Murmur, Raum, Phenex, and Verrine. Each Throne sported three sets of wings—leathery batwings with small, claw-like hands at the apexes. Their skin was ebon, scaled in the manner of armored beasts. Their faces were angular, thrusting, demonic. Red-eyed and glowering. They advanced around the flanks of Thanos, strange, multi-bladed weapons in their taloned hands.
They moved terrifyingly fast for such huge creatures. Bravo wasted no time.
“Djat had’ar!” he cried. “Et ignis ibi est!”
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than a tongue of blue fire licked out from his extended fingertips toward Thanos, but before the flames could reach the Sphinx to animate it Verrine brought his war weapons down onto the carved basalt spine. Immediately cracks appeared, and with a great booming whoosh Thanos was reduced to rubble.
Stepping over the jagged chunks of rock, Verrine brought his Thrones to bear on Bravo and Ayla.
“Run!” he called to Lilith. “Run!”
But she did nothing of the kind, instead circling around the rear of the Thrones, the bronze war hammer swinging back and forth. The Thrones ignored her, keeping their attention fixed on Bravo.
Murmur broke away from the other three. Cocking his arm, he threw a mesh net over Ayla that adhered to the wall behind her, pinning her in place. Bravo, calling upon all his grandfather’s power, sent a bolt of blue flame that sheared away one of Verrine’s six wings. Still the Thrones came on, black of heart, murder in what remained of their twisted souls.
Verrine was about to leap at Bravo when Phenex—the Scryer—pulled back, hesitating. It knew something, or had seen something in a future that it did not like.
“What?” Verrine’s voice put a shudder through the three humans. “What have you seen?”
Before Phenex could answer, the chamber was filled with a thunderous roar. The walls shook, the ground split asunder. The Four Thrones turned toward the rising detonations. And then, while their attention was elsewhere, Lilith swung the war hammer into the back of what she surmised to be Raum’s right knee. Her instinct had been sure. The bronze head of the war hammer shattered the Throne’s armor-like carapace, drove deeply into both nerve and bone. Raum let out a shriek. Phenex turned to come to its assistance when Phaedos, the Sphinx Bravo and Ayla had encountered in the Hollow Lands deep beneath Malta, made his appearance. Approaching with astonishing speed, his mouth open wide, enormous teeth glistening, he slammed Phenex aside with a hind leg, drove his teeth deep into Murmur’s neck, and, with a shake of his colossal head, threw the Throne into the stone wall of the cavern. As Murmur slid to the ground, Phaedos stamped hard on its neck with his left forepaw. At the same time, his right forepaw ripped the metal netting aside. Coiling his tail around Ayla’s waist with great tenderness, he drew her up, deposited her safe and sound upon his back.
Then he turned, stood side by side with Bravo, towering over him. Bravo inhaled the odor coming off him, like molten lava. Phaedos saw Lilith then, swinging the bronze war hammer with both hands. Again and again she struck the fallen Phenex, and a terrible sound emerged from the Sphinx’s throat. It took Bravo’s several moments to realize Phaedos was laughing, and he could not stop himself from laughing, too, even though they faced Verrine, the Throne King.
Phaedos batted away the first of the arrows Verrine sent his way, but the second buried itself in his left thigh. What the head was made of to penetrate the sorcerous basalt was beyond Bravo, but he sent a lashing of blue fire that enclosed the Throne’s bow, disintegrating it. Unfazed, Verrine drew a double-bladed sword, red-and-orange fire flickering evilly along the honed edges of the blades.
Phaedos reared back, almost unseating Ayla, who grabbed onto his mane with both hands. Verrine raced at the Sphinx, evaded the swipe of his forepaw. Bravo encased the blades in blue fire, but he could not arrest its downswing. The blades slashed Phaedos’s breast, the flames along their edges opening up both sides of the wounds, penetrating so deeply that the Sphinx staggered.
As Verrine stepped inside Phaedos’s defenses Bravo sent a ball of blue fire into the Throne King’s face. This slowed it long enough for Lilith, racing in, to deliver a blow with the war hammer. Something cracked, like a lightning bolt bisecting an ancient tree, and Verrine arched back. Phaedos drove his head forward, his gaping jaws clamped around the Throne King’s throat. But there was armor there, protected with sorcerous battle incantations, and the Sphinx’s teeth shattered. A dense liquid streamed from his mouth that Bravo could only assume was what passed for blood or the Sphinx’s life-giving force. Verrine ripped at the hinges of Phaedos’s jaw, and a horrendous noise issued from his mouth. Bravo slammed the blue flame again and again into Verrine’s face, blinding him. Lilith swung the war hammer again, and Verrine’s armor shattered along its spine.
And yet it still continued to punish Phaedos, inflicting agony beyond human comprehension. The Throne King, blind, its spine shattered, driven into a frenzy of rage, was intent on destroying Phaedos with a concentration bordering on madness.
That was when Ayla’s lips began to move, as if of their own accord. Bravo could not hear what she was saying over the bellowing of the Sphinx approaching his death throes. But Bravo knew what she was doing. The air around Verrine darkened, seemed to congeal. Its actions slowed, the berserker energy seemed to be draining out of it and into the darkened air, which now began a slow, counter-clockwise rotation. It picked up speed, faster and faster until it was a blur.
“Now!” Ayla shouted over the turmoil. “Now!”
She didn’t have to explain. Summoning the depths of his grandfather’s will, he combined it with his own. With a detonation, silent but deafening for all that, he sent a blade of cold fire straight at Verrine. It pierced the Throne King’s armor, penetrated its breast, then burst asunder inside it.
At once, all motion ceased. Verrine, still as a statue, stood burning from the inside out. It released its hold on Phaedos, the double-bladed sword dropped from its hand, and it burned on, with a fire that was without smoke, cold as a mountaintop, inimical, unquenchable.
*
LILITH EXPLAINED to them that they were running out of time if they wanted to save Emma. Nevertheless, Ayla did not want to leave Phaedos, or was it that Phaedos did not want her to leave? Perhaps it was both, Bravo thought, watching her small hand in his paw. The Sphinx was dying; that much was clear. That he had formed some kind of attachment to Ayla was just as clear—and infinitely sad.
As she leaned over to kiss his all-too-human face, he whispered something to her Bravo could not hear. But then Lilith was urging them to leave, desperate for their help. And as much as Bravo was grateful for Phaedos’s sacrifice, his mind was preoccupied with the extreme peril his sister was in.
He knelt beside Ayla. “Thank you, Phaedos,” he whispered. But the Sphinx only had eyes for Ayla. She was weeping openly now.
“I tried to save you,” she said. “I tried.”
“We all did,” Bravo said, but the occult light was gone from Phaedos’s eyes. He was dead.
Bravo pulled Ayla to her feet.
“Now we run!” Lilith called to them as she started off back the way she had come. “Run as fast as we can!”
48
The Hollow Lands: 1919
“FINDING THE STOLEN GOLDEN APPLE IS OF PARAMOUNT importance to me,” Conrad said.
“I hear a ‘but’ coming on,” Tanis replied with a wry smile.
He nodded. “My friend Yeats’s prediction that my grandson would be murdered—killed before his time.”
“You know the future—well, there are many futures, all of them possible.”
Conrad nodded. “So the Farsighters claim.”
“You don’t believe them?”
“Oh, I do,” Conrad acknowledged. “But Yeats is something more than a Farsighter.”
Tanis shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“He’s a Scryer.”
She frowned. “What’s the difference?”
“What he
sees is truth. He sees the singular future that will be.”
They were standing in a vast chamber of the Hollow Lands, where Tanis had led him. Far above them was the sleepy fishing village of Arwad. She had taken him here through waters filled with great peril from marauding pirates and the remnants of the war—soldiers half-mad with killing, grief, witnesses to the massive carnage wreaked by mustard gas attacks. Haggard men, hollow-eyed, shallow-breathing monsters, reavers whose minds had been perverted by death and more death. And now here they were, closer to the stolen apple than he had ever been, and all he could think about was his grandson, yet to be born.
“I want to protect him,” Conrad said now. “I need to protect him.”
Tanis cocked her head. “Why?”
Conrad looked at her in the most intense way. “He will be your grandson as well, Tanis.”
There was silence between them, an odd, eerie presence that seemed almost alive. It hung in the air between them, now dark, now light, revolving, resolving itself. And then in the blink of an eye it was gone.
“I can help with this,” Tanis said.
“In my heart I knew.”
She gave him another wry smile, tinged this time with a peculiar sorrow. “There will be a heavy price to pay.”
He did not hesitate. It was as if he already knew his grandson, could see him, speak into his ear, guide him toward the things he would never get to see or do. “I am prepared.”
“I very much doubt that you are,” Tanis said. “You must renounce your birthright. You can never be immortal.”
Conrad seemed unfazed. “Immortality is overrated. Besides, what would I do without you?”
Tanis laughed. “Yes, yes, Conrad. I do love you as I have loved no other, as I will love no other.”
“Let’s get on with it, then.”
She positioned them facing each other, put her hands on his shoulders. “Repeat what I say without hesitation.”
He nodded. “I understand.”
She spoke in Tamazight; he recognized the language immediately, but the words were wholly unfamiliar to him. They seemed ancient, even by Tamazight standards. The next thousand and one seconds were filled with this peculiar call and repeat. Soon enough he understood their circular nature, the composition of all spells and incantations. Tanis was weaving them both into the fabric of sorcery. He might have been frightened, but such was his faith in her, in her essential goodness, his surety that she was an emissary of the Light, that wherever she led him he would willingly follow.
And then it was done. He didn’t feel any different, but he knew that he was. Something essential had been altered inside him, woven into his very nature. Was it protection, or something else altogether?
He was about to ask her, when she threw her head back and spoke a phrase that might have been Tamazight but wasn’t. It was Phoenician, one of humankind’s mother tongues.
A moment later shadows coalesced in front of them, towering, massive, looming like the tower of Babel.
Summoned by Tanis, Leviathan had come.
49
The Hollow Lands: Present Day
STOP, CONRAD SAID IN BRAVO’S EAR. STOP!
“I can’t stop. If I don’t do something Emma is going to die.”
Lilith looked at him without breaking stride. “Who are you talking to?”
Yes, she will die if you don’t stop. Listen!
Bravo heard nothing but the echoes of their feet slapping against the stone floor as they ran. “Stop,” he said.
Lilith blanched. “There’s no time—”
Yes, Conrad said. Time is all you have now.
When Bravo repeated this out loud, the two women paused, breathing heavily. For a moment, that was all Bravo heard. But as their heart rates slowed, there was silence. And then he heard it, the rustling as if a wind ruffling a field of long grass.
Yeats was a Scryer. That was driven from my mind in later years. Part of the price I paid.
Yeats. Conrad had given Bravo a book of W. B. Yeats’s collected poems, much battered and worn—his own copy—and Bravo had read the contents many times. Not that he needed to. After the first read he’d committed them to memory. But reading them again and again gave him a kind of comfort he could not find elsewhere.
Now the rustling in this chamber called to mind the last verse of a poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” about a man who in his youth catches a silver trout with a fishing rod made of hazel—a magical wood. The fish becomes a beautiful woman who runs off. Throughout his life the man seeks her, without success:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
The golden apple. In long dappled grass. Bravo turned and turned again. The rustling of the long grass. The golden apple.
“It’s here,” he whispered.
“What’s here?” Ayla said.
Lilith’s hands, curled around the haft of the war hammer, grew restless. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
“We can’t help Emma without the apple.”
Lilith shook her head, appealing to Ayla. “What’s he talking about?”
But Ayla was too busy looking with Bravo.
“ ‘I dropped the berry in a stream / And caught a little silver trout,’ ” Bravo said, quoting from the poem’s first stanza. “A stream, Ayla. We’re looking for a stream!”
“This way,” Lilith said. “I heard it when I passed this way before.”
The chamber was immense, but as they followed her the rustling as of long grass changed to a deeper pitch, became a soft liquid gurgle.
Bravo knelt on the bank of a sinuous stream, narrow but seeming quite deep. The water was entirely black, swift running. Here and there little silver highlights glimmered, reflections from the directionless light.
“We’re looking for the glitter of gold,” Ayla told Lilith as she knelt beside the stream.
Lilith stepped over to the stream, reluctantly looked into it. “I don’t see anything,” she said.
Bravo moved farther from where they knelt. Then of a sudden he saw something, a cluster, glimmering darkly. Like a bird of prey, he swooped down. His hand and arm pierced the icy water, drawing forth an object he held within the cup of his curled fingers.
“I have it!” he cried. “The apple.”
Lilith frowned. “But it’s silver.”
Without a comment, Bravo slammed the apple as hard as he could against the stone wall.
“What are you doing?” Lilith said in horror. “Bravo—!”
Again and again he smashed apple against stone until a spiderweb of cracks appeared in the silver and one by one the pieces fell away.
“The golden apple!” Ayla breathed.
“Chynna protected it in the same way Conrad did with the rood—by coating it in another metal.”
“What does all this have to do with saving Emma?” Lilith said with a hard edge to her voice.
“Everything.” Bravo took out the two golden apples and the crucifix. At long last, the four elements of what Kamar had called the sacred instrument had come together.
“Now what?” Ayla said. “How do they fit together?”
It was then they heard the sound of buzzing flies, drawing closer. Lilith’s head came up.
“God in Heaven,” she whispered. “Leviathan!”
“Bravo!” Ayla said. “What do we do?”
“Run!” Lilith cried.
“No.” Bravo forestalled them. Into his mind came another part of Yeats’s poem:
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor...
Bravo laid out the three apples and cross—a golden quadrangle—on the ground. Nothing.
The buzzing of the flies, a drone now, as if speaking with one fearful voice.
“Oh, hurry!” Lilith said. “Whatever you’re going to do, for the love of God do it.”
Bravo rearranged the order: the rood in the center, surrounded by a triangle of gold. At once, they slid toward the rood, melded themselves, melted into it until it itself began to alter its shape.
“Dear God,” Ayla whispered. “What is happening?”
The melded golden artifacts began to rotate counter-clockwise, then stopped, reversed themselves, becoming what they were meant to be: a triangle within a circle within a square.
Bravo shook his head. “It’s the Nihil, the sigil of the Unholy Trinity. Not what I expected.”
Take it, Conrad said in his ear. Use it!
Bravo picked it up. His fingers tingled, then came a sharp pain like a jolt of electricity. He ignored it. “Let’s go,” he said to Lilith.
The horrific buzzing followed them, an army on the march, coming closer.
*
“WHAT IS that thing?” Lilith asked as she ran alongside Bravo.
“The instrument that will save my sister.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t.”
Lilith, grabbing his arm, spun him to a halt, facing her. Ayla came up alongside, made to intervene, but Bravo signed to her to stand down.
“If you don’t know...” Lilith was full of rage and fear in equal measure. “I won’t let you use it on her.”
Bravo kept Ayla close to him. With his arm around her he could feel the tremors of tension and anxiety rippling through her like a scythe through a wheat field. “Do you have a better idea, Lilith? You’ve told us that Emma is changing—changing into one of the Fallen. If the process has gone too far... Lilith, she’s my sister. You must know that I don’t want to lose her, either.”
Lilith, staring at him with red-rimmed eyes, nodded. “I love her, Bravo. If this happens to her—”
“We’ll see that it doesn’t. I promise you.”
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