Mists of Everness Read online

“You are wise, Owl,” said Meadow Mouse. “Who else might know the Princess’s name, or know the pathway to the stars?”

  Owl shook his head again. “They say Phoenix has gone so high as the Sun and learned from him the secret of descending in fire to rise again; but Phoenix lives far to the south, outside the Iron Mountains. And even the Sun is not so high as the stars.”

  Then Owl drew himself up, blinking. “But, wait! Pigeonhawk might know. They say he once flew to the Moon, for he is a secret and mysterious old bird.”

  Mrs. Owl blanched. “I heard he is a sorcerer! That he built his nest in the World Tree once and slept for a thousand years beneath the roots of an oak! Even if he does know where to find the Princess’s name, who would go ask him?”

  Meadow Mouse shivered in terror at the mere mention of Pigeonhawk’s name. Even Horned Owl hunched up his shoulders, shrugging. “I certainly wouldn’t go. Not that I’m afraid, mind you. But sorcerers and crackpots just aren’t received in polite society.”

  But Meadow Mouse was thinking about the Princess. He dearly wanted to help her, and for a special reason he had never told anyone else. It was simply that, in a valley where everyone had wings, the Princess was the only other creature who walked afoot; and he always felt particularly close to her for that.

  And she had once told him not to worry that he could not fly, and whispered to him that she also had once not been able to do it, but that later she had learned the secret. And this gave him hope.

  It was that hope, more than any courage, that caused Meadow Mouse to straighten up in his chair and put down his tea. “I’ll go,” he said, in a firm, quiet voice, “if you will tell me the way.”

  VII

  It took Meadow Mouse all day and all night and all the next day again to climb rock after rock and slope after slope of the frowning mountain to the north where Pigeonhawk lived. And just as he was faint with hunger, fatigue, and despair (for the refreshing scent of amaranth had been left far behind), he came suddenly upon the barren aerie of Pigeonhawk.

  And here was Pigeonhawk himself, grim and solemn, wrapped in a blue robe tinged with gray, standing on a crag overlooking the valley. “Come forward, Meadow Mouse: I will not harm you. But do not step within my charmed circle, for I have drawn the rune Algiz, the rune of protection, all about me here with my foot.”

  Meadow Mouse crept forward meekly. He saw the marks clawed into the rock all around where Pigeonhawk stood, but he could not tell if it were a secret magical system of writing or not. Frankly, it looked like bird scratches to him.

  “Do not speak!” said Pigeonhawk. “I know what has sent you to me. The Princess has lost her name. I know the emptiness such loss entails, for I myself once had another name, a name I carried for another. I shall not return his old name to him till he learns contrition, repentance, and remorse. Likewise, the Princess shall not regain her name until she learns forgiveness.

  “Listen, and I shall tell you the secret of our world. Our world is a false one, a copy or image of the true world, which is beyond the reach of our senses. It is from that true world our Princess comes, a place and condition that I cannot describe nor can you imagine. I will, however, attempt to tell you one mystery of that world.

  “There is a thing there called Death. I do not know what color this thing can be, nor shape, but certain mystics envision it as something like a great evil king, tall as a mountain and black as night. When Death strikes, all your limbs go numb, and your body falls and rots away, and your thoughts depart and do not return. It is like Forgetfulness, but deeper. It is like being eaten by an owl, yet you do not get up again. It is a horror beyond any thing we know.

  “In the true world, certain spirits living there are under the curse that they do not know whence fly their thoughts after death strikes. If one spirit puts Death upon another, that is a great unkindness and evil: it is called murder.

  “In that other world, the Princess fell in love with a raven-spirit who was under such a curse and who committed this unkindness to Galen Amadeus Waylock, whose secret name is Parzifal. I see you know of whom I speak.

  “For a day and a night of the true world, which is equal to an age here, the raven-spirit kept his crime a secret from his love; and when she discovered it, she fled here to our world, using the Silver Key of Everness. But she was as innocent of the mysteries of our world as we are of theirs; and when Forgetfulness, summoned by her weeping, came upon her, she did not know the Three Signs to raise in her defense.

  “And so our Princess dances on the meadow-grass, and dances in the moonlight, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Nor can she go home again, nor use the Key of Everness, for she has forgotten why she sorrows, why she dances, or what is her name.

  “Many ages of our world have passed, and time in that world also; days, or weeks.

  “Now you may ask me three questions. Speak, but choose with care. For we shall one day be brought to a high place and judged on the prudence of our actions.”

  VIII

  Meadow Mouse nervously brushed his whiskers with his paw, staring up at the gold-eyed bird of prey. Meadow Mouse thought carefully, then asked, “If Parzifal were brought back from the dead, and the Raven bridegroom brought here to remind her of her name, would our Princess remember and forgive him?”

  “Only if the Raven did the deed himself, with none to aid him, could she forgive—if he repented his fear of death, which led him to the crime, and healed all harms that fear had caused.”

  And because he had been cautioned to be wise, Meadow Mouse thought carefully and asked, “Is there any price for this?”

  The Pigeonhawk said, “Yes; the Princess will meet Death that day, and Death will reach out his great talon to carry her away.”

  Meadow Mouse’s alarm made him ask, “Can I save her?”

  “No.”

  And for a time, the great Pigeonhawk was silent, but then he spoke, as if to elaborate upon that answer. “Only one might save her; but he is trapped below the sea; and only one might free that one; but he is wounded and paralyzed and ensnared in evil sorcery and held prisoner in a dungeon by a Warlock.”

  Now Meadow Mouse was silent, his thoughts all scampering. He turned his beady, bright little eyes away from Pigeonhawk out to where the shining valley lay in the light. His eyes roamed the valley, and his gaze traveled from the Tower (which had perhaps once been a castle in the clouds) past the Weeping Willows, to the Old Oak, the Rushing Brook, and the Brook’s solemn older brother, Wandering Stream, and thence to Shadowy Lake where Gray Goose lived. Here was High Hill, and Flowering Dale, Hidden Coomb, and, next to Shadowy Lake, lay Wild Marsh where Stork’s nest was.

  A great love for the valley and all who lay within came into Meadow Mouse’s heart then, and so he said, “Pigeonhawk, now you must take me up in your dreadfully sharp claws and fly me over these mountains, I beg you, to wherever this man lies, whomever he is, so that I can do my part to save the Princess. I am only one small mouse, and I can only do what one small mouse can do, but that is more than if I do nothing, or wait for others to do my tasks.”

  “I will take you,” said Pigeonhawk. “I will bear you from this kingdom to that other place, a place so terrible and strange that all words fail. Nor can I tell you what you must do, nor can I warn you of the dangers there, for you have foolishly wasted your final question, and I may not speak beyond what is allowed.”

  Pigeonhawk opened up his terrible sharp talons, sharper than the sharpest thorns, crueler and larger even than Owl’s, and reached toward Meadow Mouse.

  “Wait!” said Meadow Mouse, shrinking back. “I want to tell my mother and my seven hundred brothers where I am going.”

  “You may not.”

  “But she’ll worry so! And I should pack something …”

  “If you hesitate, or look backward, the enchantment of this valley will make you forget your courage and resolve, and your delay will last forever; you will be trapped here, eternally resolved to go, eternally delayed by some further scruple
. Come! Already it may be too late!”

  But he did not move his claws forward. The cruel talons hung in the air, half-open, poised above Meadow Mouse; and Pigeonhawk cocked his head aside, to glare down at Meadow Mouse with a large, fierce, yellow eye.

  Meadow Mouse plucked up his courage, and jumped up into the talons with a flourish of his tail. “Let’s be off, then!” he said, with only the smallest quiver in his voice.

  Pigeonhawk fell off the cliff, snapped out his wings, caught the wind, and soared. All the while, Meadow Mouse shrieked with terror. Then the glory of flight overcame him and his squeaks became squeaks of joy.

  Pigeonhawk flapped his wings, found rising air. The Valley fell away below. Meadow Mouse saw the Iron Mountains pass beneath him, peak and chasm, crag and cleft. And then, in a break between two mountains, a dark green glint of trees unknown, unnamed waterfalls plunging to alien rivers, and strange new fields beyond the fields he knew.

  “Pigeonhawk,” said Meadow Mouse, “if I encounter Death there, in that land, will I be permitted to come back here?”

  Pigeonhawk did not look down but kept his beak pointed at the far horizon. “That question, I truly wish I were allowed to answer. The knowledge is mine; I may not speak.”

  Strange lands and seas were below them, and a moon like none Meadow Mouse had ever seen rose up pale and full in the east.

  In the distance, where the sunset was spreading along great ranges of cloud, broader than any horizon Meadow Mouse’s valley had ever let him see, the Towers of Dusk rose up, gold minarets draped with purple, rose, and red, with the setting sun a fiery ball between them. Faint and far in the distance, Meadow Mouse’s ear caught hints of the music sung by the Hours and Seasons, and the harmonies of flute and lute and clash of cymbals that rose to greet the descending sun.

  Meadow Mouse said, “I say, I’ve just had a thought. Shouldn’t there be a way I can also get you your old name back, while I am out there trying to get the name of the Princess?”

  Pigeonhawk did not look down, but stared with his fierce eyes into the sunset. “That question, also, I truly wish I were allowed to answer.”

  Meadow Mouse thought about that for a while. “Well, I’ll try to get it if I run across it.”

  “That is kind of you,” said Pigeonhawk solemnly.

  2

  The Nemesis of Evil

  Emily slowly came awake, her mind still drugged and dimmed by nightmare-images of her son, leaning over her, fire in his hand. And later, when the other men had come …

  Memories slowly came back to her. Her son, Galen Waylock, had been in a coma for months. The doctors had given up hope. But then, unexpectedly, he had woken. But his eyes were strange: dark and magnetic. His voice had been like the voice from another world, majestic and inhuman.

  Galen came back to life with someone else inside him, some strange and archaic phantom from the Dark Ages. A man with strange knowledge, strange powers—why not use the word?—a warlock.

  The Warlock served a darker power yet, something he feared and hated and feared to disobey; something the world had forgotten, or had been made to forget. He had spoken of this power briefly to his minions, briefly, while Emily lay paralyzed at his feet. The Black City called Acheron was rising from the waves, he said; and when it rose, darkness would cover all. Emily made a small, strangled noise from paralyzed lips, for she had heard the name of Acheron before, in the nightmares her son described to her. The Warlock, glancing darkly down, made the merest gesture, whispered a name of power: there had come a smothering pressure inside her brain that drove her into sleep.

  She dreamed of a dark and windowless city drowned beneath the waves, seven towers of imperishable metal rising into the sunless gloom of the abyss, while blind and transparent fish sported among the tombs and monuments, or shapeless squid, mute and grown to monstrous size in the eternal night, floated near the barbicans and gates, their pale hides trickling with firefly light, their eyes like lamps.

  From the city rose a dim and broken sobbing, and she was terrified to recognize it. It was the voice of her ex-husband’s father, Lemuel, that odd old man who lived alone in a deserted mansion on the coast. Lemuel had been calling out to her, telling her to warn someone, something. What was it?

  The memory was gone. Only the sick, sharp sense of overmastering terror remained.

  Only a dream. Now she was awake. Or was she?

  Blearily, she looked about her. She was lying where the horrible person who was impersonating her son had dropped her, on the carpet before the fireplace. It still was dark in the house, but the first rays of red sunlight were streaming through the upper branches of the trees outside, wreathed in mist.

  She was still benumbed and could not move her arms or legs, but there was a tingling sensation, as if her limbs were returning slowly to life.

  Emily heard snoring from down the hall; she recognized it as belonging to Wil, having heard it for many nights these past few years.

  After Peter, her first husband, had returned from his post overseas wounded, unable to stand or walk, Emily had remarried, as was only sensible. It was sensible to avoid a life as a crippled man’s nursemaid, wasn’t it? Sending Galen off to live with Lemuel had also been sensible. The old man, odd as he was, was rich and could afford to see to the boy’s education.

  Heaven knows, Wil, her second husband, had not wanted Galen around. He’d made that plain enough.

  But now, paralyzed, she wished Peter were here. He always knew what to do in a moment of danger. Usually it was something brutal, involving gunfire and broken bones, but he knew. Many evenings, back when they were first married, Peter had spent showing her his knife collection, showing her how to give an attacker a scalp wound to send blood into his eyes, how to cut the tendons in the wrist with one stroke. (She remembered Peter had been so disappointed that no mugger had molested them during their New York trip.) He knew how to handle emergencies, back when he had been whole. He always knew. If Peter had stayed here … where had he gone? She did not remember him leaving the house tonight.

  If only Galen were here. Galen, her little angel, was so bright, was so good at everything he tried to do. If only Galen had returned alive and sane from the dark place you go when you go into a coma, whatever Land of Darkness lay beyond the world of men …

  Instead, there was no one. No one but Wil, snoring away.

  From where she lay, Emily started shouting and shouting, then screaming, for Wil to wake up.

  The front door swung open without noise. Beyond it was darkness.

  There was something in the darkness. Emily made her eyes into slits and pretended to be asleep.

  The silhouette of a tall man glided forward into the room. He was draped in a long cape of unrelieved black. His head was bowed, and the crown of a wide-brimmed black hat shadowed his features. In the gloom Emily could not distinguish the hat from the cloak, and the whole apparition seemed one eye-defeating mass of inky blackness. With the silence of a specter, the man flowed into the room, silently shutting the door behind. The hat tilted left and right, as if he were carefully and quickly examining each detail of the room.

  Now he raised his head, and Emily saw the brim of the hat rising like the rim of an eclipsing planet to reveal his features. His cheeks and chin were hidden in the high collar of his cloak, wrapped in the long scarf he wore. As the hat brim tilted farther up, Emily caught a hint of strong, high cheekbones; then, a hawk nose; and finally, eyes as greenish gray as the eyes of a cat, perceptive, daring, with a frightening look of forceful intelligence. The man was not young; there were wrinkles around those startling eyes, and his eyebrows were silver.

  For a moment the man stared down at her, his gaze traveling over her with the cold, swift precision of a trained doctor making a diagnosis. Emily kept her eyes as slits, wishing she could move.

  His head jerked up when the noise of Wil’s snore came again. A black-gloved hand, bearing a ring with a strange, gleaming gemstone, came into view from beneath the cl
oak. In that fist was a .45 automatic; the gray metal was lined with black, nonreflective tape the same dark hue as the gloves and cape.

  Then, with a rustle of fabric, he stepped beyond her range of vision down into the hall.

  She tried to move and found she could curl her fingers slightly.

  A moment or two later the dark man returned. Emily caught a glimpse of the man returning the gun to some unseen holster beneath his cloak, and also pocketing a miniaturized camera with some sort of special lens attachment.

  The figure turned its back to Emily and bent over the coffee table where half empty cups lay next to an unemptied ashtray. The black figure spoke in a calm, clear voice. “The fact that you can see me indicates you’ve been exposed to magic. Do not fear.”

  As he stepped around the coffee table, Emily could see what he was doing. One black glove was brushing powder onto the coffee cups. The other held a strip of cellophane that he carefully applied to the fingerprints, which became visible.

  “Who—who are you—?” Emily choked out.

  “I am the enemy of the men who came to your house tonight and of their leader, who is a master-criminal and super-hypnotist who calls himself Azrael de Gray. He is an archfiend whom I intend to bring to justice. I am one whose life he has tried to destroy. I am his nemesis.”

  “I can’t move … ,” she said.

  “I can release you from Azrael’s hypnotic charm. But before I do, you must answer my questions.”

  The black gloves now held tweezers and small plastic bags. With the steady hands of a surgeon, without a wasted motion, the figure began picking up flakes of cigarette ash and tiny threads of fabric lying on the table and the couch.

  “Let me up first!” Emily panted.

  “The mesmeric forces involved do not allow for that.” Now the figure paused in his work and turned the force of his gaze upon her. She stared in alarm into those green eyes, but something she saw in their depths seemed to calm and reassure her. He said, “You must decide to help me.”