THE DARK RIDERS: A TALE IN THIRTEEN RIDES
RIDE THE FIRST: CAR AND SALESMAN
Seventeen-year-old Teri Ross had never in her entire life seen anything like the car sitting outside her house when she got home from Mayfield High, and thanks to her brother Brad, she had seen a lot of cars. She could hardly believe it was real.
For one thing, the car, which curved way far down front and back from its center, was so low to the ground that Teri seriously wondered what would happen if it hit a bump. Even weirder, wheel covers that were part of the body swooped down so far you couldn’t see the tires at all. The covers would have to retract when the car moved; they would absolutely have to.
As if that wasn’t enough, there was the color. It was deep purple all over, but, and Teri didn’t know how else to put it, there were lights in it. Flashes of pink, red, and occasional dark blue surfaced in its hood, its roof, and its doors, but they came and went, as if welling up from some secret and hidden depth in the metal before fading away again.
Teri started walking around it, and from every angle it seemed the same: sleek, almost glowing with its deep purple color, powerful, impatient to be driven, likely to take off at any second and leave Mayfield, Illinois far behind.
She had walked completely around it once when she realized how much she didn’t like it. There was something brutal and nasty about it, almost like a bad smell. It just felt—wrong.
The next second Teri, really startled, stepped quickly back. As clear as day, the ridiculous thought had come to her that the car didn’t like her, either.
It was a relief to turn away from it and her crazy ideas about it and walk up the sidewalk to her Christmas box house, with its white siding and bright red trim. Sometimes she thought it was boring, but right now the oak and maple trees and quiet neighborhood around it seemed reassuringly normal.
She stopped short in the living room. There was a stranger there, talking to her older brother, Brad, and their mother. Brad, dressed in jeans and an old T-shirt, was sitting on the couch looking dazed, and that was odd; he would usually be standing up stretched as high as his stocky five foot seven frame would let him, square-jawed face stubborn and determined, when someone like the stranger was in the room. It was a guy thing with Brad. Mom, dressed for work in a neat blue skirt and blouse, was sitting in the dark mahogany chair, looking puzzled and slightly upset.
The stranger turned so quickly that Teri was startled and took a step back. Mom also stood up.
“Teri,” Mom said, “this is Mr. Lissard. He is a salesman.”
Here her mother stopped, as if not sure how to explain any more his being here. Mr. Lissard didn’t leave a long silence.
“So you are Teri,” he said, but not really like he was pleased that she was there. He had a quick, smooth voice that seemed to fill the room. “Do you like the Python?”
He was a big man for somebody so light on his feet, well over six two, and sleek, like the car outside. His dark suit fit him as if it had been molded on his muscular body, and his face was tanned and handsome and regular, reminding Teri of a local TV anchor, but his head seemed small for someone so large. He had well-groomed dark hair, his lips were parted in a full, even smile, and his teeth were too clean and too white.
“Is that what the car outside is called?” Teri asked. She didn’t like the name any more than the car, and as for the salesman...
“It is,” the man said in a solemn, almost reverent voice. “A revolutionary car, the only car of its kind. Just driving it is a reward in itself and a key to fulfilling larger ambitions. It can re-make your entire world. This is the car your brother has a rare, exclusive chance to own.”
That Teri did not believe.
“It must be really expensive,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” the salesman said, his voice softer now. “There is a price to pay. Very much. Only special people, like your brother—I had heard of his love for cars—find very special terms given to them for the chance to drive a Python. Not everyone has that kind of luck. No, indeed.”
“You’ve heard about Brad?” Teri asked. Brad liked cars, but he wasn’t famous for it or anything. “Are you from Mayfield?”
The salesman laughed.
“Oh, no,” he said. “From Cleveland. I have gotten to know people here, though.”
“What’s the difference where he’s from?” Brad said irritably. “He’s here to talk to me, not you.”
Teri flushed, the car salesman’s smile, already really wide, got a little wider, and she realized that the salesman didn’t like her any more than his car did. She was about to say something when her mother intervened.
“Teri,” she said, “come into the music room.”
Her mother’s voice had a warning note in it that Teri knew well. She got up without saying anything and left the living room to Brad and the salesman, her mother following.
Not many families had a music room, Teri knew, but not many families had a mother who used to teach piano and a daughter who wanted to be a concert pianist. By long habit Teri headed for the piano bench as her mother settled into the red-upholstered arm chair.
“Mom,” Teri burst out, “we can’t afford another car, especially one like that. Look at it! It must cost close to a hundred thousand dollars! Why is this Mr. Lissard even here talking to us? They’ll take our house away!”
“Calm down, Teri,” her mother said, with a faint smile. It was something she said to Teri a lot. To Teri’s annoyance Brad had started saying it recently too, and since he was short and blond like Mom and had the same pinkish square face, it really got to her. She told him to stop, but of course that only made him do it more. She herself was dark and taller, like her dad.
“But Mom,” she said.
“We aren’t buying a car, Teri,” her mother said. “I told Brad I wouldn’t co-sign any papers for him. I’m sure that car is expensive, and whatever that salesman says, he knows Brad doesn’t have the money to make even low payments on his own.”
“Oh,” said Teri. That was true. Brad would have to have six jobs like his to pay for anything like the Python.
“We couldn’t really even afford the Mustang,” she couldn’t help adding. The Mustang, a collector car that would have been worth a lot if it had been in better shape when he and Mr. Seligman got it, was Brad’s pride and joy.
“Maybe not,” her mother said, looking a little more tired. “But cars are the thing Brad loves, Teri, like you love the piano. We have to try to afford both.”
That shut Teri up. A cold, guilty feeling shot through her. She took lessons with the only teacher who would do her any good, at the university fifty miles from here; there were fees for the contests she entered, and there was transportation to both lessons and contests, as well as the sheet music she seemed to always have to be buying. Most expensive of all were the payments on the Steinway baby grand piano that had been going on for four years already. As if that weren’t enough, there was her dream of entering Julliard, or one of the other big music schools. She knew it all really weighed down on her mother. She felt bad about it, but it was her dream, and she couldn’t stop wanting it.
“—only car made that runs this way. Not the internal combustion engine, not electric, not just solar, and not atomic. Its combination solar and—”
The salesman’s raised voice, its smooth power reminding Teri of the car he sold, broke into the silence between Teri and her mother. Mom had obviously stopped to listen for a moment, then realized what she was doing and spoke up again.
“It will all work out somehow, baby,” Mom, looking at her keenly, said. She got up, came over, looked down at the keys of the piano with a kind of half smile, and ran the fingers of her right hand gently over them. She kissed Teri on the forehead and went on out.
At least starting to practice would take her mind off what was happening in the other room. Teri opened the lid of her piano bench and took out the sheet music for Schumann’s Carnaval. All its pieces started with different combinations of the same four notes, taken from the name of the town where a girl Schumann admired lived, and it was about the strange dancing and cavorting characters of the Harlequinade. Teri had had to go on line to find out about those stars of pantomime and puppet show whose masks and makeup both hid them and also told you what they were like. It wasn’t one of her current pieces, but somehow it seemed right for the salesman.
It was May and the branches of the two maple trees outside the window were moving in the wind, the light around them a sort of greenish-yellow from the sun on the leaves. They would be her inspiration today. She held her hands above the keys. They automatically curved and took on the right shape. She pulled them back, and they lost it automatically. She advanced them again.
Strike. Her hands were making the grand, stirring chords of the “Preambule” come to life. It wasn’t very long, but it cleared everything out of her mind but the music. The notes lived not only in the air, as she struck the keys, but in her head, as a beautiful pattern, something she was building with her mind as much as her hands. The pattern glowed with emotions; it was alive, like the maple trees, only in a different way.
“Pierrot” came next, dancing sadly and gracefully by in his white face and white costume with its green decorations. In playing Carnaval she was playing a pattern of masks, which could tell or hide a truth, changing things into what they were not, and even do harm. She was just in the next section, where Harlequin himself, in his multi-colored costume, invisible to some of the other dancers, but not to her, cavorted wildly—
“AHHHH!”
The scream from the other room startled Teri so badly she crashed her hands down on the keyboard. Rushing out to the living room, Teri stopped cold when she saw—
The Python salesman was curled up on their living room rug, his head almost between his knees and his hands over his ears, moaning harsh, high-pitched squealing sounds, while Mom and Brad looked on in astonishment.
Slowly the squealing got softer while they all stood there staring, and the salesman uncurled slightly; then he rolled up onto his knees, his hands clutched weirdly at either end of his still grinning lips, as if he were afraid they were going to come right off his face. He turned in Teri’s direction, and it was almost like he was blind; he didn’t seem to be seeing her at all. The next instant he dropped his hands to his sides.
“Are you all right?” Mom asked him.
“Headaches,” the salesman said, not at all smoothly. “Splitting. It is the air. I must go now. Come back later. At a better time. The atmosphere is not right.”
He got slowly to his feet, staggering slightly. He raised his hands to his mouth quickly, as if still worried his lips might come off, and then he dropped them again. As if there weren’t enough weirdness, Teri saw that after his rolling around on the floor and everything, his dark suit seemed completely unwrinkled. They were all staring at him.
“The Python,” he said, staggering slightly. “Wonderful. Will take you places. You have never been. Experience different. Car. Owner. One with your car.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Teri’s mother asked.
Teri didn’t think he could be all right. Nothing he was saying made any sense.
Suddenly the salesman seemed to be really seeing them again. He looked around, first at one of them, then at another. The look he gave her, which nobody else could see, went so far beyond the dislike she had suspected that she stepped back slightly.
“Must go now,” he said. “Back later.”
They all moved together to the front window to watch as he staggered to the car, got in, and drove off, not all that steadily.
“That,” Mom said at last, “was very strange behavior. Can that man be—well, quite normal?”
“He’s O.K.,” Brad said sullenly.
“Really?” Teri asked, her voice rising higher than she wanted. “Like all the normal people roll around on the floor, try to tear their faces off, and glare at everybody?”
Brad flushed.
“Maybe your playing gave him a headache,” he said angrily. “Sometimes it gives me one.”
“Yeah, right,” Teri said, now also angry, but her Mom broke in before either of them could say anything else.
“That’s enough! Brad, it’s about time for you to get ready to go to work. Teri, go finish your practicing.”
Brad muttered something under his breath and went out. Teri went back to the music room, remembering guiltily how hard things were now for Mom.
By the time she was done, Brad was gone to his service station job. Brad had graduated from Mayfield High in December, and was now trying to get enough money together to start community college next September. Things were rough for Brad too, Teri reminded herself, and although that didn’t excuse his being a butthole, she wasn’t that mad at him anymore. What she couldn’t get out of her head were the strange and sullen car, the eerie lights in its paint job, and its unpleasant salesman. She found herself replaying his sudden fit and rolling on the floor over and over in her head; his hands had clutched and unclutched as if he could not control them, and there had been a slight but steadily increasing hissing undertone to his voice. Most of all, she could not forget how wide his smile had gotten, so wide it seemed about to tear his whole face off.
She texted her two best friends about it, describing everything, and then felt stupid because she hadn’t used her cell to take the picture of the Python Shannon had asked for. The whole thing, Teri thought, would probably give her bad dreams.
She lay in bed, and the salesman’s face looked in at the window. He was smiling, or more like grimacing, both face and smile stretching wider and wider, until they were all she could see, and the stretching lips of the smile threatened to—
The salesman’s face tore away.
It didn’t just dissolve and leave nothing; no horror movie mess lay underneath it. There was color: a confusing mass of blues and greens, a medley of browns changing into deep crimson, and over and around all, a strange orange-red light. Teri was not afraid; the colors that had been released by the disappearance of the face were beautiful. There were shades among them that she had never seen before: blues that were no blue she knew and greens darker and more passionate than the darkest and wettest grass. Most of all, warmth, a warmth she wanted to sun herself with, came from the orange light.
The colors shifted and took more definite shape. The blue rippled softly and in waves, as if stirred by an unseen wind; the green rose and fell. Suddenly, Teri knew.
She was seeing a place. The face of the salesman had covered the face of a new world.
A hissing sound filled her ears. From somewhere there was a moan, and suddenly from all sides a new color, a sullen red, dark and malignant, poured onto the others, moving with deadly speed, faster as the hissing grew louder, covering everything in its path as if it were the lava and ash of a volcano. What it covered it changed, forming—
Teri was lying on her bed in the dark, heart pounding. The Python salesman’s face, Mr. Lissard’s face, torn by a wide grimace, stared at her from outside her window.
She shrieked; the face vanished. She lay still, unable to move, her heart pounding.
“What’s wrong, Weed?”
It was Brad’s voice, kept low so as not to wake Mom. His room was next to hers. He didn’t call her “weed” much anymore; he had started calling her when she had hit her first growth spurt.
He came into the room and closed the door behind him at the same time Teri turned on her bedroom light. They had worked that out earlier this year. Teri had been having a lot of bad dreams, and if she cried out Brad came in, closing the door so that their light or their talk wouldn’t wake Mom. He stayed until she calmed down and felt better.
Teri looked at the window again: no face. Suddenly she felt really guilty for complaining about the stupid car.
“It was a nightmare, I guess,” she said. “I thought I saw a face at the window,” she went on.
Brad walked to her window, peered out of it from different directions, and then opened the screen and stuck his head out.
“Nobody out there,” he said, turning to face her. “No ladders or anything, either.”
He hadn’t even made his voice sound sarcastic.
“Thanks, Brad,” Teri said. “Did I wake you up?”
Brad shook his head.
“I just got back from work,” he said. “It’s only about midnight.”
“Thanks,” Teri said again, looking at him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, but they didn’t do that. Brad smiled at her, though.
“Sleep tight, Weed,” he said. “No more nightmares.”
He didn’t remember that was what Dad used to say, or he wouldn’t have said it. He went out, and Teri shut off the light and told herself firmly that it had been a nightmare, but deep inside something didn’t believe that’s all it had been.
Even though it hadn’t been real, something was telling her it had also been a warning.
THE FIRST OUTRIDE
It was when Dobbs, his Chihuahua, stopped dead and gave one short bark that Mr. Alford looked at the neat white house across the street and saw the shape at one of its upper windows.
He should have been able to see it clearly. He was only taking Dobbs for a second walk, and later than usual—around midnight—because the moon was bright, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and bright shining stars and a warm little breeze seemed to freshen things and promise that if only you went out, something special would happen. Maybe, Mr. Alford thought, he would see something special, or remember how he had used to feel, years ago.
So it was light enough even without the streetlight on the corner, but he still couldn’t make out what was at the window, except that it was moving like it was alive, but how could that be? There was no ladder or anything to stand on and there were no wings, so it would have to be somehow clinging to the side of the house. Of course maybe it wasn’t alive, because there was some trick of light, or of shadow, around it and nowhere else, a sort of blurring like an out of focus photograph. One thing he could tell, even with the blurring, was that it wasn’t human; the area of the blur had the wrong dimensions.
It was alive! Mr. Alford’s heart started beating faster as all of a sudden the thing turned until it was head down—head down!—and clambered more swiftly than any human could down the side of the house to the ground.
Mr. Alford drew a deep breath, his head pounding with excitement. This could be dangerous. He knew he should walk away, but he had come out looking for something new, something to liven up the life he shared with Dobbs, and this was certainly new. He began to cross the street, keeping his eyes on the thing, which was now moving, fast, in his direction. He still didn’t recognize what it was, because just like its shape was wrong, so was its movement. It was jerky in a way that made it hard for him to focus on it. In a second it would be close enough that surely what it was would be clearer.
Just then the leash jerked in his hand and curled around his legs, and involuntarily he looked down.
“Dobbs!” he said sharply to the shivering, obviously fearful little Chihuahua. “Heel!”
When he looked up again he started and took a step back, almost tripping over the leash. About six feet away stood a grinning man, much taller than his own five six and much more muscular than he was; Mr. Alford would describe himself as “portly.” The man wore a smoothly fitting dark business suit, and he was movie-star good looking. Mr. Alford disliked him on sight.
“You should not be here,” the man said in a hissing voice, his grin widening even as he said it. “You should not have seen us.”
There were two more strange movements in the darkness, and before Mr. Alford could even blink, two other men uncannily like the first—same size, same muscles, same suit, same grin—were standing beside him.
“Now look here,” Mr. Alford began apprehensively, but in his surprise he had slackened his grip on the leash, and with a sudden jerk, Dobbs was loose and running as fast as he could. Mr. Alford turned to look—
—and saw one of the three men bend over, and there was a blur. The next moment the man had caught Dobbs and was standing upright, his grin widening even as he held up Mr. Alford’s Chihuahua, and the nightmare really began.
“Dobbs!” Mr. Alford yelled, and then the other two men were clutching him.
“We will show you,” the first one, grinning more widely than ever, “something new: a whole new world.”
THE CHANGE STONE: A MOST SECRET LETTER (beginning)
Most Private
To the Queen’s High Agent
By Secret Messenger
October the twenty fifth of this Year of Our Lord, 1889
My Dear Sir Robert:
The horrifying information you relate only confirms what has become clear to me, if not to the other fools in this University: the most desperate and dangerous of times has come upon us. You have requested knowledge of a secret history known only to two or three within these walls, and by my guess, to two or three powerful mages outside them; despite the singular nature of our association, I will comply only because of the horrific nature of what approaches. I also attach one absolute stipulation: I must ask you on your honor to destroy this translation (my own) as soon as you have read it. The source document itself is mystically coded, and none who could decipher it has felt it safe to preserve a version in plain language. In light of the prodigious memory you have exhibited from your student days on, this is surely a small request.
Here, then, is the full account of that final and most terrible meeting, now three hundred years gone, of the Mage’s Council.
This account I, John of Lincoln, leave to whoever of my order survives and has talent enough to read what I have committed to the clouds.
(Translator’s note: The manuscript was written on paper, wetted, mixed with seed in pellet form, and fed to seven captured crows, which were then released while the west wind blew. Although it was known that John had written an account, it was not retrieved until seventy years later, when the mage Alain De Guise reconstructed what had been done, worked out the words of the spell, and spoke them in a Lincolnshire field while releasing seven noisily cawing crows to a west wind. When the spell compelled his birds to return, De Guise watched as the shadowy presence of one of its long-dead brethren appeared beside each of the newer seven. Barely visible beyond an impression of dark feather, the older birds prompted the newer, who with great labor and difficulty, seemed to form and utter the words that had waited in the clouds all those years to be retrieved. These De Guise transcribed and donated to this University.
The spell itself shows the mastery of the mage who cast it, but De Guise’s recovery and completion of it--what a combining of magic and magical scholarship! Where is its like today?)
I was awakened from dreamless sleep to find the whole chamber about me shaking with what seemed the tolling of a deep and hidden bell. To anyone with the talent, this was as compelling an alarm as would be the pounding of soldiery on his door to a peasant. I knew at once that an act of magic more powerful than any I had known in a long life dedicated to the study of the art had been accomplished, and that it had taken place in the Great Chamber of the Mages. I hastily threw about me both clothes and what protections I could, and then requested Basquard to lead me through the Dark Pathways.
As soon as we entered, the cat headed straight for the sound of the bell.
(Translator’s note: Then as now, cats are attracted to great acts of magic. The Dark Pathways have been much theorized about, but little more is known than John says below.)
To awaken with the very stones of one’s bedchamber so shaken that the tower itself seems to tremble, and then of a sudden to step through one’s closet into the silent stability of the Dark Pathways--it seemed at first the very stuff of dream, but dream it was not. The mage lights, both the fixed and silent inward stars and the treacherously fickle Will O’ The Wisps, illuminated the darkness and outlined the sharper, harder night of the pathway beneath my feet, at the same time calling on something in me, as in every mage, to step off; shapes just out of sight in the shadows moved furtively and whispered words just so low as to tempt the walker to leave the Pathway to make them out. Somehow the traveler knew that these words promised whole worlds, paradises and hells, each filled with knowledge ready to be plucked by the adventurous mage and lying just beyond the shapes that whispered them. All this I stepped around as a mage must, treading on dark nothing as I followed the striped tail of the tabby. Before me Basquard moved at a steady pace, unhesitating in his choice wherever the dark paths divided, golden-green eyes meeting mine each time he turned his head in silent inquiry to see that still I followed after.
Of a sudden Basquard stopped, letting me stoop and take him into my arms, and then a single step took us into the Great Chamber of the Mages.
The wonder of that chamber, the pride and showcase of our art! An immense circular base of pure white stone almost a quarter mile wide, rising in seven concentric stone circle-steps to the dais at the top, yet suspended so high in the air that the purple hills and the white stone of the great city, Karas, could be seen stretching out below! Seen it all could be, for the whole Chamber was covered by a dome of glass spun so fine that only the glint of the sun’s rays revealed its presence. Up and down a massive open stone stair, the Chamber’s only connection to solid earth, soldiers and servants ascended and descended warily.
The chairs were placed around the edge of the highest and inner stone circle, and they were being filled as we appeared, seemingly out of thin air. Some had preceded me; some followed. I sat, the cat seeming content to remain in my lap when I placed him there; I then looked inward, and at what I saw endeavored to keep my face expressionless as Basquard, fur standing out stiffly, hissed. I remember dour-looking William of Widdersham arriving, glancing expressionlessly towards that same center, and saying “These always were more thrones than chairs, Astoret.”
“Thrones follow power,” Astoret responded from his chair, the highest of all the chairs, as he was the most skilled of all the Council. Tall and thin, face pale as ash like all the nobility of his race, golden hair long and swept back, clothed all in white, there could be no greater contrast to William, short, dark, broad and plain of face, dressed in coarse trousers and doublet, his short dark hair unkempt. For all that, I preferred William.
Just then Andre Malbecq, who had arrived but remained standing and staring into the center of the dais, threw up his hands and spoke in horror.
“So many children slaughtered! In the name of God, how could you?”
It was so, and their blood, some still visible on the stone to even unskilled eyes, had been infused with spells of the greatest power both before and after their deaths, so that now their tormented spirits, barely visible in swoops of motion and nearly inaudible cries, were bound to this chamber and what sat at its center.
(Translator’s note: That the mages present could see all this is not so great a proof of their talent as it might at first seem. Mages arriving not long after its completion see traces of any powerful spell; this abominable casting was so powerful that even absent the bodies, even granting the killings to have been done elsewhere and only the blood brought to the Chamber, almost any mage could have seen much.)
“The poor have many children,” were the words with which Astoret dismissed Malbecq.
Such abhorrent practices were not uncommon with the mages of Atlantis. Magic seemed to grow naturally there, like ripe fruit ready to be picked by any who walked by, and it had long been the center of our art, home to the most powerful of mages. Atlantis placed no restraints on the practice of magic; all knew that the Emperor and Council of Nobles held their places only because the Atlantean mages had little interest in the exercise of mundane power. Nowhere was the art so powerful, and nowhere so shameful.
“Was that not the apprentice Vazel?” asked William of Widdersham, nodding inward.
In the center of the dais was a chair of some plain dark wood written over with spells. On it sat a pale youth, blood upon his face, upon his dark curled hair, and spattered over his white singlet. Whether life or death held him, I could not tell, but his mouth was open and the spirits of the murdered children circled him, one at a time entering his mouth.
“It was necessary that the speaker be a mage,” Astoret said calmly. “His death brings incalculable advancement to the art which we all serve. His is a role to be taken on with pride.”
“Yet,” I found myself saying, “I wager he would willingly have ceded the honor.”
Astoret took no notice of me or my remark, instead addressing the figure in the chair.
“Vazel.”
The young man’s bloody head slowly lifted, blank eyes in a face I now confidently judged to belong to death turning to the speaker.
“I know you, Astoret,” the dead voice said.
Holy God forefend such a creature should name me so, and with such cause!
(Translator’s note: When knowledge is sought out of the mouth of the dead, the dark and horrible art of the necromancer decrees magical control of the moment of death: murder is therefore the most practical method. What speaks, some remnant of the deceased or something else, is uncertain and varying, but it is considered ill-fated to be recognized and addressed. I report all this as a scholar must, but as a man, I name this whole art foul, stinking murder.)
“Vazel,” Astoret said again, untroubled in voice.
The dead man spoke, but not to answer.
“I loved Illiana of the dark locks,” he said, his voice and face blank, and though I found that I had clenched my fists, Astoret remained dispassionate.
Not so Andre Malbecq, who with a sound of disgust and outrage, rose from his chair, turned, and vanished back into the Pathways. This also did not disturb Astoret.
“Vazel,” he said again, and when the figure in the chair remained silent, he spoke once more.
“Tell us of the Change Stone.”
At this a turmoil of voices, my own among them, echoed off stone and glass. The Change Stone! That any spell could take hold of that most powerful of objects stirred both amazement and reluctant admiration of Astoret for achieving it. In some, I among them, it stirred more of something else: fear. To attempt a spell so dark and violent on something so powerful was the height of madness.
Astoret’s voice cut through the rest.
“Silence! The Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life: what are these to the Change Stone? The Stone is the ultimate challenge to the Art! If magic is to be preeminent and the world to conform to its practice and rules, the Change Stone must be--”
His pause brought silence: silence absolute. He finished then with ’found,” but too late; all present knew his thought had been not that, but rather “controlled.”
Four of those present were Atlantean: the other three readied themselves to support Astoret. Surely control of the Change Stone would bring power absolute; such power could not be shared by many, if at all. Muttering began, hands were raised, staffs readied, even though unleashing such power in such a space as this was impractical and likely to be deadly to all.
And I? I sat motionless, Basquard on my lap. It was as if some defense of this place had enchanted me alone, and I watched helplessly, as one in a dream.
THE CHANGE STONE: A MOST SECRET LETTER (Beginning)
CHAPTER 1: A MOST SECRET LETTER
Most Private
To the Queen’s High Agent
By Secret Messenger
October the twenty fifth of this Year of Our Lord, 1889
My Dear Sir Robert:
The horrifying information you relate only confirms what has become clear to me, if not to the other fools in this University: the most desperate and dangerous of times has come upon us. You have requested knowledge of a secret history known only to two or three within these walls, and by my guess, to two or three powerful mages outside them; despite the singular nature of our association, I will comply only because of the horrific nature of what approaches. I also attach one absolute stipulation: I must ask you on your honor to destroy this translation (my own) as soon as you have read it. The source document itself is mystically coded, and none who could decipher it has felt it safe to preserve a version in plain language. In light of the prodigious memory you have exhibited from your student days on, this is surely a small request.
Here, then, is the full account of that final and most terrible meeting, now three hundred years gone, of the Mage’s Council.
This account I, John of Lincoln, leave to whoever of my order survives and has talent enough to read what I have committed to the clouds.
(Translator’s note: The manuscript was written on paper, wetted, mixed with seed in pellet form, and fed to seven captured crows, which were then released while the west wind blew. Although it was known that John had written an account, it was not retrieved until seventy years later, when the mage Alain De Guise reconstructed what had been done, worked out the words of the spell, and spoke them in a Lincolnshire field while releasing seven noisily cawing crows to a west wind. When the spell compelled his birds to return, De Guise watched as the shadowy presence of one of its long-dead brethren appeared beside each of the newer seven. Barely visible beyond an impression of dark feather, the older birds prompted the newer, who with great labor and difficulty, seemed to form and utter the words that had waited in the clouds all those years to be retrieved. These De Guise transcribed and donated to this University.
The spell itself shows the mastery of the mage who cast it, but De Guise’s recovery and completion of it--what a combining of magic and magical scholarship! Where is its like today?)
I was awakened from dreamless sleep to find the whole chamber about me shaking with what seemed the tolling of a deep and hidden bell. To anyone with the talent, this was as compelling an alarm as would be the pounding of soldiery on his door to a peasant. I knew at once that an act of magic more powerful than any I had known in a long life dedicated to the study of the art had been accomplished, and that it had taken place in the Great Chamber of the Mages. I hastily threw about me both clothes and what protections I could, and then requested Basquard to lead me through the Dark Pathways.
As soon as we entered, the cat headed straight for the sound of the bell.
(Translator’s note: Then as now, cats are attracted to great acts of magic. The Dark Pathways have been much theorized about, but little more is known than John says below.)
To awaken with the very stones of one’s bedchamber so shaken that the tower itself seems to tremble, and then of a sudden to step through one’s closet into the silent stability of the Dark Pathways--it seemed at first the very stuff of dream, but dream it was not. The mage lights, both the fixed and silent inward stars and the treacherously fickle Will O’ The Wisps, illuminated the darkness and outlined the sharper, harder night of the pathway beneath my feet, at the same time calling on something in me, as in every mage, to step off; shapes just out of sight in the shadows moved furtively and whispered words just so low as to tempt the walker to leave the Pathway to make them out. Somehow the traveler knew that these words promised whole worlds, paradises and hells, each filled with knowledge ready to be plucked by the adventurous mage and lying just beyond the shapes that whispered them. All this I stepped around as a mage must, treading on dark nothing as I followed the striped tail of the tabby. Before me Basquard moved at a steady pace, unhesitating in his choice wherever the dark paths divided, golden-green eyes meeting mine each time he turned his head in silent inquiry to see that still I followed after.
Of a sudden Basquard stopped, letting me stoop and take him into my arms, and then a single step took us into the Great Chamber of the Mages.
The wonder of that chamber, the pride and showcase of our art! An immense circular base of pure white stone almost a quarter mile wide, rising in seven concentric stone circle-steps to the dais at the top, yet suspended so high in the air that the purple hills and the white stone of the great city, Karas, could be seen stretching out below! Seen it all could be, for the whole Chamber was covered by a dome of glass spun so fine that only the glint of the sun’s rays revealed its presence. Up and down a massive open stone stair, the Chamber’s only connection to solid earth, soldiers and servants ascended and descended warily.
The chairs were placed around the edge of the highest and inner stone circle, and they were being filled as we appeared, seemingly out of thin air. Some had preceded me; some followed. I sat, the cat seeming content to remain in my lap when I placed him there; I then looked inward, and at what I saw endeavored to keep my face expressionless as Basquard, fur standing out stiffly, hissed. I remember dour-looking William of Widdersham arriving, glancing expressionlessly towards that same center, and saying “These always were more thrones than chairs, Astoret.”
“Thrones follow power,” Astoret responded from his chair, the highest of all the chairs, as he was the most skilled of all the Council. Tall and thin, face pale as ash like all the nobility of his race, golden hair long and swept back, clothed all in white, there could be no greater contrast to William, short, dark, broad and plain of face, dressed in coarse trousers and doublet, his short dark hair unkempt. For all that, I preferred William.
Just then Andre Malbecq, who had arrived but remained standing and staring into the center of the dais, threw up his hands and spoke in horror.
“So many children slaughtered! In the name of God, how could you?”
It was so, and their blood, some still visible on the stone to even unskilled eyes, had been infused with spells of the greatest power both before and after their deaths, so that now their tormented spirits, barely visible in swoops of motion and nearly inaudible cries, were bound to this chamber and what sat at its center.
(Translator’s note: That the mages present could see all this is not so great a proof of their talent as it might at first seem. Mages arriving not long after its completion see traces of any powerful spell; this abominable casting was so powerful that even absent the bodies, even granting the killings to have been done elsewhere and only the blood brought to the Chamber, almost any mage could have seen much.)
“The poor have many children,” were the words with which Astoret dismissed Malbecq.
Such abhorrent practices were not uncommon with the mages of Atlantis. Magic seemed to grow naturally there, like ripe fruit ready to be picked by any who walked by, and it had long been the center of our art, home to the most powerful of mages. Atlantis placed no restraints on the practice of magic; all knew that the Emperor and Council of Nobles held their places only because the Atlantean mages had little interest in the exercise of mundane power. Nowhere was the art so powerful, and nowhere so shameful.
“Was that not the apprentice Vazel?” asked William of Widdersham, nodding inward.
In the center of the dais was a chair of some plain dark wood written over with spells. On it sat a pale youth, blood upon his face, upon his dark curled hair, and spattered over his white singlet. Whether life or death held him, I could not tell, but his mouth was open and the spirits of the murdered children circled him, one at a time entering his mouth.
“It was necessary that the speaker be a mage,” Astoret said calmly. “His death brings incalculable advancement to the art which we all serve. His is a role to be taken on with pride.”
“Yet,” I found myself saying, “I wager he would willingly have ceded the honor.”
Astoret took no notice of me or my remark, instead addressing the figure in the chair.
“Vazel.”
The young man’s bloody head slowly lifted, blank eyes in a face I now confidently judged to belong to death turning to the speaker.
“I know you, Astoret,” the dead voice said.
Holy God forefend such a creature should name me so, and with such cause!
(Translator’s note: When knowledge is sought out of the mouth of the dead, the dark and horrible art of the necromancer decrees magical control of the moment of death: murder is therefore the most practical method. What speaks, some remnant of the deceased or something else, is uncertain and varying, but it is considered ill-fated to be recognized and addressed. I report all this as a scholar must, but as a man, I name this whole art foul, stinking murder.)
“Vazel,” Astoret said again, untroubled in voice.
The dead man spoke, but not to answer.
“I loved Illiana of the dark locks,” he said, his voice and face blank, and though I found that I had clenched my fists, Astoret remained dispassionate.
Not so Andre Malbecq, who with a sound of disgust and outrage, rose from his chair, turned, and vanished back into the Pathways. This also did not disturb Astoret.
“Vazel,” he said again, and when the figure in the chair remained silent, he spoke once more.
“Tell us of the Change Stone.”
At this a turmoil of voices, my own among them, echoed off stone and glass. The Change Stone! That any spell could take hold of that most powerful of objects stirred both amazement and reluctant admiration of Astoret for achieving it. In some, I among them, it stirred more of something else: fear. To attempt a spell so dark and violent on something so powerful was the height of madness.
Astoret’s voice cut through the rest.
“Silence! The Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life: what are these to the Change Stone? The Stone is the ultimate challenge to the Art! If magic is to be preeminent and the world to conform to its practice and rules, the Change Stone must be--”
His pause brought silence: silence absolute. He finished then with ’found,” but too late; all present knew his thought had been not that, but rather “controlled.”
Four of those present were Atlantean: the other three readied themselves to support Astoret. Surely control of the Change Stone would bring power absolute; such power could not be shared by many, if at all. Muttering began, hands were raised, staffs readied, even though unleashing such power in such a space as this was impractical and likely to be deadly to all.
Orphelians: Beginning
BLOODY EYES
I’m the really strange new kid in school. Nobody knows me and nobody’s friends know me, but in my case that’s nothing different; nobody knows me anywhere. I don’t even know myself, and nothing is scarier than that.
OK, I’m wrong: there are scarier things. That’s why I’m here. My coming means your school has cancer and doesn’t know it. It’s weird being bad news wherever I go, but for you it’s a mixed bag. Just like you won’t know who I am if you see me walking the halls, the cancer walks the halls too, and you don’t recognize that even if it walks up to you, smiles, and says your name. That’s why it can be better for you if I show up: because nothing else can do any good.
Nothing else can keep you from dying.
So, like I said, mixed bag.
In this school it started fast. I was already getting the looks. I don’t mean the ordinary stares you get when you’re new. There were a lot of those, like you’d expect. Four preppie girls going the other way down the hall interrupted talking into their cells to stone-face me all at the same time, just for half a second; three jocks stared and laughed, and I heard “there’s a” and missed what; some skater-looking guys standing protectively around a locker like they had their stash there just looked, and maybe thinking I might be one of them, this bony redhead nodded at me. I’m tall, six feet, and kind of thin and move weird, and I dress in old jeans and either a leather jacket or a jeans jacket. None of it was expensive even new except the leather jacket, which I wasn’t wearing today, and maybe they thought I looked like one of them. I nodded back, being friendly, but I knew I wouldn’t be one of them; I wasn’t one of anybody.
It was the other looks that were freaking me out. Already it had happened four times. Twice the looks had come from behind or way off to one side. When that happens, it feels like something is crawling up my back, and there’s a creepy warm feeling like somebody standing right behind me is breathing on my neck. I don’t look around or give any sign I know.
The other two times it was face to face. Once it was in the eyes of a computer geek who passed me in the hall, and once it was in a sideways glance this tall jock girl in a basketball jersey gave me as she looked up from her iphone. When it’s that way, my vision gets this dark flicker for a second, like I’m about to go blind, and something even darker looks out at me from eyes that don’t belong to it. Right afterwards the eyes the look is coming from get red, like they have pinkeye. In a few seconds they go back to normal, most of the time.
“Where to, gimp? What’s in the case?”
Oh, yeah, I have a limp. It’s not too noticeable, but it makes me walk a little funny.
I stopped and looked up. I hadn’t been paying attention, and three kids had moved out to block my way. The one in the center was the one who spoke; he was big, black, maybe six four, and he had a Mohawk and tats of a red guitar and a white skull on his arms, while his two friends had shaved heads. With the straight leg jeans, Mohawk was probably going for a retro punk look.
I looked down at my battered brown instrument case. It was about four feet long, narrow, and looked like nothing special. It is, though, and I hate it when it draws attention. I had already had to open it for security on the way in. Hopefully these guys wouldn’t make a point out of messing with it. I didn’t want the kind of attention I’d get sending them to the hospital.
I shifted the case to my left hand, across my body in front of me, real fast. They blinked.
“It’s my strings. I’m really getting the looks here. What’s up with that?”
“You’re weird looking,” Mohawk said cautiously, but his words just kept me going.
“Not those looks,” I said, kind of worrying out loud. “I mean the Dark Looks, where something else is using a kid’s eyes to look out. It’s creepy, and if it happens enough to people, their eyes start bleeding from the corners. Do you know anybody in school with bloody eyes?”
Their expressions changed even more. I hadn’t meant to say all that out loud; I just forgot. I have this major problem with forgetting, and I mean big-time major problem.
One of the shaven heads got this wary look and started to say something, but without looking at him, Mohawk grabbed his shoulder, and he stopped.
“Nope, we ain’t seen that, and you talk weirder than you look. What’s your thing? Can’t tell if it’s playin’ the world, or you really trippin.”
Great, I thought, as they did a quick fade out of my way, now there’d be stories about me. At least they’d left before I’d had time to answer Mohawk’s question and blurt out what my thing was. That would have just made it all worse. It’s not like I can do anything about it.
Great start, Lem. I haven’t even been in this school five minutes, and I’d made problems for myself already. What was its name, anyway? I should know the name of my new high school. While we’re at it, what city was I in?
I had forgotten. That figured. Oh well, I was on the way to the office. They’d know there.
“Nobody knows me,” I muttered to myself. “Nobody.”
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: GHOSTS! LURKERS!
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: “Nobody knows me.” Hah. That’s truer of me than him, except for you guys. That’s right: I know you’re there. So you found my message board. I’m the only one who can post on it, so don’t even try. If you do, I’m going to have to kill myself or maybe go for electric shock therapy, because the freakin’ board is on my hard drive, not online, and this part really bites, but I thought you ought to know: you’re all imaginary. I created this board and you.
[Multiple Rejected Posts]
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: HEY! Don’t you people listen? I give you just one rule, and you--
NEMO7 says: You didn’t forbid imaginary posts.
SHE says: Oh. Well, yeah, I guess that makes sense for imaginary posters.
HORNDOG90 says: Yee Hah! Way to go, Nemo 7!
NEMO7 says: Our details have been coopted. Only the names remain, and those are changed. Why?
SCHIZO2 says: I hope you did that, She of Cleveland, or someone is hacking us, and nobody’s safe. Oh, and not that I care, but you talk like you’re 50 or something, Nemo7.
NEMO7 says: I do not!
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: Yup, I did it, and deleted all the siggys. Pictures and places in your details? Don’t you want to be safe? Even Avatars show stuff about you. Siggys with links when you’re not online? Really?
NONEXISTENT34 says: You know, madam moderator, you’re coming across as kind of paranoid. I bet you’re not even from Cleveland. Why? Do you have some deep secret?
SCHIZO2 says: Don’t case on her. Paranoid is just another word for careful.
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: You are so right, Schizo2. It’s not so much that I have a secret, Nonexistent34; I am a secret: the greatest secret of all. I’m a seer. I know things before they happen. That’s weird by itself, and dangerous too, but what makes it a million times more dangerous is I’m an Orphelian seer--the last one--and that means that what I see…
ETHEREAL6 says: What’s an Orphelian?
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: you’ll know soon enough, and it so isn’t pretty. Anyway, I’m the most hunted person on earth, in a secret way. If anyone found out I was the Seer--anyone--
SOMATOTYPE68 says: I’m guessing y’all don’t have too many friends offline.
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: True, but I bet that’s true of a lot of people online, and there’s one person that’s not me I know more about than anyone else does, including himself: Lem.
EHEREAL6 says: Who is Lem?
NONEXISTENT34: How did you get to know anyone well?
NEMO7: How could you know more about someone else than he does himself?
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: Lem seems like he’s about seventeen, but he worries he might be older: way older. There are the weird dreams, the musical instrument he carries everywhere, the Voice, the way dogs act around him, his freaky memory, the fits, and why he’s always running into us: the Orphelians. Lem doesn’t understand any of it, but me? I understand--some of it. I know him, Nonexistent34, because sometimes I see his life through his own eyes, as he lives it. That’s because of who and what he is; I know some things he doesn’t about that. Seer, Nemo7.
HORNDOG90 says: So you can see him naked if he’s looking in a mirror or something?
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: OK, I’m getting the feeling your board name fits you really well, Horndog90. Be careful, or I’ll cut you off, and don’t even think about making a joke about that.
[A short pause in posting follows.]
NONEXISTENT34 says: It sounds like Lem’s life really sucks.
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: It does, but it’s really entertaining. I may not have friends--OK, sorry, don’t flame me, I know you guys are now; I mean people who actually exist--but Lem is like this constant webcast I’m always tuning in on, and it is brain-tearing, dog-freaking, spoor-shedding weird. All that happens in the next few days—oops. My bad. Brain tearing doesn’t happen--yet. There will be lots of tarantulas, though, and who doesn’t like lots of tarantulas?
ETHEREAL6 says: Many of them? Crawling all over the place? Ew!
HALLUCINATION16 says: I get needing to be alone, but don’t you want to meet him?
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: Good question, Hallucination16. Sometimes. Wouldn’t it be freaky to see myself through his eyes? I know so much about him, but he doesn’t even know I exist. If I do meet him, it better be soon. In a year the Orphelian Evolution will be done, Lem and I will probably be dead, and so will everybody else. Not existing has its advantages, posters.
HORNDOG90: We’ll all be dead? But I need to have way more sex!
NEMO7: What we are, She of Cleveland, indeed our whole “nonexistence,’ is more complicated than you realize.
SHE OF CLEVELAND says: You’re offensive, Horndog90, and what is going on here? You imaginary types are way feistier than I thought you’d be. If I were anybody else, I’d think I was going crazy, but I’m as sane as you guys are. Going now, and only I know when I’ll be back.
—She of Cleveland