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  For Zoe

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to both of this book’s editors—Eric Raab and Liz Gorinsky—and to everyone at Tor for the outstanding art and design of this thing. Particular thanks to Wilhem Staehle, who produced a dozen wonderful alternative cover art designs; I wish we could have used all of them. And as always, thanks to my agent, Howard Morhaim.

  Thanks to Sarah for her comments and constant support, and thank you to William for his patience.

  Inspirations for this book are too many to list, but the reader may notice in particular bits of A Princess of Mars (especially in chapter 18), Gullivar of Mars (chapter 8), Out of the Silent Planet, Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (chapter 21), William Timlin’s The Ship That Sailed to Mars, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (chapter 13). Robert Markley’s Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination and Robert Crossley’s Imagining Mars: A Literary History were both invaluable. Key inspiration came from Alex Owen’s brilliant The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. An early scene in this book is based on a real event described in her book—an 1898 meeting of Frederick Leigh Gardner (stockbroker) and Annie Horniman (theatrical impresario) for occult purposes.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraphs

  The First Degree (The Great Storm of 1893)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  The Second Degree (The Modern Age)

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  The Third Degree (Perdurabo)

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  The Fourth Degree (Analysis)

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Fifth Degree (The Liber ad Astra)

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  I: Sun

  II: Mercury

  III: Venus

  IV: Terra Mater

  V: Mars

  VI: Jupiter

  VII: Saturn

  VIII: Uranus

  IX: Neptune

  The Sixth Degree (The Great Magical War of 1894–1895)

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  I: The Rite of Jupiter

  II: The Rite of Mercury

  III: The Rite of Mars

  IV: The Hour of Venus

  V: The Hour of Saturn

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  The Seventh Degree (Angel and Abyss)

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  The Eighth Degree (Vast Countenance)

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  The Ninth and Final Degree

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  1937

  Tor Books by Felix Gilman

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The nineteenth century has run its course and finished its record. A new era has dawned, not by chronological prescription alone, but to the vital sense of humanity. Novel thoughts are rife; fresh impulses stir the nations; the soughing of the wind of progress strikes every ear.…

  The physics of the heavenly bodies, indeed, finds its best opportunities in unlooked-for disclosures; for it deals with transcendental conditions, and what is strange to terrestrial experience may serve admirably to expound what is normal in the skies. In celestial science especially, facts that appear subversive are often the most illuminative, and the prospect of its advance widens and brightens with each divagation enforced or permitted from the strait paths of rigid theory.

  —Agnes Clerke, A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century, 1902

  Unfortunate Mars! What evil fairy presided at his birth?

  —Camille Flammarion, Astronomy for Amateurs, 1904

  THE

  FIRST

  DEGREE

  {The Great Storm of 1893}

  Chapter One

  It was the evening of what would later be called the Great Storm of ’93, and Arthur Archibald Shaw sat at his usual desk in the Reading Room of the British Museum, yawning and toying with his pen. Soft rain pattered on the dome. Lamps overhead shone through a haze of golden dust. Arthur yawned. There was a snorer at the desk opposite, head back and mouth open. Two women nearby whispered to each other in French. Carts creaked down the aisle, the faint tremors of their passing threatening to topple the tower of books on Arthur’s desk, which concerned explosives, and poisons, and exotic methods of murder.

  He was writing a detective story. This was something of an experiment. Not knowing quite how to start, he’d begun at the end, which went:

  That night the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral broke through London’s black clouds as if it were the white head of Leviathan rising from the ocean. The spire and the cross shone in a cold and quite un-Christian moonlight, and diabolical laughter echoed through the night. The detective and his quarry stood atop the dome, beneath the spire, each man ragged from the exertion of their chase.

  “Stop there, Vane,” the detective called; but Professor Vane only laughed again, and began to climb the spire. And so Dr Syme pursued.

  Which was not all bad, in Arthur’s opinion. The important thing was to move quickly. It was only that month that Dr Conan Doyle had sent his famous detective off into the great beyond—chucking him unceremoniously from a waterfall in Switzerland—and the news that there would be no more stories of the Baker Street genius had thrown London’s publishing world into something of a panic. In fact, there were nearly riots, and some disturbed individuals had threatened to torch the offices of the Strand Magazine. The hero’s death left a gap in the firmament. The fellow who was first to fill it might make a fortune. It was probably already too late.

  For the past two and a half years Arthur had been employed by The Monthly Mammoth to write on the subject of the Very Latest Scientific Advances. He wasn’t any kind of scientist himself, but nobody seemed to mind. He wrote about dinosaurs, and steam engines, and rubber, and the laying of transatlantic telegraph cables; or how telephones worked; or the new American elevators at the Savoy; or whether there was air on the moon; or where precisely in South America to observe the perturbations of Venus; or whether the crooked lines astronomers saw on the fourth planet might be canals, or railroads, or other signs of civilization—and so on. Not a bad job, in its way—there were certainly worse—but the Mammoth paid little, and late, and there was no prospect of advancement there. Therefore he’d invented Dr Cephi
as Syme: detective, astronomer, mountain-climber, world-traveller, occasional swordsman, et cetera.

  Vane dangled by one hand from the golden cross, laughing, his white hair blowing in the wind. With the other hand he produced a pistol from his coat and pointed it at Syme.

  “What brought you here, Syme?”

  The Professor appeared to expect an answer. Since Dr Syme saw no place to take shelter, he began to explain the whole story—the process by which, according to his usual method, he had tackled each part of Vane’s wild scheme—how he had ascended that mountain of horrors—from the poisoning at the Café de L’Europe, to the cipher in the newspaper advertisements that led to the uncovering of the anarchists in Deptford, which in turn led to the something or other by some means, and so on, and thus to the discovery of the bomb beneath Her Highness’s coach, and thus inevitably here, to the Cathedral.

  Arthur sketched absent-mindedly on his blotting paper: a dome, a cross, inky scudding clouds.

  The notion of the struggle on the dome had come to him in a dream, just two nights ago; it had impressed itself upon him with the intensity of a lightning flash. Unfortunately, all else remained dark. How did his detective get there? How precisely had they ascended the dome (was it possible?). And above all: what happened next?

  Nothing, perhaps. In his dream, Dr Syme fell, toppling from the dome into black fog, nothing but hard London streets below. Not the best way to start a detective’s adventures. Something would have to be done about that. Perhaps he could have poor Syme solve his subsequent cases from the afterlife, through the aid of a medium.

  Dr Syme lunged, knocking the pistol from the Professor’s grip, but his enemy swung away, laughing, and drew from his coat a new weapon: a watch.

  “We have time,” the Professor said. “Dr Syme, I confess I have arranged events so that we might have time and solitude to speak. I have always felt that you, as a man of science, might see the urgent need for reform—for certain sacrifices to be made—”

  Arthur’s neighbour began to pack his day’s writings into his briefcase. This fellow—name unknown—was stand-offish, thin, spectacled. Judging from the pile of books on his desk, on which words like clairvoyance and Osiris were among the most intelligible, his interests tended to the occult. He closed his briefcase, stood, swayed, then sat back with a thump and lowered his head to his desk. Arthur sympathised. The dread hour and its inexorable approach! Soon the warders would come around, waking up the sleepers, emptying out the room, driving Arthur, and Arthur’s neighbour, and the French women, and all the scholars and idlers alike out to face the night, and the rain, and the wind that rattled the glass overhead.

  Midnight! The Professor waited, as if listening for some news to erupt from the befogged city below.

  “Well,” Syme said. “I dare say I know your habits after all this time. I know how you like to do things in twos. I knew there would be a second bomb. At the nave, was it, or the altar? I expect Inspector Wright’s boys found it quick enough—”

  A terrible change came across the Professor’s face. All trace of civilization vanished, and savagery took its place—or, rather, not savagery, but that pure malignancy that only the refined intellect is capable of.

  Howling, the Professor let go of the cross and flung himself onto Dr Syme.

  Pens scratching away. Rain drumming on the glass, loudly now. A row of women industriously translating Russian into English, or English into Sanskrit, Italian into French. Arthur’s neighbour appeared to have fallen asleep.

  Arm in arm, locked together in deathly struggle, the two men fell—rolling down the side of the dome—toward

  Toward what, indeed!

  “By God,” said Inspector Wright, hearing the terrible crash. He came running out into the street, to see, side by side, dead, upon the ground—

  Arthur put down his pen, and scratched thoughtfully at his beard.

  His neighbour moaned slightly, as if something were causing him pain. Concerned, Arthur poked his shoulder.

  The man jumped to his feet, staring about in wild-eyed confusion; then he snatched up his briefcase and left in such a hurry that scholars all along the rows of the Reading Room looked up and tut-tutted at him.

  * * *

  Rain sluiced noisily down the glass. Lamps swayed in mid-air. Thunder reverberated under the dome as the Reading Room emptied out.

  Arthur’d thought he might try to bring out his friend Heath for dinner, or possibly Waugh, but neither was likely to venture out in that weather. Bad timing and bloody awful luck.

  He collected his hat, coat, and umbrella. These items were just barely up to the Reading Room’s standards of respectability, and he doubted that they were equal to the challenge of the weather outside. Certainly the manuscript of Dr Syme’s First Case was not—he’d left it folded into the pages of a treatise on poisons.

  Outside a small band of scholars, idlers, and policemen sheltered beneath the colonnade. Beyond the colossal white columns, the courtyard was dark and the rain swirled almost sideways. In amongst it were stones, mud, leaves, tiles, newspapers, and flower-pots. Some unfortunate fellow’s sandwich-board toppled end-over-end across the yard, caught flight, and vanished in the thrashing air. Arthur’s hat went after it. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. A tropical monsoon, or whirlwind, or some such thing.

  He was suddenly quite unaccountably afraid. It was what one might call an animal instinct, or an intuition. Later—much later—the members of the Company of the Spheres would tell him that he was sensitive, and he’d think back to the night of the Great Storm and wonder if he’d sensed, even then, what was behind it. Perhaps. On the other hand, anyone can be spooked by lightning.

  He was out past the gates, into the street, and leaning forward into the wind, homewards down Great Russell Street, before he’d quite noticed that he’d left the safety of the colonnade. When he turned back to get his bearings, the rain was so thick he could hardly see a thing. The Museum was a faint haze of light under a black dome; its columns were distant white giants, lumbering off into the sea. The familiar scene was rendered utterly alien; for all he could tell, he might not have been in London any more, but whisked away to the Moon.

  His umbrella tore free of his grip and took flight. He watched it follow his hat away over the rooftops, flapping like some awful black pterodactyl between craggy, suddenly lightning-lit chimneys, then off who-knows-where across London.

  Chapter Two

  In a quiet Mayfair drawing-room, a man and a woman sat stiffly upright, eyes closed and hands outstretched across a white table-cloth. The curtains were drawn. A single candle on a rococo mantelpiece illuminated a circle of midnight-blue wallpaper, a row of photographs, and a rather hideous painting of the Titan Saturn devouring his children. There was a faint scent of incense.

  The woman was middle-aged. She wore high-collared black and silver, and an expression of fierce resolution. The man was young and handsome, fair and blue-eyed, and faintly smiling. He was the subject of most of the photographs on the mantelpiece, posing stiffly, dressed for tennis or mountaineering or camel-riding.

  On the table there was a large white card with a red sphere painted on it; they rested their fingers on its corners.

  They sat all evening in silence, hardly even breathing, until at the same moment they each opened their eyes in alarm, jerking back their hands so violently that they sent the card spinning off the table into the dark.

  The man swore, got to his feet, and went in search of it.

  The woman clutched her necklace. “Mercury—what happened?”

  He went by the name Mercury when they met. She went by Jupiter.

  “A rude interruption.”

  “Rudeness! I call it an assault. They struck us.”

  “I suppose they did. Yes. Where did it go, do you suppose?”

  “We were further than ever before. I saw the gate open before me—the ring turning—did you see it too?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then a
terrible discord. And shaking, as if the spheres themselves halted in their motions—how?” She took a deep breath, collected herself, and stood.

  He crouched. “Aha. It slid under the wardrobe—and that hasn’t moved since my father’s day. Bloody nuisance.”

  “They struck at us, though we were far out.”

  “They did, didn’t they? Troubling. I thought we had more time.”

  She glared at him. “Your father’s friends, Atwood?”

  Martin Atwood was his real name, and this was his house. He stood. “Well, don’t blame me.”

  “No? Then who should I blame?”

  “I expect we’ll find out soon enough. I wonder how they did it? I wonder what they did? Something dreadful, no doubt. Wouldn’t that be just like them?”

  He lit a lamp, and snuffed the candle.

  “If only we knew who they were,” he said.

  There was the sound of rain at the window, first a whisper, then a clattering, thrashing din.

  “Aha,” he said. “See? Something dreadful.”

  Over the noise of the storm there was the shrill insistent ring of the telephone across the hall. Atwood poured himself a drink before answering.

  * * *

  The storm smashed a fortune in window glass. It uprooted century-old trees. It sank boats and toppled cranes. It washed up things from the bottom of the river, rusted and rotten stuff, yesterday’s rubbish and artifacts older than the Romans. It vandalised the docks at St. Katharine’s. It flooded streets and houses and cellars and the Underground. It deposited chimneys on unfamiliar roofs, laundry in other peoples’ gardens, dead dogs where they weren’t wanted. It cracked the dome of the Reading Room and let in the rain. It coated the fine marble facades of Whitehall with river muck. Lightning struck Nelson’s Column, scattering the few dozen unfortunate souls who slept at its foot like so many wet leaves. The lights along the Embankment whipped free and floated downriver. The London Electric Supply Corporation’s central station at Deptford flooded and went dark. Barometers everywhere were caught unawares. Omnibuses slewed like storm-tossed ships, trams derailed, horses broke their legs. Men died venturing out after stalls, carts, pigeons, and other items of vanishing property.