8.
The Devil stood at the window of the office tower, gazing down at the garden below.
His thoughts moved with a slow, vicious solemnity. At that moment, if all of the city’s humanity had but a single throat, he would have seized it in his sharply nailed fist and squeezed until the last bubble of red had burst.
There were the usual supplicants cluttering up the lobby—but it wasn’t their whining and begging that had turned his dark meditations even more bloody-minded than before. Desperate people were always scrabbling for his attention, as if he cared about their petty little lives and how badly they wanted him to let them out of the contracts they all had once been so eager to sign. He would deal with the humanity yammering at his elbows when he felt like it. Right now, he needed time to ponder all that was happening at the foot of his glistening tower.
His gaze turned even more incendiary as he contemplated the distant garden. Even as the rain continued pelting down, the peach tree stood in full bloom, the wet blossoms scattered throughout the lush green of its leaves. The sight infuriated him, as it had since the moment when the tree had been struck by lightning. His anger mounted higher as he suddenly realized that this must be what it felt like to be concerned about the passage of time. Human beings feared the approach of some final day, when payment for all their bargains came due; a page ripped from a calendar, or even the ticking of the clock upon a mantelpiece, must send their hearts racing with terror. A sensation like that had been unknown to him through all the millennia of his existence on earth. Yet nevertheless, here he was, brooding about what even the next few hours might bring.
Other creatures seemed happier, though. Idiots— He seethed with disdain when he spotted them. A dozen or so of the city’s residents, tending the garden. As if their pleasure in doing so was protection enough from the rain. Simple souls, even by human standards, who had not been so foolish as to let their greed and vanity entice them into diabolic contracts. Happy enough to be there, pulling up the garden square’s dead, sodden weeds, clearing away the undergrowth that had tangled around the once-dead peach tree, doing what was within their meager, mortal powers to transform this small portion of the world into something pleasant and enjoyable. The Devil despised them—and soon enough, he would take their wishes and dreams and crumple them like scrap paper inside his fists.
Dreams—and something that infuriated him even more. Even from here, he could see hope in the people’s eyes, especially those lifted in adoration toward the tree’s branches. Some stood there in amazed witness of the miracle happening before them; others knelt down and scooped up the wet dirt from the base of the trunk, rubbing it over themselves as though it were a sovereign charm against evil.
Even as the Devil watched, more people streamed into the garden square, bearing candle-lit lanterns and lengths of colored ribbon to hang amidst the glossy green leaves. Bit by bit, the tree was becoming the shrine that the dead lunatic had envisioned.
Darting past the worshipper’s legs, a couple of children tossed a rubber ball back and forth, while their parents troweled the wet dirt at the side of the garden and planted a row of daylilies. The ball got away from the kids, and bounced off the back of a man sweeping up the discarded plastic bags and other rubbish cluttering the square. From his vantage point high above, the Devil watched in revulsion as the man cheerfully accepted the parents’ apology. Leaning on the handle of his rake, the man went on chatting with the others, all of them laughing and looking each other straight in the eye.
“That’s not good,” the Devil muttered to himself. It wouldn’t have been too long ago that even a trivial incident such as that would have ended with the father and the other man first trading snarled insults at each other, then blows. And for the city’s residents to look each other in the face, instead of slinking past each other, eyes averted, the way they used to … nothing else could have indicated so clearly how the gears of Time had begun meshing and turning. Instead of being frozen in the eternal ice of abandoned hopes.
Eyes narrowing, he shook his head. If little things like that were happening—it meant that other, bigger things were as well. That enraged him a lot more than just people being so sickeningly nice to each other.
They’re out there somewhere, he thought. The three heroes that he had dispatched so many assassins to find and eliminate. And still no sign of them, let alone their corpses laid out on the street for him to approve. He had expected far better results—especially from that last one the dwarf had recruited, the giant killing machine named Hank.
And what if his hirelings failed to find the heroes? Then what? In the workings of Time, there were even more things to be confronted. Such as those three heroes, whoever and wherever they might be, assembling that great army of which prophecy had spoken. An invincible army, with the heroes as its generals, leading its ranks as they marched toward the Devil’s headquarters.
He nodded slowly to himself. That would be interesting, if and when such a moment ever came. He would have to be ready for it.
Below, the children went on playing around the peach tree. A breeze rustled the branches; a blossom drifted down through the raindrops. A little girl gazed up at it in rapturous amazement. Just as though she had never seen anything as beautiful before.
9.
Beneath the roof of the groundskeeper’s cottage, the drumming of the rain filled the wood-paneled office. By the light of a guttering candle, Nathaniel fitted the ornate brass key into the desk’s lock. It took an effort to turn, the workings reluctantly grinding against each other.
He pulled the drawer open and began sorting through the age-yellowed papers. At the bottom, he found what he was looking for: a bigger key, cruder and more ancient in appearance, like something that might have been catalogued in a museum of medieval antiquities. When he took the key out, it filled both hands.
Got it. As quietly as possible, Nathaniel slid the drawer shut again. Now for the real show …
Peering out the little oculus window at the end of the attic, he looked for any sign of Death returning. Through the glass, so old that it wavered and rippled like an ocean tide pool, all he saw was the sheets of rain battering the tombstones. His master was away, collecting souls. That was convenient for Nathaniel, since it afforded the opportunity to sneak back here into Death’s home and take care of business for himself.
He knew he had to be careful, though. If Death returned and found out what he was doing, there wouldn’t be a master-apprentice relationship between them anymore. There might not even be an apprentice, or at least not a living one. No telling what Death might do to him—the commandment for him to stay away from the Lights of Life had been so sternly delivered, and so often repeated, that he knew he was risking Death’s wrath just by having the key in his hand. His master had taken him there only once, back when his training had first begun, then had forbade him from ever returning on his own.
Closing the attic office door behind himself, Nathaniel started down the spiral staircase that wound through all the stories of the cottage. In the cobwebbed mirrors, the candle flame wavered like a tiny ghost. With each tread, the iron stairs groaned, the slight noise vanishing into the shadowed rooms. By the time he reached the basement, he was dizzy from going through one descending circle after another.
Gnarled tree roots, thick as a man’s legs, had long ago broken through the old stone walls. Rats scurried into the crevices, then regarded Nathaniel with their spark-bright eyes as he cautiously made his way through the low-ceilinged space. He squeezed his way past ranks of sagging bookshelves, crammed tight with leather-bound volumes. The archives of all the world’s deaths—he knew that if he touched any of the books’ ridged spines, an unbidden glimpse would open within his thoughts, of the dying moments inscribed within.
The bookshelves extended without seeming end, stretching away in a labyrinth of darkened corridors. Nathaniel’s destination lay elsewhere—he kept one hand in front of himself until he felt the mottled surface of an i
ron door. Setting the candle on the ground, he pushed the key into the hole. It took both hands to turn, the rust of ages sifting down to the bolted sill.
Nathaniel let go of the key and pushed the chamber door inward with his shoulder. A draft extinguished the candle, but he could still see. A shimmering glow poured out from the doorway, lengthening his shadow out behind him.
He stepped into the chamber. The space seemed to reach for miles, as though it were a tunnel that might run beneath the oceans and emerge on the other side of the world. Waist-high stone pedestals filled the immense chamber. On top of each was a glass vessel like an antique oil-lamp cover, wide at the sealed base, then tapering to a narrow outlet at the top. Inside each glass, a small light floated. Billions of them, flickering inside the clear shapes, some larger than others, some brighter.
He knew what the lights were. Death had told him all about them, as part of his apprenticeship in the fatal arts. He could hear his master’s unemotional voice: Each light is the essence of a human being’s life. The smallest belong to the newly born, the largest and brightest to those in their prime, the ones fading as though their fuel were almost exhausted—those belong to the aged and infirm, about to die. And when the light is extinguished, that person is no more. But for each light that dies, Death had told him, another light immediately springs to life, replacing the one before inside the glass vessel. In that way, the balance between life and death was always maintained.
There was no turning back after having come this far in breaking Death’s stern commandment. Nathaniel pushed the chamber door shut. It hadn’t been idle curiosity that had brought him here; he had a job to do.
A clear vision held in his mind, of the spell to be performed. Death had shown him that once, too, when he had been in the chamber of lights with his master. But he had never attempted this on his own. And if he failed at it … that thought he pushed away.
He sat down on the chamber’s floor, letting the glow from the Lights of Life play above his head. Closing his eyes, he let his thoughts slow, then still, then cease. Emptiness, first within, then slowly beyond the limits of his being.
Without looking, he knew that another light had entered the chamber. A radiance formed around Nathaniel’s body and expanded outward, like a full moon spreading a silvery haze across gathering clouds. The light flowed wider and wider, filling the space from floor to arched ceiling and rolling down its endless length. As each glass was touched by the glow, a vaporous figure shone above it. Human images, revealing what each living person on earth was doing at that exact moment in time. Laughing, shouting, praying, fighting, caught in passion or mired in sleep; reflections of the images swirled inside Nathaniel, as though he himself were now as translucent as glass. He held the world in his unmoving awareness, experiencing the thoughts and fears and dreams and desires of all who lived.…
It was too much to know. Death could withstand such enormity, but for any mortal mind—
Nathaniel felt a trickle of blood drop from his nostril. The halves of his skull felt as though they were about to be forced apart from within.
A sharper pain lanced across his heart. The pins, already weakened, holding in his soul—those began to tremble, a moment away from bursting into splinters. He laid his hand upon his chest, pressing tight, as though he could keep everything there from breaking apart.
You’ve gone too far. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep this up. Pull back—
At the far end of the chamber, the edge of the radiance began to fade. The pain lessened inside him at the same time as he regathered his strength. Above the glass vessels on their pedestals, the tiny human figures faded away. But not all of them—Nathaniel opened his eyes and looked around. The vessels closest to him still had the moving forms floating above them. Those were the spirits of the city, the people in the streets and buildings immediately around him. That’s what I need, he told himself. The rest of the world would have to take care of itself for the time being. What he was looking for, needed to find, was right here.
He got to his feet and began looking along the rows of glowing vessels. Any with an image of an adult human being above it, he ignored. He was looking for a child. An infant.
At last, he found it. Nathaniel bent down, carefully studying what one of the carved pedestals held. A tiny spark inside the glass, and the form of a baby, hardly more than a couple of months old, drifting above it.
He knew the child’s name. Ren-Lei …
And more than that. With his master, he had reaped so many souls, in so many districts, that he had picked up a smattering of every tongue spoken in the world.
Humanity. That was what the child’s name meant. In Mandarin. The ancestral language of its mother.
The child was crying, its face contorted with uncomprehending fear. Nathaniel’s heart trembled in sympathy.
Setting his hands on either side of the glass, he concentrated all of the spell’s energy into that space. The spark burned brighter as his own soul joined with it.
Faintly at first, then completely, he was no longer looking at the tiny human image floating above the glass. He now saw through the infant’s eyes. His breath rushed from him in a gasp as he realized where Ren-Lei was being kept, where she had been taken. He recognized the place visible around the child. Death had taken him there, more than once. And each time, he had dreaded going. An evil, dangerous place, where no innocent soul should be.
I was right, thought Nathaniel. To do this. The conviction formed solid in him that disobeying his master’s commandment had been necessary. To save this child … and more as well. He didn’t care if it was the child’s fate, or destiny, or whatever grand words Death used. No one, least of all an innocent baby, should suffer in such a way.
He let the spell fade. What the child saw, he no longer saw. Nathaniel found himself once more inside his own body, gazing at the glass vessel on the pedestal, and the small, bright spark it held. He drew his hands away …
Something happened. Another image appeared above the glass, faintly superimposed above the infant’s. He leaned closer to the pedestal, trying to make out what he saw there.
It was his own face.
Nathaniel drew back, startled. That was something he hadn’t expected. As he watched, he could see the two images fusing together—not into one thing, but one fate. The realization slowly dawned inside him. Somehow he and the infant Ren-Lei were tied together—not just now, but in the future as well.
He let the energy dissipate. The conjoined image disappeared from above the glass. Turning his head, he saw the chamber darken around him, the radiance that had filled it now pulling back into his core.
From the corner of his eye, he saw one glass vessel different from the others. The spark inside was high and strong, the brightest of all those around him. Or it would have been, if there hadn’t been a shadow hanging over it, like a shroud.
But worse than that. As Nathaniel watched, he saw that the patch of darkness was somehow a living thing itself, one that had seized upon the light below it. As an owl might swoop down and sink its talons into a mouse skittering through a night forest, squeezing out the small creature’s breath. Some evil aspect of this shadow’s nature gave it the power to extinguish the light inside the glass vessel, smothering it until the dim, obscured glow could hardly be seen at all.
He had never seen such a thing before, and Death had never told him of it. Nathaniel bent down to take a closer look at the vessel’s contents. His eyes narrowed in puzzlement as he discerned something else about the light—
Half of it was gone. Underneath the shadow, the light seemed to have been split down the middle, from top to bottom, and one side surgically removed.
A shiver ran down Nathaniel’s spine. The glowing specter both fascinated and appalled him. Nothing in his training as Death’s apprentice had prepared him for such a sight. Some great evil had struck the bearer of that hideously impaired soul. The broken light inside the glass vessel could mean only one thing—that t
here was someone out there in the city whose essence had been riven the same way.
Nathaniel both pitied and feared that creature, whoever—or whatever—it might be. How can it survive like that? He could only wonder. Someone with only half a soul, and that part hidden by this encroaching shadow. A human being like that could know only suffering and grief. The pain was beyond Nathaniel’s comprehension. It would be a mercy, he knew, to reap the remainder of that agonized soul, drag it from the body that was its prison, and entomb it here in this dark chamber.
But who was it? Whose partial soul floated inside the glass vessel, struggling endlessly with the black shroud that sought to consume it? He didn’t even know the man’s name.
Not yet …
There was still a little bit of the spell’s force left inside him. Nathaniel touched his fingertips to the darkened glass, and let his consciousness flow inside it. A human image formed above the vessel. He peered close at the small form. It seemed to be a beggar, with dirty, matted hair. And the equally filthy rags in which the figure appeared to be clothed—Nathaniel could see that those were actually what had once been a long overcoat, now held together by stitches, as though it had been patiently mended over and over. But somehow the garment held the figure in torment; the beggar’s grime-darkened fingers clawed at the coat, but couldn’t pull it from his body.
That’s the shroud, realized Nathaniel. The one around the light, seeking to smother it out. Woven from pure evil, by hands that hated all living things, and sought their destruction. Even now, the shroud was trying to keep the soul inside the vessel from fighting against all the cruel attacks that had left it split in two, a fatally wounded thing. But the beggar’s soul, even in its crippled state, still possessed an indomitable will, not just to survive … but to triumph.
Nathaniel pushed harder, entering into the man’s mind and seeing through his eyes, as he had done with the infant Ren-Lei.
Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel Page 10