They stood hand in hand, facing a ghostly portrait of Nessa and Marie as they prepared to activate Ezra’s machine. A moment frozen in time, like a misty hologram. Marie’s image brandished the tarot card. Hedy walked around her, studying it from every angle.
“This…some of this makes sense to me. The machine’s beyond me, obviously, but these aren’t purely mechanical designs. The circuits are glyphs. Sigils of power.” She pointed to the stone circle at the heart of the room. “This is harder.”
Nessa looked to the rock. It was a hazy, blurry smear. “Why are some of these images sharp and some washed-out?”
“Because we’re standing in your memory,” Hedy said with a smile. She pointed to Marie. Her face was clear, distinct, more vivid than anything around it. “This is where your attention was focused. You did take a good look at the card, so I can see what you saw, but apparently you only made a cursory glance at the ritual stone.”
“I may have a way around that,” Nessa said. She paused. “And while we’re here, just the two of us…I’m sorry.”
Hedy glanced up from the card. “For?”
“You expected some kind of hero, after waiting all these years. A witch-queen, a savior to lead you out of the woods. And I’m just…Vanessa Fieri, professor of anthropology. From the West Village. And originally from a trailer park in Hoboken.” Nessa dropped her empty hands to her sides. “I can’t imagine what kind of a letdown this was.”
“Mother.”
Hedy crossed the span between them. Wreaths of white mist wound between their feet.
“I have been beleaguered, battered, bereft of hope. Until now. And I have you and Marie to thank for that. Yes, I waited decades for you to come back to us. Not to save us. Just to see you again. It’s strange, you know. You’re the age you were when you left us, and I’ve…gotten older.” Hedy glanced down at her hands. At a long vein standing out against once perfectly smooth skin. “But you’re still my mother. I’m still your daughter. And don’t think for a second, just because you’ve been reborn, or that you haven’t had the same experience, the same path as before, that I’m disappointed. Can I show you something?”
“What’s that?” Nessa asked.
“I’d like to show you some of my own memories. My memories of you. I want you to see the witch you once were, the terror you once were. And could be again. If you wish it.”
Nessa reached out. She took Hedy’s hand.
“I do,” Nessa said.
* * *
As the sun went down over Mirenze, the sky painted with long streaks of wispy gray over shimmering turquoise, half the coven was liberating an Imperial wagon loaded with copper and gold. On the opposite side of the city, under Nessa’s direction, a party dressed in workmen’s clothes set out to find the spot where Nessa and Marie had landed in this world.
Just as when they arrived, a big chunk of the ritual stone—still bearing its engraved sigils, the ones lost to Nessa’s memory—jutted from the cobblestones. They set upon it with hammers and chisels, chips of rock flying as they carved it free.
“’Ere now, what’s this?” demanded a horseman in militia armor. He trotted up to the edge of the gathering, a party of foot soldiers in tow. “Nothing here is to be touched, by orders of the Church!”
Without his mole mask, the witch Lamberto was a heavyset, sweaty man with a greasy comb-over. He stood up and swaggered over to meet the new arrivals.
“Hey, signore, you’ve got your orders, I’ve got mine.” He wagged his chisel over his shoulder. “City says it’s an eyesore. Disturbing the locals. It has to go.”
The horseman glared down at him. His stallion snorted and stomped an iron-shod hoof against the cobblestones.
“It is a heathen artifact and a sign of dark magic. It needs to be investigated, and its perpetrators brought to account.”
“Account? You want accounts?” Lamberto waved a stack of rumpled parchment at the horse’s nose. “I’ve got accounts from the Department of Public Works, the Department of—and now your horse is eating my paperwork. Great. You just love to make life hard for an honest working man, don’t you?”
The horseman pulled back on the reins, dragging his steed away from its impromptu meal. Lamberto kept waving the paperwork at him, now half-mangled and covered in horse spit.
“Well…where are you taking it?” the rider demanded.
Lamberto looked at him like he’d asked the stupidest question he could imagine. “The church, for safekeeping. For crying out loud, where do you think I’m going to take it? To a coven of witches or something? Oh, sure, that makes sense. Here you go, witches! Here’s an evil magic rock, so you can do evil magic with it! Where am I going to take it? Are you even hearing the words coming out of your own mouth?”
“Fine.” The horseman wheeled around, turning his back. “See that it arrives safely. I’ll be checking up later. And if I were you, I’d see a priest to be cleansed after laying hands on that unholy thing.”
“And if I were you, I’d teach my horse not to eat paper. See? We all have valuable suggestions.”
* * *
Standing slates lined the far walls of the covenstead’s cavern. As Hedy worked, they slowly sprouted sigils in white, spreading across the writing boards like a virus. Now she stood before the gathered coven, pointing with a long stick of chalk.
“Between the remnants of the portal stone and the memory of the activation card, I’ve identified twenty-seven distinct magical glyphs, most of them related to spells of travel and motion. The ones on this board I’ve deciphered—they’re identical to ones we use in our own craft, or close enough that I could infer their meaning.”
Her chalk tapped against the second board.
“These remain a mystery. I’m assigning each of you to teams, and each team will receive a single glyph to research. Open every book. Turn over every stone. If the materials you need reside within the city, or a day’s ride, take them.”
One of the witches, squinting behind a feline mask, raised a slender hand.
“What about the vault under the city cathedral?” she asked. “We know they’re sitting on a trove of banned books. Maybe almost as many as the Black Archives.”
“As I said. If you need them, put a raiding party together and take them.”
“But you always told us to stay away from that place. That you didn’t want us in open conflict with the Church.”
“The rules have changed,” Nessa said, her voice rising from the back of the cavern.
The gathering parted for her as she strode forth. After her mind-walk with Hedy, she’d found some of her old things in a trunk, gathering dust in the dark. Her cloak of brown feathers, tattered and frayed with age, but still draping along her back like wings about to unfurl. Her elbow-length gloves, tipped with razor-sharp talons.
Her eyes burned behind her mask of bone.
“We wage a battle for our very survival, and my knight and I did not come this far—across lifetimes, across worlds—to see you fail. You are not permitted to fail. And this is no time for heroic self-sacrifice, either. We are the Pallid Masque. We survive. We endure. Sacrifice is what happens to our victims.”
She snatched at the air, seizing it in her fist.
“Flood the streets if you must, take what we require, and burn anyone who stands in your path. All treaties are broken tonight, all pacts are null and void. And when all of our enemies have fallen, when they are nothing but dust in unmarked graves, this coven will still be standing.”
Nessa lowered her hand to her side, fist still clenched.
“The Owl commands it.”
Some of the witches stared at her, silent, eyes wide. A few looked to Hedy, asking an unspoken question. Hedy gave them a firm and solemn nod.
“You heard her,” Hedy said. “There’s work to be done. So let’s get to it.”
Forty-Three
A day’s ride outside Mirenze, rotting mangroves leaned in a steaming mire. The swamp was sick, poisoned by decay, cake
d in a miasma that smelled like dead fish and spoiled meat. Black water, blanketed in yellow algae, sloshed around Savannah’s ankles as she made her way through the muck. Serpentine shapes rippled just under the surface, steering around her as they swam after smaller prey.
She’d seen the silhouettes around her for the last hour. Popping in and out of sight, darting behind the behemoth tree trunks before she could get a clear look at them. Finally she came to a dead stop and let out an exasperated sigh.
“I realize,” she announced to the swamp, “that this game of hide-and-seek is useful for heightening a potential victim’s anxiety just before the kill. That, or you haven’t invented television yet and you simply don’t have anything better to do with your time. In any event, I’m starting to get annoyed.”
They emerged from hiding all around her. Women in funeral gray gowns and heavy lace veils, their arms concealed behind opera-length gloves of soggy crushed velvet. Their fingers were inhumanly long, wriggling boneless and tangling around each other like the arms of a sea anemone. One came closer than the rest. Her toes dragged a gentle wake as her ankle boots skimmed the surface of the swamp, floating just above the brine.
“A visitor,” the woman hissed, “disturbs our sanctuary.”
“Yes, yes, let’s get this over with. I’m Dr. Savannah Cross, you’re the Sisterhood of the Noose, and you work for me now. Or, specifically, you work for the Network. But I’m the only Network representative on this hellhole of a planet, so same outcome.”
“Net…work?” Her charcoal veils shivered as she tilted her head. “We serve only the King of Rust.”
“We actually have an entire first-contact manual devoted to handling you backwater king cults and turning you into productive assets, but I’m pressed for time so I’m going to bottom-line this for you. You’re having trouble with a gang of witches. They took something shiny from you.”
“The Pallid Masque,” another woman hissed. “They stole our relic. It was a gift from the King of Rust, bequeathed by an angelic messenger.”
Savannah tapped a black fingernail against her rag-swaddled chin. “I strongly doubt that. More likely you’re a murder-happy cargo cult and you’re inclined to attribute the winds of random interdimensional chance to religious claptrap. But if it makes you happy, fine. I’ve been stalking these witches. I know where their coven is hiding, and I can lead you right to them. But I need help. They have a pair of guests. I want them, alive, for my studies. We team up, you slay your enemies and get your shiny back, I get my test subjects.”
One of the Sisters drifted closer. Her serpentine fingers twisted and snapped at the foul air like tiny whips.
“Your insolence all but seals your fate. Why shouldn’t we slay you now, and divine your last thoughts from the patterns of your entrails?”
Savannah’s ink-smeared eye rolled to the rotten boughs above.
“Okay. Now we jump to chapter seventeen of the first-contact manual. Who is in charge here?”
“I am.”
Savannah’s fist plowed through her chest in a wet blur, shattering the woman’s spine as it punched out through her back. The Sister’s robes tore and a plume of gray blood spattered across the algae-coated muck behind her.
Savannah yanked her hand back. She clutched a heart in her fist, desiccated and hard like a dried-up peach pit. She tossed it aside. Then she gave her open hand an annoyed shake, trying to clean it off, flicking loose bits of gore at her feet. The Sister’s corpse splashed into the swamp water in a crumpled heap.
“Let’s try that again,” Savannah said. “Who is in charge here?”
One of the Sisters muttered something under her veil.
“Louder?” Savannah cupped her blood-streaked hand to her ear. “Couldn’t quite hear you.”
“You are.”
“Excellent,” Savannah replied. “This has been a very productive meeting. Now let’s go get your shiny back. You can thank me later.”
* * *
The grand cathedral of Mirenze burned that night.
Bells rang out through the city, torches and swinging lanterns pushing back the dark as bucket brigades scrambled to haul water from the docks. Down in the covenstead, a hundred candles ignited like a constellation of underworld stars. The coven studied in clumps of twos and threes, huddled over books of lost lore and stolen, brittle parchment scrolls, combing for clues. One by one, glyphs upon the left-standing slate were erased and recopied onto the right. The code of worlds cracking, bit by jagged bit.
Marie couldn’t help with this part. She chewed on a cold chicken drumstick, dressed with some hot and sweet peppery spice, and tried to stay out of everyone’s way. Gazelle had joined the study effort—knight or not, she was still a trained witch and could read the same symbols as her sisters and brothers—but she broke off long enough to tug Marie aside.
“The night you arrived,” she said, “there were supposed to be two gifts. The feast was…obviously, a bit derailed when the Owl collapsed. Anyway, Hedy’s too busy to leave her workshop—she’s interrogating every single scrap of lore we can send her and piecing it all together—so she asked me to deliver this personally.”
She held out a box of teakwood in both hands, a twin to the one that housed Nessa’s old mask. Marie set her drumstick down on a stray plate and balanced the box on her lap.
“These were not easy to find,” Gazelle explained. “They ended up in the hands of a ragpicker, who sold them to an antiques dealer, who sold them to another antiques dealer, and they wound up as far as a private museum in Belle Terre before we finally tracked them down.”
Marie twisted the brass clasp and opened the lid.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, wow.”
In depressions lined with velvet, perfectly cut, a pair of sickles gleamed in the shifting candlelight. They were twin razor-sharp crescent moons, with long handles wrapped in cords of black leather.
“Your old weapons,” Gazelle said. “The Owl had them custom-forged, just for you.”
Marie picked up one of the sickles. The leather felt cool and firm against her palm, the steel perfectly balanced in her grip. She gave it a slow, experimental swing. The blade sliced through the air and it pulled in her hand, eager, as if the weapon wanted to lead her in a dance.
“What do you think?” Gazelle asked. “Any of it coming back to you?”
Marie turned the sickle, catching her own distorted reflection in the steel.
“Memories, no. Just a feeling. I’ve never held a weapon like this in my life—not this life—but I seem to…know it? Where I come from, we mostly use firearms.”
Gazelle squinted at her. “Firearms?”
“Like a cannon, but you can hold it in your hand.”
Gazelle’s mouth dangled open as she pictured it.
“I want one,” she said.
“I don’t doubt that you do.” Marie traced the hazy memory of a training routine in the air. The blade twisted, swinging up in slow motion, then across and down, slicing the bowels of an unseen foe a slow inch at a time. “But these…these are special.”
“You know, you have…well, a few thousand more years of experience than I do, but I’ve been carrying a weapon longer than you this particular time around.”
Marie tore her gaze from the hypnotic blade and looked to Gazelle. “Yeah?”
“Mm-hmm. So. Are you too proud to learn something new?”
“Never,” Marie said. “Are you asking me to spar with you?”
Gazelle stood up. Marie followed suit, cradling the box under her arm.
“I just want to be able to say, whether we win or lose at the end of all this, that I taught the Knight herself a trick or two. Might even save your life someday. Or a different life, who knows?”
Marie smiled and gestured to a patch of open floor in the heart of the cave.
“Let’s go,” she said.
* * *
Hedy sat bleary-eyed at a worktable, scattered papers and an open book to her left, her pyram
id of wineglasses—the black candle endlessly burning at its heart—to her right. She slumped against the table on one elbow, struggling to keep from drifting off.
She tapped a small tuning fork against one of the glasses, three tiers up. It rang out, humming a perfect chord, but the water inside of it stayed perfectly still. Down on the bottom tier, the water in a different glass rippled like an invisible finger batted against the surface.
She put down the tuning fork, picked up her quill, dipped it in a pot of ink, and scribbled the results. Again. Like she’d been doing for the last nine hours. Her notations filled page after page of her notebook, interspersed with lines-long mathematical equations as she tried to turn her piecemeal experiments into hard and reliable truth.
“How do we look?” Nessa asked, standing behind her.
Hedy gave a little start. “I’m not asleep,” she stammered.
Nessa’s hand rested upon her shoulder.
“I know. Can I take over for you?”
Hedy dipped her quill. “Better if one person compiles all the data. Less chance of error or overlap. And at the end of the day—well, it’s not that I don’t trust you to do it right, more that I don’t trust anyone but myself.”
Nessa fell silent for a moment, watching her work.
“Did I teach you that?”
“You did,” Hedy said. “You were not wrong.”
Nessa pulled over a chair. Hedy set her quill down. She picked up the tuning fork.
“Between my own research and what you’ve brought me, I’m coming closer to a functional model of a dimensional gate. Marie got me thinking. She told me that, at least according to what you heard, this Carlo person infused a portal ‘bookmark’ with his own blood. Sounds like he had a host of theories about the blood of characters from the first story, first and foremost, that you’ve got some truly potent stuff in your veins. Anyway, I’ve been jabbing her all afternoon, taking samples. She’s been a good sport about it.”
Detonation Boulevard (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 2) Page 30