Serpent Mage

  “You didn’t think it would?”

  “I had my doubts.”

  “Why?”

  They passed the guard and waited for traffic before crossing Gower to get to their cars. “Because I’ve been getting phone calls,” she said. “Someone’s still trying to stop us. He’s not succeeding, but he’s trying.”

  “Who?”

  “Clarkham, I presume,” Kristine said almost lightly. She glanced at Michael.

  “He’s been talking to you directly?”

  “He hasn’t called you?” Kristine countered.

  “No,” Michael said.

  “Maybe he’s afraid of you.”

  Michael snorted. “I don’t think so.”

  “You say you beat him once.”

  “Yeah, with all the Sidhe behind me.”

  “But you did beat him.”

  “And he survived. Apparently.”

  “Why does he feel threatened by this performance?”

  “I’m not sure he does. He hasn’t been able to stop it, and he must be a hell of a lot more powerful than...” Michael shrugged. “Than my beating him would lead you to believe.”

  “You think he wants it performed?” Kristine asked. “He’s running all this interference just to make us follow through?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kristine unhooked her arm from his and backed off a step. “I don’t know any magic,” she said. “What will I do if things really get rugged?”

  Michael had no answer. That made him acutely miserable.

  “I suppose you’ll protect me?”

  Michael felt his eyes smart and then a rising warmth behind them. Whether she was baiting him or not, he decided to give a completely serious and sincere reply. “I’ll try,” he said. “I’ll do my very damnedest.”

  “You know, I’d like to be self-reliant, but failing that...” She smiled at him. “You’ll do. I have to go now—I’m meeting Berthold Crooke at two. The fellow with the new orchestration of the Tenth.”

  They stood awkwardly two steps apart. Kristine moved in quickly and kissed him on the cheek. Michael blushed as she backed away. “You’d think we could talk about normal things sometime,” she said.

  “I’d love to.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “It’ll happen, Michael. I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “I wish I was,” Michael said.

  “Got to go. You’ll be at the library tomorrow?”

  “Signing papers. Yes.”

  “We’ll talk then.” She walked to her car.

  You can spend the most important parts of your life on a street, Michael thought, and unlocked the Saab’s door. His whole body seemed to be breathing in and out, restless and ebullient at once.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next day, at eleven in the morning, two Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door of the Waltiri house, and Michael did not have the heart to simply send them on their way. The elder of the two was middle-aged, gray hair carefully groomed, dressed in a brown suit with a narrow gold tie; the younger, a trainee about twenty years old, wore a black suit and a red tie. Both carried satchels.

  Michael listened wearily to their prophecies and Bible quotations, and they kept him at the door for half an hour. When he managed to convince them he was not really interested, he shut the door and stood with his back against the dark wood, eyes closed, almost sick.

  They preached the Apocalypse. He knew it was coming—but not as they visualized it.

  He could practically smell the poisoned Sidhe-imposed ignorance, the most modern incarnation of the thousands of years of Tonn’s attempts to play God for humans. Some of the poisonous philosophies had been transmuted by humans despite the best efforts of the Sidhe—but how many hundreds of millions of humans still wholeheartedly embraced the blindness and cruelty and the shackles? He stood up straight but kept his eyes closed.

  “No way,” he said softly. “I’m just a kid. No way I can understand how to lead so many different kinds of people. I don’t want it. I reject it.” He opened his eyes and blinked at the framed prints in the hallway.

  The silence demanded, Who asked you to lead?

  But Michael could feel it as surely as he could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock. That was what it was all moving toward: his growth, his maturation, the challenges and the apocalypse.

  He shivered and then convulsed, dropping to his knees on the tiled kitchen floor. His arms shook until he clenched his fists and he felt the inner abilities—nothing from outside all inside all from within—course through him like power through an electric line let loose for a moment, set free and exulting at its lack of restraint. It was all he could do to keep his skin on his body, to stop muscle fleeing from bone and his brain from popping through his skull.

  The trembling slowed. He lay flat on his back on the floor. Beneath him, the tiles lay cracked and powdered. His clothes smoked; he reached down to pick scraps of burned cloth from his legs. Still, the potential pulsed through him.

  Even after he had regained control of the power and had wrapped thick steel bars of his will around it, it took him hours to stop trembling, and he realized how close he had come to simply disintegrating, much as Tommy had done, but for different reasons.

  He walked slowly upstairs and lay down in the Waltiri bed. not tired but stunned, for the first time fully aware of how sensitive he was and how dangerous his sensitivity could be.

  Tiger by the tail.

  Michael—and what he contained, generated, not by his conscious self but by something within him that didn’t have a name—Michael was his own tiger. Losing control, he would eat himself alive.

  “Who in hell am I?” he whispered harshly, wiping sweat from his eyes.

  In mid-July, Kristine drove Michael to Northridge to meet Berthold Crooke. Crooke lived in a complex of condominiums at the edge of a broad empty field of dry yellow grass. He taught music in a local junior college and had received little attention until the publication of his orchestration of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony.

  Crooke was a lanky, hawk-faced man with blue-black hair and a perennial shadow of beard. His eyes were his most remarkable feature, large and vaguely horse-like. His teeth were also large and prominent. He was slow of speech and quick to smile, pulling his lips back over his broad white teeth in a way that would have seemed menacing but for the obvious gentleness of his eyes. His manner was self-deprecating but also obviously confident. Michael liked him immediately and felt no need to read his aura; however, to his mild jealousy and chagrin, he saw that Kristine also liked Crooke.

  They sat at Crooke’s kitchen table and went over the arrangements point by point. After an hour of discussion, Crooke served coffee and doughnuts and stood behind Kristine, looking over her shoulder as she compared the orchestral requirements for the concerto and the symphony.

  “They’re not really all that different,” she said, shaking her head in some surprise. “We can use practically the same players. Edgar told me the concerto was lush with orchestra, but...” She glanced at Michael. “Mahler isn’t known for his spareness.”

  “No indeed,” Crooke said. “You mentioned Moffat had the orchestra assembled—I don’t need to approve them or anything, but—”

  “You’ll have equal time for rehearsals,” Kristine said. “The university hasn’t done anything this ambitious in years. I think it’s starting to catch on. Nobody in the department is complaining about costs, and that’s a miracle.”

  “What I meant,” Crooke said, smiling sheepishly, “is that I haven’t conducted that large an orchestra. Only college orchestras. I’ll need the rehearsal more than the musicians.”

  Kristine patted his arm reassuringly. “We have faith,” she said. “It’s going to come together just fine.”

  Crooke made a face and slumped in his chair with a sigh. “Makes me almost wish I didn’t start the whole thing...”

  “How did you start it?” Michael asked.

  Crooke knitted
his fingers together. “When I was sixteen, I heard a recording of Rafael Kubelik conducting the only portion of the Tenth orchestrated at the time—the adagio, the first movement. I was playing the record in my room, away from the rest of the family. We had a huge ranch house in Thousand Oaks, halls and bedrooms all over—like a maze. Even six kids rattled around in it. The music seemed very sad, a slow and discouraged dance, and then toward the conclusion of the movement, there is this discord—trumpets shrilling in A, the orchestra seeming to scream or cry out...” He shook his head. “It devastated me. I had never heard anything like it. It was...all the oppressed, all those in pain, breaking their bonds and looking up. It was revelation, and it was death, too. It really affected me. I started to shake and cry.” The sheepish smile returned. “I knew there had to be more. I found Deryck Cooke’s orchestration and listened to that—Eugene Ormandy conducting. It was beautiful, but it seemed to be missing something. The symphony became an obsession for me. I thought if only the piece could be orchestrated the way Mahler would have done it, had he lived, then...” Crooke lifted his hands. “Bingo. How to express it? It would be the greatest piece of Western music ever written, or at least the most powerful. There were times when I simply couldn’t listen to the pages after I finished orchestrating them. I couldn’t even play parts of the four-staff score on the piano.”

  “Some people say you’ve succeeded in doing it just as Mahler would have done it,” Kristine said. “How do you feel about that?”

  “Oh, yes,” Crooke said, his expression suddenly stiff and serious. He straightened up and cleared his throat. “That’s the way it had to be. This sounds silly...perhaps even a bit insane...” His index finger tapped on the table top nervously. “But sometimes I felt I had Mahler helping me.” He laughed nervously, shaking his head. “Have you heard it before?” he asked Michael. “Any of the other versions?”

  “Not all the way through,” Michael said.

  “It is sublime, even incomplete.”

  Michael nodded. The discord, the trumpets sounding a shrill A, all that was very familiar to him. He had heard it while exploring the top floors of the Tippett Residential Hotel.

  Late July in Los Angeles was a procession of cloudy days held over from June, broken by a week of the more usual summer weather, the temperature climbing into the eighties and the sky clear of overcast, if not of haze.

  Michael did not attend the rehearsals. Kristine reported on the progress to him every two or three days. Otherwise, they did not see each other.

  He spent most of his time exercising in the back yard or jogging. Dopso no longer ran with him. Since the incident with Tommy, Michael had heard nothing from the Dopsos. The mystery had become all too specific for them, apparently.

  At night, in the house, Michael sat before the fire in the living room, practicing his discipline.

  On July 16th, at one in the morning, after six hours of steady concentration, Michael reached into the Realm with one hand and brought back a leaf and a translucent red insect, much like a ladybug. The insect quickly died, and the leaf shriveled into a brown husk.

  He had barely reached the level of Eleuth. But with just his hand in the Realm, he had sensed a discontinuity that was most unsettling.

  If reality could be described as a kind of heat or warmth, then his body—sitting on the oriental rug in Waltiri’s house on Earth—was in the middle of a kiln, reality invading everything with a bright white glow.

  In the Realm, everything felt cold. The fire was going out.

  The real fire before him was dying into embers as he thought about this. His eyes closed, and almost of their own volition, his arms rose from his sides, and he spaced his hands some five inches apart. His palms tingled, and something passed between them, a silvery extension of his discipline and of the primal emotion Preeda. He tried to bring them together and could not; startled, he opened his eyes and saw a pearly thread stretched between, and strung on the thread, a glowing sphere. He could feel the sphere’s qualities through the skin of his palms and along his arms; it was enfolded, and it embodied some of the requirements he had outlined in his poem about reality knots.

  But what was it? He slowly pulled his hands apart, and the thread snapped. The sphere swung to his left palm and clung there for a moment before vanishing.

  In early August, the rehearsals neared completion on both the concerto and the symphony. Advertisements were placed in the Sunday Los Angeles Times Calendar supplement, four days before the first of the two scheduled performances. Flyers were mailed out and posted on bulletin boards around the campus. Kristine did much of this work herself.

  On Thursday evening, she appeared on the front porch of the Waltiri house, dressed in an exquisite dark blue-black gown, smiling, holding two tickets in one gloved hand.

  “An occasion,” she said. “Shall we go, partner?”

  The dusk sky above Los Angeles was a cloudless, clear sapphire blue, complete with evening star. Kristine drove down Wilshire toward UCLA, talking about the last-minute preparations, why she had been a few minutes late—having to reassure a nervous Crooke by phone that all would go well—and generally expressing her own reservations about the evening. She became quiet as they approached Westwood, glancing at him with one eyebrow raised slightly, lips drawn together.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  She laughed and shook her head. “My whole world has changed since I met you, and you ask if something’s wrong. I don’t know how I’ve managed to lead a normal life after... Your friend disappeared. What happened to Tommy. I should be terrified. I really should.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “Because you’re with me.”

  “Not much assurance there,” Michael said softly, turning away.

  “Clarkham called again this evening,” she said, “just after I got off the phone with Berthold.”

  Michael felt a deep barb of anger and quickly buried it under the rising inner warmth of hyloka. “What did our ghost have to say?”

  “He says if the performance takes place tonight, he’ll be seeing you. You, Michael.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. I’m not afraid of him now.”

  “You should be. We should be.”

  “Don’t you feel it, though? Tonight is going to be a fine night. Because of us.”

  He shook his head. “I just feel nervous.”

  “I’m the one who should feel nervous, but I don’t. I don’t even believe I’m awake now. I think I’ve been dreaming all the time since I met you.” She swung the car into a reserved space, pointing out Moffat’s BMW and Crooke’s ancient, battered Chevy Nova on either side. “Everybody’s here. The cast is assembled. Let the dream reach its climax.” She shut off the car motor and twisted in her seat to face him. “This has been difficult for us, especially difficult for you, I think,” Kristine said. “You’ve been...not ‘patient’. That sounds so prosaic. You’ve been...” She shook her head vigorously. “Tonight, after the performance, we have to go out with everybody to Macho’s and celebrate “

  “‘Macho’s?’” Michael asked, incredulous.

  “It’s a Mexican restaurant in Westwood. We have reservations. And afterward—listen carefully, because this is important—we are going to go back to the Waltiri house, together, and make love.” She stared at him intently, biting her lower lip. “If you want to.”

  “I want to.” His need mixed with the warmth of hyloka and made an indescribable echo through his abdomen.

  “That is as important as anything else that happens tonight,” Kristine said. “To me, it is. Being involved doesn’t come easily for me. I’m cautious, too cautious. You’ve noticed.”

  He didn’t answer, simply returned her stare.

  “You are so unreadable,” she said, smiling faintly. “Let’s break through it all tonight—the music, this world, all the walls and the shams.” She opened her door and got out, and they walked side by side across the grass, heading toward Royce Hall.
>
  UCLA at night was more attractive than by daylight. Floodlights and the lighted windows of buildings produced magical areas of brightness and pitch-dark. A few students walked quickly between buildings, on breaks from their night classes or hurrying to the library.

  In front of Royce Hall, the crowd standing in line before venerable pillars and brick Romanesque arches was encouragingly large. Michael spotted his parents in the line and introduced them to Kristine. Ruth was very pleased with her but kept glancing at Michael with unspoken questions. John became debonair and witty and inquired whether they would all be able to get together after for a celebration. “If we’re still here,” he added ominously.

  “We have an appointment for a kind of orchestra party,” Michael explained. “But maybe tomorrow...”

  Ruth held John’s elbow and said that would be fine. “Go on now. This is your night.” John raised his eyebrows. “Don’t mind him.” Michael smiled and hugged them both.

  Kristine then led him around the side of the building and up a flight of concrete steps to a double door, where a male usher in a crew neck sweater and white pants examined her pass, gave them programs and let them in. They took seats in the center, fifth row back.

  Michael cleared his throat and opened the pamphlet. “Do you think we should be sitting this close to the orchestra?” he asked, only half joking.

  “All the better,” Kristine said, “that the perpetrators should take the brunt, don’t you think?” She patted his arm and opened her own program.

  “They’ve got this wrong,” Michael said, pointing out a passage on the second page. “Clarkham didn’t get sued—he left before the lawsuits began. Arno faced the reaction alone.”

  “Let’s hope our audience isn’t litigious.”

  The curtain rose, and the players whose instruments were not already on the stage carried them to their seats. In Clarkham’s instructions, the orchestra was enjoined to make itself conspicuous and to exhibit the process of the performance as openly as possible. That instruction was reproduced in the program booklet, in Clarkham’s original handwriting.