SANITY LINE
The Alabaster Man
Archaeology is one of those fields that we all secretly know to be less entertaining than the adventures of a particular whip-bearing professor of Hollywood fame would have us believe. The overwhelming bulk of archaeology could be done comfortably, in air-conditioned offices funded by major universities, after only a brief period of on-site research.
Sometimes, though, you could forgo even that. Such had been the life of Professor Malvolio Coultier of the Saffron Academy for the last few years. He had, granted, considerable administrative duties that ate up a plurality of his working hours – as dean and president of the Saffron Academy, whole work weeks could go into little more than signing off upon the issuance of degrees, consulting with associate universities, and other bits of administrative detritus that were of little interest to him.
Every now and then, something would cross his table – usually something small – that would get under the skin of that usual special knack that made someone or something interesting enough to bother recording. In this case, it was something peculiar – an old photograph.
The idea was so common it was now a meme which clogged up both serious and satirical conspiracists. Take any well-known face (and it does have to be well-known to gain traction). Spend ten minutes in a database of emergence-era photography and you'll find a decent likeness. Poor photography and a lack of intimate knowledge of a face can produce an effect of eerie similarity. For the most part, this could be dismissed, if you knew the phenomenology.
The problem for Malvolio was that one of the faces was very well known to him – Professor Donovan Kline, former Grand Librarian of the National Library of the College of Judges, emeritus of the Zaxtonian University in any of a small number of language-oriented departments. Malvolio had often suspected the man of having some secret touchstone of youth, given his long list of accolades. His father had studied briefly under Kline in a short-lived attempt at a civilian career, and that had been a good ten years before Malvolio was born. What's more, he had an uncle, older brother to his mother, who recalled Kline at a party, by the wrong name, as an instructor from his seminary. Granted, Uncle Esteban was quite famously of diminished vision, particularly at a distance (given his loss of his left eye while serving in the military with Vincent Coultier), and Malvolio had always chalked that incident up to innocent mistake.
Innocent mistakes, of course, could set whole conspiracies unravelling. It had begun a few months ago, before the Eruption of Kraterburg, that a post doctorate researcher working on the Yellow Palace site in Black Sands had, almost casually, remarked that he'd found a yearbook from his grandfather's time at one of the local high schools in the Terrwald Precinct that had, among its faculty, a listing for a Teacher of Latin that bore the striking resemblance you yourself might infer. Malvolio had laughed it off as a joke – the vaguely androgynous, vaguely ageless construction of Kline's face had as a consequence a certain vagueness of identity. It wasn't hard to look similar, especially with similar dark hair and eyes.
Of course, proving that the most inconsequential things can prove to become major hang-ups for those who work largely inside their own minds, Malvolio eventually became fixated on the idea. The following morning he sent for an archival copy of the same yearbook – preserved at the National Archives. It was duly sent, and languished for some time at the bottom of an inbox that seemed perpetually overflowing.
Until, of course, one evening, while he was swilling yet another cup of overpriced (and over-steeped) Darjeeling and trying to force himself to focus on the banality of grade-point-averages, he received a phone call.
“Coultier,” was his customary greeting at the time, and a poor one at that. More than once, calls intended for his father or sister got misrouted to him. For some reason, it was easier to be mistaken as a military officer than his athlete older brother.
“Good evening, Malvolio,” Kline's voice was warm and buttery – a tone he often took with the younger academic. “You've done away with your reception staff.”
Off balance, over-tired, and short of temper, the archaeologist-mage removed his reading glasses to better spy the clock on the far wall. “... Rare's the day you catch anyone in Administration working past eight, Don. What can I do for you?”
It was a mark of the older professor's respect for Malvolio (or, the younger thought bitterly, his father) that the man tolerated Malvolio's attitude. By all accounts, Kline was rather hidebound on matters of protocol, and while he was never so gauche as to insist upon proper decorum being shown toward him, he could make his displeasure known in any of a number of other, subtler ways. “I thought I might make some light conversation. With your work lately, we so rarely get to see you in Kraterburg. Is now a bad time?”
“Hardly.” Malvolio was looking to be distracted anyway. “Reviewing thesis defence notes from my department heads. I have a small class ready for Doctorates.”
“Really? That's certainly impressive.”
The conversation continued in this way for an hour or more (well past the point where Malvolio decided to let the work hang for morning and get a little something extra into that tea). Kline was a master of the sort of small talk that Malvolio never got the hang of. He could keep a conversation going on little more than niceties for an hour until he was ready to hit you with something big. It was a way to steer the conversation gracefully into a subject, and tonight Malvolio was either tired or introspective enough to actually notice it happening to him.
He was not surprised, then, when the purpose of the call became clear. “You know, Malvolio, one of the less entertaining parts of my work with the National Library is that, month-end, I have to make final approval on all inter-institutional loans.”
Malvolio saw where the conversation was going. In a way, he was intrigued. Obviously, Kline had seen the unusual yearbook request and would no doubt wonder in what was it was relevant. How he could make any sort of inference beyond it was the real mystery – a mystery Malvolio grew to think he did not want solved. He tried, meagrely, to deflect it. “We do benefit quite a bit from our ongoing reference loan from the National. Particularly the latest shipment. I was under the impression that the W.A. Keeping collection was strictly on-site only?”
“I've made some changes to our collection policy in the last few weeks. I understand how difficult it could be for some of your research fellows to have to travel all the way to Kraterburg to find one or two lateral references.”
“Oh, quite difficult indeed.” Malvolio felt some relief creeping into his voice, feeling that he had staved off the impossible question.
The conversation meandered onward for another hour, perhaps, before Malvolio reluctantly admitted that, while tales of his father's misadventures at university would make for interesting dinner-table-blackmail, enough was enough and he'd still have to drive home. He and Kline made their polite goodbyes, promised an indeterminate number of meetings, favours, and calls in the vaguely defined “near future”, and terminated the call.
I thought he was going to ask me about the yearbook, Malvolio thought. He swept his files away, setting them aside in the tray reserved for material relating to his next immediate task. His eyes hovered over the spine of the book in question, and he carefully removed it from the bottom of the pile. There's only a few ways to look at this. Kline saw the yearbook on the loans list. He knows somebody at the school requested it specifically, and that the request was important enough that my office approved it. He either thinks that's unusual and would ask based on the face of it, or he is concerned about it. Or, naturally, I could be thinking about this way more firmly than it deserves.
Holding the book in both hands, he frowned at the unremarkable cover and slung it into his attaché case, tucked between a similarly-constructed grimoire of his own, and his laptop. Grabbing the bag, and a light sport coat suited to the work, he stepped out into the night.
---
“Professor?”
Malvolio looked to the door, taking his attention away from his private calculations. His office had become something of an academic dream – stacks of books before the shelves themselves, and more than a few whiteboards and chalkboards rolled in from other rooms in the institution. The books, like the boards, were no-longer needed in their former homes.
“It's been a few years, Miranda, I think we can call each other by name these days.” He extended his hand, taking the clip-board she was obviously preparing to hand him. He replaced his reading glasses to his face to run down the numbers. “Christ. Really?”
Miranda, his administrative second and head of academic programming, nodded. “Might as well have had zero enrolment. Five students remaining in the introductive level. Won't pay even one instructor's salary.”
“Less than a dozen returning students. Term starts in two months.” Malvolio frowned. “... We still have our government funding. I'm not worried about the salaries.”
“The government's going to pull the funding eventually.” Miranda gestured to the window. “Look around. Nobody's going to have money for anything remotely resembling a higher-than-minimum education for a while now.”
Malvolio looked. He looked at the frostbitten bows of trees, and the light sprinkling of snow that would melt by noon. “... It's July. This could be over by august.”
“Maybe. Milk's ten dollars a litre right now. And it'll probably go up again at the end of the week.”
Malvolio sighed. He knew, but couldn't tell, that the government would implement rationing at the end of the week. If not sooner. He lowered himself into a chair, setting the clipboard aside. “... Okay, so, term's cancelled. We still have our government funding.”
Miranda frowned at him slightly. “How?”
“Department of Natural Resources has identified seventeen new sites of interest. Five more in Black Sands, three in the Terrwald, four in whatever the hell we're calling Kraterburg Bay this week, and five more in the Northern Guardians. I was going to put in on the Black Sands and Terrwald contracts. Might as well put down for the Guardians contracts now, too.”
Miranda nodded. There was good money in government exploration contracts. Money good enough that most people knew it wasn't really coming out of the DNR's budget. “Not the Bay ones?”
“Hell, if I had a submersible and a staff full of divers, maybe.”
Malvolio stood again, and paced back to his board. “... Do you see what I see?”
The board was covered in dozens of photographs, pulled from newspapers, private collections, and photographic plates of older artwork still. Kline's face dominated them all – shown in startling likeness from his obituary (one of over a million published since the Eruption) all the way back in time to the oldest – a rendition taken from a painting from a contemporary of Rembrandt.
“... Holy hell. I thought the Nick Cage one was good.”
“Yeah,” Malvolio said, without Miranda's levity. “... You're in charge. I'm headed to Tererra for the day. Alexis managed a few hours shore leave.”
---
These days, with the roads in as poor a condition as they were, it was actually safer to travel by train. The old route through Terrwald was not configured for high speed service – the area too sparsely populated. The line was active, though it had been a few decades since it had seen passenger service. In such a case, there was little left to do but prepare yourself. The old line ran through twisting and turning valleys through the Terrwald. It was the only way the Terik Remnant (who had more sway in those days) would have approved the route – to lay it with minimum destruction of land.
Malvolio did not mind travelling by train – as a rule he would each summer, booking a circuititious route around the archipelago by train and ferry, doing little more than reading and lounging. His allowance of the family wealth was itself considerable, and his investment sense (augmented, perhaps, with a big of arcane statistics) lucrative, and he could afford to travel well.
Sensing in advance this would be less an option in these days, he paid his fare for a sleeper, retired immediately to his compartment, and resolved not to come out until hunger drove him or his station came. To that end, he had a collection of good music on hand, excellent headphones, and a thick stack of books.
He was reading his way through some old Dean fables, around midnight on the first night of the journey (a journey which, just a few weeks ago, would have been much shorter). The idea to bring this particular book along had come with the mutterings he'd been hearing from his father and sister. Alexis' new posting was near Galba Dea, and Vincent commented openly that he wasn't certain the tenuous peace between the Union and the Free Kingdom city-state would hold given the recent disaster. For his own part, Malvolio considered the possibility of a war between the two nations rubbish. Galba Dea had nothing serious to offer, and while the union was certainly destabilized, they'd missed their window of opportunity to kick the Zaxtonians while they were down.
He liked Dean tales. They dealt frequently with the Fairies, in a darker light than you might expect if you grew up without having any idea that Fairy tales predated Disney and were themselves much darker than most give them credit. They weren't outright scary to anyone over the age of ten or so, but they had interesting allegorical properties, and the history of the Dean Kingdom stretched back far enough that even serious historians couldn't quite disentangle the truth from fiction as far as their tales of foundation went.
Tonight, bottle of water in hand, Malvolio was staving off traveller's insomnia with a passage about the eponymous Alabaster Man. He'd expected a tale of a bogeymanish figure, some great horror from the night with an improbable appearance that would do a decent job of spooking a man if well-conveyed. In this respect he was both wrong and right – this was no boogeyman, but by the end of his first reading all hope of a night's sleep vanished.
The tale related a pivotal moment in the history of the relationship between the Fair Folk and the Deans, who at the time were apparently still half-Fae themselves, or else the story took place before the Fae wound up stuck in the Dreamlands. This was something beyond Malvolio's power to confirm – what little attention he'd spent on onieromancy was limited to cursory protection against people spying upon his slumber. Some versions of the tale had the now-human Deans banishing the Fae, others had the increasing departure from magic into logic forcing the change upon them. In any event, this came before that.
Then, as now, the House of Sussex, all claimed to be descendants of such a lord of Fae, ruled Deans. Sussex (which Malvolio eventually took to be the Sussex for which the house was named) retained for himself an immortal throne in the shallower portions of the Dreamlands, and parleyed on occasion with his descendants. This was, itself, well and good, until a member of a rival House of the Unseelie Court (bitter rivals to the Seelie Court to which Sussex belonged) managed to marry into the family. As could be predicted in advance by knowing this was a fairy tale, the inevitable scion wound up rebellious, and this lead to a downturn in the fortunes of the kingdom as a whole.
Incensed, King Sussex prepared himself a solution, leaning upon his familiar trade as a machinist to create a political machine. This Alabaster Man had skin of fine alabaster plates, bones of hammered moonlight, and a soul of cold, calculating clockwork. Sussex breathed life into him with a verbose and extensive writ of authority, imbuing much of that same authority into the Alabaster Man, for whom the ink of the writ became his blood. This Alabaster Man was sent, surreptitiously, into the world, to eventually become an adviser to the rebellious mortal king, and insure either his compliance or downfall.
The book presented alternate endings to the tale. The first, more commonly told, had the Alabaster Man as eventually becoming a regent to the son of the rebellious mortal king. There he ruled, until, at the coming of age of the successor, he was ordered destroyed, an order with which he apparently complied. Another, older version of the tale, hardly attributable at all except in one particularly old edition once thought quite authoritative in most other respects, had the Alabaster Man as less compliant. Apparently believing himself of higher authority than either King Sussex or the Mortal King, he fled, but not before crippling the Mortal King. Interestingly, this older version of the tale makes the injury into something of a family mark, and indeed, it was well known that members of House Sussex often had weaknesses or deformities of one or both hands, or the bad luck to eventually have the said hands injured in war or industry.
This, in and of itself, was interesting, as Malvolio had never before heard this more ambiguous ending. Modern retellings of most of the Dean tales had the Fae on the side of the royals almost entirely, when mortals were mentioned in the story at all. What was more, however, was a plate at the end of the section dealing with the Alabaster Man, sub-titled as a depiction of the figure, who (in spite of being an illustration) bore such striking resemblance to the self-same Donovan Kline upon whom we are fixated that Malvolio’s cold and analytical composure cracked, at long last, and was unable to rationalize away the comparison.
He sat up through the night in a cold sweat, drinking stale coffee (having long passed the hours of the dining car) and working on his laptop. More than once, he attempted to get his attention onto anything else, but he kept coming back to the same old images, the same old photographs and portraits with their corresponding apocrypha and biographical notes. He would have expected to find no pattern other than a logical progression from oldest-to-newest.
He had thus far identified some fifteen individuals who matched his (admittedly subjective) impression of Donovan Kline, with only minor variation in facial features. These individuals (excepting for the moment the probably-fictional Alabaster Man) covered a span of time as far back as the limits of realism in art would allow – the oldest painting in the set was from the lattermost quarter of the 15th century. Allowing large gaps where lack of effort or fortune had produced no subject (assuming the subject to exist), for the most part the corresponding biographies enjoyed slight overlaps with the next in the sequence.
By the time the sun began to creep into his compartment window, Malvolio was firmly convinced that the pattern was not a product of his imagination, but a series of overlapping false-identities, of which Donovan Kline was only the latest. For now, at least, he was content to discard the Alabaster Man as spurious. Necromancy was a subject verboten by long custom, rarely even discussed, but it was known that the art persisted among the occult-minded of the Archipelago for some time now. It seemed unlikely that Eli Sharona was the first and the last of his school. The simple hypothesis, for an occultist like Malvolio, was that Kline (himself deeply wrapped in the markings of followers of the old Kitabist school of occultism) was merely the latest face of a very old student of things better not taught.
In this respect, Malvolio found some closure. Kline was dead – had clearly and undeniably been in Kraterburg during the eruption – and no magic could save you from so destructive a force. You could cheat death, perhaps, and steal yourself a bountiful life of long years, but you could not hope to uncross that particular threshold.
As far as I know, anyway, the professor reminded himself. There were some subjects into which even his curiosity would not carry him.
---
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The strangest part about Kraterburg Bay and the New Normal was its normality. It was sailing across the Volar Strait in the happy expectancy of a warm bed and a hotel reservation on the far side, but not knowing if you'd have phone service or something to eat when you got there.
Still, the family name made up where scarcity could not. In Enotekka, gateway to the Razeland Desert and bastion of the Lipan and their rich merchantile culture, the situation was perversely better. Desert or not, the Port of Enotekka did a roaring trade, and food was in abundance for those with good family names and a wallet that hasn't yet given out.
He checked his bags – barely anything to speak of, considering the length of his trip and the duration of his expected stay – and ate before retiring. By the time he had, the designated hour for the post had come and gone, and to his surprise, a package was waiting on the desk for him. A book, going by the shape of the slender rectangle, with one curved side. It was wrapped in craft paper with black ribbon, and, apart from his name, it was essentially without marking. No postmark.
Malvolio was not incautious. In spite of the package being addressed to him, he picked up the room phone and called down to the front desk, inquiring if the package had been left in his room in error. It had been hand-delivered by a couriour, a pale man (“Dean, by the look of him”), who had taken the time to deliver the package to the room in person before departing.
Malvolio thanked the woman and hung up. He continued, rightly, to view the parcel with some suspicion. From the inside pocket of his uniform Academy blazer, he extracted a charcoal pencil, and quickly made a few notations directly on the packaging. The gestalt combination of formulae taken from his study of various Kitabist and Order Magic volumes was a quick-and-dirty “grounding” for any latent arcane energies within the parcel – a bit of paranoia that had more than once saved his life.
Chuckling at his own cleverness, the young man finally tore away the wrapping. There was, indeed, a book. A fine thing, bound in leather, unremarkable. A timid glance within revealed the pages to be entirely blank, save for an inscription – by hand – upon the flyleaf.
To Malvolio Coultier, for his very own. What can be more useful in the pursuit of knowledge than a bit of extra storage space for the mind's ephemera.
Happy Hunting,
-DK
Malvolio glanced sharply up at the mirror over the desk, blinked once, and turned to re-pack his bags.