mastering. You’ll be able to leave—you’re just as overwrought now as you were when I dragged you in here!”

  The air I was staring at began to shimmer, as if in a heat haze, and I felt the strength begin to drain out of me as I worked my first magic without the House’s backing; only the trap-spell on the doorway I stood in kept me upright.

  “What?” Magdalena whispered. “You mean... no!” she shrieked, as he shoved her straight through the front door.

  Space bent. My spell held for an instant, then snapped, and she vanished. The compulsion holding me shattered. Master Ramond shouted, “Magdalena!” and rushed out the door. I dropped to my knees, coughing, and crawled to where Theresa lay crying. I picked her up and cradled her against my chest as Master Ramond stormed back in.

  “What have you done with her?” he demanded.

  “She’s in Harrow, I think.” I coughed, rocking Theresa who was starting to calm down slightly. He stared at me in shock. “Do you also think I am still here because I am just lazy?”

  “After seven years, never showing any sign of any skill whatsoever....” He shook his head. “You’ve made Master Wilthorn a laughingstock, the worst apprentice anyone’s ever picked!”

  “I suppose no apprentice has ever before lacked the ability to read when he was locked in,” I said, getting slowly to my feet. “But until you imprisoned Miss Selworth with me, I had no way to learn. Your apprentices may learn quickly, Master Ramond, but how many of them understand? I know this House now, and I have a daughter to care for.”

  In all of her furious ranting, Magdalena Selworth had not said a word about her daughter. So be it. She would be my daughter now, and I was not about to let this arrogant popinjay anywhere near her. “You will not touch her, ever.”

  “I’ll see you hanged first!” he swore, writhing his fingers at me. A twist of space slid past me and lodged in the doorway I’d just escaped. “Interfering with the affairs of the Popinjay Society—”

  “Of which I’m a part, given my apprentice’s marque,” I said distractedly, focusing instead on the hallway behind me, on solid floorboards, wooden paneled walls, plaster-paint ceiling, home. “Though I hesitate to claim any relationship with such appalling hubris.”

  He snarled something in a language I did not know.

  I stepped backwards through his magic. Theresa wailed as the doorway twitched, trying to wrap around our throats. Then it bounced off the magic of the House embodied in her, tangled partly around me, and slid off my exact certainty of where I stood. Given no other target, like any swinging door, it rebounded back on him—hard.

  He staggered. Blood dribbled from his nose, into his mustache, and he blotted at it with one hand. For a moment, fear cowered in his eyes. “This is not over, boy, but I have better matters to attend to than you!”

  He stormed toward the open front door, in what I suspected was bravado over terror. I clutched Theresa to my chest, whispered, “Unexpected be...,” and with an unsteady mental hand, painted the glyph into the archway that had been applied to every door in the House when it was built. But my glyph omitted the twist that kept the exits within the bounds of the House. This Unexpected Door was unlimited; I would never know where he ended up, but neither would he.

  He twitched in recognition, raised his hand to cancel my work. Miserably certain that I was too new a Magician to challenge him, I resisted
anyway. Our wills clashed for an instant before a rush of energy from the infant cradled in my arms surged through me and overwhelmed his unmaking.

  With an actinic flash, the glyphs burned themselves into the air of the doorway, leaving shining afterimages, and Master Ramond failed to check his steps in time. His fearful howl echoed in the foyer as he passed through the doorway and vanished.

  Theresa let out a tiny, exhausted hiccup, and fell asleep instantly.

  For a moment, everything was silent. Then the twitter of birdsong and the sound of clopping hooves resumed beyond the doorway. The faint creek of an unlatched shutter upstairs, and footsteps in the House somewhere behind us grounded me.

  I walked to the front door, looked out at the busy street beyond—the city continuing its life beyond the House’s walls. For just a moment, I considered the scene and the smiling sleeping baby in my arms.

  Then I reached out, pulled the front door shut—blocking the world out—and locked it.

  Copyright © 2010 Anne Cross

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  Anne Cross has been a storyteller since before she can remember, but only has written proof dating back to age eight or so. Originally from Washington, DC, she escaped to the greater Boston area for college and resides there still. She splits her time between writing, fixing computers, blacksmithing, and martial arts. She is a member of BRAWL and hosts her blog at http://juniper.dreamwidth.org/.

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  COVER ART

  “Fantasy Gate,” by Wolfgang Wachelhofer

  Wolfgang Wachelhofer is an Austrian graphic artist and web designer who has a deep passion for surreal art. Most of his inspiration comes from the rich and colorful cultures of Brazil, where he lived for four years. He has done a lot of work for various clients for which he has earned a high reputation for his uniqueness. View more of his art in his online galleries.