Arcana Read online

  ‘I’ve read them all before.’ The fat man sounded tired. His voice was piping, enough to make Joe wonder whether he had undergone mutilation in order to attain his present position. Didn’t eunuchs run to fat as a rule?

  ‘Sir, don’t you seek salvation?’

  ‘People come here seeking salvation all the time. We provide it, just like we always have. Nothing changes.’

  The fat man seemed to grow bored with the television, though nothing more nor less boring had happened onscreen, from what little Joe understood of the game. The eunuch switched off the set and picked up a codex from the arm of his chair. Joe had taken the volume for a TV guide, but the fat man opened it and stared listlessly at a torn page.

  There was a long silence, but Joe was used to silence: the Convenor was a man of few words and many pauses.

  The fat man grew uncomfortable long before Joe, even though he was sitting, Joe must assume, comfortably. He said, ‘Why don’t you go upstairs? Have an hour on the house.’

  ‘It’s the house that most concerns me. It used to be God’s and it could be again, if you are willing to make a few small changes.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your HQ in town?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I should have thought you’d make more converts there.’

  ‘Sir, we’re not all about making converts. The life of faith is very often a contemplative life, and there is little scope for us to rest peacefully in God’s love in the middle of town. Out here, on the other hand, the silence can be quite beautiful.’

  The two of them listened to a mattress squeaking overhead.

  ‘Do you want it?’ the fat man asked finally.

  Joe knew if he only waited long enough, the fat man would amplify.

  ‘This place? Do you want it?’

  Joe didn’t dare breathe.

  ‘God knows I’ve given up plenty to get here,’ the fat man said.

  ‘There are modern surgical procedures,’ Joe said helpfully. ‘They can restore what was lost.’

  ‘No,’ the fat man said, ‘they can’t.’

  He looked up at Joe with tears in his eyes, and before Joe knew quite what was going on the fat man had handed him an enormous keyring and waddled out through the front door into a sudden burst of sunshine.

  A Frozen Fairytale

  The tracks in the snow looked deep. Very deep. Cedric decided not to continue his journey that day. But he did not want to sit by the fire with the rest of the travellers and listen to their tales: he was not interested in illusion. So he decided he would go to the top of the lodge's tower and see what he could see. Snow was no longer falling and he hoped he would be able to see, if not his destination then at least something of the obstacles he would have to deal with when he set out the following day.

  Cedric’s whole body ached. He had been caught in the beginnings of the snow. He felt as though he had been caught in the beginnings of the world.

  The lodge servants chittered at him but made no move to stop him as he edged away from the fire. Cedric had no idea what language they spoke. He imagined it derived from Welsh, since it had been a great Welsh lord who set up the system of lodges for weary travellers. Cedric had heard legends of the prior days, when the exhausted had to take their chances lying in the open. He had not paid them any heed, for he had never imagined himself as the journeying type. He had seen enough in the war. It had taken the death of Hannah to budge him from his little estate.

  He found himself crossing a great open space. Everything in the lodge seemed built on a grander scale than suited Cedric. He supposed he had no reason to complain, as a recipient of generous hospitality, but it was as if the fixtures and fittings were the legacy of a race of giants.

  At length he reached the door. It was closed. He feared to open it: he knew, because he had stayed in places like this before, that as soon as he did someone around the fire would complain. One thing the great Welsh lord had not been able to fix was human nature: always to complain. Cedric was a little surprised that so many people should be travelling in such bad weather. Time was when you could set out without arranging any accommodation at all, counting on a lodge bed and the servants’ gratitude, obvious over the language barrier, that you had given them something to fill their lonely lives. It had been a long time since Cedric had seen the inside of an inn: he remembered, though he would rather have forgotten, a blazing row over the price of ale. These days he kept to the lodges and let the hostelries fend for themselves.

  Cedric leaned on his staff, wanting to make it very obvious to the party around the fire that he was definitely armed and potentially dangerous. With the other hand he opened the door.

  The travellers had been singing a winter song. Cedric had hoped their music would cover his exit, but they fell to bickering over the lyrics just as he cracked the door open. As if to show the unwisdom of his course, a great gale blew in. The servants had allowed the fire to slump, but the rush of air drew from it a sudden glow, like a red lamp signalling his departure.

  ‘Come back and settle this argument!’ a woman yelled. Cedric disapproved of women travelling alone: what kind of husband would permit it? Hannah had never shown the slightest inclination to go anywhere without him.

  Cedric had the door open all the way now. He shouted over his shoulder, ‘No good asking me. I don't know any of the words,’ and left the room. Closing the door behind him took some doing, because it was heavy. He considered leaving it for the servants, but they were fooling with the fire and he did not want to make the others angrier than he must. There was a lock on the door of every room, but it looked flimsy and he was sure the servants could be bribed. If someone took a disliking to him and had the money to express it, they might do away with him almost as readily as in the old days.

  He stood in the entrance hall and contemplated the great flight of stairs. There was no guarantee he would obtain the view he was looking for, even if he could get all the way up. The Welsh lord had been a great man but also a thrifty one: if the lodges had been purpose-built, they would look very different to these relics of a time when people knew more than they did today. On the whole they were uncomfortable places: physically because they were barely navigable and mentally because they served as a reminder of man's relatively lowly place in the cosmos.

  It was cold in the hall and yet Cedric fell asleep and dreamed he was being attacked by a hunched man with wheels instead of feet. Fortunately the stranger had no proper weapon, but still he struck at Cedric with his oblong shield. In the dream Cedric could not raise his staff because it had stuck itself to the floor. Nor could he retreat, because the party at the fire would mete out rougher treatment. He had to stand there and suffer the blows until his cries drew a servant from the farther reaches of the lodge. The servant’s skin marked him as a prisoner of war. Having no love for the likes of Cedric, who had served with distinction in the army, he was content to observe awhile as the half-man dealt Cedric the blows those distant islands would have loved to rain down upon the invader.

  Cedric awoke. Both allegorical figures had vanished back to the land of dreams, whence Cedric's guilty conscience would no doubt summon them again.

  He seized the bannister rail and set off up the stairs with renewed determination, if depleted vigour.

  At the turn of the stairs he tried to look out through the stained glass, but he could make out nothing but the glare of light from snow. He began to wonder whether he were quite sane, abandoning his estate in the dead of winter. He found himself as incapable of reconstructing the motives that must have run through his mind as if they had belonged to a different person—not Hannah, of course, who had always adopted his wishes as her own, but someone he had never met.

  He made it part of the way up the next set of stairs before the answer came to him: witchcraft.

  He stumbled on the stairs under the burden of that word. The Church of England had all but surrendered to witches from the Celtic lands. Just last Christmas, the Archbishop had faile
d to preach because he had been hexed.

  These are dark days, Cedric told himself. He was glad Hannah had not lived to see them.

  He righted himself and reached the second landing. The carpet was stained with the blood of the giants from whom the lodge had been wrested. Cedric was glad the army was still good for something, even if the Church had given way to these dark times.

  The upper floor, where the main room of the lodge ought to have been for the sake of the view, had been converted into more sleeping quarters, perhaps for the servants. Cedric despaired of ever getting to see the lie of the land. He had maps, but his army days had taught him you stood more chance of reconstructing someone’s train of thought from words on a page than inferring how arduous a journey would be from lines on a map.

  He marched up to the nearest bedroom door and rapped on it with his staff.

  ‘Just a minute!’ a woman's voice cried from within.

  Cedric decided he had better try the next door. There was something decidedly unmilitary about disturbing women in their beds. That sort of palaver was best left to the enemy.

  Before he could take himself off, the door opened a crack and enough of a woman peered out for Cedric to tell she was not beautiful. The enemy was welcome to her.

  ‘What is it?’ she demanded.

  ‘I didn’t mean to trouble you. I’m trying to get a look at the view.’

  The woman seemed not to understand. Cedric realised he had not spoken clearly. His head hurt. He supposed he must have partaken a little too liberally of the free drinks the servants were constantly bringing to the fire.

  Cedric pushed the door all the way open and brandished his staff in what he hoped was a threatening manner. He would never in a million years hit a woman or suffer one to be beaten who did not deserve it, but he hoped that if he looked threatening enough the woman would retreat.

  Sure enough, she let him enter her room. Cedric recognised that he would have a hard time explaining himself to any traveller who happened to look in on them. He was counting on two things: the relative indifference that prevailed among strangers in these estranging times, and the skew in giants’ buildings that often led to doors falling closed behind him.

  The door did indeed close. No wonder the Royal Engineers had had an easy time against the giants.

  As soon as his retreat was barred, Cedric realised the occupant of the room was a witch harnessing alien technology. No-one understood quite how the things worked, but witches seemed by trial and error to get enough of a response out of the artefacts to be considered operators if not exactly mistresses. The prospect of this woman as his mistress made Cedric shudder.

  ‘Are you palsied?’ the witch demanded.

  ‘Not unless you have ensorcelled me. No, it is just rather cold in here.’

  Several of the artefacts were glowing an adularia glow, the very opposite of fire: they struck chill into Cedric's bones. Cedric strode to the window. The curtains were closed: the witch was secretive, with good reason. He flung them open and beheld another shortcoming of giants’ buildings: the window faced a blank wall.

  The witch cackled. ‘Whatever you were hoping to see, you won't see it here.’

  She was wrong. Cedric could see, in the artefact she was using as a crystal ball, images that looked faintly familiar. He moved closer, but not too close. ‘What is that?’ he demanded, though he knew what the images showed.

  ‘The invasion.’

  ‘Why are you looking back in time? Why not look forwards?’ The pictures were unclear and changed from time to time, but Cedric could identify the ranks on the uniforms readily enough. He even thought he could name the places, if not the dates.

  ‘There is no future. Only snow.’

  ‘What are you raving about? There's been a past. There must be a future.’

  ‘If there was, don’t you think I would have seen it? I tell you it’s all just snow, forever and ever. Look here.’

  The witch ambled arthritically over to another of her arcane devices. It showed a monochromatic image that could have been anything or nothing.

  ‘You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re doing. Those aliens were cleverer than we gave them credit for.’

  ‘What aliens? What are you talking about?’

  Dear Lord, they've taken her mind. ‘You’ve forgotten. They’ve made you forget.’

  ‘Nobody can make me forget anything. That’s what I was given this for: to help me remember.’ The witch gestured vaguely at the working artefact, which was still showing the same few fragments of the past. As Cedric watched, the images began to repeat.

  ‘You’ve forgotten, I tell you. You need to stop looking into those things and start looking out of your window.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘I shall set out tomorrow.’

  ‘I want to come with you.’

  ‘I don't think that’s a good idea.’ An officer travelling with a woman who wasn’t his wife? Shacked up with a witch, and an ugly one at that? Unthinkable.

  ‘Why not? Why can’t I?’

  Straight talking was what they taught you in the Army, and training ran deep. ‘Because you’re a witch.’

  ‘A witch, am I? And you’re a senile old bugger.’

  ‘That’s no way to talk to one of Her Majesty’s officers, you old hag.’

  ‘I bet you couldn’t stand to attention if you tried.’

  ‘They’ve got control of you. Don’t you see?’ Cedric turned back to the window. Who in their right mind built a window overlooking only a wall? Nobody. Not even giants would do such a thing. It had to be a trap for the unwary.

  Cedric seized the artefact with its illusions of the past and flung it through the illusory glass at the illusion of a wall.

  He was convinced he had proved his point, distraught no vista had opened up as a result. That was why, in his confused state, he lashed out with his staff at the swarm of servants who dragged him back to his own quarters on the ground floor. There was no prospect of leaving that day since they had locked him in, but on the morrow he would venture out, snow or no snow. And Hannah would come with him.

  Something More

  ‘How do I get down there?’ Jan asked. That was when the co-pilot must have coshed him.

  He woke without the numbness of sleep abating. He was down there: as close to the surface of Abaddon as he could have got, lying on permafrost in the driving snow. Without an environment suit, though there had been one on the shuttle set aside for his use. They had never meant him to use it.

  Never trust the government. Jan never had. That was why he had preferred to keep the purchase tax money. He was bound to make better use of it than some bunch of brainless public servants. Who but the most inept would go to work for the government’s pittance?

  Jan wondered whether he would know death when he saw it. He couldn’t see much at all, not that there was anything to see. The hermitage was around here somewhere. So that was their game. He had put it to them: ‘Isn’t this guy going to get at least a little suspicious?’ They hadn’t answered. Jan assumed they didn’t know: no point asking brainless public servants anything.

  He was damned if he was going to lie here on the offchance Garibald would come out here and fetch him. Garibald was undoubtedly a do-gooder, which was why the taxmen couldn’t fathom him at all, but the fellow would have to be a lunatic to venture out of his hovel in this. It was winter here. Summer was more of the same, according to government data. Which meant summer probably had hula girls and ice nowhere except in daiquiris.

  No point waiting for Garibald. Jan tried to get up. Nothing doing. He could see his legs in their usual places, but they were out to lunch. His arms were going the same way.

  Probably only a matter of time before the wind blew him entirely away.

  His life wasn’t flashing before his eyes. Had it really been so eventless and drab that it wasn’t worth remembering, even at a time like this? Jan tried to feel sorry for his sins as a precaution, b
ut he couldn’t remember having committed any. It was certainly a crime to get found out, but he had had no control over that. If he had, it would never have happened. Was it sinful to be unlucky? Garibald must have some idea. Jan would have to ask him, if he ever pitched up.

  Jan closed his eyes, not seriously expecting to open them again.

  #

  ‘Wake up, Brother,’ Garibald said. ‘It’s time for prayers.’

  Jan woke up. He had never been one for praying, but now seemed like a more than reasonable time to start.

  Since he was out of the wind and the snow, Jan reasoned he must be in the afterlife or Garibaldi’s hovel. He ruled out teleportation, which would never get invented now because it was impossible for inventors to get a break. Jan knew this because he had looked into setting himself up as an inventor. It seemed like a great business to be in: people looked up to you on the basis of all the stuff you didn’t know, admired you for pledging to find out. Every day was time to remake your New Year’s resolutions. But the banks wouldn’t advance him a start-up loan: no lab for Jan.

  Garibald said, ‘I’ll lead the prayers. You follow.’

  Jan tried to pay attention to Garibald’s static murmur. Garibald began by thanking Elph for saving the life of Its servant Jan. Jan wondered how Garibald knew his name, then realised it was stencilled on the breast of the shipsuit he was no longer wearing. Panic. The government was really taking a chance here: for all they knew, decades of isolation might have turned Garibald into a raging sex maniac. Jan didn’t feel violated, but his body was still very numb. Anything could have happened while he was out. He swore he would find out, and if anything untoward had gone on, he would get home somehow and arrange for the very same thing to happen twenty times to the Assistant Inspector of Their Majesties’ Taxes who had sold him this pup of a deal.

  Swearing vengeance, Jan passed out.

  He felt a warmth infuse him. At first he thought it was the love of Elph, but he managed to open his eyes enough to establish it was Garibald feeding him gruel. And gone again.