The Silenced Tale, стр. 57
“Apologies,” I say, just loud enough for them to hear. “I thought I—”
A frisson of fear races over me then. Something in the air is . . . something crackles against my lips like summer lightning, brief and fresh, and the air, for just a moment, tastes of wonder and home.
Something of my joy and horror must have shown on my face, for Riletti puts a hand on my arm and says, “Mr. Piper?”
“Pip,” is my only response, as I fumble my phone out of my pocket. The nurse immediately bears down on me with a “sir, you can’t use your phone in the hospital; it interferes with—” and I shout my apologies and excuses as I run for the door at the far end of the hall, brushing past the nurse as my fingers shiver and slip on the phone’s slick surface.
The man in the hoodie levels a look of loathing at me that I barely register, his light eyes flashing as I rush past, and then I am banging back the heavy fire door and striking the call button probably harder than necessary. The phone rings only once before the call connects.
“I feel it,” Pip says, breathless, as if she’s been panting. She makes a strangled sound. In the background, I hear peppy, upbeat music. The sounds of many people doing something with metal things in a small space grow muffled and give way to the sterile echo of an empty, tiled room.
Ah, my wife was at the gym, and is now in the dressing room.
“Alis?” I ask, and I needn’t say anything further, for Pip already knows what I mean.
“At my parents’,” Pip says.
“Pip,” I reproach her.
“No, I’m fine. I was crawling out of my skin waiting. I just wanted to . . . nunnngh,” she groans, and there is the heavy thump of her hitting the lockers and sliding down to the ground.
“Pip!”
“I’m okay. I just need . . . just need a second to . . . god, I can’t breathe—” she pants, and, futile and impotent on the other side of the connection, I simply inhale and exhale as loudly as I can, keeping my own head, trying to calm my own heart, trying to trick my wife’s body into following along. “The—the rage,” she stutters around her ragged breaths.
“Rage?”
“He’s so angry.”
“Pip, do you tell me you can feel what he—?”
Pip’s voice is growing shallower, fading away, and I do not know if it is because she is suffocating, or if the phone has dropped away from her face. “How . . . how dare the-the-the S-Shadow Hand inter . . . interfere . . .”
“Interfere? How . . . what are you—?”
“Not supposed . . . how—hcccck—can they travel so . . . ung! . . . fast in the Overrealm . . . had time—” She chokes and splutters her way through the words, like a prophet drowning, but determined to spit one last verse of dire warning.
“Pip, please, breathe,” I plead, my free hand balled into a fist.
“Ma’am?” someone says on the other end of the line. “Hey, lady, are you okay?”
“Help her!” I shout, hoping that my voice will be heard. “Please, it’s . . . a fit of some sort. She can’t breathe!” My heart twists and burns in my chest, my throat closing up in fear.
Writer, please, please, do not let my wife die when I am too far away to hold her as she does so.
“Lady, jesus, hold on. Let me . . . I’m just going to tip your chin up, okay? Open up your airways,” the woman says, and she sounds confident and collected. Perhaps she has first aid training. Whoever she is, I owe her a thousand thanks.
Pip gasps, and then sucks in a hard, shaking breath. I can hear the phone clatter onto the floor. And then Pip screams: “A knife! Forsyth, there’s a . . . oh fuck, stop him!”
“A knife?” I take a moment to echo, and then I understand.
The man in the hoodie, I realize suddenly, and the revelation is like a punch to the gut. The hand gestures. Spell-weaving. His eyes weren’t merely light—they were amber.
“I love you,” I shout down the line. “Breathe.”
“She’s fine. It’s over,” says the woman.
I take just enough time to shout my thanks, and then hang up, shove the phone back into my pocket, and run. The fire door slams back and cracks against the wall opposite as I burst through it. My dress shoes are slippery against the polished floors, but I run full-out all the same. The same nurse I saw on my way out still stands in the hallway. She looks dazed, green fading from her eyes. She moves to stop me, but her gestures are slow, jerky, puppeteered by a master whose mind is elsewhere.
Outside of Elgar’s room, Riletti and the two officers protecting it are staring aimlessly, heads turned only vaguely in my direction, hands on the butts of their guns, eyes turned emerald.
“Mr. Piper,” Riletti says, “You can’t—”
She and the officers both make a grab for me, but, borrowing a move from my nephew, I roll low under their arms and through the open door into the pitch-back hospital room. No, not pitch-black. There is light—dim and twilit—leaking in around the edges of the curtains.
And against this, a shadow suddenly moves on the other side of the room. It peels away from the rest of the darkness, as if it has been pared off with a knife: a slow, keen slide that curls into a tall, slender silhouette. It cuts between the window and the far bed, where Elgar’s unmistakable bulk lays in oblivious repose. In the moonlight, the blurred