The Poison Master Page 19

  She had to find Iraguila Ust, or seek out Ghairen's antidotes for herself. The latter option was more appealing. She did not trust the murmuring governess, sensing plots within plots.

  As she was about to try the elevator, she heard footsteps— measured, but muffled—inside one of the inner rooms. Alivet stepped quickly back into the shadows and crouched down behind the high wings of the armchair. A door opened—third on the left, Alivet noted—and Iraguila slipped through it, wearing a silk nightgown. Her feet were bare. Before Alivet could call to her she ran swiftly and silently through the hall and disappeared. Alivet rose quickly to her feet. At the end of the long hallway, far beyond the lamplight, she saw a small door. It was ajar. Brimming with curiosity, Alivet ducked through the door and found herself on a spiral iron staircase, leading up past paneled walls. Footsteps echoed distantly down the stairwell: Celana had gone up, toward the alchematorium and the poison garden. As quietly as she could, Alivet followed.

  Soon, she reached the landing. Ahead, lay two more doors. One, possibly leading to a further staircase, was barred, but the other stood open. A wan, frosty light streamed through into the stairwell and Alivet realized that she had reached the garden. She stepped through the door, keeping close to the shadows by the wall.

  Above, through the glass ceiling, she could see only darkness. But light was coming from somewhere: a dim, intermittent glow. It took Alivet a moment to realize that the illumination was coming from the rocks themselves. In daylight, they had been obsidian black, but now they gleamed silver, casting wavering shadows across the garden floor. The ferns fronded outward, as if courting darkness. Celana stood by the window, hands pressed against the glass. Her shoulders were shaking. Suddenly, Alivet felt very sorry for her—how must it be, to live in this stifling place and have Ghairen as a father? To put up with the sinister kindness, the threats veiled by oppressive concern?

  It wasn't only Inki who needed rescuing, Alivet thought. She might not be able to help everyone—perhaps she would not even be able to save herself—but Alivet decided then and there that Celana was another one whose name was now on the list. Celana's hands were banging soundlessly against the glass and for a terrible moment Alivet feared that she might be trying to break through and fall down the side of the great black tower, tiny as the ghost of a leaf. She was about to step forward, but Celana turned abruptly and stood quivering, with her back to the window.

  “You!” she cried. “Why have you followed me up here? Why are you always following me? Why can't you just leave me alone?”

  Alivet was about to step forth and say that Celana had been the one to seek her out, but realized just in time that the girl had been speaking to someone else.

  “Now, Celana,” Ghairen said, gliding out of the shadows. He wore his usual robes. Alivet thought immediately of the door of her bedroom, still ajar. And where had Iraguila Ust vanished to? “There's no need to be upset. We're simply worried about you, that's all. Now be a good girl and come back to bed.” Something in his tone suggested unspeakable possibilities to Alivet. Could Ghairen be sleeping with his daughter? It would explain Celana's erratic behavior.

  “Go away!” Celana cried. She spun back to the window. Ghairen strode swiftly across the garden and tapped her on the shoulder. Celana grew rigid. Then she crumpled into her father's arms. Ghairen picked her up as though she were weightless and with her head dangling bonelessly over the crook of his elbow, carried her back through the poisonous, dreaming ferns and into the elevator. The doors hummed shut and Ghairen and his daughter were gone. Alivet stepped out into the garden and a hand gripped her arm. She leaped, turning her ankle on the moss, and lashed out. Iraguila Ust hovered at her shoulder like a large dragonfly. The lenses that had concealed her eyes had been removed. Her eyes glowed in the pale light like moons.

  “What are you doing up here?” the governess whispered.

  “Celana opened the door of my room. What about you?”

  “I sleep next door to Celana; I heard her leave her bed. She's done it before. She walks in her sleep.”

  Alivet did not believe this. Celana's movements had seemed all too purposeful. “How did Ghairen know she was wandering about?”

  “I don't know,” Iraguila said. “He seems to know things…”

  “Then it's not such a wonderful idea for us to be standing up here, is it? I left my bedroom door open.”

  “It's too late now,” Iraguila said, nervously. “And at least it's private up here. Alivet, we have to take you to an alchemist—to someone who can give you an antidote. I know of someone who may help. Can you meet me here tomorrow, around this time?”

  “I'll try,” Alivet said. “How am I going to open my door?”

  “The lock is genetically keyed. Do you know what that means?”

  Alivet shook her head.

  “You need some of Ghairen's blood, or saliva, to open the door.”

  “How in the world am I going to get that?”

  “I don't know. You won't need much—just a smear will do. You'll have to insert it into the lock; it will read the blood. I'll do my best to help you, but you'll have to try, too.”

  “I'll see what I can do,” Alivet promised, dubiously.

  Iraguila seemed to feel that this was enough. She bobbed her head and, with a quick lizardlike glance through the door, left the garden. Alivet waited for a moment as Iraguila vanished into the depths of the stairwell, then she headed into the glowing garden.

  The first place she tried was the antidote case. To her dismay, though not to her surprise, it was securely sealed. It did not even seem to possess a lock, but appeared to be nothing more than an ornamented box. At last Alivet gave up and turned back to the garden itself.

  There were some plants here that she recognized, plants that could prove useful. Taking care not to touch anything with her bare hands, she gathered a selection of leaves and berries into a fold of her dress. Her heart was pounding, as though at any moment Ari Ghairen might glide out of the shadows and place a toxic hand upon her shoulder. But the garden remained still and silent.

  Clasping her precious cargo of poisons, Alivet made her way back down the stairs. When she reached the landing level with the hallway, she could hardly bring herself to step through. She did not want to look up and see her bedroom door closed against her, Ghairen standing accusingly in the hall… But the hallway was empty. The single lamp glowed, her bedroom door was ajar, just as she had left it twenty minutes before.

  Alivet listened. She could hear voices in one of the adjoining rooms: someone—Celana?—cried out, but the sound was abruptly stifled. Then came a lower, male voice, speaking in a cold, measured way that nevertheless caused a chill to run down Alivet's spine. The voice clearly belonged to Ghairen and Alivet thought with a pang of Celana, facing her father's wrath. She saw herself rushing to the door, hammering upon it, forcing Ghairen to leave his daughter alone.

  But such thoughts were nothing more than fantasies. Celana was not Alivet's responsibility. And yet Alivet could not help but feel that she must do something to help the girl. Battling frustration and anger, she crept across the hallway to her bedroom, Ghairen's icy voice still echoing through the shadows.

  Once inside the illusory sanctuary of her own room, Alivet leaned against the door and closed her eyes for a moment in sheer relief. Then she spread her hoard of stolen poisons across the bed and made a quick inventory. Paralysis; blindness; flowers to freeze the voice and cause the breath to stop in the throat. She had an array of latent weapons at her disposal, and an alchematorium in which to distill them. She still had no antidote, but for the first time since her fatal meeting with Ghairen, Alivet felt that she finally possessed a means of defense.

  What now remained was a decision about how, and when, to deploy that means. If she simply killed Ghairen, she would be disposing of the Night Lords' enemy—assuming that Ghairen had been telling her the truth. And she still had no way of ascertaining whether Iraguila, too, had been lying. But then she t
hought: There might be a way. The Search had taught her to travel within, using a drug as her guide. Though she had no drug to hand, perhaps she could still travel inside her own mind, see if she could get a hint of the true state of her health.

  Alivet lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.

  She pretended to herself that she had indeed ingested some substance: menifew, perhaps, a friendly ally. She focused on the symptoms generated by menifew, imagining herself in the grip of the drug, and very slowly the pathways of her mind began to open up before her. She traveled along them, picturing herself walking a road and noting what she saw upon it. There was a darkness upon the horizon: clouds of fear, storms of anxiety. The imagery was simple, but effective. If she looked up, she could see the neurons of her brain arching over the road like the branches of trees, pulsing with lights. She passed a figure with its back turned to her: from the black robe and the silky hair, she recognized Ari Ghairen. A mixture of emotions swarmed around him: fear, anger, resentment, hope—and something complicated and arousing, from which Alivet shied away.

  Take me to that part of my mind that tells me about my own body, she instructed herself. Let me see if I am well. And gradually, slowly, the scene changed. She was in a room, surrounded by plants. Some were green and thriving, but many of them were already brittle and dry. In the corner, a small fern trailed dead from its pot. Alivet's hand crept to her throat. The room was icy cold, then burning with heat. If this was her health, then something was clearly wrong. Her eyes snapped open, bringing her out of her head. She lay consumed with worry.

  Even if Iraguila's contact could cure her, if Ghairen were gone, her chances of getting home and rescuing Inki were slim. She closed her eyes once more, wrestling with possibilities. Am I dying? Or is this just a fancy, brought about by fright and stress? Let's see what Iraguila can do for me. And then, If and when I'm cured, I'll find a way to deal with the Poison Master.

  CORRUPTION

  Elizabeth gave Dee warrant… “to do what I would in philosophy and alchemy, and none should check, control or molest me…”

  DR. JOHN DEE, diary

  Chapter I

  MORTLAKE 1564

  Summer was drawing to a close now, and the September sunlight lay low over rosemary and henbane, parsley and hellebore and rue. Dee regarded the garden with satisfaction: it had taken most of the spring to set in order, patiently following moon to moon to ensure that the most auspicious planting times were achieved. The parsley seeds that he had put in on the eve of Good Friday had produced a particularly fine crop.

  As it is with my garden, Dee thought, so it is with my life. The last few years had been turbulant ones, akin to sailing a small ship upon uncharted seas, with many changes in season and climate. Dee had been lucky to navigate through such inclement political weather. It still seemed miraculous that he was standing here in this silent summer garden, listening to the humming of the bees and the lapping of the Thames against the water- stairs, rather than reduced to a pile of ash and bones in the flames of Smithfield.

  But Dee's compromises had left a stain, nonetheless. Dee might be the Royal Astrologer, called upon to advise on such matters as the wax effigy of the Queen, bristling with hog hairs and found in Lincoln's Inn Fields, or the blazing star that had recently appeared in the heavens, but there had been no ensuing promotion as Court Philosopher. In a way, this was no bad thing. It left Dee a poorer man, but with more time to study those most burning questions: the issue of the colony, of taking Niclaes and his Family of Love to the new world of Meta Incognita.

  “John!” He could hear Katherine crying out from the kitchen, and turned. His wife came flying up the path, her skirts flapping around her like wings. Immediately, Dee feared the worst.

  “Is it my mother?” The old lady had already fallen once, tumbling down the long staircase. Fortunately, she had broken no more than her wrist, but it was an ill precedent.

  “No. It's the Queen.”

  “She's dead?” The garden spun around him, the sound of the bees a roaring in his head.

  “No, John,” Katherine said, losing patience. “Really, you are the most morbid man—the Queen is here. She's come to see you.”

  After a gaping moment, Dee followed his wife down the path to the house with all speed. As he pushed open the twisted oak slab of the front door, the sun slid behind a cloud. Yet Elizabeth, standing among the lavender bushes in Dee's garden, seemed to shine with a light of her own. No doubt this was a function of the pearl- stitched cloth-of-gold of her gown, but the effect was dazzling. Dee bowed.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, “is indeed the sun around which all else turns.” Flattery never went amiss, but the strange thing was that he could not help but mean it; the Queen had that effect on people. Elizabeth's Spanish dwarf, Thomasina, hovered at her side like a stray moon.

  “Indeed,” the Queen replied and Dee could hear the chilly amusement in her voice, “but do I not represent the Earth the universal center of which your Copernicus would deprive me?”

  When discoursing with queens, Dee had discovered, the ground could very often open up and swallow you whole, like Jonah's whale. Elizabeth could be a stimulating woman and Dee would have enjoyed the verbal fencing if only she had not been the Queen, and had held so much power in those small gloved hands.

  “The sun is the greater body, and thus more fitting,” he ventured. He saw the dwarf Thomasina hide a smile; her intelligent dark eyes rested on Dee for a moment. As Elizabeth's toy, she no doubt had an understanding of her mistress' whims.

  “Well, and that is kind, but I am here not to talk of suns, but of moons and their reflected light,” the Queen remarked.

  What was she talking about? Dee wondered, panicking. The trouble with Elizabeth, as opposed to duller monarchs, was that she frequently honed the sharpness of her wit upon her subjects and left them bleeding. He ransacked his thoughts for an answer and found it.

  “Your Majesty wishes to inspect the mirror?” If he had half the powers of prediction that his neighbors attributed to him, he should have foreseen this. He glimpsed Katherine's face as she hovered in the hallway and her face became momentarily blank with shock. He knew what she was thinking as clearly as if she had spoken aloud: Will she be coming in? And the house in such a state… But the Queen must have been used to such reactions. He saw the faintest trace of a smile across her mouth as she said, “We will not trouble you to entertain us, Dr. Dee. We shall inspect the mirror here, among the loveliness of your garden.”

  Relieved, Dee said, “I shall be happy to bring it to you.”

  The Queen nodded in brief dismissal. Dee hurried up the stairs, past the gaping servants, and into the study where he kept the most precious of his books and artifacts. He had hidden the mirror, wrapped in a soft cloth and a leather case, beneath the floorboards. Perhaps he had been unwise to tell others about the device, but there was little he could do about that now. He pushed the board aside and retrieved the case containing the mirror, then carried it carefully downstairs.

  He half feared that the Queen's visit might yet prove to be nothing more than some waking phantasm, that would splinter and fracture in the noonday sun, but he told himself to stop being a fool. It was not such an extraordinary thing that the Queen should ride out this way. Walsingham lived only a short distance from Dee's own house. Besides, did she not value Dee's own counsel and his astrological expertise? Yet Dee was always conscious of not being quite within the Royal inner sanctum, and that meant that he was not entirely trusted.

  Elizabeth stood where he had left her in the golden September sunlight. “Will it work upon so bright a day?” she asked as Dee panted up the path.

  “Noon or midnight should make no difference,” Dee told her.

  He unwrapped the mirror and held it out to her. The mirror filled his hands like a pool of darkness. It was made of some black polished substance, perhaps glass or obsidian, which seemed to swallow the light.

  “Sir William Pickering gave you this, I
believe, during your sojourn in the Low Countries?”

  “That is so. A most valuable gift, for which I am permanently indebted.” That was true enough. Pickering had picked up the thing as a curiosity, having no idea of its value.

  “Explain to me what it does, and how it functions,” the Queen instructed.

  “It is my own belief that every object emits a kind of light, that delineates its shape and form. We cannot see such a light with our eyes, but certain substances attract it, as a lodestone draws iron to its very self. And once the light has been attracted, the mirror retains it, thus allowing us to witness objects from afar.”

  “And how,” Elizabeth said, frowning, “does the mirror choose its subjects?”

  “The mirror does not choose. Rather, the one who looks into the mirror must apply their mind to the purpose and settle upon one or another place or object. This attention helps the mirror to focus, the light being filtered through the concentration of the mind as if through a colored glass.”

  “So if I should wish to see a thing, I need only think upon it?”

  “That is so.” Dee added, quickly, “It is usual to enlist a trained scryer for the task, such a one whose mind is used to this process of ‘tuning.’ ” He would, he thought, spare the Queen an account of how troublesome it had been to find a scryer who was neither a rogue nor mad and how he was at present without a man who could provide such a service. If he embarked upon such a recitation, they would be there until sunset.

  He felt, rather than saw, the Queen's basilisk gaze. Beside her, Thomasina shifted restlessly.

  “We do not,” the Queen said, “require the services of such. We will do it ourselves.” Noting the shift into the Royal plural, Dee was swift to concur. The Queen frowned down into the mirror. The sunlight around her seemed to glow more brightly, as if she willed it into her own essence. Dee held his breath. It would not work; he would be cast from her orbit into the outer dark and never see the rarefied light of the court again… And then Elizabeth's cold eyes opened in wonder. She said, “I can see it!”