Palus Somni
TIMELINE: AUGUST 18, 2017. THREE DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.
The door to the decoy apartment which connects to the stairway down to the lab opens, and a man steps out. He's thin, almost skeletally so, and he adjusts his tie with one hand as he turns his face up toward the afternoon sun, tightening the knot. Something must have gone terribly wrong for it to have been loosened in the first place; everything about him is pressed and proper, suit crisply ironed, creases arrayed just so, like a model of a man. A single splattered drop of something mars the toe of one perfectly shining shoe. No Avery here to sell the shine from his shoes for safety, no, sir!
Luis, who has returned home from school to find the apartment empty and a note on the counter reminding him to walk the dog before he watches cartoons, suddenly decides he would rather spend some time doing his homework before he walks the dog, delaying TV time even further (for he would never think to go against his mother when the welfare of his best friend is concerned; in other ways, certainly, but not this one). He grips Bobby's leash tighter as the dog whines, and stumbles backward through the still-open door, into the safety of the apartment.
Bobby's whining doesn't stop until the door is closed between them and the man in the pressed suit. He plasters himself against Luis's legs then, shaking hard, but determined to keep his body between his boy and the door. Luis can feel the growl radiating through the big dog's ribs, deep and almost inaudible, but strong enough to shake his bones.
He crouches, wrapping his arms around Bobby, and in doing so, he saves his own life, because crouching means he isn't visible through the window when the man turns his face toward the apartment. Isabella's wards are holding. The man did notice the boy and the dog, for an instant, but they dropped out of his mind as soon as they went inside, and he doesn't remember them as he turns a slow circle, assessing his surroundings for threats.
The man finds none, and so he lowers his face, straightens his spine, and pulls a piece of forked wood out of his pocket. Like all good dowsing rods, it grew in this shape, was whittled down but not truly carved, only refined. Unlike its naturally occurring kin, it was cultivated, trained into this shape while still on the branch. It grew on an impossible hybrid of willow and peach, fruiting and shade trees combined in a botanical lab whose research didn't quite follow the laws of nature. It is, by any measure, perfect, the points tipped in hardened ash where they were burned, the base capped with silver that rests cool against his palm as he turns a slow and easy circle, holding the rod at roughly waist-level.
When he is facing west, the rod twitches, ever so slightly, a small rise followed by a sharp fall, and he frowns in thought before he begins to walk, letting it guide him away from the apartment, out of the courtyard, onto the street. A brief, self-satisfied smile creases his lips as he leaves the apartments behind him.
Tristan Rapp has never been a patient man. Oh, he's capable of waiting—all alchemists are, and they have to be in order to succeed at their profession. Impatience does not help a solvent mature or bring a project more quickly to fruition. But waiting and patience are not the same thing. When he waits, he does so on a set timeline, knowing that in the end, the results will fit a very narrow band of possibilities. Patience involves trusting the universe, which is not something he has ever been inclined to do.
This lack of tolerance for wasting and wasted time has made him an excellent weapon in the arsenal of the new Alchemical Congress. He served under the prior masters, of course, has served for many years with distinction and with excellent results, but the prior Congress was more conservative in many ways than these new, upstart children of the modern age. He takes orders from scholars eighty years his junior, and he smiles with all his teeth as he agrees to their inane demands, reminding himself in the silence that follows that he has seen better men than them hung by the chains of their own hubris.
He is an alchemist but not one of the serious researchers, the ones so invested in the Great Work of chasing and claiming the City that they lose track of life here in the world where all flesh begins and much of it will end. He makes his own philters and draughts, but he creates nothing new, pursues no innovations, crafts no cuckoos. There are those who think less of him for these choices, and others who think more, and he values both schools of thought precisely the same. None of them matter.
What he enjoys most is the sensation of a job properly and efficiently done, the sight of a body coming apart into its component elements, ready to be repurposed and put to better uses, the sound of an apprentice begging for the life they don't realize they've already lost. He knew Leigh Barrow, called her a colleague when others called her a monster, and respected her methods, even as he occasionally questioned the fervor with which she employed them. Barrow could never be truly great, for she allowed herself to be too easily distracted by vengeance and desire. He has no such issues.
Also unlike Barrow, he is a naturally occurring form of monster, born of flesh, and destined to die the same way if the City is not taken in his lifetime. He drinks his elixir of life, which tastes ever more of apples, and he endures, for his lifetime is a malleable thing, while the taking of the City is an inevitability.
The girl may have fled the lab while he was waiting for the filters to cleanse the alkahest from the air, but she didn't sanitize her quarters on her way out the door, and after the small matter of Margaret's assistant had been resolved—quite pleasantly so, at least for him—he had returned to the girl's room to locate her hairbrush, which had several strands tangled in the tines. One of them even still had the root ball attached.
Affixing them to the fork of his dowsing rod with a loop of ice-washed cobweb had been a matter of seconds, and now he will find her. Wherever she's hiding, unless it's behind protections she couldn't even imagine, he will find her.
The dowsing rod continues to twitch and tug as he makes his way along the sidewalk, ignoring the people who pass to either side. They are nothing more than mist and vapor to him, as inconsequential as a thought, and he pays them no mind. They go on their way, unaware of how lucky they are to be ignored, and he goes on his, passing storefronts and houses, attention reserved for the wooden rod in his hands.
Unlike Kelpie, he sees nothing of the newness or wonder of this world. Newness and wonder were worn away for him a long time ago, before this modern world was even born. All he sees now are disrepair and decay, all the places where this reality falls short of the shining perfection that waits within the City.
Tristan Rapp is many things. Man. Monster. Mutilator. Murderer. Destroyer of innocent lives and dreams.
But at the end, he is also a cautionary tale.
When he was a child in the faraway streets of London, his older sister, whom he loved beyond all reason, was called to the seasonal coronation. Summer sang in her soul, and over the course of her bid for the crown, he watched it blossom, until flowers sprouted where she stepped and fruit grew ripe and rounded at her touch, even when it had been rotted to the seed. He followed her through the trials and terrors of the coronation, until he had seen her walk into the maze that wavered on the edge between reality and unreality, fading into the pale liminal space reserved for creatures out of story.
All that, and she hadn't claimed the crown. She had come out broken and weeping, her hands cracked and black with frost, and she had died a week later in her own bed, wasting away to nothing in the absence of her season. But that hadn't been the worst of it.
Oh, no. For he had been a boy, young and quick and curious, in the way of young things everywhere, and when she had gone into the maze, he had followed. But for him, there was no clash of seasons, no Winter meeting Summer on equal ground and discussing the world that was yet to come, there were no tests or trials. There had been only blackness, the emptiness of the void outside all things, and then, in the dark, the endless rainbow flashing of instants passing to their deaths, of entropy made manifest. He had entered the everything, although he had no such name for it, and he had come to understand in an instant why so many human cultures saw the rainbow as a bridge between the heavens and the earth. The everything was no bridge, no Bifr?st to lead him to Asgard, and yet it was something so far outside his experience that his mind had rejected it, refusing to accept what was happening around him.
Young Tristan had screamed into the abyss, and run deeper, unwittingly moving away from the exit that would have seen him restored to the world of men before he could damage himself permanently. Instead, he had traveled unhindered through the everything, until he had come to a window hanging in the air, perfectly suspended on nothing at all, and yet something concrete and comprehensible, something for his wounded mind to seize upon.
The window had been closed when he reached it, and he lacked the strength to pry it open, so he had been unable to climb through in his quest for solid ground. Instead, he had pressed his face against the glass and looked out upon a great and glorious city such as he had never seen before in his life.
It was as if his familiar, well-loved London had been somehow purified and transformed into the very ideal of what a city could be. The streets gleamed iridescent, as if they had been cut from the delicate whorls of a snail's shell. The storefronts were a riot of colorful delights, the produce stands boasted treasures such as even his sister's strange and growing powers could not dare to dream, and the buildings were flawless. It was the Platonic ideal of a city, and it struck him both silent and sightless in a matter of seconds, unable to perceive anything save for his memory of that city.
How he escaped the everything was a mystery to him then and remains a mystery to him now. He stumbled out of the maze where the potential kings and queens of summer and winter battled for their place, tears streaming from his unseeing eyes and his own breath a keening wail in his ears.
As his sister dwindled, severed from the Summer, his sight had gradually returned, and his voice had come back with it. Still, he did not weep when they gave her to the ground, she who he had once loved best in all the world, for whom he had stepped outside the bounds of the reality man was meant to know and trod the Bifr?st as an unwanted intruder. He watched them pile earth atop her body, and could see no real change in her state, for everyone around him was decaying by the second, their bodies and bones slipping further and further from the ideals of that shining, impossible city he had seen.
Any alchemist or sorcerer could have warned his parents of what was going to happen next, but they were ordinary people who had intersected with the elemental world purely by chance, thanks to the nature of their much-mourned daughter. They had no one to warn them. No one to tell them why the City, so dazzling, so perfect, was forbidden to mortal eyes. Tristan started killing a month after his sister's burial.
He was clever and resourceful, even then, and carried out his first such acts with surprising skill, finding beauty in the arch of arteries and treasuring the last beating of each heart, the soft collapse of each lung. He sought the City in the broken bodies of those who moved too slowly to evade him, and he had nearly a year to hunt unhindered before he had come to the attention of the local alchemists. His latest victim had been a promising apprentice of theirs. With her death, he had passed from environmental hazard into figure of quiet interest, and shortly after that, he had been acquired.
Tristan's training with the British Alchemical Congress had taken several decades, as was the norm, but as his new masters had managed to capture a manifestation of Ieunn and keep her alive long enough to compel the planting of a healthy orchard, they had no need to focus on the purification of alkahest or the creation of a philosopher's stone. Their focus was, instead, on the search for a reliable passage into the City.
Then Baker's curious creation had begun gaining traction in the hearts and minds of children, causing them to map North America to her Up-and-Under, and when Baum had followed with his own imaginary world, reversing the elements, he left the concept of the City where she had placed it, right at the center of all things. It had become quickly apparent that if the City were to become manifest in this time, it would do so in North America. The alchemical heart of the world had been shifted by manipulation of children's dreams. Tristan hadn't even been able to resent that theft of power from the European Congresses. It had been done too elegantly, and too quickly to evade.
He had killed his masters on the same night the European Congress collectively admitted defeat, and he had left their bodies cooling in their own labs as he made for the shipyards and hence to the New World. With him he had carried his small store of personal possessions, the grimoires of the three men who had taken charge of the bulk of his education, and a small leather bag of apple seeds.
Ieunn herself had been long gone by then, and he might have been pleased to know that over a century later, a goddess of the moon would feel a pang of guilt over how long it had been since she'd last wondered after her peer in immortality.
It wasn't difficult for a man like him, even with such narrow and focused alchemical interests, to find the North American Congress. It had proven even less difficult for him to integrate himself within their ranks.
He had never joined Reed's wild attempt to harness aspects of the universe beyond those which incarnated naturally. Baker had been a genius, the sort that comes along once a generation at the absolute most, but that wasn't enough to have rendered her infallible. A candle is a controlled fire. Even a campfire can be used as a tool and a weapon, beneficial if somewhat riskier.
But forest fire is no one's tool. Perhaps it burns what you wanted to burn and perhaps not; the fire is burning either way. The fire doesn't care.
Tristan knows, perhaps better than most, that humanity owes everything they have today to the acquisition and "taming" of the flame, even though he also knows, deep in his soul, that no fire has ever been truly tamed. It is his unfashionable belief, which would limit his advancement through the Congressional ranks if he had any interest in advancing, that the manifestations of various universal constants are just another form of flame. Grasp a Winter or a Summer, you have a controlled fire. Net a minor god, a Lunar or a Harvest, and you have a tool or a weapon. Reach for something more than that…
Forest fire. The Doctrine of Ethos was always going to turn against the people who forced it into a single incarnation, because it blazes too big to be held. It doesn't warm. It devours. So when he heard of Reed's plans, inherited from Baker with her blood still wet on his hands, Tristan had turned away and busied himself serving other goals, other masters. He does that still.
He may be the oldest alchemist alive in North America, and he hasn't enjoyed a single full day of his existence since he saw the City. He subsists on the apples of Ieunn, which he has never shared—let the other alchemists think him more skilled than he actually is if they like, this strange, cadaverous man with his seemingly endless supply of the elixir of life. He lives on apples and the bitter, hateful knowledge that he may never see the City again. He will never walk those streets, he will never smell those flowers or taste those fruits.
He was not the one to propose the use of Lunars to gain access to the City, but he supports it. Slaughter them all. Not a one of them has earned what they have. Not a one of them deserves to cross that sky, to shine on those streets and spires, to have what he's denied. He'll see them all dead if given half the chance.
The dowsing rod in his hands shudders, guiding him onward. He'll have more than half a chance. He has the apples of immortality and all the time in the world to accomplish his goals.
Margaret had been clever enough, in her way. He's still not sure he supports the inclusion of women in the ranks of the Congress. There were always women who could serve as reasonably talented apprentices, who enjoyed the feeling of mercury running over their palms or viscera yielding before their blades, but they were the exception, not the rule. He's found women to be too sentimental in the main, too inclined to become attached to their subjects, to humanize what should never be humanized. To care.
Oh, men care also, but the men drawn to alchemy are usually the sort he's known all his life, the ones who can control themselves and retain their focus even in the face of temptation. Margaret's assistant had been very forthcoming once she realized she was never going to walk away from the lab. She told him everything about their concealed successes, about the conspiracy to hide cuckoos and resources from the eyes of the Congress.
None of those successes matter now, of course. The project has been canceled. Like all canceled projects, it will be stripped for parts, the pieces that work distributed among all the other, more deserving projects, while the pieces that don't will be recycled into anything that can still be of use. The "Rabbit" she and her team managed to incarnate had been in the botanical section when Tristan made his appearance, the creature wearing lab coat and goggles and behaving for all the world as if he had a right to be there. As if he were human.
Human or not, he'd died as easily as the rest of them. One more unnecessary incarnate, no longer walking around to complicate the alchemical transformation of the natural world. If only Tristan had been a little less willing to believe that Margaret was too smart to lie to him, if only he hadn't chalked her anxiousness up to a desperate need to save her own skin, this could all be over already. He could have killed her little runaway Hind and be on his way back to Maine to check in with his handlers.
Ah, well. It's too late now, and some things can't be helped. The dowsing rod is good; it will see him to his target, and he'll finish the matter tonight, wherever it is the girl has gone to ground.
The neighborhood has been changing around him as he walks, apartments giving way to larger single-family homes. He moves now in an atmosphere of wealth and plenty, the territory of the sort of people who never want for anything for more than a moment. The territory of alchemists.
There are methods of becoming rich that don't involve breaking the laws of nature, but those methods are far less fun than the methods practiced by the alchemically inclined. He continues to let the dowsing rod guide him, interpreting each twitch and tremor with the skill of someone who's been doing this for decades, and stays on its path even as he begins to detect traces of chaotic, semi-controlled working from one of the houses up ahead. Pure elementalism, performed with the enthusiasm of the amateur and the power of the professional.
The two make for uneasy bedfellows. He can feel the contradictions in the power as he draws closer. The professional has been fighting to control the enthusiasm, but not as hard as he might have expected. Efforts have been made to disperse the energy afterward, but they've only been partially successful—pools of elemental power are gathered on the ground and in the branches of the nearby trees, making him wonder whether there are any self-respecting alchemists left in this benighted city.
Margaret may have been a liar and a thief, but he'd always thought better of her work than this implies. She should have been aware someone was making such a mess in her territory. She should have stepped in. That she didn't speaks poorly to her training… or excellently to the shielding abilities of whoever made this mess. If someone has been actively hiding their activities, it's possible that Margaret wasn't entirely incompetent.
The dowsing rod leads him to the steps of a large house, and up them to the front door, where he rings the bell, listening to it echo. As the sound is fading, the padding of bare feet replaces it, and a blurry face swims into view on the other side of the leaded glass.
It's a woman. She peers through the glass for a moment before incorrectly assessing him as harmless and unlocking the door, one hand resting on the doorframe and the other on the door itself, blocking him from seeing too far inside while also telegraphing, none too subtly, that she can slam the door in an instant.
If she does, he'll come back later tonight with a Hand of Glory to guarantee no one responds too quickly to her screaming. She's not a target—yet—but he doesn't like to be denied.
She's tall, pale in the way of someone who never goes outside without cause, thin in the way of someone who can afford the high price of thinness, the delicate, delicious, calorie-light foods and the personal chef to prepare them nightly, the trainers and the surgeries and the endless pursuit of an impossible illusion of "perfection." As if "perfect" hasn't been as mutable as any other human ideal across the centuries. As if people didn't once pursue plumpness with all the vigor they now direct toward the opposite extreme.
Only three things in the universe are perfect: gold, alkahest, and the Impossible City. Everything else is flawed, and wasting time pretending otherwise has never served anyone well.
Her eyes flick to the rod in his hand, then back up to his face. A small crease forms between her eyebrows.
"Can I help you?" she asks. Her voice is pitched too high, a trained affectation intended to make her sound like something to be protected and cared for rather than pushed against. He pauses, giving her another look. Everything about her is designed to give that impression, to encourage underestimation, to nudge people toward the conclusion that she poses no threat, offers no obstacle to their own progress.
It's a fascinatingly constructed fa?ade. She has no power. He can tell that as well, from the pools of elemental energy dotted around the property, some of which have started to curdle and turn septic. That will be a problem eventually, but the future is a room there's no guarantee either one of them will enter. Her, especially, with her measuring look and her hand on the door and her careful air of fragility.
Perhaps he can use that. He lowers the dowsing rod, taking in the perfect house, the elemental pools, the feigned fragility, and comes to a conclusion he hopes will be correct. It's not that he doesn't want to kill her—that would place too much importance on her one way or the other—it's that he wants this to be simple. And if he's correct, it still might be.
"No, but perhaps I can help you," he says, and smiles a skeleton smile as he tucks the dowsing rod into his jacket. "I can tell that you're a person of great power and connection within the local magical community." The word "magical" is sour on his lips. "Alchemical" is the correct term, the scientific term that treats the taming of a natural force as the art it is rather than some trick out of children's folklore. "Magical" is a word for people without training or safety rails, who believe the universe has no obligation to bow to humanity. It's a word for amateurs, and he hates it.
But from the way she lights up, he's alone in this. The line between her eyebrows disappears, replaced by a slight, smug tightening of the skin around her eyes, her puzzled look becoming a smile. "We took the flyers down months ago," she says, and the way she pronounces the word "we" tells him she had nothing to do with the manual labor of taking down flyers: that was all handled by hands that weren't as soft as hers, that were more accustomed to working. "How did you find me?"
"The sheer energy radiating from this location led me," he says, and while he's lying, he's also not. The dowsing rod picked up on something. The girl has been here.
"I'm sorry, but you've missed this week's meeting, and… forgive me for presuming, but we're an all-female coven. It keeps the energies cleaner when we're not pulling between the divine feminine and the divine masculine. I'm sure someone as learned as you clearly are will understand."
"Oh, I do, I do, but I'm not looking for your coven."
"No?" There's a glossiness in her eyes, a slightly husky catch in her voice, and he knows what she's hoping he'll say next.
Reed should never have tried to make his cuckoos mind readers. All he'd really needed to do was teach them to watch people, and the world would have been in the palm of their hands whether or not they became manifest.
"No," he echoes. "I'm looking for you. A coven has no power without its members, and even then, it accomplishes nothing without a strong hand at the wheel. A woman of your obvious position and potential… you must be that strong hand. I'm here because I need to speak to you."
She looks at him assessingly, showing her first flicker of true brilliance since she opened the door. All her masks and affectations may be enough to protect her from predators when she goes out into the world, but nothing will protect her if she asks the predators into her home. Tristan stands perfectly still, doing his best to look nonthreatening, and much as he wants to press the issue, he doesn't say a word, only waits. This is what she sees:
A man of average height who nevertheless holds himself like a tall man, like he expects to tower over the people around him and is perpetually surprised when it doesn't happen. His hair is a sandy shade of brown, cut short and slightly feathered at the top, clearly styled by someone who was paid well for their time; his suit is impeccably cut and pressed, and tailored to fit the skeletal angles of his form, not allowed to wrinkle or drape inappropriately. If not for the spot on one shoe, he would be perfectly groomed. His thinness is off-putting for some, but this woman has been trained not to criticize what cannot be changed in a minute's time, taught politeness like a weapon, and so she shunts that thought to the side as she continues her assessment.
He looks like the sort of man who moves in her social circles. He looks like money. Strangeness of the dowsing rod aside, he stands in her neighborhood like he belongs here, and she is thus inclined to trust him, to believe him when he speaks words of sweet flattery, to see him as one of her "own kind," whatever that means. Finally, she nods and steps to the side, the door opening as she does.
"I'd love to talk more about this," she says. "There's coffee in the kitchen, if you'd care to join me."
An alchemist is not a vampire: they don't need to be invited inside. A gentleman, on the other hand, is a sort of vampire, in that they do generally need the invitation. Tristan, who has considered himself a gentleman for quite some time, smiles his thanks as he steps past her into the conditioned air of the hall.
"Yes," he says. "I think we have a great deal to discuss."