I’ve referred before to the Era of the Children. A new era now began in your life and my undeath respectively: the Era of the Murders. Despite my best efforts, consciousness sometimes intruded on me and I saw one promising young woman after another fall to you—
Never mind. I must focus on what I can save, not on what was lost.
The Era of the Murders meant that we began spending much of our time in the unworld. Gus wanted to watch his beamers as closely as he could. How else could he monitor your performance? The magic required to observe the various yous all the way from Nautilus was too expensive to allow for more than an occasional glimpse; it was far cheaper to dog your steps. You see, Angus, your own creator never trusted you, never really believed in your loyalty or competence. I hope the realization rankles.
Even the wild winds, the dews and roses of the unworld were no longer sufficient incentive to lure me back to awareness. But I felt such things dimly nonetheless, soft stir and ruffling scents. I knew our days in the unworld meant Gus was aging, and I found in that fact another excuse for inaction: perhaps, though I did nothing, he would simply die in time and so put an end to the nightmare.
Oh, how could I have been so craven?
Both my willful somnolence and our restless shadowing of the beamers obscured the change that had occurred in me. Yes, in me, most changeless of beings! For the first ten or so beamers the new sensation was only a distant nagging, an unexplained aching and doubling that I was at pains not to explain. Sometimes you would catch a girl’s face between your hands and she would rise in my vision as if she stood mere inches away, even though Gus spied from a vantage a dozen yards distant. Sometimes I felt your composite flesh around me, its pressures and its appetites, even as I went on flapping in my weary way above Gus’s head. I did not consider what it meant, and yet I must have known—stubbornly though I disavowed my own knowledge.
It was harder to ignore what was happening when Gus was back in Nautilus.
Permit me to gloss over an unworld decade or so of my shame and negligence. What good does it do to dwell on those awful years, when by my own choice I observed so little and have correspondingly little to tell? Anguses were dispatched, one after the other, and girls were killed, and ugh, even now I retreat into the passive voice as if in that way I could escape from my own cowardice—
Onward. For the hour came when someone roused me again and made me sensible of my responsibilities. Of all my regrets this is the keenest: that I found my dearest one when my life was already gone, when I could give her nothing in exchange for the wonders she gave me. What good to anyone is a ghost’s love, however ardent?
Gus was in Nautilus, fast asleep. Your incarnation at the time was asleep as well, thoroughly drunk, beside Vauxhall Bridge in London. How can I know such a thing, you might ask, since by necessity I must have been with Gus, and therefore far away from you?
I was with Gus. But not all of me. A broken-off fragment, an outlier of myself, was distantly aware of lamp-smeared darkness of a depth that never occurs in luminous Nautilus. Of smoky air and faded moonlight cavorting on a river.
Of two people standing over the beamer’s defenseless form. That was what finally drew me from my swoon: I became aware, as in a dream, of those looming figures. It was nothing to me if they meant to disembowel you, understand. I did not even bother to desire such a thing, though I did not then understand you could not be killed in such a manner. You would only come back wearing a new face and figure, but with your essence unchanged; and if your current target was spared, the next girl would not be. I was simply curious. Who were these people, and why were they watching you?
In the next moment self-awareness caught up with me. I could no longer deny that I was now in two places at once, flapping and screaming above Gus but also in you. And in you I was perfectly silent and secret, a residue of mind that neither you nor Gus had detected.
I did not have time to examine the realization before the pair crouched down close to you. There was enough moonlight to define one figure as graceful and feminine, the other as a burly male. They did not look like cutthroats, which disappointed me somewhat—so I suppose I’d hoped that they would gut you after all.
“If it’s so asleep,” a lilting soprano voice asked, “then why are its eyes open?”
I had never heard that voice before. But there was something familiar in it anyway, a sardonic drawl at odds with its mellifluous tones. All at once I knew.
And in my delighted astonishment, I blinked.
I blinked with your eyelids, Angus; I watched the river, the two silhouetted figures, vanish and then flare into being again; and I understood that I had moved a physical body, albeit only a tiny part of one. But: I had commanded flesh! Muscles, however minuscule, had contracted in response to my will!
An eyeblink no doubt seems negligible to you, hardly cause for rapture. But, please recall, it was my first incarnate movement in a century. I could not have been more amazed if some enormous fortress had teetered at the flick of a fingertip, or if the moon had answered my summons and come galloping down the sky.
I launched into a frenzied flapping of your eyelids until they sputtered like startled quail.
“Is it malfunctioning?” a man’s voice asked. A soft voice, its timbre best described as cinnabar. “To think of the wealth he must have poured into this creature, thousands upon thousands of talens, and it still can’t sleep convincingly.”
“Thousands of talens that weren’t even his, or not for the most part,” the lady replied sharply; and oddly, her observation startled me. How many thousands, indeed? I had long ago lost count; was it a hundred thousand by now? More? Light limned her pale hair until she looked like a cloud passing the moon, crowned in fugitive brilliance. “Flesh that wasn’t his, ripped apart by a power that wasn’t his. I don’t for one moment accept that its blinking is a malfunction.”
“If you believe all the gossip,” the gentleman—and here I must humbly apologize for the term, but at that moment I mistakenly believed the speaker was one—rejoined, in fondly reproachful tones. “Sky and Asterion aren’t what I would call reliable witnesses.”
Oh, the luxury of blood and nerves, the surge of one, the urges of the other! I was too much distracted by the ecstasy of gesture to wonder what use I might make of my discovery.
“I have more to go on than the word of those scoundrels, as you know. Or we wouldn’t be here,” the lady—allow me to apologize for this misnomer as well—replied. “And even if I’m not exactly a font of magic, that doesn’t mean I’m deficient when it comes to theory. Well, we can check right now. Catherine, are you in there?”
I strained, at this, to borrow your voice and speak. But that proved beyond my capacity and I managed only a faint croak. To this day, I have never succeeded at producing oral language.
“Blink once for yes, and twice for no,” Anura instructed—for oh, it was indeed she, my cherished one, my wild amphibious heart! Anura had come to me in her human shape, long since rejected, but assumed this night for my sake. There is no gratitude, no love adequate to meet the simple fact of her existence.
It took some effort to compose myself, to stop the manic battering of your lids. But after a struggle—I was very much out of practice with this business of embodiment—I managed to calm your eyes. To pause.
And then I replied to her with a single, emphatic shuttering. When I opened your eyes again the light that flooded me was not of the ordinary kind. After decades of loneliness the brilliance of communication is enough to outshine any sun, on any world.
Anura stooped and swiftly embraced you, since that was the only way she could embrace me. I don’t doubt it was unpleasant for her, but she did it. She knew quite well of what you were made. She let go very quickly and sat back on her heels. How I longed to rise and fling arms around her in return, even if those arms were not mine!
“I thought you must be!” She hesitated. “I suppose I should have asked your permission before I touched you, and whether you even—I can’t expect it. Do you recognize me?”
I blinked once, of course, but inwardly I howled, Don’t dare to ask me such a thing! Ask rather if I love you, if I revere you. Ask if your poem has sung in my head ten million times. Ask if the memory of your kindness has been my sustenance through these endless decades. Ask—
I could no longer deny the depths of my love for Anura. But the fact that I had no proper body of my own—it let me gloss over the precise nature of that love. What could it matter?
“I’m glad you know me in this unworld rag! Can’t stand the thing, but wearing it was a necessary evil if I meant to find you.” It was too dark to make out her face, but I heard her smile. It was something of a surprise to find her so animated with me, when she had always been so snide and laconic in her exchanges with Gus—though of course she’d made no secret of her dislike for him. “I thought, if a thousand talens stolen from you was enough to let you speak a few words to me, then the absolute fortune he’s drained and dumped into this doll ought to do more than that. And then, if the rumors are true, you were forced to disintegrate the original body.” She paused, but her silence roiled with disgust. “Is it true?”
In my shame I wanted desperately to deny it. To bat your lids twice and drive the truth from me. But I could not lie to her.
I blinked once, heavily. The burly gentleman let out a horrified gasp. I had not yet recognized him, or rather her, but that gasp informed me that his appearance might be deceiving. There was something distinctly feminine in the sound of it.
“Anura,” he said—and oh, Laudine, if you ever chance to see these pages, I humbly beg your pardon for my mistake!—“excuse me for doubting you. Everything you hypothesized is borne out. You were right.”
“I had to be!” Anura said, not without pride. “Using Catherine’s mental energies to break a living body apart—it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of a sorcerer trying, that’s all. Of course her patterns were bound to imprint on the neurons as they passed through her! And then on top of that, using her power in the reassembly—what did he expect? Gus Farrow is an arrogant bungler, that’s all.”
Alas, my new powers did not extend to laughing. But I could blink once in warm agreement.
They both saw me do it, and they burst out laughing for me. In my long century of ghosthood I had never taken so much vicarious pleasure in anyone’s glee before.
After they’d roared and cackled to their satisfaction, Anura wiped her eyes and produced a small electric lantern. In the wash of its light, the two figures flared up like candle flames against the darkness. The supposed man was dark, with thick black hair and a golden brown skin that I, with no real justification, associated with Palestine. The hair was worn long, the features of the face rather broad and coarse. But it was immediately apparent to me that the face and body were tragically inapt, a terrible fit for the graceful spirit within. Every nuance of stance and gesture expressed the purest elegance.
And Anura? She was a vision in gold and blue, all possible conventions of angelic loveliness on blazing display. Eyes like a summer sky, hair like sunlight flashing on a river, rosebud lips, pearly skin. Perhaps twenty-five years old. Patience Stott, I remembered Asterion had called her—and instantly I rejected the name as a hideous imposition.
I suppose it was only because I’d known her in Nautilus, in her rightful shape, that I recoiled at her human beauty. That exquisite person was simply wrong for her, ill-fitting for a spirit that took no refuge in smoothness.
“Well?” Anura said, rather bitterly. “Do you prefer me like this?”
I blinked twice, as firmly as I could. No.
Relief washed through her face, which meant—thank all things holy, from paramecia to planets!—that my preferences mattered to her! She had feared, even, that I would admire facile prettiness over the fiercer beauty that belongs to truth. Dear Anura, how could I?
I remembered her words to me, so long ago: I am well aware of what recognition can be worth. Had I thought she was speaking of her poetry?
“This is Madame Laudine; you met her once before.” Oh! The man’s body became transparent as a veil to me, and I saw through it to the bright lady of fountains. Anura’s expression tightened again; her eyes narrowed defensively. “Do you understand why we leave Nautilus as seldom as possible?”
I blinked once. Yes. Indeed, there was an abrupt reversal in my head, as the long-hated city seemed to roll and reveal new colors. It was a prison for me, but a haven for one I cherished. I could not reconcile these opposed aspects of the place. For the time, I simply endured an anguishing muddle of contradictions.
“So you’ll believe me when I say that I never would have followed you here if I didn’t have a compelling reason.” She took a deep breath, abruptly serious. “Catherine Bildstein, I owe you both an apology and a very great debt.”
What? I blinked twice, paused, sincerely bewildered. Blinked twice again, vehemently. No. No! I assure you, the debt is all mine.
Of course, I could not explicitly convey any more than the bare and unadorned no. But Anura seemed to understand me at least to some extent, and she held up a hand to forestall any further objections.
“I do, and I mean to pay it all. Only once that is done, and with interest, will I be so bold as to ask you to forgive me.” She stopped, her breathing labored; it was clear that she had rehearsed this speech, probably many times. But now she found that it stuck in her throat. “You must suspect my motive for acting as I did. When Gus Farrow came to me with his bribe, I was nearly broke. I’m a middling sorceress, never up to more than a talen or so a day, and my salary—” She grimaced, and something of the Anura I knew before bent that flawless face. “It’s a pitiful excuse, isn’t it? Without that bribe, I would have been forced to give up the body I wear in Nautilus—not permanently, but for what seemed to me a longer time than I could endure. I do realize, naturally, that many people would not see this particular humanskin as a terrible burden. All I can tell you is that it is to me.”
I blinked once. I had indeed divined these basic facts of the case, even at the time; her frog’s shape was plainly expensive to maintain and beyond the means of a petty bureaucrat, or indeed of a fine poet. As for the burden of her beauty, well, I had been murdered over charms far inferior to hers.
“But I knew the talens he paid me must have been stolen from you! Even before you spoke in my mind, I knew that! The rumors about Gus Farrow’s ghost had been flying thick and fast ever since he’d arrived in Nautilus, and I knew that he’d fallen under Asterion’s influence. There was no explanation for how he’d raised that sum so quickly, unless you were the source. Catherine, please. You must not spare me your anger! I knew what they were doing to you, and yet I bought my own peace at the price of your suffering. It’s vile, inexcusable! And then, then, as I was in the midst of drinking down your ravished magic—oh. That was the moment when you spoke of your gratitude to me!”
She rushed through these words in a passion, tears coursing down her face. I hadn’t considered the matter in this light before, nor did I wish to do so, ever. But now that she was weeping in front of me, I could see how she might have arrived at this frenzied self-reproach. The extremely long lives enjoyed by Nautilusers allow them ample time to brood. Was it possible that I had lived in Anura’s imagination as she had lived in mine?
My feelings grew in such wild excess of anything a yes or no could hope to capture that I entirely forgot myself. I forgot that I was dead, a whisper installed in a carcass. I forgot everything that I could not do, and, all unthinking, I tried to catch her hand so that I could press it to my heart.
Of course, the only resident organ of that description was not mine at all. Nor even yours, properly speaking.
Madame Laudine let out a cry. “Anura, the right hand! It’s moving!”
It was, I realized; your right hand was creeping sluggishly over the stones, grasping and releasing. Anura reared back. Perhaps she misunderstood me once again, for I thought she looked frightened. But Madame Laudine’s face fired with delight.
“Could you try to hold a pen?” she asked me.
A pen! I did not suppose I could control such an implement, but even to touch one again would be an acute pleasure. Yes, I blinked.
One was produced. To my own amazement, I managed to enclose the pen, nib down, in your fist, and keep it fairly steady atop a scrap of paper. After a quick conference, Madame Laudine moved around you and lifted your head onto her knees, in order that I might see whatever marks I made. I’m sure it was a disgusting service for her, and I thank her for her generosity in performing it.
Luckily for all of us, you’d drunk yourself into a drooling stupor—some of your iterations take after Gus in that respect—and you remained insensible throughout the various adjustments we made to your position. I know now that it was owing to your profound unconsciousness that I was able to commandeer your body even to the small extent I did. My skills, of course, are somewhat improved by now.
And then, when everything was in readiness, I froze. After all, I had not formed words in any medium since those few borne into Anura on the flood of my appropriated magic, so long ago. I was afraid of failure; afraid that, if I did shape words, they would be too effusive, or too reserved, or in some other manner offensive; afraid that, even if I expressed myself perfectly, I might nonetheless find my audience short of sympathy. If all the thrills of communication leapt up in me at once, all the perils and anxieties attendant on self-exposure toppled down on me at the same instant.
“Catherine,” Anura said—and oh, her proud voice broke! “Whatever you have to say—whatever reproaches you have for me—I’m prepared to hear them. It took me too long, and I’m sorry for that. It was very hard to find you, I swear it! But I’m here now, and I’m ready.”
I could not bear to hear her speak so, and her pain drove your hand into movement.
I thanked you then, I scrawled. The letters were large, lumpy, barely legible. Each one seemed to cost me the labor required to shift a boulder. But they were letters for all that, and they made words. I thank you now. Anura, you have been my only friend.
A stillness came over the pair of them as they studied my message. Then Anura let out a small sob and covered her face.
“No longer,” Madame Laudine said in tones soft but decisive. “Catherine Bildstein, will you accept my friendship as well?”
If I am fully truthful, I must confess a momentary reluctance to answer Laudine’s kind offer. She was an enchanting lady and a marvelous artist, and her graces only made me more jealous of her evident closeness with Anura. They were plainly the dearest of friends, and I wondered if they had been, or were still, something more than that. But I could not be so churlish as to decline.
I had not yet confronted the full implications of my feelings—that I had fallen hopelessly in love with another female, and moreover with a frog. But if I avoided inspecting those feelings too closely, I nonetheless surrendered to them. I knew, I did not deny to myself, that I loved Anura. In any body, any sex, and any world. And here was her best friend, welcoming me into their communion.
I blinked yes; it took far less effort than writing. Then after a moment’s thought, I forced your hand into motion again. With great pleasure. Your fountain is the loveliest thing in Nautilus.
Laudine tipped sideways to read my words, and laughed with startled pleasure at the compliment. I suppose no one expects art criticism from a ghost.
“Thank you! There are many, though, scattered around the city. Which one do you mean?”
Avian.
“That’s my favorite too,” Anura said, emerging from behind her hands. “Though there’s another where the water enacts the myth of Artemis and Actaeon that you should really see. And there’s a small one in my room that Laudine gave me as a gift, a frog pond. Even the dragonflies are sculpted from living water.”
How quickly the casual warmth of an ordinary conversation among friends had reasserted itself! To me, of course, there was nothing either casual or ordinary about it. Anura’s words were meant for me, and that gave each of them a lapidary sparkle and sharpness: rare gifts, held up to the light. I was painfully aware that I would have no opportunity to give Anura presents, but then, she was unlikely to expect any from me.
“Catherine, listen,” Anura pursued, with a fresh intensity that marked a change of subject. “There’s something I don’t know if you understand—though I tried to tell you once.” That could only refer to her poem, its deeper meaning so long concealed from me; I felt a rush and whirl of anticipation. “I have to believe you don’t understand, really, because if you do—if you’re allowing this, living with this and doing nothing to stop it—”
Living with anything was not in the cards for me, of course. Anura seemed to realize the awkwardness of her phrasing and stopped, embarrassed and, I realized, anxious. What on earth was disturbing her so?
“They say Gus Farrow has been pulling ten, even twelve talens out of you for every unworld day,” Madame Laudine said briskly. Her manner seemed very different, too, now that she wasn’t playing a malicious coquette for men she despised; it was the frankness, the freshness I’d suspected must be between her and Anura, only now I was included in it. “Is it true?”
One blink. Where was this tending? Laudine nodded in acknowledgment.
“He pours most of the take into his beamers, but not all of it. He’s made some good investments with the rest, and he’s getting rich.”
I hadn’t known that Gus was exploiting me over and above the sums needed for his loathsome work. In my self-imposed exile from myself, my cultivated unawareness, I had paid no attention. I should have known better than to feel hurt by this information, but it landed a slap nonetheless.
“They say, too, that Old Darius very much wanted you as an apprentice, and you rejected him and insisted magic didn’t interest you. They say he kept hoping he’d snag you in the end, and he never really forgave Gus for killing you and spoiling his plans.”
Yes, I blinked again, though in fact I had certain knowledge only of her first statement. What Darius had hoped, what he had forgiven or not: those matters were opaque to me.
“Have you put those things together?” Anura asked. Tentatively, as if she were afraid to find me guilty of something terrible. “The talens, Darius. That’s what we need to know. Do you understand what it means?”
I wasn’t sure what she was implying. I blinked twice. No.
Madame Laudine released a plosive breath. Anura squeezed her eyes briefly shut, as if in relief.
“Then—the things Gus Farrow has been doing with these beamers of his—you’ll swear it’s without your consent?” Laudine asked, and I heard in my new friend a new and dismaying sharpness.
The murders.
What, did they think I approved? That I colluded with my own killer out of some generalized spite toward the living? How could they hold me in any way responsible, when it took all my efforts to shift your hand a few degrees? I tried to scribble an urgent reply but the paper was too crowded, and I had to wait while Anura turned it over.
I hate him and all his doings. I have no power to prevent—and here I found it hard to go on—the killings.
At once I found the fault in my claim. I’d made not the smallest attempt to stop Gus’s murders; I’d done nothing but waft away from my duty, feckless as a summer breeze. I’d told myself I was helpless, that I could change nothing. But I hadn’t imagined that I could blink or write, either, and within the space of half an hour I’d done both! A power untried isn’t the same thing as a power nonexistent.
Anger, disappointment flushed Anura’s delicate face a heated scarlet—and it was anger at me. I saw at once how readily the ferocious judgment she’d turned on herself might pivot and find a different target. And I could not face the knowledge that I deserved her fury; I would do anything to rate her esteem—
“Really? What makes you so sure you can’t? Twelve talens in a day! I doubt Mariam herself did better than that when she was starting out! A mind that strong in death would have been just as powerful living. You could have been a very great sorceress, Catherine, that’s what you must understand.”
Mariam had been deposed some time previously by an entity called The Going in a great, city-rippling upheaval, but Anura’s point struck home for all that. She was wringing her mallard skirt, her eyes darting, and I thought that she was again doubtful whether her impulsive anger of a moment before was justified. Once I came to know Anura better, I learned that she was often indecisive, even wavering, as she weighed every aspect of a problem. When her mind was at last made up, though, its conclusions were remorseless.
“It’s not about could have been,” Laudine interrupted. “It’s about the present. You still have your thoughts, and that’s all any of us require to work magic. The fact that you’ve gone on producing so much—what Anura means to say—”
How I envied the familiar way they tripped over each other’s speeches, the intimacy of their overlapping exclamations, even their glancing annoyance with each other!
“What I mean to say,” Anura snapped, and her rosebud mouth flattened very froggishly, “is that the power Gus Farrow is stealing from you is yours. For good or ill, you cannot disown it.”