Chapter 52
In Which I Have Overcome the Fear that All My Life Has Been a Plague of the Most Noxious Variety, Worse than an Ass Full of Boils, and In Which I Have Made Use of My Wonderful Recollection of Childhood Trauma to Do Something Quite Remarkable and Worthy of Praise.
I defeated a dragon!” I cried, bursting into our bedroom.
“Is she dead, then?” Merulo stood in the center of an immensely detailed pentagram, the ashes of his burnt arm flaking at his feet. He looked pale, but invigorated.
“Ah . . . no, just temporarily floating away.”
“Then we have different definitions of ‘defeated.’” He accepted his leg from me, and his sloshing wand, and—frowning as I reached down the front of my shirt—his defrosted eyeball.
“Why . . . No, I need to stop asking you why.” He dropped the body parts onto our bed with a thump.
The melting ice immediately began to seep into his spread of paperwork.
“It’s time, now, to send you somewhere safe. ”
“Absolutely not,” I said, and surprised myself by not feeling the slightest bit tempted. “There must be some way that you can make use of me.”
“I already have several uses for you.” He smirked, inappropriately I thought. “Combat, however, is not one of them.”
“Have you forgotten who saved you from Sir Gareth?” I asked. Then, at his blank look: “Oh, you have forgotten. The knight who was bashing your face in? That ‘scoundrel’ from the bar? Anyways, even if I’m useless, even if I’ll get in the way, I can’t just go.”
Merulo paused his gathering of materials to turn a cold eye on me. “I could make you leave.”
“I know,” I said. “But please don’t.”
Baring his teeth, he tore animalistically at the papers covering a wall, then seized an ink-loaded quill and slashed black curving lines across it.
“We’ve wasted enough time. Come on, then.
” He completed the elaborate pentacle with a flourish, then turned to grab at the bed sheet, wrapping his eye, his leg, a sealed jar of blood, and various other materials into a compressed bundle.
Struggling slightly under its weight, he handed it to me. “Here, the work of a mule.”
I took the bundle—which turned out to be rather light—and Merulo pointed his wand, spitting words I now recognized.
The painted circle shimmered with the warping of space.
Ducking, the sorcerer disappeared into it, and I leaped after him—just as something huge broke through the bedroom door.
With an uncharacteristic yelp, Merulo shouted the portal shut, and we stood staring at the empty space it had occupied.
“Alright, so she’s not completely defeated,” I said, while Merulo urgently scratched another pentacle into the soil. Choking heat surrounded us, as did the screams of strange animals. Moss-damp trees towered on all sides, taller than any pine or maple could grow.
“Here,” said the sorcerer, hastily jabbering the words of command, and he leaped through the circle.
I jumped after, clutching the bundle to my chest—and landed in searing cold.
Wind whipped at my eyes, forcing them shut, while my feet sank deep into numbing snow.
This time Merulo carved his glyphs into a snowbank, his thin form hunched and shivering.
Again, he cast the spell, and again we passed through space.
A desert. Warm wafts of sand, sticking to the moisture of my snow-soaked legs. Dunes rose around us, carved into waves by some inhuman sculptor, while the afternoon sun scorched overhead.
“That should grant us enough time.” Merulo took the bundle from me and unwrapped it, scattering its contents across the golden sand. In this heat, the politely frozen body parts would soon be swelling with rot.
“Enough time for what?” I fidgeted with the sword at my waist, eyeing our desolate surroundings. At any instant, I expected that dark hurtling mass to reappear.
“For me to kill God,” said the sorcerer, and he danced, as giddy as a child. “First, I will have to locate it. That’s where my eye comes in.”
“Should we . . .” Everything was moving too fast. “I mean, one way or another, this will be goodbye, won’t it?”
“What are you after? One last frolic in the sand?”
“Merulo!”
I didn’t like draining the joy from him, or seeing the hard downturn of his mouth. “I’ve earned us a head start. I must use it to complete my end of this, now.” The sorcerer’s shoulders hunched, and he half turned from me. “This has been good, though, Cameron.”
I spoke around the lump in my throat. “It has, hasn’t it?”
“Very good.”
“Yes.”
“Now, if that’s settled . . .” The sorcerer’s grin had returned. “I have a God to kill.”
Following his shouted directions, we spread the white bed-sheet across the ground, piling sand in the corners to keep the breeze from catching it.
My role complete, I stood to the side and watched as Merulo painted the sheet with blood.
It rusted as he worked, the interconnected sigils darkening from a fresh scarlet to the maroon of Hydna’s scales.
For once he did not work from memory, instead heavily referencing his clutched notebook.
I worried at the time spent on this, extended by his frantic paging in search of specific glyphs, but managed to direct my energy into rehearsing a set of drills.
Sweat soon drenched me, dripping down my brow and pooling under my armpits, but it felt good to swing about a long, sharp piece of metal.
A joyous yip came from Merulo, the sound a coyote might make with something fresh and squirming in its jaws.
His pentacle was complete. He stepped into its center, straightening to his full height and smoothing down his robes—dirty and torn now.
I felt a pang for how they’d looked upon our first meeting.
Granted, I hadn’t been a fan, but they’d grown on me. As had their owner.
Merulo thrust out his thoroughly defrosted eyeball in a fist. Far from easing into the spell, he erupted into a complex recitation, thick with anger and sniping accusation, howling the guttural vocabulary as if it were his native tongue.
Rippling outward from him, a bubble of something rushed toward me. I stumbled back with a cry to avoid it, and saw—
Nothing.
No desert. No evening chill. No toying wind, not the scent of baked sand nor the metal of painted blood. No sweat trickling down my neck, no hunger in my gut, nothing.
There was nothing.
Nothing.