The other prisoners were confined behind straight thorny bars. Father, on the other hand, was ensnared in something that might once have been a cage, but was now a jumble of twisted, thorny vines. Only one remained fairly straight, warping in only slightly, so that it was still a good two feet from his body. The other eight curled about him like hungry vines, pressing their painful barbs into the flesh of his shoulders and chest. His arms were trapped, and he could barely move his head. Scratches and scabs marred his cheeks. If these thorns were even a tiny bit as painful upon physical contact as they were to our eyes when we looked at them, it was a wonder Father was even conscious, much less smiling.
Father looked ghastly. His face was gaunt and pale and scratched in many places. His gray hair and beard had grown long and unkempt. His clothes were in tatters and through the holes the bones of his ribs were clearly discernable beneath his skin. His eyes, however, were as fierce and intelligent as ever. They lit with delight upon Gregor and the youthful Theo.
“It worked!” His voice was but a faint shadow of his normal robust baritone. “Gregor lives!”
Gregor planted his staff and shook his head. “No, Father, I was never dead.” With the briefest glance at Ulysses and Logistilla, he added, “It is too long a story to tell now. Sufficient to say I was held against my will but was rescued by the family at Miranda’s insistence.”
Father turned to me, and his eyes rested on the green wings of light protruding from my shoulders. He did not seem surprised. “They match your eyes nicely!”
“We’ll have plenty of time to talk back home.” Erasmus came to stand near the cage, averting his face so as not to look directly at the bars. While I had not heard him scream, he must have looked at the thorns, for there were tears of blood on his cheeks. “How do we get you out of here?”
“That should be easy enough.” Theo grinned and unlimbered his staff.
Father’s welcoming smile faded. He shook his head. “I am in a trap from which there is no escape. It was noble of you children to come here to rescue me. Foolish, but noble! Yet, I fear it was futile.” The thorn-bars constricted him terribly, but he turned his head the little bit he could and glanced toward the Tower. “Quickly. You must leave now, before the Torturers come. Hurry!”
Erasmus barked a laugh. “You can’t seriously think we’d come all this way and leave without freeing you!”
Theo spoke brusquely. His tone reminded me of his soldiering days. “Describe the situation in detail, Father. Perhaps we can find a way out you haven’t considered.”
“Quite unlikely,” snorted Father, “but I suppose you deserve that much for your efforts. Here is the situation: I am in a cage with nine bars. Each bar is made from a hair off the head of one of you. The hairs have been enchanted so they are in a magical sympathy with your staffs. Every time you use your staff, the corresponding bar contracts.”
“Oh, is that what they did with those hairs?” Ulysses murmured. “Smeg!”
Several of my siblings glared at Ulysses. Father continued, “One of the bars—I do not know to which staff it belongs—is currently embedded into my flesh, poised to drive a thorn directly into my heart. If its corresponding staff is used again, I will die. If a bar near it contracts too much, I will be forced onto the thorn and die. If you use your staffs to free me … you will kill me.”
Mab had borrowed Theo’s goggles and was peering at the cage. “This bar by itself, the one that is still mostly straight, must be for the Staff of Devastation,” he said, returning the goggles. “Mr. Theophrastus is the only one who hasn’t used his staff a great deal. He should be able to fire it off a bunch more times, without endangering you, Sir.” Mab turned to Theo. “Mr. Theophrastus, can you blow up the top of the cage without hurting your father?”
“Mab! You’re here? How odd!” Father did not pause to hear any answer Mab might make but continued rapidly. “Theo, whatever you do, do not fire! My explanation is not finished!
“The only way to free me from this trap would be to break your staffs. This I forbid! The purpose of my life has been to keep Solomon’s demons trapped and away from mankind. I fail to see the point of undoing all my life’s work, just to save my life. Besides, if you did break a staff, the newly released demon would probably slay me before you could rescue me, making the whole exercise moot.”
“What you are saying is: we can’t get you out without killing you in the process,” Erasmus said.
“That’s the speed of it.” Father nodded crisply, wincing as one of the thorns scratched his face. “It’s been a good life. I don’t mind leaving it. I trust you all to carry on.”
“We won’t be carrying on much longer.” Titus lowered his great head. “Osae the Red raped Miranda. We no longer have a source of Water of Life.”
Only three times have I seen my father cry: at Gregor’s graveside, at the death of our infant sister born between Cornelius and Titus, and over the corpse of his brother Antonio. Yet, now, tears welled up in his keen eyes, tears he could not reach up to wipe away. Logistilla, who was closest to his head, pulled out Ulysses’s handkerchief, now stained with Erasmus’s blood. Reaching carefully between the thorny bars, she gently wiped his cheeks.
“Oh, those are grim tidings indeed!” He gazed upon my face, stricken. The fortitude that had allowed him to resist the thorns seemed to be failing. In Italian, he whispered, “My poor darling, what will become of you now?”
I knelt beside the cage, holding his fingers where they stuck through the twisting, vine-like bars. Tears ran down my cheeks, too. I wished bitterly that Titus had not told him. Could Father not have been spared learning of my terrible shame? On the other hand, I supposed if he truly was not going to come back with us, he needed to know, in case there was some last-minute instructions he wished to give us.
The notion that, after all this, we might lose him was too much to bear. We had come all this way, endured so much; surely we could not fail now! Could life even go on without him? Father had been the mainstay of my existence for over five hundred years. I could not imagine the world without him.
Why had the angel sent me, if the task was impossible?
And yet, was he even what I thought him to be? I raised my head wearily. “Father, why did you tell me my mother was Lady Portia Lucia Gardello?”
My heart beat with hope. Please, I prayed, dispel the whole theory with a snort of merry laughter. Let it vanish like a bad dream!
But he did not laugh. Instead, his eyes filled with sorrow.
“From whom did you hear that name, Child? Did it ever pass my lips?”
I thought back, using the picture of Ferdinand and me on the ship from Father’s journal as a launching point, striving to search the real past, not some later fancy invented by Shakespeare. As far as I could recall, Father had only ever referred to my mother as “your mother” or “my fair love.”
“It was Ferdinand who told me the name of your wife.”
“And you assumed she was your mother. I never said that she was. I only told you that she had owned the silver locket in which you carry your splinter of Unicorn horn.”
“But…” Tears threatened to spill down my cheeks. “You told me you loved her! You described how she changed your life! Shakespeare even quoted you as saying: ‘Thy mother was a piece of virtue!’”
Father drew his bushy eyebrows together. “Shakespeare was an overly wordy man!”
I wanted to say more, to ask him who my mother was, but Mephisto interrupted me.
“Daddy, you actually ’pooned Sycorax?” He blurted out. “What was it like? Did she smell bad? How do you ’poon a hoop?”
Father actually blushed. “She was not yet grown into a hoop when I first encountered her.” He glanced at Caliban speculatively. “She was rather lovely, in fact.”
“Then, Caliban is our brother?” I asked.
My father was silent a time, gazing off toward the general vicinity of the Tower of Thorns, his cheeks bright red. I had never before seen him so
ashamed that he could not find his tongue. Finally, with great difficulty, he admitted, “He is.”
Behind us, Ulysses let out a strangled moan. Blood ran down both of his cheeks. He clutched at his eyes. Titus, who was beside him, took his arm and helped him to sit down on a dry patch of snow. After a moment, Ulysses blinked and managed a smile.
“Trying to find a way to free Father. I’m rather good at casing joints with an eye to escape, but I have to be able to see the situation to assess it.”
“For God’s sake, Ulysses! Think!” Father frowned at him. “Use Theo’s lenses!”
Theo whipped off his goggles and handed them to Ulysses, who rose shakily to his feet.
“Right-ho. Just let me get a good look at Father’s position.” Ulysses put the goggles on, though he was still blinking from the pain of his previous try. “I’ll let you chaps know whether the situation allows for any hope.” He began tracing each convoluted bar, circling the cage as he did so. As he stepped around the far side, he nearly lost his footing again. “Aw, bollocks! Would be a darn sight easier if it weren’t so slippery! Why is it so wet here?”
Father chuckled and pointed off toward the incline, down which the little rivulets were rushing. “My captors made the error of allowing me to hold on to my staff, thinking that they could take it from me when we arrived here and use it to resurrect armies of evil dead. The fools!”
“What happened?” asked Ulysses.
Father’s eyes sparkled merrily at the memory. “They cannot touch it. Not even to pick it up and move it from the spot where I dropped it.”
Mab flipped open his old ruined notebook and squinted at something. He looked up. “Because it came from a piece of the True Cross?”
“Exactly,” Father said with a smile. “Hell cannot exist where that staff is. Even here, down in the Seventh Circle, it brings life. Should it remain there, over time the glacier will melt away around it, and trees will grow.”
Theo approached the bars. “Father, I must ask you to answer a question: Did you put Miranda under a spell?”
“I beg your pardon?” Father sounded quite startled.
Erasmus said, “Theo believes you ensorcelled her to make her pliant and obedient.”
Father looked from Erasmus to Theo to me, his face inscrutable. Then, he stated rather tartly, “I would think the answer to that would be obvious!”
Before we could question him further, Ulysses spoke up. “Doesn’t look good, chaps! If we could break even one of the eight bars that are close in around him, even a single one I could get him out, but as it is, he hasn’t any leeway.” He sighed and handed the goggles back to Theo. “Even if we used Logistilla’s staff to turn him into something small enough to climb through the bars, there’s a good chance the thorn that’s already piercing his chest would get his heart before the change was complete. Ordinarily, I’d be game to try it, figuring we could always patch him up afterwards with Water of Life, but with these thorns … Well, they give me the willies! I rather think they might kill him instantly.”
“Could we bring him back with the Staff of Eternity?” Cornelius asked.
“Unlikely, if I die on the thorns,” Father replied. “They would convey me directly into the hands of the Torturers.”
Glancing toward the Tower of Thorns, which was about a quarter of a mile away, Father’s bushy brows drew together. I could only glance that direction briefly, and even that filled me with dread and loathing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a door open in the bottom of the tower from which some figures in long hooded brown robes emerged.
Father gazed at each of us, as if trying to memorize our features. “You should not have come, Children, and yet I will go to my grave more easily having looked this last time upon your faces. Now, you must leave me. I will be dead within half a day. Queen Lilith has promised to come in person to watch me die. I am to be slain at the stroke of midnight. If I am not mistaken, it is currently somewhere in the vicinity of vespers—one can track time here by how often the Torturers come out of their tower to visit their charges. They are due any minute now. Please obey this last wish of mine and save yourselves. My whole life will be for naught if you perish here beside me.”
Erasmus said, “Father, we met Uncle Antonio. He had been casting spells upon me for generations, working through me to derail your plans!” He fell to his knees beside the cage. He reached up as if to grab the bars but thought better of it at the last minute. “I am so sorry. I have failed the family, and I have failed you.” He covered his face with his hands.
“Buck up, son. You’ve time to put it right.” My father spoke firmly. “Now, go!”
Erasmus did not rise. Instead, he bowed his head. “I didn’t even respond to the message you sent by Phoenix-script! It would have gone ignored had Miranda not stumbled upon it.”
“Cried wolf one too many times, did I? That will teach me not to be so dramatic.” Father gave a grim smile. His fingers moved toward Erasmus’s head, but could not reach it. “Fret not, Son, we all make mistakes. I’m sure Miranda’s Lady must have drawn my message to her attention. Besides, all is well that ends well.
“As to Antonio”—Father sighed—“I am saddened to hear this but not surprised. Lilith must be behind it. It was she who set up this trap for me, and she who sent the Three Shadowed Ones.” He looked at me again, his eyes glistening brightly. “So, we have lost the Water of Life. Everything will depend on the Orbis Suleimani now. Do your best, Children, while you can. It will be a tragedy if, after all we have done, the Queen of Air and Darkness succeeds.”
A soft whisper, like a snake’s hiss, came from the brown robed figures, who were covering the distance between the tower and Father’s cage very quickly. In their hands, they carried mist-gray sickles. I remembered these creatures from Astreus’s dream. When they opened their mouths, what issued forth was pain rather than words.
“Go!” commanded Father. “Now!”
I jumped up, pulling at Mab and Mephisto, who were closest to me. “We must go!”
Theo turned on Father. “Look! She does exactly what you say, even when it is absurd. This may be our last chance, Father! How do we set her free from the spell you’ve cast upon her?”
“Theo, do not be ridiculous. The Torturers are coming!” I shouted. The mere sight of their awful sickles brought back to me all the terror that the hymns had banished. “Let us at least withdraw until we come up with a plan.”
“She has a point!” Ulysses twirled his staff impatiently. “And, furthermore, we cannot use our staffs—well, except for Theo who has quite a bit of leeway—unless we wish to be responsible for murdering our own father. Which means we have to walk out of here!” He paused. “Amazing that we just so happened to have used our staffs just the right amount so that we arrived to find put you in mortal peril but not so much as to have slain you!”
“It’s no coincidence,” Father replied. “Lilith and the Torturers control the constriction of the bars. I am certain they arranged things so that you all would find me alive and be unable to extract me from my predicament. Lilith would like nothing more than to have me slain by my own children. That kind of perversity appeals to her—but only if you all were aware you were committing patricide and did so because you were forced to pick your own well-being over mine.
“That being said,” he added, “I urge you to do just that. Take Ulysses’s staff and go home! Flee this terrible place! If even a single one of you perished trying to walk out of here…” He paused, his eyes traveling over each of our faces. “Please! Save yourselves!”
“We will go but not by staff,” Gregor replied. “Lilith may slay you, but our father’s blood shall not be upon our hands.”
Theo stepped forward again. “Father, about Miranda?”
Father’s fierce eyes filled with sadness. “I cannot help her, Theo. I have done all I knew to do. Apparently, it was not enough.” He looked at me. “Miranda, I cannot be there for you any longer. Neither, apparently, can the Lady whom I
hoped would save you. You must listen to your brothers from now on. Now, go, Children, and may God grant you speed!”
“But, Father—” Theo began.
The Torturers were growing larger in size as they approached: ten feet tall, fifteen feet, twenty. They began to wail, a sickly sound, like a knife scraping across glass. Cornelius gave a cry and covered his ears.
“Go!” commanded Father, shouting.
We ran.
* * *
THE brown cowled robes of the Torturers opened. From beneath them streamed bat-winged monstrosities. They flew above us, until the sky was black with them, and from everywhere we heard the thwak-thwak of moist leathery wings. Ducking our heads, we ran. Logistilla raised her staff to transform them into something more amenable, but Titus yanked it from her hand, shouting that no wife of his would be the one who killed Father. After that, we just ran.
From out of the sky came a flying thing three times as large as the rest. It grabbed me by my hair, yanking me upward. I slashed at its leg with my fighting fan, slicing one leg clear through. The severed limb, still clutching my hair, fell forward and whacked me in the face. My victory was short-lived, as the creature produced more legs, four or five in all. One was shaped like a crab’s pinchers. It grabbed my arms and legs. Croaking a most horrible sound, it turned and began flapping toward the Tower of Thorns.
Theo raised his staff, then lowered it, no doubt fearing he would hit me, too. Leaping prodigiously into the air, he grabbed one of the larger flying creatures, swung himself onto its back. Grabbing it by some sensitive membrane, he forced it to pursue me. The creature flapped toward me, Theo’s arms tightly about its neck. It was not fast enough, however, to catch up while bearing my brother’s weight. Theo and his bird-monstrosity fell behind.
Below us, more bird monstrosities dive-bombed my siblings. Logistilla was curled up in a ball, screaming. Titus stood over her, punching the creatures out of the air with his big meaty fist. Cornelius screamed as one plowed into him, razor-sharp beak first. Glancing back and forth between me and the others, Theo saw that he was not going to reach me but he might still do some good on the ground. Casting one last anguished look in my direction, he turned his captive mount and dived down to rescue our siblings.
Prospero Regained Page 38