Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) (22 page)

“You could have phoned.”

“I didn’t think.” Stevie hurried to hand over the car keys.

“I tried to call you, but it went to voicemail. I was worried!”

“Fin, I apologize with all my heart. Daniel’s mother is really sick. We had to call an ambulance and they took her to Derby. She’s got pneumonia. And I had to find someone to look after Humphrey, her dog—that’s all she was fretting about in the ambulance—so I had to go back to her house. Fortunately one of her neighbors took Humphrey in. Bloody hell, what a day.”

“My god, is she going to be okay?”

“I hope so. It’s probably the best thing for her, because she wasn’t looking after herself properly, but she’s in a bad way. Now I
have
to find Daniel, in case … Anyway, Fin, I’m sorry.”

Fin sighed. “It’s all right. Andy picked up the kids, and you’re okay, thank goodness. But honestly, Stevie, we can’t make a habit of this. Next time, get a taxi or hire a car…”

“Or grow wings,” said Stevie. She pushed a twenty-pound note into Fin’s hand, vowing to add a large box of chocolates and a bottle of wine. “It won’t happen again. You have my word.”

“You’re forgiven. I hope Daniel’s mum gets better soon. Now go home, and don’t you dare show your face at work before Tuesday. Doctor’s orders, not mine, remember?”

Stevie had no answer. Cold and tired, she waved Fin off, then made her way around the building and up the steps to her front door.

Alone in her apartment, Stevie felt jumpy. In the four days since the theft, she hadn’t felt safe anywhere. Yet the intruder had taken what he wanted and gone; surely there was no need to break in again? Mist had taken the mysterious stone disk, but would that put
him
in danger instead?

She firmly suppressed her fears. Her door was securely locked. She refused to feel vulnerable.

Supper was a microwave-heated shepherd’s pie, a wrinkled apple and a glass of cold white wine. She tried to watch television, but could only fret about Frances. She might have collapsed anyway, and not been found for days—yet Stevie couldn’t help feeling that the stress of their visit had tipped Frances over the edge.

In the corner of her eye, the small uncanny leopard lay flicking its tail. “Oh well, you save me a fortune on cat food and vets’ bills,” she murmured.

On a sudden thought, she jumped up and grabbed her laptop. Swiftly she typed a new regime for locking up the museum. From now on, no one must close up alone. She was more worried about her colleagues than herself, but she’d have to introduce the system subtly, so as not to arouse their suspicion … She saved the document, then opened the web browser and made a fresh search for Daniel.

Nothing. His profile had vanished from the Jellybean Factory website. Even the thumbnail of
Aurata’s Promise
had been replaced by a red X. She groaned.

“What are we going to do, puss?” she said sideways to her companion. “Three more days before I’m allowed back to work.”

Three days to find Daniel and tell him, “Cut the diva act and get back here
now
before your mother dies.”

With a sense of urgency, she opened a new blank document and began typing Mist’s story. He’d told her more on the journey back, and she wanted to record it before she forgot the details. The keys rattled under her fingertips. She knew that for every sentence Mist uttered, there were several pages unspoken, with a mass of mental footnotes. His shadowy, otherworldly grace lent credence to his words … while Daniel, who’d been lovable, shortsighted, and as mad as a box of polecats, was as plainly human as could be.

So how the hell had he painted Mist’s life story, without ever meeting him?

*   *   *

Mist walked around the city center for a while, to avoid his empty hotel room. The stores were shut, the pubs and bars busy. Coarse de-icing salt crunched under his boot soles. At least he knew that Frances Manifold was safe from the entity that had been prowling her house. The presence, he suspected, was some form of barely sentient hunter, trained to sniff out a very particular trail: the aura of items or people connected with Azantios. Which meant that
someone
must have sent it.

In his coat pocket, the base of the Felixatus felt heavy and warm, tingling with its own life. He sat down on a wet bench and closed his eyes …

Mistangamesh looked up at the sun, seeing its brilliance dimmed to a flat white disk by veils of orange dust. Azantios lay behind him. From the viewing platform—a high natural ledge of rock—he surveyed the realms of the Felynx. In the far distance, mountains plunged towards steamy blue-green forests, wetlands and lakes. Closer lay a tumbled red landscape of canyons and tall, sculptural rock formations: Fire Valley, they’d named it. All around him, the ledges and slopes were covered by a shifting mass of Felynx, proud and beautiful in shimmering garments, their striped cat faces crowned with shining manes of hair.

Rufus and Aurata were with him, all three dressed in finery befitting their status as members of House Ephenaestus. This was a special day marking the climax of the racing season. The ultimate race was in progress. The air shimmered with heat and excitement.

The runners were all Tashralyr, a different clan of Aetherials who dwelled in the distant wetlands. They’d inhabited this area even longer than the Felynx, and generally the two clans had little to do with each other. The Felynx kept to their great city and the Tashralyr lived wild, but they had an interest in common: the Tashralyr were natural athletes who loved to race. Over the centuries, the Felynx had grown fascinated by their sport and were now enthusiastic spectators, placing bets, and even sponsoring their own favorites.

The event was in three parts, a race devised long ago by the Tashralyr for their own pleasure and now regarded by the Felynx as a thrilling yet deadly serious entertainment. First, the competitors swam across a vast blue lake. Next they undertook a grueling climb to the peak of a tall red hill. At each stage, weaker entrants were eliminated. Last, only the toughest remained to race flat-out around the challenging terrain of Fire Valley.

Now a sandstorm came pouring towards the spectators. The cheers of ten thousand Felynx rose in a roar. From the center of the cloud, the runners surged like a single, undulating fleece. The Tashralyr ran on all fours, their long legs a blur, paws barely skimming the ground as they flowed towards the finish line. Orange dust caked their silvery fur. Felynx race officials stood waiting at the finish line: a golden thread stretched between two spires of rock.

The favorite, Karn, was in the lead. Rufus pushed forward to cheer him on. Mist, caught in the moment, shouted for his own runner.

“What a surprise,” Aurata said over Mist’s shoulder. “Karn always wins.”

“Because he has the best patron!” Rufus retorted. “Of course he’s unbeatable. He’s mine.”

“Unbeatable, only because there’s no competition,” she said, giving Mist a smile behind Rufus’s back.

“Jealousy doesn’t become you, sister,” said Rufus. “It’s not my fault you have a nose for also-rans.”

Karn was two lengths ahead of the pack when a dark muzzle drew alongside his paler one. Another Tashralyr was gaining. Then—impossibly—beginning to pass him. The cheering swelled, stoked to a climax by surprise. The outsider broke the finish ribbon, winning by a full body length.

“Who’s that?” yelled Rufus, outraged. “Who in the name of all the stars is that?”

“I don’t know,” said Aurata, “but I lay claim. From now on, he or she is
mine
.”

And she was off the rock and running downhill through the crowd, her fiery hair streaming. Rufus and Mist followed her, the Felynx crowd parting for the scions of House Ephenaestus.

Down in the valley, they entered the competitors’ enclosure—a natural hollow in a canyon wall—where only athletes and their patrons were allowed. The Felynx race marshals let them through with respectful nods.

Stragglers were skidding in, panting for breath, while a crowd formed around Karn and the unknown victor. Mist congratulated his own runner, Tamis, who’d made a respectable third. He watched the exhausted Tashralyr beginning to unfold from their running form—long and lithe, silver fur dark with sweat, flanks heaving—into bipedal shape. Stretched feline heads flattened, manes became hair, paws morphed into hands. They kept the subtle grey coloring that distinguished them from the bright red-golds of the Felynx.

“Who is the winner?” Aurata called out.

One of the marshals said, “Her name is Fela.”

“Let me congratulate her. Does she have—Fela, do you have a sponsor? I don’t care who they are, I’ll buy them out.”

The calm face looked into Aurata’s and smiled. “No, Lady Aurata, I have no patron.”

“Well, now you do. We thought Karn was unbeatable. Why have we never seen you before?”

“It was my first race,” Fela said modestly. “Karn is my friend. He encouraged me to enter.”

“A decision he no doubt regrets,” said Mist. He observed Fela’s quiet pride and Aurata’s swift claim of ownership: he saw Rufus with his arm around his own competitor’s shoulders, Rufus glowering, Karn merely resigned.

“What went wrong?” Rufus demanded. “That was quite a loss of form.”

“No loss of form,” Karn answered. “I swam, climbed and ran as hard as I have in my life. Fela pushed me to the limit. She was better, that’s all.”

“Oh no, not good enough. We can’t let this happen again, can we?” Rufus grinned menacingly at Karn, kissed him on the cheek. “Defeat is not in our plan, is it, my friend?”

Strange days
, Mist reflected on his cold bench.
We may not have enslaved or abused the Tashralyr, but still we used them for entertainment … as if they were racehorse and jockey all in one being. Or as traveling acrobats visiting a royal court … to be feted one moment, discarded the next.

He remembered the parade back to the palace. Fela, Karn and Tamis, wreathed in flowers, were borne high by the Felynx crowd. Sunlight shone through the dust as it settled like layers of glowing lace. Beneath a bright turquoise sky, the spires of Azantios shone yellow, orange and diamond-white, reaching up to the heavens as if weightless.

Mist trailed behind his brother and sister, amused in a jaded way by their endless bickering. They tried to bait him into taking sides, but he stayed aloof. Let them behave like children if it pleased them.

“How dare you snatch Fela from under my nose?” said Rufus.

“Dear Rufe, you have no automatic right to pluck the finest fruit,” Aurata replied. “You have Karn, who has won and won to the point of tedium. Until today.”

“He should have warned us about Fela.”

“You are such a sore loser. Don’t take it out on poor Karn.” Aurata put her hand through her sulking brother’s arm. “Don’t discard him. I know what you’re like. Don’t boot him out of your patronage—or out of your bed—over one small
defeat
.”

“Ah, sister. Are you interested in this Fela purely for her athletic prowess, or for other reasons?”

“She is very lovely,” said Aurata, eyes narrowing. “And now she is
mine
. Remember that, Rufus. No trespassing.”

Mist sighed to himself. While his brother and sister played their games, he never forgot that, if all went as planned, he would become Sovereign Elect. That meant no wild behavior to embarrass Poectilictis. He’d had only a very few, discreet lovers, and certainly had never taken his athlete Tamis to his bed. Aurata and Rufus cordially despised him for being straitlaced, and punished him by teasing, goading him, and worse. And he couldn’t deny that, sometimes, their casual malice hurt.

On glowing evenings like this, however, they forgot such pettiness. Rufus and Aurata slipped their hands through Mist’s arms, and the three of them drifted up the steep winding ways towards the palace with a huge train of followers, anticipating the evening of celebration, drink and pleasure ahead.

They were happy. The Felynx lived in a golden dream that could never end.

*   *   *

“There can’t be many things better designed to turn sons and daughters against parents than for the children to discover that their parents have lied to them.”

Stevie rapidly typed Mist’s words. On the drive home, he’d explained what he meant.

“The lie was this,” he told her. “No one told us that the Spiral existed. We, the Felynx, were given to believe that Azantios was everything. No one explained that we were exiles from the Otherworld, a vast Aetherial realm that was as much our birthright as that of other Aelyr.”

He described Earth, or Vaeth, as a closed globe, while the Spiral was a ragged, ever-changing structure like the whorls of a snail shell. The two formed a double kingdom of outer and inner worlds, joined at powerful nodes of energy. Aetherial evolution was mysterious. First came the serene entity known as Estel the Eternal, then the sentient energies, Qesoth and Brawth, followed by the primal Estalyr, and then their descendants, the Aelyr in their various forms.

“We were told only the evolution part,” said Mist. “Other realms were never mentioned. Only three people knew the truth: my parents, and Veropardus, the Keeper of the Felixatus.

“We were complacent,” he added ruefully. “Vulnerable, because we had no predators and therefore no natural defenses. Death was rare to us, more a transformation in which the individual fades into a different state … but if we couldn’t enter the Spiral, where did our lost ones go?”

He’d left the question in the air, although Stevie knew it was connected to what he said next. From Mist’s description, and from the image in Daniel’s triptych, she visualized the Felixatus as a mechanism of nested globes and lenses, its purpose unknown. “The tallest spire of the palace contained a chamber where the Felixatus was kept, pointing at the stars like a telescope,” Mist went on. “Veropardus wasn’t a priest, as such, because we didn’t worship gods. He was the guardian of our sacred mysteries.”

“But why did they keep you in the dark?” Stevie had asked as she drove.

“We were curious, of course. Poectilictis would have told me, as his heir, when the time came. I was content to wait, but secrets drove Rufus mad. He argued constantly with Poectilictis. Our mother would try to make peace, to no avail. Anyway, something changed. Rufus illicitly entered the Felixatus chamber. Somehow, he discovered the truth. He told Aurata first, and they both came to me raging that the whole Felynx race had been lied to.”