1552

The best thing about elevation was spitting on losers. Out of a clear blue day a solitary wad of rain blesses the odd shoulder, the odd brow. What's that? Passing strange! I say, is someone having me on up there? So it was a singular disappointment of Ry's principal occupation in the spring of '52 that, though granted regular access to some of England's loftiest heights, he was ringed on almost all sides by moat or Thames. You could try with the boatmen—and he did, all the time—but the thing about boats in rivers is they didn't stop, and then after awhile your mouth ran dry.

Alex Brood paused in his paces along the Tower of London's outer curtain wall. 'Scored yet, deMille?' He peered down at the brown and placid Thames stocked with mercantile traffic gliding toward London Bridge.

'You'll know when I do. You'll hear a yip. I shall entirely dash our cover.'

'I'd not put it past you.' And away he went, stiff in the livery of a yeoman of the guard.

Being a special friend of their employer, Ry'd successfully negotiated better duds. The Brindlestick contingent—four of them plus Brood—manned their stations as rote as the Muggles they pretended to be under feathered caps, cocking immense, bewitched halberds over their aching shoulders, itching beneath their hose and stifling jerkins.

Ry had the run of the Tower; it only befitted one of his stature—a stature brightly proclaimed by his fine white linen shirt glimpsed through a slashed doublet of emerald green crazily embroidered with golden thread, flourish of white ruff about the throat, and the miraculous bronze codpiece resembling, in every particular, nothing less than an Olympian idealization of the member it so carefully cherished.

He was staring down disconsolately into the unbothered river traffic when the artiste shot up into the sky right before him. Launched from the wharf, apparently. Refocusing on the waterborne, Ry observed them to a one concentrating elsewhere—clearly the victims of a well-timed distraction.

How meet it was that Van ascended every day! That he squirted up above the clouds on his broomstick like a seeker in scent of the snitch, as single-minded, as blind to everything else!

They'd lost touch after Hogwarts. Ry'd stood usher at the wedding, relinquished Caty Jax in law, if not completely in deed, since within the rain-lashed precincts of his heart she'd taken on, more or less from the very start, a permanence, an affection not to be dislodged by mere ceremony. He'd done the expected things and reaped as a result the reward of disappearing completely from their lives. Not that he'd fought it.

He'd flailed about Britain, waiting for his parents to die. Van and Caty put down roots in Plymouth, where for twenty generations the Vandals had been profitable boatwrights. Ry travelled, trying on occupations, by and large in the line of procuring: fledgling owls, potions ingredients and the like, the fewer questions asked the better. For a time he made good coin as an escort for rich Muggle dames—a job that was risky if seldom hard.

Here's something no one saw coming: Van got consecutive sets of identical twins out of Caty! While she heaved them forth he flitted about taking commissions: from ducal Muggles for royal yachts; from the cream of wizardry for august portraits.

Ry caught the random scrap of gossip, the occasional letter. In Dorset he lit one on fire and, for a shilling, smothered it on his tongue. Then he left the tavern with an honest-to-god bear in tow and set about making a small fortune guiding it into circuses, fights, showing it off. His trick was an Imperius charm, but it was gross, heavy, sweaty work—holding so much beast in his mind. Before long he'd sold it to another bearleader, wiped his hands of Dorset and mounted Sasha to trot home, where at length, and finally, news had reached him of his mother's decline.

Looking back, his relationship with Sasha was the only aspect of his life that hadn't been water slipping through his fingers. Under his saddle she grew into a potent blue roan, packed with life and twitching muscle. She breathed England in and grew on it—not the towns so much but the distances...the cold creeks and soft grasses and mornings draped with mist… Sasha didn't care that Ry was wicked on the outside. Like Mary, she'd warmed to the inner part. Like Mary, she validated him.

He and his father buried his mother. Blink and they buried his granny. Blink again and he'd buried the old man and taken possession of the house and sold everything worth selling. He did one better than pay off his disastrous debt to the Diagon Alley tailors (yellow robe) and became their partner (Messrs. Smythe, Hammerstein & deMille). Next to torment, fashion had always been his foremost weakness. This was how he finally achieved a regular income, which proved a boon when Van unexpectedly showed up recruiting for a big new project.

'Painting for the Muggles?' Ry said, in a shadowed nook of the Leaky Cauldron, the two of them several pints in already. 'Who'll pay?'

Adulthood had lengthened and thinned Van. Long thin face, long thin nose, long thin lips with which he now smiled thinly, tapping a long thin finger on the rim of his glass. 'I've a patron.'

'Is it a Muggle? No, don't answer that. Of course it is. Do you know I heard your name, just last month, in the mouth of a fancy Muggle fresh from Court? It was right next to what's-his-name's, the royal portraitist, Hands Hold Mine or whatever. "If you can't get Hold Mine, I've heard this Vandal chap's coming up." Or something in that vein...'

'Hans Holbein.'

Ry might not have realized he'd been corrected. 'And all we've to do is strut about the Tower a bit, casting smoke?'

'The spell's a bit more complicated than that.'

'Right, right. Scaffolding and cover simultaneously. Ceiling and roof, puffed up invisibly from our…what did you call them?'

'Halberds.'

'To be honest, Van, it strikes one as rather advanced, that spell—for you, I mean. Are you better than you used to be or does your patron handle that side too?'

'But Rybel, didn't you just decide he was a Muggle?'

Ry sniffed. 'Anything to get away from the brats, is that it?'

'How well you know me.'

'Is Caty maintaining, by the by? Has she still her figure?'

Van's smile didn't flinch, but his eyes weren't in on it. 'We're very happy.'

Ry wasn't sure if it hurt or helped if Catydid had been ruined by childbirth. He scowled. 'You wouldn't want me to go out corralling people for you, would you, Van? You've already got that part squared away?'

'Indeed I do. You'll find a full contingent at your beck and call.'

'Who.'

'You'll hate them, my dear. They're Merlings.'

'Merlings? What in Slytherin's name are you hiring them for?'

'As I said...my patron.'

'Oh I see. Blame him.' Ry swished his ale. 'You don't go in for that stuff, do you, Van? Now a father, et cetera? Intimations of mortality, and so on?'

Van opened his hands. 'It is nothing to me.'

Merling was a descriptor of the aberrant in wizarding society, the bulk of whom since the beginning of time had put no stock in the divine. There was enough going on in the stars and the tides and the grain of wood and the blood of dragons and in numbers and animals and the cauldron's churn and the alchemist's gearworks to need gods; much too much real and everyday access to awful powers to need devils. As far as Ry understood it, Sir Jesus supplied to Muggledom the spice, drama, scope and prospect that wizards claimed as a birthright.

Merlings kept to themselves, as cloistered within Wizardry as Wizardry was within Christendom. In Hogwarts they'd crammed into a converted Quidditch closet near Brindlestick's wing bedecked with iconic imagery and chanted and wheezed in the old dialect (or in what of it had survived the mulching of history) and committed their odd sacrifices and offerings that stank into the hall and then filed out, melting back into the larger organism, closed-in on their secret knowledges, their 'salvations' from what-exactly-no-one-could-say.

Fleetingly he considered asking Van if Van knew what it was Merlings were even devoted to. But he couldn't—evincing indifference was too in-grown a habit. He knew what you couldn't not know, which was that they deified Merlin. But there was something more—an air about them, a certainty you could sniff but that they sequestered deep inside, only letting hunt a bit in a lost language in their paltry closets of worship. Hieratic wisdoms. Secret histories. Zealotry. The separateness they carried around with them, even fully integrated in a Charms class or the Mess Hall. The sense of mission. If they ever actually did anything you'd be scared shitless of them.

The look in her eyes when she set the world ablaze…sometimes the memory just sparked up from the faithless turf of his mind.

'This isn't a Susurro thing, is it?' For he'd heard she was back. From somewhere epically south. Timbuktu, Persia, Manchuria…one of those remote places whose name alone evoked passions from the complacent Englishman. Ry did casual with this question but gave even odds Van would see through it. They'd been as close as ever back then, third year, when in a rage of vengeance over the slaying of a Muggle she'd accidently incinerated a dozen of them—the witnessing of which had had shall we say an effect on young deMille…so it was possible, if he wasn't too distracted by his own life, Van would hear the question for what it was, would sense the wick of fear inside it.

'Brindlestick Betty? Isn't she in India?'

Ry relaxed.

୫

But relaxation never kept, and it just so happened that, as Alex Brood stalked off, a likely water-taxi down below ambled toward a promising knot of traffic. The dinghy carried an adult couple as passengers—a deeply unequal pair, he a Muggle dandy and she every pound a witch in abysmal disguise—and they studied the Tower, speaking urgently but attempting inconspicuousness. Ry summoned forth his salival yield, leaned, pursed his lips—

—and she looked right up at him. Susurro. Susurro or stone him dead.

Seeing but not recognizing, not yet. Cherry lips, snow cheeks, transfixing eyes.

He slurpingly recalled the assault and collapsed into a crouch behind the short wall. The codpiece clanged dazzlingly against stone and tears lubricated Ry's eyes, obscuring his view of the two in the boat—whose attention was drawn elsewhere with a speed that was a relief until he had time to turn it into an insult.

Ry wasn't sure how, but, trying to get back up, he became unbalanced and fell over backwards. Flung a few epithets into the day. Scrabbled to his feet. Brood stared at him, animate with joy, as though the gods had conducted for him alone a most splendid amusement.

By the end of their Hogwarts days Brood and deMille had come without trying to respect each other. (Chalk it up to Mary Potter's precocious genius: she'd seen that inequality was the most souring, most fundamental ingredient to a relationship, and that well-matched foes were likely to in time exhaust their animus and find it'd transfigured into a species of affection.) But for cheap thrills there was still nothing better than unforced public humiliation.

'Well, if that didn't dash our cover…' Brood chuckled.

'I shall have to double my efforts,' Ry blustered. 'Accio rope!'

From a point in the middle of the sky, a hundred feet above deMille, a fat coil of tawny line unraveled. It made an excellent sound all the way into Ry's hands. He started climbing.

'Curses, deMille! In broad daylight?'

'Get busy, Brood, or we're all for the bonfire!'

Ry had to hand it to him: Brood managed smartly what easily could have degenerated into a disaster of apocalyptic proportions. He caused the sails of a passing yacht to go up in flame, galvanizing all attention to the river, then disillusioned the rope Rybel scaled from the bottom-up, so that his climbing seemed to consume it, which deleted the trailing evidence (Ry appreciated this as he climbed) while leaving the immediate future of his path visible, abetting his rapid progression into invisibility.

Right at the top, suspended exactly like nothing in the known world could ever be from a cloud, just before catapulting himself out of that world's range, Ry called down with admiration: 'Ten points to Brindlestick!'

Ry was giggling as he climbed up into 'cloud-cover.'

The 'floor' was a mattress of swirling gray feathers. The spell Van claimed was his own blinkered the oblivious Londoners below while providing him a platform from which to render his preposterous art on the sky. Ry, who didn't often feel wonder, couldn't resist: he stood upon a horizon of smoke spreading off in all directions and beheld above a vista trembling with outrageous color.

Actual sunlight gushed about in its usual way, picking out fleecy clouds and wheeling birds, whose occasional cry came all the starker above the magical threshold, which muffled the city's perpetual clangor. It was a pretty day that Ry and his gang of devout worker bees were depriving the poor Muggles of. And it had another day coming out of it, as though in an act of labor.

A confusion of time crisscrossed the sky: clouds tinted as of daybreak hovering, static among the fleecy sailers more typical of afternoon. A moment's study and Ry could see the hand at work in the former: a depictedness…hard to describe. The experience was fully uncanny. Also there were two suns, both rising, one doing so in fits and starts and flickering a bit. Some ways away and on his back, with a large and silly hat protecting him from their glare, Van tweaked and nudged the extra star, a channel of wispy magic tethering his wand to its object as he prodded it just, brushed it just.

Awash in a queer and interesting puzzlement, Ry realized he couldn't figure out where exactly Van's imitation sun sat in the depths of the sky. Was it mere yards distant? Or did the artist's slipstream of charms extend far up and away into the celestial reaches?

He didn't try sneaking up but it wasn't easy making noise when you walked on the clouds. 'It's Susurro's spell, isn't it?'

'What the-' Van jerked. His sun became superimposed over the much older one. 'What are you doing up here?'

'I saw her just now, in cahoots with some Muggle grandee. Both of them assaying our little endeavour here as obvious as can be. You lied.'

After a moment, Ry returned to his work. 'The hardest part,' he said, 'is all the bloody movement. Climbing, reducing in aspect whilst it climbs, arcing across the sky whilst it reduces… Astonishing instrument, really, the sun.'

'Who's the Muggle?'

'What business is it of yours?'

'A man likes to know who's paying him.'

'Is this integrity?' Van stood and faced Ry. 'Did you pick some up along the way? Not too busy stealing things and whoring yourself out?'

'Fuck integrity. I'm watching my back.'

Van nodded, gratified by Rybel's consistency. 'His name is Jones. You'd like him.'

'Why lie about it? You know I don't give a fig.'

'I didn't lie. It was a convenient dodge—given your history with Lady Ann.'

'Is she Lady Ann now?'

'There's nothing wrong with her, you know. She has big ideas and knows how to drum up backing. I rather think we've quite a future in store.'

'So she's the dreamer, Jones is the money, you're the artist and we're the mercenaries. Where does Nightless Day come in?'

This Van hadn't seen coming. 'He doesn't. He's nothing to do with it.'

'Really? And when are you doing to debut your great work? When did Lady Ann tell you to finish by?'

'She doesn't tell me anything. We mutually agreed that the covering spells will be dispersed at a midnight, whenever the piece is finished.'

'A midnight. Susurro commissions dawn to break in the middle of the night and you think it's nothing to do with Nightless Day, that she isn't unfurling a sigil. You're a fool, Andrew.'

Van rolled his eyes. 'So what if it's a sigil? Lady Ann may do what she likes. It is nothing to me.'

'You might think twice before entering the arena with them, Van. You've the brats to think about now. And Caty.'

'Please. Time didn't freeze in Hogwarts. Some of us moved on and grew up. Day and Ann—that was decades ago. And isn't he in Ireland?'

'Not for long he is. Not once you've lit the bloody signal fire. It's the perfect way to hail him, don't you see? Here I am, Nightless, back from India and stronger than ever. Your move.'

'Pish. You worry too much.'

'If you'd seen what I saw—'

'Twenty years ago, for Merlin's sake!'

' "For Merlin's sake" is what I'm afraid of. They've been arming themselves for their next bout—for Merlin's sake. Do you not remember what happens to the people who get between them?'

'I remember what happened to one.'

Ry frowned. It occurred to him that he'd entirely outrun his indifference. The thing that controlled him felt dormant in his legs. He was suddenly weary. 'Why would I like Jones?'

Van's thin smile. 'He reminds me of you. Born without a penny but he never let it hold him back. You can smell the striving from a mile away.'

It wasn't the sharpest arrow but it was well-placed. Ry let his eyes drop from Van's, then after a moment went back looking for the trapdoor to Earth.

'Are you still with us?'

The trapdoor was a swirling nacreous portal, Merling guardsmen just visible below, huddled about on the Tower peering up at him. He shrugged. If you had to take an insult, you might as well make it lucrative. 'Double my pay.'

'Done.'

'Triple it.'

'No.'

'Give me some time—a day's notice—before the big reveal.'

'Anything else?'

Ry smiled, looking over the shoulder of his erstwhile friend. 'Your star, Van.'

'What of it?'

'It's fading. The real one's burning right through it.'