by Amy Cross
Wait.
He's in my head.
“I'm not,” he says out loud, before frowning. “Oh. Wait... I rather gave myself away there, didn't I?”
I try to push him back but I can't even find the strength to stand. Placing my hands against the table, I try to turn it over, only to realize that I can barely even move.
“You can resist for as long as you wish,” Damos says firmly, “but this story always ends the same way. There's a prophecy, or had you forgotten that? I know the Book of Gothos is somewhat vague, it just says that you'll die here at Karakh, but we have our own prophecies in the demon world and they line up remarkably well with yours. The thing is, ours are far more specific, and they state in clear terms that you will fall to my will, and that the grail of a thirteenth demon will be born from your body. As I've already explained, time isn't something that troubles me a great deal, so I can literally spend eternity right here, pushing you further and further. Do you think you can hold out against me forever? Really? Are you that confident?” He leans closer. “Prophecies mean nothing to me. I can flick them away, as if they are mere cobwebs.”
What's my name?
I have to remember my name. Without it, I'm nothing.
“Are you not ready to submit?” he continues, with a faint, knowing smile. “Come on, don't be shy. I can see the fear in your eyes.”
Again I try to push the table away and get to my feet, but my whole body is paralyzed. If I could just remember my name, I'd get all my strength back, but something seems to be blocking my thoughts, forcing me down into the darkness.
“You can speak, you know,” he tells me. “You won't automatically crumble if you just say a few words.”
I hold my breath, hoping against hope that my name will come back to me.
“Ask,” he says with a grin, “and I shall answer.”
“My name,” I blurt out, finally succumbing after so many years of torture. “Tell me my name!”
He stands. “Abigail Hart.”
Suddenly filled with the strength I thought I'd lost, I push the table aside and get to my feet. Before I can say anything else, however, I realize that the garden has begun to fade away. When I turn, I find that I can see the vastness of the universe spreading out all around me.
“And now,” Damos continues, placing a hand on my shoulder, “the struggle is over. You're mine, Abby Hart, and the thirteenth demon can be conceived. I was right all along.”
I want to push him away, but his touch has frozen me in place. All I can manage is to look down as he places his other hand on my belly. Beneath my feat, there's nothing but an abyss of stars.
Part Seven
Demon's Grail part 2
Emilia
“Did you hear that?” I ask suddenly, turning to look back across the dark, moonlit plateau. I wait, but whatever the sound was, it has already faded.
“I haven't heard a damn thing since we got here,” Jonathan replies, fiddling with the metal sphere in his hands. “Maybe this device malfunctioned and just brought us back to the last place it detected Abby's presence. Maybe she's not actually here anymore.”
“I swear I heard a scream,” I continue, taking a few steps forward. “It came from...” Pausing, I try to remember, before finally looking down at the rocky ground beneath my feet. “What if the palace of Karakh was built on top of something older?” I whisper. “What if my father and the other royals were aware of something beneath the palace?”
“That's quite a leap,” Jonathan points out.
“But it'd make sense,” I reply, as I spot a series of large cracks running across the ground. I could be wrong, but I don't think those cracks were here before. It's almost as if the plateau and the mountain are slowly starting to split. “Why were the demons so keen to find Karakh? The palace meant everything to my people, but there's no reason why the demons should have cared about it at all, unless there was something hidden here, and the only place something could be hidden would be in the ground beneath our feet.” I pause for a moment, before turning to him. “It was always said that Karakh was built on sacred ground. I think that was a lie. I think the palace was built on top of ruins left behind by the demon civilization.”
“So maybe Abby is somewhere underground!”
“Do you have any better ideas?” Without waiting for him to reply, I follow the cracks and see that they seem to be much wider at the plateau's farthest edge. Making my way over, I realize that the cracks seem to be following a vague pattern, and it doesn't take long before I'm able to locate what appears to be the central point of a huge impact. Peering down into the crack, I swear I can sense a presence down there, as if somehow I just know that Abby and the demons went this way.
“What do we do when we find them?” Jonathan asks cautiously.
Sitting down, I let my legs dangle over the edge of the crack. “We do what we always do in situations like this. We improvise. I learned that lesson once from a very annoying werewolf.”
“But we don't know what we're facing,” he continues. “Do the demons have any weaknesses?”
“Well, they can turn you to dust just by looking at you,” I mutter, still staring into the darkness at the bottom of the crack, “and they seem to have been able to survive for millions of years in the void beyond life, so I'd have to say that they seem pretty hardy. Still, no-one's invincible, and I don't think they're operating at full power. They're holding back and hiding, so obviously they can't be too confident. Hopefully Abby has learned a lot about them over the past decade while they've been keeping her here, so she might have some pointers.”
“So you think we should just go down there?”
I glance up at him, and the fear in his eyes is impossible to miss. “I met your daughter,” I say after a moment.
“When?”
“Relax,” I continue, “I didn't tell her who I am. I was trying to track you down, and I sort of bumped into her. What's her name again... Maisie?”
He nods.
“Nice girl,” I tell him. “Smart, too. We had a little chat about the weather, all the usual garbage people talk about when they're at a bus stop. It wasn't too far from your motel room, actually, and she looked like she'd been crying. She didn't say anything about you, of course, not specifically, but I could tell she was angry about something, maybe a little bitter. I offered to get her a drink so we could talk some more, but she said she had to get home. Like I said, smart girl. I guess she was a little young for cocktails.”
He sits next to me, ready to jump down into the crack that leads beneath the palace's ruins.
“She hates me,” he says finally.
“She's a teenager. Of course she does.”
“It's more than that,” he continues. “She knows that I abandoned Abby, and she has every reason to call me a coward.”
“You and I finally have something in common,” I point out. “We both let false versions of a long-gone parent trick us into doing the wrong thing.”
“That's no excuse.”
“But it's an explanation,” I reply. “It's not like we did the wrong thing just because we got scared. I honestly thought my father had come back to lead the spiders to glory, and you honestly thought your mother...” I pause for a moment. “Well, it's tough, that's all I'm saying. You think you're doing the right thing, and then you turn around and realize you've made a terrible mistake. I think that happens to a lot more people than you'd like to believe.” I wait for him to reply, but he seems lost in thought. “I bet your kid'll come around eventually,” I tell him. “When she finds out that you came back for Abby, I mean.”
“And how will she find out?” he asks. “From her point of view, I've probably just disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.”
“Pessimist.”
“I want her to be proud of me again,” he continues, “and I want to be able to look at my reflection without feeling nauseous.”
“Plastic surgery can only do so much,” I tell him with a faint smi
le, before nudging his arm. “That was a joke, by the way.”
He turns to me. “Do you think -”
“Let's do this,” I continue, suddenly feeling as if I've said way too much. Putting my hand on his shoulder, I give him an almighty shove, sending him tumbling down into the crack, and then I take a deep breath before jumping after him. Hell, Abby had better appreciate how much we're risking to save her neck.
***
“Is this spider language?” Jonathan asks a short time later, as we make our way along a dark passage deep beneath the ground.
Stopping next to him, I hold my phone up and use the screen's light to illuminate a set of shapes and symbols that have been carved into the rock.
“No,” I say after a moment, before spotting a different set of symbols higher up, “but that is. It's almost like we've reached a point where the lower reaches of Karakh met the top of some other set of ruins.” I take a moment to translate the words. “Go no further,” I whisper. “By royal decree and on the advice of Emitus the Wise, the rest of these passages are to remain forever sealed.” Glancing along the dark passageway, I can help wondering why the ancient spiders would have been so scared to explore the caverns beneath the palace. I guess maybe they were just too scared.
“Why would your ancestors have built their home directly over the ruins of an earlier civilization?” Jonathan asks as we start walking again, making our way into the darkness ahead.
“Beats me,” I mutter. “Superstition, I guess. The earliest spiders probably didn't even understand what they'd found, maybe they treated the demons' ruins as some kind of holy site. Whatever happened, the truth was being actively suppressed by the time the Book of Karakh was written, and only vague whispers reached the ears of my father's generation. I guess everyone accepted that the demons were a myth, when in reality they were just waiting for their chance to come back and -”
Stopping suddenly, I hold up a hand to warn him not to say anything. Up ahead, the faintest rustling sound is coming from somewhere deeper in the maze of passageways.
“I think we've got company,” I whisper.
“Maybe they left guards behind,” he replies.
“This whole place seems completely undefended,” I continue. “Somehow I get the feeling the demons aren't exactly massing here, preparing to unleash their fury on the rest of reality. In fact, I don't think they've got much fury left. It took all of them to kill Oncephalus, and all they managed with me was to turn my right foot to dust. Hardly the unbridled power of an ancient evil. If they were weak when they died all those years ago, maybe they're still weak now.”
With that, I take a few steps forward. I can already make out the light of a flame flickering against the wall up ahead, apparently coming from a chamber off to the left-hand side, and as we get closer I realize the rustling sound is just around the corner. I brace myself, in case something suddenly comes lunging out to attack me, but finally I'm shocked to see several figures on the floor. Torches are burning on the walls, casting flickering orange light across the chamber, and as I step closer to the first of the figures I realize that he seems to have collapsed into a heap.
“What are they?” Jonathan asks. “Did the demons do this to them?”
As the closest figure lets out a faint, weak moan, I lean toward him and see that there are deep cracks running across his face.
“The demons didn't do this to them,” I whisper. “These are the demons.”
Looking over at the next collapsed figure, I realize that whereas before these creatures had burning blue light rippling beneath their skin, now they seem to be on the verge of death. I quickly count them, finding that in total there are ten dying demons in this chamber.
“All but two of them, anyway,” I mutter. “There were only ever twelve to begin with.”
Stepping over the nearest demon, I see one that seems to have just a little more life in him.
“Hey,” I say, kicking his arm. “Wake up. What's your name?”
“We only...” he gasps. “We...”
“You what?” I sneer, stepping around him.
“We... Fought our way back to this world...” he stammers, “only to fulfill the last prophecy of the demon race. We knew... we would die... We just... We... needed to give all our power to Damos so he could... We should have listened to him right at the start.”
Another gasp emerges from his throat, before his head tilts back and he falls silent.
“No!” I say firmly, reaching down and grabbing his throat. “You don't get to die like this! You have to suffer first!” When I haul his body up, however, I can immediately tell that he's gone. “Damn it!” I shout, slamming him into the wall and cracking the back of his skull, before tossing his corpse aside as I turn to Jonathan. “I wanted to hurt him!” I shout. “I was owed that much! Still...” Glancing around at the other dead demons, I realize that the one I'm after isn't here. “Where's Skellig?” I whisper. “He's definitely mine!”
“I don't understand,” Jonathan replies, looking around at the other demons as, one by one, they too start to die. “They were supposed to be powerful, they were supposed to be this fearful race...”
“They were once,” I mutter, stepping over to another of the wretches and staring down into his dying eyes. “Whatever they were planning when they returned, clearly it wasn't just a repeat of their old empire. They're after something else, something they were willing to sacrifice their lives in order to get. It's almost as if they became this single-minded cult at the end.” I pause for a moment, before my anger flares up and I kick the nearest demon, shattering his skull. Letting out a cry of rage, I step over his corpse and crunch my boot down against the face of another, before realizing that I feel completely impotent. “That one back there said they gave their power to Damos,” I continue, turning to Jonathan. “What does that mean?”
“I've never heard of anyone named Damos,” he replies.
“There are only ten bodies here,” I continue, “so maybe Damos is one of the demons who's still alive. Maybe the rest of them gave him their life-force so that he'd be able to complete some kind of task.”
“Something involving Abby?”
“Do you sense her?” I ask, turning to him. “Come on, you're her brother, you must know if she's here.”
“It's hard to be sure,” he replies, stepping past the bodies as he makes his way toward the far side of the chamber. “There's so much conflicting energy down here, it's almost as if something is drowning out a lot of the other signals.” He turns to me. “I know the demons we've encountered so far have been relatively weak, but there's an immensely powerful creature somewhere in these caverns, and somehow I don't think it's Abby. I thought I sensed her death once, many years ago, but now I think that was just another misoform trick. I can't even trust my senses anymore.”
Heading over to join him, I look along the next passageway.
“You should still be able to sense her,” I mutter, “unless...”
“Unless she's dead?”
“Either that, or for some reason she's hiding herself from you. But why would she do that? Why wouldn't she want us to find her?”
Abby Hart
“My brother is here,” I say calmly, as I run a hand over my bare, flat belly. “I thought he'd given up on me by now, but I suppose he's come to interfere. That dumb bitch Emilia is with him, they must be -”
Before I can finish, a thought flickers through my mind. More than a thought, a scream, as if part of my mind is trying to break free. I pause for a fraction of a second, before pushing the scream down.
“They must be coming for me,” I continue. “After all this time...”
I wait for a reply, before looking across the chapel and seeing that Damos is leaning against the old stone altar, seemingly in pain. I've noticed over the past few hours that his physical condition is starting to deteriorate, and it's clear now that he isn't simply tired; his body seems to be breaking down, and the burning blue fire beneath his skin
has noticeably darkened. He's been quite open with me, and he's explained that the demons are still suffering from the same sickness that caused them to die before. This return of theirs won't last forever.
“Do you think it might have worked yet?” I ask him. “In my belly, I mean.”
“Have a little patience,” he replies, turning to me and straightening his posture. He's clearly too proud to let his weakness become too apparent. “Nothing can stop us now, Abigail. The other demons gave me their strength, their lives, so that I would have sufficient power to complete my role in the prophecy. All except Skellig, of course. Even now, he clings to the old dream of immortality.”
“I hope -” Pausing for a moment, I realize that there's a strange sensation in the back of my mind, as if a voice is crying out. At the same time, I can feel a steadying presence filling my thoughts, forcing me to focus on the importance of the demons' plan. When I think back to how much I fought against them, it's hard to believe that I could ever have been so foolish. I can only be thankful that Damos was finally able to get into my head and rearrange my mind so that I understood his needs.
“Don't waste your time on hope,” he says finally. “Hope is for those who lack the strength to enforce their will. When I saw that my species was dying all those millennia ago, I didn't hope that something would save us, I decided that I would do anything to ensure that we survived.” He takes a step toward me. “The others were focused on extending their own lives, and denying the new life they saw from the windows of our fortress, but I knew -” Suddenly he stumbles, his right leg having apparently given way. He manages to steady himself against the wall, but when he turns me it's clear that there's pain in his soul. “I don't have much longer,” he tells me. “I held on for so long in the chaos of the void, but...”
“What can I do to help?” I ask, stepping toward him.
“There's nothing,” he continues, his voice filled with agony. “It was always destined to end this way, for me at least. All that matters is the seed in your belly...” Reaching out, he places a hand against my flesh. “I would give anything to see the thirteenth demon once it has been born,” he whispers. “Just to see the next generation of the demon race. Still, I know that the child will be strong, and that knowledge will have to be enough.” He looks up at me. “You have no regrets, do you? No doubts?”