The Pyramids of London

THIRTY-ONE

Aunt Arianne looked very small and crumpled, sitting with her knees drawn up under her chin. Though her eyes were open, she didn’t seem to notice Eluned and Eleri’s arrival until they put their hastily-assembled tea tray on the low table in the centre of the room. Then she unfolded, and said, “Thank you,” and then her face went tight and blank, like she regretted saying that and was trying to hide it.

“What happened to your hands?” Eleri asked, bluntly.

The way Aunt Arianne looked down at her collection of broken nails and scrapes made it clear she hadn’t even noticed.

“Oh,” she said, voice croaky with exhaustion. “That Sea of Lies thing. Nearly pulled me down—I was trying to drag myself out.” She lifted her head. “But I killed both Mendacii. I find I am inordinately proud of my shooting today.”

Aunt Arianne hadn’t told them that she’d been caught by the same thing that had killed Dem Blair. Eluned was willing to bet she’d have never even mentioned it, if they hadn’t asked about her hands. But even Aunt Arianne couldn’t be lightly amused tonight: she’d never sounded less able to breeze through all difficulties.

“He bit you, didn’t he?” Eluned said, putting a cup of tea almost sweet enough to please Griff in her aunt’s hands, and then sitting down and slipping her left arm around her waist to steady her upright.

Even though the day had been quite warm, Aunt Arianne’s skin was cold, and she seemed boneless and limp, only managing to drink a little tea before resting it on her lap. Eluned considered Forest House’s excess of stairs, then mouthed “Blanket” to Eleri.

“I don’t think I would have liked doing anything even resembling that with Lord Msrah,” Aunt Arianne said, distractedly. “Raw. Yes, raw. It would not have suited.”

Eluned freed her hand so she could rest it against Aunt Arianne’s forehead, but this was clammy, not hot. Still, the action seemed to bring her aunt a little way back to herself, and she offered Eluned an amused smile.

“It’s the loss of ka,” she said, and sipped her tea. “Not quite like being drunk, but I am rather disconnected.”

“Did he—did you decide to serve as his Bound after all?”

“No.” Aunt Arianne paused, then repeated more definitely. “No, that was an exigencies of battle thing, not a career decision. And something of a foretaste…” She looked absently at her cup, then up at Eluned. “Speaking of careers, Eluned, why is it that you change the subject whenever I try talk to you about your atelier application? Is it because you won’t be able to go to school with Eleri any more?”

Ambushed. “It’s nothing. I don’t.”

“I did receive a lot of artistic training, you know, even if I don’t…but if not me, I know a great many people—indeed, I believe I’ve met Nathalie Morris. Would you like me to arrange for you to talk to her?”

“No!” The idea of admitting to a National Artist that she couldn’t even… “It’s nothing.”

Aunt Arianne didn’t push, just sipped her tea again. It was only Eluned’s imagination that she slumped. She’d only been asking because she was a dutiful aunt.

But how true was that? One thing Eluned had come to understand was that Aunt Arianne was both nothing like the shallow care-for-nothing mother had thought her, nor the detached sophisticate Eluned had struggled to accept.

Eluned should have seen as soon as she noticed that every second person Aunt Arianne met remarked on her parents, and Aunt Arianne had to tell them she didn’t have the talent to follow in their footsteps. That light, vaguely amused tone made it into nothing, a small thing, so they wouldn’t ask again. A glass shield of pride, so expertly wielded it looked weightless.

But it felt like Aunt Arianne’s shield had become so much a part of her that she couldn’t put it down. This might be the first time Eluned had seen her without it, and only because it had shattered under multiple blows. To add another, even a tiny one, seemed impossibly cruel.

“I can’t draw,” she admitted, barely loud enough to be heard.

Eluned expected some kind of protestation, some insistence that that couldn’t be true, when the house in Caerlleon had been dotted with framed examples of her work. Instead, Aunt Arianne drank the last of her tea, then said: “You’ll never be able to show Aedric anything again.”

“What?”

“He was your teacher, yes? The one whose opinion mattered. Nothing you do from now on, no matter how good or bad, can ever make him proud of you.”

Eluned felt short of breath. It was true, true.

“But, then, what can I do?” Her throat hurt from the words.

“Stop. If the only reason you have is Aedric’s approval, you should find a better way to spend your time.”

Eluned stiffened. She knew she shouldn’t have asked Aunt Arianne.

“And there,” Aunt Arianne said, with a smile in her voice. “Now you can prove me wrong. But I meant what I said. Be someone who doesn’t draw. Don’t even try, until something comes along that makes it impossible to not draw, which makes it not even a choice. Then it won’t matter who is proud, or not, because that isn’t the point, is it?”

“I…”

“You’ll find a way, Eluned,” Aunt Arianne said, and dropped her head to rest on Eluned’s shoulder.

Her weary certainty was oddly warming, and Eluned sat quietly until Eleri returned, and they tucked their drowsing aunt under the blanket.

“What next?” Eleri asked, as they left Aunt Arianne a covered plate and took the teapot back to the kitchen. “Sit up? Bed?”

“I don’t think Dem Makepeace is likely to come back tonight,” Eluned said. “I don’t think I can sleep yet, though.”

“Going—”

The window rattled. Not from wind, but as if something had tried to tear it open from the outside. Eluned managed, barely, not to drop the teapot, and stared into the blackness of the grove, and at the shape barely visible in the soft gaslight, standing on the sill.

“Cat. Folie?”

“Must be,” Eluned said, staring at the small head, the slender legs. “That’s what chased off that thing on the wall?”

The folie clawed at the window again, and the whole casement shook, the glass in extreme danger of breaking. Tiny as it was, the folie was clearly capable of doing serious damage if they didn’t let it in.

Eluned opened the window next to it, to avoid knocking it from the sill, then stepped hastily back as the folie leapt onto the long countertop. It was less than half the size of a normal cat, the top of its head and back brown gradating through shades of orange to a white belly. Narrow black stripes were visible on its face and front legs. And there were tiny leaves and flowers growing out of its fur.

“Leaves lift up to hide it?” Eleri wondered.

“Maybe they retract? Unfurl?” Eluned could not work out how the scattering of leaves, mostly toward the lower back and tail, could possibly hide the whole cat. “What’s it doing?”

The folie had walked toward the window, and then back toward them, and back to the window again, where it looked impatiently over its shoulder.

“Follow it. Obvious.”

“To do what?” Eluned asked, then realised there was only one way to find that out. “Find the torch. I’ll write a note for Dama Seleny.”

As Eleri hunted quickly for the hand-wound torch, Eluned ran through all the thousands of things she should or shouldn’t say, and opted for the simple truth.

Following folie. Don’t wait up. E&E

“Need a better torch.”

“I don’t think it’s going to wait.”

In fact, Eluned had already lost sight of the folie, but it was a simple assumption to head directly for the gate, and rediscover a tiny, tail-switching nub of impatience. The leaves in its tail made a rattling noise as they moved.

“Hurlstone at night?” Eleri said, doubtfully, then added: “Automaton?”

“Maybe?” Eluned wasted no time as the folie, having apparently achieved its goal, leaped away, scaling the nearest tree in two effortless bounds. She reached for and grasped the key she had been granted, fit it into the gate, and turned.

Warm breeze swept through the grove, bringing heady floral scents, and a puff of wind-blown seeds. And one amasen.

“Lila?”

The pale horned snake slid around Eluned’s ankle, and then transferred to her arm when Eluned bent down to her. The violet tongue flickered. As much as a snake could look urgent and distressed, Lila managed it, but she was even less able to express herself than the folie.

“Check the automaton?” Eleri suggested, winding hard on the torch to build up a better glow.

Chasing that automaton—whether it was controlled by the ba of an Egyptian or something else—about in the dark did not strike Eluned as an easy proposition.

“Surely we can work out some way to communicate,” she muttered. “Nodding—if she understands us at all, we can manage that. Lila, can you bob your head once for yes and twice for no?”

The amasen’s gold-crowned head bobbed immediately.

“There. So is there something wrong with the automaton?”

One bob.

“Do you want us to go into Hurlstone to get it?”

Two bobs.

“Not in Hurlstone any more?” Eleri asked.

One bob.

“What? Did it go into the forest?”

Two bobs.

“Came through gate when vampire left?” Eleri guessed.

One bob, which sent them staring around the grove, until Lila’s increasing movement drew them back to questions.

“Is it still here, Lila?” Eluned asked.

Two bobs, and then the amasen partly uncoiled and stretched out her head, pointing back in through the gate into the Deep Forest.

“It’s not here, but you want us to go…do you want us to go through the Deep Forest?” Eluned asked slowly. “Like Dem Makepeace does?”

One bob.

“Stray gods,” Eleri commented.

“And at night.”

“Should look around here—can’t have gotten far.”

Lila’s repeated bobbing made it clear she thought this a bad idea. Eluned and Eleri glanced at each other. Eluned’s heart was racing at the very thought: Hurlstone itself was in theory a minor risk, but the Deep Forest was vast, and dangerous, and even escorted by one of the amasen, their safety could not possibly be guaranteed.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

“Bringing a proper light, then.”

Eleri sprinted back inside, returning with one of the few fulgite lamps they had. A recent purchase by Aunt Arianne, it was a tall, slender bronze of Sulis herself, holding a glass sun above her head. Powered by a piece of vampire.

“I’m not sure of the symbolism there,” Eluned said.

“What?”

“Never mind. You’ll point the direction we have to go, Lila?”

The amasen nodded, then stretched toward the lamp, and when Eleri held it closer to her, transferred to twine about the bronze figure. Then Eluned pulled the gates shut behind them.

The scent of flowers was even stronger, a heady pungency that suggested a night-blooming species. There were birds calling. At least, that’s what Eluned thought they were, because the sound seemed to come from above. They seemed very high, so she tried to ignore them, and concentrate on closer problems as Eleri upended the lamp so that the sun was pointing to the ground, and Lila’s head was silhouetted above it, pointing toward the small stream that cut through the ruined town.

“Stars are enormous.”

They did seem closer, but perhaps they dazzled so because everything except the area directly around them was utterly black, with not a single amasen statue relieving the dark.

“Let’s hurry,” Eluned said. “Look at Lila and the ground, and go.”

“Can’t see anything else anyway,” Eleri muttered, but did as suggested, walking quickly with all her attention on her feet, and the occasional changes of direction of the slender wedge-shaped head, with its two glinting horns.

Eluned had toured the boundaries of Hurlstone more than once, and she was sure the path they found beside the stream hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t particularly wide, an animal track, but did make progress a little quicker through the thick grass, though it was only marginally helpful when they left the open space of Hurlstone, and gnarled roots crossed and criss-crossed the way, more than ready to trip the unwary.

Almost as soon as they stepped under the trees, the scent of flowers dropped away, and a sharp smell of sap took its place. Insects chirred, lead singers in a forest chorus that fascinated and threatened at the same time. Owl, leaves, unidentifiable rustle, fox.

Lila’s head pointed confidently forward, and Eluned breathed loam and pine, and tried to guess at what swooped so loudly above, and then swallowed a gasp when the tree ahead to the left shuddered, as whatever it was landed, in a massive cracking of twigs and clash of leaves.

They stopped, Eluned holding on to Eleri’s shoulder, wary about continuing forward, uncertain what the dipping of Lila’s head was meant to convey. And then the whatever it was hopped from the first tree to the one immediately above them, a branch crashing to the ground in the process.

Eluned pulled Eleri down, and barely in time, as a head dipped through the canopy, and jaws snapped in a sharp clack.

“Leave the lamp,” Eluned whispered. “Crawl!”

They wasted no time, Lila sliding free to lead the way, racing on bruising knees along the path. Crawling was one of the things that a mechanical arm complicated for Eluned, because she could not feel what was below her on the right, or adjust for the uneven surface. She tucked the arm against her chest instead, unable to stop herself from falling behind Eleri, concentrating simply on going as fast and quietly as she could manage.

A second heavy flier landed in the tree above, and twigs and leaves rained down, and she sped frantically, ignoring rocks bruising her left palm, and something scratching her hip. She strained her eyes to keep sight of Eleri, and almost rammed her, sitting with her back to a heavy iron gate.

No room for hesitation. Eluned rose to her knees, calling the circular key and thrusting it into place. A turn and they were through, banging the gate shut behind them and then falling when it vanished altogether, leaving them in a windbreak of trees, staring across a paddock at the long, half-cylinder buildings of the airfield.