“And the book,” Hedy said, acid-tongued as she moved to stand at Nessa’s shoulder. “Spells laced with death traps. Was it you?”
“Don’t play the fool,” the Lady replied. “If I wanted your mistress dead, girl, she would be dead. No. Those gifts came from another hand. One that seeks to manipulate you into doing their bidding.”
“You know who it is,” Nessa said. A statement, not a question. “Tell me. Why all these theatrics, this subterfuge? Whatever it is you want from me, why not just come right out and say it in the first place?”
The Lady raised a manicured fingernail, scarlet paint matching the amused bow of her lips, and tapped her chin as she studied the woman before her.
“You needed to be tested. Tempered. Your dull edges made razor-sharp. That’s the kind of lesson only hard experience can teach. If I sheltered you, coddled you, you never would have made it this far. Look back at the ordeals you’ve survived, Nessa. You were a timid, abused housewife, afraid of her own shadow. But you found the strength to fly free. You shattered your shell and broke your chains. You learned to spread your wings and blood your talons. Most importantly, you learned to trust yourself, and to trust your lover. You and Marie, together, are stronger than anything this paltry world can throw at you. I took no pleasure in watching you suffer…but I take great pleasure in watching you triumph.”
Nessa’s arms unfolded. She spread her hands at her sides. “So why show yourself now? Why end the game?”
The Lady in Red turned, strolling over to the wrought-iron table. She flashed a wicked smile.
“Oh, this game isn’t nearly over. Not yet. But you’ve earned a gift. And with your knight lost, storm-tossed across the wheel of worlds, it’s one you very much need right now.”
With a nod from the Lady, Dora lifted the lid on the china teapot. Wafts of white steam gusted up, breaking like waves in the open air as they spiraled At her side, the Mourner’s boneless fingers squirmed as they slid into her rags. She tugged out a kitchen knife. Then she held it out, over the open teapot, and let go.
The knife hung there, slowly turning, suspended weightless on a pedestal of steam. It wasn’t much to look at. The blade was dull and pitted with rust. Cracks shot through the slender wooden handle, wound with a strip of black electrical tape to keep it from falling apart.
“Oh, hey,” Daniel said. “It’s the knife I nearly died trying to steal from a restaurant full of cannibals out in LA. Got my ass kicked on my way out. Got stabbed, too.”
He paused, expectant. No one answered him.
“You’re welcome,” he added.
“This is a Cutting Knife,” the Lady said to Nessa.
“Seems redundant,” she replied. “A knife that can’t cut isn’t much of a knife at all.”
“You are familiar with the Shadow In-Between. The primal well of power that exists between all things. Between all places and times. Between all worlds. Countless Earths, hanging suspended in that moonless and eternal midnight like pearls on a string.” The Lady’s scarlet fingernail trailed along the rusted blade, and it quivered in response. “A Cutting Knife can carve through the Shadow itself. And open a doorway to anywhere you want to go.”
Hedy frowned at the knife. “I don’t understand. My coven uses those. We have for generations. But they’re useless if you haven’t already been to the place you’re trying to go. And they don’t work across worlds. Believe me, Butterfly and Badger both have theirs. Cutting a doorway to our old covenstead, just to see if we could do it, was one of the first things we tried. Their knives are powerless here.”
The Lady favored her with a faint smile.
“What you have are imitations, with only the faintest spark of the original Cutting Knives. I suspect that at some point in the distant past, one of your forebears came across the real thing and made an effort to recreate its magic. A spirited attempt, but one that fell short. This is an original. Only nine exist, and only nine ever will. Tell me, what do you know of the Kings of Man?”
Nessa glowered at the knife. “I know that my ex-husband and his ‘lodge’ gave their allegiance to something called the King of Wolves.”
“And on our world,” Hedy said, “we were plagued by the Sisterhood of the Noose, and their devotion to the King of Rust. Two sides of the same coin?”
Daniel put his closed fist to his lips and cleared his throat. He stepped up, the rest of Hedy’s coven watching in silence at his back. Carolyn was a quiet silhouette at the edge of a candlelight globe, pad open in her hand, her head bowed while she jotted feverish notes.
“Not a coin,” Daniel said. “More like a pair of dice, and every way they land is a losing bet. The Kings of Wolves, Worms, Rust, Silence, Lament—I don’t know the others’ names. I do know that they’re not human, and they’re not demons, either. They’re something else. And the Network is how they get shit done; it’s half crime syndicate, half cult, with mortal agents doing their dirty work on a whole bunch of parallel worlds. Bad news, and they’ve got a knack for burying anyone who gets in their way.”
The Lady’s fingers slid along the knife’s cracked and taped-up hilt. The blade gave off a low, throbbing hum, like the peal of a tuning fork.
“Once upon a time,” the Lady said, “nine beasts dreamed themselves kings and carved out fiefdoms within the Shadow In-Between. They infested it. Corrupting the very essence of raw magic and bending it to suit their own warped souls. And those who called upon that power were, in turn, warped by it. They were—and are—an infection at the heart of creation. A living cancer. So nine of my strongest daughters—war witches, proud and true—set out to hunt and slay the nine Kings of Man.”
“Considering the kings still live,” Nessa said, “I don’t imagine this tale ends with ‘and they lived happily ever after.’”
“There was an ambush. My daughters were taken. Not slain, no. The kings instead chose a far crueler fate than death. They were remade, stripped of their voices, their bodies, their authority. Refashioned into new vessels that could be used, held, and commanded by any man who wished it. It was the greatest insult they could devise.”
Nessa’s lips parted. Her eyes widened behind her glasses as she pointed to the knife.
“You mean, that…”
“Is the witch Clytemnestra, my beloved daughter, lost to me for centuries. She has been trapped in this form, passed between lackeys of the kings, treated as a bargaining chip and a possession. Forced to employ her magic in the service of her worst enemies. Daniel did us a valuable boon, freeing her from her latest captor.”
“But you’re going to change her back now,” Nessa said. Her voice went hard, unyielding as her feet on the cavern-floor stone. “You are going to set her free.”
“Me? I’m not going to do anything at all.”
The Lady in Red held out a graceful hand, beckoning Nessa to her side.
“You are. Now come closer, so you and my other wayward daughter can get a good look at each other.”
Ten
Nessa approached the wrought-iron table warily, leaving the sanctuary of candlelight. The table had illumination of its own, a faint gossamer glow that boiled from the open teapot and raised shifting bands of silver upon the steam. It smelled of honey and strange spices.
The black electrical tape upon the hilt unwound on its own, one end swaying like a serpent’s tail. Slowly it peeled free, twist after dirty twist, to fall away. The cracks along the hilt made faint sandpaper sounds as the wood began to mend. Fractures closed, a road map of disrepair drawn in reverse as flakes of dirt and rust rained down from the blade.
“You’re healing her,” Nessa breathed.
“She is healing herself,” the Lady in Red replied.
Beneath the rust, beneath the wear of centuries, steel caught the candlelight and gleamed like a newborn sun. Hard, unyielding, and sharp enough to cut the skin of the world.
Nessa stood transfixed by the reflected light dazzling her eyes. She floated toward it, drifting off her feet, a
way from her flesh, and the knife loomed large in her vision. It turned, becoming a frozen beam of hard steel light. Nessa stood upon the beam. She wasn’t alone.
A woman, dark-haired, long of face, in olive Grecian robes and leather sandals, stood before her.
“Clytemnestra,” Nessa said.
“And you…in you I see a thousand names across as many lifetimes.” She squinted like she could see them under Nessa’s skin, written along her bones. “Shall I call you the Owl? It seems the name of which you’re most fond.”
“That would be fine, or Nessa will do. I think I’m supposed to set you free, but honestly, I’m not sure how.”
“Hardly,” she said. “Do you not have eyes to see? I’ve been free since I was delivered from captivity and returned to our queen’s grace. The simple fact that I’m speaking to you is proof of that. I could abandon this cursed form anytime I please.”
“Then why don’t you?”
Clytemnestra gave a humorless chuckle.
“Because I spent one lifetime in a human body, and many, many more than that in my current form. One can become accustomed to the worst of conditions, given enough time.”
“What I’ve always considered the folly of hell,” Nessa replied. “After a thousand years in the lake of fire, you’d forget what not burning felt like.”
“But your tormentor is more creative than that, isn’t he?”
Nessa tilted her head, studying her in the steel-beam light. The world around them was a shifting gray void, pale lights strobing in the distance like a smog-shrouded aurora borealis.
“What do you know about me?” Nessa asked.
“That you and your lover are condemned. That this is either a natural and inescapable consequence of your creation or a curse that’s been inflicted upon you, depending on who you talk to and what tales you believe. I know you’ve been tricked this time around, infected with a fatal illness, and your time is fast running out.” Clytemnestra offered a demure shrug. “Our queen favored me with two gifts. One is the gift of prophecy. I see many things, some clear and strong, some through a glass darkly.”
“What is your other gift?” Nessa asked.
Clytemnestra held her gaze.
“Poison,” she replied.
“A valuable skill for any witch. So if I’m not supposed to heal you or free you, what am I doing here?”
The woman closed the gap between them. She took Nessa’s hands in hers.
“I haven’t had a voice in so long,” she said. “Will you hear me?”
“I’m listening,” Nessa told her.
“I can carve through the doors of reality. Blaze a trail across the wheel of worlds, a path to your knight. Among other talents. I can aid you in your ambitions. And I think that you could help me with mine.”
“Which are?”
“First,” Clytemnestra said, “you need to understand. To see what I’ve seen. To feel what I’ve felt. It’s the only way we can be truly bound together, to amplify one another’s—”
Nessa cut her off. “Yes, yes. But you can take me to Marie? You can help me save her?”
“I can. But this is nothing to take lightly. There will be pain. More than most could endure.”
One corner of Nessa’s mouth curled in a bitter smile.
“Don’t confuse my quick decision for rashness,” she said. “My hourglass is running out as we speak, and being bloody, bold, and resolute is the only way I can get anything done. You have the power to help me save Marie. I want it. I’ll pay your price.”
Clytemnestra seemed almost regretful as she extended one gentle hand.
“Then join me. Enter me. And understand.”
Nessa took her hand. The steel beam under their feet turned to a pool of molten metal. Breath gusted from her lungs as she dropped, and the liquid swallowed her whole.
* * *
Nessa was (not Nessa) freezing, exposed, strapped by unyielding bands to a slab of metal. Rust flakes scoured her naked shoulders as she tried to squirm free. Her vision was a faded smear, distant pin lights stretched to gauzy yellow strips. Blurry figures shambled around her, elephantine and hunchbacked under ragged gray coats. Someone, someone she knew, someone she loved, was whimpering in the dark.
She flexed her bound wrists. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t help. Couldn’t do anything but wait for her turn.
Failure swept over her like waves thundering down on a stormy beach, washing away the sand. She had failed her sisters. She had failed their queen. Words echoed in her mind. Her thoughts, but Clytemnestra’s voice.
Purge the kings. Purify the Shadow In-Between. It was my idea. My sisters weren’t certain. I cajoled them, pushed them, argued their fears away until they agreed to join my crusade.
“It was my fault,” Nessa whispered. A rusted iron band fixed her neck to the table, holding her head in place. She felt it squeeze her throat as she struggled to breathe.
I led them into the ambush. We were taken alive. My fault. What happened to them was my fault.
A high-pitched mechanical squeal, the whine of a dentist’s drill, echoed through the blurry darkness. Then a woman’s scream. Shrill, louder than the drill itself, going on and on until her breath gave out. Nessa’s heart shattered.
Circe, Clytemnestra thought. Nessa’s hands twisted, fingernails digging against the unyielding slab, shards of rust stabbing under her broken fingernails. Circe, my love. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—
Crude voices grunted in the dark. Laughing. They were laughing. And the pain and grief and loathing, the tempest in Nessa’s broken heart, began its slow transformation into a feeling she knew all too well. Rage.
Do you understand? We were the Lady’s first daughters. Magic was our life’s breath, our wine and bread. The kings did more than occupy the Shadow. They corrupted it. Turned it toxic. Poisonous. I had to act. I had to do something—
Clytemnestra’s desperate thoughts broke against another wail in the dark, her sister, her first love, ending on a ragged torrent of tears. Wheels scraped against a filthy tile floor. One of the hunched figures swayed as it shoved a cart alongside her slab. It had been positioned so Nessa could see the instruments upon it. The drills, the pincers, the scalpels, all caked with blood and dirt. Other tools, ones she couldn’t guess at, shimmered with blood-red runes and the promise of cruel magic.
It was her turn.
A presence loomed, glowing white-hot at the edge of her blurred vision. A hand with three long fingers, skin luminous, the air crackling around it. The fingertips traced Nessa’s cheek, the curve of her chin. Then they slid downward. Trailing between the valley of her breasts, down to her stomach.
“This one,” a voice said, ethereal as its glowing hand. “Has this one been claimed yet? Have my brothers spoken?”
The huddled figure answered with a phlegmatic grunt.
“Then this one shall be mine. Begin the treatment.”
The figure’s hand, sheathed in a moth-eaten glove, lifted a pair of corroded pincers. Nessa took the deepest breath she could manage, with Clytemnestra’s words on the tip of her tongue. She was going to defy him, curse him, swear that she would see him dead—
—then the three-fingered hand fell upon her face. And she shrieked into his palm as the flesh of her lips began to melt, running like candle wax. He took her mouth away, leaving a blob of twisted scar tissue and her breath, her rage, her words, her truth, trapped inside of her chest forever.
“You have nothing to say,” the voice calmly told her. “You are an object.”
The pincer closed on the flesh of her hip, scarlet runes flaring under a crust of dried blood as it twisted in the hooded figure’s grip, pulling at her flesh. The voice only said one more thing as the luminous hand pulled away.
“Reshape it,” he said, “and educate it.”
Then her skin tore, a ragged wet line welling up and drooling onto the rusted iron slab, and white-hot agony burned her thoughts away. There was nothing left of her but a scream, a scream
she couldn’t let out.
She lost her hands. Her arms. Her legs. Her face. Everything peeled and scoured and drilled and sawed away as a barbed net of alchemy transformed what remained from gristle and bone to wood and metal. Her magic, the gifts of her queen raged inside of her, no longer hers to control.
A calloused hand squeezed her hilt. A thumb caressed her body. She saw a woman running, recognized her. Another daughter of the Lady in Red.
Her magic crackled free, the tip of her blade flaring. A bolt of occult lightning blasted a hole in the woman’s back.
She cut ragged holes in the fabric of the universe, making doorways between worlds. Openings for monsters, for assassins, for the servants of the kings.
Her blade sawed through human meat. Sometimes dead. Sometimes alive and screaming. They used her power to preserve their victims’ lives, to keep them awake, suffering, begging for death. She was an accomplice in every crime. And as she was passed from hand to hand in a whirlwind of endless depravity, the faces of the fallen burning into her trapped and helpless mind, she had one constant companion: the scream she could never let out.
* * *
Nessa knelt upon the beam of steel, in the hazy world of flickering gray smog, back inside herself. She clutched at her arms, shuddering. Her eyes were wide, cheeks wet, mouth dangling open as the pieces of her mind fell back together like a mirror shattering in reverse. Still broken, still fractured into razor-edged shards.
Clytemnestra’s hand rested upon her shoulder.
“You hear me now,” she said.
Nessa swallowed hard, throat sore, searching for words. Language came back to her in fits and starts.
“I understand,” Nessa rasped. “I saw—I felt—”
Clytemnestra’s hand tightened. “And as you walked through the hours of my pain, I walked through yours. You listened, and you understand. Now we are in true rapport. Our magic can work as one, a whole greater than its parts. Now we can form a pact, if you wish it.”
Nessa ran the back of her hand across her mouth. It came away sticky with spit. She shoved herself to her feet and stood on wobbly legs.
Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3) Page 8