The Duke In His Castle

And yet, how marvelous he must appear to this Molly formerly known as Izelle, the wind whipping his honey hair into a golden frenzy, his eyes, when not squinting, revealing a multitude of violet and blue hues. There is the proud gauntness of his jaw, the fine immaculate cuff-lace of his shirt. He belongs here, in the bright open, under the dome of sky. . . .

  Molly sniffs the lush flower that she holds, drawing it close to her face, so that her perky button nose is concealed in the velvet petals. “My Lord. . . .” She is about to speak something important, it seems.

  Eyes still narrowed from the world’s brightness, Rossian glances at her.

  But Molly does not speak. She glances instead in the direction of the open gates and nods to him.

  The Duke considers that the moment is at hand.

  Ah. . . . In that instant it seems the wind is blowing their way in particular, past the invisible occult barrier, with such ease that it is once again on the verge of impossible to believe it’s there. Rich air comes in a stream of clean force inside the gates, carrying with it scents of wildflowers and honeysuckle from the meadowlands, a fierce elixir of the outdoors.

  The Duke inhales it, growing dizzy with the unfurling of his lungs, the heady pressure inside.

  “So, my Lady . . .” he says, feeling the warmth of the sun against the skin of his face. “I suppose I must do it now. It’s not to be postponed. Though, there is nothing worse than the overturning of one’s final hope. And yet—might as well get the inevitable over with.”

  “Yes,” she says softly. And then, “My Lord, before you continue—Rossian, wait. First, I need to show you something.”

  And for the first time Molly truly looks him in the eyes. There is a subtle difference between simply looking to examine, looking to address, and facing another with conviction. There are masterfully complex looks that present an intended effect, sideways looks designed to confuse or beguile, insidious and stealth glimpses that go unnoticed. Some looks are tangible projectiles, shots of intensity, quick, fierce, stabs in the heart. Other looks are bland, forthright, or nearly vacant for the lack of true engagement. And yet other looks are forceful, insisting, nigh physical touches of warmth, affection, concern.

  Molly’s look is a revelation. She lifts an invisible veil and shows him her self—past the skin, past the tissue and bone and blood.

  The Duke, who just about puts his foot forward to advance toward the gates, stops. He is mesmerized.

  Despite the fresh pleasant breeze streaming at him, there is a shiver-inducing chill in the air—nay, in his mind—as he looks and sees her. “I remember . . .” he says breathlessly. “Did you not say your arcane secret is somehow related to mine?”

  “Yes . . .” Molly barely responds. And at last he knows what is on the inside, what it is that lurks just beyond her tragic eyes.

  “Look closely, my Lord . . .” she says. “Look.”

  At first he merely watches the bottomless abyss that opens in her eyes; he does not consciously attend what she means, or where to look beyond her centerpoint of face.

  But soon the in-rush of power about them points directly to the correct spot; not her face, but below, no, lower yet. He feels it pulling, a hand of wind, drawing him to the invisible flow, an aerial funnel that moves beyond sight but takes his gaze down, lower, binds and drags him. . . .

  Molly suddenly averts her eyes—they are filled with roiling sorcery—and he feels the line of contact between them breaking with a snap. But the invisible force-vortex continues pulling his attention, engaging his focus, and so he watches, of all things, the splendid tea rose blossom in her hand.

  If this were nighttime, he might never notice. . . . But now, in the light of day, darkness comes in an eerie materialization of smoke, seeps into being from an elsewhere and begins to gather about Molly’s fingers. As though a shadow of mottled sunlight through moving leaves of a tree is cast momentarily over her fingers, over the place she holds the flower stem. Yet—there is no tree nearby, nothing to cast a shadow. The castle bulwarks here loom in clean straight lines, devoid of crenellation at the edges, devoid of anything that might reduce the phenomenon to a natural explanation.

  She stands (onlookers might assume she is but deep in thought), and ponders the flower before her, motionless, locked in the arcane process that is taking place.

  In a cloud of dust, the darkness pouring from her hand permeates the air all about the blossom, and it begins to wilt, discoloring and then curling up into a dry husk, with the unnatural swiftness of sped-up time. Musky burgundy velvet is no longer; the rose petals curve then twist, invert upon themselves and dry preternaturally. Their deep redolent scent is gone, effaced into the ether.

  Water departs, together with life.

  Another heartbeat, and only grey dust fills Molly’s small palm. It runs through her fingers, and is scattered by the vigorous wind. Darkness too is gone, fading into dappled sunlight, and in its place comes the homogeneity of clean day glare.

  Molly stands, saying nothing, a vacant expression in her eyes. And then, in the culmination of divulged intimacy, she weeps.

  The Duke finds the sunlight harsh, a cruel whitewashing glare, and he narrows his eyes even more, in an act of retreating.

  “Oh. . . .” He exhales. “Lady. . . .”

  “I’m death!” she cries, weeping louder now. There is something childish and horrible about her shaking frame. “Now do you see . . . what I am? Abomination!”

  With a peculiar calm settling over him, pieces of information coalescing, he is drawn to move toward her, to console, and yet, he is held in place. There is a confusion of various different emotions, for now Rossian knows for certain that his original supposition is correct, and with this realization for the first time comes a kind of relief. At the same time a coincidental thought occurs to him; it is not she herself that he feels aversion for, but the nature of her power.

  For some reason it pleases him. It pleases him not to feel aversion for her.

  “Allow me to guess,” he says. “The power of the Dukedom of White is in fact identical to mine. Your sister and you attempted something arcane and complicated to bypass the barrier of your castle, and the effort went awry. The backlash of the force exchange turned upon her, killing her, and simultaneously imbuing you with the inverse nature of her power.”

  Sobbing, Molly nods. “I killed her . . .” she chokes out, gasping between sobs. “Killed . . . my Nairis. We . . . we planned a temporary transfer of power . . . from her to me. Just for a moment! In the precise instant as it happened, she was supposed to cross—cross the barrier, and then she was to receive the force back into herself. It was to be a trick, a silly brilliant workaround to fool the castle . . . But . . . but when I channeled the power back into her, it was wrong, it was corrupted, life into death, and she turned black as coals and crumbled—before my eyes!—my beautiful tall sister screamed and turned charred and shrunken, and she burned, and there was only bones and ash and—”

  Rending terrible sobs return, and Molly is shaking.

  “You could not know this would happen,” the Duke says kindly.

  “But oh, we did! We thought of it, we even discussed the possibility! Izelle, the silly obstinate girl, oh, she laughed and told me to put her in a box in case she died, and to collect her ashes if she burned and make sure they were all in one place resting on pretty cloth, as they did in ancient Aegypt. . . . And now that very power, that horrible thing that killed her, is a part of my nature! It is in me forever, it sits inside, death, death, her death sits inside!”

  Molly struggles for breath between harsh sobs; she screams, bends over forward and holds herself slowly as she begins to collapse. She is in a foetal bundle on the beaten earth and stone of the ground, contorting in agony underneath the bright sun.

  Rossian finds himself completely frozen, realizing in self-horror that he is so incapable of responding to another’s sudden pain on an emotional level that he cannot decide between his own emotions, cannot find it in himself to
do anything. He feels the urge to say cruel things, “Don’t be a gusher, my Lady . . . Stop your theatrics and compose your pitiful self.” But thankfully he does not.

  Instead he says, “Well, this at least explains in part our relationship. The frequent antagonism, conflict, the constant sense of being at odds with each other, grating on edge—”

  “Relationship?” she cries, wiping tears and snot with the back of her hand. “You don’t know the half of it! Do you think this is all? That I am all done with you?”

  Shivering from a fever in the brilliant sun, she continues. “I came here, to you, Lord, so that you could bring my sister back! You, with your clean uncorrupted power, with its fountainhead reaching into the great common well of force, surely you could perform this feat, as natural as the act of breathing is to you—”

  “Why me? What of the other Dukes?” he asks.

  “Because”—Molly is raving; her face is once again a shriveled mess of tears—“Because the others are impotent idiots! The Duke of Yellow is a doddering drooling senile who never did anything in all of his life to discover the nature of his secret. He rots in his castle as did his father before him, and they will bury him in the vault—thankfully the line ends with him. The Duchess of Red is too busy amassing a fortune in trade and fine wines, too busy directing the planting of vineyards to even open a history codex! The Duke of Green is a weak-minded fop with artistic pretensions who likes to dress up in his wife’s crinoline ball gowns and heels to put on masque performances before his circle of cronies. The Dukes of Black and Orange are dead with no heirs, and it turns out the regents are not bound by their castles. The Duchess of Blue and her twin brother are engaged in earnest study yet show no aptitude for the arcane arts, and are ineffectual.”

  She pauses with a gasp, staring up at him. “That leaves only you. Now do you see why?”

  Whatever the Duke is about to retort is interrupted by the appearance of Harmion. As the wind continues to blow strongly through the gates, the butler emerges from the front entrance and hurries in their direction forgetting his usual dignified pace. He is followed by a skinny wisp of a maid who runs behind him, whimpering and wringing her hands.

  “Your Grace, the Duke, my pardon! Your Grace!”

  Rossian watches their approach.

  “M’Lord, terrible, terrible news,” Harmion exclaims, then stops short of breath, in a fit of coughing.

  “Tis the young lady, m’Lord!” interjects the maid. “She be dead, m’Lord!”

  “What?”

  “We watch over her, an’ she was sleeping all fine less’n a quarter hour ago, no more. But then, just now suddenly, she starts up, an’ her eyes are all terrible, all big as saucers, m’Lord. An’ then she falls back on the bed an’ she turns all white’n blue, then all black an’ she be dust and bones! Oh, an’ m’Lord, earlier in the morning, Jennie an’ I both dreamt of an incubus all night, an’ when we wake, we sees his unholy seed spilled on her bedding, m’Lord! Oh, woe is us, there’s a demon incubus in the castle! He killed ’er, surely he did!”

  “What nonsense,” the Duke replies softly, and his voice is rich with potential intensity. “Filthy superstition, girl. There’s no such thing as demons. And what you call an incubus is but a figment of a dream, or a flesh and blood man disguised and welcomed in secret by a woman who needs a reason to deny the meeting. . . .”

  “Well, one thing’s a certainty. The so-called Nairis is dead, my Lord,” says Harmion, wheezing, but recovered enough to speak at last. “I checked the bed myself, and there are only . . . pardon me . . . dry remains. Very peculiar and certainly terrifying, not even a body is left. And the girls here claim they watched the transformation happen—a living woman, my Lord. She fell apart before their eyes, only minutes ago from now.”

  “Thank you, Harmion,” the Duke says. “I do believe you. Now, go and make sure that all is untouched in that unfortunate bedchamber. Do not allow anyone else to enter. I’ll be there . . . shortly.”

  Harmion nods, used to the peculiarities of serving his master. He knows there are occult happenings, has observed evidence of such upon occasion, and is not particularly surprised even now—or at least not too much. And thus he sets out, back inside, with the maid walking behind him. The maid casts wide-eyed, frightened looks at her Lord the Duke, as though the words he tells are blasphemous enough to conjure an army of demon incubi now, just to prove him wrong and punish the whole lot of them.

  When the two serving staff disappear, Molly speaks in a stumbling voice, her eyes liquid with tears and brimming with deep anguish. “Why d-did you tell her that d-demons do not exist? You . . . know very well they do. You know what an infinite number of—of layers there is beyond this material fabric. You know the other arcane spheres—”

  “Yes,” he replies, grim. “I know indeed. But the ordinary uninitiated must not know. You understand yourself how such a thing must never be admitted. Why even ask me such a question?”

  “Yes, but, but—”

  “But what?”

  In response Molly wails. She shudders and weeps as though she is a torrent, and it makes no sense until he realizes why she is weeping really. Or maybe he does not realize at all, dense and unfeeling and remote even then.

  “Nairis . . .” he says. “So, then. My act of resurrection last night was for nothing. A temporary thing. Or maybe it’s that she did not come fully into her own self, was incomplete, as we saw by her mental state? Only, I was so certain that life had taken a solid hold in her. . . . I wonder.”

  Molly sobs, wild and futile.

  “No . . . it is I,” she finally manages to say. “I killed her . . . again! The act of death, the withering of the rose flower I demonstrated to you in idiot disregard of possible causality, it was to blame! As the flower died, so did Nairis! I could sense it, I knew it was happening but did not want to admit, could not admit, ever, could not stop—”

  “But—” the Duke says, “I don’t see how you might have undone my intricate effort by a mere shriveling of a branch, and being so many feet away?”

  “Oh, you must restore her again, my Lord! Please, I beg you!” Molly gasps out, ignoring his attempt at reasoning. “Only this time you must do it true, do it so that life can not be so easily defeated by corruption!”

  Life is constantly defeated by corruption, he wants to say. Though, somehow it persists. Maybe therein lies the key, in the surmounting of seemingly impossible odds?

  “I will do what I can,” he says coldly. “But I must first try this thing, here, since we’ve come so far.

  The Duke ignores her whimpering, her pitiful sounds, and walks suddenly toward the open gates.

  Toward the barrier.

  It seems that for a moment, something fleeting passes over the face of the sun. Brightness of day seems diminished, just for a split instant. Again, a shadow of dappled sunlight comes out of nowhere, but this time it seems to slither over all of the open sky, casting the courtyard into momentary gloom.

  For the first time in his life, the Duke feels the barrier before he even touches it. It is a solid presence, a thing of metaphysical matter, of occult mass and solidity, yes. . . . And it stretches thick and vibrant on a different plane, one that is perceived only in a special compartment of his mind.

  Rossian stops at the gates. He is washed by the wild impossible freshness of wind. He knows that if he is to move forward but an inch, his nose, his cheeks will touch it. But first, his tiny hairs on the skin will know. They will prickle, bristle, raise up bumps alongside his pores, stand on end, and there will be a charge of force in the air, a familiar buzzing in his face as he touches. . . .

  Today there is something different about his awareness of the barrier. It’s as if he knows exactly which intricate lever in the ethereal mechanism will raise it up and bring it down. He knows that he can reach out and push or pull something, grasp it just so, and the whole thing will collapse like a tall theatrical stage curtain.

  The barrier, why, it is flim
sy! A mere cobweb. . . .

  His fingers curl and flex in anticipation, for he knows now he can move a single muscle and tear a ragged hole into some gaping otherplace. Ever since yesterday, when he pours and shapes life-force from himself and harvests it from the fabric of the world, then gathers it into one focused place, he knows how to do this thing.

  Indeed, he suddenly has a terrifying thought—just as one pulls a stage drapery and suddenly a whole vista of a grand theater is revealed, he can pull and reveal endlessly the fabric that makes up the universe! And it will come falling, falling down on him in thick soft folds. . . . The air will fall first, and then the sky with its fixed lights, heaven toppling gently, and then, as he keeps pulling, the firmament underneath will begin buckling as though it were a carpet that he was grabbing at from under his own feet. . . .

  He thinks this, and he somehow knows it to be true; he can do it. He can unravel the world just as he can make his way easily now, forward across the barrier, a knife cutting into butter. . . .

  Power runs through him in a thousand ants crawling up and down his arms, his back, his face and every bit of surface of his skin.

  The Duke puts his hand up and stretches his index finger forward and gently pushes.

  There is a tingle, a painful crawling intensity, as always when he confronts the barrier. Only this time, he is touching past it and around it, as though he is wearing special protective gloves of force.

  His finger moves forward and through.

  His finger touches the air on the outside. Touches freedom.

  And in that instant as he makes the hole, he senses the delicate fragility of the barrier curtain. He senses how far it goes in all directions into infinity, and that what he’s done by putting in a fingertip is already enough to collapse a mountain range . . . which will only be the beginning.

  Sudden lore-fragments out of histories come to mind, codexes of strange notions that he knows rather well and casually, for he considers it to be foolery, for so long—the notion that the Just King contains and binds the forces of the Dukes not in order to punish but in order to preserve the verdant realm itself, to ground the power of life in the land. Other notions, of pooling waters, of holding them back—the Duke thinks, remembers—that the world is a garden because of this binding, that it must not be relinquished, must not be abandoned, else there will be a great flood—