All Night Awake (30 page)

N
ever so weary, never so in woe. Ariel’s legs could not keep pace with her desires, and longing for her absent lord tore at her heart.

She dragged her feet, which hurt, unaccustomed as they were to walking this long.

Under the moon of Elvenland, the bright sun of mortals, she’d sought for Quicksilver all over bustling, heartless London.

Her aching, blistered feet, her muddied dress, stood as mute witnesses to her travails.

She’d labored in vain.

She’d braved the unaccustomed smell of refuse in her nostrils, the shrieks of children, the barking of dogs, the grunting of pigs—all of them feral, all of them uncontrolled. She’d seen executions and duels, and rough men had attempted to lay rougher hands on her.

But she’d not found the pattern of power on which she homed, her sovereign lord, King Quicksilver, whom she’d come to seek, whom she’d come to upbraid with righteous anger.

Did he hide from her? Should she not have come looking for him? Did the hill need her more?

And yet without Quicksilver, the hill could not be healed.

Without Quicksilver, Ariel could not be happy.

And she remembered, with icy fear, his cry of
I am betrayed.

Had that truly been his cry? And if so, what had happened to Quicksilver, to Ariel’s brave, loving lord?

Ariel felt tears prickle in her eyes. If he had been attacked, by whom had he been attacked?

Had he been doing battle all this time? Had she been misled as to his intent and actions in London?

Her feet hurt and bled and she wished she could fly, as she was wont to do in Arden’s green woods. But the power of the hill, like a distant, vacillating light, would not allow her such strength as would lift her toward the heavens. She must continue crawling, footsore, upon the earth.

If only she could use her scrying power, and look through the surrounding houses for her lord. But no, she could not.

The houses hereabouts contained too much iron, too much cold metal, too much that was poison to the gentle ways of elvenkind.

No, Ariel must go on searching for her lord with her eyes only, on foot and sleepless, through the smelly, dark alleys of London.

Ahead of her, something stirred, a feeling of power much like hill power, a feeling of power much like Quicksilver’s.

But this power felt corrupted, dark, blotched with evil and full of unrighteous anger.

Had Ariel then driven her lord to this?

Oh, let it not be so.

Let her find him, unscathed and clean and capable of coming back to the hill. Never again would she complain about Silver. Never again would she, with shrewish voice, tell her lord how much she wished he were a proper man, a proper male elf and not a mad weathervane shape changer.

But as she walked closer, around the tall house ahead of her and into the narrow little alley behind it—so narrow it barely admitted her—she saw the marks of darkness and evil stronger and stronger upon that power that glimmered softly at the end.

She knew the whirls and twists of that light radiating ahead between the two buildings like she knew the lines and etchings on the palm of her own hand.

From the same place, a very small scream emanated, followed by grunts and sounds of pain.

Ariel’s elf senses knew what the sounds meant.

Ahead someone died.

Ahead, someone else drank that life.

But only dark creatures fed on death: the Hunter fed on the life of wrongdoers, as did the dogs of the Hunter and other, minor spirits linked still to the darker spirits of antiquity who used to be thus fed.

“Quicksilver,” she said.

She walked into the alley.

In front of her was a scene such as she’d never before witnessed, such as took her a while to comprehend.

On the ground lay a small body—it looked like the body of a child. It had been gutted and lay still, obviously dead.

The thing stooping over the child raised a bloodstained face.

It was a human face, yet it looked—for just a moment—as though it possessed a snout and powerful jaws such as hadn’t been seen on any creature on earth for millennia.

As it straightened, the snout disappeared, and the man standing in the clearing would have looked normal, and perhaps comely, were not it for the blood dripping from his face, staining his clothes, pasting his hair.

He grinned at Ariel, showing bloodstained teeth.

“Not Quicksilver, milady. That fool is where he should have been consigned by our long-suffering mother at his birth. In Never Land, where, amid the potentials never realized, his magic shall drain away to nothing. He shall trouble us no more.”

Though the voice issued from a mortal’s mouth, from the bloodstained lips of a man that Ariel had never seen, never met, yet the voice, smooth and honeyed, velvet soft and flowing like fresh water, was well known.

“Sylvanus?” Ariel said, and stepped back, step by step, while her mind reeled.

It couldn’t be Sylvanus here, Sylvanus the parricide, Sylvanus the murderer who had killed his parents so he could inherit a throne that rightly belonged to Quicksilver.

It couldn’t be Sylvanus.

But the bloodstained creature bowed and chuckled. “At your service, milady. Though you’ll soon be at mine, for I have now secured this body you see.

“With it I shall slaughter the maiden, thus unseating the three aspects of the female element through which humans and elves perceive reality. I have already, with your husband’s help, dethroned the Hunter, my erstwhile master. I shall soon be the master of creation, and creation’s sole arbiter.”

He walked toward Ariel with a smile.

Quicksilver was in Never Land? Quicksilver had helped unseat the Hunter? Why should he? Could Ariel trust this creature to tell the truth?

Yet, if he wasn’t in Never Land, where was he? And how had Quicksilver helped Sylvanus defeat the Hunter? Had Quicksilver, then, been so lost, so alone, that he must go and find camaraderie with his evil brother?

Sylvanus’s new body stepped nearer Ariel. She could smell the blood and gore in his clothes, and face, and hair.

The closeness of pure evil sent a shiver through the queen of elves.

What did he mean to do to her?

Nothing good. That much was sure. Nothing good.

Quickly she raised her hand.

She reached for the weak power of the hill, that burned through her like a dying fire, all embers and smoke. Wishing it stronger, she interposed it, as a flickering shield between her and Sylvanus.

Sylvanus attacked. His raised hand came down, and she heard the crackle of magical power, the fizzle of a transportation spell that didn’t work.

If she hadn’t shielded, she, too, would be in Never Land. Lost to this earth, lost to any hope of helping Quicksilver.

How had Quicksilver been so surprised by his brother that he hadn’t shielded? Did he know this mortal? In the scant light the man’s hair looked red and his form and figure reminded Ariel of what she’d seen in a water drop, disporting with the Lady Silver.

Trembling, she called the power of the hill back to her. It burned into her, slow and hesitant, like a light with insufficient fuel, like a candle near its end.

Whatever the blight was that consumed the force and strength, the nobility and fine flower of elfdom, it tapped, too, the force that the elven queen could use for defense.

Her shield would not endure. She would not be able to use it again.

Yet Ariel saw Sylvanus raise his hand.

She would not have the power to shield from him.

In a fright, Ariel turned and ran away, heedless, into the dark night and the labyrinthine alleyways of London.

She ran because she had no power to fight. She was doomed if they met again.

The laughter of the creature behind her told her that Sylvanus knew this as well as she.

Scene 31

Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Again, he lies on his bed, on his stomach, and the bed and himself are covered in blood.

K
it Marlowe didn’t startle at the way he stuck to the covers, nor at the reek of blood on his nostrils, nor at the dull ache behind his eyes, nor at the feeling that something horrible had happened the night before, something that made the world a black place and his earth a hell.

He woke with a curse upon his lips, and opened his eyes to the dull throb of headache and the grey light of an overcast day coming in through the diamond-shaped panes of his window.

Curse the world and the light and the blood, and his headache, too.

From the street below came the calls of wakening vendors, the hurried footsteps of apprentices and laborers, children’s voices raised in high, playful calls.

Kit’s head throbbed.

He rolled over slowly, bringing the blanket with him, stuck to him by a dark substance that smelled pungently of blood and that Kit didn’t even attempt to tell himself wasn’t just that.

He pulled the blanket away from his body—he appeared to have lain abed naked—and amazed himself only with how calm he felt, how collected.

Horror experienced once is horror indeed: marvelous, strange, and terrifying. Horror experienced twice is dim and dull, an occurrence expected if not welcomed.

Thus step by step do humans become used to their own sins.

Thus had he become used to the idea of betraying friends and strangers to the secret service.

He dragged himself up, out of the bed, and set his feet firmly on the floor. His clothes were by the door, in a blood-soaked heap. Another suit ruined.

Walking like a drunkard, or one only half awakened, Kit tripped to his basin, and poured in it the cool clear water from the jar, dipped his hands in it, and watched the water turn red. He realized, with a sob—caught in his throat and suffocating his emotions—that the desperate revulsion of the day before was not gone. It had turned, instead, to an aching despair.

He remembered craving life. He remembered . . . . What had he done?

All this blood, whose was it? Where had it come from?

Some knowledge, some thought, tickled at his mind, but he could no more hold it than a child’s hands can hold the fluttering butterfly.

He’d done something horrible. The darker half of his mind had committed what crimes? Oh, better die than live so.

And yet no.

All the things he’d done, to avoid death, and now he’d play the roman fool and fall upon his own dagger?

No. It was useless.

Kit was damned, and he might as well learn to live with his damnation. Indeed, he was not all that unusual. As he’d written in Faustus, Kit had for some time suspected that all on earth were in some way damned—Hell was empty and all the demons were here.

“I am in blood steeped so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over,” he told himself reasonably, while staring at his hands, submerged in the red liquid in the white porcelain basin. “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand; which must be acted ere they may be scanned.”

He rinsed his hands with prosaic calm and, opening his window, poured the bloodied water out.

A man, passing underneath the window, jumped away and shook his fist at Kit.

What land this England was, what a place this London that a man might pour blood from his window, early morning, and draw from it no more censure than if he’d poured the nightly wastes from his chamberpot?

Bemused, Kit returned the basin atop its stand, and poured fresh water into it, then cupped his washed hands with fresh water to wash his face.

It was when his hands touched his face that he remembered clearly.

He remembered John Penry’s prayer and his death.

He remembered the dark alley and Poley’s face, and the woman behind him.

Had it really been the Queen?

Marlowe couldn’t help remembering her face, and juxtaposed on his memory of royal portraits, it looked like the same woman.

He’d long heard that the Queen, mistrusting all, her mistrust growing as she got older, often personally followed the high personages of the court, spied on them, and sometimes, attired as a peasant woman—unguarded, alone—sneaked out of her palaces and her keeps, to listen to the common people.

But that she’d spy on her own spies . . .

Kit washed his face, and watched the water run red into the basin. He’d almost attacked the Queen of England with his bare hands.

Why? He couldn’t even guess. His mind was a foggy mirror that reflected nothing to his questing reason.

His father had been right, then, when he’d told Kit that too much reading would disturb his reason. Kit almost smiled at the thought, and yet indeed, here he was covered in blood and without knowing how.

If he was not insane, then who was?

He finished the water in his jug, opened the door, and called for more.

He hoped Imp would bring it, and not Madeleine. He could not explain to Madeleine how he’d got all bloodied again. Had Imp told his mother about Kit’s state the day before?

He heard steps coming down the hallway. Heavy steps. Madeleine’s steps.

She came into the room, perfect and immaculate, in her starched apron, her impeccable white cap, and looked at him with raised eyebrows, but said nothing.