“They haven’t found Kyla,” Mother Esterville whispered in her ear while she tucked the flimsy blanket around her. “She got away.”
“Hey, get to work on the floor,” a guard shouted. “You aren’t there to help the girl. Her troubles’ll be over in a few hours—when they hang her.”
A cold cloth gently cleaned Marta’s face; Mother Esterville hadn’t obeyed the guard.
Marta opened her eyes and looked up at her benefactor. “I’m sorry we got you into this,” she said.
“Tch! Don’t worry about me. It’s you who needs help.”
“Cut the chatter and get to work,” the nervous guard called out.
“You shouldn’t have to do that,” Marta said. “It’s my mess. I’ll clean it up.” She sat up.
Mother Esterville pushed her down again. “You lie still. I was brought here to do it, and I will. Not for them, but as a service to the gods.”
Marta watched as the older woman took the wet cloths the guards had thrown into the cell, got down on her knees, and worked away at the vile mess.
To think that she had disdained this woman and mocked her devotion to her gods! Mother Esterville was a truly good woman—possibly the only one Marta had ever known. She owed Marta and Kyla nothing, yet she was here because of her loyalty to them. She had received no gift of power from them—and had asked for none. She had never shown jealousy at Marta’s and Kyla’s powers, as many did who had no talent of their own. She had never blamed them for Jerome’s disappearance, nor accused them of “corrupting” him. Marta knew how quick some mothers were to fault others for the defects in their children. Mother Esterville was certainly aware of Jerome’s involvement in Ed’s disappearance, but not a word of reproach or even of suspicion had she uttered.
Marta had come from the hearing with the conviction that she had thrown her life away by trying to bring the gift of magic to people who neither deserved it nor were capable of accepting it. Mother Esterville was not one who could receive their gift of magic, but she had a special magic of her own: a faith that transcended any adversity and a goodness that refused to be dismayed in the presence of evil. If only Mother Esterville could share her gift with others as Kyla and Marta had tried to share theirs. Possibly she did—or would, outside of this prison.
Mother Esterville’s concern for her gave Marta fresh strength. The loving care of that motherly woman recharged her psychic energy. Marta, who had never had a mother of her own, kept her inner self locked tightly, but Mother Esterville had found the key, entered, and brought cheering warmth to a place that had long lain cold and empty.
Marta had to find a way to free her, even if she could not free herself. Surreptitiously she tested her power. It was back, though far weaker than she liked. Still, she could do something. She just had to decide what might be effective.
Mother Esterville finished her scrubbing, not only leaving the floor cleansed of Marta’s unfortunate deposits but having removed several layers of accumulated dirt beneath that. She pulled herself to her feet and smiled at Marta.
Marta beckoned her close and whispered, “When the guard opens the cell door to take you out, drop the dirty scrub cloths onto the floor and be ready to run.”
Though her eyes widened, Mother Esterville did not question, but nodded and turned toward the door, the bucket full of rags in her arms. “I’ve finished,” she announced.
A guard unlocked the door and held it open as she neared it. She pretended to stumble and upended the scrub-bucket. The filthy cloths spilled out onto the cell floor.
“Hey, watch it, old fool,” the guard yelled. And then swore as one of the cloths flew toward him. His curses were choked off when it wrapped itself around his face.
Straining her power to its limit, Marta hurled all the cloths across the peacekeepers’ faces, blinding them. “Go,” she called to Mother Esterville. “Find Kyla and tell her I need her help.”
The old woman dodged through the peacekeepers as they clawed at the vile rags clinging to their faces. Marta took pleasure in the sight but could spare no energy on laughter. She had to concentrate on the power it took to keep the rags wrapped around the guards’ faces while Mother Esterville pounded down the corridor toward the outer office and freedom.
If she wasn’t stopped by someone in that office. It was not likely to be empty, and it was beyond Marta’s ability to control what happened there. She could only trust Mother Esterville’s ingenuity—and her faith—to get her through.
His head would explode soon with the force of the blood pulsing in his temples, behind his eyes, against his eardrums. His face burned, his trapped legs were icy cold. He wavered between struggling to remain conscious and desiring oblivion.
He’d hallucinated the voices. He must have. Both had said he had power, but Jerome had never felt more powerless, more abandoned, or more despairing. He had long since given up on Simple Eddie. The fool had probably gotten himself killed. But even if he’d only gotten lost, Jerome no longer expected his return. His world! What a joke! Who did the simpleton think he was, to create a world?
No, they were both dead, and being tortured by the Lords of Death for crimes committed in their lifetime. Jerome could only hope that somewhere in the ruined building Eddie was undergoing even worse torture than this that he suffered.
But he had killed Ed, so his punishment would probably be more severe. Dying along with his victim ought to be punishment enough, but life had never been fair to him. Why should he expect fairness from death?
He thought of calling on his mother’s gods for help. He did, in fact, cry out the name, “Harin!” But he had never shared his mother’s devotion in life, so why should the gods, if they existed, help him now? More likely, they were complicit in his punishment.
They were against him. He saw it clearly in an inner light that grew brighter as the outer world dimmed. They’d sent his father away, turned his mother into a fanatic, even turned Genevieve Hardwick against him. She was Genevieve Wirth now, wed to a funeral director in preference to Jerome. Why didn’t the gods punish her? And why hadn’t her father encouraged her to marry his loyal secretary instead of allowing a union with a mortician?
Hardwick liked Matthew Wirth—he’d often said so. Never mind any loyalty he should have felt for his secretary. Nor the fact that if he’d paid his secretary a decent wage, maybe Jerome would have had a better chance with Genevieve.
Though he was just as happy that he hadn’t married her, now that he saw her for what she was—a money-grubbing slut. She should be here instead of him. She deserved this pain and cold and the terror of hanging here like this through the long dark night. Instead she was starting a new school, welcoming her students, the refugees from the wreck of Abigail Dormer’s misplaced trust in Simple Eddie. He pictured her standing in front of her class, smiling at the collection of childish faces, enjoying her power over them. Never mind that some didn’t want to be there, like that whiny Crowell’s red-haired brat. Genevieve would greet them all and teach them all and revel in the doing of it.
Too bad he had no way of changing places with her or of transferring his pain onto her. If he had power, as the voices had claimed, that’s what he’d do.
You do have that power, something whispered in his head.
He could no longer feel his limbs—neither his trapped legs nor his arms that had lain limply, one over an adjacent rock and the other across his body. They might still be there, or they might have become detached and were floating loose somewhere.
He could not, for that matter, any longer feel the rocks he lay against. He might have been suspended between worlds, hanging like a bridge between two universes.
Perhaps he was.
Maybe he could stretch just a little and reach the world he knew. Maybe he could touch Genevieve and flow into her. His body seemed liquid, ready to flow and melt into the darkness.
Yesss, hissed the voice he imagined he heard.
He needed an anchor, something to hold him together. He had
nothing. Nothing but memories—of his mother, of Hardwick, of the wonder workers, of Genevieve.
Of his anger with them. With all of them, but especially with Genevieve, though he could not say why so much of his anger focused on her. He’d thought he’d forgotten her rejection, or gotten over it in the four years since it happened. But time was meaningless here, and he needed to focus his anger on a single target, because that anger was his last anchor to reality, and if it scattered, he was lost.
A rat scrabbled across a precariously balanced rock. It shifted, fell against another stone. The unstable pile tumbled, carrying Jerome with it. He crashed to the courtyard in a burst of pain. Stones clattered around him, smashed down on him. Dust choked him. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. He turned his head and stared into the hideous stone face of a grinning Dire Lord.
“Mother,” he cried once and then lay still.
His consciousness dwindled to a single spark, a spark in search of kindling.
As he picked his way over fallen stones and breathed in dampness and mold, Ed wondered why he’d insisted on exploring this structure. Jerome was right; it was dangerous, even foolhardy. If anyone but Jerome had advised him not to go in, he would have listened. Possibly the knowledge that his insistence on exploring the building annoyed Jerome was what drove him onward. Jerome’s fear of being left outside alone and dread of what might be inside impelled Ed to demonstrate his own courage and confidence.
It was at least cool inside the building, a relief from the heat and brilliance of the afternoon sun. And the walls were in better repair as he went farther in. On the other hand, the light was growing dimmer.
The hall he stepped into doglegged into a long corridor with many rooms opening off it. He glanced into each as he passed, but none held any interest. They were small, some with roofs and some without, but all empty except for a scattering of broken stones.
He didn’t know what he expected to find, but he had the odd feeling that he stood on the verge of a great mystery that he had to solve before he could find the way back to the real world.
Real world? This world now seemed no less real to him than the one he had left. It had become more than a product of his imagination. He might have invented it in the same way that the man Miss Leah had told him of had invented the train, but it had acquired just as much substance as the long line of cars, pulled by the coal-burning engine, that chugged over the steel tracks through the middle of Carey each day.
The corridor vanished into darkness before him. He thought he’d been walking long enough to have come to the end of the building. The passage hadn’t forked or curved; he couldn’t have doubled back.
He should turn back. He was not so foolish as to wish to be caught in this place at night. Yet some impulse pushed him to go on just a little farther.
He took a few steps forward, and those steps plunged him into sudden and total darkness. He turned slowly and discovered that he could no longer see light in either direction. Fighting panic, he reminded himself that to find the way out he had only to keep one hand against the corridor wall and walk straight ahead.
Except that he was not certain whether he had turned back to the way he had come or, in searching for light, had made a full circle so that he was still heading inward. Perhaps, he told himself, it did not matter. Either direction should bring him to the corridor’s end and an exit.
He forced himself to proceed slowly, forbidding his feet to keep pace with his galloping heart. He’d been in dark places before. He would not be in this one much longer; in minutes, surely, he would find the way out.
And indeed it was not more than a minute or two before a light appeared in the distance, dim at first but growing brighter as he hurried toward it.
As he approached, he saw that it did not have the quality of daylight. It flickered and wavered like firelight and had a reddish cast. His steps slowed, then stopped. The light was moving, coming toward him.
In its center was a darkness that seemed to be acquiring form. He thought suddenly of the globe of light he had held on the night in the cell when he had met Marta and Kyla. That light had been a smaller version of this, the same color and shape. Just so had it wavered and flickered, and just so had a blackness appeared in its center and taken form and become …
His pa, tall as he had been in life, gaunt, slightly stoop-shouldered in a way that always made Ed think he was leaning forward, ready to grab and shake his son. He had done so often enough.
Ed cringed and backed from the apparition. “You can’t be here,” he said in what he’d meant to be a shout but came out as no more than a whisper. “This is my world.”
His pa sneered. “That’s all you know. This is a link to the Dire Realms—the realms of the dead. How else would I be here?”
“How could a world I made up be a link to the Dire Realms?”
“Like the fool you are and always will be, you left it unfinished. Empty around the edges. Anybody could get in and build on it.”
“No-o-o-o.” Ed despised the whine he heard in his own voice, but he couldn’t help himself. In his father’s presence he reverted to his child-self. “This is my place, no one else’s. My safe place.”
His pa said in that raspy voice Ed remembered so well, “There’s no such thing as a safe place, and you’re a fool to think you could make one.”
“I’m not a fool.” Ed dredged the words up from some hidden reservoir of rebellion and pride. “Marta doesn’t think I’m a fool.”
“Ah, so it’s like that now, is it? Like the idiot you are, you’ve taken up with a girl you know nothing about.”
Anger shouldered aside fear and let Ed speak forcefully. “I know she’s kind and good and doesn’t think I’m stupid. She doesn’t call me Simple Eddie. I’m teaching her to read, and she’s teaching me to use magic.”
“That makes her a worse fool than you. She ever tell you where she got that magic? You ever think to ask?”
“Miss Kyla—” Ed began indignantly.
His pa laughed. “Miss Kyla never gave her a thing. Your precious Marta was a street brat. She got her magic by sleeping with a Dire Lord who’d taken human form. Guess she tricked him—or he tricked her. Seems her magic’s done nothing but get her into trouble.”
The words struck Ed like kicks to his stomach, hurting worse than all the beatings his pa had given him. They weren’t true, they couldn’t be.
His doubt must have shown on his face. His pa broke into the cruel laughter Ed had thought never to hear again. He’d always dreaded that laugh, less for the beating that usually went along with it than for the way it made him feel slow and stupid and useless.
He felt that way now.
Then he remembered Marta saying to him, “You aren’t stupid, Ed, and you aren’t simple. Don’t let anyone—anyone—tell you that you are.”
Whatever Marta had done, however she had gotten her magic powers, she was his friend. She was good to him. He loved her.
And she had warned him not to return to “his” world.
He’d had no choice. Marta would understand that. She’d tell him not to be afraid.
“Go back where you came from, old man,” he shouted at the apparition. “You can’t hurt me anymore.”
“Oh, can’t I?” His pa reached behind him and brought out a flat board, the kind he used to paddle Ed with. “You’ll see what I can do.”
Ed shrank back, feeling like the small child who had so often felt the weight of that board.
But what had Miss Abigail told him so many times? “You’re a man now, Edwin. You’ve no need to act like a child.”
His pa swung the plank. Ed jumped aside and caught his arm. It was cold and hard as a winter branch. He gripped it tightly and pried the board from the bony fingers. It fell soundlessly onto the stone floor.
Gripping that dead wrist in one hand, Ed raised his other hand, clenched into a fist, drawn back for a blow.
The frightened look in his pa’s eyes stopped him. That loo
k was too like his own. And his pa no longer seemed large, no longer seemed like a viper ready to strike. Why, he wasn’t as tall as Ed!
It was Ed’s turn to laugh, but his laughter was at himself, for being afraid of this ineffectual ghost of a pathetic, twisted man.
“I’m sorry for you, Pa,” he said. “I guess you only wanted to make me as unhappy as you were. You made me feel stupid because that’s how you felt. But I’m not stupid, and I doubt you were, either. I wish you could have found someone like Marta to tell you that.”
The ghost receded into the fiery light.
“Goodbye, Pa,” Ed called after it. “I forgive you. I hope that sometime you’ll be able to forgive yourself.”
The figure shrank to a small black dot, the fiery light to a candle flame that flickered, trembled, and vanished as though a puff of wind had blown it out.
Beyond it the darkness had lessened, and Ed made out the dim outline of a door. He hurried to it, pushed it open, and stepped outside into gathering dusk. In front of him lay nothing but flat, empty land, growing darkness hiding the distant horizon.
He must have come out the other side of the building. He’d have to circle it to return to Jerome. And he’d have to hurry. Jerome would be afraid in the growing darkness.
He turned to make his way around the building, a forbidding fortress of stone looming above him. A voice stopped him, though whether it spoke aloud or in his mind he was not sure.
“Jerome will wait. You must forge a path back to the world you left. You are needed there. Marta needs you—and so does Abigail.”
It was not his father’s voice. It was one of the voices that had spoken in his mind before—not the horrid one, thank the gods, but the one that had promised to protect him. It was a voice of authority, holding a power that allowed no doubt or dissent—not the voice of an enemy, but a voice to be obeyed.
It said Marta needed him. He had to hurry, had to reach her quickly. He walked into the barren field and the darkness, picturing to himself Marta as he had last seen her, in the hallway of Mother Esterville’s house. Of Jerome’s house, but of that he would not think.
Bringers of Magic (Arucadi Book 2) Page 22