by Kevin Hearne
It was another bedroom—the master suite, in fact. It was tastefully appointed with a sod floor fed by regular waterings and sun angling through a long glass panel on the far side of the very high ceiling. On the near side of the ceiling, a wrought-iron chandelier with those ingenious motion-sensing candles flared to life as I opened the door. Midhir—it was definitely him, for I recognized the Druidic tattoos on his biceps—hung upside down from it, wrapped in iron chains to nullify his magic. His throat had been cut, and the blood had sheeted down his face and turned the grass below a dark red. Unable to cast a healing spell and cut off from all earthly aid by his suspension, he’d bled out.
“Gods below,” I breathed, “I’m in deep shit now.”
Whoever had done this to Midhir could easily do the same thing to me. I could cast spells past my iron amulet and aura, of course, but wrap me up in that much iron and cut me off from the earth and I was as vulnerable as a tadpole.
I cast a wild-eyed glance back down the hall, expecting a trap of some sort to be sprung. I immediately assumed I’d either suffer the same fate as Midhir or else be framed for his murder. But seconds ticked by and no cries of alarm sounded. No one snuck up in camouflage and punched me in the junk. The phrase deathly silent came to mind.
My panic gradually faded as minutes passed and it became clear that the world was unaware that I’d just found the body of an ancient being. Eventually, though, they’d figure it out; if nothing else, once Midhir’s body was discovered, Brighid’s hounds would be brought in and they’d pick up my scent.
I toyed briefly with the idea of shifting to a hound myself to pick up some scent clues but discarded the idea as unwise when I was so messed up. Hounds can’t hop on one side very well. And, besides, once this got out, Brighid’s hounds would pick up the scent of whoever had really done this.
Though it was unwise to approach any farther and place myself in the same room as the murder, I spied another tangle of chains, resting on the feather bed. This demanded a closer look, for there were clothes underneath the chains—clothes I thought I recognized. And as a couple of hops improved my angle of vision, I saw that there wasn’t actually a body there—just ashes and foppish clothing that could only belong to Lord Grundlebeard.
I had no way of knowing if those were really the ashes of Lord Grundlebeard or if he—or someone—was clever enough to fake his death this way. But Midhir’s death certainly wasn’t faked. And a powerful magician like him couldn’t have been so thoroughly dominated this way except by another member of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
Though I knew it was all conjecture, the deaths of Midhir and Grundlebeard suggested that they had indeed been involved in the hunt for us. They’d kept an eye on Granuaile through divination or else had spoken to someone who did, and then they’d communicated with vampires and dark elves and Fae assassins and shuttled them around the Old World where they’d be most likely to run into us. They’d even told the Olympians where to ambush us back in Romania. And maybe they’d told Ukko where to find Loki, thus setting him free and possibly accelerating the beginning of the end. In that sense, this ending for them felt like justice.
But they hadn’t been the true bosses. They’d been something akin to executive assistants, a layer of insulation from where the real orders originated, and once Granuaile and I had escaped their net, these two, who could point fingers and name a name, had to be eliminated. Something else clicked into place: It had always bothered me that Faunus began to spread pandemonium throughout Europe at the same time that Perun’s plane was destroyed by Loki. But Grundlebeard could have easily sent a message to Faunus to begin as soon as I arrived at the Fae Court and then made up a cover story to match. He’d probably been the one to send that pod of yewmen after us as well—at someone else’s orders, of course. But now that someone had drunk his milkshake, and Midhir’s too.
Thinking of milkshakes reminded me of the kitchen and my dire need for protein. There was no good I could do by lingering in the bedroom, but I could do myself all kinds of good if I found something to eat. My stomach clenched and rumbled at the thought—genuine hunger pangs. If I fed it, perhaps I’d be able to think more clearly.
The parlor-cum-library, when I hopped through it, turned out to be one of my favorite rooms ever. A tree grew in the far corner to my right, its trunk allowed to stretch up through a hole in the ceiling and spread its canopy there. The floor was a lovely trimmed lawn. Starting on either side of the tree, walnut bookshelves lined the walls, oddly but fabulously filled with nothing but graphic novels and manga. Centered in the room, a copy of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta was set precisely in the middle of a matching walnut coffee table set low to the ground, Japanese style. The room invited you to pick a graphic novel and read on the grass, perhaps leaning against the trunk of the tree. But the placement of V for Vendetta bothered me. It hadn’t been casually laid near one of the edges, which would indicate that it had been left by a reader. It was aligned squarely in the center, so that the table edges acted like a frame, directing one’s attention to the cover. Perhaps it was a message of some kind? If so, intended for whom? For whomever found Midhir’s body? If Midhir had been killed to conceal the identity of the real person behind my hunting, was this message intended for me? Or maybe Midhir’s death had nothing to do with me at all. The vendetta might have been against him rather than me, and this timing was entirely coincidental. Regardless, it only increased my suspicion that there was a trap here somewhere and I had yet to spring it.
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 dea
d. 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. Bin
d 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.