Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) (6 page)

“Yes, so I can make contact in order to forward stuff to you, wherever you happen to be. You want to find Rufus, so I’m oiling the wheels. Hop on a train, and you can be in London in a few hours. After that, you’re on your own.”

“I’m so grateful, Juliana.” An awkward silence fell for a moment. Then he looked up at her and said, “I feel foolish. The truth is, I don’t really know where or how to start searching.”

“Well, there’s always the Internet,” Juliana said wryly.

“The what?”

“Come on, Mist. Even I have a creaky old computer. As Adam, you must have noticed. The side room with a collection of yellowing plastic boxes?”

“No. That I don’t remember.” He smiled. “Still, I am a fast learner.”

“I’m sure you are.” She reached into her bag and placed a shiny oblong device on the table. “Start learning.”

“What’s this?”

“This is me, entering the twenty-first century. It’s one of those tablet computer gadgets. You touch the screen and it tells you what you want to know. Magic.”

Mist stared at her in disbelief. Then a smile pulled at his mouth. Perhaps there would be sparks of wonder in the journey after all.

“Honestly, it’s easy, even for someone of my great age. Look.”

She powered up the device, and had to show him only once how to use the search engine. Mist was entranced by the small, glowing screen that could call up any part of the world, any piece of information, at the touch of a few keys.

Hardly knowing how to start, he typed in his brother’s name; Rufus Dionys Ephenaestus. The result came at once.

Your search did not match any documents.

Entering his most recent assumed name, Rufus Hart, yielded 774,000 results.

Mist sat back in his chair and laughed, causing people at the next table to look at him. Ignoring them, he tapped on some of the links, but found none that bore any relevance to his brother.

“He wouldn’t use that name again, would he?” Juliana put in. She’d shifted her chair around to look over his shoulder.

“Not Hart. But he nearly always used Rufus, as if he was winking at the world, saying, ‘I’m pretending to be someone else, but we all know who I really am.’”

“I noticed that about him. He was proud of being infamous, didn’t even try to disguise himself. The way he brazened it out before the Spiral Court was quite breathtaking. You should have seen it! Oh … you did.”

“Well, Adam was there, and I have all his memories.”

“Of course. Try being more specific. Aelyr, or Aetherial?”

He tried. Links to foreign language sites appeared for “Aelyr,” while “Aetherial” had over 30,000 results. Apparently it was too generic a word to be of much help. All it meant—according to an online dictionary he consulted—was
“of the aether,” “pertaining to the higher regions beyond the Earth
,” and
“from the Greek verb, to blaze.”

Mist sighed to himself. He continued entering every word or combination of terms he could think of. Azantios. Poectilictis. Theliome. Aurata. Places and people he had not seen for countless thousands of years.

For “Aurata,” images of beetles, fish and caracal lynxes appeared. The name meant nothing more specific than “golden.” How had they spelled it, in the ancient days? That alphabet no longer existed. The language of Aelyr and Vaethyr alike had evolved along with the Earth and the humans who’d taken it over.

On the fifth page of results, a title caught his eye. “Aurata’s Promise. Central panel of triptych, tempera and gold leaf on wood panel. Artist: Daniel Manifold.”

He tapped on the link and found a website for an art gallery, a working studio whimsically called the Jellybean Factory. He scrolled a list of names with a thumbnail image beside each one. Mist pressed on the stamp-sized picture beside Daniel Manifold’s name and up came a bright image like a religious icon. He sat back, stunned.

There was a red desert landscape and a city of towers, gold and pale yellow and white, so glassy and weightless they seemed to float. But their perfect shells were crumbling, open to the sky. Smoke rose. A woman with flowing auburn hair and the face of a feline goddess stared straight at him, enigmatic, one finger pointing at a volcanic crack in the ground, the other hand holding up an orb to the fiery sky.

He recognized the place. Even with her stylized, cat-like features, he knew the woman, too.

“What is it?” said Juliana, leaning forward.

“Aurata,” Mist said softly. “My sister.”

3

Ghosts and Shadows

Stevie dreamed she was drowning. She was on her back, fully immersed in cold green water, enveloped in cushiony moss. The surface rippled above her face. No air bubbles rose from her mouth. Her struggles had faded to calm acceptance. She was now like an amphibian, part of this watery, mossy realm. She had always been here, a forgotten sunken treasure, watching the hypnotic play of sunlight and shadows far above …

A steel cord snared her, dragging her violently up to the surface. She gasped in the dry world like a hooked fish.

The “steel cord” was actually the shrill of her alarm clock. Stevie slammed her hand on the button to silence it. Seven-thirty. Waking brought a rush of adrenaline, her usual reaction to such disturbing, recurring dreams.

The boiler that supposedly heated the water and radiators clunked into life, jolting her back to reality. She stared at the sloping, off-white ceiling as she recalled the previous day’s events.

She didn’t believe Daniel was dead. He’d always been wrapped in artistic visions, but had he been making a decent living? Didn’t a London studio equal success? Yet she knew too well that anyone could put on a confident front while quietly falling apart inside. Inner turmoil, provoking him to some crazy action … well, that was possible. But suicide? Surely not.

Stevie hoped with all her heart that his mother was wrong.

Daniel had been her savior. The first time she met him, she was seventeenish and working in a café, without family or hope. One lunchtime, there he was at a table, sketching. He looked up, caught her staring in fascination, and grinned. Warily sliding into the seat beside him, she saw that he was drawing her. They began to talk. He was so excited to be starting at art college that she decided, in a spontaneous rush of optimism, that she would apply too.

She had nothing to lose.

He’d helped her compile a rushed portfolio of artwork, told her what to say at the interview, and by a miracle, she scraped in. Horribly out of her depth at first, she abandoned fine art and found her vocation in working with metals.

Daniel had been her first true friend, her first lover. Until then, her only brush with boys had been fighting off the unwanted advances of older foster-brothers, who’d all learned the hard way to keep their distance. Daniel was different: gentle, nervous and equally inexperienced. They discovered pleasure together, until their bond faded naturally back into friendship again.

Did he have other girlfriends? Surely no one special; no one she could remember. Since leaving college, Stevie had had occasional brief affairs, all of which she’d ended because she never felt at ease. She’d concluded she must be too unconventional or damaged to connect with “normal” people. Perhaps both she and Danny were simply too weird to sustain a proper relationship.

Stevie made to get out of bed, but paused, recalling something else. His painting style had changed radically after he’d met her, or so he claimed. “I drew anything and everything,” he’d told her, “but I had no real direction. Once I met you, though … I can’t explain. It’s like you give off an aura and my head’s suddenly full of images that are really important, even though no one understands them, least of all me.”

Thanks
, she thought,
since you weren’t painting pretty portraits of me. No, it was grotesque stuff like saints with snake heads, angels with lion paws and beaks—images that made your lecturers shake their heads in despair.

Some muse I was. No, Dan, you had no business trying to shift the credit for your bizarre visions onto me. Credit or blame, whichever—it wasn’t my doing.

She decided that when she found him she was going to tell him exactly that.

“So what’s going on, Danifold?” she murmured. Reluctantly she pushed back the bedcovers and felt the chill of the air. “What’s happened to you?”

*   *   *

The watery world of the dream haunted her as she took a barely warm shower and dried off. How frustrating, that she rarely dreamed of anything more pleasant than drowning. “Aquaphobia” was the official term for her fear of water, a doctor had once told her, although his simplistic diagnosis didn’t begin to cover what she felt.

She chose a calf-length patchwork dress in blue-green shades, adding a thick jade-colored cardigan. Once dressed and sipping a mug of tea, Stevie finally stopped shivering. She smudged kohl on her eyelids and worked at her knotty hair until it was more a flow of russet-amber ripples, and less of a fright wig. Perhaps she should trim it to jaw-length, like Fin’s, if only to save five minutes of pain and swearing in the morning.

But her hair was part of her, a kind of veil that gave her both identity and camouflage.

She hung strands of rough-tumbled beads around her neck: orange carnelian and turquoise. The color clash pleased her. She added silver gem-set rings that she’d made herself, and bracelets with dangling charms. Her spectral cat, like a tiny leopard, lay watching her from the bed with its claws digging into the duvet.

The water dream had been unusually intense. The triptych, the sudden reminders of Daniel and the past, awoke feelings she was always trying to bury.

By eight-thirty, Stevie was down in the museum shop, counting money into the till, firing up the computer, ensuring all was neat and ready for opening time. She checked the upstairs gallery, where examples of metalcraft stood on display behind glass: jugs, trophies, world globes, even a model battleship hammered from silver and gold. Her favorites were five skeleton clocks, each one unique, with their inner workings of cogs and spindles revealed like elegant kinetic sculptures.

She unlocked the doors to the factory, poked her head in and said, “Good morning,” to the ghosts. No apparitions were visible, but she greeted them anyway, out of courtesy and a mild dash of superstition.

Back in the gift shop, she entered the exhibition space, put out fresh piles of leaflets and tacked up a poster advertising a jazz concert. The clockmaker’s bench in one corner was her addition. However, one of the staff, Alec, was a lifelong clock-obsessive and often requisitioned her workspace. To her annoyance, he was untidy and failed to keep her tools in pristine condition. His latest repair lay in pieces strewn all over the bench. Yet Stevie indulged him, because visitors loved to stand and watch a craftsman at work.

Such a novelty, these days, to see anything made by hand.

By nine, her part-timers were arriving: Ron the retired engineer and Margaret, a cheerful, matronly type who’d worked in the factory in her younger days. Stevie had a dozen casual staff to call on, retired folk who worked for sheer love of the museum’s history. This gave the place a happy atmosphere, and made it easy for her to be a popular boss.

“Morning, Ron,” she called as he passed, leaving a trail of wet bootprints. “Still raining, I see?”

“And ruddy freezing,” he replied, turning and noticing the mess he’d made. “Oh, look at that. I wiped my feet, honest. Sorry, I’ll grab the mop.”

“Don’t worry, Alec can do it,” said Stevie. “Get the coffee machine on!”

Stevie never went behind the café counter if she could help it. Preparing food was not her favorite activity. When Alec arrived, he headed straight for the workbench. Mildly irritated, she called out, “Hold on, Alec, would you mind cleaning the floor first?”

He stopped, giving her an ironically grumpy look over his spectacles. “Who’s doing the tours today?”

“It’s on the duty roster. You’ve got the two o’clock.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He went to collect a mop, adding wet footprints of his own.

Stevie sighed and went behind the counter. Alec was the only staff member who acted up; he was old-school and resented women telling him what to do. At least his sense of humor redeemed him.

In the back room, she unfolded Daniel’s panel on her desk. The flame-haired goddess resembled an angel, offering a choice between heaven and hell … but no, that interpretation wasn’t right. She frowned. Daniel’s work appeared as puzzling as ever.

“Sorry I’m late!”

Fin breezed in, throwing her coat over a chair and complaining about the slow and rainy school run, and how if it weren’t for her kids, she would be on a plane halfway to Florida by now. Without waiting for a response, she hurried into the café, reappearing minutes later with two large cappuccinos.

“Thanks,” said Stevie, accepting the mug. “The coffee bribe always works.”

“Third time this week, and you’re not going to tell me off?”

Stevie took a breath. “No. I’m going to ask you an enormous favor.”

“Oh-oh.” Fin took a sip of her cappuccino, which left foam on her upper lip. “What dreaded task have you lined up for me?”

“Nothing awful. Mustache,” Stevie added, grinning.

“Always happens.” Fin wiped her lip with a tissue. “How come you drink yours so daintily? I end up with a Santa Claus beard if I’m not careful. This favor…?”

“Right, okay, about the mystery delivery…”

Stevie explained about her phone call to Daniel’s mother. Fin froze, staring.

“Oh my god. You don’t really think he’s done away with himself, do you? That’s terrible.”

Stevie’s throat tightened. She gave a vehement shake of her head. “No. I can’t let myself believe that. But his mother’s in real distress, and she’s not one to ask for help unless she’s desperate. I promised I’d go and see her. Today. Now. Can you manage without me?”

“Absolutely. No problem. I mean,” Fin corrected herself, “absolutely
not
, but we’ll struggle through somehow. You want me to do anything with the triptych?”

“Leave it in the office for now. I’ll make a decision after I’ve seen Daniel’s mother.”