Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

“No harm,” it growled. I shuddered and drew back in my seat.

“He means he will do you no harm,” the man said softly. “His name is Fossa. He lives with us—not as a slave, but as a friend. Please don’t fear him.”

I glanced a little desperately at Miss Scarlet. In her tartan blanket and with that little glass balanced in her hand, she looked calm enough; but her black eyes betrayed her own unease. I turned back to the man.

“Who are you?”

He leaned forward in his chair. A middle-aged man of medium height, sturdy and with ash-blond hair that nearly hid the gray that streaked it near his temples. He had a fine-boned face with slanted blue eyes, a few of the dark spots that show where one has labored too long and unprotected beneath the poisonous sun. For all that, his face was curiously unlined. Indeed, there was about him an odd sort of youthfulness—his movements were quick and lithe, his voice strong and clear as a boy’s. Only his eyes and graying hair betrayed him. He wore trousers of archaic cut, of heavy checked wool, and a heavy woolen sweater. His hair was long and hung in a braid down his back. He smiled and raised three fingers to his mouth. “Greetings, cousin.”

“You’re a Paphian!” I had never seen a courtesan of his age before, except bent beneath the weight of a palanquin or begging before one of the seven Paphian Houses on the Hill Magdalena Ardent. “But—you’re old.”

He grinned. The aardman made a deep guttural sound that might have been laughter. When I tried to stammer an apology the man cut me off. “Please—it’s been twenty years since I left the City,” he began, when—

“Twenty- three,” interrupted another voice—that of the first man who had brought us inside. I turned to see a figure silhouetted in the doorway. “He was very good at his work, too. Lysandra Saint-Alaban nearly had a fit when I stole him away from them.”

A Saint-Alaban! That was the Paphian House of my lover Justice—

“You were—did you know—” I said, then stopped. Because of course he would not, if he had left there twenty-some years ago—a few years even before Justice was born.

“I am Trevor Mallory,” the second man announced. As he entered the room, the aardman’s body shook, and I saw where its vestigial tail twitched in anxious greeting. “I hope Giles and Fossa have made you comfortable?”

His drawling voice belied a formal air, in keeping with his clothing: a long haik of sueded leather, heavily embroidered and hung with tassels of yellow silk. I thought he might be some ten or fifteen years older than his companion, but as with Giles it was difficult to guess his age. His hair was white, cut very close to his head, and he had a fine-trimmed white beard. His skin was pink and unlined as a child’s. Gold and silver wires threaded his ears, and he wore a narrow silver enhancer across his eyes. A few feet from the fireplace he paused, removed the enhancer, and cleaned it with a slip of white cloth. A smooth membrane of flesh covered the sockets where his eyes should have been, pierced by two glittering optics that glowed bright blue. I stared at them, marveling. In the City of Trees, not even the Curators had prosthetics that could be said to work successfully. I hadn’t seen an enhancer of any sort since I fled HEL. Carefully he placed it back over his eyes.

“The heat fogs it up,” he said apologetically. “I’ve tried to get a new one, but you know how it is.”

From behind me came a faint rustling. I glanced back and saw Jane sitting up in another chair, clutching a heavy comforter to her breast. She stared wide-eyed at Trevor and Giles, then at the aardman, finally at me.

“Ah, here’s the last one,” Giles announced. A gust of wind rattled the windows, sending a whirl of smoke and ashes from the fireplace to fill the room. Fossa started, growling. Coughing, Giles crossed to the fire and prodded it with a rusted poker. The aardman watched him, then slowly settled back to the floor. He sat there, his legs drawn under him like a dog’s, but with head raised and his chin resting upon one large hand.

Trevor turned to me, his enhancer glinting softly in the firelight. “Would you like something hot to drink? Tea, or we could heat some wine. Or there’s brandy—not very good, but it doesn’t seem to have killed your friend yet.”

Miss Scarlet smiled somewhat nervously and raised her glass. “It’s very good, I recommend it.”

I asked for brandy. Giles passed me on his way to the liquor cabinet. The smell of his sweat cut through that of wood-smoke; but there was another scent as well, something like lemons but more pungent. In a moment it was gone, swallowed by the smoke.

Jane refused anything and asked after her clothes and pistol.

“They’re drying in the kitchen,” Trevor explained. “Your gun’s there, too—it’s safe, we’ve got quite enough of our own, thank you.”

Jane frowned but said nothing. Trevor yawned noisily, then settled into a large armchair near the fire. Its torn leather arms had been patched with plastic tape, but he fit comfortably in it and sighed as he leaned back, adjusting his enhancer. “Now: who goes first? You or us?”

“Oh, them, I think,” Giles said airily. He grinned and handed me a brandy snifter. I took a sip and winced. The liquor was raw but powerful, and had a pleasantly woodsy aftertaste. “We put it up ourselves, but that was before the grapes were blighted—what was it, ten years ago?—a viral strike right here, the very first if you can believe it, we’ve been so lucky. The animals were all right but the plants died. They’ve still never come back as they were before.” He turned to me, his blue eyes wide. “But you—where did you all come from?”

I hesitated, wondering if it was wise to betray our history. But it seemed we had no choice, and certainly our hosts appeared friendly. Even the aardman on the floor sat calmly, staring up at me with sharp foxy eyes.

So we told them, Miss Scarlet and I interrupting each other at first, Jane gradually cutting in with her own details of the fall of the City of Trees: the Mad Aviator who had commandeered the armory in the Cathedral; the bloody rituals he had devised there, setting up my twin, Raphael Miramar, as some kind of dark god; the murder of so many innocent Paphians and other revelers during the feast of Winterlong. And finally, what had seemed to be the revelation of some true god on Saint Alaban’s Hill, where the Aviator had died.

“We left the City then,” Miss Scarlet finished. She tilted her head and sighed. “We have no idea, really, what we left behind us. When we looked back, it seemed the City was in flames—”

“Ascendant janissaries,” Jane said darkly. Despite refusing the brandy, she had warmed enough to our hosts to move her chair closer to the little circle gathered in front of the fire. “We saw them—fougas and other airships. Gryphons, I think—Wendy recognized them from HEL—”

“HEL?” Giles said sharply. He and Trevor exchanged glances, and Fossa’s ears pricked up. “The Human Engineering Laboratory?”

I glared at Jane, then nodded reluctantly. The men looked at me with new interest, Giles frowning a little. When after a minute they still said nothing, I pulled the hair back from my temples to display the scars left from the experimental surgery I had been subjected to by Dr. Harrow.

“You were interned there?” Trevor asked. I knew there were no human eyes behind that enhancer, but still I could feel his gaze on me, a heat that was almost painful.

“Ye-es.”

Hesitantly, I explained something of my history to them. My autism and the terrible price I had paid for its “cure”; my participation as a subject in the so-called Harrow Effect. Emma Harrow had been my teacher at HEL. She had reclaimed my mind from the shadow-world of autism. She had also made me into a monster, one of a battalion of children whose minds were manipulated for the Ascendant Autocracy’s own ends. I spoke of Dr. Harrow’s dream research, her work in deliberately inducing multiple personalities in children, and how I had been used as a neural conduit through which patients relived certain traumas in hopes of overcoming their effects. But I said nothing of the suicides I had provoked in my patients. Nor did I mention Dr. Harrow’s suicide, or the demonic image of the Boy in the Tree, the hypostate I had somehow been imprinted with during Dr. Harrow’s own forbidden experiments with me. I did not know if they would believe me. I remembered Justice’s dubious expression when I first told him how the Boy had come to me: a sinister occult figure thousands of years old, the living dream-image of Death that haunted my dreams and waking alike, and which seemed to want to use me as a channel for loosing some ancient darkness upon the City.