The Grimoire of Yule (The Shadows of Legend Book 1)

by Adam Golden

  Nicholas let out a long breath and tried to blink away the tears forming in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, studying the other man’s one good eye. “Sorry for so much.”

  The chain between his manacles clanked as he reached around Tulio and pulled the shattered remnant of his brother into a fierce bear hug. The ebon blade slid smoothly through Nicholas’ heart as the jagged end of the knife’s onyx ram-horn handle punched through Tulio’s chest and heart.

  The wreckage of Tulio’s earthly form crumpled around the weapon. His raw, bloody brow came to rest against Nicholas’ forehead so the two were eye to eye. Long strands of bloody spittle hung from lips which quivered into a tumultuous smile.

  “Free . . .” Tulio gasped.

  Nicholas watched the last light of life leak out the shattered corpse he was pinned to and felt hot tears rolling down his cheeks. He spasmed, coughing bloody phlegm, and forced a ragged, shuddering breath into his dying body.

  “Goodbye, brother.” It came out as a sort of rattled sigh as the two men clutched each other amidst the spreading pool of their mingled hearts’ blood.

  Betwixt Two Shores

  Stiff fingers, more than half frozen and flayed to bloody ribbons, clawed desperately at another sharp crag. With a strength born of sheer animal panic, Nicholas dragged his battered body up and up, forever up. He scrambled madly, pushing himself in a bounding reckless dash, racing over the slippery, broken face of a tumbling mountain of ice.

  The frozen peak twisted and rocked like a drunk man’s stumble. Slabs of ice that seemed granite hard one moment disintegrated beneath his feet the next. No hold was certain, and each mammoth shift or violent concussion threatened to drag the hapless climber down with the wreckage of the crumbling behemoth.

  He hung by one tortured hand looking down into the churning lake of liquid flame that swirled below. Glowing with malevolent hunger, the burning whirlpool was slowly pulling the broken mountain down into oblivion, and Nicholas along with it. The sorcerer pulled his gaze away and forced his attention upward. There was no time, no room for a slip in his focus. If the blazing whirlpool didn’t flash him to a cinder, the knife-edged ice would split him open like a husk or crush him flat between falling boulders the size of houses. Keep moving up. Up toward what?

  Hope?

  Doom?

  He couldn’t know. The blazing white hole in the roiling roof of black clouds that surged above this place could be anything, it might not be a means of escape at all, but there was a chance, and any chance had to be better than the madness around him now.

  The small part of his brain that wasn’t wholly consumed with surviving second to second knew this couldn’t be real. Every working of his hand reminded him of the sound of the knife, and the feel of those fingers coming away. It felt like a memory barely recalled, but he knew he’d been on a ship before he was here. Yet the heat of that bubbling pool of incandescent flame felt real, as did the numbing keen hardness of the mountain. Certainly, the ragged bloody pulp he’d made of his somehow remade hands in his furious climb felt real. But surely no place like this existed in the world?

  Are you still in that world? the whispering traitor in his mind asked.

  Nicholas remembered the nightmare scene in that cabin of horrors all too clearly. He remembered Tulio’s madness, his wild homicidal glee. He remembered the knife sliding into his heart, and then this.

  Could it be?

  If he were dead and he’d been judged . . . No. He couldn’t let himself think it. Though, this place . . . No! Even if it were true, what choice did he have but to try to go on? He looked up at the shining white disc in the clouds. It was an escape. It was! He would reach it, and when he did he would discover that he was . . .

  Where? that hectoring little voice asked him. Where might you be? You remember dying, and you woke to this scene of nightmare. Accept it. You’re dead and this is Hell.

  “No!”

  The snarled reply to his own thought never even reached his ear, lost between the grinding death knell of the falling mountain and the constant hiss of rushing columns of boiling steam that shot up all around him. A sickening crack rang out, like a half-dozen claps of thunder harmonizing all around him, and Nicholas’ heart sank.

  The mountain shuddered, the glacial slab beneath his feet trembled and tore itself free of the larger body. Nicholas barely had an instant to push himself off the retreating ice. His battered, exhausted legs hardly had the strength to propel him upward. The weak jump nearly failed, and his tortured hands refused to grip the narrow promontory that offered the only slim hope the wizard had of avoiding the flames below.

  Nicholas spread both arms and legs wide as he slammed into the iron-hard spike of ice and desperately clinched his limbs around it. A thousand keen-edged blades of ice ripped into flesh and muscle. He gritted his teeth and tightened his hold, pushing the frozen fangs deeper into his own skin. It hurt. God, it hurt! But the pain was welcomed, if he hurt he lived. Surely that was so, and what’s more, the shimmering hole in the dark clouds was much closer now. He couldn’t look directly at it—it blazed brighter than the sun ever could—but he felt it.

  A wave of warmth washed over him. It wasn’t the savage heat of the fire below, this was softer, like the soothing glow of a spring afternoon’s sunlight. A languorous sigh leaked from his lips at the delicious comfort the soft warmth offered. The cold seemed less biting, the clamor farther away, and the rigid tension of his muscles started to relax. Finally, some respite, just a pause, just for a moment.

  His long sigh became a strangled yelp as his weight, the slick wetness of the ice, and the hungry sucking pull of the vortex below conspired to pull him free of his perch. Desperate, Nicholas sawed the blade-sharp ice deeper into his flesh, trading blinding pain for precious leverage. The broken bishop screamed out his agony and determination as he ripped his battered body free of its frozen barbs, only to force the sharp ice back into his flesh again and again as he climbed. Progress came slowly, tortuously slowly, but he dragged himself upward one bloody, bone-deep gash at a time. Nicholas’ lifeblood streamed over the slick ice in thick rivulets, like the tears that poured over his cheeks.

  Time passed like the slow drift of a glacier, and progress came in grudging, infinitesimal drabs. After what seemed to Nicholas like the span of dynasties, he looked up and saw a broken, ragged claw of icy rock jutting up toward the boiling storm above. He could see the peak. He was actually going to do it! His pain-addled, blood-starved brain could barely fathom the truth of it. Success? Could it really be?

  Nicholas hung there, hugging the hated rock. One broken remnant clung desperately to another. He was horrified to realize he couldn’t move. He was frozen, petrified.

  What if it isn’t what you hope? that treacherous voice asked, and Nicholas shook off the thought stubbornly. There was no room for doubt. He wouldn’t fail.

  What if it is exactly what you hope? the small voice pressed. What then?

  That thought brought him up short. Why, once he was back he’d . . . of course he’d . . .

  What? the agitator in his own mind demanded. What are you struggling so badly to get back to? What is there for you? More plotting and power games? More scheming for influence and position? More betrayal? More murder?

  No! he told the voice. I can do better, be better. I will. I can make amends, can’t I?

  Nicholas shook himself, trying to shed the doubt that clung like a weight. He would restore himself, he would win, and then he would make it right, all of it. The diamond determination that had once been constant, and which he’d feared was gone forever, was suddenly there, sure and steady.

  A pretty idea, but it’s too late. You’ve trapped yourself, again.

  The realization all but knocked the wind out of him. The mocking voice in his head was right. There was nowhere for him to go. The path to the peak above was fifty feet of sheer ice, a smooth wall of slick milky white, utterly free of the barbed projections and sharp edges of the rest of th
e mountain. A man would need talons of iron.

  “. . . or wings,” Nicholas muttered to himself as he hung on the side of the pitching mountain.

  He cringed as a column of steam screamed its way upward, spattering him with boiling droplets of water whose heat melted the ice around him, making his perch ever more precarious.

  The mountain trembled, and Nicholas let out a long, resigned breath and closed his eyes.

  Just rest, the voice told him. You’ve done enough. More than enough.

  Another violent burst of superheated stream rocketed upward, and Nicholas adjusted his grip to compensate for the melting ice without opening his eyes.

  Four, five, six . . .

  Keeping calm and measured was important, but it was so difficult in the tumult, so much distraction.

  Let it end, his bludgeoning conscience begged.

  Twenty-one, twenty-two . . .

  Nicholas bellowed and kicked against the rocky ice wall, throwing himself backward off his hated mountain and out into oblivion. He pinwheeled, toppling end over end as he raced toward gaping jaws of flaming annihilation. He knew, somehow he simply knew, that those flames, for all of their incredible heat, would not offer him a quick death. That roiling rift of fire was as cruel as it was hungry. It would be slow and vicious. Spider web cracks fractured his new-found confidence as he cartwheeled toward certain doom. What had he done?

  You let go. It was ri . . .

  A column of blazing steam three times as thick as the span of his arms slammed into Nicholas’ body and shot his rapidly cooking wreck of meat into the air. Pain like nothing he could have imagined obliterated all thought. Searing, melting heat blasted away all identity, sense of self, or purpose. His universe was empty, a white void where only agony lived. The twisted claw of ice atop his mountain was left far behind, though Nicholas didn’t see it. His eyes had dried and burst under the pressure and heat of the jet he rode. Every hair on his hapless corpse flashed to ash. He felt his tongue shrivel in his mouth and his testicles roast between his legs. His broiled flesh crisped, shrank, and cracked, and boiled muscle and tendon loosened and slid, slipping from bone. Nicholas felt every blazing filament of his torment, conscious and attuned to every instant.

  —

  A high pitched, gleeful shriek brought Nicholas’ head around in time to see the children vanish into the ocean of tall brown grass that surrounded the lone tree he and Lyra sat under. He lost sight of the pair instantly, but the sounds of their chase, the raucous crash through the grass and the muffled, excited exclamations of their adolescent hunt, still reached his ears and made him smile. A soft breeze bent the brown stalks in a spreading wave as it blew through. Somewhere in the branches, a lone bird trilled. Nicholas’ thumb brushed rhythmically over Lyra’s forehead where it rested in his lap and he leaned his head back against the gnarled elm’s trunk. What a beautiful day.

  A vague sense of tension pricked at him for no reason that he could identify. Not that he was trying all that hard, after all, it was a small thing and easily dismissed with the sun shining so brilliantly above. He let the rhythm of his thumb on Lyra’s smooth brow and the sunlight’s bright blaze against his closed eyes lull him. It felt good to relax, to rest. How long had it been since he really rested?

  Too long, part of him answered, but that was foolish. He, Lyra, and the children lived a peaceful, quiet life. He had his tasks overseeing his lands of course, but his life was as restfully idyllic as any man could want, and yet . . .

  Goosebumps prickled his skin, and he shivered. The soft breeze had become a chill wind that whistled mournfully through the rustling grass. The warm light on his eyelids dimmed now. Had he dozed? The weight in his lap was gone. He opened blurry eyes and found himself alone and the landscape transformed. Pregnant iron-grey clouds crowded the previously bright blue sky, while stiff gales held the grass prostrate, and kicked a stinging screen of fine grit into the air. The limbs of his tree groaned and creaked distressingly under the assault.

  “Lyra?” Nicholas called over the screaming wind.

  He was halfway to his feet when the world was consumed in a blinding flash. He flailed, trying to hang onto his balance. An earth-shattering boom shook the ground, and he went sprawling onto his back, ears ringing, and blinded by a thousand halos of brilliant white light. Something brushed his face, as softly as a drifting feather, and then another and another. As his vision returned, Nicholas made out a curtain of white flakes falling all around him, coating the ground.

  Snow?

  No. It wasn’t cold or wet. He held out a hand and one of the strange greyish flakes landed on his palm, smearing black when he touched it.

  Ash?

  Fire.

  The screams reached him belatedly, they were far away sounding, but even the ringing in his ears couldn’t disguise the panicked desperation in the immature shrills.

  The children. Lyra.

  Nicholas struggled up, half-blind, dazed, and reeling. Which way? The scene was a confusion of blowing ash and thick smoke that obscured everything. The branches of his tree where ablaze, throwing embers everywhere as they whipped in the crazed wind. The thick bole stood split and leaning as though it had been hewn down the middle by a great flaming axe. Where the flung embers landed, fire roared to life. Flames raced through the dried grass like hunting dogs crazed with hunger.

  He bounded into the flaming grasslands, racing toward the spot where he’d seen his children enter.

  “Illya! Tyro! Where are you?” he screamed. “Lyra!”

  Maybe they’d left enough of a trail to follow, or maybe they’d come back the way they entered, maybe . . . He yelled for them, screamed for them to follow his voice until the thick smoke pressed into his throat and started him hacking. He coughed and sputtered, but he kept moving, kept calling. He had to find them.

  The smoke obscured everything except the dirty orange smear of firelight, which was everywhere. He was surrounded. Nicholas staggered on all but blind, and bent nearly double in order to stay as low as possible. His throat was too raw, his lungs too smoke-seared to call out any longer, and his eyes leaked constant obscuring tears. Had his missing family been within arm’s reach, he doubted he would have been able to see them. Besides, he no longer had the strength to get them, or even himself back out, even if there was still a path out of the inferno. Still, he wouldn’t turn away. He couldn’t. Not while he lived.

  ‘Won’t leave . . . oh God! Lyra!” he sobbed. “Illya! Ty!” His hoarse voice cracked and was replaced by a pained breathy rasp.

  The shape on the ground was indistinct in the smoke, but the moment he saw it he knew. The land around was scorched black and smoking, utterly destroyed. Even the flames had retreated to seek fuel elsewhere.

  Nicholas didn’t feel himself fall to his hands and knees, didn’t feel the hot grit of the ground stinging his palms. All of his attention was locked on that shapeless, charred mound. When the tears came, they came in a violent torrent, agonized heaving sobs rocked the sorcerer’s body. He shuddered and quaked, struggling to pull in gasping irregular breaths. Lyra. He’d tried, he really had.

  She was an unrecognizable mass of blistered, charred meat, smeared with traces of blood and fragments of unburnt cloth. A single wisp of unburnt blonde hair clung to the scorched lump of her head. The single honey-gold tress released a flood of memories that carried him away. A lifetime of fleeting glances, tender smiles, and angry scowls flashed before his eyes like lightning, bright and dazzling in its splendor, and then gone without a trace.

  The grief surged through him like an expanding bubble in his chest, pressing on his organs, clutching at his heart. He could barely draw breath, and when it did come it came in shuddering gasps that didn’t seem to fill his lungs. He wanted to lie down, just curl himself around the charred wreckage of his heart and let it end. He could, it would be so easy except . . .

  A gnarled, twig-like protrusion stretched from the ruin of his wife’s corpse. What had she been reaching for? T
here was nothing near. Was she reaching? Was it the random falling of a limb as she writhed in the flames or . . . ?

  Pointing.

  Nicholas was sure he was right, she was pointing. It was a sign, a sign left for him. She would have known he’d be coming, and she would have done everything she could to help him save the children.

  The children.

  For some reason, Lyra thought the children were in that direction. His determination surged. It didn’t replace the grief, nothing would ever do that, but rather, it pulsed in counterpoint with it, twin beats urging him on like a rower’s drum. He couldn’t stop yet. He couldn’t leave them, he couldn’t fail her. With an effort akin to pulling off a limb, Nicholas forced himself back to his feet, offered a last long, gut-wrenching look at the woman who had been the center of his life, and made himself trudge forward.

  The cave opening surged up out of the broken ground like a great stone mouth frozen in the midst of hideous screams. The jutting slabs of black stone that formed the jaws of the mouth were utterly out of place in the flat grasslands that surrounded them.

  Nicholas couldn’t imagine what ancient cataclysm must have taken place to force the projections up from the earth. In truth, he didn’t care to. Imagination and interest had been burned away. He was pointed at his single goal like the needle of a compass pointed north. The strange rock formation only held his interest for one reason. He was sure, irrationally, unmovably sure, that Illya and Tyro were in there. As he approached, the mouth of the cave seemed to brighten, to hum with a warm light. It almost seemed to invite him, to beckon. Strange, but also comforting. Nicholas found his pace increasing as he drew closer. The children were inside, in that light, that wondrous light.

  He was within half a dozen long strides when a wall of flame flared up in his path. A solid, raging inferno that hissed and snapped like a thousand angry vipers. Nicholas, blasted by the heat it threw, reared and fell onto his back. An anguished croak that would have been a scream if it’d been able tore out of him.