I grabbed at a hanging chain, nearly ripping the skin from my hands as they took the full weight of my swinging body. I screamed in pain, but held on. I swung amid the dangling animals and knocked loose a calico cat, which fell into the dark. The gullet was too deep and too dimly lit for me to see the bottom. I heard the echo of a landing several moments later.
“Oh, Jesus.” I held on.
There were shouts above. Then gunfire.
Cerise screamed. I heard her voice. “Behind you! Behind you!”
“You have to get them in the organ under the liver!” the doctor shouted. “Under the liver!”
“Where the fuck is the liver?” Harriet yelled back in anger.
“Right side! Right side!”
I looked down. The cutest little boy looked back.
“Are you okay?” I asked him again. My voice faintly echoed.
He nodded. But his eyes shouted otherwise. They were as wide as the ocean.
I dropped. No sooner had my feet rattled the grate floor that the whole thing shook again. In the dim light, I saw the flash of a slych. It had leapt to join us. And I had no weapon.
The fleshy pad on its insectlike appendage touched me and everything disappeared. There was only me and it. No boy. No pit. No platform. No sounds. Everything was darkness, even the nothingness on which I crouched.
It was in my head.
I could not be killed, but I realized then there was nothing to prevent my mind from being erased, or all the parts that mattered anyway. I had no defense. I was kneeling before the dark-robed monster like a supplicant. I felt like I should want to move. To run. But I didn’t, as if it had hold of my will. Behind it, some distance away, a long table appeared, like one might find in an executive board room. Seated around it were thirteen warlocks in fine business attire. Their eyes were closed, their hands clasped. We were psychically connected through the creature. I could see them and they could see me, but only in their minds, and they kept their heads bowed and eyes closed.
“Lady Mila,” they said unison. “Tell the others to lower their weapons and they will be spared. We have not underestimated you this time. We have not underestimated you at all. You have penetrated deep. But the day is ours.”
“If that is so, then why hide the battle from me?” I couldn’t hear it, but I could feel the noise reverberate in my chest as if from nowhere.
“There is no one coming to save you. The chef is dead.”
“Lies!”
“No. See for yourself.”
The blackness dissipated then, along with the table and the warlocks and the slych and myself. I was observing a scene as if from everywhere. I was aware of it from every angle.
A taxi waited on the curb of a busy street in lower Manhattan. It was the middle of the day. The rear door opened, and a barefoot man in rainbow feathered garb stepped onto the curb. A snarling wooden mask covered his face. A drum was tucked under his left arm, and he tapped it after each careful step across the sidewalk. He was chanting softly as well-suited passersby gave him strange looks. But he paid them no mind. He stepped, one foot in front of the other, across the wide pedestrian walk directly toward the front doors of the glass-and-steel skyscraper before him. A pair of white-shirted security guards propped open the doors, as if they were expecting their guest. They waited patiently as the man in the feathered garb took step after single step, each with a pause between, while he chanted and gently tapped the drum like a slowing heartbeat. Slower. Slower.
When the man finally stepped through the doors, the guards closed and locked them behind him and walked to the taxi, where a small boy waited with his colorful backpack.
The skyscraper’s high-ceilinged entry hall was empty. The barefoot stranger stepped across speckled green marble, swirled in white, towards the elevators at the back of the columned hall. When he reached the midpoint, two elevators rang and their doors opened, one after the other. Nine men and four women exited. They wore dark suits and ties. Some had their hair slicked back. Some were bald. They wore polished, handmade shoes, which clicked on the marble as they formed two lines, five on a side, with three at the head. Thirteen warlocks stood and waited for the slowly stepping man to enter the gap they had made. The stranger stepped and strummed and they reached into their jackets and removed gloves fixed with blades. Each was different. Some had knives at the fingertips. Some had razors on the palms. Some were barbed. Some were serrated. Some were like claws. Some were like talons. The warlocks fixed their gloves snugly, and still the man walked, chanting, one step at a time, and entered the gap. He passed the first pair, and they dropped into a stance and swiped with their bladed gloves—first one, then the other. Cut feathers flew. Dribbles of red hit the green-and-white marble. The stranger stumbled and momentarily stopped his chant.
Then he recovered. And stepped once more. He passed the second pair, and the ritual was repeated, but this time, blades were swiped twice. Again, the stranger faltered. Again, cut feathers fell to the ground, leaving a littered trail in the stranger’s footsteps. Blood dribbled.
But still he walked. Still he palmed the drum. Like a heartbeat. Slower. Slower.
He passed the third pair, and the blades were swiped three times. When he reached the fourth, his legs were shaking, and at their attack, they buckled. He screamed in agony. The chant stopped, and the stranger fell to his knees. The spell was broken, and the warlocks pounced. They moved around each other and around the stranger in a steady, determined dance, swiping at him with each pass. The mask was broken and fell, revealing the stranger’s bald head. The drum was punctured by a high-heeled shoe and smashed. Droplets of blood flew like spittle against the columns of the hall. It ran over the ground.
The stranger, on his knees, grimaced in terrible pain. His lips pursed as if to continue his chant, but he could only mouth the words feebly as the attack continued apace. His feathered garb was torn to shreds, revealing his naked body underneath. His bare chest was an unusual color, like the ochre of earth, and it was marred by a great scar over his heart. The mark of the jaguar.
When at last he fell, the stranger’s chest was opened and his heart removed. Raised in triumph, it was then split in half. Each half was handed to another, who split it into quarters. Each quarter was handed off again and placed into a jar and the jars were sealed and sent in different directions, one to each of the four winds, so that the dead man on the floor would never rise again.
And with that, the warlocks removed their gloves and walked single-file back to the elevators, leaving the cut and bloodied feathers on the ground—the exact image I had seen in the picture I found in the shadow of Harrowood House.
It was true.
Etude was dead.
I felt myself engulfed by despair as if swallowed slowly by a giant snake. It slithered darkly up from the tips of my toes and over my thighs to the top of my head.
He couldn’t be dead.
Couldn’t.
“It’s a trick!” I shouted. But I knew it wasn’t.
I felt something pressing on me then, pointed and hard, like a spike. I clutched my head at the very spot where, in the real world, the slych was still touching. Its attack had begun. I might’ve had a defense, if my mind was focused and clear. But my grief was consuming. I began to sob as a psychic nail was driven into my mind. My jaw shook as I held back a scream. My lips curled around it, but nothing came.
And then it stopped.
“What’s wrong?” a man at the table asked. His voice was slow and distant, as if played on a record spun too slowly.
Everyone around the table shifted nervously. They weren’t speaking in unison anymore.
“What’s happening?” a woman asked. Her voice was slower and deeper, and her lips moved slowly to match.
They looked at each other then, slowly, slowly, amid a deep, extended baritone of syllables.
Behind me, another figure appeared. The interloper stood barefoot wearing the same brown dress we buried her in.
Anya.
Her arms extended as she rose into the air—slowly, serenely. Everything about her lightened. Her dress, her skin, her hair. All of it went from drab to pale to fair. Finally, it glowed. She had not increased in size, and yet she seemed larger than all of us by a factor of ten or more. She became ethereal. Radiant. This was the moment of her ascension, I realized, as Madame Helena had predicted. After that moment, I would never see her again.
Then the miraculous happened. Streaks of light broke in both directions from Anya’s back, like luminous wings. Her appearance changed. She became not only beautiful but so radiant I could barely discern any distinct features. Her hair was a bright dawn. Her eyes, twin suns. Her skin, the shimmer of the moon on a still pond. She was not angry or vengeful. She was not joyful or happy. She was content. Peaceful. Serene. The wings of light that shone from her back swung forward and alighted the aghast faces of the men and women seated around the table. It was not an attack. Such a being would not act with violence. Instead, it gave a vision of pure grace. Not just sights and sounds but direct experience, however brief, of the serene lands—the higher realms, where matter does not decay and creatures must not eat each other to survive.
The effect was immediate. Several of the warlocks began to shake in heaves. Some simply wept. Others went catatonic. For they knew then what they had rejected, what they had been trying to destroy. And they saw themselves as they were: not mighty and powerful, taking from the world what others could only wish, but scared, hurtful, needy little things, lashing out from insignificance and fear. Lying and lied to. Abusive and abused. Petty. They knew it to be true. One woman slid from her chair as everything disappeared, even the slych, and I saw only Anya, or whatever her true name was, smiling down at me serenely. And I knew. She was the champion we had called.
Higher beings do not experience time as mortals do. They are not limited by it. We had lit the watchtower and aid had come. A volunteer had stepped forth and slipped onto our plane one hundred and fifty years in the past, like a divine commando sneaking behind enemy lines. It took human form, as has happened many times before, from Christ to the avatars of Krishna. It was born as Anya. It suffered as we suffer. It lived her short, despicable life, its divine nature bursting through in the form of her terrible gift. And then it died, having bound itself psychically to me. And when it died, it became again what it was. It saw my life as Madame Helena described: not 150 years in a succession, but all at once, like an unrolled tapestry, and it pushed from that tapestry any threat that might divert me from the path—the path that took me to that exact moment.
It was a miracle. And I watched, penitent and in awe, as the being rose higher and higher, and as it did, it shone brighter and brighter until I could barely discern a face in its radiance. I thought it would be happy. But it wasn’t. It seemed quite worried in fact.
It spoke to me in a whisper.
“Your demons,” it breathed, “you must face alone.”
I awoke to the slych towering over me in the dark. I jumped and raised my hands to fight it off, even though I knew I could not. But it didn’t strike me. It struck the little boy. It swatted him away as its faceplate came loose from its head. I saw the boy roll to the edge and I lunged with a shout, grabbing a tiny red tennis shoe with Velcro straps. I pulled him up and cradled him, expecting the slych to take us immediately.
But it didn’t. It merely slumped to the platform, which rattled under its weight. Part of its cancerous head dropped to the grate. I got a good look at it then. It was enormous.
The boy held a buckled strap in his hand. A single, bloodied 9-inch nail erupted from the inside.
“Did you take that off?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“Why?”
“It was hurting him,” he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
He had a fattening lip from where he’d been struck. I pulled it down and saw red on his teeth.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded as four gunshots erupted overhead. Blam blam blam blam. I looked up, but there was no movement.
“We can’t stay down here,” I said.
I knelt again and asked the boy to climb onto my back, which he did. I inverted the strap so the nail pointed out and used it to lash him to my shoulder. I tightened the buckle.
“Don’t look,” I said.
“Okay.” He was clinging to my neck, and he pressed his face to my skin.
I jumped for the lowest chain, from which a fluffy rabbit dangled. My hands grasped its fur and our weight pulled it down. The tiny corpse bounced off the platform and fell into the dark. I jumped again and grabbed the hook with one hand. With a shout, I pulled up enough to get my other hand on the chain. We dangled for a moment. This was going to be hard, not least on my hands. If I could get my feet into the hook, I could push us up nearly halfway to the hole. I would then have use of my legs and my arms wouldn’t have to do all the work. I lunged again, but I couldn’t get my foot high enough.
I dropped back into a dangle. “It’s too high.”
Suddenly, the chain jerked upward once and stopped. It lurched again, and again, and again, as if attached to a crank. I looked up and saw Harriet perched over the round opening. She had the doctor’s staff. She had threaded it through the chain and was turning it, which caused the chain to bunch at the top and pull us up.
“Hang on!”
As we neared the lip, she held the staff in place with one hand, thrusting out the other. “Give me the boy!”
I nodded, and we made a very careful trade.
“I’m stuck,” I said once it was done.
“There,” she nodded to the side.
A line dangled over the lip of the hole. The material was so dark, I hadn’t noticed it before. They had torn one of the slych’s robes into strips and braided it like a thin rope.
“It’s alright,” she said, sensing my hesitation. “It’s strong enough. I tested it.”
I would have to let go of the chain to reach it. I took a breath and lunged.
“Where is everyone?” I asked at the top.
“Come with me,” Harriet said grimly.
She led me around the curved hallway to an open chamber, like a ballroom. The far wall was open to a foyer attached to the central staircase. Curved struts—part columns, part ribcage—rose up from the floor, tapering as they stretched to the ceiling. It was a ballroom, magnificent in its day. But now it was just a hull. A slych lay face down in the center of the room in a wide puddle of dark fluid. I didn’t see the other. Cerise and Kai were tending to the doctor, who rested against one of the giant ribs. He was hurt.
“Doctor . . .” I scurried to him.
He had been shot or speared through the left side. They had bandaged him, but there was blood all down his leg and on his arm and robe.
He smiled. “Glad you made it,” he panted. He looked at the boy, who had a nervous hand to his mouth.
“What’s your name?” the doctor asked, panting. His forehead was covered in sweat, and he wasn’t moving his arms or legs.
“Ólafur,” he said, pronouncing it like a question.
“Ólafur,” the doctor repeated. “That’s an interesting—”
We screamed as something fell like rocks on top of us. But it wasn’t rocks. It was not anything physical, in fact. We knew what it was. We knew because it wanted us to know. It was a sentient malevolence, born of cataclysm: the demon, Amaimon, freed from his prison throne.
The warlocks, like all good financiers, had secured their venture with a policy to protect them from catastrophe. The man they feared was Etude. They feared him so much, in fact, that after he slipped their net, they didn’t bother to pursue, as he had expected. Instead, they sought the one being that could finish the job, the one being that had both the power and the desire, for it had been kept prisoner at his hands—humiliated and used as a dog. They sought the demon and struck a bargain.
But the warlocks knew a demon does not serve men, and rather than be beholden to a creature that might very well turn round and usurp the empire they had built, they kept it in reserve, taking that risk only if the alternative was ruin. We had succeeded. We had penetrated the Keep. In so doing, we now faced an insurmountable foe. It wasn’t possessing us, as it had done to Lady Bathory. It was eating our minds, as it had done to the men above. I saw—and felt—twin rivers of fire, like mirror images of each other, one inverted above the next, where flames rolled and undulated in a turning flow, like fog over mountains. The heat was so intense, it felt as it my flesh itself was evaporating to smoke without the lick of a single flame. Then there was the noise . . . not just of the twin rivers of fire, which roared like waterfalls, but of the demon’s voice—a growling, snarling, booming gibberish that wove through an insane laugh. It rang through us like an echo from a great distance.
I had no weapon. No barrier. None of us did. We collapsed in terror and pain.
And just like that, our quest ended in catastrophe.
I surfaced without moving, as if I had been plunged into a phantom sea. The despair that took me knew no bounds. I was finally, utterly alone, and I understood so deeply why people take their own lives. The helplessness. The certainty that no matter what you did, there was simply no point to any of it—only long years of suffering, ending in death.
But.
We should never believe it. That terrible, disgusting, enchanting lie. That love and fellowship have abandoned us. For it is never true.
In that moment that should have been our demise, a single light shone.
From a crystal.
Caught in despair, the dragon and the phoenix, the spontaneous pair, turned to each other one last time, and what flowed between them—what was invisible to us—was made patent by the gem in Cerise’s heart. The jewel of many colors, forged so many years ago, was a gift to us, the gift to see what could not be seen. It glowed and lit Cerise’s chest. And for a flicker, the demon faltered under the pure light of love. Feeling resistance, Amaimon pushed again—and again and again, like a hammer on our minds, and we crumpled. The two lovers fell together, crying—not for themselves but each for the other, that death might come. They fell down and down and down until, huddled over Cerise’s belly, she remembered the reason for her flight, and the crystal glowed again, stronger. It lit her heart and her chest and belly glowed. And we all could see.
She looked frightened into her husband’s eyes, but he smiled at her.
“You knew?” she whispered.
As the phoenix kissed her dragon, his hand moved over her womb, completing the holiest of trinities: mother, father, and child, and the jewel of many colors burned so brightly in the dark that the three of them seemed a sun and the encroaching demon was beaten to a great height.
Harriet looked to me. “They can’t hold it forever.”
“She’s right,” the doctor said, panting. He pushed himself up against the wall.
“How do we stop it?” Harriet asked.
“We can’t,” he answered.
She shook her head. “They did it before!”
“Only a saint can perform a miracle.”
The demon pushed again, harder, and the jewel cracked. Cerise screamed as we bowed under its force. The light weakened.
“Do something!” Kai yelled.
“There’s nothing to do!” the doctor yelled.
Only a saint can perform a miracle.
I mouthed the words.
Etude would’ve known that. He wouldn’t have sent us there to die.
“He knew he couldn’t win,” I whispered.
“What?”
“He knew he wasn’t a saint! He knew they had all been killed! The seekers of the dark had seen to that. Their great plan. Mr. Morgan’s plan. To remedy that which had cost them the war.”
“What are you talking about?”
Only a saint can perform a miracle.
I covered my mouth and looked at each of them in turn.
The doctor, clutching the wound in his side. Etude had sent him his library—all his knowledge gathered over years of travel, the books of the True Canon—and it was the doctor, a clever man if ever there was one, who solved the riddle of the book’s resting place.
He was Knowledge.
Cerise, aglow with her family. Etude had resurrected her, but only by virtue of being part of a spontaneous pair. He had buried the jewel in her heart and sent her through the other side so the pair rejoin and so complete their trifold destiny.
They were Love.
Harriet, fists clenched. Etude had spared her. He had turned his adversaries’ secret weapon, the dire hunter, right round against them. He’d sent her on a vision quest so the spirit walkers of old could give her that which she needed to defeat them: insight into her true self.
She was Courage.
The little boy, clutching Harriet’s hand. I did not know him. But who else—who else in this entire world—could have looked at the slych and seen not a monster but only a man in pain?
He was Compassion.
Etude knew he couldn’t beat the enemy, not by himself, not after so many years of trying, so he retired to his sanctum and did the only thing he could. The thing he did best.
He made a recipe.
He kept his mixture secret, kept it hidden, kept it occult so his enemy would never suspect. Never see. Never prepare. He made a saint as the enemy had made the Lord of Shadows. I had thought at first that our salvation was the little boy. But it wasn’t. He was merely the final ingredient in the chef’s greatest creation, a mixture baked by demon’s fire.
Us.
All of us.
He’d planned it, kept it secret, even from me, locked it inside his heart so it would never be discovered. But the enemy struck before all the ingredients had been assembled. So he let it all go. His library. His collections. His restaurant. His money. His reputation. He cast it all aside, all his worldly possessions, and went on a fast. He prostrated himself humbly before the door to the other side. He begged forgiveness. He played his flute and our ancient allies brought him to Ólafur. With his totem complete, Etude cast his spell and sealed it, immutably and for all time, with his very life.
I must have seemed catatonic to my friends. Lost in realization and shock.
My mouth hung open for a second. “He would have given us everything we needed.”
“Who?” Kai asked.
I turned to the doctor. “Do you know how to bind a demon?”
“Bind? Maybe. I mean, there are spells, but I’d have to know—”
“—it’s real name,” Harriet interrupted.
She stood and faced the howl that whirled around us. She reached up and ripped a thin chain with a gold cross off her neck and threw it to the ground. Then she stepped out of the sphere of light. She was completely bare before the demon. But then, she knew something the rest of us did not. Etude had told her. The night she broke into the sanctum. Harriet knew Amaimon’s real name.
She spat it like a curse. “Bolochai . . .”
We all felt it quiver as her voice echoed in the high chamber.
Harriet strode forward wearing a look that I will never forget. Brow low. Fists clenched.
“BOLOCHAI!” she screamed.
It quivered again, and spat at her, and she walked through vermin and blood. She walked over fire and pestilence and the burning boils of the sufferers of hell.
“Bolochai!” she yelled. “I command you. In the name of the Father. And the Son. And the Holy Spirit.
“Bolochai! I command you in the name of the Buddha. And all the bodhisattvas.
“Bolochai! I command you in the name of the prophet Muhammad. And all the saints and shamans.
“Bolochai! My eye is open! And I—Command—You.”
Harriet worshiped no god. But she had faith. She had faith in us. But more than that, Harriet had sworn on her very soul that someday, somehow, she would end the adversary’s coven. She had sworn it on All Hallow’s Eve, the night she rescued the young girl with Down’s from the warlock’s dark court. She’d sworn it again an hour before, when she saw the menagerie of corpses and what the seekers of the dark had done to the little boy. There were many reasons why that oath might never have been fulfilled. More than we could count. But one of them was not, and never would be, that Harriet Chase was afraid.
There was a shriek and a rumble like the tearing of the sky and Harriet reached out and grabbed the sentient malevolence as if by the throat and threw it down.
Then she stepped on it.
Like a cockroach.
We all had a sense that the thing we could perceive but not see was squirming like a snake under her boot.
But a demon is not so easily trapped. Furious that a mere mortal would even dare try, it pushed Harriet off. She fell back and it rose again to fill the room and behind. Fire burned, and the pair began to wrestle, the demon and the guardian shaman.
I grabbed the doctor’s arm. He had the library. In his head. “What do we do?”
“Uhhh . . . Different demons can be bound in different—I don’t have everything memorized, you know!”
“Help her!” I told Kai and Cerise.
They squeezed hands and shone again. Shafts of light radiated from them and pierced the demon like spears.
“He was trapped in bone,” the doctor said. “So that must work.”
“Shit hurry up!” Harriet was being overtaken. She had hold of the demon’s maw and was staring down it. Her eyes glowed orange, reflecting phantom fire.
“Doctor!”
“What? You want me to summon a bone? Fine.” He raised his hands. “I summon a bone.”
Animal bones.
“Did anyone keep any of the animal bones?”
But no one had.
“FUCK!” Harriet screamed.
The roar was deafening now, and she fell to her back.
“DO SOMETHING!” she screamed in the din.
If the world had turned by adults alone, we would’ve been finished then and there. But it doesn’t. The world has children, too. Little Ólafur tugged on my hand and I looked down at him looking up at me with those big eyes. There was a bit of dried blood on his cheek. He reached deep into his mouth and squinted hard and pulled out fingers covered in bloody saliva. Between them was a tooth, knocked loose in the battle.
“Oh, sweetie . . .”
The doctor grabbed it. “Close enough!”
“HURRY UP GODDAMMIT!” Harriet’s hands held open the phantom maw as it pushed down to her—closer, closer. Her fingertips began to blacken.
“It was held by a six-pointed star!” I yelled.
The doctor nodded. “Right. Two triangles. One to summon. One to bind. So we need a triangle.” The doctor looked at the ground around him. “We need something to draw with!”
I bit my finger and tore. It hurt. But I managed to draw blood. “Here!” I scratched a triangle on the floor.
“Form a circle!” the doctor yelled as he placed the tooth inside.
As we did, Harriet’s entire body was lifted a few inches in the air. She grit her teeth and grunted and grasped the nothing before her tighter. Unlike the demon, her strength wasn’t inexhaustible. I understood then why Etude was always near death after using the chair, even for a few minutes. A strong-willed mortal might hold a demon momentarily at bay. But it would never win. Not without help.
Doctor Alexander went down on one knee and held up his hand. He paused for a moment as if thinking what he should say. “Okay . . . Okay. I got it.”
Harriet’s fingernails were frayed and the tips were bleeding. “NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!”
The doctor squinted as if in pain. Then his face was calm. “Zero is the number of nothing, which there was in the beginning. One is the number of the world, the singularity, which God created from it. Two is the number of the waters that move over the land. Three is the number of life, of the plants that grow from wet earth. Four is the number of the animals that feed on the plants. And five . . . five is the number of man, both saint and sinner, who is separated from paradise. Six is the number of the devil, curse and plague, who bars the way. But holy number seven is the final judgment of the divine, which is locked behind seven seals.”
We all felt the change. The demon had stopped struggling. It was clawing now, clawing to get away, trying to break free of our circle. It had come expecting to be master, but as the doctor spoke the words he improvised from the thousand texts of Etude’s library, it realized the truth. It was vulnerable.
But Harriet wouldn’t let go. Standing in the middle of all of us, teeth gritted, she was all but growling. She was a wolf, gripping a beast ten times her size by the throat, bringing it down.
“We here gathered,” the doctor shouted, “in holy number seven”—he reached to his right and touched Cerise’s belly—“being together anointed by a shaman of ancient order, do hereby act by the Logos of the one called the Christ, and by the three jewels of Buddha, dharma, and sangha, and by the suras of the Holy Recitation, and upon their power, we do bind the demon Bolochai, foul one, who is called Amaimon, Prince of Devils, in the flesh of an innocent!”
Harriet pulled the demon down until she had all her weight on it, and the moment the spell finished she collapsed. Her hand knocked Ólafur’s tooth free, and we cringed as it bounced away, expecting the demon to roar back upon us.
But it didn’t. Other than our labored breath, there was silence.
We looked at the blood triangle. Harriet’s left palm was pressed flat to it. I saw her grimace. She looked at me, worried, like something was wrong. She was on her knees, and as she caught her balance and lifted her hand from the triangle, it shook violently, as if something had a hold of it. She immediately pressed it flat against the floor.
“Holy . . .” Doctor Alexander’s face was pale.
“What?” Cerise stepped forward.
“It’s in her hand. In the bone.”
Harriet made a slow fist and stood. We all watched in horror as the skin of her hand darkened and turned black. Then her entire arm shook. She was sweating and grimacing and struggling against the demon inside her own body. The black color seeped up her arm as the wriggling lines of her veins traced black snakes across her skin and carried the darkness deeper into her body.
“No . . .” she said softly.
Standing there in the silence, fist clenched, Harriet Chase mumbled lines from the Invictus.
“Out of the night that covers me . . .” She gritted her teeth. “Black as the pit from pole to pole.” She grimaced again as her arm moved on its own. She grabbed the crook of her elbow with her right hand and squeezed as if to stop the blood. Her lip quivered as she held it fast. “No one uses my body but me.” She squeezed harder. “No one.”
The dark seepage slowed. Then it stopped. Her hand and wrist were stained charcoal black, as were the veins of her forearm. But her will had held. The demon was trapped.
I touched her shoulder.
“I’m fine,” she said. But she was very short of breath, and she wasn’t letting go of her elbow, as if the grip were necessary to choke the contagion at the source.
Everyone sat. Other than the sound of our breathing, it was desperately quiet.
“We’re not done yet,” the doctor said, sweating.
Our ascent up the central stairwell was unimpeded. Kai helped Harriet. I helped the doctor. Cerise took Ólafur’s hand. She appeared to be limping from the battle.
The spiral staircase stopped at a round hall one floor below the top, where an ornate pair of curved staircases rose to the final chamber. Statues in nooks lined the walls. Cerise shone her light around. They were all there, the warlock’s champions. In the ceiling were carved the six sigils of the Nameless gods. The room above, the highest in the Keep—and also the lowest—belonged solely to them. Only the highest among the seekers of the dark had ever seen it.
I left the doctor leaning on his staff to shine my weak, yellowish light at the statue of Rasputin on the wall. His long hair was parted in the middle. His eyes, which stared out to the horizon, contemplating secrets, sat like minarets atop his long face, their gaze calling the penitent to prayer. Next to him was a slightly shorter man with large hands, a square-ish head, and tousled locks of wavy hair. He was not looking to the horizon. He was looking down. His heavy eyebrows were unforgiving and seemed to push the viewer to the floor.
I must have lingered because the doctor hobbled closer with his staff. “Know him?”
“Zaragoza,” I said, as if it explained everything.
We walked up the stairs, whose surface undulated with the same coral-snake skin pattern we had seen below. I stopped near the top, my beam alighting the domelike ceiling that recessed in circular terraces. Resting at the center, as if reclining in bed, was Nebuchadnezzar’s tome. I hadn’t seen it in decades. It was exactly as I remembered. Shaped more like a cube than the rectangle of a modern book, its stiff, square pages stuck out irregularly from its tortoiseshell covers, which were lashed to the wide spine by X-shaped stitching. It was ancient and brittle and looked it—a spiteful aged imp, wrinkled and gray. It seemed to spit at us as we came. I turned to see Cerise’s reaction, but she was frozen on the stairs, her head barely over the floor.
“What do you see?” I asked.
She shook her head, like she couldn’t describe it.
My flashlight wavered then and gave out. I slapped it, which did nothing. We were down to one light. I saw a breaker box on the wall by the opposite entrance. A black cord curved up to it along the wall and then to an array of bulbs in steel cage fixtures that ran along the back of the dome. Several of them were broken.
“I got it.” Kai trotted to the breaker and swung open the metal lid, which squeaked. He flipped the switch and a low hum popped and turned into a piercing squeal.
“Gah!” I covered my ears.
He flipped it off again.
“It’s defending itself,” I said.
The terraced dome ceiling stretched nearly to the floor at the sides, where a three-foot wall left just enough space for someone to sit cross-legged in the squat meditation nooks that lined the chamber. Cerise set our remaining flashlight on the ledge and the sideways beam illuminated the floor in relief, revealing the skeletons. They seemed to have been re-mineralized in dark material, like fossils. They grasped and tumbled in a spiral, both terrified of and irrevocably drawn to the center.
Cerise looked between us. “So . . . What’s the plan?”
I turned back to the book. I could barely take my eyes from it, in fact. The scuffed, scarred, stitched, aged, gray-brown cube had pages so dry you could break them like crackers. But it seemed to be gloating. And it sung. I heard it wail in pestilence and glee. The terraces of the recessed ceiling seemed to turn around it in alternating directions, a great cog around which the whole world spun. It was everywhere. It had opened the portal. It had sprouted tendrils. It fed on all our pettiness, all our hate, like a weed covering the earth.
Cerise turned my shoulders hard. I blinked. Everyone was in different places, including the doctor, who leaned, coughing, against a different wall.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You were frozen,” she said. “We couldn’t wake you.”
I glanced at the book again, at its stack of yellowed pages. Of all those there, I alone had turned them. I alone had read.
The doctor’s staff rested obliquely against the steps of the ceiling as if pinned there, along with one of Harriet’s heavy combat boots and several bits of smoldering cloth. It seemed that at the tip of the ziggurat, gravity returned to normal.
“How long?” I asked.
“About an hour,” Harriet said.
She looked pale, and she was sweating profusely. The doctor couldn’t stop coughing. The boy was asleep on Kai’s lap.
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t know.” I looked up again. “You all have been busy.”
Doctor Alexander saw me looking at his staff. “Should’ve known it wouldn’t budge it. Truth isn’t a virtue, right?”
“We tried to douse it in lighter fluid,” Harriet said.
After she mentioned it, I could see the green plastic capsule and where it had darkened one of the terrace steps and a corner of the book in unlit fluid.
Nothing had worked.
“How do we destroy it?” Cerise asked me.
They had run out of ideas and had tried again to wake me. But I was no help. I could tell I wasn’t thinking clearly. It had done something to me. I shook my head and started to pace.
“There has to be a way,” she said meekly.
The doctor lowered himself against the wall slowly. It seems his legs were having trouble supporting him for any length of time. “The greatest magicians of the age threw everything they had at it,” he said. “They didn’t so much as dent it.”
“Then what the hell are we doing here?” Kai demanded.
Ólafur woke at the shouting, and Kai blushed.
“Kid’s got a point,” Harriet said.
“It’s laughing at us,” I whispered. “At the puny humans crawling like ants underneath it, trying to silence the song of the gods.”
Our last flashlight flickered and dimmed, along with our hopes. Cerise collapsed next to her husband, leaving me the last on my feet. But I couldn’t think. It had got to me somehow. Confused me. I rubbed my forehead.
There was a tug at my leg. I looked down at beautiful little Ólafur.
“Is it time?” he asked.
I knelt. “Is it time for what, sweetie?”
“Is it time to say my word?”
“Word?”
“The one the stag gave me.”
Silence. Everyone stared at the little boy.
He thought we were challenging him, as adults do—politely telling him by our silence that this wasn’t a place for a child—and he rushed to defend himself. “And Mr. A-trangay said if I wanted to stop all the bad stuff, I could help, and that was why the stag gave me the word, but I had to go a scary place. The scariest place anywhere. I think that’s here. But I would be okay and people would come and I could say my word.”
Harriet grunted loudly to her feet. She stopped clutching her left hand and let it fall to her side in a fist, which she opened and closed a few times to stretch her fingers. She stood behind Ólafur as if in defense.
“Do what you gotta do, little man.”
“Okay,” he said very seriously. He took a deep breath, like he was about to go on stage for his first piano recital. He stepped forward bravely. And after a moment’s pause, he finally spoke his word aloud. The new word in an ancient language. The word too heavy for anyone to carry but an innocent. He yelled it, just as he had been practicing.
It echoed.
But nothing happened.
The doctor dropped his head. “Probably should’ve said the word before we threw the lighter,” he breathed.
Cerise collapsed against her husband’s shoulder. Her lips turned down. Tears were close. “It’s not fair . . .”
Ólafur looked like he wanted to cry as well. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Oh nononono,” Cerise said, shuffling to him on her knees. She clutched his face. “No, you were perfect, sweetie. Perfect. You did just the right thing.” She hugged him and looked at me, desperate.
Harriet plopped to her butt. She’d been battling the demon for so long. She was done.
I turned to the doctor, but he only shook his head, which rested against a ridge in the wall.
“I got nuthin,” he said.
Cerise’s eyes were on me. “We need Etude. Where is he?”
I hadn’t told them.
They didn’t know.
I lowered my head.
“He would’ve given us everything we needed,” I said. “We can figure this out.”
“Why not just tell us?” she demanded.
“Because then it could be discovered. If I knew, then the slych would’ve known, and if it knew, the warlocks would’ve known, and so too the book.”
Quiet.
“It has to be something only we would know.” I looked around at my friends. “There must be a way. He would’ve told—”
I stopped.
“He would’ve told us.”
“Told us what?” Kai asked.
“How do you stop the feast of shadows?”
Everyone looked at me like my ears had started flapping. I stormed to the far wall and stopped before the electrical box.
“You turn on the light,” I whispered.
I opened it and flipped the switch. The piercing squeak resumed again immediately. It resounded in the chamber, whose recessed terraces reflected and amplified the sound, and everyone covered their ears. The noise rose and rose and until it finally cracked. The pitched changed, as if an obstruction had been cleared. A single steel-caged lamp began to flicker and glow softly, fed by a series of capacitors that had been charging since Kai activated the generator hours before. The coiled filament in the glass glowed red, then orange, then yellow, and finally white. Its intensity grew and grew, and it began to hum—louder, louder.
It burst. Showers of sparks flew from the box as well as from the fixture of every lamp in the array, which broke free from its mount and crashed. For a moment, the sparks hung in the darkness like stars, illuminating our faces. We were giants striding the universe. And then they fell—both up and down. Sparks hit the lighter fluid and flames rose immediately. They traveled up the terraced steps to the book, where they flared, and we all felt a burst of heat.
The stitching burned and contracted, forcing the pages open. The book screamed for help as it turned into a fireball. Air rushed forward to feed it. Heat escaped through the hole over which it rested, and a convection current fed the rising inferno. Flames grew and spiraled into a vortex, carrying the disintegrating tome with it. Smoke filled the room and I coughed. We would suffocate quickly in that closed chamber, deep underground. We had to retreat. Kai grabbed Cerise. Harriet grabbed Ólafur. She picked him up with one swipe of her good arm. I grabbed the doctor’s hand and was about to pull him to his feet when the world turned right-side up again. Everyone fell and hit the ceiling, which was now the floor. Smoke swirled about in whorls, unsure which way to escape, and we breathed it and coughed as a tremendous racket filled the fortress overhead. Everything loose had fallen, including the enormous mass of bones. Rocks shifted under new weight, and the fortress shook.
It was going to collapse.
“We have to go!” I screamed.
The others were already on their way up the terrace steps to the exit, whose stairs were now overhead.
“WAIT!” the doctor called. He raised his hands to the heat and side-stepped down the terrace to his staff, which he bent to retrieve.
The uneven square pages of the burning book were turning. The doctor and I could see the glyphs change. They were contracting, trying to escape the flames. I think it was jettisoning everything it didn’t need, including the spell that kept the fortress turned the wrong way in space. I remembered what Etude had told me years before, that it wasn’t a book. Not really. Knowledge is never evil, even knowledge of the dark. There was a matrix, an entity, embedded in the chorus the dark gods had sung to Nebuchadnezzar. We heard it then. The fire peeled it from the pages, and we covered our ears. The fire burst and sputtered and then burst again.
“It’s trying to escape!” The doctor raised his staff and drove the tip through the glyphs, impaling them on the burning book. He grit his teeth through the pain. His side was bloody, but he held on. “GO!” he yelled.
“Doctor . . .“
He looked at me then, and I saw his eyes. “Without hesitation,” he said with a little smile.
I nodded and turned to climb the terrace with my hands and feet. I glanced back once to see him laughing at the dark entity trying to break free.
“That all you got?” The doctor’s voice echoed over the rumble of the fire. He held his staff against the pages. The diamond tip of truth hadn’t been enough to dislodge it, but it was more than enough to stop the flight of its deceptions.
We ascended the Handred Keep using the roof of the central staircase as a spiral ramp. We crossed the scaffold bridge and the moat-pit and stepped out into a wide-open sky as the earth underneath us shook and the mine collapsed into a tower of dust that, we would later learn, was visible from space.
We who remained stood in silence and watched the sun rise on a day that was not supposed to be.
Magic burned.
Across the world, it withered and flaked and disintegrated into invisible embers. Forces bound by the book frayed and fell apart. The figurative tower the warlock had built, whose black spires cast long shadows over the earth, began to shudder. Then to shake. And then to topple. All the seekers of the dark felt it. So, too, the people of North America when a tremor rattled the entire East Coast. A sidewalk in New York cracked and three concrete slabs were forced upward, as if something massive were about the break from the ground and was stopped. The force of the rupture launched a bull statue into the air, and it crashed onto those who had strangely come to kneel before it, who had come to be obliterated by their lord as he burst through the portal and onto our plane, and so to be reborn holy martyrs. But they were not. They were crushed as the lords of shadow, high above the street, were transformed. Some wailed as wasps broke from their mouths. Others squatted painfully in their board room and shat snakes. The police would later find both when they raided the offices moments later.
What we few carried forth is still known across the world as the greatest spell ever cast. Possibly, the greatest spell that ever could be cast. At once:
the blighting of the book
the conjuring of a saint from the void
and the binding of the world against eternal night
How long he worked on it, I couldn’t say. Years, I expect. By it, his sickness had ended, the initiatory sickness of the shaman that Etude thought had concluded in the jungle. But that was just the beginning. The loss of his village, his people. That was his sickness. His removal to France. His bouts of anger and depression that ultimately manifested his revelation of the book. That was his sickness. The loss of it, his guilt, the years spent searching. That was his sickness.
The warlocks hadn’t torn Etude’s heart. They’d opened it as his master never could. Not a pinprick hole, as with the shattered splinter of the world tree. For his heart was too great for such things. They’d shorn it completely. Turned it inside out. As wide as the sky.
To let the whole world in.
With his garb and mask and drum, my strange friend was killed. He made his way to the underworld, the nadir of his journey, the journey we had started so many years ago. And somewhere along the way, he whom the Western world had falsely christened Etude Emile Saint-Antoine Étranger—he whose real name passed unknown and unspoken—became more than just the shaman of his village, or his nation. He became the shaman of the world, the greatest sorcerer who ever lived.
May his kingdom last a thousand years.