“Anything to bring this abomination to justice at last,” Justinian said. “Tell me what I can do to assist you.”
This being had no need of his assistance, that much I knew. Whatever it was, Justinian was deluding himself to think otherwise.
Which no doubt it intended. Its face, so reminiscent of his dead daughter, combined with a small stature and the styles popular in his youth, were nothing more than a trap meant to lull him into complacency.
I tried to pull free from the stone, but I was still held fast. I reached again for the arcane fire, but that only allowed the thing in the Needle to more thoroughly invade my thoughts, which I couldn’t afford.
The girl turned to me. She carried a cloth-wrapped bundle in her arms. Something moved and twitched beneath its coverings.
She paced toward me, accompanied by Justinian. When they were a few feet away, she smiled guilelessly. “Would you like to see my pet?”
“No,” I said with absolute certainty.
“Are you sure?” She grinned and reached for the edge of the covering. “I think he wants to see you.”
She pulled aside the tattered cloth. At first glance she held nothing but a repulsive mass of squirming tentacles. Their pallid hue appeared sickly, and many of them dangled limp and unmoving, though far too many still stirred. Mouths gaped at the end of some, needle-like protrusions emerging from their tips.
Then the writhing mass shifted, some of the tentacles drawing apart to reveal the lumpish tumor forming its body. Staring out at me, embedded in the oozing flesh, were the familiar features of my brother Stanford.
Chapter 37
Griffin
Several things happened at once.
My bindings gave way. The guard Hattie had stabbed let out a strangled gurgle and collapsed. Heliabel flung herself at Ophelia, teeth exposed and hair ready, even though her hands were still bound at her back.
Hesitation could prove deadly, so I turned and punched the guard behind me with all of my strength. His nose gave way beneath my fist with a gush of blood, but he didn’t go down.
“Iskander!” Hattie shouted, and tossed him one of her knives.
He caught it easily and stabbed another guard with it. Ophelia called out something in a language I didn’t speak, and Heliabel went flying back, as though blasted by a shotgun.
Then I had no more attention to spare. The guard I faced had stumbled slightly, but now raised his sword. I grabbed his wrist, trying to force the blade down and to the side, away from me. But that left one of his hands free, and he struck me hard on the side of the head—directly atop the wound already there.
Fresh blood sluiced down my face, and what had faded to a dull ache turned into a white spike of pain. My hold loosened, and he wrenched free.
Christine, her hands still bound, head-butted him in the side. His arms windmilled, trying to catch his balance. I kicked his knee, and he fell to the ground with a most satisfying thump. Christine tried to boot him in the head, but he rolled out of the way, and she missed.
I attempted to grapple with him, but he swiped his sword at me, forcing me to jump back. The blade of the guard Iskander had killed lay in the grass nearby, and I snatched it up, blocking the guard’s blow just in time.
Metal rang off metal. The witch hunter’s sword was heavier than my cane, making my moves slower and clumsier than they would ordinarily have been. Things might have gone badly for me, but Christine hurled herself into his back, sending him off balance—and directly onto the point of my blade.
His weight nearly tore the sword from my hand, but I managed to pull it free as he slumped to the ground. “Good work,” I called to Christine, before turning to the fray.
Ophelia had backed up to the edge of the cliff, a wand in her hand. The last guard lay dead, Iskander standing over him. Heliabel struggled to sit up; one half of her face was badly blistered, and the tentacles on that side were blackened and shriveled. Hattie stood before Ophelia, her knife held out before her.
“Traitor,” Ophelia snarled. “We lifted you from the gutter my accursed brother left you in. I took you under my wing, reared you alongside your cousins. I made sure you learned the knives from the best, even if it meant going outside the family. Where before you had only known want, I—we—gave you everything you could possibly need. The only thing I ever asked in return was your loyalty.” Rage and pain darkened her eyes. “And this is how you repay me?”
“Earnest was a good man.” The wind ruffled Hattie’s hair, but otherwise she was still as a stone. “He didn’t deserve what happened. The Keeper should’ve called a council. Should’ve brought us all home so we could decide together what to do. But Justinian was too afraid we’d choose different, so he tried to force us. He says he never turned his back on our family, but he’s lying to himself. And so are you.”
“Surrender,” Rupert said. He held up his manacled hands. “We’ll bind you with these and leave you safe and unharmed, somewhere you can’t cause trouble.”
Ophelia’s eyes narrowed. “And then what, Rupert?”
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “We’ll decide that after we prevent Justinian from summoning Nyarlathotep.”
Ophelia’s brows arched, and an ugly laugh escaped her. “Summon him? Don’t you understand? He’s already here.”
Shock and horror froze me, so that when she took a step back, out into the air, I couldn’t even react. Hattie lunged to grab her, but it was too late. Ophelia toppled out of sight, a brief scream quickly cut off as her body struck the rocks below.
I stared at the empty air where she had vanished. “She was lying,” I said, past lips that had gone numb with anxiety. Not because I didn’t believe her, but because I didn’t wish it to be true.
My fingers went cold, and my heart seemed to seize, like an engine without oil. Whyborne was in Nyarlathotep’s grasp, which meant everything I’d dreaded for months had likely come true. The masters’ greatest servant wouldn’t simply let him survive, not after the defeat in the Draakenwood.
My husband—my love—was either injured, dead, or enslaved. And I was already too late to save him.
Chapter 38
Whyborne
I screamed.
Bile rose in my throat, it was all I could do not to vomit. I shut my eyes, but then opened them again to horror.
This monstrosity couldn’t be Stanford. This was some terrible joke, some trick meant to break me.
The face made a burbling sound, unable to speak either because he no longer possessed lungs and a larynx, or had no mind left to form words. Watery eyes fixed on me, and there might have been a spark of recognition somewhere within their tormented depths.
“Your brother failed me,” the girl said. “But as you see, I am not unmerciful.”
Dear God, no wonder I’d sensed a vast presence hiding behind the mask of the young girl. Hadn’t I read of the different forms taken by the thing before me? To the mad pharaoh Nephren-ka, it had been Nyarlathotep, a god of chaos. To medieval sorcerers it had taken on the shape of the Man in the Woods. Across eons and continents, it had put on whatever form would most easily help it accomplish its dark designs. This was simply the one best to present to Justinian, nothing more.
“There was still too much of this world in his body,” she went on, “and not enough of the Outside for him to survive after you pushed him through the rip in the veil. I might have let him die, but instead I removed what was needed so he might live. You should thank me for being so good to your brother.”
My head ached, and a wave of faintness swept over me. Stanford had been a terrible man and a worse brother. If there had been anything left of the boy Mother remembered, it had been unable to withstand the hate and greed infecting him.
Perhaps Stanford deserved everything that had befallen him. Surely he had brought it upon himself by agreeing to graft a thing from the Outside onto his own flesh.
And yet the repellent monstrosity he’d become revolted me on a soul-deep level. As t
hough a rock had overturned and revealed a squirming mass of maggots underneath. He’d been this way for months, assuming time even worked in a similar fashion in the Outside. Did anything remain of his mind? Was he mercifully mad, or agonizingly aware of his condition?
There had been no mercy in this, any more than there had been when Justinian transformed his family, or had Nyarlathotep do so for him. There was only mockery and torment, a blasphemous horror from the Outside laughing at mortal pain, delighting in suffering.
The thing that had created the maelstrom—created the essence that was me—was a howling void of madness and cruelty.
“Well?” Nyarlathotep cocked her head at me. “Aren’t you going to say ‘thank you,’ little spark? Or perhaps you aren’t grateful for your brother’s wretched life. You did mean to kill him, didn’t you?”
The being in the Needle recoiled. I fell to my knees, freed from its curious grasp. Heart pounding, I scrambled up. If I couldn’t get away, I had to fight, somehow. Though what I would do against a god of sorcery, I couldn’t begin to imagine.
“Kneel.” Nyarlathotep’s voice thrummed in my brain, my blood. “Kneel before your creator.” She raised one of her slender, girlish hands and gestured to Morgen’s Needle. “Long ago, at the behest of my masters, I stood in this very place. I used the black stone and through it commanded the arcane lines, the very blood of the world. I turned some of them from their original course, twisted them together, and wove an arcane vortex larger and stronger than any in existence. So powerful it could open a gateway to the Outside massive enough to admit armies.”
She dropped her hand to her side. The wind howled over the island and flung handfuls of rain from the darkening sky. “But mistakes were made. We were cast out through that selfsame gateway. The masters were cut off from this world, the world they had once ruled as gods. I returned as their emissary, sowing chaos among humans, gifting them with magic. Setting events in motion, until the masters could return and reclaim their rightful place once again.”
Her cupid’s bow lips turned into a petulant frown. “But in all that time, I never imagined my masterpiece would turn against me. That my absence would allow the maelstrom to grow arrogant. To forget it is nothing but a tool shaped to do the masters’ bidding.”
Justinian stared at me as though I were some kind of strange insect. “What could it have hoped to gain by that?” he wondered aloud. “To give itself flesh and blood.” His jaw tightened. “To murder my children?”
My mind raced. Why was Nyarlathotep going to the trouble of talking to me?
She had to want something from me. Persephone and I, or at least the fragments of the maelstrom within us, could be of use to her somehow. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of organizing Stanford and the Fideles to capture us last February?
At least she couldn’t simply strip the spark from me and use it herself. Killing me would seem the simplest alternative, but presumably my essence would return to the maelstrom if that happened. So either Nyarlathotep didn’t want that to occur, or she still hoped in some way to make me her tool.
“If you mean to kill me, why haven’t you?” I challenged, though my voice shook with fear.
“Kill you?” She shook her head slowly. “No, no. You have it all wrong. I’ve come to save you.”
Chapter 39
Griffin
“I believe Ophelia told the truth.” Rupert’s brown skin had taken on a sickly pallor. “Justinian himself said he’d called for ‘greater assistance’ than the Needle could offer. I’d hoped it meant he’d summoned some lesser creature from the Outside—a rat thing, as we’d seen them earlier, or something similar. But he’s been working with Nyarlathotep all along.”
Hattie shook her head slowly. She stared at the last place Ophelia had stood, despair written on her features. “Then what hope do we have?”
“None that I can see. Balefire is lost,” Rupert said heavily. “Our best—perhaps our only—chance is to make for the causeway. If we can find a seam in the enchantment close to land, we can cut our way through as we did before. With luck, Katherine and the children will meet us, and the seas won’t be so rough that even the smallest can’t navigate them.”
There seemed little chance of it, given the toddlers in Katherine’s charge. For a long moment, no one spoke. My entire body felt numb with dread. Nyarlathotep was a being beyond my ability to comprehend. An entity from the Outside, with the power and knowledge to bend the very arcane lines. To instruct generations of sorcerers. He’d been worshipped as a god in Egypt and called upon by medieval cults in Europe. His shadow lay across all of history.
Now he had my Ival. Might have already done something terrible to him, or even simply killed him outright. Fear constricted my lungs—we had to save Ival, if there was any chance whatsoever. Somehow.
But how? We were five mortals, and only one of us versed in any of the arcane arts. I had my shadowsight, but as useful a tool as it was, I didn’t deceive myself into thinking it would allow me to stand up to such a being.
Perhaps if we’d had Whyborne with us, or Persephone, or both, we might have had a chance. If we’d been in Widdershins, at the heart of their power, we could certainly have fought back.
But Nyarlathotep had taken Whyborne, and Persephone was far away, and we had nothing but ourselves.
Likely he would wipe us off the face of the world with barely a second thought.
But it didn’t matter. Until now, I had managed to put my secret fear to the back of my mind, because there were so many immediate tasks, immediate terrors. The maelstrom had created the twins to aid its fight against the masters. Whatever came, they would be at the forefront of our defense. Even if we won, the chances of their survival couldn’t be good.
Even if we won. As though there could be any victory if I lost my Ival.
I couldn’t conceive of it. Couldn’t imagine our home empty of his living presence. I didn’t want to even consider never again sitting across from him at breakfast, or arguing amicably over whether he should add more color to his wardrobe, or shopping together at the grocer’s, or any of the thousand other little moments that formed the mosaic of our life together.
I had to try to save him. Both today and in the future. No matter what it took.
“I will never see any of my grandchildren again.” Heliabel said unexpectedly.
Iskander had found the key to the manacles on the body of one of the guards, and set Heliabel and Rupert free. Now she walked to the edge of the cliff and stared out over it. The blackened tentacles on the right side of her head stirred only feebly, but the others whipped around her shoulders in a frenzy of grief and rage.
“Heliabel?” Christine asked uncertainly. Iskander had cut her bonds, and she rubbed her wrists as she stared at Heliabel’s sinewy form.
Heliabel didn’t move. “I never even laid eyes on Guinevere’s son, and Stanford’s children know nothing of their heritage.” And neither Persephone nor Whyborne would give her more, even if we all survived and the world didn’t end. She must have had the same thought, because she said, “I wouldn’t change a single thing about either of the twins. They’re perfect as they are. But they’re all I have left.”
I swallowed. It was hard to speak the words aloud, but I had to. “And the odds of them both surviving what is to come aren’t good.”
“I know,” she said. Our gazes met in a moment of complete understanding. “But I will not give them up a moment earlier than I must. Not even if I must face down a god.”
Christine stepped to Heliabel’s side. “I’m with you. My baby isn’t going to grow up without its godfather, if I have anything to say about it.”
Heliabel looked at her searchingly, then smiled. “Thank you, daughter.”
“Christine…” Iskander hesitated, then said, “I didn’t realize…you’re so fearless. I never thought you would worry about…well. Becoming your mother, as it were.”
She bit her lip. “It seemed easier to pretend I wasn’t wor
ried. You know me, Kander, I don’t care for anything I can’t fight.”
He laughed and swept her into his arms. “That I do.”
Rupert glanced at me. “Mr. Flaherty? I assume you are also in favor of fighting rather than fleeing?”
“I have to try,” I said. “Nyarlathotep has my husband. I swore I would be with him in sickness and in health. There was no exception for kidnapping by monstrous entities from beyond the bounds of the world.”
Iskander chuckled. “Drat, I knew there was something we left out of our vows, Christine.”
“Hattie?” Rupert asked.
Hattie finally turned away from the precipice. She tossed one of her knives into the air then caught it. “I’ve got two knives and I’ve already picked out the holes they’re going into.”
“Thank you, Hattie, that was far more colorful an answer than I wished.” Rupert turned to the door leading back into Balefire. “We have something of an advantage at the moment, in that no one remains to interfere with us.” He didn’t mention the fact that advantage came from the wholesale slaughter of his family, but Hattie flinched slightly at his words. “We should make for the armory as quickly as we can. If we’re to have any chance at stopping Nyarlathotep, we’ll need the weapons within.”
“The ketoi artifacts,” Heliabel said. “The Sword, the Spear, the Shield, and the Source. Are they there?”
Rupert looked taken aback. “I suppose they’d be in the vault, which is within the armory, yes.”
Heliabel nodded. “According to legend, together they’re capable of killing anything from the Outside.” She smiled grimly, revealing her rows of shark teeth. “I say we find Nyarlathotep and put them to the test.”
Chapter 40
Whyborne
“What?” Justinian exclaimed. “Save him?” He thrust a furious finger in my direction, even as he rounded on Nyarlathotep. “I brought you here to destroy him! To twist him into something as terrible as his brother. To get my revenge!”
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