“We’re dragons,” Toinette said quickly. Here are the facts. Let’s have them out. “When we wish to be. We heal quickly. We live long. We see in the dark, and I’m surprised you didn’t wonder about that.”
“I hadn’t realized it was so dark,” Adnet said. “Although it must be. The mind does not rot as the body does, but certain perceptions—and the expectations with them—do fall away.”
That raised questions, the same that Erik had been contemplating ever since the ghost had made his appearance, but they would have to wait. Practical matters were at hand, which Toinette confirmed by speaking again. “We also can breathe fire,” she said. “It’s stronger than most flame and killed a few of the creatures this thing touched.”
“And,” Erik put in, thinking of the light in the forest, “we’ve a bit more resistance to Its power than most men, from what I can tell. Our kin are old too, and well-versed in magic. I don’t know as many spells as I might, but I could likely manage an attack on that front, or enchant a weapon to strike at this power.”
Adnet hesitated, or so Erik thought. What made for hesitation in a moving skeleton was far from clear. He was silent for a while. Erik and Toinette ate the last of their food without speaking, until another thought crossed Erik’s mind. “If you don’t believe we can destroy It,” he asked, “why did you guide us here? Only to tell us of our fate?”
“To offer you the chance to change it,” said the spirit, “if only for yourselves.” With a grating noise, he plucked the dagger from his ribs and held it up. “In this, one of our enchantments yet holds. If it gives a man his fatal wound, that man’s death won’t feed the un-ark, nor will It be able to make any use of his body. I came back to offer that mercy to any who made it this far, and to fight the un-ark back with what power I yet have. Now that you speak…” He sighed. “If the hope you offer is true, then I rejoice in it, but I had thought my duty clear.”
“I am,” said Erik, “a bit familiar with that sentiment.”
Toinette reached across the gulf of crumbs and stone to squeeze his knee.
“You are, in truth, the first to travel so far.” Adnet turned the dagger over in his fleshless hand. “And you’re unchanged, which speaks to your claims. It’s still a great risk.”
“Aye,” said Erik.
“It’s one I’d take,” said Toinette. “And I know it’s not only me, but in time it won’t be only us. Men are traveling more, to Araby and the Indies and to trade with the Mongols. It won’t be very long before they try to cross the ocean this way as well, and the spirit reaches forth to take prey. We can chance striking at It now, before It gains in strength life by life. I’d roll those dice.”
Adnet stepped forward, his dragging footsteps across the stone unsteady and quiet. In front of Erik, he stopped and held out the dagger, hilt first. “Then I bid you take this. Should you fail, you may yet have a moment to grant mercy to yourselves and to the world.”
The dagger’s gold hilt felt sun-warmed when Erik took it, far as the cavern was from any sunlight. Holding it, he could neither smell nor hear the signs of the un-ark, and he bowed his head before Adnet, knowing the value of the gift. “You’re most generous, sir. I vow, one way or another, that presence will have neither of us.”
If it came to that most desperate of circumstances, he vowed silently to see Toinette’s soul safe before his, and to do it when she didn’t know, that she might have the better chance of heaven. Even the idea made him want to snarl and smash the cave walls, but he forced himself to practicality.
“Outside this door and through the one opposite,” said Adnet, “there will be another passage. Take the rightmost turns, and you’ll come to the center. The place of the chest. I cannot tell you what It’ll put in your way, nor may my power approach the nexus of Its strength, but I’ll give you what aid I can.”
“Thank you,” said Toinette, getting to her feet. “We owe you our lives already, and we may owe you our souls in the end. I wish there was a chance of paying you back, but it doesn’t seem likely.”
“Might there be any service we can do you,” Erik asked, “before we go from here?”
“The ground here is too hard for burial, and you’ve no cloth for a shroud,” Adnet replied. “Yet if you would lay the sign of our Lord over me, as it is on my brothers, I would count it a kindness.”
“Gladly,” said Erik, and then had to ask the question every man would have wondered about. “What is it, on the other side?”
Despite his permanent, lipless grin, Adnet managed to convey a smile. “I haven’t gone the whole way, nor will I unless you win your battle, but I’ve seen what I cannot speak of, nor you hear save at great cost to your mind and perhaps your body. I will say only this: it is not what the un-ark would have you believe.”
Remembering his dreams, Erik found the relief of that answer quite satisfactory. “Then I’ll go with more hope,” he said, “even if the worst happens.”
“Hope is always a strength, applied well,” said Adnet. He lay down by the side of his shrouded companions, straightened his legs, and folded his arms across his chest. “Farewell,” he said, “in the truest sense of the term.”
Slowly, the red light faded from around his bones. By the time it vanished, Toinette was already picking up chips of stone from the cave floor.
“Hold,” said Erik. “We’ll need some cloth to put them on. Use my other sleeve.”
If they did walk out victorious, he thought, there was a decent chance that they’d both be naked as Adam at the rate they were going. Toinette’s nudity always made for a pleasant sight, but that particular situation sounded uncomfortable. All the same, he held still as she cut off the other sleeve of his tunic and helped to spread it carefully across Adnet’s chest.
The cross they made on top of it was less even than the others, owing to the proximity of ribs beneath the cloth, but it was clear.
When it was done, and both of them stood over the bodies, Toinette took Erik’s free hand. “You know,” she said, “if I must be here at all, there’s nobody I’d rather have with me.”
* * *
Out of the cave, behind the opposite door, they walked through the passage Adnet had mentioned. It was no worse than the rest of the temple at first. The smell and the sound picked up, but Toinette had thought they would and braced herself. In truth, when Erik walked beside her holding the dagger, it wasn’t so bad.
They turned right when the tunnel forked, walking through a small maze of twists and turns that all seemed much alike. Time drew out in a thin unending thread. Toinette tried to get her mind around the presence they were going to face, the thing for which she now had a description and a name: un-ark.
To name a thing, Artair had told her in her youth, gave you power over it. But a true name counted more than others. She doubted that un-ark would count for much. “It didn’t sound,” she said to Erik, both of them knowing to what she referred, “like anything you’ve heard of, did It?”
“Not particularly. The greater demons, or the specifics of them, are vanishingly rare. I’d not thought to ever meet with any. There’s a great deal in the worlds that even those with magic never hear about.”
Toinette could understand that. Even dragons didn’t casually cross the Alps, and the elemental messengers Artair and his kin used took a great deal of effort and the right sort of ground, or so she recalled Agnes saying. Even most of the MacAlasdairs hadn’t crossed the Channel. A magician in France or Muscovy was likely to be a surprise to them, and him to them.
“You could all stand to journey more,” she said.
“Aye, look how well this turned out,” Erik responded, half joking. Then he drew closer, and while Toinette was glad, she knew it wasn’t out of either lust or comfort. “When we reach It,” he said under his breath, “we’ll use the Greater Exorcism, then the Conjuration of Fire, then change and breathe flame. Do you object? Do y
ou know the spells?”
Closing her eyes, Toinette cast her mind backward, seeing cramped writing on old parchment, hearing her own voice reciting the procedures back to Artair. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Enough to follow your lead.”
“That will be a change,” Erik said with a grin as they went around a corner.
All at once, they were standing on a city street.
It was no city Toinette knew, and it was every city. The buildings shifted as she looked at them, blooming and shrinking like wax in water. She recognized London and Paris, and thought she saw a hint of Rome’s basilica.
Figures walked the streets. Most of them were faceless, as those in the great hall had been, but when Toinette stared at one, features lay themselves over the black void: a man’s face, purple-black with plague, eyes dazed with agony and the knowledge of his approaching death. He fell to his knees by a church and began to shriek wordless pleas to the sky.
Bodies lay all around them. Flies buzzed, landed, feasted.
It was mirage, and it was memory.
“Blessed Virgin have mercy,” she said, her voice hoarse. “It’s taking things out of my head now.”
“Or mine,” said Erik, looking at her with eyes grown dark and hollow.
And the hell of it was, Toinette couldn’t tell which. There was no part of the city she could point to and say I knew that man or This didn’t happen when I was there. The dead filled the streets, the living wept and pleaded and waited to die, and it was all a memory either of them could have claimed, from almost anywhere.
She wiped her dry mouth with the back of her hand. “There must be a thousand doors here, and they’re all changing. And behind the wrong ones—”
“I know.”
Sword in hand, Toinette started toward the first of the buildings. Erik’s hand fell on her shoulder. “No,” he said, as she turned to blink at him. He was holding the dagger, white-knuckled. “I think I can find our way.”
* * *
“Come back,” Toinette said.
She opened her mouth as though she wanted to speak on, but swallowed and shook her head, and Erik could think of no response. There in the abattoir of a dozen remembered streets, the mingled sounds of feasting insects and human misery around them, jokes offered no protection.
He took her in his arms and kissed her, not out of lust—it would have taken a twisted man to feel desire in such a place—but to hold her, to know the feeling of her beneath his hands and lips. That, as much as the dagger, would be his shield.
Erik stepped back, calmed his breathing, and spoke: “Visio dei.”
The dagger’s power answered his call in lieu of the normal spirits of vision, as he’d hoped it would. It shielded his mind too. A golden radiance cut through the clinging green-purple fog around him and kept at bay the shadowy forms twisting there, waiting for an unwitting traveler to open the wrong door. Erik averted his eyes all the same. Men weren’t meant to see all the forces of the world, and if they won the day, he wanted no clear memory of those beings, whatever they were.
Finding their route was bad enough. A distance down the corpse-strewn street pulsed a hollowness, a shifting rip in the world that led to a malign and hateful no place.
“There,” Erik pointed.
Toinette’s hand closed around his elbow and gripped tight. “I think I see it,” she said. “A couple steps closer. Then you can let go.”
The steps in question took an eternity. He moved his feet through sucking fog, stepping over phantom bodies that felt and smelled like reality. Only the dagger’s light and Toinette’s presence at his side seemed solid; the rest was a pit where he could spend his days scrabbling and flailing, lost forever.
“Here?” Toinette echoed him.
“Aye.” The door was unremarkable, but he felt the presence behind it.
“Then don’t linger, for God’s sake.”
Glad to oblige, Erik dismissed the spell. The city became marginally less horrible. He steadied himself with his hand on one wall, taking deep breaths and being sure to do so only through his mouth.
“Tell me when you’re ready,” said Toinette. She held her knife in one hand, and her eyes sparked with gold.
The color reminded Erik of the dagger he carried, and how its light had pushed back the fog of the un-ark. It was still warmer in his hand and heavier than it should have been. Notions of power crossed his mind, uncurling like bright ribbons and leading his thoughts onward.
“In there,” he said, drawing close to Toinette and lowering his voice again. Given that the un-ark could evidently pick memories out of their minds, he wasn’t sure whispering served any purpose, but old habits died hard, and he had no wish to take chances. “After the exorcism, give me a moment before the invocation. I’ve an idea.”
“That makes one of us,” said Toinette.
“I can explain, if you’d like.”
She shook her head, pushed back wayward hair, and smiled grimly. “The less we speak, the better we might be,” she said, echoing his earlier thoughts. “Besides, I trust you. Magic’s your ship. If you think you can get us through the storm, I’m glad to help you do it.”
“I’ll only hope to do as well as you’ve done all these years,” said Erik. He wanted to say more, but the circumstances would have made any confession seem cheap: words he didn’t think he’d have to live by.
Instead he fixed her image in his mind. In a moment he memorized the small, weary, defiant grin, the fire of her hair, the way she held herself although she was as tired and afraid as him. “Well, then,” he said. “Let’s have this done, aye?”
* * *
Beyond the door was cold like Toinette had never imagined, not even in the depths of winter at Loch Arach. It stopped her breath at first, and her whole body tensed, as though her skin and muscles were trying to burrow inside her for warmth.
It was not winter.
It wasn’t the ocean.
It was nothing.
A thin stone path ran from the door to a square platform, and nothing supported it. Nothing was around it. Platform and path hung in the middle of a void lit by occasional twists of purple-green radiance, which came from nowhere and disappeared almost immediately.
In the middle of the platform sat a chest about half the size of a man. Black metal bound strange pallid wood, winding around it in three thick strips. Purple-green fire flickered along the edges of that metal, and those edges blurred as Toinette looked at them.
The sound of wet inhalation was everywhere, and loud.
“Oh,” Toinette exhaled, a sickly gut-punched moan. She felt dimly ashamed of it in front of Erik, but she could no more help herself than the dying men in France could have stifled their groans. At extremes, the body took over, and the body knew that the room was wrong, a fever-dream place that belonged in front of no remotely human eyes.
She glanced back over her shoulder, though she knew flight would do no good. The door was gone. Everything was gone. There was only the path.
And so she forced one foot to rise, one leg to swing forward, and then the other. She did look down. The void was awful, but it was better than the chest.
The stone echoed beneath her feet. From the darkness beneath it, faces swam up to meet her. A few were those she recognized. All were dead. All were rotting.
The way of all flesh, came a wet voice from around them. You are this. Only wait.
It was an observation, not a threat. Toinette sought for a witty reply, or at least a profanely defiant one, of the sort she’d made in her dreams. Nothing came to her. There was only walking, and the path.
She stepped onto the platform and felt the call of the light again, as she had in the forest. This time it was more forceful. It sought the center of her mind, the weariness and the pain of her walking, the bleeding blisters on her feet and the bruises on her arms from when Erik had g
rabbed her. It pulled at those spots, working not on her mind but on her body.
The way of all flesh.
Toinette yanked back. “My form is mine,” she snarled. Artair had given her that when she’d been fourteen, and whatever she’d said to Erik, she doubled the amount of her debt to the patriarch in that moment. The light, startled, relinquished its grasp.
Defiance cleared her head. The room was still horrible, the chest more so, but she could make her way to the far side of the platform and straighten her back. She could remember words, including the ones she needed.
She didn’t look at the chest, nor at the faces coming out of the void around her. She met Erik’s eyes instead. “On your mark,” she said.
They began.
Thirty-Nine
“Strong and mighty spirit of hell,” Erik began, sending his voice out from the bottom of his chest as he’d been taught to do in such rites.
As soon as he began, the words started to slip his mind. It took an effort of will to call them back, and more effort yet to shape each one. His tongue hung heavy in his mouth. Around him, the air was both cold and thick.
The thing in the box was fighting back.
He pushed onward. Toinette’s voice rose with his, low alto mixing with his baritone. “Go back into thine own place. Return to the Pit that spawned thee, O abomination, and trouble this world no more.”
The faces around him rotted, crumbled, formed back on themselves but hideously altered. His father stared at him through eyes embedded in his cheekbones. Gervase’s crushed flesh parted in a grin, and he held out a mangled red blotch of a hand, reaching and inviting at the same time.
Come to me, said the clotted voice of the room. Love dies. Faith dies. Truth dies. In the end is screaming meat. Do you think yourself different?
Erik couldn’t answer. He couldn’t break the ritual, and if he could have, what would he have said? No, I think you’re wrong. But the words sounded small in his mind—sounded human.
Highland Dragon Master Page 24