Frank was both chilled and shaken, his wounds jostled by the ride and woken by activity as they had not been for days. He felt oddly on edge, conscious that his sluggish blood had sped up, tingling under his skin. It didn’t make it easier to dismount with one bound up arm, when his horse was sidling and sidestepping under him as if it was being bitten by a thousand hornets, but he understood its distress, his own instincts telling him that this place was bigger, stranger than it seemed.
In the end, one of the men who had accompanied them—the older man he recognised from his rescue, with the coat stitched with a thousand flowers—had to help him down. A flash of patronising amusement, above a white moustache that curtained all his expressions, and then Văcărescu was by Frank’s side.
“Cezar? You and Liviu see to the horses and then feed yourselves. We will not be gone more than an hour.”
Liviu, his pockmarked face too young for a beard, looked immediately relieved to be left behind. Cezar, the older man, narrowed his grey-green eyes, his amusement disappearing. He glared at Frank. “My lord, this foreigner is too injured to defend you at need. What your father would say if I let you walk into danger alone—”
“Neither of us will ever know.” Văcărescu patted the sword-hilt by his side, took a pistol from his saddlebags, and thrust it into his sash. “There’s no need to fret. No one comes here, and if they do, I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t like the thing itself. I don’t like the thought of you being alone with it.”
Frank wondered if the older man, too, could feel the accumulator’s power from here like the tickling feet of a swarm of spiders all over his skin. The world was reeling around him as though it was drunk, or he was. A strange unhinged, concussed experience.
Văcărescu smiled. “It’s only a tumble of wires and pots, Godfather. Nothing to fear.”
Cezar shook his head, then unbuckled the bags from his saddle and slid them onto his shoulder, taking the saddle off next and spreading the saddle blanket on ground hastily cleared by Liviu. “Sometimes I almost believe you mean that.”
Văcărescu gave the old man a perplexed look, but seemed to accept that his argument had been won, and his entourage were not insisting on accompanying them. He offered Frank the farther path—scarcely wide enough for a single man to walk carefully, placing one foot before the other as if on a tightrope. Frank’s throat felt swollen, and his mouth tasted of hot copper, as though he had bitten his tongue. He wished his right hand was out of the sling so he could feel his way along the rock wall, because he wasn’t entirely sure he could trust his eyes.
“You honestly don’t feel this?”
“Feel what?” said Văcărescu, coming behind him with his face still as unconcerned as it had been since they left the castle and its sleepers behind.
Ahead, the gorge pinched to a bottleneck, the stream scarcely a foot wide, but ice-clear and so deep he couldn’t see any bottom to it. The valley walls on either side drew in until they brushed Frank’s shoulders and met just above his head. He had to stoop and thread himself through the narrow, echoing passage that remained, water burbling cold underneath him and the light fading out behind. His skin was so sensitive that he could feel the few waves of light that passed as though they were made from powdered diamonds. Around the edges of his vision, in the darkness, he felt shapes crowding. Animals, archetypes, giants, and djinn watched him as he approached, and the hole in the earth through which they now crawled filled up with unimpressed gods.
“I . . .” The farther end of the tunnel had begun to show as a distant emerald. Frank paused, afraid to go on. “I don’t know that I really want . . . I think maybe we should go back.”
“Not you too.” A hand pushed him in the small of his back. That touch had been cool in the tower. Here it felt warm. Warm and empty, absent. Frank realised he could sense the movement of plants in the walls, the strivings of roots and worms, the turmoil of earwigs and woodlice and mites. He could feel spores in the air, life dormant and drifting. But from Văcărescu he could feel nothing except that one hand’s heat and the sound of his breathing. It was as though Văcărescu didn’t really exist at all.
Which made it somewhat eerie when he said, “What would your friend think if you turned back now?”
“Here, it doesn’t seem impossible to call out Protheroe’s spirit and ask him.”
“I suggest you don’t.” A sharp voice in the dark, and Frank was shoved forwards, forced to catch himself with one hand on the path. The seething something around him clamoured with ideas for retribution, and he shuddered and forced himself onward. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad once they were both out in the light again.
“I wouldn’t.” You’re a fine one to talk to me about the need to leave the dead in the ground.
At length the tunnel roof began to recede upwards and the walls to widen out. Frank brushed aside a whispering cloud of white hemlock umbels and squirmed out into daylight. The wall to his left tumbled down and gave way to greenness. The stream, dammed here by the narrow outlet, spread in a wide green pond, on the left bank of which a darker morass of trees climbed the rocky slopes. On the right, the path widened and wound on under an overhang of craggy granite blotched with green and grey lichens.
The sense of unbridled insanity did not go away. If anything, it grew worse. The sunny valley—the trees, the distant bright sky—seemed to bulge, as a pregnant woman’s stomach bulges when the child squirms inside it. Fists were stretching the skin of the world. Frank gave a “hnn” of protest and staggered sideways.
Văcărescu caught him before he tripped himself into the pond. He looped Frank’s good arm around his shoulders and snugged one of his own around Frank’s waist. That helped. Frank looked down at the side of his companion’s jaw with a sense of wonder, for the valley was numinous, all the stones were charged with immanence, the soil was rank with power and the shadows with sentience, but Radu Văcărescu was nothing more than ordinary, and at this moment Frank could have kissed him for it.
“How fragile you are.” Văcărescu shook his head, his expression caught between contempt and reluctant charm. Frank didn’t mind. Fragile seemed to sum it up well enough, and if the judgement came with an arm to hold him up and guide him, it was welcome. “We’re close now. Lean on me. Come on.”
A few more steps (off a cliff, through an abyss, over fiery lakes, through walls of ice . . .) and the path turned a sharp corner, disappeared into a doorway carved into the side of the hill.
“Nnnh!” said Frank again, at the sight of it. All possibilities and universes seemed to be streaming from that narrow darkness. He thought he’d be boiled alive if he went in there, the flesh stripped from his bones and seethed in the cauldron with everything that existed. What came out again would not be him.
Instinctively, he pressed back against his guide, but Văcărescu was looking around as if he saw only a pleasant sunlit glade and an old abandoned cave with a doorway too narrow for bears. He was amused by Frank’s panic, but dismissive, pushing Frank on, like a parent urging a frightened child into the world on the first day of school. Gentle, but implacable.
“It takes some people this way. None quite so bad, in my experience. But you’d regret having come so far only to run away.” He pried at Frank’s fingers—for Frank was clinging tight to the lintel by this point with his one good hand. “Let go.”
He was right. Beneath the terror, Frank had begun to feel the rising of something shy and curious in him, a part of him that wanted to see—that would never forgive him if he did not. So he didn’t struggle too much when Văcărescu peeled his hand from the stone, finger by finger, and shoved him through and in.
And after all that, it was only a tumble of pots and wire. A small room filled with stone shelves, and those shelves packed tight with baked earth pots in the shape of closed troughs, rough and reddish with a glaze somewhere between glossy and matte. Thick posts of a metal red as copper poked from each one,
and were cobwebbed together with yellower wires, polished brass or even gold.
There were no cobwebs, no dust, no leaf scatter blown through the open door. Around the walls, on the ceiling and the tiled floor, words of no language Frank had ever seen before were carved deep, the edges of the cuts as sharp as if they had just been made.
All the shelves were arranged around one alcove; all the wires led there, to two more of the red metal posts. These were carved with words all along their length and terminated in endless knots. To Frank, it was obvious that he was meant to stand in the gap between them, to grip one with each hand and thus close the circle, making his own body a conduit for the vril that yearned to flow through the wires.
The storm of unreality had quietened a little once they got past the threshold. This room was solid enough for Frank to smell vinegar and lemons and newly spilled blood. He straightened back to his own feet, and Văcărescu let him go. Potential, power, wrongness, a sensation of wary, watching eyes—all this flowed into the new space between them, where once there had been only the sensation of solid human being.
“Has anyone . . .?” Frank indicated the handholds. “Ever dared touch them?”
Văcărescu laughed, blind to everything. “Everyone who’s been up here, I should think. It was a test of bravery, when I was a child. This and visiting my parents’ graves. Neither posed much of a challenge to me.”
“And no one burned up?”
He had taken his host aback, again. He got a small, genuine frown of doubt and wonder as reward, as though Văcărescu had brought him to a place from which time and maturity had long abraded the threat, and Frank had seen the ghost in it.
“Nobody ever burned.” He looked around, as if seeing it anew, and stepped back to consider. “I’ve stood here a thousand times, waiting to be given the power to change everything, and nothing happened. I felt nothing, I received nothing. It has never made anything any better. Not for me.”
He put his hand on one of the golden wires. Frank almost leaped forward, shoved him away. His cry of “No!” had to turn itself into a cough in his mouth as nothing at all happened. It should have.
“But I’ve never had to be pushed into it as though I was struggling through a blizzard,” Văcărescu finished. “I don’t know what will happen if you do it. Maybe you’ll be the first.”
Not a reassuring thought. Frank fixed his eyes on the lettering—white against a deep blue background—on the slick floor. Mesopotamian? Sumerian? Older than that? It shared some shapes with Akkadian, but it wasn’t that. By reading along to the ends of the lines, he sidled sideways towards the grips.
Even the words carved on the hand-holds were sharp enough to bite. Everything that he had sensed on the way into the room—everything that had laid him open and scoured inside his bones—was concentrated there, glittering like ancient stars in a film over the metal.
He squared up to them, took down the sling from his shoulder, and freed his right hand. Terrified, and terrified, and terrified, like standing above a long drop into water and picturing the fall. And then one moment where he was numb. In that freedom he raised his hands and closed them on the bars.
It was not like burning at all, but cool all down to the core of him, cool and slick in his viscera, cool and blue at the back of his mind. The small gods who had seen him arrive paused for a moment in interest and took his measure. Above them, he had the sense of larger beings glancing away from their eternal concerns to note that something had happened. There was one long breath when all his many voices of self-doubt, all the habits that policed him, fell silent, and he discovered there was something left, under them, still, clear, and unassuming as a drop of water on a silver plate.
He hadn’t expected peace, but that was what came.
For a while there was only blue quiet and immensity, but a little later there came hands prizing his fingers away, and then Văcărescu was manoeuvring him out of there, supporting him again, as though he were too wounded to think or move for himself. He allowed it gratefully, full up as though with water—could feel it seeping out of his pores and wisping away on air that now seemed thin and barren compared to the reality he had just touched.
Out into the day. The sun had slid past its height and could no longer reach down into the sheer valley, though a band of yellow-gold touched the rock wall above them. The lake and trees were already greyed with shadow.
They stopped at the entrance to the passageway out, and Frank became conscious that Văcărescu had taken his hand, was trying to fit it into the sling. His bowed head was as impervious to magic as ever—it was impossible to know what he was thinking—but worried lines bracketed his mouth.
“Don’t,” Frank said, returning to himself like a sea anemone closing up when the tide pool grew shallow. He pulled his hand away. Rolling his shoulders, he couldn’t quite remember which one had been injured. “It’s better now.”
Văcărescu hissed an indrawn breath through his teeth. He undid the latch that held Frank’s coat closed at the throat, undid the first few buttons of his waistcoat and shoved all the layers of clothes and bandages aside to look. If he craned his neck, Frank, too, could see the smooth, unscarred skin where the bullet wound had been unmade. His breath was rough with nerves, but his chest rose and fell painlessly, the broken ribs also healed as thoroughly as though they had never been touched.
“What just happened?” asked Văcărescu, and leaned back against the stone as if he intended to block Frank’s return to the outer world—as if he was trying to protect his fief from some uncanny threat.
Involuntarily Frank found himself using the smile he kept for university porters, disappointed lecturers, and older men who thought their money could buy him. The combination of charm and helpless apology had always proved disarming to his opponents in the past. But at that thought he let it fall, ashamed of himself. Văcărescu was not his opponent. He was Frank’s rescuer, his host. Perhaps even a friend. He deserved honesty.
A patch of long grass by the stream’s edge looked firm and dry enough to sit on. He sank down there and wound his now painless arms around his knees, gathering himself. There was a lot more of him to take stock of now. Just as it had healed his body, the machine had given him back most of his mind, only a few of the most pressing things missing. He knew now, with some relief, that his magic was innate and not the result of him paying some terrible price. Not a witch, then. But possibly still a murderer. Frustratingly, that last answer lay still just outside his grasp.
“I don’t know exactly what happened,” he began, as Văcărescu detached himself from the rock wall and came to sit down beside him. “I felt like I touched . . .” No, this explanation was the wrong way around. He started again. “How much do you know about what the device is?”
Văcărescu leaned in to check Frank’s shoulder again, as if reassuring himself that he had not imagined the sudden healing, but Frank didn’t think that he needed to let his hand linger so long, spread fingers curved gently over Frank’s collarbone and throat.
“Nothing. As I say, it’s a holy place we associate with St. George. It’s said that when he went to kill the dragon, he put on a blue cloak that was stored in this place. The cloak carried the blessing of God and enabled him to do miracles.” His hand flexed again on Frank’s bared shoulder, and his expression shifted from suspicion to awe. “I didn’t believe it, but this is too plain for me to ignore. You somehow did the same? You drew on the cloak?”
“It isn’t a bad metaphor,” Frank agreed, easing himself closer, carefully not allowing himself to think that decency required he demand Radu remove his hand. He was more at ease now with the chaos and roiling potential of the glade, but happy to cling to Văcărescu’s obdurate normality wherever he could touch it. The sea was far less threatening when he had an anchor. “You know of the Rising, I suppose?”
“I read of it in the newspapers. It seemed fantastical, but I am not in a position to disbelieve the fantastic.”
Frank laug
hed. “I’m not explaining this very clearly, am I? I should start from the beginning, which in this story is Atlantis. Ancient records tell that the Atlanteans had access to a type of energy called ‘vril,’ which Protheroe defined as the life force of all of creation. They built a network of devices across the world to store and transmit the vril energy, all of it dependent on a master device in Atlantis itself.”
“And this is one of those devices?”
“Yes. Most countries have at least one. Typically in mountains, but sometimes in artificial structures instead. There are functionally two in England. Our own is hidden in man-made caves under Glastonbury Tor, but we also fall under the radius of the larger device in Newgrange in the Kingdom of Ireland. Neither of them is as powerful as this one, apparently. This was Protheroe’s subject, however, not mine. I was only there to translate . . .” and to escape.
“Apparently they were rarely built by the actual Atlanteans, even though they were all built to an Atlantean design. When Atlantis sank, taking the master device with it, they went largely inert. Real magic stopped working, the supernatural receded, miracles grew sparse, and the stage was set for Enlightenment, in which only the material world could be proved to be true.”
A blue cloak—such a telling little detail. St. George had obviously found something here, even in the barren times. Something Frank recognised.
“Protheroe thought that the accumulators still held a small field around their local area. It was his theory that they continued to charge themselves very slowly even while the Atlantean source was gone. Not enough to make a worldwide difference, but enough to maintain local supernatural activity. Like your strigoi, perhaps. But then came the Rising ten years ago, when Atlantis returned and the master location suddenly became available again.”
Sons of Devils Page 10