by Debi Gliori
It was exhausting territory, Titus decided, shifting the weight of the baby to his other arm and taking a deep breath before dragging himself across a particularly soft stretch of sand. His feet slowed of their own accord; he was sinking up to his knees in sand, his mind turning in a weary gyre of one-step-more-just-one-step-more-just—
He stopped to catch his breath again. Sand ground between his teeth, and he grimaced. In his arms, the baby stirred, his dark eyes opening on the strange new world he found himself in.
“Pan…,” Titus found himself whispering. “D’you…d’you think we’re de—we’ve di—?” He stopped, cleared his throat, and began again. “No. Well. Thought not. Obviously not, huh? Not dead, I mean.”
Pandora stared at him, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “How d’you know?”
“The baby just peed down my arm. Somehow I’m sure that doesn’t happen when you’re dead.” He looked down at the solemn baby boy in his arms and managed a wan smile. “You have your uses, squirt, even if it’s only to remind us that we’re still alive. Just.”
“But where are we?” Pandora’s voice was teetering on the verge of hysteria. “And where’s the sea? And we left Strega-Nonna with that awful man. We didn’t think about her. We just ran away….”
Titus wasn’t listening. He was staring at something over their heads, his eyes narrowed in concentration. With a trembling hand, he pointed to a small shape flying toward them, its rapid approach quickly bringing it within range and allowing them both to recognize Damp, her eyes sparkling, her arms outstretched in greeting, and her mouth open in a wide grin of delight.
“LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEE,” she bawled, evidently delighted to find her siblings, even if it was in such a dismal location. “Lookit, Tyts. Look, Panda, see me!” And unable to resist showing off, Damp described a wobbly loop-the-loop before crash-landing in a giggling heap at Pandora’s feet.
Dragging himself out from under the toddler, a small and mightily peeved bat unfolded his wings, spat out a mouthful of grit, and turned to address Damp.
“Well, ma’am. I have to tellya that your flight today contravened each and every Fedril Aviation Athorty regulation ever written and some that haven’t even bin thought up yet….”
“Veeeesper,” Damp groaned, picking herself up and greeting her stunned siblings with a grin. “Shoosh.” She wobbled over to Titus and grabbed on to his arms, bringing the baby nearer to her. The baby blinked at Damp, his dark blue eyes gazing deep into her brown ones. Damp smiled. “Look, baby. I brunged your friend.” And from inside the collar of her fleece she hauled out a small, wriggling salamander and unceremoniously dumped him on the baby’s chest. The salamander blinked, as did the baby.
“What the he—?” Titus couldn’t frame the question, couldn’t get over his shock at finding his little sister appearing right in the middle of what was rapidly turning into a complete nightmare. “Where did…? But why? How?”
The salamander slapped his forehead and reared up on his hind legs. “Pleath,” it lisped. “Lithen. Thith ith Hell, or Hade-eeth, if you prefer. It uthed to be the domain of Death, but not anymore. The Chronothtone hath fallen under the control of the Dark Thide, and now all ith Chaoth. Patht and Future are mixthed up with Heaven and Hell—”
“Hang on, hang on,” Pandora begged, one hand clutching her head as she tried to make sense of what the salamander was saying. “How d’you know this is Hell? How come you’re such an authority on all of this stuff? Why are you all here?”
“Ahem. If I might speak?” Vesper had clawed his way onto Damp’s shoulder and was flapping his wings in agitation. “We’re running outta time, folks. Save the Spanish Inquisition for later, lady. We need to get outta here. We need to pick up the dead broad and—”
“The dead broad?” Titus’s voice had risen into a squeak of outrage. “I hope you’re not meaning my great-great-great-gre—”
“Yeah, whatever, kid. She sure was greater than you’ll ever know, but calling her a dead broad is a helluva lot faster than giving her the full title. We gotta fly. We gotta get airborne before the sea comes rushing back and—”
“Thut up, thut up, for heaventh thake.” The salamander was almost beside himself with panic. “I can thmell him. The demon. He’th coming back. You’re all wathting time. Are you tho blind that you can’t thee?”
“No. They can’t see. Or should I say ‘thee’?”
Pandora nearly screamed out loud. That voice. It was him. The murderer. Skin crawling with fear, she turned round and there, towering over them, silhouetted on a ridge, was the demon Isagoth with one foot planted on the prone form of Pandora’s beloved ancestor.
“You filthy monster,” Pandora howled. “You evil, murdering, disgusting mutant FREAK.” And as her words turned into inchoate, choking sobs, she ran at him, clawing her way up the dune, her eyes, nose, and mouth full of sand, blind rage alone propelling her onward, her mind full of hatred for everything Isagoth stood for.
And he laughed. The demon stood astride his victim and mocked Pandora, relishing her pain, reveling in her grief, and, above all, delighting in having turned her into some creature powered by blind hatred, just like him. Seeing this, Titus thought his heart would burst with sorrow. The pointlessness of Pandora’s struggle, the mocking peals of laughter, the pathetic sight of Strega-Nonna’s body lying defenseless beneath the foot of her killer: all of these conspired to crush Titus and render him impotent with despair at his inability to change the situation.
The salamander inched along the baby’s body until his lagoon-blue eyes were level with the infant’s own. The little creature dipped its head once, twice, and then scuttled out of sight down the neck of the baby’s sleepers. The baby turned his head and looked straight at Damp, a single glance passing between them like a spark of raw energy. Damp’s eyes grew wide.
“Here. Catch!” Isagoth yelled, jamming his foot beneath Strega-Nonna’s ribs and, with one kick, sending her body rolling and flopping downhill like a bundle of discarded trash. Seeing this, Titus paled and Pandora turned away in horror, but Damp walked forward to meet the tumbling body as it came to a standstill.
“Jackan Jill,” she said dismissively, an unreadable expression crossing her face. She looked up at the demon on top of the dune and, as if she’d come to a decision, took a deep breath and called out, “Not like it, that one. Damp do it now. Damp’s turn. Damp says Maffew, Mark, Lucan, John….”
Isagoth had been turning away when Damp’s words took magical effect. His eyes flamed ruby red as he realized what the child was doing. That spell. That ancient spell. The White Paternoster? How the hell had she known to use it? He spun round, but it was already too late. A wind sprang up from nowhere and swirled playfully around his feet, giving the temporary illusion that he was floating above the dune, just as now, down below in the dark valley, four distinct columns of light floated around the little group of souls. Even as he shrieked in defiance, Isagoth heard Damp’s voice complete the invocation, the little girl shifting fluently into the ancient Babylonian version, as taught to her by Mrs. McLachlan.
“…then Damp says, Shamash ahead; behind me, Sin; Nergal to my right and Nimb by my left—”
At this, Isagoth bent forward and vomited blood onto the sand. It was intolerable. That child, that malignant human dwarf, was getting the better of him. Somehow she had managed to cast the one spell that gave her and her companions absolute, one hundred percent protection against anything he could throw at them…. Isagoth caught his breath. Hang on a minute. The Chronostone predated any Babylonian babble, did it not? It was around long before the Cabbalistic version Damp was now intoning.
The great names drifted up to where Isagoth shook and spasmed, spitting blood across his sandy perch: “…Michael to my right, Gabriel to my left, Uriel in front of me, and Raphael behind…”
“Oh, yessss,” he hissed. He held the ace. The Chronostone would break the spell, and then he’d have her, the meddling little troll. With an effort that c
ost him dearly, he stretched his arm back and threw the stone with all his might in a lethal trajectory straight toward Damp’s head.
Time-to-Go Time
Later he would remember the awful sense of waking from a very bad dream only to find himself in the middle of an even worse nightmare, but when Luciano staggered back from his half brother’s body, his first thought was to stop himself from being violently sick in reaction to what he’d done. In this, he was not successful. Between heaves, he attempted to piece together what had happened. So, Luciano, he told himself, try this one on for size—your wife is dead and somehow you’ve killed your half brother, Lucifer. Both of these statements were so preposterous that, for a few seconds, Luciano’s mind simply refused to accept such patently false information. System error. Incorrect data entered. Please check and try again. Then the nausea passed and he opened his eyes on a world so transformed that he briefly entertained the idea that he’d gone insane.
Lucifer was dead, that much was certain. His body sprawled across the billiard table, his sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling, his blood pooling beneath him, turning the green baize brown and running in rivulets to drip through the mesh pockets under the table’s rim and spatter the floor below. Luciano was aghast. He had done this? Somehow, in a fit of madness—for what other explanation could there be?—he had killed his half brother. Stabbed him several times, judging by the pools of gore. But how? Luciano wanted to scream. With what? Had he been so possessed with rage, so blinded by hate, that somehow he’d done this, this dreadful deed, without even being aware of doing it?
At this he began to shake, his castanet teeth chittering uncontrollably, his jellified legs barely able to support his weight as he was filled with the terrible knowledge of what manner of creature his blind rage had turned him into. He was a murderer. A killer. He had taken a human life. Lucifer lay dead by his hand. What kind of beast had he, Luciano Perii Strega-Borgia, become?
“Noooo,” he wept, his trembling hands reaching out to touch his dead sibling. “Oh, let this not be so, please, no, not this, noooo.” And then, precisely when he needed it most, he recalled something he’d read in a book. It had been in one of the dusty old leather-bound books on Roman philosophy that he habitually read during those lonely nights when he rose in the darkness and tiptoed down to his study to find comfort in the words of long-dead wise men. The words did not fail him now; they reached out across the centuries to give the weeping Luciano precisely the comfort that he craved:
“Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear.”
A sob caught in Luciano’s throat, and a great stillness swept over him. It was almost as if, at that precise moment, everything in his life, all that had gone before, was balanced equally against all that was yet to come, and he, Luciano, had become a human fulcrum, and was poised at the tipping point in the exact center of his life.
The stone flies through the air, its weight more than enough to shatter the delicate shell of Damp’s skull and to so damage her growing brain that she would never take another step, or breathe another breath unaided.
and
In the damp twilight of the kitchen garden, Minty, Latch, and Mrs. McLachlan catch their breath, drawing sweet, deep lungfuls of the moist air and ridding themselves of the lingering taint of corruption from S’tan’s final fiery departure. A line of geese stretches across the sky, their distinctive call sounding like the very essence of winter. Flora McLachlan looks up and sees where the birds describe a long cursive l in the sky. The nanny’s hands creep up to clasp first her throat and then her mouth, as if to stopper up the words that spill forth.
“Amelia,” she breathes, her eyes on the skein of geese. “Amelia, do you leave us?”
Overhead, the birds wheel and call, their line coiled upon itself into a circle, an o in the sky, just as, in turn, they will slowly spin and loop, their wings beating until they have spelled out a further v and an e, at which point the distance swallows them and a deep silence blankets the Earth.
and
They wait, the long-dead Borgias, wait on the shores of Lochnagargoyle, allowing no clank of metal from their armor, no creak of leather from their saddles nor the rough whurr of a horse’s exhaled breath to break the silence. Their faces are solemn but also attentive, alert, as if they are waiting in glad anticipation of something not yet here. Nowhere is this air of joyous expectation more evident than on the features of Raphael di Clemente Borgia, beloved son of Amelia, known to her family in her later years as Strega-Nonna.
No matter what dangers may still be lurking inside StregaSchloss, the deep chill of a winter’s night is no place for a woman who has recently given birth; thus Ludo Grabbit decides to take Baci indoors, come what may. They enter StregaSchloss by the front door, Ludo leading the way, Ffup and the Sleeper bringing up the rear, Baci bearing the watchful changeling in her arms. For a moment there is no sound, save for the mournful honking call of a flock of geese flying landward from the loch. Then the changeling whimpers, for perhaps it has caught a faint whiff of charred demon, or perhaps it simply knows that in a house where love abides, its time is nearly over. Regardless of the reason, it whimpers and Baci responds automatically, pressing it closer to her breast, closer still so that it might hear her shy lullaby, for she is too embarrassed to sing out in front of this man, this Ludo whom she hardly knows. So she sings quietly, sings the first song that comes to mind, sings:
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—”
…a song she’s often heard Mrs. McLachlan humming to Damp…
“Bless the bed that I lie on—”
…her voice so soft that, turning along the corridor at the top of the stairs, Luciano at first thinks he is dreaming…
“Four corners to my bed, four angels round my head.”
“Oh my God. My love. BACIIiiiii—”
One of the effects of having earlier consumed far more than his fair share of cappuccino muffins is that, despite the rigors of his swim and subsequent conquest of several sand dunes, Titus is still full of seemingly boundless, caffeine-induced energy. As the deadly stone comes flying toward Damp, Titus is automatically reaching out to intercept it. As if on rails, the Chronostone sails into his outstretched hands, docking there with an audible slap.
It is Isagoth’s demented shriek of fury that tells Titus what a prize he has caught, but then he hears a distant boom that suggests the Strega-Borgias’ troubles are far from over.
Vesper lurches into overdrive. “Secure the dead broad,” he bawls, and to his relief, Damp responds exactly as he has taught her.
“Check,” she says, wrapping a skein of spider silk around herself and anchoring this to Strega-Nonna’s lifeless body.
At this, Pandora’s mouth falls open. “Where did you learn how to do that?”
“Tan’tella showed me,” Damp says, extruding more silk and wrapping it around herself, Titus, the baby, and, finally, Pandora, before returning to Strega-Nonna and repeating the entire procedure. Titus looks as if he might be about to vomit.
“I don’t want to even begin to find out where that stuff is coming from.” He shudders, trying and failing to extricate himself from its adhesive clasp.
“Jeez. You guys,” Vesper groans. “Just cool it, huh? Save your energies.”
“Here comth the wavth again,” the salamander says, somewhat redundantly, because as Isagoth’s Chronostone-enhanced power falls away, the old order comes crashing back, and the Light gains ascendancy over the Dark. The babbling seas return once more to replace Isagoth’s Chronostone-enhanced vision of Hell, washing it away, brushing it aside as if it were no more than a bad dream.
This time the tide that comes foaming toward them is led by a vast, innumerable herd of white horses. Orynx is overjoyed, recognizing these beautiful creatures for what they really are: colleagues and descendants of the last Etheric Librarian, the one who Orynx witnessed refusing to give up the whereabouts of the Chronostone, even when his demon torturers set him alight. Ory
nx knows the Librarian only as “the one who got away,” but Pandora knew him as the onetime custodian of the Chronostone, having once accompanied Mrs. McLachlan to the Etheric Library before its destruction by demons. Pandora knows more—knows the Librarian’s name, which she now says out loud.
“Alpha?” she says, her voice hoarse with fear as the first wave of horses surges all around them, sweeping their feet out from under them as Pandora repeats the Librarian’s name, screams it, all to no avail as they are pounded beneath white hooves and dragged under by a towering white tidal race. “ALPHAAAAAA?”
“Alpha is the beginning,” Strega-Nonna explains, her voice kindly in Pandora’s ears. “It is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, the place where everything has its birth.”
A pause; then: “Child? I have the sense that you are drifting away, your thoughts elsewhere.”
“Sorry,” Pandora mumbles. “It’s just…well…I don’t want to sound rude or anything, but…I’m drowning here.”
“Nonsense,” Strega-Nonna snaps. “You cannot drown here, although some have tried. This is the sea of knowledge, a place that knows no beginning nor end.”
“Nonna, I…er…” Pandora is uncertain about the rules of etiquette governing the discussion of death with one’s newly deceased great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. On reflection, she decides that Vesper’s label of “the dead broad,” while woefully lacking in tact, has a great deal to recommend it in terms of brevity. All is blackness as against her a small body struggles, its weight such that it can only be Damp. Then she hears the unmistakable creak of oars in rowlocks, and hands are upon her, pulling, hauling her into a dinghy, briefly reminding her of Apollonius, of his hands dragging her into his hot-air balloon; but looking up, she sees that her current savior is no friendly ancestor. This figure, this hooded, shrouded thing hunched over the side of its rotted dinghy, is the epitome of what most humans spend their lives avoiding.