The Serpent Mage (11 page)
Authors: Greg Bear
Chapter Nine
Kristine called late the next morning. He answered the phone in the master bedroom upstairs and sat on the edge of the four-poster.
"Michael, I'm sorry about the night before last." She sounded tired; her tone was almost flat.
"So am I."
"Things haven't gotten any better. I'm not sure whom I can turn to."
"He hasn't hurt you any more, has he?"
"No. He's taken the car, and I don't know where he is. I've gotten this call… not from him. From an older-sounding man. He mentioned your name. And then he said terrible things were coming."
Michael looked down at his forearms. The hair was standing on end. "Did he tell you his name?"
"No. Do you know anybody who would do that?"
"I'm not sure," Michael said, his eyes closed.
"1 was going to talk up the concert before the department chairman today. Now I don't know what to do. Michael, this man said the manuscript should be burned. He didn't have to say what manuscript. We know what he means, don't we?"
"Yes."
"He's some sort of crank, right?"
"I don't know."
"He made me angry. Everything's making me angry now."
"I think you should move out of there," Michael said.
"Oh? Move where?"
Michael didn't answer.
"Yes, well, I've been packing. Some of my girlfriends are looking around for places. Rent is just crazy these days."
"You could move in here," Michael said, and immediately regretted it.
There was silence on the other end for a long time. "It isn't that easy, and you know why."
"Yes. But it's a large house, and—"
"I'll think about it. I'm at our house now. I'll take a bus to the university this afternoon and try to do some work." She seemed to be leaving an opening.
"We should get together later, then," Michael said. "No talk about the concerto or about anything important. Just small talk."
"That would be nice," she said, sounding relieved. "Michael, what happened in the street—"
"I am sorry—"
"No, it was stupid, it was all crazy, but I wanted to thank you. It was gallant, too."
They made arrangements to meet in front of Royce Hall on the campus at five. Michael opened his eyes as he replaced the receiver on the old black phone.
The footsteps in the middle of the dusty floor. The message in the blank notebook. He could feel the presence at the very fringes of the probe he had made throughout the call. There was something foul in the air. a sensation that made his stomach twist and his muscles knot.
Michael stretched and practiced his discipline for several minutes on the bedroom's hardwood floor.
David Clarkham had not died in the conflagration that had consumed his Xanadu. He had managed to escape somehow and was now in
Los
Angeles, or at least on Earth, and he did not want the concerto performed.
Beneath the tension and the anxiety, there was a calm place that Michael had only become aware of subconsciously in the last few weeks. The part of Michael Perrin that waited and grew within that calm place felt curiosity as to the lengths to which Clarkham would go to prevent the performance.
The brick facade of venerable Royce Hall dwarfed Kristine, who stood alone, hands clenched in the pockets of her brushed suede coat. Michael walked across the grass and concrete walkways toward her. She turned toward him and smiled with a bare edge of sadness.
There was no doubt about it now. He was very much in love with Kristine Pendeers She hugged him briefly and then backed away. "I tried to call Tommy at the garage where he works. He quit the other day. They don't know where he is"
Michael damped the emotions Tommy's name conjured.
"I'm worried about him," she said. "He just has no control."
"What about your situation? I can help you find a place to rent."
"That would be nice. I have friends looking, too. I can't afford much on the pay of a teaching assistant." They walked to a bench and sat, Kristine crossing her booted legs and slumping against the back of the bench, leaning her head back until she faced the bright gray sky. "You know who called me, don't you?"
"His name is — probably — David Clarkham. He's very old. He helped Arno compose opus 45."
"How old is he?"
"Several centuries, at least," Michael said matter-of-factly. Kristine straightened on the bench and half-turned toward him. "I've told my mother and father, and I've told the detective, Lieutenant Harvey, about what happened when I was missing."
"I'm disappointed," Kristine said. "I would have thought you'd confess to me first." Michael couldn't tell how satirical she was being; her face was clear of guile.
"Do you believe what I said — you could be in some danger now?"
She nodded, staring at him. "Are you going to tell me?"
"Yes," he said.
"And we're still going to go ahead with the concert, if I can get it arranged?"
"Yes."
"I have a desk in an office in the music building. We can talk there. It's more private."
Michael agreed, and they crossed the campus, passing spare and modern Schoenberg Hall. Michael began the story before they reached the small office.
He had become more practiced in the telling now. He could complete the story in much less time, with fewer unnecessary details.
They ate dinner in a small pizza parlor in Westwood, then went to see a Woody Allen movie playing in one of the smaller theaters of a hexaplex. Kristine was obviously absorbing and digesting what she had been told; she didn't seem to pay much attention to the film. Michael felt her touch his arm on the rest between them, then grip it.
"You must have been terrified," she whispered.
"I was," he said.
"So you know what all the hauntings are?"
"I can guess."
"I thought you were dangerous," she said. "I was right. I'm not sure I need this kind of stuff now."
"In your situation," Michael prompted.
A middle-aged couple in the row in front of Michael and Kristine turned their heads simultaneously and delivered stern looks.
"Let's go," Kristine said. Michael vaguely regretted the fifteen dollars spent on tickets. Back on the streets of West-wood, Kristine took him through several clothing stores, pointing out dresses she would buy if she could afford them. She was still digesting the story.
"You're not crazy," she said as they left a boutique specializing in Japanese contemporary designs. "I mean, I believe you — in a way. But can you show me something, maybe this
hyloka
or whatever it was?"
"I'd rather not," Michael said. "The last thing I want is for you to think that I'm a freak."
She nodded, thought some more and then said, "I don't want to go home to the house on South Bronson tonight, and I'm not ready to make love with you. But I would like to go home with you. And maybe you could show me Clarkham's house? That might give me something solid to think about."
"All right."
"And when we're at Waltiri's house, I will not think you're a freak if you show me some magic."
Michael didn't answer. They doubled back toward the lot where he had parked the Saab.
Michael lay in his small guest bed, arms crossed behind his head. The tip of his finger still ached from the trick he had performed for Kristine. Using as an example what Bin had done in the Realm, Michael had taken a boulder in the back yard, applied his glowing index finger to the rock's surface and split it cleanly in four sections. Kristine had jumped back and then quietly asked to return to the house.
She slept in the master bedroom now. Michael knew she slept without probing her aura. His awareness in many areas now seemed to come without conscious effort. He could feel the sleep-breathing of many people in the neighborhood; he seemed to hear the world turning, and the stars above were almost evident to him through the house's ceiling and the cloudy overcast. Rain fell in a thunderstorm far to the east, over the mountains; he heard its impact on the distant roofs of buildings and in the streets, on tree leaves and blades of grass.
How much of this was imagination, he could not say for sure; he thought none. Michael was simply coming in tune with his world. His inner breath seemed to follow the respiration of the molecules in the air itself, whining in their manifold collisions. He felt he knew more about how those atoms operated than he had ever been taught in school.
He knew how each particle communicated its position and nature to all other particles, first by drawing a messenger from the well of nothing and sending it out, while the receiving particle dropped the messenger back into nothing once it had served its purpose. That rather amused him; no little scraps of telegrams lying about in drifts from all the atoms in the universe.
Yes, if he had designed this world, that would be an obvious asset.
Just before he let himself slide into sleep, he thought he felt the very singing of the vacuum itself, not empty but full of incredible potential — a ground on which the world was only lightly superimposed, from atoms to galaxies; it seemed as if it might all be swept away by a strong enough will. Or more probably, as if the ground of creation could be overlaid with another scheme, imitative but different in large details.
He composed a fragment of a poem, back-tracking over the words and editing several times before coming up with:
Here makes real
The weaver's weft.
Lace-maker's bobbins
Spin right, leap left
Lift time's thread
Over atom's twist,
Bind such knot with
Death's stone fist.
Weave of flower
And twine of light
Must cross and thwart
By wilt, by night.
Michael mused for a time on how realities might be put together by those less than gods. Such thinking was so abstruse and farfetched, however, that he soon drifted back to more immediate concerns.
He was not disappointed that Kristine did not share his bed this evening. He was patient in his love. She already trusted him, though skittishly; she had given him an incredible gift by believing his story.
He smiled in his slumber. He was still thinking profound thoughts and still feeling Kristine's even, steady, sleeping existence. He would have gladly remained in that state forever, but he knew how fragile his contentment was.
Now he had told everybody who counted, who had the slightest possibility of believing him. If he had been secretive, if his courage had faltered and he had kept silent, he would have been playing along with Clarkham's plans.
Michael would not be isolated.
He suspected he had just purchased some extra time, at very little cost indeed.
Yet still, on the very fringes of his outermost perception: the foulness, the spoor of the Isomage.
Clarkham had one- advantage over Michael still: a plan. Michael didn't have a clear idea of what he needed to do, or even of the nature of what was coming.
Chapter Ten
Downstairs, somebody banged on the door frantically. Michael broke out of a dream — dangerous, dreams, since they now pulled in his circle of awareness — and lurched out of bed, grabbing a robe and slipping it over his nakedness. In the hallway, he saw Kristine standing in the door to the master bedroom. She wore one of Golda's nightgowns, simple dark blue flannel. "Somebody wants in," she said sleepily.
Michael extended his awareness as he thumped barefooted down the stairs. The aura of the person beyond the door, a man, was very familiar and very welcome, though there was something subtly wrong…
He opened the door. A heavy-set bearded fellow in his middle forties stood outside, dressed in skins and furs like a trapper, with a cloth bag slung over his shoulder. His short gray hair jutted out in all directions. "Nikolai!"
"Thank God," the man said with a mild Russian accent. "I have been looking all over for this place. I am not used to Los Angeles now, Michael." He lay his cloth bag down on the step and hugged Michael twice, kissing him on both cheeks.
"How did you get here?" Michael was astonished; he had last seen Nikolai in the Realm, standing beside the Sidhe initiate Biri and Clarkham's mistress Mora at the outskirts of the imitation Xanadu.
"I walked," Nikolai said. Michael invited him in; Kristine watched them from the bottom of the stairs.
"This is a friend," Michael said to Kristine. "His name is ' Nikolai Kuprin."
"Nikolai Nikolaievich Kuprin, Kolya to friends." He returned to the porch for his bag, grinning sheepishly.
"Nikolai, this is Kristine Pendeers."
"Beautiful, beautiful," Nikolai breathed, staring at her with embarrassing concentration. "My pleasure." He shook her hand delicately; Kristine, Michael noticed, extended her hand to Nikolai in the feminine fashion, allowing him to grasp her fingers. "I have not seen a human woman in… ah, if I think about how long, I'll weep. Here, I have been staying out of sight, walking at night, because I would be conspicuous, don't you think?"
"How did you cross over?" Michael asked.
"It is very bad in the Realm now," Nikolai said. "I think perhaps Adonna is dead. Everything is uncertain."
"This is
that
Nikolai?" Kristine asked, her voice rising an octave.
"You've told her? Good. Prepare everybody."
"You still haven't answered my question," Michael said, too astonished and pleased to be exasperated.
"Because I am embarrassed," Nikolai said. "I took advantage of the Ban of Hours. I used the stepping stones in Inyas Trai." He crossed himself quickly as he said the name. "The Councils of Delf and Eleu have been dissolved—"
"You know about them?"
"Yes, yes — Eleu supports human participation in creating a new world, and Delf opposes… the Council of Delf sided with the Maln. But both are disbanded now, and even the Maln is in disarray. Tarax has disappeared. The crisis has divided everyone. Inyas Trai"— he crossed himself—"is full of Sidhe again, both sexes, all kinds. They are preparing the stepping stones for migration. Many thousands have left already. Exodus. And there are so many humans — more than I ever thought could exist in the Realm! Thousands. Where did they come from? I do not know! But I separated myself from those captured in Euterpe. I had to get back to Earth and warn you. I used a stone not yet open for the journey. I'm not sure I did the right thing." He looked around the house, face filled with wonder, mouth open. "So familiar. So beautiful. Like my parents' home in Pasadena."
"Why wasn't it right?" Michael asked, sensing again something wrong in Nikolai's aura.
"I don't feel very good. Sometimes everything seems like a painting on glass. I can see through. Perhaps the stone hadn't been…" He shrugged. "I am tired. May I sit?"
They entered the living room, and Nikolai lay down on the couch, then craned his neck back to look at the piano. "A beautiful instrument," he said. "Is it yours?"
"It belonged to Arno Waltiri," Michael said.
Nikolai stiffened despite his exhaustion. "Do you know about Waltiri?" he asked.
"He was a mage," Michael said. "I know that."
"Mage of the Cledar." Nikolai returned his gaze to Kris-tine, and his drawn, dirty face seemed to light up from within as he smiled. "The birds. The musical race. He worked with the Council of Eleu, on Earth mostly. There was a rumor that the Maln collected humans from Earth, like Emma Livry… so much confusion, so many rumors."
"I haven't told Kristine everything," Michael said. "Where are the Sidhe migrating?"
"I attended the last meeting of the Council of Eleu," Nikolai said. "The Ban requested the presence of a human, and I was the most convenient. The Ban became part of the Council, but what her intentions are now, I don't know. I have no idea what is happening in the Irall. The Maln do not enter Inyas Trai."
Kristine shook her head, completely lost. "He's talking just like you," she said.
"Do not doubt my friend's word," Nikolai advised solemnly, leaning toward her from his recumbent position. "However crazy he might seem. Michael is a very powerful fellow. He bested the Isomage and destroyed him."
"Clarkham isn't dead," Michael said. "Where are the Sidhe migrating? Please answer me, Nikolai. It's important."
"Back to the Earth. They have not the power to go anywhere else. Adonna built the Realm close to the Earth on the string of worlds. They can only return."
"The hauntings?" Kristine asked.
"I thought as much," Michael said.
"The stone I took is a direct route to Los Angeles," Nikolai said. "Nobody explained why. It was certainly convenient. If I haven't done a mischief…" He fell back on the couch pillow and closed his eyes. "Do you have aspirin?"
Michael brought a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water. "Where did you come out in Los Angeles?" he asked, stooping next to the couch and dropping two tablets into Nikolai's hand.
"Hollywood," Nikolai said after swallowing the tablets and draining the glass. "A tall building on Sunset. Very bad shape inside, filthy."
"Are you hungry?" Kristine asked. Nikolai regarded her as if she were a saint.
"Very hungry," he said.
"Then let's have breakfast." She went into the kitchen. Nikolai smiled weakly at Michael.
"She is very nice," he said. "You have been well since your return?"
"Healthy, getting stronger," Michael said.
Nikolai appraised him shrewdly. "Stronger, as in arm-strong, leg-strong?"
"That, too," Michael said.
"I surprised you, no, by coming back? I'm not a great magician, not even of much concern to the Sidhe, yet I made it home, or nearly so. What year is it — truly, I mean? I look at the city and think perhaps centuries have passed."
"It's 1990," Michael said. "May the twelfth."
Combined grief and dismay crossed Nikolai's face. "Not as bad as I expected. So many changes! I am Rip van Winkle now, true?"
Michael nodded. "There doesn't seem to be any link between time in the Realm and here," he said. "I was gone for only a few months, yet five years passed on Earth. And you…"
"It is good to see you, very good," Nikolai interrupted. "My brain swims. I cannot think clearly now. Perhaps some food."
Michael spread his hands out beside Nikolai and frowned. The man's aura was extremely weak, almost indetectable. The way the morning light from the front windows played on Nikolai's eyes was also subtly wrong — the reflections seemed bland, lackluster.
Nikolai got to his feet and wobbled, shaking his head. They joined Kristine in the kitchen and sat at the small table. She complimented Michael on the larder he had stocked. "You're pretty self-sufficient. Most bachelors act as if their mommies were still around to do everything for them."
"Most women I know would have freaked out long before this," Michael said.
"'Freaked out,'" Nikolai repeated, chewing on a slice of toast he had slathered with butter and marmalade. "That means go crazy, perhaps?"
"How long has he been gone?" Kristine asked.
"Sixty, maybe seventy years," Michael said.
"Sixty-seven years," Nikolai said. "You would have made a fine dancer, Miss Pendeers."
"My hips and legs are too heavy," she said.
"Not at all. It is strength that is important, and grace. You have grace, and the strength—" He slowly lowered the last scrap of toast to the plate. "Oh, Michael, it is not good. It is not working."
Michael could not detect his aura at all. Instinctively, he reached out to hold Nikolai with both arms.
"I am going back!" Nikolai bellowed, standing and rocking the table. He held his hands up to the ceiling and moaned, clutching at the air. "Please, not—"
His last word ended in a high-pitched squeak. The table rocked on its pedestal, upsetting jars of jam and cups of coffee. Kristine screamed and backed against the sink. Michael had taken hold of Nikolai's skin jerkin and felt the material squirm between his fingers as if. alive.
The table settled, and a cup rolled to the floor and shattered. Where the man had stood, the air was wrinkled by a heat mirage. That also faded. Nikolai was gone.
Kristine began to cry. "Michael, what happened to him?" She wrapped her arms around herself, leaning backward over the sink.
Michael stepped away from the table and stood with his arms hanging by his sides, clenching and unclenching his fists helplessly.
"What happened?" she asked again, more quietly.
"I think he's back in the Realm," Michael said. The eggs that she had begun frying now smoked in the iron skillet. He lifted the skillet from the stove and carried it carefully around her, lowered it into the sink and filled it with water. She watched him as if hypnotized.
"Nobody's joking, right?" she asked. "This is serious?"
Michael nodded and took her hand, sitting her down in the chair he had occupied. He righted Nikolai's chair and ran his hand over the seat as if to search for a trace of the vanished friend. Kristine sat in silence for several long minutes, not looking at him. Her breathing slowed, and she swallowed less often.
"Do you still want to go on with it?" he asked.
"The performance?" She shrugged with a sharp upward jerk of her shoulders. Her arms were shaking. "Yes. This is frightening. It's…" Michael squeezed her hand and looked at her intently. "It's not like anything I've experienced. I mean, that's obvious, but… It's incredible." She was high from terror and excitement. "I want to go on with it. Oh, yes!"
"Why?" Michael asked, his tone close to anger. "You saw what happened to Nikolai. It's no game."
"What do you want me to say, then? That I'm going to give up? I don't understand you."
"I'm angry at myself," Michael said,
"That's your privilege," Kristine said. "I think I'm doing rather well."
Michael laughed and shook his head, then sat in Nikolai's chair. "You think it's an adventure," he said.
"Isn't it?"
"Do you understand the danger?"
"Is Nikolai dead?"
"I don't think so."
"Will someone try to kill me? Us?"
"Very likely," Michael said. "Or worse. The Sidhe can turn people into monsters, or they can lock them away in limbo."
Kristine's face was bland, seemingly peaceful, as she considered. "When I was nineteen," she said, "I thought about committing suicide. Everything seemed cut and dried. Art and music were fine, but could they explain anything? Could they tell me why I was alive or what the world was all about? I didn't think so. And ever since, I've lived a compromise; I wouldn't try to kill myself, because there was always a chance something would happen to explain everything."
Here was a depth to Kristine he hadn't begun to reach. He could feel, without probing, a melancholy and rootlessness in her words that shook him.
"When I listened to your story, I had a crazy hope that it was true and you weren't just crazy or putting me on. Even if the world was a wall of paper and everything I had learned was wrong. Because it meant there was something behind everything, some purpose or greater…" She gestured with the fingers of her right hand. "Something. Life is such a mess most of the time, and everything that's supposed to be important — love and work and all of it — can be so petty and senseless. Now I've seen a man just vanish, after confirming your story. And…"
There were tears on her cheeks. "God dammit," she said, wiping them away hastily. "I'm so God damned
grateful
, and scared, and excited. There
is
something else, and maybe I'll learn, maybe I'll be really important."
Michael smiled. "You're very courageous," he said.
"Why do we
have
to perform the concerto?" she asked, expressing no doubts about the project but simply requesting a reason.
"I wish I knew."
