tore open the closet door. Empty coat-hangers clanged, and his own overcoat hung on the door flung out startled sleeves, but there was nothing at all of hers there.
Nothing at all.
He looked around him, and then looked around him again. And then stood still in the middle of the empty floor.
"Gone," he said.
Book Five - THE ART OF MEMORY
I.
The fields, the caves, the dens of
Memory cannot be counted; their
fullness cannot be counted nor the
kinds of things counted that fill
them . . . I force my way in amongst
them, even as far as my power
reaches, and nowhere find an end.
—Augustine, Confessio
Upon a deep midnight, the Maid of Stone knocked with a heavy fist on the tiny door of the Cosmo-Opticon on the top floor of Ariel Hawksquill's townhouse.
"The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to see you."
"Yes. Have them wait in the parlor."
The moon behind the mirrored moon of the Cosmo-Opticon, and the dull glow of the City lights, were all that illuminated the heavens of glass; the blackish Zodiac and the constellations could not be read. Odd, she thought, how (reversing the natural order) the Cosmo-Opticon was intelligible, ablaze, in the day, and obscure at night, when the real heaven's panoply is full. . . . She rose and came out, the iron Earth with its enameled rivers and mountains clanging beneath her feet.
The Hero Awakened
A year had passed since she had looked up to see that the Zodiac painted on the night-blue ceiling of the Terminus had changed its old wrong order of march and went the way the world went. In that year, her investigations into the nature and origins of Russell Eigenblick had grown only more intense, though the Club had fallen oddly silent; no longer lately did they send her cryptic telegrams urging her on, and though Fred Savage showed up as usual at her door with the installments of her fee, these weren't accompanied by the usual encouragements or reproaches. Had they lost interest?
If they had, she thought she could awaken it this night.
She had broken the case, in fact, some months before; the answer came, not from her occult researches, but from such mundane or sublunary places as her old encyclopaedia (tenth Britannica), the sixth volume of Gregorovius on Medieval Rome, and (a great folio in double columns, with a hasp to lock it up) the Prophecies of Abbot Joachim da Fiore. It was certainty that had taken all her arts, and that had to be bought at the cost of much labor, and much time. There was no doubt, now, though. She knew, that is, Who. She did not know How, or Why; she knew no more than she had known who the children of the children of Time were, whose champion Russell Eigenblick might be; she didn't know where those cards were which he was in, or in what sense he was in them. But she knew Who: and she had summoned the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to hear that news.
They had disposed themselves around the chairs and sofa of her dimly-lit and crowded drawing-room or study on the ground floor.
"Gentlemen," she said, gripping the back of an upright leather chair like a lectern, "more than two years ago you gave me the assignment of discovering the nature and intentions of Russell Eigenblick. You have had an unconscionable wait, but I think tonight I can at least provide you with an identification; a recommendation as to the disposition of the case will be far harder. If I can make one at all. And if I can make one, then you—yes, even you—may be incapable of acting on it."
There was an exchange of glances at this, subtler than one sees on stage, but with the same effect of registering mutual surprise and concern. It had once before occurred to Hawksquill that the men she dealt with were not the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at all, but actors hired to represent them. She suppressed the notion.
"We all know," she went on, "the tales, found in many mythologies, of a hero who, though slain on the field of battle or otherwise meeting a tragic end, is said not to have died at all, but to have been home away to somewhere, elsewhere, an isle or a cave or a cloud, where he sleeps; and from where, at his people's greatest need, he will issue, with his paladins, to aid them, and to rule then over a new Golden Age. Rex Quondam