“Nadira!” She rocked to the side. William had pushed her. “Nadira, don’t do that.”
She looked up. He was glowing with a golden light. She looked around the room. Thedra was gone, the meal long cold. The room was illuminated, not by candles but by a shimmering glow that seemed to come from the walls. William was frightened.
His voice shook. “You are glowing, and there are sparks in the air. Tell me it is you doing this and not the necromancer coming to get us before we are ready for him.”
“I suppose it is me.” She inhaled deeply. “I was…”
He sunk deflated against the table. “Thank God, thank God.”
“…thinking.” She looked at him as he lay his head cradled in his arms on the table, blinking at her. “Tell me what you fear the most,” she said to him. William’s fear would become the missiles the necromancer would aim at her. How to form love into a weapon? It did not make sense. She must start with a defense.
“What frightens you?”
He closed his eyes. “The unknown. What I don’t know frightens me.”
She nodded. “So you became a cleric. You went to the monasteries to read the books. You went to learn the nature of God.”
He agreed. “I studied, hoping God would protect me from my fears.”
“What did you need to be protected against?” He did not answer. She saw his memories in his eyes. “Let me see them in my mind.” She reached to him and touched his forehead where the soft brown hair fell over his brow in a little arch. He shook his head slightly.
“No. Do not break me like you did the reis.”
His words hurt her. She lowered her eyes. “Kemal resisted me. I pushed harder and harder until he broke. Let me in willingly and there will be no violation. I will be gentle. I have learned that lesson.”
“Will it help you defeat…him?”
“It will,” she whispered and moved her finger from his brow to his cheek, then withdrew the touch.
He gave a little sigh and a nod. He covered his face with his hands.
She moved to sit next to him on the bench and put her arm around his waist, careful to avoid his shoulders where the deepest cuts still pained him. He leaned forward and rested his head on his arms on the table again. She hugged him with one arm and laid her other hand gently against his forehead.
“You were nine years old…” she prompted. She saw stone buildings with high thatched roofs. A barnyard. Piles of manure and haystacks. A little towheaded boy ran barefoot on the frosty ground from one building to another carrying a wooden bucket. “Oh,” she smiled. “You are sweetness, itself.” She watched him milk a cow, then another. Other children did the same. “When did you leave your family?”
The scene shifted to a city. Winding cobbled streets and tall houses. She felt a farmer’s strong hand holding hers and leading her to a stone church. “They knew you were special, your parents…you asked too many questions and spent too much time on your knees praying. They gave you to God, their most precious sacrifice.” She saw his mother weeping for the loss of her child. William began to sob with the memory of his mother. She hugged his waist. “They gave you to God,” she murmured, “because you had begun to frighten them. What were you doing?”
She saw him sitting at a table with many other children and his two parents. They were all busy with their bowls and spoons, but he sat by his cooling porridge and asked, “How do the birds fly? How does the water get into the clouds? Why did the wind blow hard last night, but this morning was gone? Where did it go? Why does the frost burn and freeze my feet at the same time?”
Nadira moved to kiss his head. “They must have thought you had been touched…”
He sighed. “They did. I was told many times to be quiet and eat, or be quiet and pitch straw, or be quiet and dig.”
“Then the brothers told you to be quiet…” she saw him in a monastery. He sat on a bench in his little brown cassock, a book in front of him and an old priest pointing to the words on the page. She saw his lessons in Greek and Latin. She saw him among the silent brothers, then in their garden, then on the streets as a young helper to the wandering friars as they moved from town to town, preaching and serving the poor.
“And you were no closer to having your answers…” she murmured.
“No. They answered me, but the answers did not satisfy, and it was a sin to doubt them.” She saw hours in penance and the wood beads flowing through his fingers over and over until they shone with the polish of his prayers.
“When…” she felt the edge of his panic and was gentle with him. “When did it start?”
“I was fifteen,” he whispered.
She saw him in the scriptorium. He had just read a passage. “What was it that you read that caused so much pain?”
“Our Lord said ‘seek and you will find, knock and the door shall be opened’.” He sighed, “I was asking and seeking, but the Lord did not answer. He did not open the door. I thought it was because I was unworthy.”
She put her cheek to his. “Yet he was answering, but not with the voice you expected to hear.” She saw William find a small copy of Plato’s Phaedrus under his bench one morning. She saw the old Franciscan who left the book for him. “But you did not want to pass through those doors, did you?” She remembered her own quandary, that feeling of being trapped between conflicting ideas. For her it led away from Barcelona on a dusty road astride a great war charger. For William, it meant fear and doubt. His religion no longer held the answers for him, but to leave his religion meant damnation. He could not leave, but neither could he stay. Plato had spoken to him with the voice of God. She felt his turmoil and her vision showed her the young man in his bed, awake at night. Afraid. Tortured by his thoughts.
“And that is when you began to show the brothers your ‘imbalance of humors’, as you say.” She saw him in hysterics, rolling on the stones of the floor. She saw the brothers backing away in alarm.
“They sent me away…” He choked out the words. “…to strangers in a strange land. I had to learn new languages, new faces.”
“You were touched again…” she saw the regret in the abbot’s eyes, and his understanding. “They knew…” she mused. “They knew and envied your courage.”
“Courage?” He sat up. His face was blotched red and white with the memories. “I was cast out.” Tears dripped and he rubbed them with his sleeve.
“No. you had asked, and they were answering. They opened the door for you, William. They sent you on a journey they were afraid to take themselves. They saw that you were special. When you went out you took the hopes and dreams of countless men like yourself who ached to learn the truth, but were afraid to abandon the security of their cells. You carried them with you.”
She saw his doubts in the images he sent her of his loneliness and rejection. For many years books were his only friends. She saw his bouts of madness in cold dark rooms and the whispers of frightened brothers. They wondered if it was God or demons that tortured the young cleric’s mind. She saw William wonder as well.
“You were not mad, and now you have seen the demons. They were not there, were they?”
“No.”
“The abbot sent you to Monsieur; he knew the alchemist would help you.”
William sobbed at the mention of Conti, “Finally. Answers that made sense,” his voice was broken.
She turned him so she could hold him close to her, cheek to cheek, arms around his shaking body. “You asked, and it was given. You knocked and the door was opened.”
His hands tightened around her. She did not stop pressing her words into his mind. “So. You saw your journey as punishment, as misery and failure, when in reality you were achieving success with every step. You thought you were being sent away, rejected by those you trusted, but in reality you were lovingly carried hand to hand by your brothers toward your destination. You do your brothers great disservice by blaming them for those tears. It was their love that sent you where you asked to go.”
; He gasped a few times before he could speak. “I caused all my pain, though I thought others were inflicting it upon me.” He groaned, “Oh…”
“Exactly. So we puzzle over the necromancer’s powers, but they may not be what we think at all. We may be hurting ourselves, afraid of our own shadows, our own pasts. Our own pain. We are letting our dragons strike at us. It is not the necromancer at all. It is us.”
She thought about this for a long while as William slowly calmed himself in her arms.
“Do you understand? We each provide him with the weapons he uses to defeat us. When we realize this and put a stop to it, we will have triumphed.”
The bright lights flickered and went out, leaving only the single candle on the table burning. Nadira frowned. William pushed her away from him and straightened his tunic. He ran his hands through his hair and nervously looked about the darkened room. He gave her a sidelong look and whispered, “Something is here.”
“It is not the necromancer,” she was quick to assure him. “I know how he feels.”
“Then what is it?”
Nadira did not answer, but circled the room, careful of the furniture and the edges of the woven rugs that covered the tile floor. William reached over the table to re-light the candles from the one that still burned.
The room was warm from the day’s burning heat, but there was a cold spot in one corner. Nadira stopped there and put a hand into it. It was like ice. She made a fist, thinking. The cold air spiraled around her body as it rose up to the ceiling and through the floor above them.
William watched her follow the path of the cold air with her eyes. “What do you see?” he asked softly.
“He has conjured something.”
William crossed himself. “What do we do?” his voice wavered.
“We send it back to him,” she answered.
William took a step closer to the table and lifted the Grimoire. He shook the spine until the book opened. Pages fluttered for a few moments as the book selected the correct passage. William leaned over the open book, tilting it toward the candles.
“It says…” He was interrupted by the scrape of furniture on the floor above them. There was a thump and a shout. William looked up and Nadira locked eyes with his. She spun on her toes and made for the stair.
Chapter Seventeen
Nadira did not knock politely, nor did she wait to be invited in to the Templars’ room. Moonlight through the large open window allowed her to see that the thump she heard was a body hitting the floorboards. The shout must have come from Calvin because Malcolm Corbett was lying on the floor by his bed, his face ashen gray, his eyes open and still.
Calvin had dragged himself out of his bed and was now propped against the wall. His eyes blinked with disbelief as he stared at Corbett. He glanced only briefly at Nadira as she entered, then focused his gaze on his companion, his face told her he could see what she saw there.
A dark wispy cloud swirled around Corbett’s body. Nadira stopped and pressed herself against a wall as Calvin had done. William came to a shuddering stop in the hallway just outside the door. He did not enter. She could hear him breathing behind her.
“Bring lights,” she whispered to him. She had not saved DiMarco. She must save Corbett. There had to be a way. She looked at Calvin. He would be next.
“Yes,” William answered breathlessly and disappeared into the hall.
Calvin looked at them both. “What is it?” His voice was tight and low.
“A shade,” Nadira answered. “He sent it to frighten us.” She had told the Templars what had happened to DiMarco. She saw Calvin make the connection. His jaw tightened and his eyes became cold and hard. She moved along the wall to get a better view. The dark swirling vapor seemed to be forming a solid shape. When she reached Calvin she put her hand out to him without taking her eyes from the thickening vapor.
“Can you walk?” she murmured.
He blew his breath out in a way that told her he could not. She glanced down quickly at his legs before returning her eyes to the dark presence that hovered over Corbett’s body. Calvin was braced against the wall on his good leg, now trembling with the strain. He was dressed in a short loose tunic he wore as a night shirt and nothing else. She tugged gently on his arm. “I want you to try to leave the room.” Below the hem of the tunic the cords of his thigh stood out hard against the weight of his body. On his other leg, the wound had festered. After Montrose left, there was no one but himself to care for and bind it and Calvin refused to allow her to touch his body. She could see how much it pained him. He would move slowly, if at all.
“No, Lady,” he answered tightly. “I will not leave you alone with a spirit from hell.”
“I am here,” William reminded him from the hall. He had an oil lamp in one hand and the Grimoire in the other.
Calvin glanced up at the sound of his voice. “Bring the light in. Perhaps it will flee.”
Nadira did not think so. She watched the column of vapor coalesce into the shape of a man. Arms and legs and a smoky head undulated from the column. She touched Calvin’s arm. “Sit then, Calvin. Go down.”
He did not resist. He could not. His knee unlocked and he slid to the floor, his back scraped against the plaster and tile behind him. His wounded leg bent under him and folded. His face tightened and his teeth clenched hard.
She placed a hand gently on the top of his head and then moved herself between Calvin and the prone Corbett to address the thickening spirit.
“What are you, and why have you come here?” she demanded.
The spirit swirled tightly for a moment before solidifying into a man. When it turned its head to answer her she saw Corbett’s face formed from the cloud.
Her gasp was echoed by Calvin’s cry.
Calvin called out, “Then he is dead!”
Nadira saw William move through the doorway with the Grimoire open. The covers splayed out and hung down both sides of his hand. His golden eyes were fierce.
“Back!” he shouted. He advanced into the room to stand beside the Templar’s body. He held up one hand against the dark spirit and the book in the other.
Nadira watched the spirit recoil from the Grimoire. It turned and grinned at her with Corbett’s mouth, then leaped at Calvin.
She dove to intercept it, thrusting her arms out to grab at it, substantial or not, to keep it from touching Calvin. The young Templar threw himself to the floor and rolled like a log toward the door. Nadira felt her hands on the shade like clutching at a stream of cold water. She could feel it, it was there, but there was nothing to grasp when she tightened her hands.
The dark shape dissolved in her hands, then reappeared over Calvin. She leaped over the body of Corbett and embraced the shade. William was waving his free hand, his eyes on the open book. He spoke a few words in Latin that she did not know, then shouted clearly, “Vos mos vado!”
She knew those words, but the dark shade did not go. William repeated them louder. The shade merely reached for Calvin through her body. She called out to William. “It is not working!”
The shade did not like her touch, and swirled about her as if repulsed. The Grimoire told her that it could only affect the living in its solid form, and could only move quickly in its vapor form. She kept after it, touching and reaching and moving with it, stepping carefully around the furniture and the men. It avoided her by roiling through the room and finally keeping itself floating near the ceiling where she could not reach it. It did not go when William ordered it to leave again.
Nadira stood in the center of the room, her feet on either side of Corbett’s body and her arms raised over her head ready to intercept the vaporous shade. She kept her eyes on the dark shifting shape but spoke to William.
“Are you making any progress with the book?”
“I am reading as fast as I can,” he answered.
She asked the Grimoire directly, “What needs to be done?”
The book spoke to her. The necromancer has taken Malcolm Corbett j
ust as he took DiMarco. He has twisted his soul and is using it now as a weapon against you.
Nadira narrowed her eyes. “Yes, the sky is blue,” she snapped at it. “Yes. I can see that. I wish to return the Templar’s soul to him and release him from the necromancer.”
The Grimoire was silent. William cleared his throat. “It says here that…” he stopped, reading. Nadira tried to curb her impatience. The dark shade was settling on top of the heavy wardrobe, and soon would become solid again. She flew through the possibilities in her mind, going quickly over what she had learned and trying to pull out the knowledge she needed to release Corbett.
Calvin had dragged himself across the floor and was sitting near Corbett’s head, his hands over the old man’s face as if he could block the spirit from using his friend’s visage again. She felt his energies as a great force protecting Corbett’s lifeless body with the fervor of his religion. Even diminished and in pain, he was a formidable fighter, strong with his beliefs in righteousness. She glanced down at him. She had removed him from her imagined arsenal because of his injury, but now realized this was a mistake.
“Calvin,” she said softly, so as not to disturb William’s concentration. “I am going to drop my body to the floor.”
The Templar looked up at her.
“I will drop it to the floor. You are not to be alarmed. It is not the shade’s doing.” She looked down at him. “Cover my body with yours. Protect it, and do not let William think I am dead.”
Calvin glanced at William then nodded once. Nadira closed her eyes. She felt her physical body fall away from her like a tree felled by a woodsman. It struck the floor with a loud thump, her hair splayed out around her head like a dark halo over Calvin’s legs. She heard William cry out before she launched herself into the air at the shade.
The shade had not expected her to enter its world. She sensed its momentary confusion before it reacted to her presence. It rose up and expanded into a dark storm cloud. Silver streaks of lightning shot from its depths toward her. She felt a tingling and a cold downdraft across her ethereal body. The room around them disappeared. Nadira flung herself at it and enveloped the stormy vapor. As she touched it she could feel Malcolm Corbett’s life in France. She felt his childhood among tutors, his lessons in combat, and his hours on his knees in his family’s chapel. She saw him reject his intended wife and enter the church. She saw his father and his men ride up to the cathedral in Paris and drag the young man kicking and screaming back to the country manor to stand before the altar beside a cringing bride.
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