by Stacia Kane
So she kept checking. Yes. Another ward, stronger, at the bottom left corner. Black spots appeared before her eyes.
She knelt on the pebbled floor and pressed her hand closer. Along the bottom of the door … she’d work her way up, instead of down—the opposite of the way it was normally done, but anyone trying to be sneaky would automatically do it backward in an attempt to create confusion. So she figured, anyway.
A creepy, crawly tickle started at the base of her spine when she hit the center of the door. Okay, that was kind of weird. She followed it, using it as a guide for her hand; when it grew stronger, her arm slowed, when it grew weaker, she moved it back.
The darkest energy came from the fetish on top of the door, as she’d assumed it would. The fetish … She’d have to cross that bridge when she came to it. Which unfortunately would be in only a few minutes.
For a second she thought of Terrible. She could have him grab the fetish—guide his hand to it, tell him what to do. But the thought evaporated almost as quickly as it appeared. She couldn’t do that to him, not now. Not when she had no idea how it might affect him, not when she had no idea what it might do in general. Toad bones—which she suspected the bone tied to the herb-stuffed leg was—were incredibly versatile. The bone could be a simple ward, or it could be a death curse; it could poison her, or it could bring water rushing from the earth to drown them.
Three more wards sat at intervals up the door, connected by thin lines of energy she felt when she waved her hand over them. And the hook holding it shut …
Ha! It was connected to that first ward, to the empty, harmless-feeling space. Like the point of a star it sat diagonally—Shit. Yes. Like the point of a star.
A pentacle, made of dark magic, hanging there over the door. Guarding it.
She rocked back on her heels, stared at it for a minute. Yes, she could see it, now that she looked: vague lines of darker air crisscrossing the seams of the wooden slats.
“What’s troubling?”
“Huh? Oh.” Her knees creaked a little as she got up. For a minute she’d actually forgotten he stood behind her. “It’s hexed. Guarded by a black pentacle—an upside-down one, I mean. They definitely know what they’re doing.”
“You do, too, aye? You get it broke up—” The words had barely hit the air before his eyes narrowed, stealing from her whatever pleasure his compliment might have given her. He hadn’t meant to say it, regretted saying it.
The heavy silence was almost worse than the slimy energy emanating from the hexed door. “I can break it,” she said finally. “It’s just going to take a couple of minutes.”
Good thing she’d stocked up at Edsel’s. From her bag she drew the mandrake and the black mirror and set them down before the door. Next came a stub of candle; she sprinkled a few iron filings—damn, she’d forgotten to get more again—over the top, and grabbed a coffin nail from a little pocket.
Tormentil and powdered crow’s bone, hopefully to counteract the toad bone at least a bit, some dragon’s blood resin and a chunk of snake. She didn’t have her stang with her, but she did have a small firetray; that would do, she supposed.
Last she pulled out the little plastic container of blood salt she always carried, and the bottle of water purified by iron rings.
She lit the candle. “Saratah saratah … beshikoth beshikoth.” A few pebbles lay near her knee; she slid them over, used them as a makeshift base to set up the mirror so it faced the door. The trick to breaking a spell like the one she thought they were dealing with was turning its malevolence back on itself, essentially creating a circuit that would burn itself out. It usually worked, anyway.
Next she used her knife to slice off a piece of the mandrake root and set it in the firedish, then piled it with the dragon’s blood and tormentil. Lighting it was the next step; she pushed her own magic into it, grabbed a thick pinch of powdered crow’s bone, and said, “Power to power, these powers Bind. Let this power, my power, become pure.”
Thick smoke rose from the fire; through it she saw the lines of the black pentacle clearly, saw the five points of darkness and the small, seething clump of it in the center. She tossed the powdered bone at it, watched it catch the lines and hold. Good. She needed to see the center, find out what it was, so she could break it. It might be something as simple as a Bindrune, if she were lucky.
Oh, who was she kidding? She wasn’t fucking lucky. But hope sprang eternal, for whatever stupid reason.
With her left hand she waved the smoke back, over herself, over Terrible. Power caressed her, slid into her nose and mouth and spread out from her lungs; it hit the energy already there, not just hers but the power of the Binding, and heated and twisted inside her, fighting to get out. Her right hand trembled as she dropped the chunk of snake onto the firedish. “Sessrika.”
The fire leapt high and bright pink before her, and so did the energy. She squinted and ducked her head, panting, checking the mirror where reflected flames danced against the black.
The pentacle flared into pinkish focus. Behind her Terrible made a sound, something between a grunt and a gasp, but she didn’t turn around. Couldn’t turn around, not when power roared through her body like a mad dog chasing blood and her fingers clenched tight and she wanted to fly, and she wanted to make him fly with her. Knew she could make him if he would let her.
The Church-designed basic counterhex required her to stand, to spin counterclockwise and build and release the energy that way. Something told her not to; there wasn’t much room anyway. Instead she used her left pinky to stir the smoke in ever-decreasing circles, watching it build into a vortex. The slow build: it would work just as well with the amount of power coursing through her system. Fuck, she could probably light up half of Downside at that moment.
She watched the funnel form, its low point touching the flames, the high point stretching to her moving finger. Felt the same funnel form inside her, pulling her power up, twisting it, sucking it from her, leaching it from her internal organs, from her very soul …
The black pentacle blazed before her, throbbing, reaching for her. It wanted her, wanted to pull her in, and she’d be safe there, there was no fear, no sadness, no—
Her vision scrambled, she shook and couldn’t stop shaking, and she was going to explode. Her hand was just a blur above the pink tornado she’d created and this was it, the sigil appeared in the center of the pentacle and it was so simple, and she pushed the vortex forward with all her might.
“Hrentata vasdaru belarium!”
The pink smoke exploded; the energy exploded from her. The pentacle shrieked, ululating high and sharp in her mind. She popped the cap on the blood salt and flung some at the door, felt it scatter and burn. The coffin nail practically leapt into her left hand, she grabbed her knife with her right and used the handle to hammer the point of the nail into the sigil.
Blowback threw her against the wall. Her firedish flew to the ceiling; so did the black mirror, which shattered. Black-silver glass rained down on her. She ducked her head, raising her hands to try to protect herself. Pink flames mixed with the shards; she clutched at the nearest solid thing she could find and it was Terrible and she couldn’t even be embarrassed because everything died around them, the candle and the flames and the pentacle and sigil, and they were plunged into silence with the wooden door hanging open before them.
It was almost a minute before he let her go, edged silently away. Without his arms, without the buzzing rush of power, she felt cold and shaken; it was all she could do not to grab him and yank him back to her.
“Damn,” he said, after another pause. “Were … damn.”
“You okay?”
He nodded. The light returned to normal, the flat unreality of the flashlight’s beam. In it his eyes glittered dark, his heavy muttonchops were black slashes against his pale face. “Aye. Right up.”
She wasn’t. Not at all. But she wasn’t going to admit it, any more than he was, so she stood on legs that threatened to rebel and
dusted herself off.
It only took a minute to clean up. She couldn’t do anything about the mirror shards, and the coffin nail needed to stay in place, but the rest she packed back in her bag, save the iron-ring water. That she opened and took a healthy swig before offering it to him. “Here.”
He took it without comment, and she watched him drink before handing it back with a nod.
Every muscle in her body hurt; she forced herself to stand, squared her shoulders before draping her bag’s strap over them. Fuck, was this day ever going to end?
Probably. No, definitely. Whether she would still be alive to see it was another question entirely.
And it didn’t matter. She was alive, and she was stuck in this fucking tunnel, and she had just broken a fuck of a hex ward, and now she was going to have to walk through the toad-door into who-the-fuck-knew-what with someone who touched her only under duress.
Some days it just didn’t pay to get out of bed; in that sense at least, this day was no different from any others.
Chapter Twenty-six
We know anything can be possible through the use of magic. But just because it is possible does not mean it is acceptable; the possible and the moral do not always intersect, and that is Truth.
—The Book of Truth, Veraxis, Article 873
He pushed ahead of her, bent over deep. The space surrounding them was a tunnel in the most basic sense of the word: an empty tube cut through dirt, scraped away with shovels and picks and hands, hands she could feel with every crouching step. Hands that wanted to touch her. Hands like snails sliding out of the dirt to grab—
She stopped short. Pressed her own hands into the dirt. Even infused with black magic, it was still dirt, still pure and natural, still a source of strength and power. That power was the Church’s wellspring, the source of all its magic and its dominion over the ghosts who wanted to destroy humanity out of simple, unthinking hatred; just touching it, digging her fingers into it, centered her.
But oh, yeah, the grime and darkness were there. Anger and blood and … what was—
“You right? Ain’t dig spendin all day in here.”
She looked up at his whisper and saw him several feet in front of her, half-turned, still bent over. This was uncomfortable for her; it must be awful for him, with his height.
“Yeah, yeah, it just—Something feels wrong.”
“Ain’t none of this right, aye?”
“But this feels … wrong wrong, you know what I mean? Not just like black magic or murder or whatever. It feels like, like the people who dug this are wrong. Something’s wrong with them.”
“Like they fucked in them heads?”
“No, it’s—Well, yeah, but … I don’t know. I can’t explain it.” She pulled her hands back from the dirt, brushed them against each other.
“Wanna head back?”
She looked up sharply. Yes, she wanted to head back; no, she didn’t want to admit it. “No. Go on.”
He shrugged and kept on; she noticed he carefully avoided touching the hard-packed mud on either side of them, and that when on one occasion his shoulder brushed it, he jerked away from it.
She didn’t bother to ask. And honestly she didn’t think she could find her voice even if she wanted to. With every step the feeling of wrong increased. She caught herself rubbing her arms, trying to calm her goosebumped skin. Trying to still her shivering, trying to soothe the turmoil in her mind.
It was no use. She couldn’t seem to calm down. Couldn’t seem to focus on anything.
Terrible stopped short; she bumped into him and hardly noticed it. He glanced back at her, gestured for her to look.
The tunnel opened to a cavernous space, a space like nothing she’d ever seen in her life and hoped never to see again.
At first she thought they were back above ground. Bright light dazzled her eyes, made them sting and water; it took a few seconds to realize it wasn’t daylight but candlelight she was seeing, that candles climbed the dirt walls in dizzying columns. Stretched across the ceiling were long crisscrossing strands of rope; from the ropes hung bones and skulls, scarves, ratskins, and twisty lines of feathers bound together. The same ropes dangled down the walls, between the candle rows, between shelves of bone and wood, between what looked almost like beds.
Small beds. Narrow beds.
More skulls littered the floor. Some of them were human.
The stench of rotting meat filled her nose; bile and saliva filled her mouth. This wasn’t a home, wasn’t someone’s cavelike hideaway. These were the hidden people, the ones so secret and reviled even Downside spoke their names as curses. This was a charnelhouse, a slaughterhouse.
Not the Lamaru, at least not if what she knew about Downside legend was true. Something much, much worse.
“We have to get out of here,” she started, grabbing his arm and starting to turn back. “We have to get out of here now, right now—”
Too late. Something scuttled along the wall behind the ropes; boards in crooked rows created a kind of hall outside the main open space, and something … something tiny and misshapen ran behind it, its feet slapping the hard-packed dirt. They’d been seen.
Terrible’s hand went to his knife. “We run they follow, aye?”
She nodded, her teeth sinking into her lip so hard she drew blood. They could run—maybe. But their journey to this cave had been rough, a long hard slog over rocks and dirt. She didn’t think they could get back much faster, and she had absolutely no doubt that the inhabitants of this little corner of hell could.
More movement over their heads; a small body clambering along the rope like a monkey. A very small body. A child.
“Ain’t see another way out.”
Her skin prickled everywhere, every gaze that hit her registering like another shock. So many of them, she felt them, their choking sick hunger clouding her thoughts and her vision. The door they’d come through had been hidden by glamour. She bet the exit—if there was one—was hidden as well.
They really didn’t have time for this shit, but neither did they have a choice. She fisted her hands, took a deep breath. Found her power, deep inside, let it flare while she scanned the walls. Ignore the movements, the unmistakable fact that more bodies twisted past behind the boards, that harsh dry whispers crossed the bone-littered space, and find the exit. Find the door.
“There.” She pointed at it; they didn’t have time for her to explain. “There, go, run—”
His big hand wrapped hers, held it tight as he set off across the floor. At the same time the people behind the boards came out, ran for them.
Oh shit they’re wrong they’re so wrong—
Twisted bodies, handless, deformed. Gaping mouths devoid of teeth, bloody smiles with too many of them. Leering foreheads reflecting the candlelight, tiny eyes set too close over humping crooked noses. Reaching for them, brushing her clothes, her hair—
She stumbled; Terrible yanked her back up, kept running. Around her wails sounded, voices cackling and screaming. Steel glinted as knives were raised.
The door wasn’t far now, she saw it, a plain door—a real door—high over steps cut in the dirt. It was a star she reached for as she pulled Terrible to the side and let him draw her along faster than she could go on her own, her lungs threatening to explode from breathlessness and hopelessness and the aching pressure of madness and twisted inhuman humanity.
A figure stepped in front of the door. They were halfway up when she saw it was Maguinness, smiling gently, his arms folded before him.
He raised a pale, long-fingered hand; the noise around them ceased, left only the ringing of her ears.
“I know you.” His gaze ran up and down Terrible’s body; Terrible’s hand tightened almost imperceptibly around hers. “Work for the lord, you do.”
“Aye.”
Now that beatific smile, horrible in its emptiness, fell on her. “And you work for the other one. Why have you bothered my children?”
She cast her eyes away from
him, couldn’t keep looking at his waxy visage. Above him toads danced on strings, rows and rows of them. Guarding the door. Guarding the inhabitants of this room. His children?
His children. She gagged, tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a cough. The glint in his eye told her she hadn’t fooled him.
Terrible spoke. “Looking for aught else, is all.”
“Oh, no … no, I don’t think so. Methinks you wouldn’t have entered here by mistake. You, witch. You destroyed my door.”
“I’m sorry” was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to utter it, much as she knew she should. Terrible had calculated their chances pretty well; between the two of them they could handle a lot, but an army of inbreeds—quite probably cannibalistic inbreeds, if the skulls on the floor were anything to go by—was too much. Their odds of fighting their way out of this wouldn’t attract even the most desperate lost-cause gambling addict.
“I thought it was connected to something else,” she said. “The Church will pay damages if you file a claim.”
Not that she expected him to. But perhaps mentioning the Church would cause him to rethink whatever murder-and-devour plans he was formulating in that rat’s-nest head of his.
Of course she didn’t really expect that either. But it was worth a try.
He blinked, slowly. Like a toad. “The Church … ah. I see. Followed them, you did? The other witches.”
The Lamaru? “Is there something you want to tell me about them?”
“I do not believe I do, no.”
“But you know who they are. You attacked them last night.” And he was smiling, a smile she didn’t like at all; it raised nervous prickles up her spine.
“I know many things. I know they have dark plans that should be stopped. I do not know what they are.”