Midnight Never Come

  Be it angels or devils he summoned inside, it was not a place a faerie should go.

  Lune put her shoulders back and approached the door with a stride more resolute than she felt.

  She was a woman on her own, with no letter of introduction to smooth her way. But the maidservant was easy enough to charm, and Dee’s wife proved sympathetic. “He’s at his studies,” the woman said, shifting the infant she held onto her other hip. The small creature stared frankly at Lune, as if it could see through the glamour. “But if ’tis urgent . . .”

  “I would be most grateful,” Lune said.

  Her reception was warmer than expected. “You will forgive my frankness in asking,” Dee said, once the formalities were dispensed with, “but has this anything to do with Michael Deven?”

  This was not in the mental script Lune had prepared on her journey to Mortlake. “I beg your pardon?”

  A surprising twinkle lightened the astrologer’s tired eyes. “I am not unaware of you, Mistress Montrose. Your lady the Countess of Warwick has been kind to me since my return, and I had the honor of friendship with Sir Francis Walsingham. When Master Deven came to my door, asking for aid in the matter of a young gentlewoman, ’twas not difficult to surmise whom he meant.”

  No magic, just an observant mind. Lune began to breathe again. “Indeed, Doctor Dee — it has everything to do with him. Will you aid me?”

  “If I can,” Dee said. “But some things are beyond my influence. If he is in some political difficulty —”

  Not of the sort he thought. Lune clasped her hands in her lap and met the old man’s gaze, putting all the sincerity she could muster into it. “He is in great peril, and for reasons I fear must be laid at my feet. And it may be, Doctor Dee, that you are the only man in England who could help us.”

  His face stilled behind its snowy beard. “And why would that be?”

  “They say you speak with angels.”

  All pleasantness fell away, but his eyes were as bright and unblinking as a hawk’s. “I fear, Mistress Montrose, that you may have an overly dramatic sense of his danger, my abilities, or both. Angels —”

  “I am not overly dramatic,” she snapped, forgetting in her distress to be polite. “I assure you. The tale is a complex one, Doctor Dee, and I have not the time to waste on it if at the end you will tell me you can be of no aid. Do you hold conference with angels, or not?”

  Dee rose from his seat, ink-stained fingers twitching his long robe straight. Turning away to pace across the room, he spoke very deliberately. “I see that you are distraught, Mistress Montrose, and so I will lay two things before you. The first is that angelic actions are no trivial matter, no miracle that can be summoned at a whim to solve worldly ills.

  “The second . . .” He paused for a long time, and his hands, clasped behind his back, tightened. Something hardened his voice, lending it an edge. “The second is that such efforts require assistance — namely, the services of a scryer, one who can see the presences when they come. My former companion and I have parted ways, and I have found no suitable replacement for him.”

  The first point did not worry her; the second did. “Can you not work without such assistance?”

  “No.” Dee turned back to face her. His jaw was set, as if against some unhappy truth. “And I will be honest with you, Mistress Montrose. At times I doubt whether I have ever spoken with an angel, or whether, as they accuse me, I have done naught but summon devils, who play with me for their own amusement.”

  Her mouth was dry. All her hope crumbled. If not Dee, then who? A priest? Invidiana had destroyed priests before. And Lune did not think a saint would answer the call of a faerie.

  “Mistress Montrose,” Dee said softly. Despite the lines that had sobered his face, his manner was compassionate. “Will you not tell me what has happened?”

  A simple question, with a dangerous answer. Yet some corner of Lune’s mind was already calculating. If he were not the sorcerer she had expected, then a charm might bedazzle him long enough for her to escape, should all go poorly. She would be destroying Anne Montrose, but no life remained for that woman regardless. . . .

  She truly was thinking of doing it.

  “Can I trust you?” Lune whispered.

  He crouched in front of her, keeping space between them, so as not to crowd her. “If it means no harm to England or the Queen,” Dee said, “then I will do my best to aid you in good faith.”

  The door was closed. They were private.

  Lune said, “I am not as I seem to be.” And, rising to her feet, she cast aside her glamour.

  Dee rose an instant later, staring.

  “The Queen of faerie England,” she said, every muscle tensed to flee, “has formed a pact with Hell. I need the aid of Heaven to break it. On this matter rests not only the safety of Michael Deven, but the well-being of your own kingdom and Queen.”

  He did not shout. He did not fling the name of God up as defense. He did nothing but stare, his eyes opaque, as if overtaken by his thoughts.

  “So if you cannot summon angels,” Lune said, “then tell me, Doctor Dee, what I should do. For I do not know.”

  Within the mask of his beard, his mouth was twitching; now she read it as a kind of bitterness, surprising to her. “Did you send him?” he asked abruptly.

  “Michael Deven?”

  “Edward Kelley.”

  The name ground out like a curse. Where did she know it from? She had heard it somewhere. . . .

  “When he came to me,” Dee said coldly, “he offered to further my knowledge in magic with faeries.”

  Memory came. A human man with mangled ears; she had seen him once or twice at court — her own court — and heard his name. She had never known more. “I did not send him,” Lune said. “But someone may have. Who was he?”

  “My scryer,” Dee replied. “Whom I have long suspected of deception. He came to me so suddenly, and seemed to have great skill, but we so often fought. . . .” Now she recognized the note in his voice; it was the sound of affection betrayed. This Kelley had been dear to him once.

  “He is gone now?” Lune asked.

  Dee made a cut-off gesture with one hand. “We parted ways in Trebon. He is now court alchemist to the Holy Roman Emperor.”

  Then he truly was out of reach. Lune said, “Please, Doctor Dee. I beg you.” Never in all the ages she could remember had she knelt, as a fae, to a mortal, but she did it now. “I know I am no Christian soul, but Michael Deven is, and he will die if I cannot stop this. And does not your God oppose the devil, wherever he may work? Help me, I beg. I do not know who else to ask.”

  Dee gazed blindly down at her, distracted once more. “I have no scryer. Even Kelley may have given me nothing but falsehoods, and I myself have no gift for seeing. It may be that I have no more power to summon angels than any other man.”

  “Will you not try?” Lune whispered.

  With her eyes fixed on him, she saw the change. Some thought came to him, awakening all the curiosity of his formidable mind. The expression that flickered at the edge of his mouth was not quite a smile, but it held some hope in it. “Yes,” Dee said. “We will try.”

  THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: May 8, 1590

  Thirst was the greatest threat.

  Deven tried to distract himself. The room, he came to realize, was Invidiana’s presence chamber. Larger by far than Elizabeth’s, it had an alien grandeur a mortal queen could only dream of, for in this place, fancies of architecture could truly take flight. The pillars and ribs that supported the arching ceiling were no more than a decoration born from some medieval fever dream; they were not needed for strength. The spaces between them were filled with filigree and panes of crystal, suspended like so many fragile swords of Damocles.

  Beneath and among these structures wandered fae whom he presumed to be the favored courtiers of this Queen. They were a dizzying lot: some human-looking, others supernaturally fair, others bestial, and clad in finery that was to mortal courtiers’ gar
b as the chamber was to mortal space. They all watched him, but none came near him; clearly word had gone around that he was not to be touched. How much did they know of who he was, and why he was there?

  Lacking an answer to that question, Deven decided to test his boundaries. He tried to speak to others; they shied away. He followed them around, eavesdropping on their conversations; they fell silent when he drew near, or forwent the benefit of being so near the Queen and left the chamber entirely. The fragments he overheard were meaningless to him anyway.

  He spoke of God to them, and they flinched, while Invidiana looked on in malicious amusement.

  She was less amused when he decided to push harder.

  Deven took up a position in the center of the chamber, facing the throne, and crossed himself. Swallowing against the dryness of his mouth, he began to recite.

  “Our father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.”

  The chamber was half-empty before he finished; most of those who remained were bent over or sagged against the walls, looking sick. Only a few remained untouched; those, he surmised, had eaten of mortal food recently. But even they did not look happy.

  Nor did Invidiana. She, for the first time, was angry.

  He tried again, this time in a different vein, dredging up faded memories of prayers heard from prisoners and recusants. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis: sanctificetur Nomen Tuum . . .”

  This time even he felt its force. The hall trembled around him; its splendor dimmed, as if he could see through the marble and onyx and crystal to plain rock and wood and dirt, and all the fae stood clad in rags.

  Then something slammed into him from behind, knocking him to the floor and driving all breath from him. His Catholic prayer ended in a grunt. A voice spoke above him, one he knew too well, even though he had heard scarcely a dozen words from it. “Should I cut out his tongue?” Achilles asked.

  “No.” If the Latin form had shaken Invidiana, she gave no sign. “We may yet need him to speak. But stop his mouth, so he may utter no more blasphemies.”

  A wad of fabric was shoved into Deven’s mouth and bound into place. His thirst increased instantly as every remaining bit of moisture went into the cloth.

  But his mind was hardly on that. Instead he was thinking of what he had seen, in that instant before Achilles took him down.

  Invidiana’s throne sat beneath a canopy of estate, against the far wall. Under the force of his prayer, it seemed for a moment that it masked an opening, and that something lay in the recess behind it.

  What use he could make of that knowledge, he did not know. But with his voice taken away, knowledge was his only remaining weapon.

  MORTLAKE, SURREY: May 8, 1590

  “You are mad,” Lune said.

  “Perhaps.” Dee seemed undisturbed by the possibility; no doubt he had been accused of it often enough. “But children are ideal for scrying; children, and those who suffer some affliction of the mind. Kelley was an unstable man — well, perhaps that is no recommendation, if in truth he did naught but deceive me. Nonetheless. The best scryers are those whose minds are not too shackled by notions of possibility and impossibility.”

  “You yourself, then.”

  He shook his head. “I am too old, too settled in my ways. My son has shown no aptitude for it, and we have no time to find another.”

  Lune took a slow breath, as if it would banish her feeling that all this had taken a wrong turn somewhere. “But if you question whether you have ever spoken with an angel before, what under the sun and moon makes you believe one will answer to a faerie?”

  They were in his most private workroom, with strict orders to his surprisingly large family that under no circumstances were they to be disturbed. Lune hoped it would be so; at Dee’s command, she had eaten no food of any kind since the previous day — which meant no mortal bread.

  He knew quite well what that meant, for she had told him. At great length, when she began to understand what he had in mind. And that was before he voiced his decision to use her as his scryer.

  The philosopher shook his head again. “You misunderstand the operation of this work. Though you will be a part of it, certainly, your role will be to perceive, and to tell me what you see and hear. The calling is mine to perform. I have been in fasting and prayer these three days, for I intended to try again with my son; I have purified myself, so that I might be fit for such action. The angel — if indeed one comes — will come at my call.”

  Now she understood the fasting. But prayer? “I have not made such thorough preparations.”

  The reminder dimmed his enthusiasm. “Indeed. And if this fails, then we will try again, three days from now. But you believe time to be of the essence.”

  Invidiana had the patience of a spider; she would wait three years if it served her purpose. But the longer Deven remained in the Onyx Hall, the greater the likelihood that the Queen would kill him — or worse.

  Worse could take many forms. Some of them were the mirror image of what Lune risked now. Baptism destroyed a fae spirit, rendering it no more than mortal henceforth. Dee had not suggested that rite, but who knew what effect this “angelic action” would have?

  That frightened her more than anything. Fae could be slain; they warred directly with one another so rarely because children were even more rare. But death could happen. Nor did anyone know what if anything lay beyond it, though faerie philosophers debated the question even as their human counterparts did. The uncertainty frightened Lune less than the certainty of human transformation. ’Twas one thing to draw close to them, to bask in the warmth of their mortal light. To be one . . .

  She had already made her choice. She could not unmake it now.

  Lune said, “Then tell me what I must do.”

  Dee took her by the hand and led her into a tiny chapel that adjoined his workroom. “Kneel with me,” he said, “and pray.”

  Her exposed faerie nature felt terrifyingly vulnerable. With mortal bread shielding her, she could mouth words of piety like any human. But now?

  He offered her a kindly smile. If her alien appearance disturbed him, he had long since ceased to show it. “You need not fear. Disregard the words you have heard others say — Catholic and Protestant alike. The Almighty hears the sentiment, not the form.”

  “What kind of Christian are you?” Lune asked, half in astonishment, half to stall for time.

  “One who believes charity and love to be the foremost Christian virtues, and the foundation of the true Church, that lies beyond even the deepest schism of doctrine.” His knobbled hand pressed gently on her shoulder, guiding her to her knees. “Speak in love and charity, and you will be heard.”

  Lune gazed up at the cross that stood on the chapel’s wall. It was a simple cross, no crucifix with a tormented Christ upon it; that made it easier. And the symbol itself did not disturb her — not here, not now. Dee believed what he said, with all his heart. Without a will to guide it against her, the cross was no threat.

  Speak in love and charity, he had said.

  Lune clasped her hands, bent her head, and prayed.

  The words came out hesitantly at first, then more fluidly. She wasn’t sure whether she spoke them aloud, or only in her mind. Some seemed not even to be words: just thoughts, concepts, inarticulate fears, and longings, set out first in the manner of a bargain — help me, and I will work on your behalf — then as justifications, defenses, an apology for her faerie nature. I know not what I am, in the greater scope of this world; whether I be fallen angel, ancient race, unwitting devil, or something mortals dream not of. I do not call myself Christian, nor do I promise myself to you. But would you let this evil persist, simply because I am the one who works against it? Does a good deed cease to be good, when done by a heathen spirit?

/>   At the last, a wordless plea. Invidiana — Suspiria — had taken this battle into territory foreign to Lune. Adrift, lost in a world more alien than the undersea realm, she could not persevere without aid.

  So far did she pour herself into it, she forgot this was preparation only. She jerked in surprise when Dee touched her shoulder again. “Come,” he said, rising. “Now we make our attempt.”

  The workroom held little: a shelf with a few battered, much-used books. A covered mirror. A table in the center, whose legs, Lune saw, rested upon wax rondels intricately carved with symbols. A drape of red silk covered the tabletop and something else, round and flat.

  Upon that concealed object, Dee placed a crystalline sphere, then stepped back. “Please, be seated.”

  Lune settled herself gingerly on the edge of a chair he set facing the sphere.

  “I will speak the invocation,” he said, picking up one of the books. Another bound volume sat nearby, open to a blank page; she glimpsed scrawled handwriting on the opposite leaf, that was evidently his notes, for he had ink and a quill set out as well.

  She wet her lips. “And I?”

  “Gaze into the stone,” he said. “Focus your mind, as you did when you prayed. Let your breathing become easy. If you see aught, tell me; if any being speaks to you, relate its words.” He smiled at her once more. “Do not fear evil spirits. Purity of purpose, and the formulas I speak, will protect us.”

  He did not sound as certain as he might have, and his hand tightened over the book he held, as if it were a talisman. But Lune was past the point of protest; she simply nodded, and turned her attention to the crystal.

  John Dee began to speak.

  The first syllables sent a shiver down her spine. She had expected English, or Latin; perhaps Hebrew. The words he spoke were none of these, nor any language she had ever heard. Strange as they were, yet they reverberated in her bones, as if the sense of them hovered just at the edge of her grasp. Did she but concentrate, she might understand them, though she had never heard them before.