The Reckoning

by Alma Katsu

  “I have seen no one,” Jonathan said, “except the queen of the underworld.”

  Adair sat back on his heels. The answer was unexpected. The queen of the underworld? He had no idea what Jonathan meant by that. Apparently, there existed a next life, judging from the fact that Jonathan’s dead soul had come back from somewhere, and in this next life there existed something that could be interpreted as the queen of the underworld. Adair felt a surge of panic. He thought of his books: he needed the old stories and reference material to puzzle out this mystery.

  When Adair turned to Jonathan to ask another question, however, he saw that he’d fallen unconscious. He jostled Jonathan’s shoulder and pulled a lower eyelid down to look on a filmy brown eye in which he saw a tiny ticking pulse, a repeating flicker of animation. Satisfied that Jonathan had not been pulled back into the void, Adair bundled him up, stinking clothing and all, tucked him into the rental car, and drove away, leaving the heaps of dirt and the body of Joe Duchesne beside the open grave.

  SIXTEEN

  Adair drove straight out of town with Jonathan lying across the backseat, a coat thrown over his body to keep him from being seen. He needn’t have bothered: not one vehicle crossed his path the whole drive south through the last hours of night, through lonesome logging territory and past potato farms. It wasn’t until he was halfway to Boston that he realized he’d left his belongings at the bed-and-breakfast. No matter: he obsessively kept his two books with him at all times, and they were all he needed and the only things he couldn’t afford to lose.

  Adair sped back to Jude’s house, driving only slightly above the speed limit to avoid attracting the police. The last thing he needed was for a local lawman to approach his window and detect the smell of rotting flesh. Back in St. Andrew, the clues chained together so easily that even a child would be able to follow them: the sheriff was dead, a grave had been pilfered, and the stranger who had been asking questions about the missing body had fled town under cover of night. He’d used a false identity for all travel arrangements and there was little chance of being discovered, but there was the risk that he might have left some clue behind. Adair would leave it to Jude to clean up any problems that might arise. He was like a clerk, unimaginative, made to handle minutiae.

  Driving in darkness down empty roads, Adair thought back to the potter’s field and the unease he’d felt at Jonathan’s grave site. Standing there, looking down into the deep, earthy hole, he experienced the same sensation he had felt during his own entombment, when the walls and floor of his tiny cell would fade away and leave him feeling as though he was floating in sheer openness. Worse still, there had been times when he hadn’t been able to feel the boundaries of his body, when a steady but immutable force had pulled on his consciousness until it thinned and fanned out and dissipated into the void. At those times it had been as though his physical self ceased to be and he became nothing more than a speck in an endless ocean of nothingness. It was the identical sensation he’d felt standing beside Jonathan’s open grave.

  And then, there was this disquieting mention of a queen of the underworld.

  As Adair struggled with the concept of an actual deity, a queen who ruled over the afterlife, he felt the black abyss tug at him again, as surely as he could feel his heart beat faster. Perhaps the sentient creature waiting in the world beyond was linked in some way to the abyss. Perhaps she could not only cope in the vast void but commanded it, too. The prospect of a being with so much power frightened him, for he knew his limitations: he wasn’t a supernatural creature but a man. An extraordinary man but not a god.

  ROMANIA AND ENVIRONS, 1300S

  The primary reason the physic had chosen to take the elixir of eternal life was to continue his study of the forces of the universe, the seen and the unseen. Now he had the rest of time to track down the wisdom of practitioners of magic who had come before him, and to surpass their knowledge with his own groundbreaking discoveries. After consuming the elixir, however, the physic found there was another benefit, one that he hadn’t expected: he began to experience life more vividly. He was stronger than he’d ever been and could run so fast that it seemed like flying. His senses were heightened: colors were brighter, smells sharper. It was as though he’d been sickly his entire life and suddenly had been given perfect health.

  Still, his body had shortcomings for which there was no compensation. It was the body of an old man and, as such, was subject to all the prejudices held against the elderly. People assumed he was slow and feeble, and either tried to brush him out of their way, or were overly solicitous, tripping over themselves to help him, even when no assistance was requested. As much as either reaction annoyed him, he kept his condition to himself, though he would have liked to slap aside the Samaritans’ offers of help or pummel the thieves who assumed he was senile and tried to pick his pockets. Adair checked his temper, realizing it was best not to disabuse these fools of their assumptions and show them that he was as vigorous and alert as any of them, because that would only bring suspicion down on him. He couldn’t risk being reported to the inquisitors. He had no explanation to give them for his rejuvenation, and so had no alternative but to play the graybeard.

  If he was delighted with his renewed strength and sharpened senses, one aspect of his rebirth was an unwelcome surprise to him, and that was restoration of the sexual longing of his youth. The physic found he had the insatiable desire he’d possessed at sixteen—no, it was worse this time around, far more intense and unwilling to be ignored. Also, unlike his teenaged self, this time he knew exactly what he was missing. He’d never married but had satisfied himself throughout his life with whores and willing servants—maybe a little less frequently than if he’d taken a wife, but that was the sacrifice he made for his calling. Science and alchemy were all that he cared for, and left him with little interest in the company of anyone who didn’t share this passion. Now, to his frustration, he couldn’t put the thought of sex out of his mind. It was as though desire had infiltrated his system through his bloodstream and ate at him from the inside out.

  But what good was this ravenous sexual appetite to a man so old and ugly that no woman would willingly accommodate him? He had grown so repulsive that even prostitutes turned up their noses at him. Because his hearing was sharper than ever, he could hear them whispering at his approach: Here comes that dirty old man again! He can’t get enough—and at his age! It’s a disgrace. If only he could be a young man again, the story would be very different. The whores would fight for the chance to bed with a man of such virility. As it was, he was no more than a freak with an unnatural sexual appetite.

  He vowed to go to the street women less frequently, but that meant he had to find other outlets for his desire. In desperation, he turned to an urchin who was selling himself in the alley, a boy of twelve or thirteen. The physic expected to be disgusted by the sight and feel of the boy’s body, even though he had the boy face the wall so he could take his pleasure from behind, but this wasn’t the case. The revelation that he could experience pleasure with someone of his own sex shook him so badly that he sat in the dark with a bottle of strong wine, trying to eradicate all memory of what he’d done.

  As he brooded, questioning his manhood, he began to see that there were desires inside of him that he’d never let surface, secret thoughts that he’d smothered. And yet, he wondered, if he’d denied himself this pleasure for fear of damnation, what else had he missed? He had nothing to lose now. Why not give his dark desires free rein? Surely his transformation had put him in a realm where the laws of man didn’t apply. Not to him.

  That was the moment that the physic parted ways with his fellow men: he no longer considered himself bound by the conventions that had restrained him his entire life. To have these extraordinary abilities and yet behave like any other person—seeking permission for his acts, self-censoring the voices in his head, restraining his hand—was a waste of his gift. No, he was immortal now, and he intended to do as he pleased, to see what he
ights he could attain. There must be a reason he was singled out for these incredible powers, he reasoned; it would be wrong and a waste of this gift to hold back in any way.

  It wasn’t until 1349, when he was back in his homeland in the employ of a Romanian count, that the physic learned of a possible solution to his imprisonment in his old man’s body. The position as physician to Count cel Batrin was as much a contrivance as his other appointments; the real reason he went to work for the count was that he’d heard a monk with otherworldly powers had once lived in that area. The number of fabled alchemists was few, and their world small. Once a man attained a certain level of prowess and was considered a master of the practice, or what would one day be known as an Adept, his name quickly spread among practitioners. His feats would be compared to those of other Adepts. From wandering apprentices and devotees of magic, the physic heard of other practitioners and tales of their wondrous deeds. He heard of lineages, of Adepts passing their special capability on to their students—disciples who could be traced back through generations of training.

  Lines were often cut short through the intervention of the church—important work lost when a master and his disciples were found and executed for heresy. Inquisitors used their victims’ collections of notes and receipts to build the pyres at which these men were roasted. So much knowledge lost, the physic fretted. What a waste. It was his duty to preserve this knowledge.

  And this was how he ended up in cel Batrin’s employ, trying to find out as much as he could about a monk who’d practiced alchemy several generations earlier. The old man guessed that there might still be followers of this man living in the area, disciples with copies of their master’s recipes. The monk’s name had been Nicodemus, and the physic had heard it rumored that the man in question was able to send a soul into another body.

  As enticing as the prospect was, the physic was skeptical. He’d tried many times to create a potion for this purpose based on his knowledge of the properties of elements—tried to find the weight of a soul by taking careful readings of bodies before and after death, for instance—but nothing came of his attempts. How had the monk managed to remove the soul in the first place? What happened to the body receiving the new soul? Did the two souls coexist in some way, or did the new soul supplant the old one, and if so, what happened to the body’s original soul? He wrote his questions on scraps of parchment, formulating the inquiry in his mind with scientific precision, but never figuring out the answer.

  The physic went out evenings to investigate the whereabouts of this Nicodemus’s legacy, as such things were best done under cover of darkness. He found the oldest among the villagers and questioned them thoroughly, raking through their memories for the smallest of clues. He went to the places where the reputed master alchemist might’ve lived or worked, excavating caves for rare minerals, picking through moss and mushrooms on the forest floor. He searched the monastery’s vaults; he rummaged through cottages while the occupants slept. He was like a nighttime phantom looking for secrets to spirit away.

  In the meantime, he’d acquired a Roma boy, Adair, to be his servant. The boy was chosen especially for his comeliness. The physic had no intention of stealing the peasant’s body when they first met, as the boy was too young and underdeveloped. It wasn’t until the boy was older and had blossomed into his fullness that the physic realized the potential. But by then, he had already disfigured the boy with scars from a ferocious beating—deserved, as he was caught running away with stolen recipes—but nothing could be done for that now. The physic had been swiving the boy regularly, but that would end, too, as the thought of raping a body he would one day inhabit repulsed him. The factor that settled the matter, for the physic, was that the boy had a tremendous manhood: not so long as to be a drawback—the physic imagined there were times when a man’s yardarm could be too long—but thick, like a personal battering ram. The thought of being the owner of this weapon and getting to wield it made the physic giddy.

  Meanwhile, he’d begun to uncover clues in his investigations about the monk’s work, and the physic felt he was close to finding someone who could tell him more. So he decided to give the peasant boy eternal life to ready his body to receive the physic’s soul once the spell was found. In the meantime, this would safeguard the body against accident. The more the physic thought on it, the more sense it made: he found the boy’s body suitable, the face pleasing. Others seemed to think the boy handsome, too. If the worst should happen, the physic might have to wait months or years before finding another acceptable body.

  Besides, he’d begun to sense mutiny in the boy’s heart. The physic had recently taken him on a pilgrimage he made every decade, to go over accounts with the manager of his estate. He had taken the boy and noticed that the trip had changed him. Perhaps it was a reaction to seeing the vastness of the physic’s wealth, but it seemed to have been too much for a peasant who’d been poor his entire life, and had put ideas into his head. In any case, since their return, the boy was as skittish as a cat around him.

  The physic picked an evening soon after for the peasant’s transformation. He drugged the housekeeper’s drink so she would remain asleep should things grow ugly or loud. That night, the physic lured the boy down to his chamber in the cellar by baiting him with the promise of teaching him to read. While skeptical, the boy was tempted enough to follow him, and as soon as he bent over the pages to begin his lesson, the physic grabbed him and forced him to swallow the elixir that he kept in a vial on a leather cord around his neck.

  The spell required time to take effect, for the body to die and allow the soul to return once it was stripped of the troublesome requirements of mortality, or so it had been the physic’s observation. By morning, the servant’s transformation was complete and he woke with the power of the rejuvenation coursing through his virile body. How the physic envied that youthful body, recalling how he had felt taking the elixir at the age of eighty-seven. He could only imagine what it would do to a man in his early twenties.

  As it turned out, the physic discovered the old monk Nicodemus’s work through the simplest route. By then, he’d gained Count cel Batrin’s trust and could be freer in his inquiries. The castle and its occupants were mad for the magical arts. Not that anyone openly professed belief, for the church zealously hunted down those who worshipped Satan, and anyone foolish enough to admit such leanings could expect to be tortured and killed as an example to the rest of the kingdom.

  No, the count’s interest in magic seemed to be for his entertainment as well as his court’s, and so the physic obliged them with harmless demonstrations of legerdemain just short of the heretical: flash powder and prognostication, potions to induce hallucinations, states in which the men were susceptible to the suggestion that they were flying or invisible. Of course, the physic had in his possession spells and potions that could make one temporarily invisible and the like, but he didn’t dare let anyone know. However, these simple antics endeared him to the count and earned his trust, enabling the physic to travel more freely inside the castle.

  It was while exercising this freedom that he learned there was an old man who had made himself the keeper of the kingdom’s history. By day he kept the treasury in order; he knew where every piece of silver plate and jewelry was stored and how many gold pieces were packed away in special trunks, and he wore the keys to the vaults on a belt around his waist like a chatelain. But in his spare moments—at night in his chamber, with quill in hand—he kept track of all the stories told about and within the kingdom.

  So one night the physic paid a surprise visit to the treasurer, bringing a goatskin of strong wine. The treasurer so enjoyed having an audience to hear the stories that he’d meticulously collected over the years that the physic didn’t even need the wine to loosen his lips. Nonetheless, the bright-eyed old man sipped the wine gratefully and told the physic everything he’d heard.

  Apparently, there had once flourished within this kingdom a secret sect of monks who, it was said, had a de
ep and abiding interest in the dark arts. True, it was a perverse interest for a brotherhood of monks, but then, everyone knew that not all monks joined the church because they wished to devote their lives to God. Some just needed a profession, and becoming a monk was better than soldiering, as it was less strenuous and not at all deadly. Others took it up because food and shelter were provided and they often learned some useful skill; still others were either too lazy or physically unfit to manage any sort of manual labor, but content to do a job that required only a modicum of obedience in return. As in every walk of life, there were some drawn to a profession diametrically opposed to their innate character: just as there were lawmakers and sheriffs who stole and cheated, there were priests and nuns who flirted with the devil.

  To all outward appearances, everything at the abbey appeared normal, with no indication of anything amiss. The order was known for beekeeping and kept the village and the castle supplied with honey and beeswax; their bees pollinated the farmers’ fields, and the monks’ interaction with the villagers was always cordial. Then one night all the monks disappeared save two. One had been there longer than anyone could remember; an outspoken, headstrong old man so ancient that he’d shrunk to half his former height and could barely walk, so he was carried on the back of a much younger monk most of the time. The second was a recent addition to the brotherhood, an acolyte. But the acolyte wasn’t found within the abbey’s walls: he was found in the woods, his tunic torn and stuck with thorns from hiding in the brush to escape the monks’ search party, or so he claimed.

  The young man was covered with bruises, and restraints had left welts on his wrists. He said, to the amazement of everyone, that the brotherhood was dedicated to the study of the black arts and had discovered a way to live forever. They’d accomplished this by learning to send their souls into the bodies of others, trading their aging bodies for those of the incoming acolytes. Then they’d dispose of the elderly bodies with the acolytes’ souls trapped inside.