by Kevin Hearne
I hopped forward to take a peek around the corner into the next room. It must be special in some way, for, unlike the rest of the floors I had seen, this one was covered with marble. The ceiling was high and frescoed with lots of naked flesh, but my view of the room—clearly a large one—was blocked by square marble pillars around the perimeter. It suggested an entertainment room of some sort; the middle would be entirely open and servants would circulate in the space behind the pillars, darting between them to refill plates and glasses and take away empties. It was much longer than it was wide. Looking straight across from my vantage point, I could see a wooden door directly opposite me; across and to my left, on what I would call the north wall, were double swinging doors with portholes in them, the kind that one sees in restaurants to allow servers to open them with elbows and shoulders as they’re carrying trays of food. That’s what I needed. A refrigerator full of protein. Or a safe way out of here. So far I had seen no friendly red EXIT signs, but the sight of the kitchen doors made my mouth water. I made sure to top off the reserves in my bear charm before stepping onto the dead marble floor.
Hopping with a purpose, I made for the first pillar to help me keep my balance. My bare foot sounded like a sad trout flapping against the marble floor. I paused at the pillar and peered through the space between it and the next one at the center of the room. As best as I could tell, it was a room for hosting large orgies—the sort of room a realtor might diplomatically label as a “pleasure garden” or a “hedonist’s salon.”
Couches and divans and overstuffed pillows lined the edges of the room and encouraged lounging, shall we say, as broad marble stairs led down to a sunken area in the middle that had been quartered, the sections separated by catwalks that met in the middle at a circular stage equipped with a stripper pole. One quarter was a deep koi pond intended for swimming au naturel, another was a sumptuous spa, and another was a shallow tub filled with thin red liquid that I guessed was melted gelatin; it was probably meant for Jell-O wrestling but had with neglect dissolved into a wretched little fuck-puddle. The final quarter, roughly catercorner from me, was of a similarly exploitative nature; it was a mud-wrestling pit, and it was occupied. Not by wrestlers or anything human or Fae but rather by the manticore we’d seen guarding the Old Way at Dubringer Moor. He was chained with thick steel cables to three different pillars on the far side of the room. I froze and watched him; his eyes were closed, head resting on his front paws. Perhaps I’d surprised him in a nap? Or perhaps he was dead. The outline of his ribs was showing underneath his red pelt, and while it was unlikely that he had died of starvation in the three days since we’d seen him in Germany, it was possible. Dying of thirst would be more likely if he had been chained here all that time. Something had to be wrong with him; I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t have heard or smelled me long ago if he were hale.
I looked at him through my faerie specs and saw that he still had an aura; he wouldn’t have one if he were dead. So he was sleeping or pretending to sleep—or truly unconscious.
If nothing else, he represented proof that Midhir and Grundlebeard had been involved in our hunting.
And the proof that he represented a mortal threat was also plain: Small piles of ashes dotted the room, mute markers testifying to the death of numerous faeries.
Prudence and a profound disability to move quickly dictated that I should simply try to find another way out rather than hop across in front of him, chained or not, so I turned around and spent ten minutes discovering that the path through Midhir’s sex room was the only practical exit. Past the selkie alcove, the architecture afforded nothing but another couple of unoccupied bedrooms. I toyed with the idea of laboriously unbinding the substance of a wall so that I could squeeze through the hole into the proverbial sunset, but there was some bad juju about it in the magical spectrum—either a ward or a trap, I wasn’t sure which. It was advanced binding of the sort the Tuatha Dé Danann were capable of, but I didn’t know if it was Midhir’s work or the work of whoever killed him. The bindings were tightly coiled, like the ones Aenghus Óg had placed on the mind of the late Tempe police detective Darren Fagles; if I tried to unbind them, it would set off an alarm at the very least, though I wouldn’t be surprised if something more violent happened. Insane as it sounded, I thought it best to risk the sleeping manticore. I might be able to sneak by him, but there was no way I could fight off anyone summoned by an alarm.
Returning the way I had come, I nervously filled my bear charm once more before stepping onto the marble and then employed my lopsided pogo dance to reach the first pillar. The manticore hadn’t moved. It still lay motionless in the mud.
Lacking the luxury of time—my magic was steadily draining now due to the camouflage spell—I hopped to the next pillar in three bounds and paused to check on the manticore. Motionless still.
I had a much larger space to cross now. Though I was tackling the short width of the room rather than the length, it was still a damn big room and the pillars were clustered at the corners of it. A matching pair to the two on my end awaited me perhaps thirty feet away, and it was behind those pillars—or, rather, to the left of those pillars on the north wall—that the kitchen doors waited; beyond them, straight ahead on the east wall, was the door to a mystery room. It was a long way for a one-legged, one-armed dude to go without any support, but I didn’t have much choice. Taking a deep breath and praying to the gods below, I pushed off from the pillar and lunged forward, hoping I didn’t wipe out.
The manticore woke when I was halfway across. The eyes snapped open, wide and alert, and searched for me. Though I was camouflaged, it wasn’t perfect invisibility, and he was able to spot my movement if not my clear outlines. No doubt he heard me moving as well. The black spiked tail rose up into the air behind him like some unholy cobra and fired venomous barbs in my direction. Some of them sank into the upholstery of a long red leather sofa facing the koi pond and blessedly shielded my lower body, and others missed to either side. But one struck me high on the right arm, and the pain that exploded there was unlike anything I’ve ever felt.
Worse than the tooth faeries eating my left side. Worse than the Hammers of God throwing a knife in my kidney. Worse than dark elves setting me on fire in Greece. It was nerve-searing, caustic agony that shut my motor function down, and I spilled forward onto the unforgiving marble, screaming. Fragarach flew from my grasp and skittered across the floor.
I triggered my healing charm but feared it was already too late. I began to convulse with involuntary muscle spasms, helpless to stop them and unable to pluck out the thorn with either hand—my left was useless and my right hand couldn’t reach the side of my own right shoulder. I managed to glimpse the thorn before a convulsion jerked my head away; the skin and flesh around it were dissolving and blackening—not like they would in acid but more like in a base, as if the toxin would do double service as a drain cleaner. It was ruining the topmost band of my shape-shifting tattoos—the one that let me return to my human form. So if I somehow managed to survive long enough to shift to an animal—not a bad idea, since as an otter or a hound I might be able to reach around and rip out the thorn with my teeth—I would never be able to shift back. I’d be stuck.
And I was stuck anyway. No one knew where I was. No one would arrive in time to help me with a convenient vial of manticore antivenin, because no such thing existed. I had to figure something out before I died an ignominious death, cut off from the earth in Midhir’s seedy sex hall. The venom was a vicious cocktail of biological agents—nothing against which my cold iron aura would be any use. A searing alkali to burn and dissolve my skin, an inflammatory akin to concentrated capsaicin to keep all the nerves alight and to swell soft tissue, and a fast-acting tetanus analog to lock up my muscles. It wasn’t actually tetanus or I would have been able to fight that off easily; it was a different molecule causing all the trouble. It paralyzed the manticore’s victims in the most painful manner possible—imagine an epic charley horse in every single
muscle—and then he would eat them whole and alive as they screamed their way down his gullet.
The leather couch provided cover from further missiles, but the manticore hadn’t bothered to fire any more or even to rise up out of the mud. He knew by the noise I was making that he’d scored a hit, and that was all he needed to do. And he’d played me very well, very patiently; at no point had he ever been asleep. He had simply waited until I made myself an easy target.
I had to escape to another headspace if I was going to manage anything, and I thought Dante would serve me well. Though Druids have to learn different languages to manage their magic and communication with elementals, we also have to memorize large bodies of literature as a method of dividing our consciousness; it allows us to take others with us when we shift planes, for example. The body of work is a template for thoughts and a world unto itself, and we can slip ourselves or someone else into it. Granuaile had absorbed Whitman so far, so she could take one other person with her when she shifted. I had The Odyssey in the original Greek on tap, The Iliad in Latin, the complete works of Shakespeare, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov in Russian, along with a bunch of bardic tales in Old Irish, which was my first project when I was a wee lad. I was maxed out now; active human memory can’t handle much more than seven things at a time without significant risk of loss. But headspaces also have other uses—especially in situations like this one. They can be the happy place you need to find when your mind or body is decidedly unhappy. Dealing with the virulence and pain of the manticore’s venom, therefore, could be left to my primary headspace. Removing the thorn would require cool thoughts in another, and getting access to more power before my magic ran out would have to follow directly after.
The thorn was not a straight spine but rather held small sacs of poison along its length, and these were pulsing and delivering more of the manticore’s evil shit into my flesh. I had to remove it before the poison overwhelmed my ability to break it down; I was barely keeping pace as it was, fighting to keep the muscles of my right side unlocked and my diaphragm from freezing up. I slipped into Canto V of Purgatorio, and the rhythm of it existed outside the pain and the contractions and the havoc being wrought on my system:
Là ’ve ’l vocabol suo diventa vano,
arriva’ io forato ne la gola,
fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano.
Yes. In purgatory, souls burn away that which afflicts them and, passing through the crucible, become whole again. Bind the thorn to the back of the sofa and ignore the fact that you can’t blink or move your eyes and your throat is closing and your organs are edging toward failure.
Quivi perdei la vista e la parola
nel nome di Maria fini’, e quivi
caddi, e rimase la mia carne sola.
And as the poetry flowed through that part of my mind, calm waters next to burning shores of my agony, I could concentrate on my goal and craft the proper binding, croak it past the swelling tissues of my throat, and feel the thorn retreat from my arm, flying a few yards to sink into the back of the sofa. The pain dipped for a brief moment, as a burn will when ice is first applied, but it returned soon enough, as the already savaged muscles on my left side tore and contracted and my tissues continued to swell. I could conceivably fight off the toxin now and break it down if I had enough magic to fuel the healing, but I was running low and had to access the earth’s energy buried underneath the marble floor. Sticking with Dante but skipping to Canto IX, I recalled a passage that spoke of marble and sundered stone, an appropriate backdrop for what I wished to do.
The marble floor did not have the same security bindings I had seen on the walls of the back bedrooms; it was plain marble, malleable to sufficient force, and that was probably because Midhir couldn’t imagine anyone trying to escape his pleasure dome. I spread out my hand, fighting its desire to curl into a fist, and focused my mind on the swirled-milk pattern underneath it. The marble was dolomite rock with very low silica content—primarily calcium-magnesium carbonate that I unbound in a microscopic area and then strived to reapply as a macro to a larger area the size of my hand. My voice gave out, however, and I coughed in the middle of the unbinding and had to start over. I gasped for breath and the pain nearly intruded into my calm headspace, but the poetry kept flowing.
Trembling and wincing, I carefully tried again, and this time the macro took hold. The marble underneath my hand became brittle as it broke down into its component minerals, and I could pull it apart, chunks of calcium and carbon and magnesium. I had to reapply the macro binding one more time because the first hadn’t gone deep enough, and that drained my bear charm completely. Without magic to fuel my body’s war against the venom, the poison raged through my veins and I could feel it destroying me, burning and at once paralyzing. My muscles spasmed involuntarily and my giblets howled to me of their torture; I imagined I could hear my liver and spleen screaming a duet, taxed far beyond their ability to filter the blood. I clutched another handful of crumbling marble out of what was now a shallow hole, tossed it away, and managed to scoop one final handful before my fingers seized up completely and wouldn’t let go. At the same time my diaphragm locked in place, which meant I had already drawn my last breath.
The bare earth was there, underneath my hand; all I had to do was supinate my forearm, twist my wrist so that the back of my hand could make contact and draw energy through my tattoos. But my biceps wanted to flex and curl my hand away. Shaking and twitching from the effort, I attempted to roll my wrist clockwise. The pull of my biceps actually kept my hand down in the hole, the meat of the palm braced against the edge.
I strained but couldn’t do it—a simple rotation of the wrist I typically performed without thinking was now impossible for me with all my will put into it. But there was some give in a few of my longer muscles along the uninjured side of my back. I threw my left shoulder as best as I could to flip and roll over faceup, and at first I thought it wasn’t enough. I was on my side, my hand trapped in that hole, and my vision started to darken at the edges. But the inexorable tug of gravity pulled me down past the point of no return, and physics was able to turn my wrist in that hole where my will could not. Once the fine filigree of knots that formed the border of my tattoos touched the earth, the magic rushed in, all I needed and more, balm for my pain and energy to fight the pestilence and unlock my muscles. I began with my diaphragm and took a glorious, heaving gasp of air. After a couple more breaths I lay there quivering and slowly relaxing my body, laughing softly with relief. I’d be worthless for much else until I got the infection completely neutralized, but at least I knew that I’d continue to breathe, until something else killed me.
A voice pressed into my consciousness; it didn’t merely bang on my eardrums, it probed into my brain with unwelcome fingers.
∼Hrrr. How is it that you still live?
I craned my neck around but saw no one nearby. I managed to rasp, “Who’s there?”
When the voice answered, I realized that the sound my ears heard and the words my brain decoded were not the same thing at all. What my ears heard was like one of those YouTube videos where cats try to make human noises—in this case, a very big cat. But in my head I heard the words in English, except with a disturbing vibrato to them, a low, thrumming, malevolent purr.
∼There is no one here but us, you fool. You may surmise that through process of elimination.
“Is this the manticore?”
∼I knew you would figure it out. Now please explain why you have not died.
“How about you explain what you’re doing here?”
∼You persist in asking the obvious. I am here to kill whatever enters the room.
“Volunteered, did you?”
∼Hrrr. I detect sarcasm in reference to my chains. Vexing and counterproductive.
“Well, it’s vexing to be shot with poisonous barbs too, so suck it, uh … manticore.”
∼I am called Ahriman. Who are you?
Ever
since Odysseus told Polyphemus his name was Nobody, it’s been a rule that you should never give a predator your real name. So I replied, “I am Werner Drasche.” Neither of us might ever escape this place, but if we both did and he went searching for the arcane lifeleech, the result would work out for me regardless of who died. I certainly was in no shape to finish off Ahriman the manticore myself.
∼There are very few who can survive my sting. How did you accomplish this?
“I heal fast. Obviously.” Not as fast as I might wish. And the danger wasn’t behind me; I was simply behind a couch. I estimated there was at least ten feet of space between the edge of the couch and the nearest pillar. That was ten feet I wouldn’t be covering quickly, and Ahriman would easily perforate me when I tried—perhaps more than once. Fragarach lay in plain sight in the midst of that span, so I’d need to pause to pick it up. Or I’d have to crawl the whole way. If I moved slowly enough, the camouflage might keep me invisible. I doubted it.