Son of the Night

by Mark Alder

  Dow shifted. ‘I had not thought—’

  ‘No. It was known by my order but a secret we sought to keep. It is not an easy path to knowledge. I am offering it you now. Would you talk to the Light, he and she that is in us all, he who was tricked at Golgotha into a bargain the mad god would not keep?’

  Butcher shifted in the darkness.

  ‘I do not know. I—’

  ‘Then trust me to tell you why you have done what you have done. You have raised an army to storm the fourth gate. So many dead, say the priests, that Hell cannot hold them all. Lucifer sees what Satan wants, even through the walls of brass, even surrounded by the Moat Doleful, even across the Lake of Fire.’

  ‘What ?’

  ‘He wants this earth. God lies wounded, unable to impose discipline. Satan stirs, calling in the magic to take over the earth. There will be no middle place. Just Heaven where God lies bleeding and Hell, here, ruled and ordered by devils if men cannot do it.

  ‘Satan cannot be allowed here.’

  ‘Satan must come here. He must. We must help him,’ said Jacques.

  ‘No !’

  Good Jacques held forward the box.

  ‘Wear the crown of pain,’ he said. ‘Let the light into your mind!’

  Dow took the box.

  When he had last seen this crown he had been a boy, overwhelmed in the presence of the great angel, shocked to see it die. He had not thought what the crown meant, or what it might do. It had touched Lucifer, pierced his skin, the thorns had soaked in his blood.

  ‘I will do it,’ he said.

  He stood back from the fire and walked towards the altar. Butcher glistened, slick and bloody in the firelight, crawling with flies, hopping with fleas.

  Dow put the box on the altar and took out the crown, gently. The thorns were still sharp after so long and he felt them pierce the skin of his fingers. His stomach skipped and he felt dizzy. The church was no longer around him; the fire no longer burned. He was on a hill, looking up towards three crosses. On two writhed the figures of men; the third and central cross was vacant.

  The sky was dark, storm clouds blowing over, the sun bright behind them.

  He put on the crown. Dow had been cut in his life before – when he was a young child his tongue was sliced by a priest for spreading heresy. He had been branded, too, with the fork of Lucifer, but this was a pain beyond all those. The thorns cut his skin, burrowed into his skull, it seemed, through his skull to his brain, sharp pins sticking through him like pins into a cushion.

  Each thorn was a shaft of light cutting through his head, a lattice of pain illuminating inside him. He was no longer a person, just an agony hung on light. Light was in his hands too, and stuck through his feet; he was nailed to a tree of light. He turned his head, or his head was turned. He could not see who was on the cross beside him.

  He heard a voice that was like a million voices speaking at the same time, in every tone, in many strange languages, but he knew what it said.

  ‘One to be my herald.’

  He turned to his left. On the cross he saw himself, choking and spluttering in agony.

  ‘One to set me free.’

  He turned to his right. There was another figure. He could not make him out but he knew him, or rather the pain taught him about him. He was a thief, as Dow had been, a scoundrel. Lucifer would not be lifted up by kings but by the despised of the world – not those who choose their destinies, who war and struggle because they can, but those who have destiny thrust upon them, who scrabble, strive and struggle because they must, because to do otherwise is to starve and to die.

  His mind was carried on the beams of the thorns, his thoughts ranging wide over a burnt and blasted land. Hell. It must be. He saw armies of devils streaming across burning plains, heard the screams of the tormented, driven in columns across searing deserts, saw the multitudes of dead, so many dead. So many. They turned their eyes to him and, in his agony, he was above them and among them at the same time. There were the routiers he had killed, there the many dead of Caffa, the brightly clad merchants, the drab poor who he had slain with the pestilence he had summoned.

  They wandered unguided. The devils had no time for them. Vast armies were gathering – slithering eels with men’s heads, fly devils and snake devils, devils that seemed put together from a hundred different offcuts.

  ‘The gates will open,’ he heard. ‘The gates will open!’ In voices human, insect, animal.

  ‘Three gates will open,’ said a voice. ‘And then the army of dead will storm the final gate that controls the way to Dis. With Satan on earth, his devils gone, the way to the gate will be clear.’

  Dow’s head swam. The scent of burning hair filled his nostrils, he didn’t know if he stood or lay. He felt blood streaming down his face. He was on the cross again but not on the central one. He was looking across at the shining body of Lucifer, his side pierced by the lance, his head cut by the thorn.

  ‘God! God!’ said Lucifer. ‘Why have you forsaken them?’

  ‘Enough!’ screamed Dow.

  He pulled the crown from his head and it was as if he was uprooting his brain, that it was a mandrake torn screaming from the soil of his skull. His hands bled, his mouth was full of blood, blood in his nose, in his throat. He put the crown on the altar, coughing as if he would hack up his lungs.

  ‘What has happened to me?’ said Dow, gasping.

  ‘In sharing his pain,’ said Jacques, ‘your mind has gone through the gates of Hell to hear him whispering to you from beyond the walls of Dis.’

  ‘I was on a hill when they killed him.’

  ‘I watched that too. I saw you on the cross.’

  ‘You were the third?’

  ‘No. I don’t know.’

  ‘Who was that? He was to open the gate. If we can get to the gate, clear the path, he will open it. Who is he?’

  ‘Someone,’ said Jacques. ‘But for all my art I cannot see who.’

  ‘He will present himself when the time comes,’ said the woman in the angel armour. ‘For now, we must act on what we know and do what we can.’

  Dow swallowed, made the sign of the three-pronged fork on his chest. His body shivered and he was suddenly very cold but his heart was glad.

  ‘What I did was right. There is a mighty army waiting to release Lucifer so it may be free. What can God do to them? He has already locked them in Hell. Lucifer is their hope. Lucifer is hope.’

  ‘And you have done enough,’ said Jacques. ‘Aude . . .’ He spoke to the woman.

  She unsheathed a sword. The church filled with light, all the colours of the rainbow dancing off the walls, dancing inside Dow’s mind, filling him with dread and elation. He had come to the end of his taste for action, for doing. He just watched as she approached Butcher, the light dancing off the slick meat, a host of flies and hopping fleas falling from it in a swarm before the rainbow flashes.

  The thing keened, its calf’s tongue clacking against its fleshless palate.

  ‘Yes?’ said Aude.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are sure there are enough?’

  ‘There are enough,’ said Jacques.

  She raised the sword and struck. There was a bright flash, so bright Dow had to turn away, and when he turned back only a pile of meat like a butcher’s poor table lay on the cobbles.

  Dow felt tears come to his eyes.

  ‘He is coming, isn’t he? He’s truly coming.’

  ‘He is,’ said Good Jacques. ‘But it is up to us to open the way.’

  18

  Osbert pushed aside the bed and chair and drew the circle on the stone floor of Eu’s chamber. Even as he inscribed the letters around its edge, he trembled. He had never worked with such powerful magic and, though he knew his Hebrew letters well from his time in the captivity of the priest Edwin, knew how each related to each in their jumble of consonants in order to produce the sounds of the vowels, he would not let himself say them in his head as he drew them. The name of God filled hi
m with fear. He had worked his summonings before, pulled spirits from their wanderings in the air or through the cracks in the lesser walls of Hell, but then he had the names of angels to work with, not the most holy and secret name of God.

  ‘I can bind him while he is in the circle,’ said Osbert. ‘With this name, I can command his silence, perhaps even return him to Hell, though that will be harder. And yet, I do not think we will even need this.’

  ‘Why not ?’

  Osbert didn’t want to say in case the summoning went wrong, though why he was worried about disappointing a man who seemed determined to be hanged with the dawn, he did not know.

  When the circle was drawn, he sprinkled the tomb dust around it. His stomach felt tight and he had the sensation of bitter fruit in his mouth.

  ‘You are taking your time,’ said Eu.

  ‘The preparation must be meticulous. We are dealing with a powerful devil, a king too. A slip could be costly. My Prince Navarre is a small man but fast and full of claws. I would not like this to go wrong.’

  ‘It will be dawn soon. I’ll be hanged before you’re finished.’

  ‘That is your choice. You have the means to leave with the feather.’

  ‘I should fetch my sword.’

  ‘You will be discovered by the guards if you move through the inside of the building. Never mind, the circle is done.’

  He stepped back to survey his work. The circle was an exact copy of the one on the manuscript, more detailed and finer than any he had ever drawn. Angels’ names intertwined with those of wind spirits, Latin wrapped around Hebrew. Sworls and curlicues graced the edges, spikes and triangles towards the centre but all gave way for that greatest of names at the edge in plain, blocky letters. There was one gap in the circle, to good purpose.

  Osbert took the incense from Eu’s bag and lit it from the rush light. The sweet smoke drifted up across the room like a spirit stretching itself out in the light, like the angel-bane dragon at Crécy in miniature.

  He intoned the names of the angels, called the names of the spirits, made passes with his hand.

  ‘Will this take for ever?’ said Eu.

  And then he said it again. Directly afterwards, or sometime later, Osbert couldn’t tell. That minute shift in attention, the feeling that the world had been knocked slightly off its centre, took him. It was working.

  Light streamed through the windows and Eu said something else; Osbert couldn’t make it out. Was it dawn? Yes, the pre-dawn. His mouth tasted of ashes, he felt tired, the light was hollow. It was time. He began, intoning the first letter, the second, moving on with a great deep vowel to the third.

  ‘You are too late,’ said Eu. ‘They are coming across the courtyard.’

  The fourth letter, the fifth, and still on, still on.

  ‘Navarre is with them.’ Osbert heard that. Part of his mind was still left in the ordinary world and, as an eavesdropper, he heard his own thought. He would be. He is being summoned.

  The letters tumbled from his mouth. He had the idea that he was spitting up gems, beautiful sparkling gems that cascaded from his lips to the floor.

  Footsteps on the stairs, the sound of the guards coming to quick attention. A hard knock on the cell door.

  The sixtieth letter, the sixty-first. His breathing was heavy, as if there was a weight on his chest. Was there a light in the circle? It seemed so, an emerald, dancing light.

  ‘We are going to open the door, My Lord. Prepare yourself to meet great men in decent array.’

  The seventieth letter, the seventy-first.

  The door opened and Navarre pushed his way past the jailer.

  ‘What is this?’ he said.

  The seventy-second letter. The emerald light burned bright, bright enough to make Osbert turn away.

  ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ Navarre cried out, shrieking and shaking.

  The most incredible transformation had come over him. No longer was he cat-like, with catty eyes and sharp little catty fingernails. Half of him was a cat, a gigantic black cat with ears and fur and whiskers. The other half of him was a man, an ordinary, quite handsome man in that blond Capetian way. The cat aspect of the king had split away, leaving one half of his body feline, the other human.

  ‘What is happening?’ the king cried out like a cat. A red line surfaced on his forehead, more than a line – a crack running down the entire length of his face, cutting him in two. The king tore at his clothes, his human hand quite ineffective, his cat’s paw shredding them.

  ‘My Lord!’ his men cried out.

  ‘Get these off me,’ he said. ‘Part of me needs to leave!’

  He tore still at his clothes, rolling and thrashing on the floor. The crack in his face grew. It was clear the lord was splitting apart.

  The emerald light shone fiercely. A crackle, a smell of ozone, and then a thunderclap.

  ‘Sorcerer!’ cried one of Navarre’s men.

  His sword was free and he swung it, but not at Osbert – at Eu.

  The count fell, a great wound at his neck, his blood splattering onto the circle.

  ‘I am dying!’ screamed Navarre. ‘Dying!’

  Eu’s blood mingled with the tomb dust and the whole perimeter of the circle bubbled like a hot spring.

  A final scream like that of a man on a rack and the king of Navarre split in two, the cat half of his body rolling into the magic circle, wrapping entrails around it as it went. The human half lay where it was, its beating heart visible.

  The noble with the sword turned to Osbert.

  ‘No, My Lord,’ he said. ‘I have battled the sorcerer Eu all night. This is bad magic he has wrought.’

  The noble brought his sword to Osbert’s throat.

  ‘Undo this magic. Undo it, or I swear on the saints’ bones that I will halve you as he has been halved.’

  A hiss from the human half of Navarre, a wheezing of lungs and his half-tongue struggled to form a sound. His leg tried to stand, while his hand struggled to contain his guts.

  ‘Save me,’ he said. ‘Save me and I will be in your debt.’

  Osbert looked at the body of Eu, the bubbling magic circle, the jumble of organs, blood, bones and fur that was Navarre. A king in his debt. A king reliant on him to survive. A king who had made a vow in front of his nobles. Navarre was split exactly in half, split as by a great axe, down the centre line of his body. An ordinary man would have been dead, but the king was far from ordinary. He recalled when the devil Nergal had lost his head. Navarre’s mother had sewn it back on and made it stable with an iron collar. Devil’s flesh mended well.

  He bowed.

  ‘Fetch me a bodkin and strong thread,’ he said. ‘And send for a smith. We will need bonds of iron.’

  Osbert was acutely aware of Prince John’s eyes upon him as he stitched up the king of Navarre. Half the court had turned up to watch. They brought in two ladies of the court who were skilled with needle and thread to help with the work, but neither could face it. When Prince John arrived, and the smirking La Cerda, Princess Joan was summoned – as the betrothed of Navarre she was bound by duty to help with the stitching.

  She blanched when she saw him and crossed herself.

  Luckily the girl proved of stronger stomach than the other ladies and set to work with her precise, neat stitch. Osbert marvelled that one so grievously wounded could live, though the success of the stitching did not surprise him. He had seen devils stitched before and noted that it proved marvellously effective.

  Throughout the pricking and stitching, Navarre howled piteously, though Osbert had heard knights contend that true mortal wounds are not lamented by their bearer.

  ‘Where there’s pain, there’s life,’ one knight had told him. And where there’s life, there’s pain, he’d thought.

  Stitching would not suffice on the split sternum, nor on the jaw and skull, so the smith hammered in some firm staples to fix one side of the body to the other.

  ‘Good news, sire,’ said Osbert, as they worked u
pon him. ‘Your cock is left whole, so the future of the line of Navarre may yet be a happy one. Hold still while we sew up your, er, derriere. This is tender work is it not, Princess Joan? Not many a bride knows such intimacy in such a pure and helpful way before her wedding night. The, er, rear will require a woman’s nimble fingers to make the neatest join.’

  It was not easy work, though it was done as best they could. Still, as Osbert had seen in the case of Nergal, the devil who had been decapitated at the Sainte-Chapelle, devil flesh has its own ways. The summoning over, the circle broken and the green orb of light gone, it was as if the cat part of Navarre had been out for long enough and now butted and mewled to be reunited with its former half, the entrails stuffed back inside. The iron staples alone would not have held Navarre together, nor put the internal parts back in their correct order and relationships. Once the stitches were in place, the cat half and the human half melded very well, the flesh not quite fusing, but still making a very good join.

  The king of Navarre was quickly measured by the smith and the bands were fashioned well before the last stitch was in place. They were quite impressive – in the style of an eastern breastplate. There were fastened at the back by quickly improvised ties. The smith promised better when he had more time. ‘Armour, more fitting to your station, sir,’ he said.

  Navarre tried to speak – presumably to tell him not to address his superiors unless told to do so – but the cat side of the top lip came away from the human side and had to be restitched. They worked on him until the day faded. By the time they were finished, a very creditable job had been done, at least in the rush light. The king looked quite impressive in his iron bands, his tight leather collar and the riveted band he wore about his head. Osbert suspected it may have been improvised from a barrel but did not share that with Navarre.

  ‘Good as new!’ said Osbert.

  ‘That,’ said Navarre, in a way that indicated the human and cat halves of his lips were not working quite as they might, ‘is demonstrably untrue.’

  He was quite a sight – on his left side a gigantic cat’s paw and hind leg, half a very good cat’s nose, a fine large black cat’s ear, a wonderful coral pink at the centre. On his right, a human leg and arm, an ordinary nose and ear. The join between the two was picked out in the best stitching Osbert and Princess Joan had managed – which was very fine for her part, less for his.