Chapter 54
In Which There Is Nothing. In Which I Am Nothing. In Which—
The nothing retracted with a snap, and I heard guttural sobbing. I’d clearly fallen at some point during the spell, as the desert sky filled my vision. Time had evidently passed. It was violet dusk, faintly pricked with stars, with the rising moon staring down at us.
“Cameron!” Bony hands shook me, and Merulo’s face appeared, lined with concern. “Cameron, it was only a vision. You are unharmed.”
“Death,” I heaved, recognizing the cries as my own. “Death, that was death, that was—”
Merulo slapped me hard across the face. I blinked at him. “Microwave.”
“If you two are finished,” came a woman’s voice. “We have much to discuss.”
Domitia sat cross-legged in the sand, close enough for it to be shameful that neither of us had spotted her.
Merulo sprang off me and, with some unsteadiness, I followed.
I unsheathed my sword, and Merulo brandished his wand, but the half-dragon didn’t show us the courtesy of responding in kind.
She stayed seated, the slouch of her shoulders betraying sadness, but also victory.
As if she didn’t expect to fight. As if she’d already won.
“So now you’ve seen,” she said. “Just as I did, many years ago.” With a thumb and forefinger, she reached beneath her eyelid and plucked out her lazy eye. I quickly looked away, not wanting to see the empty socket.
“I . . . don’t understand.” Merulo gripped his wand tightly. “Why couldn’t I see God? Where does it hide?”
“God is dead,” I said, certain of my words. “That was death, Merulo. That was the nothing.” Desert grit clung to my drying cheeks. I felt like I could crumble to the ground at any moment, and that if I did, nothing in the world could get me back up.
“I imagine it happened on the Day of Descent.” Domitia pushed her false eye back into its socket without any sign of discomfort, then motioned for us to sit across from her.
Neither of us complied—me, because I had to remain standing to maintain my sanity, and Merulo I assumed out of pride.
With a sigh, she continued. “It was the dying act of a being beyond our comprehension. It came to our choked, dying world and answered a prayer.”
At Merulo’s snort, something in Domitia’s posture sharpened.
“I don’t hate God. A being of that scope, expending its life to grant our wish .
. . I think it must have loved us. Not as individuals, but as a world.
I think in its last moments, it loved us enormously.
And the connection people seek with it now, the desire to touch that love through prayer, and artwork, and music .
. . Some of it is beautiful. Some of it moves me. ”
I opened my mouth to protest, ready to share my own experiences as a lifelong churchgoer, but Domitia raised a hand.
“I cannot, however, ignore the arrogance of the act. The same arrogance that you now demonstrate yourself.” She leveled her gaze at the sorcerer.
“A single being, no matter its power or intelligence, cannot make decisions for millions. Merulo, you must understand. You have no right to impose yourself on this world.”
“Watch me,” snarled the sorcerer.
I wanted to clap at his brevity.
“You think you deserve to choose, because you can take it by force? Then take it. Outmatch me.” Domitia spread her arms, displaying both her musculature and those strange, snaking scars.
Merulo made no move. Slowly, Domitia got to her feet. She cast a deliberate look at the leg that lay, in a cloud of meaty stench, beside the painted bedsheet. “Your use of that wand. The amputated limbs . . . You’ve drained yourself, haven’t you?”
At my side, Merulo remained silent.
“Then there’s no need for me to kill you. Crippled from overuse of magic, no path remains for you to achieve your goal.”
“My body remains,” Merulo said faintly. “I’ll wring out the magic from every vein and limb and inch of gut.”
Despite her flowery speech and supposed kindness, Domitia had shifted into the predatory stance I knew well from her dragon siblings.
“Ah,” she said, advancing over the sand.
“When he cut off my wings, my father kept them, folded in cloth, to be burned for spells. It’s disgusting, how we can be used.
” She stopped before him. “Merulo, I’d like to leave you alive.
It will be a long life, I’m sure, with much to experience.
Spend time with your partner, who clearly adores you.
Just say you will not continue, and I will leave now, in peace if not in friendship. ”
Merulo spat, a thick gob that hit Domitia on her rounded blue cheek.
“Then I’m sorry,” said Domitia. “I truly am.”
All this time, she paid me no heed. Of course, why should she spare a thought for a lowly, insignificant little human? My swung sword caught her from behind, a killing stroke driven by all my practice, all my muscle.
The blade shattered.
Domitia sighed. “Sir Cameron, please step aside.” She hadn’t even bothered to turn around. Her floral dress hung open at the back, slashed by my sword stroke, but underneath her skin gleamed a healthy and unbroken blue.
Right, she was a dragon. Well, can’t say I didn’t try.
This distraction did, however, allow Merulo to point his wand. He shouted dark words at such staccato speed, it was a marvel he didn’t stumble over them, issuing a spell that—
Domitia brushed her hand through the air dismissively, and the wand flew from his grip. It burst into splinters midair, leaving the spell to die on his tongue. With another wave and a calmly spoken word, Merulo’s prosthetics exploded.
He crumpled, empty socket bleeding, cheek flecked with the crushed remains of his stone eye. His arm and leg still hung attached, but mangled, nothing more than scrap metal.
“Wait!” I threw my sword to the sand, staggering toward Merulo. Why hadn’t he chosen a location with dirt and grass, somewhere with traction? Each step through this sinking material was agonizing. “Please!” I flung myself down before him, arms out, a shield against the half-dragon’s bulk.
“Sir Cameron,” Domitia said softly. “It doesn’t matter where you’re standing.
Magic doesn’t operate as a projectile. Merulo has made his decision, please allow him to honour it.
” She raised her hands again, fingers spread, but paused at the widening of my eyes.
At the way I looked past her, over her shoulder.
I’d seen it first. The rise of gigantic red lines, towering walls of light cutting through the sky. The colossal strokes of a pentagram that encompassed the entire world.
Domitia whirled, her placidity fracturing. “There’s another—”
“Another dragon?” Merulo laughed. “Of course there is. You didn’t think I was the brains behind this, did you?”
Bloody walls dominated the horizon, their light blotting out the stars.
He spoke in exhausted fragments, but still I recognized the dark glee in Merulo’s voice—from Benedict, from the needle, from every time he’d taken pleasure in inducing my fear.
“All I needed to do was kill God. That was the entirety of my role. How accommodating, to find it already dead. Take my life if you wish. You’ve already lost.”
“No,” said Domitia. “No!”
It was hard, seeing the woman’s despair as she swung her attention to me, knowing that I would do nothing to alleviate it. “Sir Cameron, what do you know of this? Please, think of your brother.”
“Chickens will stay the same,” I said, with remarkable restraint considering the beating she’d just delivered to her own brother. “Simon will be fine.”
The whisper of moving sand behind me: Merulo, crawling toward his amputated leg. Domitia shouted, and an invisible force backhanded the sorcerer, so that he wheeled in an arc of sprayed blood. I shouted.
Red light painted the desert then, washing out all other colour.
The ascending walls bathed the world in a macabre glow.
Reduced to a mere observer as unthinkable magic mounted on all sides, Domitia’s face knotted in distress, her fingers clenching uselessly at nothing.
It took me by surprise when she closed her eyes and began to sing.
From the foreign lilt of the words, I knew it to be a spell.
Her voice soared, pleading and prayerful, the volume quickly surpassing my tolerance.
I clapped hands over my ears, but still I heard her keening crescendo.
The scent of magic tickled my nose, that sharp, wild prickle of something changing. And as she sang, Domitia smoldered.
“Shut up, shut up,” Merulo rasped, scarcely audible. He was somehow still conscious, hunched in the sand like a twisted black scorpion. “You have LOST! Shut up!”
Flames rippled from Domitia, shifting colours in a nauseating chaos, burning back the red night. Beneath that kaleidoscopic inferno, she sang louder and louder, even as her flesh dripped from her face and her clothing turned to ash. In a blaze of light, it reached its climax.
As did the pentagram’s gory walls. Together, they erupted, so that the air itself seemed made of magic.
Just as quickly, it faded. The starry sky returned, and Domitia lay dead, a scorched husk.
Merulo was repeating something in a garbled voice. It took me a moment to understand. “What did you do, Domitia?” he cried. “What did you do?”