All Night Awake (6 page)

The grin died upon the transparent face, like a candle blown out.

Sylvanus’s eyebrows gathered, his mouth pulled in a rictus of pain. “You were done with me, brother. Or so you thought. Done with me when you turned me out of Fairyland and stole my throne.”

A hunting horn sounded in the distance.

Sylvanus’s transparent shape wavered and trembled with each note, as though the sound injured him.

Quicksilver looked up at the sound, because he knew that horn well. Louder and clearer than any human instrument, it was the call of the Hunter, a being who had existed before the elves, a being whom the elves themselves believed embodied a fundamental thread in the fabric of the Universe. God or demon he might be. But powerful he was. Years ago Sylvanus had been made the Hunter’s dog, the Hunter’s slave.

Up on the horizon, in the purpled sky where thunderclouds began massing, a dark shape showed, looking like a hunter on horseback, his silver horn at his lips, calling to his dogs that clustered, growling and threatening, around his horse’s legs.

Twice before had Quicksilver met the Hunter, twice before, once in sorrow and once in joy.

But neither time had he escaped unscathed. The terror of the Hunter, the knowledge of something that, beyond elf and man, judged both and cared for neither, had chilled some core of Quicksilver’s innocence and forever ended his prolonged elven childhood.

Now, feeling the hair rise at the back of his neck, Quicksilver looked over his shoulder at Malachite and the three younger elves, all them terrified looking, all pale, all trembling.

“Go,” Quicksilver said. “Go, all of you. Stand back. Take refuge.”

The three younger elves ran madly toward the trees, but Malachite stayed, stubbornly, rooted to the spot, staring at his king.

“You, too, Malachite. Go.”

Malachite shook his head slowly. “No, milord. There’s something you must know—”

Sylvanus, in the center of the darkness, screamed, his voice changing from elven speech to a wide baying.

Quicksilver turned. Sylvanus transformed.

He transformed as if he were being burned, as though his substance had ignited in the hottest breath of a blazing furnace.

Twisting and writhing like a bit of hair that, caught in a candle flame, curls and twirls and is finally consumed by heat, Sylvanus dropped to all fours and trembled, and changed, and transformed, until in his place there was only a squat, square-headed, heavy-jawed dog.

One of the Hunter’s own dogs, which Sylvanus had become, in punishment of his many crimes.

In that shape, a form neither wolf nor dog but something predating both—a creature that had rounded and nipped at man in his cave and howled around the mountain holds of the elves when the world was young—Sylvanus turned baleful eyes to the Hunter.

The Hunter had stopped, amid the thunderclouds, and with outstretched arm, incited his dogs forth.

The dogs ran down from the sky, seemingly descending a staircase woven of darkness and steps made of roiling purple clouds.

As they neared, Quicksilver trembled. Panic closed his throat and ice gripped his stomach. What dread creatures, these, square and squat, broad of head and shoulder, low of legs, creatures made to hunt in ice eternal and eternal night.

How would it be to be hounded by them?

Sylvanus trembled and looked as piteous, as forlorn as a deer faced with the baying dogs that would tear it apart.

Whining, he backed away from the other dogs, his belly close to the ground, his tail tucked between his legs.

His squat body trembled, his hirsute fur ruffled at the neck, and his piteous eyes, Sylvanus’s incongruously blue eyes, turned to gaze at Quicksilver as the dog slid and shied away from the Hunter’s mastiffs.

“Brother,” Sylvanus said, his voice composed of growls and low baying, which yet formed intelligible words. “Brother, they’ve come and they’ll rent me limb from limb, or yet worse, they’ll take me with them. They’ll take me with them forever, to be one of them.”

He had time for the words—no more—as the dogs closed around him, screaming, nipping, baying, a pile of fur and open maws, of claws and blood-lapping tongues.

Quicksilver gaped at the mayhem of fur, the melee of furious canine bodies. His heart contracted in horror as fur covered fur and jaws snapped, and teeth met teeth in ferocious clash.

This was his brother there, he thought. His brother, turned to such a low, demeaning form. Sylvanus, Quicksilver’s brother, born of the same noble Titania, sired by the same majestic Oberon, once Queen and King of Fairyland. Sylvanus’s birth had been welcomed, celebrated through the hilltops of many lands. Sylvanus had been a pampered prince, once.

And now this—this pile of fur, this bestial strife.

Quicksilver heard Malachite draw breath behind him.

With scant breath, Quicksilver asked, “How does he not come to us? How not run this way?”

“I’ve tried to tell you, lord,” Malachite said. “The barrier hasn’t really been breached. Your brother has projected the illusion of it being so. But it remains whole. Whole enough that he can’t crawl onto our side.”

“An illusion?” Quicksilver asked, and yet dared not look away from the giant figure of shadow, with glimmering red eyes and a shining silver horn, who climbed down from his horse and strode down the same stairway his dogs had used, toward them, toward cowering, pitiable Sylvanus.

“How an illusion?”

“How I don’t know, Quicksilver.” Malachite spoke in a whisper. “But that is all. It is all delusion. He has no power such as would breech our defenses. Yet he fooled us, and me first of all. What a trick to master! I think it was that he knew the defenses so well, having once been . . . . our king.”

Once the King of Fairyland and now a cur.

Quicksilver shivered.

Why had his brother wished him to see this? Had he meant Quicksilver to have nightmares over it, all his life long?

“Come,” the Hunter said, and his speaking rustled the leaves of the trees like an icy wind, freezing Quicksilver’s mind and heart. “Come.”

At this word, the dogs parted and heeled to him, gamboling and frisking like happy puppies on seeing their master.

On the ground lay a pile of fur, wet with blood, stained with the iridescent saliva of the creatures. Nothing more.

The Hunter took the horn to his lips and blew upon it. The cold, silvery sound wove itself into the surrounding trees like a mist of ice, bringing a reminder of winter to the summer night.

“Come,” the Hunter said.

At that one word, the pathetic remains quivered.

At that one word, the bloodied piece of fur moved.

Legs grew on it, and a muzzle. A cowed, shivering dog stood on uncertain paws, bleeding from myriad wounds.

You see how it is,
Quicksilver heard in his mind.
Neither death nor eternity will free me. I was greedy, brother, but I meant no harm. I thought you not able to rule the land, and so I tried to rule in your stead. Does this deserve punishment eternal?

The voice was not a voice, but a thought, whispered close into the ventricle of Quicksilver’s brain. But that thought was Sylvanus’s. The voice of a scared elf.

It echoed a voice Quicksilver remembered from when Sylvanus had been but a young prince and faced with the monumental sky-cracking rages of their father, Oberon.

And though Quicksilver knew that his brother had done more than enough to deserve this fate, though he knew Sylvanus’s crimes mounted to the sky and raised bloody hands to the heavens, craving the gods’ revenge, yet in his heart Quicksilver pitied the vile thing.

Sylvanus had once reigned in Fairyland.

Now Quicksilver was the king of elves.

In vain he told himself that a king must be impervious to the hurts and lacerations of his subjects.

Yet if Sylvanus was his subject, then couldn’t Quicksilver decide to stop Sylvanus’s punishment?

Ten years, Sylvanus had endured near the heart and center of a vengeful force, his elven body consumed away, his elven nature distorted. Was that not enough?

Behind Quicksilver, Malachite withdrew his hand and whispered, “I’m sorry, milord. I—”

Raising his hand, Quicksilver spoke, his voice small against the gathering thunder, the baying of the dogs that clustered around their master, Sylvanus’s whimpers of desolate pain.

“Stop, Great One,” Quicksilver said. “Stop, I beg you.”

The Hunter turned to Quicksilver a face that looked almost human or elven, save that no human, no elf, could even envision the perfection of the Hunter’s noble look, from curly dark hair to chiseled features. As he turned, the Hunter exposed his chest where—in the place a human heart would lodge—an empty darkness, an absence of all, reigned.

“You beg?” the Hunter asked. Laughter poured out, as cold as ice, as chilled as winter fog. “You beg me to stop? Who are you to beg and to demand how I should punish this cur, and when I should stay?”

“But justice—” Quicksilver said.

Again the Hunter laughed. “Justice is a word you don’t understand, oh king, who judge everyone according to your changeable measure. This is true evil, and this I will punish.”

The Hunter’s arm rose. Upon it something crackled, a whip of light, a cord of lightning.

He raised it and let it fall upon Sylvanus’s canine form.

Sylvanus howled and fell, bleeding again, yet rose again as the Hunter called, “Come.”

Quicksilver could not endure it.

He could neither watch it nor turn away. His heart pounding, his blood raging through his head like a fever, he raised his hand.

“No,” the Hunter yelled. “No. Give way. I’ll take what’s mine.”

Sylvanus, the dog, whimpered, belly to the dirt.

Before Quicksilver knew it, he lifted his hand. He summoned to him his magic and the gathered strength of his hill, that gathering of elven souls and bodies and magic over which Quicksilver reigned, his to command. He aimed a bolt of destruction at the Hunter’s feet and threw it and felt the burn of power leave his hand.

The power of the hill, in a form like the thunderbolt, flew from his open palm.

Quicksilver meant only to let the ball of fire land between Sylvanus and the Hunter, and thus call the Hunter’s attention and give his brother respite.

But as the fire crackled, bright, from his hand, it flew past the dog and the dog, somehow, reached out a hand that looked like Sylvanus’s and caught the fire and spun it off again—toward the thatched roofs of Stratford.

Fairy lights burned in the mortal night, a trail of power splitting the mundane peace of mortal repose.

Fire hit the roofs of the nearby houses.

The thatch blazed.

Dogs howled, men screamed, babies cried.

“Milord,” Malachite whispered.

“Stop,” the Hunter yelled. “Stop.”

Quicksilver took a deep breath, tainted with the smoke from the burning houses. One breath to realize he was alive.

Another breath as the smoke grew worse.

Another breath and Quicksilver saw Sylvanus writhe to human shape and grow and smile, a smile of satisfaction such as babes show after milk and men after love.

“He’s feeding on the deaths,” the Hunter yelled. “He’s feeding on the life force of dead mortals. From me he learned that, but I refrain unless the life comes from evildoers.”

Sylvanus’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed in satisfaction, his small, pulpy lips widened in a broader smile, and he waved a hand that looked more solid than before, in the direction of the fire that spread, from roof to roof and from thatch to thatch, like vermin that jump from one body to the other and consume all.

“Thank you, brother. Thank you. I would have lived my whole life as the Hunter’s dog, but for you. By setting this fire have you given me lives that, in the manner of the Hunter, I can collect to grow my own, and increase my force.”

As Sylvanus twisted and writhed in his obscene pleasure, he grew. The dark mist around him overspread, darker and darker, like a killing frost, its tendrils reaching out to the burning houses and by them growing in strength and force, like a dark octopus that grows and spreads over the floor of a blighted sea.

There was plague in that wicked mist, Quicksilver thought, the pestilent touch and evil humor of illness.

And other things, other dark things that would bring death to most and feed Sylvanus’s swollen appetite.

What was this creature Sylvanus was becoming? What powers would it have?

Never in the collective memory of Fairyland had something like this happened.

Never had an elf been king and slave to the Hunter and then . . . what?

Quicksilver broke into a sweat of shame and fear.

Never had a king been so weak as to help free his mortal enemy.

Quicksilver wished he could hide, wished he could crawl away in shame.

Screams echoed from everywhere in Stratford. Women and children and men woke to find themselves engulfed in flame.

Some ran out of the houses, flaming like living torches, to burn and die on the street. Others ran here and there, with buckets of water, throwing these at the flames, which mockingly grew despite all.

Quicksilver, unable to breathe, unable to think, looking at his brother grow in power, looking at Stratford being consumed, sank to his knees and screamed, “What have I done?”

“No time for that, no time,” Malachite said. “No time for that, milord. These your vassals await orders. Should we not fight the fire?” He gestured to the elven youths who stood behind Quicksilver and waited.

“Listen to him, listen, brother,” Sylvanus said before Malachite was even fully done. His words echoed of amusement and mockery. “Listen to him, for he’s a man, his wit greater than your womanly wiles.”

Quicksilver wanted to scream, he wanted to rage. He wished he could throw fire again, this time the fire that consumed his heart and burned his soul. But instead he nodded to Malachite and said, “Aye. Go. Help them.”

Aware of what he must look like to the young people he commanded, he stood up and, trembling, tried to brush the knees of his breeches.

Sylvanus’s power still grew and Quicksilver must do something.