Delusion (8 page)

She tugged at the doors, but they wouldn’t budge. Whirling, she glared at the conclave. “How dare you treat me like this! I’m an English citizen and a representative of the Home Guard”—a lie in a good cause—“and my sister and my...my father will be coming in search of me.” Her voice, which had started out stage-strong, began to falter, and she felt like she was on the verge of tears.
Whatever happens,
she told herself,
I’ll never let them fall. If you can’t be brave, at least you can act like someone who is brave.
She’d acted like an executioner and a mer-girl and a snared fox and a queen onstage. Surely she could act like someone who felt no fear.

She steeled herself as one of the men rose. It was the gentleman she’d met earlier, whose arm she’d taken so trustingly. Well, she had a thing or two to say to him!

Unfortunately, with all those eyes on her in the flickering torchlight, she couldn’t quite recall what they were at the moment.

“You are a resourceful girl,” he said, walking a step or two nearer but stopping when she made a motion with the sword. He turned to one of the men still seated. “I say, Barnaby, did you by any chance tie her up in the
Game Room?
” His tone was affable, but Phil noticed an edge to it.

“It is the only room that’s never in use, Headmaster Rudyard, and I thought—”

“You thought you’d put our prisoner in a ROOMFUL OF WEAPONS!” For a breath he looked furious, and most of the people in the room, including Phil, cringed, but the next moment he was all smiles and bonhomie again.
Like correcting a dog with a sharp word,
Phil thought. And like a dog, the man who had erred looked abashed but slavishly eager to please the next time.

The Headmaster turned again to Phil. “You see, we are so unworldly here at Stour that we forget some of the subtleties of life. Such as, do not arm your enemy. Particularly when it may not be in your power to disarm her.”

“I’m not your enemy,” Phil said.

“No? Is not the mongoose the enemy of the krait? The little snake may bite and bite, but the mongoose is immune to its deadly venom, you see. Immune.” He let the word linger.

“I just want to leave,” Phil said desperately, reaching back to try the door again. She knew she could pick the lock—doors or chains or handcuffs, it made no difference to her—but it would take her a few seconds at least, perhaps longer if it was a tricky device, and she couldn’t turn away from these men. Maybe she could do it one-handed behind her back, as she did the handcuffs and the simple padlocks they used onstage, but she couldn’t do it left-handed and didn’t dare shift her sword.

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible, young lady. You’ve stumbled on a secret organization.”

“Are you Nazis?” she gasped, electrified.

The Headmaster frowned in puzzlement and bent to confer with one of the men in a brief whisper, then shook his head. “No, we are not Nazis. We are...something else.”

“If this is an asylum, I understand you don’t want word to get out. Is this where the nobility sends their batty sons and crazy cousins? Fine, that’s none of my business. But surely you know that you can’t keep me here. I’m sorry I came onto your property, but the worst you can do is have me before the magistrate on trespassing charges.” She hoped that if everything she said was rational and practical, this might all somehow start to make sense.

“We are not mad,” the Headmaster said, smiling gently within the shelter of his neat silver goatee. “It is only that we ought to kill you.”

He said it so calmly, it actually slipped by her for a second.
Oh, well, if that’s all...
Then the full force of her dire situation struck her. Even if she was brave enough to hack through some of them, she’d be overpowered by sheer numbers. This was her finale, and she had to decide how to face it. This was the water tank escape in the third minute, when her lungs were burning and her brain was screaming
breathe!
and at any moment her mouth would obey and gulp in a deep breath of death.

She gripped her tulwar tighter and narrowed her eyes at the Headmaster. She would launch a preemptive attack, and he, their leader, would be the first to fall to her blade. She hoped that might throw the others into such disarray that she could make her escape.

At least,
she thought with a brief melodramatic return of her usual stage theatrics,
I will take a few of them with me when I die!

She took a step toward the Headmaster, over the prone fleshy form of her erstwhile guide, and pointed her sword tip at his chest.

“We
ought
to kill you,” he said, without moving or seeming the least concerned. “But we cannot. One of our number has spoken for you. A prentice, it is true, but our laws are ancient and unequivocal. Any objection to a death sentence must be honored.”

A small figure materialized from the flickering torch-shadows at the edge of the room.

Phil dropped her sword with a clatter and had the boy in her arms in a heartbeat. She wasn’t afraid anymore. Madmen and murder—they couldn’t count for anything in a world that allowed miracles.

Her little adopted brother Stan was alive.

She hugged him fiercely, burying her face in his dark shaggy curls. She kept her eyes closed for the longest time, only feeling him, afraid to look at him directly in case she’d been wrong. But no, he smelled like her Stan, too. When he came to the Albion family, he had had nothing more than a spare shirt and a string of sandalwood beads, tied up in a handkerchief. The beads never lost their smell. He kept them between his folded clothes, and their sweet warm spice always hung about him. Phil took a deep breath and opened her eyes.

“Stanislaus Bambula has joined our order in the College of Drycraeft as a junior prentice. He claims—he swears—that you are no threat to us, and so we must let you live. Against our better judgment, I might add. Against
my
better judgment.”

She looked into Stan’s otter-brown eyes, eyes so dark they were almost black, but with an earthy depth, a softness, that black eyes never quite attain. Black eyes glitter—they reflect, like glass or obsidian. The darkest brown eyes draw you in.

“Why did they take you?” she asked, kneeling and gazing up at her brother.

“Don’t worry, Phil,” he said, and she felt her heart catch at that familiar voice, the strange mix of Shakespearean precision and Cockney and some vague central European accent he’d picked up in his short but varied life.

“Don’t worry?” she asked, incredulous. “Come on, we’re leaving right now.” She glared over his shoulder at the gathering of men, daring them to stop her.

“I can’t,” Stan said gently. “I won’t. This is where I belong.”

“You’re confused. What happened? Were you hurt in the bombings? Did they bring you here?” Her fingers traced spider steps over his skull but found no injury.

“I wasn’t hurt,” he said, enduring her fussing with a little squirm. “And yes, they brought me here. But as soon as I arrived I knew—oh, Phil, this is home. Or as close to home as I’ll ever have, without my own mum.”

Phil frowned. He’d never said a word about his family, and she’d always assumed they’d died or abandoned him when he was too young to remember them.

“Our home is at the Hall of Delusion,” she said firmly. “At least it was, and it will be again as soon as it’s safe, but in any case your home is with us.” She rose and took his hand, giving it a tug, but he stood firm, surprisingly stolid for his size.

“This is where I belong,” he said. “I would have been here long ago, if only I’d known, but my mother always told me...well, that doesn’t matter now. Believe me, I’m safe here, and happy.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. These men—lunatics or perverts or whatever they might be—have kidnapped you and...and tricked you! I’m not leaving without you.” She gave his hand another pull, but before it could dissolve into a battle, Head-master Rudyard stepped nearer.

“As well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb, they said when I was a boy. It is clear that she won’t leave without further assurance of your safety, Prentice Stanislaus. We may not kill her, we cannot contain her with magic, and I’m sure we can only toss her back over the ha-ha so many times before she decides to make herself a true nuisance. You say she is safe, prentice? Well, you may hold the future of the College of Drycraeft in your hands. If you think she can be trusted to hold her tongue, why don’t you tell her about us.”

Stan nodded. “And about her, sir?”

The Headmaster’s silver caterpillar eyebrows twitched upward. “No. We know nothing about her, lad. We only suspect, and that is no better than the wagging tongues of old gossips. Go someplace you can be alone. The solar, perhaps. If we are very fortunate, she’ll tell the world and end up locked in an asylum for the rest of her life and will trouble us no more.”

Phil snaked out an arm and recaptured her sword. “Somewhere outside the manor, if you please.”

The Headmaster chuckled. “Of course, of course. You are no prisoner—anymore.”

“Neither is Stan,” she retorted.

He did not answer her directly, only studied her for a long moment before saying, “Don’t leave the grounds too quickly. There is still a matter I must discuss with you.”

The doors clicked behind her, unlocking and swinging ajar. Holding Stan tightly, she backed out, telling herself that no matter what Stan might say, she was taking him back to Weasel Rue with her, even if she had to drag him all the way.

Stan led her through the woods, past vines growing as fast as twining snakes that reached for her arms. Unseen in the shrubbery, something large moved, making a sound between a purr and a growl. When the landscape opened near the lake’s mossy bank, she glimpsed a flash of prancing white. A horse, she assured herself, wide-eyed. For there was no way she could have seen a horn.

“What is this place?” she breathed. If Rousseau had painted a madhouse, it would look like this. But Stan seemed to have no fear, so she clung to him and kept her terror secret when a golden bear lumbered across their path, ignoring them as it reared up to eat pink lychee nuts.

They sat together under the Japanese maples, on a high bank overlooking the lake. For a long moment Stan gazed over the water, watching the reflection of passing clouds until the surface was shattered by the stout, olive-colored body of a hunting pike. When at last he spoke, he didn’t answer her directly.

“My mother never danced for me, but she told me of the nights when the campfires were so bright they blinded the moon, when fiddlers played songs that would lure gods from the heavens and ghosts from below, when the caravans looked like palaces. On those nights, she told me, she would dance, and it was beyond the power of any eye to look away from her. They took her when she was heavy with me, away from her family, away from her lovers, and locked her away in a place they called a university, in Dresden. It was a prison. There she bore me, and there we stayed for five years.”

His voice was far away, and he spoke as if he had seen those womb-times with his own eyes.

“I don’t understand. Who took your mother? Why?”

“We are Romany, Gypsies. She was a sorceress, renowned among her people. We were in Poland when they found her. They had taken members of our clan before, over the generations. It runs in our line, you see. They came from nowhere, and in an instant we were behind beautiful, cold stone walls. I know I can’t remember—how could I?—yet I know there was a time when all the warmth and light fell out of the world. I was born a month later in the Universität Zauberhaft.”

“But
why
did they take you?” Phil asked, knowing she was missing something crucial.

“Magic,” he said. “Haven’t you been listening?”

She had been, but in her mind there was only one kind of magic, and these people didn’t seem to practice it. Any other definition would not be logically possible. She shook her head.

Stan smiled, a beacon in his shadowed face. “Look. Tell me what this is, if not magic.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and Phil thought he must be thinking of his favorite thing in the world, for every care in his serious young face seemed to vanish. He opened his eyes, beatific, and the ground began to shimmer beneath his crossed legs. It stirred some memory within her, like a recollection of a delicious smell, or the ghost of a loving touch from infancy, something so irrevocably lost it might never have been, yet so precious it made her heart hurt. Pale green light rose like a mist to envelop Stan, and he stretched out his hand to bestow a benediction upon the earth.

Then, at their feet, a flower began to grow.

The ground stirred and cracked, heaving from below as with a miniature incipient volcano, and then a spearhead of green cleft its way to the sunlight. In a matter of seconds it sprouted stem, leaves, and curving cat’s-claw thorns, and at last a gaudy scarlet flower budded and blossomed and unfurled itself in sanguine glory.

“It’s from Madagascar,” Stan said as the jade glow faded. “I saw it in a book once.”

Phil nudged his feet aside, first one, then the other. “There’s a button, right, and a pneumatic device?”

Stan grinned.

“A projection then?” But she knew no smoke and mirrors could produce such a perfect illusion at close range. She could smell the damned thing! Already little flies rose from the lakeside mud to investigate its novel nectar. “A trapdoor?” she asked desperately.

“Magic,” Stan said.

“It’s not a real flower, then.” She chuckled with relief. “All of this is an illusion. Thank goodness! I admit I was a little worried about the bear and the tiger. But if they’re not real—”

“They’re perfectly real—as long as they last.” He waved his hand, and with an opalescent wave of light, a curtain of vines dissolved, revealing a nonplussed tiger, which vanished in turn a moment later.

Stan touched one of the delicate flower petals. “I created this, from nothing, using the powers of the earth. Nearly everything on these grounds was created by the magicians, drawn up out of nothing, here for a breath, and gone again, like everything that lives. We’re all part of the Essence. I knew what it was even before I came here and they gave it a name. I could always summon the earth’s power, though when I was in Dresden, I hid it as best I could. It was easier there—there’s hardly any Essence outside of England.”