The High House (17 page)

* * *

“Why have I been summoned?” Lady Murmur demanded as she sat in the wicker chair in the drawing room, Duskin standing by her side. Carter thought his half brother had not slept well that night; dark circles lay under his eyes, and his face was so pale he looked ill.

It was early morning; the remainder of the night had passed untroubled; the cellar doors had contained the Dark for a time. Despite his weariness, Carter had slept little, and had risen with the gray, cloudy dawn, nervous but prepared for the coming confrontation. Mr. Hope, Chant, Enoch, and Captain Glis were seated around the room, restless, uncertain what would occur.

“Lady Murmur, I will waste no words,” Carter said. “Last night, through means I will not reveal, I discovered you have collaborated with the anarchists. It was by your invitation that they entered the Inner Chambers of the house.”

Her face flushed, and Duskin looked as if he had been struck, but she managed a slim smile. “That is nonsense! Why would I do such a thing?”

Carter felt old resentments rising within him, but he kept his voice level. “For the same reason you invited the Bobby in the first time, when he nearly drowned me in the well—for power, for greed, for all the things my father abhorred. Denial is useless; Mr. Hope and I heard it from your own lips.”

“You have spied upon me, then!” she cried. “And in doing so you have erred! A chance comment—”

“A full confession, you mean,” Hope said.

Murmur looked from face to face, suddenly sly as a wounded wolf. Her eyes fastened on Enoch. “You have lived here longest,” she said. “Will you believe this boy, who gave the Master Keys away?”

It was more than Carter could bear. “And if you hadn’t lied about me, I would have gone to Naleewuath with my father and not been tempted to take them!” His face grew hot, but he quickly mastered himself. “I will accept responsibility for my actions, and hold you responsible for yours. I can do nothing to punish you legally, but as Steward of the house, in the interest of Evenmere, I can banish you from its doors. The will stated Duskin was to dwell here; it made no mention of you. I find no guilt in him, at any rate. Is there anything you would offer, to redress the ills you have caused? If so you may find me merciful, if only for your son’s sake.”

Her face changed then; that which she had hidden behind the corners of her eyes slipped out—the malice, the envy, the hatred of a small, wicked mind.”
I
married your father!
I
was his queen, and he gave me nothing! The
servants
and the hired help sit in our drawing room like rats upon new cheese, and you treat them like old friends!”

She halted, containing herself, and a low smile spread across her face. “Very well,” she said, almost sweetly. “If you choose to send me into the rain, I will depart the house. I will go to my allies, who will soon possess Evenmere anyway. Come along, Duskin.”

As he took her hand to help her up, Duskin gave Lady Murmur a sad, pitying look, one Carter thought no man should have for his mother.

“You don’t have to go with her,” Carter said.

“No,” Duskin replied, his eyes down. “I don’t, but I won’t allow her to go to
them
alone. I’m sorry we damaged Father’s house. I’m sorry for … everything.”

With Captain Glis on one side of her, and Chant on the other, with Carter, Enoch, and Hope leading the way, they marched to the front door. Beyond the statue of the monk, beyond the hedgerow, beneath the lamppost, stood the Bobby, a light rain running down his helmet. Carter opened the door, and perhaps for his father’s sake, handed Murmur a white parasol. She glared at it a moment, then took and flung it back to him, where it bounced harmlessly on the floor. But Duskin, a trace of gratitude in his eyes, retrieved it and held it over her as they made their way out the door to where the anarchist stood. Her dress was white, and she moved with elegance down the walk.

Carter closed the door and quietly locked it, feeling triumph and grief, together as one.

The Path To The Towers

A blast of thunder shook the house and the air crackled with power as Carter spoke the Word of Secret Ways, and it was difficult to know which was the stronger, the force of nature or the spoken Word. The windows rattled; the pictures trembled, and to Carter, wielding that mighty utterance, shaken by its use, it seemed both were the same kind of power, harnessed but never mastered.

He stood beside a door tucked away in a corner of the second floor, the gateway to the Towers that the anarchists had locked. But upon his speaking the Word of Secret Ways, the portrait-length painting upon the west wall, depicting an eerie house and the sinister figures from Machen’s
The Three Impostors
, began to glow with a faint blue light, giving the characters a spectral appearance.

By the time Enoch, Chant, and Hope peered cautiously around the corner, they found him sitting on a stool, his eyes closed.

“Are you all right?” Hope asked. “You shook the rafters with that one.”

“I shook myself. It made me weak in the knees. I don’t know why it was so strong this time. Perhaps I’m learning to use the power. I’m fine. Just give me a moment.”

“I see no hidden doorways,” Chant said, turning in a slow circle to survey the corridor. “
I saw the different thing you did, but always you yourself you hid.
”

“Only the one who uses the Word can see its work,” Carter said. “Help me up and I’ll show you.”

With Chant’s aid, he went to the portrait and felt along its back edge, where he quickly discovered a latching mechanism. With the clamp released the gilded frame slid to the side on silent rollers, revealing a square opening, tall enough for a man, draped with the silver webs of spiders.

“
Where shall we adventure, today that we’re afloat, Wary of the weather and steering by a star? Shall it be to Africa, a’steering of the boat, To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar?
” Chant quoted wistfully, peering into the dark passage.

“I really wish you would let a few of Glis’s men accompany you,” Hope said. “Or some of the servants.”

“No. Enoch and I have discussed it. Glis intends to retake the library and get a messenger to the White Circle; thereafter he will liberate the path to the Towers, hopefully in time to provide us a safe escort home. He will need every man, and ours is not a military expedition. We have to go swiftly and in stealth. They may guard the Towers if they think we can reach them, but they can’t yet enter there; it is a place of tremendous power they can’t master. Only Enoch and I will go.”

“It seems vaguely wrong,” Hope said. “But I do have something to give you, an article Chant helped me find.”

He handed Carter a thin scroll, with sculpted rosewood handles. “It looks small,” Hope said, “but it will surprise you.”

The material was soft as damask, dyed with blues, greens, and yellows, still brilliant for all its obvious age.

“A map!” Carter said.

“Let me show you,” Hope said. “We are here. It won’t show the secret ways, but it reveals the main passage to the Towers. I’ve even found Naleewuath and Arkalen.”

“Thank you,” Carter said. “This will be useful. I only wish I were going to Arkalen now; I desperately need to find my father’s sword and cloak. Sufficient for today is today’s troubles, I suppose, but I must reach there soon.”

As he put on his pack, Carter glanced out the window at the morning; water stood in pools upon the muddy ground; the gray clouds left all subdued, drained of light and life, the kind of day he normally thought good for curling up with a book. But the constant dreariness had sunk into his soul and he would have given much for a real ray of sunshine.

Far below, the tiny figure of the Bobby stood beneath the lamppost, like a wooden soldier in the rain, and Carter shivered suddenly, wondering what had happened to Murmur and Duskin.

Enoch gave him a lamp and a wink. Carter already had his pistol in his coat and a short dagger about his belt, and if he had possessed the Lightning Sword, he might even have felt eager, instead of only half-equipped. Still, he returned the tall man’s grin. They shook hands with Hope and Chant, and the Lamp-lighter said, “Godspeed, Master.
I can but trust that good shall fall, At last—far off—at last to all, And every winter change to spring.
”

They stepped into the shadows of the secret passage and murmured a final farewell as Hope slid the painting back into its place, caging them in darkness, save for the tender light of Enoch’s lamp. The floorboard slats, which were layered with dust, creaked beneath their steps; spiderwebs thick as twine caught their arms and hair. The plaster had crumbled in parts, leaving piles against the border and bare boards upon the walls.

“Sneaking like rats,” Enoch said softly. “To a place where I have always walked proudly. Will this teach me humility? Maybe so. Humility is a good thing. Tell me it is, so I don’t pound the walls in frustration.”

Carter glanced at his friend, but saw only humor in his eyes. “It’s a very good thing. At least, so Father always said.”

“He was a wise man, your father. Wise and foolish as are we all. I miss him. Do you think you will like the Towers?”

Carter chuckled. “I hadn’t considered it. As a child, I always thought of you climbing a long stair with the stars in-between; I never imagined your arrival.”

“A tower to heaven? My descendants tried it. They were unsuccessful. The Towers are nothing like that.”

“Why did you never allow me to accompany you?”

Enoch stepped over a bit of debris on the floor. “Your father wouldn’t permit it. He was cautious, as fathers sometimes are. He feared something might happen to you. It lies outside the Inner Chambers, where the anarchists sometimes go.”

“Did they ever attack you?”

Enoch drew his greatcoat aside, revealing a long, silver scabbard, heavy with runes, inlaid with topaz and lapis lazuli, with ivory and pearls adorning the guards of the gleaming hilt of the wide sword. “Those who did, did not again.”

Carter fell silent, amazed at the innocence of youth, that had perceived a dangerous journey only as a forbidden holiday, and a grim warrior as a laughing uncle.

The bare corridor continued only a brief time before ending at the base of a wide stair, which ascended to a gallery leading to the left, its end lost in the darkness. The steps were gray marble, and monks were carved upon the balusters, their mouths wide as if in song, their faces all turned toward the top of the stair. The wall beside the steps had been papered long before, and the material puckered and sagged from accumulated moisture. A faded painting of a ship on a restless sea hung at the bottom of the stair and Carter reported the presence of another hidden doorway beside it, marked by a blue, luminous rectangle.

Enoch paused a moment in thought, looking at the staircase.

“Does it feel right? No. It must go up, yes, but see how it leads back east? It can’t reach the Towers unless it crosses upon itself.”

They climbed to the gallery, which terminated before ornate double doors opening into a long, straight corridor. Enoch shook his head. “Who knows which way a passage may turn? But this leads the wrong direction. Should we try the secret way?”

The two men went back down and examined the walls for a device to open the panel. They soon discovered a spy-hole hidden beneath the painting. Enoch peered through it and declared that the main stair to the Towers lay on the other side.

“There must be a way between there and here,” he said. “It is most sensible.”

Carter explored the stairway, and eventually realized that one of the carved monks was turned slightly more to the right than its companions. It rotated easily at his touch, and a distinct click emanated, like the opening of a latch, yet the doorway did not appear. He was momentarily mystified, until he discovered that the banister knob, previously secure, now lifted effortlessly from its position, revealing a hidden compartment, with a small valve within. He turned it with some labor to overcome decades of disuse, and a hissing, like running water, flowed through the valve. He could not guess if it were truly liquid, or jets of gas that powered the mechanism, but the wall slid slowly aside, revealing by the light of a single lamp in the room beyond, green, golden-flowered carpet wrapped around the bottom of a wide staircase. They entered cautiously, the circle of their lantern eclipsing the ring of the other light.

The room was paneled in dark oak, with a door facing the stair and another on the far wall. Above the shadows of the high ceiling a faint rain tapped against the roof. The stair, seen from its bottom, stretched long and straight into the darkness, and Carter sensed vast heights above him, the massive weight of wood and stone ascending as if indeed to the stars.

He slowly perceived that this was not simply imagination, but a true communion with the leviathan architecture, and he knew, somehow, that it was connected with the Words of Power.

“Enoch, there are other secret ways above us. Do you feel them?”

“I know only the single stair. You see more than I. But I do smell tobacco in this room, which I have never done before. Our enemies were just here. They must be very close, perhaps behind that far door. Or perhaps above us. If we climb the stair, we may meet them.”

“You say the other stair doesn’t go to the Towers?”

“Am I a wise man? Who am I to say what goes where? I say only it doesn’t seem to, but it might wind and curve and so bring us there at last.”

“We should use this one, I think. But first, there must be a way to shut the passage behind us. We should guard our secrets.”

“The first lever was hidden in the banister knob. Why not the second?”

Carter inspected the rail of the main stair. “Why not, indeed?” he said, finding and turning a valve identical to the first, which closed the sliding door.

They followed the flowered carpet up the stair; Enoch held the lamp low, and little else could be seen except the steps and the dark wood at the bottom of the railing. They listened as they went, but heard only the rain above them.

“Is it always this dark?” Carter half whispered.