Thomas heard her outburst and spun fast enough to see the glow coming from Molly’s hiding place. Snapping once at Leon as he swooped by, Tom turned and barreled toward the brush, and Molly.
“Damn!” Molly could not think of anything to do, and she jumped up from the brush as Tom stampeded into view. As he spread his jaws and lunged for her, Molly winced and vanished from sight. Tom clamped his teeth down and bit his own tongue with a yelp. Confused, the black eyes in his head swirled around in their sockets.
When Molly’s own eyes fluttered open, Thomas was gone, or, at least, was much farther away than he had been, but she was the one who had moved. I made that happen, she realized. But, how? Too pressed for time to work out what had happened, she again prepared to defend herself, but the dreigher changed its strategy. Instead of pursuing her, it fled with Tom’s body.
“This way!” yelled Leon from the sky. The shadow cast by his wings ran like a dark puddle out of sight.
Sore, scraped and bruised, Molly picked Geoffrey up out of the brush.
“What’s gotten into him?” He wondered aloud as he tugged at his bandages that stuck to the bramble.
“He called it a dreigher,” answered Molly. “Do you know of it?”
“Yes, it’s a lesser demon,” he began, giving up on his bandages and surrendering them to the twigs and thorns.
“Lesser than what?” Cheeks drooping, she waited for him to wade out of the thorns before turning and heading in Leon’s direction, rolling up her sleeves and scowling at her ugly, stinging scratches and aching welts.
Folding back his wings and perching high above Thomas, Leon lowered his épée and observed the way the demon behaved when it came to a stop. Tom’s body stood still and loose, his head dropping forward as if he’d fallen asleep standing up. The forest chilled, and even Leon noticed the sharp change. It was unnatural.
“What?” Leon said softly in surprise as little whispers reached his ears. “Where is this coming from?”
Below, a multitude of shadows walked the darkness like many lost people, turning their globular heads and looking for a way to go. The presence inside Tom had divided into several shades and left him only partially in order to figure out which direction to take him next.
“Thomas!” Molly’s voice came from the distance, and the shades all turned to look in her direction. Each one changed shape, their skins wiggling and stretching, so that each took a similar form to Thomas. Soon, five mimics of the real Thomas loped around the forest, growling, snorting and baring their fangs.
Leon heard Molly skid to a halt near the base of his perch, and then he turned to watch as the real Thomas came back out of his hypnosis and hid himself within the copies.
“This truly isn’t Thomas,” Leon thought aloud. The creature occupying Tom’s body was clever, but not clever enough. It had let Leon see its ploy. Tom himself would never have been so easy to scout. “Molly!” Leon shouted to her from up high. “Five of the monsters are faux! Thomas is the one with white-ringed eyes!” He opened his wings and descended to the ground, raising his épée and challenging the nearest copy. “Come on!”
When the werewolf charged, Leon stood his ground, waiting until just before the beast ran him over. As if timed to music, Leon stepped aside and twisted, cutting upward into the werewolf’s chest and drawing the blade out its back. It fell hard to the ground and reverted to its true form, shrieking and retreating into the dark, where it evaporated.
Molly led the next one, channeling magical energy into her fists and waiting for her attacker to strike. Hers decided to dash back and forth, low to the ground, making it difficult to follow. With a great shout, she hurled a bright bomb of light from her left hand. The orb struck too late and blew a crater in the earth. The second, she whipped side-arm and struck the pouncing werewolf square in the side, blowing it to a thousand ragged pieces.
My body!
A horrendous quaking rocked the forest. Unprepared for the powerful outburst, both Leon and Molly froze, poised like cats until the words reverberated off down the sloping mountainside. The mimics crept away into the dark, and only the original remained, its broad chest heaving, billowing steamy breaths out through Tom’s snout.
Black haze obscured the outlines of the monster. Second by second its limbs became thinner; its hands, bonier and more wicked. Taller it seemed to grow. The black haze washed over the forest floor and stole the little light that lit the mountainside. The air felt heavy, oppressive.
Molly knew what to expect next. Fear. It crawled up her ankles and saturated her skin, immobilizing her, constricting her will to fight back, swallowing her alive.
Leon felt it as well. Less accustomed to the emotion than Molly, his mental defences weakened first, and he released his grip on his sword. It slithered from his hand and plopped on the ground next his feet.
“It’s only a trick!” Molly reminded herself and Leon, whose uncharacteristic surprise kept him from breaking free and picking up his sword. “Don’t believe in anything it shows you! Leon!” Unable to get through to him, Molly pooled another magical bomb into one hand and aimed at Thomas. She could not wind back her arm to throw, and would have to propel the orb at him like a missile, which, she knew, might well injure him worse than she would like, but she had no other choice. Leon would not be able to help her, and Geoffrey was far behind. Molly cried out, her head aching from the nauseating gravity pulling at her insides. All she could imagine was Tom exploding to bits like the mimic.
“Molly?” Leon called out, now walking around blindly, caught in some illusion Molly could not see herself. “Molly, where are you?”
Molly couldn’t wipe the hot tears from her eyes enough to take aim, so she raised her glowing hand slowly and concentrated. The longer she waited, the heavier her arm, and the dizzier she became. Too sick to look straight, she fell over and fired her missile far off target. Somewhere down the mountainside it detonated in a brilliant flash of white and blue, separating a few trees from their roots.
****
“Lumen de protegentibus! Manus sancti!” A hoarse shout rang in Molly’s ears. Several pairs of feet ran past her head, kicking up leaves and dirt. Bright flashes of light came from the hills, and many blazing trails of magical essence streaked the air, fading and melting toward the ground after incantation. A sharp crackle followed by a droning hum and the dreigher’s shriek blasted her ears. Curling up and rolling over, she cupped her ears with her hands. When the noise left, she turned over again and saw on the ground hundreds of moonbloom sprouts, opened up and emitting soft light. If they had been there before, Molly had not seen them. Their beauty held her attention so that she momentarily ignored Leon as he shook her and pointed to the figures gathered around Thomas.
“Molly! Molly, they stopped him! They are taking him somewhere!” Leon was shouting.
“What has happened?” Geoffrey said, wheezing, as he staggered up from behind and stopped to rest his hands on his knees.
Concerned for Tom, Molly hurried to him where the strangers from the forest were performing a kind of magic ritual over him. Something told her these people were friends, and she did not feel any reason to attack them.
“Protego anima,” said one of the people, a man in leather armor. He was carrying a short rope, on the end of which hung a large, spherical knot of wood wrapped in a netting of fiber. With it he cast several spells and brandished the wood knot like a sorcerer would a staff. When Molly approached, he turned and looked right at her, making a series of sounds that she didn’t recognize as Gresh, the werewolf language. The vocalizations were subtle and intricate, impossible to read from his lips because they hid behind a long, bushy white beard strung with what looked to be thousands of linked beads, which hung to at least his old knees, if not a hair further.
Geoffrey did understand and had heard the man clearly. Picking up his pace, Geoffrey moved between Molly and the man.
“Non espes Gresh,” Geoffrey said with elementary pronunciation, explaining to the m
an that none of them could speak Gresh. Geoffrey strained the phrase out in a mélange of Gresh and Scriptic, a mixture which only a scholar of both languages would find humorous.
“English?” The man asked, as if Geoffrey’s accent gave it away. “Come with us,” he told them. “We will need her,” he added, looking at Molly.
“Helvetii?” Molly guessed, speaking to the man but watching his fellows as they lifted the untransformed Thomas and began to march him away.
“Yes. Luna Mater ses hartas.” The man smiled, greeting her in the old Gresh fashion, raising one hand, bent in a meaningful crescent, and twisting it as if to scoop the air with the inside of his palm. Then, taking her arm, he followed the rest up the hills. Leon sheathed Fantome and tagged along after Geoffrey, making sure the winded magescribe did not collapse.
A tiring, three-and-a-half-hour hike up into the hills taxed the three travelers, who exerted themselves beyond their thresholds to keep up with the Helvetian werewolves. Not much of anything was said. The Elder, as the others referred to him, recited an incantation that, he explained, kept Thomas asleep and the demon restrained, but would only be useful as long as he could draw strength from the moonbloom. The time during which they opened their petals each night was short, and when they did, the magical energies they released under moonlight were fragile. These energies, as the Elder called them, rose like clumps of dust from inside the flowers, and handling them took masterful discipline. Due to this difficulty, the other Helvetii carried and held tight to Tom, allowing the Elder to maintain the spell that kept the demon at bay.
“Where are they taking him?” Molly asked the Elder when he finished his incantation, nearly four hours after he had begun.
“To the Novaci Tablet, on the plateau.” The Elder pointed to a clearing on the hill where the forest broke, the wood knot swinging from his hand.
“It is real?” burst Geoffrey excitedly, digging through his bag for something on which to make a note of their location. Molly and Leon looked at him and each other in confusion.
“Of course,” said the Elder. “The giants built this place before our time. The Tablet tells us all about the seasons and heavens.”
“It is also said to be made from a meteorite that fell from the sky, bringing new and powerful magic to this world,” added Geoffrey. “Only two or three times has it been used to craft a magical tool or item, and those items are long gone … or they are legend.”
“Because the sorcerers who took the magic did not respect it,” said the Elder, nodding his head. “Disrespect power and you will lose it.”
His words reminded Molly of Oi’alli and her ominous curse upon Thomas. She wondered if the Elder already knew what was wrong with Tom.
“The giants, the last and youngest of the ancients, left this place one era before the Helvetii followed Luna Mater south. From the ice to the mountains we came, over many lifetimes, and when we came to this place, the Tablet and its secrets were here for us to learn from.” Each time the Elder spoke of a time or place, he would pinch a specific bead on one of the strands in his beard, since each bead represented an event in the history of the Helvetii.
“You came to the Carpathians with the first lupomorphs?” asked Geoffrey.
“Lupomorph?” The Elder scratched his beard thoughtfully.
“You came here when the Helvetii settled, I mean,” Geoffrey repeated, changing his choice of words.
“I did. I was a child.”
“That had to have been a few thousand years ago!” Scribbling away, Geoffrey did the math in his head, comparing the appearance of werewolves in the East to other mortal timelines.
“No, no,” said the Elder. “Days ago.” He smiled at Molly in a grandfatherly way, touching her arm as he joked, because he saw she had been crying. Whoever she was, he recognized the pain she felt. It belonged to a frightened young woman in love. “Luna Mater ses hartas,” he said, repeating himself and using the same hand gesture he had used with the words earlier. “It means, ‘Luna Mater keep you.’ You see?”
Molly smiled and spoke it back to him, imitating the hand gesture.
“Yes, like that.” He nodded and the beads in his beard clicked about noisily. “We have arrived,” he said, moving ahead of the others and leading them to the foot of the plateau.
Atop the plateau, sunken into the earth by ages of patience, the Novaci Tablet shone in the moonlight. A great, thick disk of speckled black and white stone, resting horizontally atop a base rock at a slight incline, it was broad enough for several dozen people to lie across it, end to end, without a head or toe jutting past the edges.
Cresting the hill and seeing the Tablet’s full size, Geoffrey felt dizzy as he looked up to study it. Under the moon, many thousands of hand-carved notches and symbols on the disk’s surface lit up purposefully, denoting the time of year, the season, the position of the stars, and heralding the anniversaries of significant dates in the history of the giants.
The Elder walked around the disk to the foot of a stone staircase that wrapped round and round the plateau up to the face of the Tablet, seventy-one steps and nine metres from the ground. Molly, Leon and Geoffrey followed, each stopping to look out beyond the plateau at the valleys and plains beyond.
At the top of the stony stair, on the face of the Tablet, the Helvetii had surrounded Tom in a circle. At the center of the circle, Tom stood, completely asleep, held upright by the Elder’s spell. Tom’s feet were planted inside two magescript symbols, drawn with water and finely ground minerals, meant to keep his body and soul together and in place.
“He came here for this,” the Elder said to Molly, making the words state a fact rather than form a question. “The evil can be removed, if you will help us. It is fortunate for him that you came here. If he had come alone, he would have died.”
At that moment, Molly did not understand the Elder’s true meaning, thinking him to be saying Thomas literally could not have traveled so far on his own. The Elder was trying to tell her that her love for Thomas would save a part of him normally lost during the extraction about to be performed.
“I will help. How can I help you?” Molly walked with the Elder toward the other Helvetii on the face of the Tablet.
“You have already helped,” he replied. “But, there will be a consequence. Does he accept this?”
The question startled Molly. What consequence could the old werewolf mean? She was not comfortable speaking for Thomas, but if the only other outcome was his death …
“What do you mean?” she asked the Elder, looking at Thomas and clasping her hands together at her stomach. “What is going to happen to him?”
“He is going to be cleansed. Much of his life must be forfeited if the evil is to leave him and never return.” In both hands he held tight to the wood knot, which swayed in the cold breeze that crossed the plateau and bit the warm bodies on the Tablet. In his old eyes Molly saw the same churning spirit she always saw in Tom’s. This churning was the mark of a good soul, she believed. She knew the old werewolf was not telling her everything he knew, but for the same reason Thomas never did. It was a way of telling her to do what must be done, sparing her the details of consequence, which, after all, was ultimately a waste of breath. Consequence, as Tom, the Elder, and similar hearts understood it, was inevitable, not optional. Molly, sensing a familiar story unfolding before her, asked the Elder nothing more, and nodded her head.
Geoffrey and Leon watched the two from near the top of the stone stair, both wondering the same thing and neither wanting to be the first to have to ask. Was Thomas Crowe going to die? Geoffrey felt adventure and knowledge fleeing further away by the second, and Leon, more than his business with Sylvia LeRouge, lamented the real possibility that he would lose a chance at humanity.
Winter air rested heavily on the plateau for a long moment, and then another frigid breeze flew across the Tablet. Luna Mater blinked as the snow clouds brushed her eyes. The flurries raced up the hills and broke over the plateau, dusting Thomas’
s hair and stinging his face. There were strangers all around him. Who were they? One of them gave off a warm glow. Molly?
“Tonight, with Luna Mater’s blessing,” began the Elder, speaking loudly to all and taking a new bead from a pouch on his hip, “ten and eight days before the mid of the dead season, while the Boar bearing the stone sleeps …” The Helvetii surrounding Tom turned their heads and watched the Elder as he spoke, adding the new bead to his beard, the first of a new strand that he affixed close to his chin. “…the Helvetii drove darkness from the mountain,” he finished. “Where was the demon placed? What was it made of?” he asked, looking to Molly as he led her to the circle of werewolves closing their circle around Tom. “Stay here,” he told her, leaving her outside the circle as he himself moved within, approaching Tom.
“On his chest. It was …”
Molly thought hard and remembered the day that Oi’alli boarded the ship. She had done something specific that, at the time, had meant nothing to Molly.
“Was it cloth?” the Elder suggested, touching a hand to Tom’s chest and turning to speak to her.
“Yes!” Molly burst, jabbing a finger through the air. “A woman from the sea took a black cloth and pushed it into him!”
“Ah.” The Elder nodded and left the circle, walking to Molly’s side and reaching into his pouch again. From it he took what appeared to be a spool, carved from the same wood as the knot he carried, except, unlike a spool for thread, it was convex, with several dark gemstones set around it at its thickest points.
“A demon spool,” muttered Geoffrey, stepping closer to see. “What kind of stones …”
Leon stuck out a hand to stop Geoffrey. “Much of what I learned of the sword, I learned firsthand,” said Leon, “not by asking questions.”
Geoffrey yielded and looked at him blankly.
“Thomas hasn’t much time, and often time arbitrates the narrow difference between life and death, Mr. Mylus. Be patient,” Leon whispered.
The Lore Series (Box Set): All 3 Books In One Volume Page 53