A Stranger in the Garden (6 page)

Charles had twisted Malcolm Nyx’s love and used it to turn him against his daughter. With the Grue’s silver tongue, he had convinced the Pedant that his daughter could not be salvaged. That if he truly loved her, the best thing he could do was offer her up to Science, so that she could be redeemed. Everything she’d done had played straight into his hands.

He wondered if she was dead now, if there was even any world to return to. The Creeping Waste might have swallowed it all.

But what if Vespa had succeeded? What if the Heart had been returned to the Heavenly Dragon? What then?

The Grue laughed at his thoughts.
She had no idea what she was doing. Rousing the Dragon will cause unimaginable turmoil.

He sensed the ring of truth in the Grue’s voice and it made Charles shudder. More often than not, the Grue told the truth. It was just a truth no one wanted to hear.

What do you mean?
Charles thought. He didn’t want to fall into the trap of listening, but the burden of guilt for so many deaths was almost more than he could bear.

What does it matter? You are never going back there.

The Grue was playing coy.

“Tell me!” Charles whispered out loud.

All the magic will be thrown out of balance. You can see what happened as a result of your own dabbling.

And the magic must be brought back into balance?

That depends. It’s in chaos that the true opportunity for power arises.

“So I once believed,” Charles said. He sighed, wishing he could fall asleep.

But the Grue murmured on and his hunger gnawed at Charles so terribly that at one point he found himself kneeling on the floor, trying to chew at the bedpost.

“What is this madness?” he whispered, and the words fell into echoes around the guttered candle on the nightstand.

He climbed back into bed and slid under the coverlet, though his blood seemed to run hot and cold. He was thankful the doctor and his colleagues hadn’t seen fit to bleed him as a physick of New London might have. The blood would have driven him mad with hunger.

Before dawn had even begun to seep through the shuttered windows, they came for him. Dr. Gully and a manservant stripped him naked and then wrapped him in cold, wet sheets. They covered him again with blankets. He froze and burned for an hour before they returned and put him on a gurney, which they wheeled down corridors and passageways to a high-ceilinged, stone-lined room.

They sat him in a chair and tied him to it.

There was a little arched window high above him where the morning light poured through. Everything turned white, and he was reminded of nothing so much as Corinna turning the fog into living starlight.

The first bucket caught him unawares. In fact, in his weakened state, he imagined it was Corinna returning again to warn him of how much good he still had left to do. But as the light poured down, it became water. The freezing cold Malvern water slapped him. For a moment, he was startlingly awake and alive. Then, he was in terrible icy pain.

When that was finished, Charles was wheeled into the Malvern pump room where he was fed dry biscuits and more of the water.

The Grue hated it.

The water was pure, unadulterated magic.

It was the same kind of odd magic he had felt when he’d tried to summon it in this world for the first time, the same he’d discovered in the standing stone circle, only thousands of times more powerful and pure.

It was a magic the Grue hated.

STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP.
His howling was like a fire in Charles’s brain.

He began vomiting and they rushed him to his room. They administered the laudanum again, laced perhaps with the concoction they’d discussed earlier. They wound a thick, damp sheet laden with herbs—a Neptune’s girdle—around his waist. The Grue could feel the herbs, and he hated them, too.

He gasped in pain as the Grue moved toward his back, but the girdle was woven all about him.

The next morning was the same treatment: cold sheets, dousing with buckets of water, ingesting the waters. They gave Charles more of the poison remedy this time, and then they put him in a hot sulfur bath.

Lastly, they administered the syrup of ipecac. Charles had no idea what to expect, but suddenly everything was on fire inside him. Dr. Gully watched him.

“Get a bucket,” he said to his nurse. “A big one. And line it with the syrup.”

It was as if he was being torn asunder. The Grue was coming out and there was no stopping him.

Charles remembered how delicately he had opened his mouth to the Grue, the way it felt when the Grue had crawled inside him, small as a slug. He remembered the illness that took over for days as his body tried unsuccessfully to reject its new inhabitant. It was then the Grue had driven him to feed for the first time as he tried to gain control. Their odd union had been reinforced by the raw
myth
of sylphs devoured in the Cataloging Room.

Now it was all that in reverse. Charles’s body was desperately trying to rid itself of the Grue, and the Grue was at last trying to rid himself of Charles. The nurse placed the bucket below him as he heaved out of the tub of hot water, wet sheets dragging at his limbs.

And then, like a worm popped from a canker, the Grue was out.

Charles’s throat was raw and burned and he could not speak, but at long last there was silence in his head.

He knew who he was again.

Charles convinced them to put the Grue in a specimen jar. He found it more than fitting, considering the number of specimens the Grue had consumed in his hunger. The Grue was a sad, shriveled thing—a wizened rat of the starlit being he must once have been.

Dr. Gully wanted to study him, but Charles demurred. The Grue had caused enough trouble.

He was sick for days after that, and he continued to take the water cure, sans poison. When he was strong enough, Charles did the full treatment, walking five miles between all the springs of Malvern and drinking the water along the way. It was a beautiful little town, and he was grateful to be able to notice this. He had not truly seen beauty with his own eyes in more than a year.

It made him long to stay, but Corinna’s words goaded him.
You must get back to your world. You cannot long be separate from the magic of your birth.

He felt in his bones that this was true. Malvern’s waters were sustaining him now, but it wasn’t quite the same. It was the wrong kind of magical fuel. Eventually, he would burn out.

The problem was quite simply that he had no idea how he was going to get home.

The Grue had brought him here. Without him, Charles didn’t know how he would get back. He mused over this as he wandered the tree-lined path and came to the next spring. He wished, oddly, that Vespa were here, though they had never been friends. But she had always been so very clever and could get herself out of any scrape. Surely she could have figured out this one.

When he entered the pump room, a man with dark, wavy hair a bit older than him bent over the wellhead, inspecting it. He drank from his own cup, eschewing the one provided. He was the first person Charles had been near besides Gully and his staff since he’d been brought here.

Then the man turned and looked at him, irritation crossing his face at being intruded upon. Once again, Charles was faced with meeting a Saint in the flesh. Saint Tesla of the New Creation stood before him.

“Sir,” he murmured, before he scooped up the waters in the cup and drank.

Tesla nodded and departed rapidly after that, as if Charles had interrupted his reverie with the machinery.

But a tiny idea sparked in Charles’s brain.

If Tesla had opened the doors between worlds once, surely he could do it again.

Charles pursued Tesla in a leisurely fashion, rather like the Grue would have done but without his darker purpose. He was finally allowed to take mealtimes with other recovering patients, so Charles watched for Tesla in the canteen, hoping for an opportunity.

He was never there, of course. He preferred to take meals on his own.

Charles didn’t want to make inquiries about Tesla, as word might have gotten back to him and made him even more unapproachable. Their next meeting had to be as natural a discovery as the one in the pump room, and the timing of Charles’s request must be perfect. Charles sensed that Tesla was prickly, not to be trifled with. He had read descriptions of the Saint that said he was a prideful man, deeply obsessed with his own creations. If he appealed to Tesla’s ego and inventiveness, Charles hoped he would be interested in his proposition. First, though, he needed to earn Tesla’s trust.