Chapter 31
XXXI
Margeride Mountains
The weeks that followed the massacre at Saint-Julien were intoxicating. Exhilarating. Scandalous. Magnificent.
Antoine and I disappeared into the wilds of Gévaudan, utterly consumed in each other.
As a lover, he was as shameless and fearless as he was in all things.
We spent our days following tracks through the mountains, taking every opportunity to indulge our carnal desires.
We met fewer and fewer hunters as the days grew colder and shorter, so we took ridiculous risks, cavorting naked in the northern cascades, or bucking in sudden, violent heat against the trunk of an ancient cedar.
I would be crouched, perfectly still in the bracken, sighting a hare with Antoine’s musket. Then suddenly I would feel him behind me, his beard brushing my ear and his hands reaching around to unbutton my breeches.
“Do you think you can make the kill, Sebastian?” he would whisper, with a playful bite at my earlobe.
“Do you want to know what I’ll do to you, if you can?
There were other games we used to play, the village boys and me.
” His hands wormed inside my clothes, searching and stroking. “Let me tell you . . .”
I didn’t always miss.
Antoine delighted me, I think, most of all because he surprised me.
“I’ve figured it out!” he said suddenly one evening, bolting upright where he sat. We were camped in the mountains once again, not far from where the Beast had taken a traveler on the eastern road.
I smiled wryly, looking up from my notes.1 “I am apprehensive. What have you figured out?”
“The fire—that’s how you’ve been doing it!”
“Doing what?”
His mind was clearly racing. “I knew there was a reason you always managed it when I couldn’t. It’s magic, isn’t it?”
Sarmodel’s derisive laughter made it difficult to keep a straight face.
“Antoine, are you suggesting that I’ve been using the dark arts to light our campfire?”
“Well, have you?”
Yes—confess, Sebastian!
I had the seed of an idea, so I decided to play along. “Most astute, Antoine. I have indeed. Tomorrow night, I will show you—it’s a simple enough trick, if you are willing.”
“Whoreson!” He glared at me, pointing an accusatory finger at our cheery campfire. “I knew it! And yes—I am willing, by the Christ. Tomorrow night!”
The following evening, we sat by the unlit fire. Antoine’s face was pinched in concentration as he focused on mentally reciting the “cantrip” I had taught him that morning.
“Good, Antoine,” I said encouragingly. “I can feel it working.”
“How much longer, Sebastian? These ridiculous words are going to fly out of my head,” he said. I smiled to myself.
“Try it now, just like we practiced.” I shuffled back slightly.
With a grave expression, Antoine pointed at the pile of logs and took a deep breath.
“Sim Sala Bim!” he boomed.
With a thunderous roar, the logs burst into flames. A ball of fire ballooned up into the treetops, provoking hysterics from the horses and loud swearing from me. I scrambled to calm the animals, casting a panicked gaze skyward to make sure we hadn’t set the forest ablaze.
“By the Almighty, Antoine—did I tell you to shout?”
Antoine sat in wide-eyed shock, his finger still outstretched. Then he began to laugh.
“An inferno!” he whooped, as the fire settled to more domestic proportions. “I knew I could manage it! Tomorrow I will do it again—and better.”
I considered telling him the truth—that I had written those nonsense words2 in pyric chalk on the wood while I was gathering it, and that anyone with the power of speech could have triggered them. Then I observed his sparkling eyes and fierce grin, and knew I’d tied my own noose.
“Very well, but in more civilized tones, mark me,” I said. I felt a little better about it when I sat down beside him and he rewarded me with a kiss.
Sarmodel had been remarkably quiet through the whole “lesson,” but he spoke up now.
Be careful, Sebastian, he said lightly. Best not to play with your food.
No harm done, I replied. But I didn’t teach Antoine any more “magic” after that night. My Guest was wagging his finger in my face for good reason.
I was telling Antoine things. Arcane things.
Dangerous things. Things that would give the young baronet a robust case against me for any number of capital offenses, if he were so inclined.
Either way, I was initiating him into a world for which he was certainly not prepared.
But he was curious and unafraid—always unafraid—and it made me ever bolder.
So I shared perhaps too much with him: my secrets, my body and even my heart.
Not all my secrets, of course. For all the wonders I could show Antoine, there were things whose horrors could never be disguised as “ancient arts” or “folk remedies.” I was host to a demon.
I had eaten people, body and soul, at his behest. Together, we were a life-drinking aberration of the natural order, centuries old.
These were the realities I could not deny or justify or laugh away as small-minded superstition.
And so I kept them to myself; let Antoine be dazzled by my fire-lighting cantrips and musical horse charms.
And what of the Beast?
The hunt went on, never fear. The attacks had stopped briefly after that day at Saint-Julien, and many hoped that the Beast had in fact perished. I knew better. Now that I understood what we faced, I spent time making preparations for his return.
By the time we received word of new victims—travelers on the eastern road—Sarmodel had taught me a dangerous new Word which he promised me would leave a mark even on the ancient Spirit of War.
He would not tell me what it meant or permit me to say it aloud, but it made the world flicker alarmingly when I recited it in my mind.
I also envenomed my hunting knife with a potent poison made from powdered Bombay thorn apple and the gland of an amphisbaena.
3 It was a tense and risky procedure I hoped never to repeat.
But Avstamet would come for us, now that he knew who we were, and I wanted to be ready.
And come he did, though not in the way I imagined.
I realized something was wrong as the moon grew full, perhaps three weeks from the massacre at Saint-Julien. Antoine’s dislocated shoulder and cracked ribs had healed in days, with a little Arcane help, but the Beast’s bite on his hand was concerning me greatly.
In objective terms, the monster had barely nipped him; the Beast’s mighty jaws could easily have dismembered my young lord.
But Avstamet had bargained away his claim on Antoine’s life.
The creature’s bite was a parting insult, nothing more—or so I had believed.
It left a semicircle of deep punctures on his hand, from the tip of his little finger across the heel of his palm and all the way to the tip of his thumb.
This same neat line was mirrored on the back of his hand, where it had miraculously missed the vital nerves and ligaments of his wrist.
But in spite of my best efforts, the wounds would not close.
They no longer bled after the first day, and Antoine said they caused him no pain, but his flesh would not heal where the Beast’s teeth had pierced it.
And Antoine grew sicker by the day, in turns possessed of a feverish energy and debilitated by exhaustion.
What is it? I asked Sarmodel. I was changing Antoine’s bandages and discreetly inhaled the scent from the cloth—completely clean, even with the open wounds beneath. Can you find anything?
Nothing, he answered. If there is something there, it’s working outside my range.4 Keep an eye on your young hobbyhorse—we’ll know soon enough, I think.
That evening, after a fiery, bruising round of lovemaking, Antoine rose from our nest of blankets to relieve himself.
The night was cold; winter had begun its march. I lay smiling, breathing white clouds up at the moon, enjoying the warmth Antoine had left.
I sat up suddenly. There was movement in the darkness, strong and violent.
Sarmodel.
Of course. My Guest brightened my vision and I stood up slowly. I wished, not for the last time, that I still had my Walloon silver.
“Antoine?” I could still see nothing with my augmented vision. The black-and-white shadowland outside the firelight was utterly still.
I heard a low voice and felt my heart quicken. Antoine was talking to himself.
In itself, this was no great anomaly; Antoine often talked or sang to himself when he was busy with a task. But this was different. He sounded angry, or terribly confused, or both.
“Antoine? Who are you talking to?” I was naked and very cold, but fetching my clothes would mean turning my back on the low, bestial muttering coming from the darkness.
“To the Gorgon of Crete!” he called back suddenly. His voice was too high and too distant; how had he moved so far away in those few short moments? He laughed at his own jest, and then he made a strange choking sound.
Oh, Antoine.
I spoke a Litany of the Hunt and slipped, snakelike, into the forest.
I smelled blood immediately and turned after it. It was grim confirmation to feel the residual warmth of Antoine’s footsteps beneath me as I followed the scent.
He was there, as I feared, where the trail ended.
“Antoine, please, come back to the fire,” I said softly, suddenly wishing that I could dispel my augmented senses; that the darkness would hide even a little of what I saw.
Antoine was surrounded by a miasma of vital traces: the twin plumes of his breath misting from his nostrils; the lingering scents of sweat, hormones and sex; his urine on the trunk of an alder. And vapor from the fresh blood that ran down his torso, shining black in the moonlight.
Antoine had found a pine marten, no doubt busy with its own nocturnal hunt.
The poor creature had ended its life bludgeoned against a rock, with my lover’s fist around its neck.
And now he held its sleek body close to his face like a child with a cherished toy, his teeth working into the animal’s soft innards.
“Please,” I said again, not sure what I would do if he refused.
He looked up at me suddenly, discarding the bloody corpse on the forest floor.
“Sebastian, aren’t you cold?” Antoine’s teeth were long and pointed; a predator’s weapons.
He absently sucked his fingers clean, one by one.
He seemed oblivious to the blood that dripped from his beard and down his chest.
“I am. Why don’t you come back to bed with me?”
Antoine followed me back to the fire, picking gingerly over the forest floor with his bare feet.
He made no objection as I washed his face and body clean of blood, even allowing me to inspect his teeth when I was finished.
The elongated fangs were already reverting, dissolving into plasma.
His eyes were very bright but somehow empty; I wondered how much of this he would remember in the morning.
Then suddenly he staggered into the brush, heaving. He disgorged his grim repast in a crimson stream and then cried out for water.
Afterward we sat by the fire, wrapped in blankets. I watched him watching the flames. He breathed deeply and seemed to come back to himself gradually.
“What was she like?” he asked suddenly, meeting my eyes over the fire.
“Who?”
“The Gorgon of Crete.” There was a shadow of a smile on his lips. The tight fist of fear in my gut began to loosen its grip.
“She was . . .” I let out a heavy breath. “More than anything, she was terribly sad. In the end, death was a mercy for her.”
But Antoine was already asleep where he sat.
Sebastian, watch him tonight, said Sarmodel. Or think about killing him now. There’s no telling—
Yes, I know! I know, Sarmodel! I snapped. I saw what happened.
My love, I am only being careful. This is a curse, or something similar. Avstamet has done something to the boy. It will certainly get worse.
This is my fault. I showed the Beast my weakness and he stuck his teeth into it. Of course he did.
All true, he said. Now be smart. What are you going to do?
I will find help, I answered, looking at Antoine’s wounded hand, glistening in the firelight. And I believe I know where to start looking.
1. I was indeed still devoting some of my time to the hunt, in spite of all the fornicating.
2. Yes, they are meaningless, in spite of what you may have heard—they are firmly in the “abracadabra” school of Mundane twaddle. And no, I can’t really teach someone magic words if they’re not gifted with some Arcane capacity.
3. Two-headed snakes found in the deserts of Mesopotamia. Their venom is almost universally fatal, but it’s particularly effective on mortal tissue infused with Spiritual enrichment, i.e., victims of possession.
4. Much like a spectrometer, my Guest has a certain “range” over which his senses operate. While Sarmodel is a reliable enough bloodhound in the Mundane, Abject and Arcane realms, there remain entire spectra of supernatural realities that are as imperceptible to him as they are to me.