But growing, certainly, and in those mad hours after sunset he conceived the idea that
the size of the unseen, ghostly – possibly imaginary – cat grew with the progress of his work,
that the spirit fed off the task that its master had left unfinished. By his fourth night in the property, hunched over the keyboard and working on the bibliography, the patch of quiet
beside him had the presence and bulk of a tiger. Perhaps all cats were tigers, in their own
minds.
When he left the work, he felt those wide eyes track him across the room, a moment’s
doubt of his dedication to the project, but Felix knew his routines by now. Felix trusted him
to get the job done.
He found that he was stringing the work out. During the day, when both Felix and his
belief in Felix waned, he did little. He sat at the keyboard listlessly, feeling oddly alone and bereft. Without his spectral taskmaster he found it difficult to motivate himself. Instead, he
mooched around the house, picking over the grave goods of the rooms he had not much been
into, reading Bechter’s books, going through his cupboards and drawers.
That was where he found the collar. On seeing it, that red plastic loop with its circular
metal tag, he felt a surge of triumph. Here, at last, was some relic of Felix that Mrs Bechter
had not excised. Perhaps he would even keep it as a souvenir of a peculiar but not unpleasant
week. At dinner parties maybe he would trot out the anecdote, and brandish this forlorn little
collar as proof that yes, there had been a cat named...
The stamped name on the tag was “Mr Buffles.”
Stewart frowned at it and then shrugged inwardly. Obviously he had gone back
further into the Bechter family history than he had realised. The relic he had excavated had
come from a former age, when cats were given decidedly dafter names.
Towards evening, feeling the pull of the work just begin to get its hooks into him, he
called Mrs Bechter again.
“I found some things belonging to your previous cat, by the way.” He had reported on
the book, but he still felt fiercely partisan in the case of Felix vs Mrs Bechter, and now he had discovered that she had presumably been persecuting whole generations of unfortunate cats,
of which poor deceased Felix was only the capstone.
Mrs Bechter sounded surprised. “We never had a previous cat, Dr Tyrell. What do
you mean?”
“Well who’s Mr Buffles then?” he asked her, in the manner of the great detective
unveiling the murderer.
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Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Mr Buffles is my cat,” came the voice over the phone, honestly bewildered. “You
must have seen him in the photo, in the kitchen.”
Stewart was in the kitchen right then, and he locked eyes with the despairing-looking
feline in the photo. That animal gaze had an urgency to it, a message for him.
“But if you’ve found anything belonging to Mr Buffles I’ll come and pick it up
tomorrow, or the next day,” Mrs Bechter was saying. “Yes I will, Mr Buffles.” And there in
the background, distant as the echo from a tomb, a faint mew.
“But I thought... you didn’t like cats...”
“I love cats, Dr Tyrrel. I’m a cat person. George, though, he never did get on with Mr
Buffles-“
He moved the phone away from his ear, staring, hearing something move, soft-footed
and yet so large, in the house above him. But she said it was Felix in the photo, he told
himself. There was only one cat, though, and it was not sharing a frame with George Bechter.
Instead, he was the academic alone with his pipe, one proprietory, fond hand upon the
fishtank. The fishtank?
It was in the study, dry and drained, and he had assumed that the fish had been taken
by Mrs Bechter, or flushed down the loo for all he knew, and thought no more about it.
Looking at it now, partially occluded in the corner of the photo, it did not look much like an
aquarium. There was no sense of water, no refraction of light over the sandy and stones that
He dashed upstairs and bolted into the study, looking at the tank anew. No backing
paper of water weeds, no pump, just a glass box lined with dirt, with a heater.
Not an aquarium: a vivarium.
In the room, Felix moved restlessly. It was past time for Stewart to get to work.
Whatever shared the study with him - the thing that monopolised the shadows, half-glimpsed
between stacks as it stirred from its slumber - would not fit in that tank, not any more. He had fed it too well, with his industry and his attention and his belief.
He sat at the desk, with that bulking presence at his back, feeling the keen point of
Felix’s attention as his hands hoivered over the keyboard, ready to resume. Instead, he
brought up a search engine. Named after the saint, she had said. His fingers shook slightly as
he typed.
Saint Felix of Nola, was the prompt result. There was a picture of the man’s defining
moment, hiding in a hole whilst a renaissance-looking bruiser stalked past, saved from the
hunters only by the intervention of one of God’s smallest creatures. The soldiers had, the
story went, seen the web built across the mouth of the holy man’s retreat, and thought it long-
abandoned.
Only then did he turn around and see Felix plainly. For a long moment he stared into
the expectant, clinical gaze of those round and plate-sized eyes.
Then he hunched back stiffly towards the screen and brought up the bibliography
again, because that was his task, and for that, and no other reason, was he tolerated in this
house. As the hours stretched towards midnight, he paginated and corrected errors and hunted
a few last references through Bechter’s landscape of books with trembling hands. And all the
while the vast, many-legged shadow of Felix was squatting, where the wall and ceiling
joined, waiting for him to finish.
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Coat Like Bright Fire
Long before dawn, Eloise Elethar arises, stepping out into the last rays of moonlight to ready
her mount for battle. The world is silver; let the long-gone dwarves and dragons love gold,
silver has always been the metal for the elves.
Areth Elan, he is named, and his coat shines, gleaming like the moon even within the
darkness of the stable. His wise eyes watch her approach; he knows what the dawn may bring
for both of them.
She brushes his coat and mane, and feeds him berries from her hand, cleans his
hooves, polishes the spiral horn that thrusts lance-like from his brow. And, when she has no
more comforting routine to give him, she holds to his neck and touches her head to his.
Four hundred years is no great span of time for elves, who live forever if they are left to. Four centuries ago and more, when Eloise was but a child, she walked into the depths of the forest
and waited. There were wolves big as bears, in the dark places of the wood. There were
spiders that spoke whispering entreaties to her and begged her to be a guest in their silken
halls. There were strange spirits of twisted trees that watched her with a hostile gaze. All
these things are gone, now, but in those days the deep forest was a place of fear and wonder,
even for the elves.
&
nbsp; Four centuries and more, Eloise went alone to the deep forest and drew wards in the
air to protect her from the monsters which made that place their last enclave. She went and
she waited: to die or to be found. She was young, and pure of thought and deed; she had one
ambition only in her life and that one chance to realize it.
And there, in the depths of the forest, in the deep of the night, Areth Elan had come to
her, radiant as moonrise, and touched his horn to her shoulder, and from that moment they
had been together, neither of them to love any other.
She can hear some of the humans, now. Areth Elan shares the stables with their common
steeds, brown horses who watch the unicorn with wide, dumb eyes. Still, when Areth Elan
rides to war, they follow with a song in their hearts. Just as the humans stare at this elfmaid in their midst with awe and hope and reverence and fear, so do the horses look upon their
horned exemplar.
They are not like Areth Elan; the humans are not like Eloise. She is older than their
king’s lineage, older than their borders and their nation. She has ridden to war in battles their history books have forgotten, against foes they know only from fairy tales. When they curry
and groom their horses, it is as a shadow; the affection they feel for their mounts is a fleeting thing. But then everything about her allies is fleeting. Only the elves were meant to be
forever.
She hears the jingle of harness, and a pair of men come to the stables leading tired
steeds. They have been patrolling all night, scouting out the disposition of the enemy. When
they see her there, they stop with that familiar expression. They cannot know her; they cannot
understand her. The sight of her speaks to something deep within them that they have no
words for.
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Adrian Tchaikovsky
Awkwardly, one of them bows. It is not the gesture of respect he would show his
superior officer; he reserves it only for her.
“Tell me, what news?” she asks him.
He takes his cap off, rubs a hand across his dirty brow. “They’re not coming to us,
that’s for sure. They can wait there day and night.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” the other man breaks in. “I mean, that they’re not on the
advance. That sounds good to me. Maybe tomorrow they’ll pull back.” She thinks he is
younger than the first man, but they are all so young to her that she is not sure. Even the
oldest of them, silver-haired and crease-faced, is like a child.
“They’re not going away any time soon. They’ve made themselves right at home,”
says the first man, the older. He steals a glance at Areth Elan as though he would like to
touch him; as though touching a unicorn would make everything all right.
“And what word from your prince?” Eloise presses.
The men exchange glances. “If it’s come in since we left for patrol, we don’t know,
ma’am,” says the elder. The silence he leaves after seems to say that he hopes no word will
come.
Her life has been war. The many hosts and clans of humans fight constantly, but even the
most bloody-handed champion has not known so many battles as Eloise. Four hundred years
ago, the great kingdoms of the elves were at their zenith, and at every border was a tribe that
wanted what they had. As the forest shrank to the axe and the torch, as the world’s other
children rose out of barbarism into kingdoms and empires, so the legions of the elves fought.
They fought to defend their own, but more than that: the elves had been made as light in a
shadowed world. When darkness drew the sword they were the shield.
When she was young, it had seemed so easy to tell dark from light just by looking.
And the years and the decades and human lives had come and gone, and borders had
changed. Religions and ideologies had risen and fallen amongst the kingdoms of men and
still, from time to time, perhaps once in a generation, there had been a battlefield set to silver fire by the coming of the elves. They would thunder at the enemy lines, and the horns of their
mounts would be their lances, as they loosed their unerring arrows at the foe. Their white
streaming cloaks would shine bright, but not so bright by half as the coats of their steeds.
And yet, some historians marked, each time there were fewer, for the lands and the
lineages of the elves were not what they had been. Each time they were diminished, and
dwindling too had been the certainty that once drew the sharp line between light and dark, for
the wars of men are many and tangled and fought for many reasons all at once.
And yet, in this war, when the ancient allies of the elves had found themselves beset
by the boot of the invader, overrun and outmatched, they had cried out for their erstwhile
friends, and the elves had heard them. Eloise and her fellows had saddled their bright steeds
and ridden to one more war, shining in the sun, radiant under the moon.
She lets Areth Elan out from the confines of the stable and he stands looking up at the stars,
his breath frosting a little in the cool pre-dawn. Over there, in their commandeered
farmhouse, she knows the humans are looking. Young men who should be cooking or
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Adrian Tchaikovsky
cleaning have stopped their work to stare. And they are all so young, yes, but even Eloise can
see that some are little more than boys who have never yet needed the razor’s touch.
They are all being roused, though. She hears the quiet murmur of a company of
human warriors rising, complaining, drawing on their war-gear. Young, but there is no sound
of life or laughter to them, no music or joy that was the meat and drink of the elves. In this
one way the war has already made them old.
And when some of them cross over towards the stable, pausing to take in Areth Elan’s
radiance as though it was a fire to warm them, she knows. The human prince has sent his
orders, and they are to fight.
One of their captains is already walking towards her; he has a slight limp, an old
wound, but he is as good ahorse as any human. His moustache is peppered dark and light but
still, when he looks on her and on Areth Elan, there is the hope of a child in his eyes.
“Your prince sends his word,” she observes as he stops at a respectful distance.
“The generals, yes.” Translating her concepts into his as second nature. “They’re…”
He clears his throat awkwardly. “Well, they’ve taken in what our scouts have seen of the
enemy.” His hands make a nebulous gesture in the direction of the foe, who have made their
home in a village of this man’s native land. The peasantry have been driven out or killed or
enslaved. Now only the enemy warband remains, taking its ease amidst the spoils of war. Or
so Eloise assumes. That is how conquerors behave, in her long experience.
She realizes the captain is waiting for some response from her and so she nods
encouragingly.
“They’ve ordered the charge,” says the captain. “There’s a battalion of infantry
moving in but they need cover and they think we’re their best chance…” His words tail off,
his eyes flicking from her to the lambent coat of Areth Elan. “They want us to attack,” he
adds. He sounds like a man in a dream. And yet a man still waiting for her to say something.
She glance
s from him, and sees all eyes on her. Men stand in the courtyard before the
stables, they are at the windows of the farmhouse or in the doorway. They have heard the
orders, and they are bound to follow them, but they watch her. She is not under the command
of their princes or generals or whatever titles the humans give themselves. She can just ride
away.
And in that moment she wants so desperately to ride away.
When the call to arms resounded through the forest, through the last stronghold of the elves,
she and her fellows went to battle joyously. They sang and laughed, in the manner of their
kind. They rode into the fray shining like the sun, gleaming like the moon. Their ancient
allies called, and they came, no matter that the allies who sought them out barely believed in
them. The humans who had come to the elven court had been following the half-remembered
tales of their great-grandparents.
And Eloise and her fellows had gone to war one last time, glorious and proud and
fierce. They had ridden and they had fought and they had fallen.
If she touched heel to Areth Elan and guided him from this place, back to the deep forests
where her people – even there – are barely more than a memory, would these young and
gallant warriors do their duty? Yes, she knows they would, but with heavy hearts, with the
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