Page 106 of The Death Wish
But the idea had ignited, and Silas would not let it burn out.
He left the music room and stepped out into another impressively wide corridor. Every inch decorative, elaborate, and, of course, golden. He surveyed either end of the way and found it endless once more. But he’d been in just such a predicament before. At The Atlas, and more significantly at Harvington Hall where the spectre had taught him special lessons in how to find his prince.
Do not believe the illusions. Strike out where the way is most denied.But too many ways lay open here to choose from.
‘Wake, and aid me.’ Silas clenched his fist, squeezing the ring between his fingers. ‘Do you know his melody?’ For Silas did not. Pitch had always been a quietness to his ear. Perhaps the prince had been too meddled with by the Seraph for his naming melody to hold readable notes; who knew? But the scythe had laid upon Pitch’s skin. Izanami herself had held Pitch back, as Silas battled her sister Morrigan. Death knew the daemon.
The certainty swelled like a rose blooming in Silas’s chest.
‘You know him. Find him.’ His command made the sconces’ candles flutter, the chandelier sway against their fittings. Thering hummed harder, the vibration travelling along all the tiny bones in his hand, moving up his arm.
Silas unfurled his fingers. The shifting light glanced off the ring, catching it in a way that reminded him of the glint of Crane’s spectacles.
His hand jerked forward, a sudden tug that had Silas taking a stumbling step forward. Towards the wall. The pull at his fingers led him to the smooth surface, the plaster like silk beneath his palm.
‘Of course it’s through the bloody wall,’ he muttered.
With an exhale, he shook his shoulders, readying to strike at something that did such a good job of seeming solid. But he’d not be played with any longer.
Silas moved a few steps back, giving himself a chance for a slight run up, then leaned into his conviction and ran at the wall; shoulder lowered to take the brunt of the impact that seemed certain.
The illusion evaporated, as though fearing his touch, and Silas went racing into a new room, nearly coming off his feet after putting far too much effort into his barge.
His hand lifted, the tug of the scythe now undeniable, and he kept on, straight through a buffet filled with an assortment of figurines and dust-gathering trinkets, through another wall, and onwards into a room gripped with confusion. The place did not seem to know what it was. His headlong path had the Sanctuary working frantically, it seemed, for this room shivered between designs: a half-tester canopy bed with gold tasselled cushions and damask covers sat at one side, whilst on the far side of the room an enormous cast-iron stove glowed with heat in its furnace, and pots bubbling on its surface.
Silas was driven towards the stove. Dragged forward by the scythe that now followed his command with the eagerness of a hunt hound scenting a downed pheasant.
Silas did not hesitate. The heat reached him when he was still several feet away from the stove, the fire that burned warmer than he’d expected of illusion.
But he’d not doubt the scythe. He’d not doubt himself. Silas felt free, strange as it was, after seeing Rossdhu House and the jetty. The past had been such an anchor, the good and the bad of it. He’d hungered to know of it, but looking at the remnants of his past, in the shape of that mansion and its gardens, and its loch, it was as though his desire sank into those waters. His period of mourning was over.
What was done was done.
More important was what remained tobedone.
He ran on.
Heat bit at his knees, and he swore he felt the sting of boiling liquid sear his front as he passed through the pots.
Silas emerged into a small room, a chapel, perhaps, though who knew what gods were worshipped here. The altar was plain, marble cut, with only two gold candleholders for decoration. There were mats upon the floor where pews might be in a church, lined up for a handful of worshippers. The floor itself was a marvel, a mosaic of opalescent tiles, with gold pieces strewn seemingly at random among them. But most glorious of all was the window, an arch of glass so pristine in clarity he thought for a moment the room to be open to the elements.
Beyond the glass, an incredible array of wildflowers grew upon a slope in the ground, with the jut of moss-covered stones visible through their colourful display. They were in something of a circle, the stones, and Silas wasted no time lingering here as memories of the greenswards’ faerie circle disturbed him.
He was led out of the door, this time, into a white-tiled corridor. The ferocity of the scythe’s guidance abated, softening from the near-painful prickling in his arm, to only a feathering atthe tips of his fingers. A door, with half its body made of frosted glass, lay ahead. Silas opened it and stepped inside.
The conservatory was modest, with its glass ceiling set within a thick white wooden frame, and filled to near overflowing with many wondrous ferns and orchids, plus an untold number of blooms he did not recognise. Everything was bathed in that gold-hued light the Sanctuary so favoured. As was that which lay beyond the glass, where the wild flowers he’d seen from the chapel continued, interspersed with adders’s tongue ferns, and some astonishingly strange plants, one with leaves of onyx and blooms as colourful as Scarlet in their full rainbow array.
Silas made his way through the unseasonal orchids, their spectacular flowers as large as his palms, and the fronds of ferns that had grown far beyond their natural size: moonwort and maidenhair and holly-fern large enough to rise over him and hang in his way, giving him the sense of being lost in some exotic jungle.
The tingling at his fingertips vanished. And voices reached him. Soft murmurs. One stood out.
‘Pitch?’
Silas swept back the drape of an enormous Harts-tongue leaf.
Pitch stood with Jacquetta. Very close. The Child of Melusine had one hand upon Pitch’s cheek, whilst she rubbed her thumb over his lips.
They jumped at Silas’s voice. Jacquetta stepped back, thrusting her hands into hidden pockets upon her silver tunic.