And adding to this, a haggard and trail-beaten Fisk had now returned to us. Empty-handed.
Fisk looked at me, inclined his head slightly, and said, ‘Shoe, you know me.’
I slowly nodded my head. ‘Yep, I sure do.’ I lowered my voice and looked around, wary that Lupina or Samantha might re-enter the small stateroom unannounced. ‘But you don’t know that man, Beleth.’ I pointed to my temple, and said, ‘He’s shithouse-rat crazy, that one. He don’t care about you. He don’t care about the Senator or Miss Livia or this boat. He don’t care about nothing. I know him now, more than I ever wanted.’ I looked helplessly at Livia; maybe she would back me up. ‘We’re all entertainment for him. He’ll bind something horrible to you. He’ll fill that hand with the foulest rot from the depths of Hell just to see how it affects you. You don’t have to do this.’
‘You know I do.’
‘Livia? Talk to him. He’ll listen to you.’
‘To what end? So he can be even more disgraced and sent away, back to the garrison at New Damnation? So the person most able to help Isabelle is banished? So I can’t be near him in such brief time life gives us?’ She took Fisk’s hand, held it in her lap. ‘I have not known him as long as you, Mr Ilys, but I know that he won’t be deterred.’ She brought his hand to her lips, kissed it. ‘We are both barred from our original society. For that I am grateful. The stain on my name gives me a freedom I’d never have been allowed otherwise.’ She kissed his hand again, and they looked at each other with soft eyes.
I watched the lovers. A strange pair they made, both fallen from their birthright. Both with names besmirched. Both strong in different ways. Their love for each other was obvious, writ large on their features.
It’s a strange thing, love. It is a great gift Ia gives us, beyond name or family or honour. A gift we give ourselves? Hell, I don’t know.
‘Well,’ I said, slumping back into my chair. ‘Shit fire. I guess I’m gonna have to go too. Gimme some of that whiskey, will you? I’ll be damned if I’m going to watch this dog and pony show sober.’
Beleth’s quarters were large, the size of the small stateroom, and as I examined them I realized his rooms could very well sit directly above the stateroom we had just left. A large orbis argenta was burned into the floorboards and at the centre point was a terrible scorch-mark, witness to some dire combustion. A great table stood littered with sketches of wards and intaglios, inkwells and spare parchment, sandwells, wax blocks, knives and stoppered bottles with dark currents swirling in their smoked glass. There were bullet moulds, a stack of small silver ingots – a fortune large enough to buy another Cornelian sitting there as pretty as you please – a scrawl of holly, a smelting brazier, and the empty casings of Hellfire shells. This, all along with the tools of every firearm-inclined engineer – numerous engraver’s tools, vices, awls, V-shaped burins, needles, hammers, tongs, and a great mounted eyeglass I could only assume was for finer wardwork. There were dark wooden cabinets and podiums holding thick books. Skeins of open pipework came through the wall and snaked across the ceiling, held tight with brackets, to a large basin. Behind a small enamelled bamboo partition – a relic, I surmised, from Beleth’s days in far Tchinee – stood a modest bed. No wild cavorting with succubi here. A wall of Gallish doors was mostly hid behind heavy drapes. Beyond the bed towered an imposing wardrobe, doors negligently left open, stuffed with suits, jackets, hats, and patent leather shoes. It seemed that Beleth was quite the clotheshorse.
But more noticeable than the clutter was the stink of sulphur and the acrid odour of silver smelting and burnt flesh.
Samantha led Livia, Fisk, and me into the room. Beleth who sat at the great table, affixing a silver hasp onto the ragged stump of Isabelle’s severed hand, frowned at our entrance. He shook his head and said, ‘As much as I appreciate the audience, this is a rather delicate procedure. My pardons, Miss Livia, but you and the dwarf will have to leave.’
Beleth scared me. But I had no intentions of letting him have Fisk to experiment on.
‘We shouldn’t be any problem,’ I said, holding up my hands.
‘No, Beleth,’ said Livia. ‘I think we’ll stay.’
Beleth put down his utensils. The smoke from a pot of something near his elbow, made him whip off his glasses and rub his eyes.
He sighed. ‘Are we going to have this now? This contest of will?’
‘No contest,’ Fisk said. ‘They’re just concerned for my person.’
‘It isn’t your body we’re worried about,’ I said.
Beleth’s eyes narrowed, and he looked at me sharply. His lips pursed. He thought for a moment, then stood up, walking to the centre of the orbis argenta.
‘In a little while, a daemon minima will occupy this space. Those wards will bind and contain him, for a while.’ He walked outside of the orbis argenta, and I noticed two smaller, denser, circular intaglios of wardwork. ‘As the summoner, I shall stand here. Mr Fisk shall stand here.’ He let his hands fall to his sides, and he looked very exasperated and resigned. ‘Where will you stand?’
‘We’ll be fine right where we are,’ Livia said. And suddenly she was holding the same pistol grip sawn-off with which she’d brought down Agrippina. I hadn’t seen her take it out from beneath her dress. She thumbed back the hammers and said, ‘You’re not the only person with a little mechanical knowledge, Beleth. I filed down the hammer catch. I’m holding it back with my thumb. Should anything happen to Mr Ilys, Fisk, or myself, it’ll release and you’ll share our fate.’
Beleth laughed. ‘You’d doom all these people on the boat, and possibly this whole region, just to keep an eye on me?’
‘Doom? Hardly.’
He laughed again and shook his head. ‘You, madam, are an idiot. Should something go wrong in this room, you having a gun pointed at me will be a blessing. The alternative would be –’ he smiled, showing teeth – ‘unpleasant, to say the least. Quick death by that gun would be welcome.’ He pointed to a bench. ‘Stay out of the way and remain absolutely silent, and you might live through this.’ He beckoned. ‘Mr Fisk, if you’ll please come forward and stand here.’
Fisk moved to where Beleth indicated, his back stiff and the faintest hint of a limp marring his stride. He hadn’t changed from the ride back from Broken Tooth, and his clothes were discoloured with blood and the dirt of the trail. He kept his hand on the six-gun. He looked utterly weary.
Beleth nodded to Samantha and she left, shutting the door carefully.
‘Where’s she going?’ asked Fisk.
‘Somewhere near, but safe. Her quarters are warded.’
‘Why?’
‘All procedures like this involve great danger. What did you think we do here?’
‘Always figured you raised devils,’ drawled Fisk.
Beleth walked to the worktable, opened a leather kit all too familiar to me, and withdrew a knife. He turned to a large book, opened it, and removed a small piece of paper from its pages. Turning back to Fisk, he said, ‘Yes, we do that. But in a larger sense, we contain and direct raw energy. In this way, we are like gods.’ He gestured to me with his knife. ‘Your pious friend is no doubt offended by that, but it is true. Mankind can assume the power, even the aspect, of the divine.’
‘And the infernal,’ I said.
He said, ‘Remain absolutely silent. Once blood has been sacrificed and placed within the circle, attentions beyond your understanding are focused on this space and any word … any sound that passes through the air above the orbis argenta … can be construed as part of a binding covenant.’ He looked at us. ‘Nod your head if you understand.’
We nodded.
Beleth chuckled and picked up the severed hand, turned, and approached Fisk once more. ‘Put out your hand, Mr Fisk.’
Fisk stuck out his hand, palm up. The knife flashed out and Fisk’s palm gained a long mark, a parody of the wedding wound. Blo
od began to drip from his cupped palm. Fisk winced but nothing more.
‘On Isabelle’s hand, if you please.’ Holding out the silver-hasped limb, Beleth waited as Fisk’s blood dripped onto the grisly thing, streaking the skin. Beleth put it in the centre of the orbis argenta and took his allotted position just outside.
The room, already dim, seemed to grow darker at the edges and corners and the thrum and hiss of the daemon-heated water surging throughout the ship quieted. The scorched silver intaglios of the orbis argenta radiated with a cold, hard light.
Beleth said, ‘In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.’ His voice was pitched low, and it deepened as he went on. ‘In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.’ Over and over, he repeated his incantation. As his voice deepened and the lights dimmed, I thought about the phrase. It meant either “we wander in the night, and are consumed by fire” in the tongue of Rumans. Or it could mean “we enter the circle in the dark and are consumed by fire”.
I heard a strange cadence to the words, and soon little arcs of yellow light, like miniature falling stars, dashed about within the orbis argenta and a darkness pressed in all around us, a palpable darkness, a darkness spun from hatred and damnation and sin. I felt it creeping toward me, and it pulsed and throbbed. Or maybe that was my terrified blood pumping through my body, tensed and ready to flee. I could not see the room’s walls. All my attention was drawn to Beleth’s voice and the darkness coalescing now in the centre of the circle, laced with golden flashes as though someone had tossed in a shower of golden coins, flashing and winking in some unknown light.
‘In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni,’ Beleth said again, low and sonorous.
I heard a ringing like the tolling of a great bell, and in my mind’s eye I saw the words Beleth spoke and realized they made a horrible burning circle, moving forward and then curling back on themselves, like a snake devouring its own tail.
The darkness swelled inside the orbis argenta, and I felt a popping in my ears as though I was descending a cliff. My breath steamed in the now bitterly-cold air and rose in front of my face, and I watched as the darkness, like ink settling at the bottom of a glass, shifted and became sediment in the silver circle of wardwork on Beleth’s chamber floor.
I felt a great distance then, as though we all stood on the edge of a great chasm above a darkling plain where devils and imps sodomized penitents, daemons desecrated flesh, and the inferis capered and pranced and gibbered in tongues that no man, no dvergar, had ever heard, but all could understand. On every tongue a malediction, in every action an atrocity.
I was going to run. Something was coming, something massive and unstoppable, wicked and full of glee. I was going to scream, scream into the impregnated air, scream into my hands, scream and scratch and tear at the door to be let out.
I glanced at Livia. Her face was utterly white, as though a vaettir or vorduluk had cut her sanguiducts and drained her of all life. Her lips pulled back in a grimace, her eyes wide. She shuddered in absolute terror.
The bell tolled again across the darkling plain spread beneath us. The darkness swirled and centred itself like some mad whirlpool caught in oil, slowly turning, narrowing, laced with lighting and golden arcs.
The darkness at the edges of my vision pushed past us, and now all that we could see were strange shapes contained inside the black ink of the summoned abomination. It mocked us with inky visages, like frescoes cut from obsidian. There Fisk was locked in embrace with Livia. There he strangled her. Here I stood naked with a blade. There I had cut open Beleth and spooled his guts into a noose that I wrapped around Livia’s neck. And more images, flashing, flashing. There a vaettir held a child. There its gutted body roasted on a spit over a fire. Faster and faster the images came, each one more horrible than the last.
I couldn’t see Livia, but I could hear her gasping.
I blinked, and it was as though, in the instant my eyes closed, the room filled with flames and the screams of the doomed and damned and above us all sat a Crimson Man on a throne, dripping with blood and grinning, grinning with terrible ferocity. The Crimson Man held out his arms like he was gathering wayward children unto himself. Drenched in blood, he held a sceptre and wore a crown and under his chair – his throne – was a mountain of living damned. And he smiled. A smile that could devour the world.
When I opened my eyes once more, the room returned and now the darkness was almost welcome. Anything to keep the Crimson Man at bay. Anything.
I told myself to flee, but my body was not mine to command. I could not move.
The surge of blood hammered in my ears and I felt an unbearable pressure behind my eyes and then I was screaming, truly screaming in a high-pitched, tortured wail. I was joined by Livia.
Our wails made strange infernal harmonies and the orbis argenta glowed, very bright, sending white light into the room and illuminating Beleth and Fisk at the edge.
Beleth raised his hand and spoke a word very clearly. ‘Invado!’
And suddenly the pressure was gone. The room was different, yet it hadn’t changed at all. The orbis argenta still glowed but the viscous black had vanished, and the darkness in the room had reverted to the wholly ordinary darkness of the Cornelian at night.
Beleth stepped forward, out of his own circle, and glanced at Fisk. Fisk had his pistol drawn and was blinking rapidly.
‘The danger is, if not gone, relocated for the moment, Mr Fisk.’ He motioned to the six-gun. ‘You can put that away. Be thankful you showed enough restraint not to fire it.’
When Fisk spoke, his voice was raw. ‘Why’s that?’ he said.
Beleth sighed and shook his head. ‘Just be glad, Mr Fisk.’ He turned and knelt near the hand. It was no longer the grey of decaying flesh. It had turned glossy and obsidian, as though dipped in ink. It didn’t take an engineer to figure what the hand possessed.
‘Mr Fisk, I believe your new friend is waiting for you now. You must pick it up.’
‘That red man. He the one in the hand now?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when we find Isabelle, he’ll be released?’
‘Yes. That is his impetus to assist you. The promise of release. And help you he will. He will do anything to be freed.’
‘Once he’s unbound, he’ll be loosed?’
Beleth nodded gravely. ‘The daemon in the hand is a minor one—’
I laughed, and even I could hear the panic in my voice. ‘Nothing minor about that son of a whore …’ I stopped, looked at Livia.
She was still pale but she let a smile touch her lips and said, ‘Do not worry about my sensibilities, Shoestring. He’s an abomination.’
Beleth stared avidly at the hand. ‘Nice work there, I must say. The daemonic vestment is almost fully transmuted.’ He stood up, stepped away. ‘As I was saying, the daemon in the hand is a minor one. The red man is to Gooseberry as a candle flame is to an inferno.’
‘Ia help us,’ said Fisk. ‘You’re shitting me.’
‘I shit you not.’
Fisk walked to the centre of the orbis argenta. He looked from me to Livia to Beleth. Then he slowly reached down and picked up the hand.
For a moment pain and despair washed over his face. He gasped, and looked at the room as though he was seeing other things, other vistas than what stood before him. His body twisted as though from invisible blows. And then I saw a thing I’d seen many, many times before.
Fisk set his jaw.
It was a small thing. A nothing in the face of the infernal. But he gritted his teeth, locked his jaw, and straightened his shoulders. It might have been a terrible weight he bore, but – Ia damn it – he would bear it.
It made me smile. Fisk and me sure weren’t simple scouts no more. We’d experienced so much, so quickly – Livia loving Fisk, this cursed boat carrying the cursed engineer, Banty’s death, the warpath
vaettir. He was a centurion now and I was – what was I? A torturer’s assistant? – an evil man?
Fisk caught my stare, nodded to me. And then, in utter seriousness, winked.
It was as though he said, Shoe, I got this damned thing.
I looked at the blackened daemon hand he held.
I thought, You sure do.
TWENTY-THREE
The morning that a lascar walked from the west to the east shore of the Big Rill both crew and passengers on the Cornelian felt a sinking despair, akin to the feeling of Hellfire.
Full winter had come, bringing with it the baying of wolves and the promise of stretchers.
The morning of our departure, lascars lowered the swing stages over the icy surface of the Big Rill. It had stopped snowing but the sky loured slate grey. Clouds raced across the face of the heavens, and the wind cut through the legionaries and lictors like a daemon-driven wheel-saw from a lumberyard. Men sank into their cloaks and jackets and huddled around braziers and in the lee of stacked johnboats, gripping carbines in numb fingers.
We had been long hours in preparation, the urge toward haste was fierce. Beleth and Samantha spent their time in his quarters, making the ship reek of brimstone and smelted silver and scorched holly. The stinks of an ammunitionist.
I spent my time tacking out the ponies while Fisk and Livia spent the daylight hours in discussion with Cornelius and Secundus. Fisk looked both wan and washed out, restless and antsy. As though he could never be comfortable – even though he bedded down with Livia each night. He wore the daemon hand around his neck on a silver chain – given him by Carnelia, strangely – and it became obvious to me that it had a weight that was only apparent to those of us who had been in Beleth’s chamber that night.
The night before our departure, Cornelius had feted us in the stateroom. Lupina served fresh bread and auroch swimming in thick ale-based gravy, honeyed cakes and many bottles of claret and glasses of whiskey.
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