Prospero Regained

by L. Jagi Lamplighter

  The rock underfoot soon changed to snow and then packed ice. The air grew colder, too. Icy winds bit into the back of my neck, sending goose bumps up and down my arms. The spells in our enchanted garments protected us from the worst of it, but Ulysses’s teeth soon chattered so loudly that Mephisto began composing a song to the beat. Theo, who was shivering as well threw him a dark look. With an exaggerated sigh, Mephisto summoned up his Bully Boys and instructed them to fetch parkas. Twenty minutes later, he summoned them again. They dropped off three parkas, some sweaters, some hats and gloves, and a few scarves. Mephisto handed out the bounty, and the constant ch-ch-ch of teeth finally fell silent.

  By then, we had reached the glacier proper. Unfortunately, travel across this icy terrain proved to be slow and treacherous. Fissures hidden beneath the icy surface constantly threatened to engulf us. We clambered over undulating wave ogives, rising to cross their snowy mounds and descending to pass over their dark rocky gullies. This was both dangerous and exhausting. More than once someone slipped, limbs sprawling as their feet slid out from under them.

  We could hear the moans of sinners, but we could not see them. We were hemmed in by tall, pyramid-topped, blindingly white seracs that made it seem as if we were walking through the snowfields where frost giants grew the blades for their weapons. Some individual icy spires rose over a hundred feet.

  My turn to slip came as I clambered down a particularly slick ogive. I would have fallen straight backward and smashed my head on the ice had Theo not caught my arm, steadying me. He looked a mess in his overly large parka. His eyes were black and blue, his nose and lips were swollen. Yet, to me, he appeared as dear as ever! Reaching over, I squeezed his hand. He squeezed mine back and smiled, though this caused him to wince. The two of us continued together, helping each other across the more treacherous stretches.

  As we crested one frozen wave, a ghostly serpent came slithering across the snow.

  “The Shape Stealers! They’ve found us!” Ulysses leapt onto Caliban, who caught him, holding him like a child.

  The serpent raised its head and swayed back and forth, hissing. Approaching it, Gregor knelt and inclined his ear, listening. His face was a study of calm serenity.

  “It is a messenger from Eliaures.” Gregor stood again. “The Frenchman sends the following message: ‘Reached Milan. Our mutual friend here before me. Headed your way. Big procession. Be wary.’”

  “That’s clear as mud,” Erasmus stuck his icy hands in his pockets. He had not been lucky enough to score gloves, though he did have a red and blue sweater and a green hat with a pompom. “Eliaures would have been a menace had he lived until the age of telegrams.”

  “What in tar … creation does it mean?” asked Mab.

  “By ‘our mutual friend’ does he mean Malagigi or Galeazzo?” I asked.

  Theo frowned, “By ‘headed your way’ does he mean he, Eliaures, is headed our way? Or that the ‘mutual friend’ is headed our way? In either case, why should we be wary?”

  “Why would Galeazzo have a big procession?” asked Logistilla.

  Gregor questioned the snake again and then shrugged. “It is a sending, not a real creature. I can get no more from it.” Even as Gregor spoke, it vanished, fading like mist.

  “What was that snake thingamajiggy?” Mab bent down and sniffed the ice where the thing had been.

  I said, “One of the serpent sendings Eliaures was able to summon in life, when he was a sorcerer.”

  “It’s creepy, really, how many magicians seem to keep their skills after they are dead,” Mab shivered. “Don’t seem right, somehow.”

  * * *

  THE third time Logistilla slid and fell, landing hard on her bottom, she began to cry. Gregor and Titus went to her, trying to comfort her but mainly getting in each other’s way. Ulysses gave her a silken handkerchief upon which to blow her nose.

  “Oh, get away, all of you,” she cried, driving back Gregor and Titus by brandishing the greenish globe atop her staff at them. “You’re a useless bunch! Mephisto’s the worst of all. Doesn’t the Staff of Summoning have anything that could carry us over this horrible landscape?”

  “As a matter of fact, it does!” Mephisto tapped his staff. “What a good idea! Don’t know why I didn’t think of that!”

  I began to imagine a wall of matted fur rose from the glacier. Then, Mephisto’s mammoth stood before us, the one I had glimpsed out in back of his house. It was a great brown furry creature with round ears as big as a large dinner plate and huge curving tusks as tall as a person. Its long flexible trunk ended in two almost fingerlike knobs. Immediately, it wrapped this appendage around Mephisto, embracing him mammoth-style and trumpeting its joy at their reunion.

  Mephisto asked the creature to kneel, and we all climbed aboard, trying to find a comfortable spot. The creature’s back, from the dome of its head to its rump, was a good twelve feet long and at least three feet wide. Eventually, we found that if we sat back to back and clung to the thick, woolly hair, we could steady ourselves and keep our seats. This was important, because when the creature rose ponderously to its feet, we found ourselves a good ten feet in the air.

  The effort was worth it. The mammoth moved across the uneven field of ice with surefooted ease. Once we became used to the undulating motion, we found ourselves traveling in relative comfort, with the warmth of one another’s backs to lean against, except for Mephisto, who rode astride the beast’s head. Only the strong musky aroma of the oily wool kept the ride from being ideal, though after some of the stenches we had encountered in the last few days, the smell of mammoth seemed rather pleasant.

  I was seated between Ulysses and Mab, with my back against Theo’s. To my left, Mab surveyed the countryside; suspiciously, his eyes took in the miles of ice and snow.

  After a time, he leaned over so that his mouth was near my ear. “A snowball’d have a better chance down here than I had thought, Ma’am.”

  * * *

  “I WAS just thinking,” Erasmus opined, after we had been swaying along on mammoth-back for half an hour, “about Ulysses’s comment back on the Paths of Pride, when he said he was glad to have ended up among the snakes and not in the Endless Queue? Interesting, Ulysses, that you didn’t end up in the Queue. Apparently, Hell is not about living our worst fears.”

  “I don’t think it’s even about punishment.” Ulysses lounged against Caliban, with one crossed leg resting atop the other knee.

  “Really? How so?” I asked. “It certainly seems like a ghastly place, all the torture and such.”

  Ulysses toyed with the fur cuff of his borrowed parka. “Certainly, there are individuals being tortured by demons and the like. But, I can’t help feeling that it looks more like the strong preying on the weak, and less like the Big Bearded Guv’nor In The Sky picks on Mere Wormlike Mortal.”

  “Then what do you call all this?” Erasmus gestured at the snowy landscape, with its ogives and moraines.

  “Wish fulfillment.”

  “Come again?” Erasmus jerked upright, causing Cornelius, who sat behind him, to throw his arms out and dig his fingers into the mammoth’s long wool.

  Ulysses shrugged. “It just seems as if everyone’s being given what they asked for. You want to steal? Sure, go ahead. But everybody else around you wants to steal, too. You want to fight? You want to rule? Go ahead! But that’s all you get. You don’t get any of the good that, on earth, we expect to come along with it—the end we think these behaviors will gain us. Because all the good is up there.” He pointed up. “To get good, you have to give it, too, or some rot like that.”

  “That’s a rather deep thought for you,” Gregor rumbled from where he leaned against Logistilla. His hands were folded in his lap.

  Ulysses smiled and gave Gregor a friendly punch on the arm. “I jolly well couldn’t have hung around with you all these years and not picked up something.”

  Gregor did not reply, but a slight wintry smile disturbed the grim symmetry of his face.


  * * *

  THE click of Theo’s goggles woke me from a light trance. “I see a procession of some sort off to the left. It’s traveling basically the same direction we are. I can’t tell much about it from here, though. They seem to be carrying someone in a chair.”

  “Is it Galeazzo?” Logistilla asked hopefully.

  A few more clicks, and Theo replied, “Can’t tell. The angle’s wrong. But, looking ahead, I estimate that our path will cross theirs in about … twenty minutes.”

  * * *

  WE heard them before we saw them, a weird, eerie sound, like a marching band that played out-of-tune pipes and broken drums. The music was wild and sensual, such as a siren might sing to lure her victim, and yet it brought with it a sensation of fear and repulsion. No music on earth could have been simultaneously so beautiful and horrible.

  I covered my ears, aghast.

  Marching across the ice came a procession of men and women in ragged uniforms of various offices and walks of life. In their midst, a regal figure rode upon a sedan chair carried by brutish figures. Unlike the bestial and wraithlike procession members, this enthroned man was handsome, almost dashing—or he would have been, had part of his face not rotted away. I recalled that Abaddon had had a similar affliction.

  Then, I made out his features, and I knew.

  I knew who it was that had set Erasmus and me against each other; who Eliaures had found when he reached the ruins of Infernal Milan; who the Angel of the Bottomless Pit had meant when he claimed a traitor lurked within our family. As Mab had suspected, Abaddon had lied, and yet … there had been truth in his words.

  “By all that’s holy!” breathed Erasmus. He leaned forward for a closer look and nearly slid off the mammoth. “It’s Uncle Antonio!”

  * * *

  I URGED the others to push forward without stopping. I wanted nothing to stand between us and saving Father. Mephisto, however, signaled to the mammoth to kneel. So we all slid off and moved awkwardly over the ice toward the procession. Uncle Antonio’s bearers lowered his chair to the ground, and he rose to meet us.

  “Nephews!” Uncle Antonio waved. He spoke in Italian. “Nieces. How fortuitous!”

  Erasmus bowed respectfully. Mephisto jumped up and down, waving. Theo leaned on his staff and frowned. The others stayed back, never having met Uncle Antonio, who died before they were born.

  I saw all this with my eyes, but my mind, which seemed to be moving slowly, as if in a cart pulled by a very elderly donkey, could not grasp it. My brothers were speaking to him? They were smiling at him? Had they forgotten that his was the hand that had slain my only hope of escaping a joyless, barren life?

  Trembling with rage, I strode forward to confront him. My heart pounded in my ears, as if hatred had a sound like rushing waters. “Murderer! Vile monster! You killed Ferdinand! You exiled Father to that tiny island, you plotted against the King of Naples, and you murdered his son!” I thought but did not add “and my love!”

  “Remain calm,” Gregor whispered gently under his breath. “Remember Malagigi’s warning.”

  “So, you finally enlightened her, did you?” Uncle Antonio directed his magnetic smile upon Erasmus, pulling my brother in like an iron filing. To me, he merely gave a courtly flourish of the hand. “Guilty as charged. I did slay the young whelp, and I plotted against his father, the King of Naples, that I admit.

  “But, exile Prospero? Quite the opposite! Prospero betrayed us! He tucked you under his arm and crept away under the cover of night, taking with him all our treasures. I had no objections to him taking Vinae, but he could have left Paimon for me. Selfish knave. Would not even share with own his brother!”

  “Father wasn’t exiled?” Theo asked.

  “Exiled? By whom?” My uncle spread his arms in an expansive Italian shrug. “He was the duke. Milan was a sovereign state. Who was there to exile him? No. He ran, the coward. He ran and hid and gathered his power. Then, armed with his newfound knowledge, he came back, and used magic to wage war against us, until he had remade the Orbis Suleimani in his own image.”

  “Why did Father do all this?” Gregor came up beside us, his face impassive. His half cape billowed in the icy wind.

  “You must be one of the young ones.” Uncle Antonio bowed. “I am Antonio, your uncle.” He nodded toward the others whom he had not met, Cornelius, Titus, Caliban, Ulysses, Mab, and, finally, Logistilla, at whom he flashed a charming smile. Logistilla lowered her dark lashes and smiled mysteriously.

  Watching this exchange, I wondered if some illusion showed the others the missing portions of his face. I reached out and touched my sister’s shoulder. She gave a little gasp and jerked away from Uncle Antonio, repulsed.

  Uncle Antonio turned back to Gregor and shrugged. “I know no more of Prospero’s musings than you, less most likely. At first, I thought King Vinae, in some effort to put himself above his fellow demons in glory, had offered my brother yet another gift. Later, we learned otherwise. Apparently, Prospero used the summoning magic Vinae taught him to call up some abomination. This wicked creature offered him yet more power, if he would betray the rest of us. Probably, it was that witch who could control the moon, the one whose bastard we found living on the island where Prospero was hiding.”

  “Or Lilith,” Erasmus murmured softly, his dark malicious glance resting on me.

  “While this is fascinating,” I spoke through gritted teeth, held rigidly due to both anger and cold, “you killed Ferdinand!”

  “And I am here to pay for my sins.” Uncle Antonio gestured as if to take in all of Hell. “What more would you require of me?”

  I stood mute, not knowing what to say to that.

  “What is your position here, Uncle?” Theo eyed the motley procession with distaste.

  “I am Duke of Infernal Milan.”

  “How is it that you are a duke, Uncle?” Erasmus asked. “That hardly seems like a vile torment.”

  “I am glad you asked,” my uncle smiled at Erasmus as if they were comrades at a drinking party, “for it is thanks to you, Nephew.”

  “Me?” Erasmus asked, surprised and pleased.

  “Indeed. Do you recall the kindness you did me on the battlefield, as I lay dying, my innards spilling out upon the earth? You soothed my brow and gave me a drink from your own wineskin. A bond was forged between us by your kindness. Because of that kindness, I escaped my torment, after many years spent trapped and freezing in a field of ice.”

  “Did my brother pray for you?” Gregor gazed at Erasmus with newfound approval.

  “Not quite.” Uncle Antonio smirked. “Not one to leave a kind turn unrewarded, I bent my will and sorcery to aid you, Erasmus. All the best moments of your life, I was with you.”

  Erasmus brushed his lank hair from his eyes and straightened his shoulders. Something hopeful flickered across his face, like the first breath of spring breeze after a particularly harsh winter. “Thank you, Uncle.”

  My uncle gave my brother a smile I did not like. “When your pride in your ancestry ruled your actions, I was with you. When you treated your soulless seal wives cruelly, as such creatures deserve, I was with you. When you denounced your scheming sister as a witch and a harridan, I was with you.”

  The color drained from Erasmus’s face. “Those were hardly my best moments…” His voice faltered. His throat convulsed. “In fact, one might argue they were my worst. I learned during this trip that those poor faery women might have gained souls had I treated them with human kindness.”

  Uncle Antonio shrugged. “If God meant such creatures to have souls, would he not have granted them souls at the hour of their creation? Surely, you are doing His work by keeping such women from growing a human heart.”

  “You are vile!” Erasmus backed away, sliding on the slick ice. “This ‘kindness’ of yours has done me nothing but harm!”

  Theo caught him, steadying him. I reached over and touched Erasmus’s arm. He shrugged me off, but not before his back stiffened. He had seen what I h
ad wanted him to see.

  Uncle Antonio swaggered forward. “Shall I tell you how you helped me, Nephew? Oh, this will amuse you, of that I am certain! Listen closely and learn how you have benefited your fond uncle.

  “When first I awoke, after my death, I found myself in the freezing ice fields where traitors are punished—not this ice. It’s smooth and bluish and much, much colder. A wasted and inhuman place, where no care or human affection ever lingers. Not a place men, even dead men, should ever be.” His face took on a strange, haunted gauntness as he spoke of his torture. I almost felt sorry for him. “For a hundred years, maybe twice that, I suffered thus. Then, one day—in the midst of this numb nothingness of ice—a woman of incomparable grace and beauty appeared. She came to me and spoke words of comfort, saying she would set me free, grant me power and honors, and make me Duke of Infernal Milan, if I would only agree to help her. All that was required was that I help destroy my hated brother Prospero and his despicable daughter.

  “She explained she was Lilith, the Queen of Air and Darkness, one of the Seven Rulers of Hell. She wished to strike a blow against her nemesis, the White Lady of Spiral Wisdom. To do this, she needed a damned soul that had some bond of blood or affection tying him to Prospero and his daughter, her enemy’s Handmaiden. Since I had in my heart a drop of affection for Prospero’s youngest son, Erasmus, and since, even more importantly, Erasmus was fond of me but hated Miranda, I would do splendidly.

  “The Queen of Air and Darkness was as good as her word. She freed me from the ice and made me the duke here. All she required in return was that I breathe hatred into my nephew and turn his heart against my loathsome niece. I objected when I learned that my actions might cause you discomfort, Nephew, for I am genuinely fond of you. You were kind to me, when you might have been otherwise, and made my last moments more bearable. However, Lilith made it clear that if I refused, I would return to that ice, forever. Reluctantly, I agreed.