“The Sullen and Slothful,” offered Mephisto. “People who didn’t do enough with their lives … you know, the kind of guys who go on welfare and drink beer and watch TV all day, never even lifting a finger to brush a fly from their nose? Guys who waste their lives, never doing any good for anyone but never really hurting anybody, either.”
“The Angel said Titus’s sin was sloth,” I commented wearily, hardly aware that I was speaking. The wonderful effect that recalling the angel had had upon my spirits had faded. In the same way that I had not been able to think of fear when she was present, I now could no longer remember the lightness of spirit that had accompanied her. I recalled that it had been present, but I could not remember what it had been like.
“Explains why Titus is here,” Gregor’s gravelly voice growled as he ran. Despite his serene expression, his face was red from the exertion. It was unlikely he had gotten much exercise while living in his Martian prison.
“Has anyone explained to Gregor about the demons in our staffs?” I gasped, pressing my hands against the stitch in my side. My legs felt like they were made of waterlogged wood, stiff and sluggish.
“The what in our staffs?” Gregor stopped short and gazed at the length of black ebony carved with blood red runes in his hand. While my mind cried out indignantly against the delay, I felt gratified to learn I was not the only one in the family who had been in the dark.
“Our staffs are powered by demons that Solomon stole from Hell,” Erasmus said. He, too, was panting. Taking advantage of Gregor’s pause, he leaned over and rested, his hands resting on his thighs. “Prolonged exposure to demons warps the human soul. Titus’s makes him slothful.”
“Why did Father give us these accursed things?” Gregor raised his arm as if to throw his from him. Erasmus lunged and grabbed the staff just as it left Gregor’s hand.
“Because someone had to keep them safe—as in: out of the hands of the Rulers of Hell!” Erasmus shouted. He shoved the length of ebony back at Gregor. “Have you gone crazy? Or would you like me to give this back to the Three Shadowed Ones for you?”
Gregor glared at Erasmus, his face red, his nostrils flared. For a moment, I feared he would strike him. Instead, he closed his eyes. Perhaps he was praying. When he opened them again, his face was calm, though still flushed. He retrieved his staff from Erasmus’s hand.
“Which demons?” he panted.
“Powerful entities,” Erasmus replied. “Princes and Dukes of the Pit, lords of their respective realms. Their loss was a heavy blow to the Inferno, and many a man has been saved due to their absence.”
“Indeed? I wish Father had told me.” Gregor’s husky voice was curt. He shook his head hard, as if to clear it, causing his shoulder-length hair to spread about him like a silky black mane. Continuing forward, he moved at a rapid walk. “Am I the only one he left in ignorance?”
I shook my head, taking big steps to keep up with him. “I only just found out myself.”
Erasmus smirked. “Father reserved many of his secrets for those of us who joined the Orbis Suleimani.”
The landscape grew more boggy, and it became impossible to run. Our feet disappeared into the springy mat of the rusty sphagnum moss. Hundreds of lakes and ponds covered the countryside, peat floating on the black water, thick and dark. Here and there, a hand or a knee protruded through the brown mat of dead vegetation. Where the ground grew firmer, we had to push our way through thorny brambles.
Insects swarmed thick above the surface of the bog. My dress repelled them, but they passed through my face and hands, which I found disconcerting. Their immateriality did not protect us from their unpleasant, high-pitched, buzzing drone. Erasmus tried to swat a few, annoyed by their noise. Irritated, he found he was able to catch one. He squished it between his fingers with a satisfied sigh.
Immediately, he was mobbed by swarms of mosquito-like creatures, all of which were able to draw his blood. Swearing, he activated his staff. The insects about him vanished. He swung his staff near the rest of us, and the irritating buzz ceased, leaving only the soft whir of the Staff of Decay.
Erasmus’s staff was not the only thing preying upon the insects. The landscape was dotted by lank-leaved butterworts and sundews fringed with hundreds of slender tendrils, each tipped with a blood-red dot. Each was spotted with gnats, mosquitoes, and dragonflies, still writhing and alive but unable to escape the sticky grasp of the carnivorous plants. I shivered.
So tired …
My limbs felt heavy. My eyes were closing. If only I could rest and do this later, rest even the littlest bit …
With a hiss of determination, I threw off the suggestion of fatigue. I was not a person inclined to sloth. I could not have been C.E.O. of Prospero, Inc., had I not been willing to drive myself above and beyond what the next person would do. Certainly, I might be drowsy, but there was work to be done, siblings to be saved.
Around me, my traveling companions fought their own battles with fatigue. Gregor grimly strode forward, but Mab and Erasmus stumbled, and Mephisto walked with his eyes shut, his hands stretched out in front of him like a blind man. I remembered that Erasmus had not slept in the Kronosaur.
“Help! Please, I beg you, help me!” A middle-aged man struggled to free himself from the bog, pushing against the spongy peat. He waved his arms imploringly. “You there! Please, I beg you!”
“Well … what do we do now?” Mab asked uneasily. He rubbed his eyes and the back of his neck, blinking tiredly.
“We keep going!” I snapped.
“Probably a trick anyway,” Mephisto replied airily. He yawned again and stretched. “Anyone up for nap? All that debauchery back on the island tired me out.”
“Fool!” Mab spat. “It’s this place! You told us yourself about the bodies sleeping beneath these waters. If you fall asleep here, you’ll never wake!” He glanced worriedly at the man struggling toward us. The stranger waved more frantically, but he was sinking. “I think he can see us. Shouldn’t we try to help him? What if he’s like those people Malagigi was able to rescue?”
“What if he’s an evil scum?” Mephisto countered.
“He does seem able to see us.” Erasmus took advantage of the conversation to pause. He leaned heavily upon his staff.
“I’m going after him,” Mab declared.
“Wait!” I cried. “Mab! We can’t afford to stop and help him! Besides, it could be a trick!”
“Ma’am, it’s a chance I’ll have to take. Until I caught that star, I didn’t know about my soul, so I was free to act as I pleased. But now I know. A soul is a big responsibility, Ma’am! What happens if I sully it?” Mab glanced at the dreary landscape around us and shuddered. “I can’t allow that to happen, Ma’am, so I’ve got to do the right thing, whatever presents itself. Leaving a helpless man to flounder in the black marshes of doom can’t be the right thing.”
“Oh, what the heck,” Erasmus muttered. “I’ll go.”
Erasmus strode forward. He moved quickly around the pool to where the man thrashed about, and offered his hand. The stranger in the bog reached out and caught it. To Erasmus’s surprise, he was able to grasp it. He pulled, and the man began to come free of the peat.
The sod around Erasmus and the stranger yawned open, revealing a pool beneath. From beneath the waters rose a gigantic sundew, its shiny yellowish petals speckled with thousands of slender tendrils, each glistening with what looked like a drop of blood. The stranger yanked back, catapulting Erasmus directly into the clutches of the flesh-eating plant.
The tendrils reached blindly toward Erasmus, sticking to his body. As he yelped and struggled, tearing the tendrils from his hands and clothes, the long petal itself rolled up like a yellowish tongue. Erasmus was now caught in the plant’s embrace, wrapped up like a living hors d’oeuvre.
“Told you it was a trick,” Mephisto’s tired yet cheerful voice sang out as he tapped his staff, calling up reinforcements.
It flashed through my mind what a great relief it wou
ld be never to be teased by Erasmus again. We had to save Theo. We could not pause to rescue another family member who had gone astray.
Immediately, I rejected such nonsense, but not before Erasmus caught sight of my expression. As he disappeared beneath the black waters, a sneer of ironic amusement came over his features.
Shaking myself, I leapt into action. Mab was already creeping along the peat toward Erasmus’s last known position, reaching blindly under the surface with his lead pipe. Gregor strode along the spongy stuff and slapped the shade that had tricked Erasmus with the Seal of Solomon. The stranger screamed and shivered. Then, his eyes closed, and he fell down and began to sink into the bog. As I ran forward, I imagined that a long, sinuous hamadryad slid along the peat beside me.
“Here, follow Kaa and Soupy! They’ll take you to him!” Mephisto cried, indicating the two snakes, now slinking their way across the brown peat, the great hooded hamadryad and the slender, green, grass snake I had last seen wrapped around the waist of the Queen of the Maenads.
I grabbed the tail of the slender green Soupy, who happened to be closer, and dived in, pushing through the peat and letting the snake be my guide. Beside me, Gregor pulled off his heavy crimson robes and grabbed hold of the king cobra, diving in as well.
The black water looked ominous, but after the Swamp of Uncleanness, it seemed almost wholesome. It was thicker than normal water and black. If I had not been holding on to the snake, I would have been utterly lost. Soupy seemed to know where he was going, however, so I gripped his smooth, scaly, length tightly and pressed on.
Following the snake through the thick black water was nerve-wracking. First, I feared I would run out of air before I found Erasmus. Then, I became afraid that this black liquid was actually water from the Styx. If so, it was not something into which I should have immersed my whole body. Achilles’s mother was careful to keep his ankle out so that his skin would have a place to breathe. It would be sad to live through my encounter with the impurities of the Swamp of Uncleanness only to perish in the Styx.
Before I could fret further, however, my hand encountered Erasmus’s leg. At least, I was pretty sure it was Erasmus’s leg. At least, I hoped …
Opening my war fan, I slid it forward until it rested on the pulpy stem of the sundew petal. Very carefully, so as not to harm my brother, I slit the stem, freeing him from the plant. I could feel the sundew tremble and recoil.
Grabbing his leg, I swam upward. Only Erasmus’s leg suddenly pulled off to the left. I yanked back. His foot moved toward me then away again. Somehow, I had lost my hold on Soupy, so I dared not let go of Erasmus. Desperate for air now, I moved in the direction Erasmus was being dragged and swam upward.
I broke the surface of the water beneath the peat. The soft spongy stuff sat on my head like a hat the size of a rug. In the darkness, something splashed and sputtered. I heard a hoarse indrawn breath.
“Gregor?” I cried hopefully.
“Quick, help me!” he gasped. “I have Erasmus by the arm. The plant must still have a hold on him, though, because every time I pull him toward me, he snaps back.”
“That was me!” I exclaimed. “I’ve got his leg. I thought something was trying to take him away from me!”
“Jesu! If it’s not one thing, it’s another!” he exclaimed. Then he burst into laughter. Despite the horrific images still dancing in my mind, I could not help but join him.
Laughing, we drew the unconscious Erasmus out of the water, so that his face was in the small air pocket we made by pushing the peat up with our heads. Luckily, his staff was still in his hand. Gregor split the peat above our heads, and after many false starts and much splashing about, we managed to drag our brother out of the bog and onto a bramble-covered island. I snagged Gregor’s robes from Mephisto, who lay sleeping (some guard he turned out to be), and spread it over the thorny thicket to make a place to stretch out Erasmus. Gregor, meanwhile, worked on getting the water out of our brother’s lungs.
Finally, after numerous attempts to rouse him, Gregor declared, “I am not the physician Erasmus is, but I believe he is asleep … rather than unconscious or in a coma.”
“Mephisto is sleeping, too.” I glanced across the miles of brown fens with their eerie will-o’-the-wisps glowing here and there. There was no sign of the snakes, either. I hoped they would be okay. “What do we do now? Mab?”
Mab, who had managed to remain awake while we were below, crawled slowly to our position, head drooping.
“No good, Ma’am,” he slurred sleepily. “Sloth isn’t much of a threat to a wind, but this fleshly body isn’t fully under my control…” He began to slump over. “I could leave it, if you want me to, abandon the body, but…” His eyes closed and his head fell forward. He began to snore.
Gregor, lean and taut in his wet black garments, with his hair slicked back, glanced toward where we believed Titus lay, and then down at our sleeping companions.
“There is no point in waking the sleepers just to drag them farther into this bog,” he said. “The effect will only grow stronger as we continue, and they will succumb again. One of us will have to go take Mephisto’s ball and go after Titus. The other one will have to stay here and guard the sleepers.”
“We’ve got to hurry!” I cried. “Theo!”
“Perhaps I should go. You may have trouble moving Titus.”
I looked around me. Erasmus lay asleep on the crimson cardinal’s robes, Mab sat slumped over, snoring gently, and Mephisto lay sprawled out with his mouth open; staffs and gear were scattered around him.
“No. You stay here. You can protect them should the Hellwinds come,” I declared. “I’ll find some way to rouse Titus.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream …
I trekked across the fen, my flute strapped to my back. The crystal ball still showed “the quickest way to reach Titus safely.” I followed it, pushing through brambles. They slid along the enchanted fabric of my gown with an eerie zipping sound but cut the backs of my hands. Blood welled out of the little scratches, drawing hordes of insects. Apparently, I did not need to be angry for them to sip my blood, once it was spilt. Or perhaps my frustration with the brambles was enough to make me vulnerable to the locals.
Like the barghests Mab and I had fought in the warehouse, which now seemed like an eon ago, the insects drew substance from my blood. Human blood granted solidity to creatures of the spirit world when they drank it, which is why the ancients were always feeding it to ghosts whom they called up from the underworld. The insects that supped off my bleeding scrapes became so solid that they could then bite my face and ears.
The carpet of peat beneath my feet rose and fell occasionally, as if something moved beneath it. I began to feel exposed. Worse things might be attracted by blood in this place than insects. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
So I went forward.
I shrugged off my fatigue, until the thought occurred to me that I might be legitimately tired, as I did not know how long it had been since I had last had a good night’s sleep. The moment a legitimate reason for my weariness occurred to me, I could hardly keep my eyes open. My eyelids drooped. My limbs grew heavy.
I stumbled.
The first three times I righted myself. Soon, however, my legs would no longer hold me. I had to put the crystal ball in my shoulder bag and crawl forward, first on my knees, then on my stomach. My arms trembled from the exertion of pulling along my body.
It seemed pointless, stupid, to crawl along across this spongy, yielding substance, my mouth filled with little twists of dry sphagnum moss I could not seem to spit out. What was I going to do when I reached Titus? Pull myself back with my fingers while I dragged him behind me with my toes?
And yet, I would not give up. The very idea of yielding to sloth was so offensive that I refused to stop, refused to give in, refused to lay my head down as every aching muscle begged me to do.
Besides, Theo needed help, and w
e needed Titus to reach Theo.
Hours I crawled, hauling my body across the bog, dragging myself through prickers, swimming through dark waters. My hair was wet and lank. I began to shiver.
How much more of this could I take?
I rejoiced when I finally laid eyes on my great titan of a brother. There was Titus, in the distance, asleep on the fen, just where the ball showed him to be. But my joy was brief. It was still a long way to go, and my brother was slowly sinking into the peat. If he went under, I would have no chance of finding him, and even if I did, I would not be strong enough to drag him up again.
I crawled on and on and on. Funny to be crawling across the fens to Titus. All my best memories of fens involved Titus. The loamy smell mixed with the scent of mold brought those memories vividly streaming back. Titus had been the first to return to Scotland after resigning his commission under Marlborough; this was while Logistilla and I were still living in frosty Denmark. Only, instead of returning to our estate, Titus married a country maid and took up a job as a collier cutting turf. When the rest of us arrived, some years later, Titus chose to stay with his wife and his work. Peat was the main source of fuel and warmth for much of the British Isles at the time, and Titus felt he was contributing to the quality of life of ordinary people.
I used to visit him occasionally, sometimes bringing goodies from Edinburgh, sweets and finery, for him and his family. I remembered watching him come walking across the fen after a day’s work, with the long handles of his flaughter and his tusker, his turf-cutting tools, slung over his back. He would wave at us with one of his big hands as he strode confidentially along whistling “Farewell to Lochaber.”
Sometimes, he and I would hike the fens together, talking of days past or gathering plants for him to press and sketch. Upon one occasion, I even joined his wife and his “wee lad and lassie” in laying out the cut turf to dry. We would stop for lunch sitting amidst the storrows, the pyramids made from stacks of the dried peat. Peat made a beautiful fire, I recalled; it glowed rather than burned. Titus often declared that food cooked over peat tasted better than the finest cooking at the best clubs in London.
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