Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) (21 page)

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.” With all her heart she wanted to believe him. His fluent, undramatic narrative had sounded true, but there was still no guarantee that he wasn’t the most charmingly smooth con man she’d ever met. She inhaled, letting the wintry air cool her emotions. Her anger at Frances and her feelings for Mist fell away. “The way you talk about Aetherials and suchlike is highly plausible, even to an average skeptic like me. But I’m warning you, you’ll find Frances an infinitely tougher audience. Still, nothing ventured…” She smiled, and was gratified to receive a warm, bright smile in response. “Are you ready? Come on, Mist, let’s do this.”

*   *   *

Humphrey came running to meet them, his tail wagging so hard that his whole body was in sinuous motion. Frances Manifold was poking listlessly at the fire. The living room felt warmer, the drab walls mellow with creamy-orange firelight. Humphrey sat down at Mist’s feet, gazing upward and making tiny jerks as if to plead in vain,
Let’s play!

Frances straightened up and said, to Stevie’s surprise, “Are you all right, my dear? I don’t blame you for walking out: I deserved it. I’m so sorry. Please come and have some tea while it’s still hot. It’s all my fault.”

“What is?” asked Stevie.

“That Daniel went. I should have kept my opinions to myself. He was fragile. He must have felt I was suffocating him.”

That, Stevie suspected, was close to the truth.

Awkwardly, she and Mist sat on a sagging couch with the professor facing them across a low table. Frances was like a wraith haunting the deserted shell of a house. Her spaniel pushed his tawny head into her hand as if to anchor her to life.

Stevie poured tea, trying to regain her poise. Her hands, by a miracle, were steady. “Can I explain why I was seeing Dr. Gregory?”

“You needn’t.”

“I’d really like to. Frances, I couldn’t tell you about my background because I don’t remember.” Stevie took a breath. “I was found wandering in the countryside on the outskirts of Birmingham. Even that’s a blur.”

Frances’s forehead wrinkled with doubt. “Stephanie, I know Dr. Gregory. He’s a decent, professional man. He told me true amnesia is a myth. You must have memories, but you’ve blocked them out, for some reason.”

“That’s what he told me, too, but the effect is the same. It’s called psychogenic memory loss. They estimated me to be about fifteen. The police took me to a psychiatric ward, where an array of doctors and social workers spent months trying to discover my identity. Nothing. So I was put with various foster families, who couldn’t cope with me because I kept doing unhelpful things like flooding the bathroom.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t mean to be troublesome, but I had a fixation with water that I can’t explain. It’s blurry. I was frightened. In the foster homes, I often got pestered by older boys. I avoided being assaulted or raped, only because I fought back so hard I left bruises. Then they’d turn on a crybaby act, and I’d get the blame and labeled as aggressive. I don’t want pity,” she added sharply. “I’m stating facts. They sent me to school, but I felt too old to be there, out of place. Eventually I ran away, and found a job waitressing, earning enough to rent a tiny room. It was like … relearning how to live, I suppose. That was when I met Daniel. I must have been seventeen by then and I wanted … to be a normal person.”

As she spoke, Mist was turning the pages of Daniel’s sketchbook. He even studied the old shopping list, smoothing it flat on the coffee table.

“You remembered your name, though?” Frances put in.

“No, I chose my name. Stephanie, after a policewoman who was kind to me, and Silverwood because my first memory was of silver birch trees around me. That was my new identity.”

“It’s not easy to function without a birth certificate.”

“I know, but not impossible. They sorted new documents for me.”

Stevie described meeting Daniel, and how they’d started talking. “He was so happy about going to art college, absolutely glowing. He helped me produce some tolerable artwork, and Dr. Gregory wrote a persuasive reference. I was awarded a sort of vocational, give-her-a-chance place, thanks to my tough start in life. The first year was hard. Then I switched to the jewelry and metalwork course, and never looked back.”

Frances made a
hmph
noise of acceptance. “Well, I’m glad they were more charitable than me.”

“I can’t emphasize enough that Daniel helped me to rejoin the human race. After college, I found jobs managing art materials and jewelry stores. I fell in love with the Jewellery Quarter and the museum, and made myself so indispensable that I ended up running the place.”

“Quite a story,” said Frances, her voice very soft.

“So all the bad stuff was twelve, thirteen years ago. My past is not who I am.”

She stopped, finding it hard to catch her breath. Her memories—not least the missing ones—still opened a pit of fearful emotion inside her.

“Stephanie,” said Frances in a small, dry voice, “truly, I’m sorry. I’m controlling, overprotective and intolerably overbearing. What you went through was dreadful. I should have been more understanding.”

“It doesn’t matter. The point is to clear the air and be honest. Mist thinks he knows—”

Humphrey barked. Cold air moved through the room, strong enough to shift the coals in the grate and nearly extinguish the flames. Again Stevie sensed the intrusive, writhing snake shadow. The fire recovered, but the spaniel continued growling at nothing. Stevie and Mist exchanged a quick, dark glance.

“I swear this bloody house is haunted,” said Frances. “Sometimes I’ll enter a room and see Daniel’s father standing there, as clear as day, but he does
not
indulge in cold drafts and door-slamming antics. As if my nerves aren’t shredded enough. Humphrey, silence!”

Without reacting, Mist pressed his fingers to the shopping list Frances had retrieved from her son’s pocket. Stevie looked sideways and read the last few items out loud. “Toothpaste. Detergent. Bleach.”

“I know,” Frances said in an arid tone. “What single young man thinks to buy cleaning products? He was strangely domesticated, more so than me. Oh, I mustn’t say
was
! He
is
domesticated. But it’s just a list.” She paused to cough. “What of it?”

“A name,” Mist said softly. At the bottom of the page, a word had been neatly printed with a different pen, and a curved arrow drawn above it. “Poectilictis.”

“What does that mean?” asked Frances.

“Poectilictis was the name of my father.” Mist frowned, rubbing his forehead. “How could your son possibly have known it?”

Her thin eyebrows rose. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“And this.” He showed her the sketchbook page with a pencil drawing of a carved stone disk. “What was his source for this object?”

“Oh, good lord.” Frances’s voice was croaky. Her face turned bone-pale. “You’d better come upstairs and take a look in his room.”

*   *   *

It felt strange to be in Daniel’s bedroom again. Stevie recalled times they’d spent on the narrow bed; usually talking, but occasionally—if his mother happened to be out—naked under the covers. Standing here beside Frances, she turned warm with embarrassment.

Nothing appeared to have changed. There was a bookshelf with a couple of worn teddy bears on top, a chest of drawers supporting a glass-fronted case containing fossils,
Doctor Who
figurines and some small sculptures Danny had made.

Mist went to the glass-fronted case and laid his hand on the door. Stevie saw his breathing quicken. “It’s here,” he said. “May I?”

“Please, go ahead.” Frances waved a resigned hand. “You’re so polite. It seems bad-mannered to disbelieve the tales you’re telling me.”

On their way upstairs, he’d told her only a bare outline of the Felynx story. That he came from a prehuman, lost city, Azantios; that he was trying to find his brother, Rufus, who might be the source of Daniel’s ideas; and that he would not be offended if Frances didn’t believe him.

Far from challenging him, Frances simply listened, uttering an occasional, wet cough that made Stevie worry that she’d got bronchitis. Perhaps she lacked the strength to argue, or even to concentrate fully on what he was saying.

He opened the door and took an object from the middle of a glass shelf. It was a thick disk of quartz, eight inches across and three deep. And it was heavy, from the way Mist lifted it in both hands. Stevie couldn’t recall ever seeing it before, except in the sketchbook.

For long moments, he was so intent on the object that he seemed to have forgotten the others were there. Stevie looked over his shoulder. The disk was whitish and translucent, like rainbow moonstone, carved with stylized, interlocking images of leopards and birds.

A color-changing sheen danced through the crystal, blue-green chased by fiery orange. Mist turned the object over and over between his hands. His ink-black eyelashes were wet.

“Professor, can I ask how Daniel found this?”

“He didn’t. I unearthed it a couple of years ago. Fossils are my thing, not man-made artifacts, so I passed it to the archaeology bods at uni. They concluded it’s what they call a UCSO, an ‘unidentified carved stone object.’ Possibly a forgery—you know, like the crystal skulls that turned out to be fifty and not five thousand years old, or whatever the figures were? So I kept it. A curiosity. I’ve never seen it change color before.”

She sat down on the edge of Daniel’s bed, fingers worrying at the edge of the duvet.

“And where did you find it?”

“On a dig in the States. We took some students on a field trip to Nevada. Why?”

Mist ran his fingertips over the carvings. “I recognize it. This is part of an item I thought was lost thousands of years ago. It’s only the base, but still important. This might be the connection.”

“So you found it, Frances, and Daniel made drawings,” said Stevie. “Perhaps all the images and names are on it, in tiny detail, and that’s how he came across them.”

Mist was shaking his head. “No, they’re not. But he might have picked up some kind of resonance from the stone.”

“Resonance?” Frances moistened her lips, looking paler by the second. “What on earth are you suggesting?”

Mist sighed, “I don’t know.” His expression became apologetic and confused, which made him look less otherworldly and more endearingly human.

“No, let me clarify,” said Frances. “Daniel didn’t draw the UCSO after I brought it home. He was drawing it for years before I found it.”

“
Before
?” they said together.

Stevie and Mist went still, waiting for her to continue. “He began after he met you, Stephanie. He also made some sketches of a distinctive landscape like you see in cowboy movies: desert scrub, mountains and buttes. I thought nothing of it, until I was actually in Nevada. One evening, I climbed the shoulder of a hill and saw the exact landscape Daniel had drawn. I assumed he’d seen photos in a magazine.”

Frances broke off, wheezing slightly. “Normally I’m the most skeptical old curmudgeon on the planet. It was an ordinary dig, hot and tiring. I spent most of trip supervising students, helping them to identify fossils in the shale, to tell their ammonites from their cornellites. Strange things do not happen to me.”

“Except this once?” Stevie asked softly.

Frances seemed irritated that she had to confess. She described waking in her tent to a strange glow and looking out to see the sky filled with golden columns; knowing she was dreaming, but stepping outside anyway.

The light resembled the aurora borealis, she said, but the fiery towers rose from earth to heaven all around her, as if she walked through curtains of light.

“I woke to find myself in the open, lying in a small ravine. In my hand was a lump of stone. I rubbed off the dust and dirt to reveal this carved tablet … exactly like the ones in Daniel’s drawings.”

“You saw Azantios,” Mist said softly. “Did you find any ruins?”

“No ruins. Only crumpled rocks. The works of nature, not man.”

“Of course.” There was a trace of sorrow in his voice. “The city’s fabric dissolved into the Dusklands.”

“I’ve no energy to decide whether I believe your theories or not,” Frances said thinly. “The experience shook me up quite severely. Visions of long-lost alien cities do not happen to cynical old bats like me. I may be in denial, but that was why I didn’t want such things happening to Daniel. It’s not pleasant. People lose their minds over less.”

Mist pressed on, “Did Daniel consciously know what he was painting, or was he simply a cipher? It feels like there’s a force trying to reveal Felynx secrets, and an opposing force trying to suppress them. Perhaps not Rufus at all.”

“Who, then?” Stevie asked. Mist gave no answer.

Frances looked so exhausted that Stevie decided they should leave. There was no easy way to tell her that an intruder had taken
Aurata’s Promise
, and no need to unload more stress onto her.

She’d no sooner made the decision than Mist said it anyway. “Someone found out Stevie had Daniel’s remaining work, the triptych, and stole it.” He touched the stone tablet. “Whoever it was may come for this, too. If they are not already here.”

The pale furrows of her face deepened.

“Well, take the damned thing away, then,” she said. “I don’t care if it’s genuine or priceless. I want no more of this. I want my son back, full stop.” Her voice grew hoarse and ended on a rattle. A couple of coughs became a violent spasm that shook her until her eyes streamed and blood sputtered from her mouth. Stevie supported her bird-thin form with one arm and thrust her cell phone at Mist.

“Call an ambulance.”

9

Fela and the Lie

Stevie dropped Mist near the city center at his request, and she was glad. Exhausted, she couldn’t face any more intense conversation. She needed solitude. As she pulled up in front of the museum, she noticed with horror that it was six o’ clock. Fin was standing in the doorway, looking distinctly irritated.

“Stevie!”

“I know, I know. It’s unforgivable. I’m so sorry—it’s been a nightmare. The roads are icy…”