Touching the Heart

The Duke's invitation came in the third week of September, and this time it did not ask.

His Grace the Duke of Draymoor will exhibit to the Fellows of the Meridian Society, on the night of the autumnal equinox, the principal acquisition of the present season. The Viscount Wynmore, as discoverer of the specimen, is desired to attend, and to bring with him such assistants as he judges requisite.

Garrick read it aloud at breakfast in a voice like a man reading a sentence.

"Such assistants as he judges requisite," said Odette, from behind her chocolate. "That means Calla."

"It does not mean Calla."

"It means Calla and you know it. He saw her in the carriage. He asked her to dance. He sent Crale to smell her." She set down the cup. "I think he wants to see what happens."

Nobody answered. Ixara sat very still with her hands in her lap, in their gray gloves, and looked at the tablecloth.

So, said the small cold voice at the back of her mind. The door has opened.

She had not asked for it. She had waited, with the patience of a hunter, for six weeks. She had listened to the Heart through the walls and smelled it on the wind. She had lain awake in the east bedchamber with her hand on the bright spiral at her navel, and the child had turned and turned toward the vault like a compass needle, and she had thought, Soon.

Now the Duke himself was holding the door open. It could only be a trap.

She went anyway.

…

The Hall was lit as for a coronation.

Lanterns blazed along the portico. A carpet of violet cloth ran from the carriage-block to the bronze doors. Footmen in the Society's livery stood in two rows, as stiff as chessmen. And inside, in the great hall where the planets turned on their brass arms, forty or fifty gentlemen in black coats and white stocks stood in clusters, talking in low voices, glancing now and again toward the far end, where a pair of doors of dark polished wood stood closed.

Ixara walked among them in gray silk with her gloved hand on Garrick's sleeve.

She wore her high collar and her black jet. She had powdered her wrists until she looked like a woman with a skin complaint. Beneath the stays, against the spiral at her navel, Mrs. Hatch had bound a strip of lead foil, cut from a tea chest, and sewn into the lining. It did not stop the glow. It dulled it. "It will do," the old woman had said grimly, "for an hour."

She felt the Heart as a pressure on her chest. Every step toward the doors made it worse. It was the sensation of walking into a gale, a great warm roaring wind that blew only on her and left every other person in the room untouched. Her teeth ached. The marks under her gloves tingled and prickled. In her womb, the child began, softly, to sing.

"Breathe," said Garrick, very low.

"I am."

"You are not. You are holding your breath. I can feel it in your arm." His gloved hand covered hers on his sleeve. "We can leave."

"No."

"Ixara."

"If I leave, he will know that I am afraid." She lifted her eyes to his. "And I am not afraid of the stone."

It was true. She was afraid of everything else.

The doors opened.

…

They went down.

It was a long descent: a spiral stair of white stone, lit by lamps in iron brackets, that wound down and down into the foundations of the Hall. The air grew cooler. The walls were damp. Ixara counted the steps, from habit, and stopped at ninety. Garrick's arm was a hard warm line beside her. The fellows of the Society went before and behind in silence, a procession of black coats, and the only sound was the shuffle of shoes and the faint, steady beat.

Thump.

Thump.

At the bottom was a vaulted passage. At the end of the passage stood a second pair of doors, of bronze and glass.

The Duke of Draymoor waited before them, in white.

He did not speak. He raised his hand, and a pair of servants swung the doors wide, and Ixara saw the room she had seen in the smoke.

It was a perfect circle. The walls were white tile; the floor black marble; the ceiling a shallow dome painted with the signs of the zodiac. Brass cabinets of instruments stood round the wall, humming. And in the center, on a plinth of granite, beneath a bell of glass bound in copper, lay the Aurelith.

She had known it would be beautiful. She had not known what it would do to her.

It was awake.

On the ship it had slept in its lead box, muffled, dreaming. In the hold, in the storm, even at the grating of the Hall, she had felt it only as a distant ache. Now it blazed. Light poured from it in slow waves, blue and green and violet, running up the glass and across the tiled walls and over the faces of the watching men so that they seemed to stand in deep water. The fist-sized stone shuddered on its stand. The brass wires attached to the dome quivered. A needle on one of the gauges swung wildly and snapped off.

Someone gasped. Someone said, "Good God."

And in Ixara's body, as if a bolt had been drawn, the Gate opened.

…

"Gentlemen," said the Duke.

His voice was soft and carried to the walls.

"You are privileged. You stand in the presence of the most remarkable object ever brought to these shores. We do not yet know what it is. We know it is not of this earth. We know that it breaks instruments and warms the blood and sings to those who have ears." He smiled at the room. "We know that it did not behave so, in all the months of its captivity, until the arrival of the Lady."

He had not turned his head. But every eye in the room did.

Ixara stood motionless. She felt the fellows' gazes move over her, cool and curious, like hands over a statue.

"Miss Merrow," said the Duke gently. "Would you care to approach?"

"Your Grace," said Garrick, in a hard clear voice, "my ward is unwell. I must ask—"

"She appears quite well." The pale eyes did not leave her face. "I merely propose a small experiment. A courtesy to science. My engineers have observed that the specimen's output rises in proximity to certain persons. One would like to establish whether the effect is general. Miss Merrow has such a sympathetic constitution. She has, I think, a gift."

Ixara looked at the Heart.

It was calling her. It was calling her with every fiber of its being, in a language older than speech, in a voice that she had known since before she could walk. Come. Come. Come. The marks on her skin were burning through the gloves. The child inside her was thrumming like a struck bell.

A trap, said her mind. A trap, and you know it, and you will go.

He wants to see.

Let him.

"I will," she said.

"Ixara—"

"It is all right." She slid her hand from his sleeve. She did not look at him. If she looked at him, she would not be able to do it. "It is only a stone."

She walked across the black marble alone.

…

It was thirty feet from the doors to the plinth. It was the longest walk of her life.

Every step brought the Heart nearer. She heard it in her bones. She heard the voices of the dead whispering from within its depths, her mother, her mother's mother, the nine and ninety priestesses before her, a vast soft rustling like wind in the canopy. The light lapped round her ankles. Her shadow stretched away behind her, tall and strange. She felt the child swell with joy.

She stopped before the dome.

It was taller than she had thought. The copper bands gleamed. Inside, an arm's length from her face, the stone pulsed on its velvet, and she saw the emerald core and the violet flame and the deep midnight blue of the sea at the end of the world.

Mother, she thought.

"The glass is lifted by a lever," said the Duke, behind her. "There. On the left. One may withdraw it for a moment. We have found it safe."

She did not turn. She did not ask whether he was lying. She took off her right glove, finger by finger, and let it fall, and the blue tracery on her wrist leaped up in the lamplight like flame.

A murmur rose from the watchers.

She put her hand on the lever.

The bell rose with a groan of counterweights, and the Aurelith lay bare before her, and the world went white.

…

She was falling.

She had expected the smoke. She had braced for the soft violet curl, the dizzy stretching of time. This was nothing like it. This was a wall, a roar, a cataract of images that poured over her and through her and out the other side without a single pause. She saw everything at once. She saw it with a clarity that burned.

A street in fog, and a lamp, and her own hands lit from within with blue fire, and a ring of men in gray.

A man in a white coat, laughing, with a glass in his hand and a ship's wheel at his back.

A hall of ice-white stone. A table. A woman in a pearl-gray gown with tears on her face, turning her head away.

A fire.

She saw the fire. It rose over a crowded square in the black and gold of a December dusk, and in the center of it stood a stake, and tied to the stake was a woman with her head thrown back, and the woman was herself.

She screamed.

A boat in a storm, small and black on a roaring river, and a child's first cry.

A man on a roof, with a pistol in his fist and blood on his face, and his gray eyes turned toward her, and his mouth shaping a word.

An island: gray, silent, dead. The great trees bare. The Heart gone. The air still.

A black ship on a black sea, and sails like the wings of a bird.

A child with two-colored eyes, grown tall, standing on a cliff with a spear, and below her a hundred ships.

A hand, in a gray glove, on her cheek.

"No," she said, or thought she said. "No. No. Show me. Show me the—"

A man weeping.

She did not see his face. She saw only his shoulders, bent, and his bare head, and his hands pressed over his eyes. She knew him. She knew him by the way he held his breath. And she knew, with the certainty of a scream, that he was weeping for her.

She tore her hand away.

…

The sound came first.

It was a crack like a gun. Glass flew. Copper rang. The gauges on the cabinets burst one after another in a rattling chain, and the lamps along the wall guttered, flared, and went out. In the sudden dark there was only one source of light, and it was her.

She was burning.

The marks had come alive. They poured up from her wrists and over her hands and down the front of her gown, pale blue and green and gold, so bright that they cast shadows on the faces of the watchers. The glove-lead had split. The silk bodice had split. Through the rent she could see the tendrils on her belly writhing, branching, and over her heart, in the place where the stone had sat on the ship, a great spiral blazed like a star.

The vault was filled with a strange whirling music. It came from the walls and from the floor and from her own body. It was high and sweet and terrible.

"Ixara!"

Someone was shouting. Someone seized her. Strong arms went round her, hard and warm, and a voice, rough with fear, was saying her name again and again in her ear. She tried to answer. Her mouth would not move. She sagged.

"I have her," said Garrick. "Stand back. Stand back! Get a door open!"

"Lord Wynmore, the specimen—"

"To the devil with the specimen!"

He lifted her. She felt it dimly, as one feels the sway of a boat in sleep. She heard shouts, and the scrape of boots, and the Duke's cool voice saying, "Gentlemen, I beg you, be calm." And through it all, as the darkness swallowed her, one thing, one single bright unbearable clarity:

At the door of the vault, motionless, with the light of her skin shining on his long gray face, stood a man in a cassock, with a silver lantern on his breast.

He was not afraid. He was smiling.

…

Garrick carried her up ninety steps.

He did not remember doing it. He remembered only a darkness, and the weight of her, burning against his chest like a coal, and his own breath sawing in his ears. He remembered a footman holding a door. He remembered a small, cold, tiled room off the main hall, with a bench and a washbasin and no window, where the Society's porters kept their coats. He laid her down on the bench. He knelt.

"Ixara."

She lay with her eyes half open. They were glassy, unfocused, the whites rimmed in blue. The light was ebbing from her skin, a slow tide drawn back from a shore. Her whole body shook in long shuddering waves. Her lips were gray. He took her hand in both of his and it was ice, and yet the faint lines on the wrist beat under his fingers like a living thing.

"Ixara. Can you hear me?"

"Garrick."

It was a thread of sound. He bent closer.

"I saw," she whispered. "I saw it all."

"Hush. It's over. You're safe."

"No." Her eyes rolled to him. They were wet, and wild, and terribly clear. "No. It is not over. It is only the beginning. Garrick, I saw—" Her voice broke. "I saw so much."

"Don't try to speak."

"I saw you."

He swallowed. "What did you see?"

She was crying. The tears ran sideways down her temples into her hair, and she made no sound at all. She only lay and looked at him with those enormous, desolate eyes, as if she were memorizing his face for a long time to come.

And he knew.

He could not have said how. There was no argument in it. It rose in him whole, like the answer to a sum that has been sitting on the page for weeks, unsolved, and then one morning is simply there. It was not a theorem. It was not a hypothesis. It was a plain fact, as plain as his own name. He had known it on the terrace under the roses. He had known it in the hold, in the lamplight, when she had turned and said, You came. He had known it every night for six weeks, lying in the dark with her hair on his arm, and had called it by every name in his vocabulary but the right one.

"I love you," said Garrick.

He heard it fall into the small tiled room, and it was a very small sound. It did not echo. It did not shake the walls.

Ixara went quite still.

"I do not say it to comfort you," he went on, rapidly, roughly, before his nerve failed. "I am not good at this. I have rehearsed it, God help me, in the carriage, in my study, in front of the glass, and I always say it badly. I am not eloquent. I am a man who counts things. But I have counted this, and I find that it comes out the same every time." He drew a breath. "I do not know what you are. I do not know what you want. I do not know what you saw in that room, and I will not ask. But whatever it is, whatever happens, I want you to know that I am here. I am not going anywhere. I love you, Ixara. I think I have for some time."

For a moment there was perfect silence.

Then she turned her face into his hand, and wept.

It was not the quiet weeping of before. It was a harsh, wrenching, broken sound that came from deep in her body, and her whole frame shook with it. She pressed his palm to her mouth as if to stop herself. She was saying something, over and over, in the language of the island. He did not understand a word. He understood all of it.

"Hush," he murmured. "Hush. It's all right. I'm here."

"You do not know," she gasped. "You do not know what I—"

"Then tell me."

"I cannot."

"Then do not." He gathered her up, gently, and held her to his chest, and rocked her. "Not tonight. Whenever you wish. I'll wait. I've nothing else to do."

She shuddered, and clung to him.

And he held her, and did not see that her tears were not of joy. He did not see that her eyes, over his shoulder, had gone to the closed door; nor that she lay rigid in his arms, with every muscle drawn tight in an agony of guilt; nor that the words she sobbed were not I love you, too but a litany, a prayer, an endless, desperate plea in a tongue he did not know.

Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

He heard only the rushing of his own blood.

…

Perhaps that is why he did not hear the footstep in the passage.

It was very soft. It stopped outside the door. A shadow fell across the sill, long and thin, in the gap of the light. For the space of a heartbeat it stood there, listening.

Then it moved away, unhurried, down the corridor, toward the stair.

In the great hall above, among the whirring planets, a gray figure paused beside a clerk in a black coat. The clerk held a notebook. The Magister Osmund Crale looked down at it, and then up at the silent doors of the vault, where the light still pulsed faintly between the cracks, and his long, composed, ascetic face wore the expression of a man who has waited eight years for a verse to be finished.

"Write it down," he said quietly. "Everything. The time, the place, the witnesses."

"Yes, Magister."

"Seven and forty, I counted. All of them saw."

"Shall I send word to Rome?"

"Not yet." The deep-set eyes were bright. A thin, patient, almost tender smile touched his mouth. "Let her be happy a little longer. It makes the ending sweeter."

He folded his hands.

"Finally," said Crale, "proof."