Chapter Twenty-One #4
“Is that even possible?” asked Ban Morin, standing beside her. He reached one fingertip to touch a pearl embedded in its surface. Even at this distance, even cloaked in shadows, I shuddered to see him so near.
“Magic this powerful would have required a mighty sacrifice,” said Milady, as if to herself. “Especially if she intended it to respond to her and her alone. There is a chance, of course, that she also allowed her daughter access.”
I jumped a little. Patrick gripped me tighter, a warning.
“Well, as a matter of fact,” said the Pontiff, sounding extremely self-satisfied, “I have her daughter in my palace dungeon at this very moment.”
“You what?” said Ban Morin, turning to him so suddenly that the glim rattled on its chain.
“She came to see me this very night,” said the Pontiff. “Offering her allegiance to the Temple in exchange for the book and her mother. I knew she would be useful.”
I did not turn towards Patrick’s accusing stare, but kept watching the Pontiff, Milady, and Ban Morin.
“Netta,” Patrick began.
“Not now,” I hissed back.
“Well, why didn’t you bring her down here at once?” Milady demanded. “Call for her now! She is my niece, and Ban Morin’s betrothed.”
“Patience, Milady. I shall. But I wished you to try to read the book first, as you are a more experienced mage than your niece. The girl will be very useful, undoubtedly, but she is young, and untested.”
“Get. Her,” Ban Morin hissed between his teeth.
The Pontiff sounded a little miffed as he turned to the guard and ordered him to fetch her—to fetch me. I bit my lip. It was a long way back along the passage and up all those stairs, but soon the Pontiff would know that I—and the Book Man—had broken out of his dungeon.
“I shall study the text,” said Milady, “in preparation for an attempt.”
They waited. No one attempted to make small talk.
Ban Morin coughed once, but was otherwise silent.
The quiet and the sense of anticipation made me want to scream.
I couldn’t move, could barely breathe, and had an urgent need to urinate.
Baldbeak was somehow managing to stay as still as a stuffed bird, his neck practically invisible as he hunched down with his chin buried in his chest feathers.
“Netta,” Patrick hissed to me again. “What did he mean, you offered your allegiance to the Temple?”
“They’ll hear us!”
“I told you, the shadows muffle sound. If we whisper, they won’t hear a thing.” He was trying to stare into my face, and I was resolutely looking straight ahead and refusing to make eye contact. “You offered your power to the Pontiff?”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” I whispered sharply.
“I couldn’t trust you to help me any longer”—he winced a little at that—“and I had nothing else with which to bargain my way into the catacombs. I thought if I just got to the book, and found Mother, then I could puzzle out what to do afterwards.”
“So you aren’t really loyal to the Temple?”
“For Plague’s sake, Patrick!” I was really starting to lose my temper with him. Again. But it was a welcome distraction from the suspense and the looming presence of Ban Morin, so I quite relished an argument in that moment. “Of course not. But what was I supposed to do?”
He exhaled. “I don’t know. And the Pontiff said you were in the dungeon?”
“Astonishingly enough, I couldn’t trust him either,” I said.
“Netta. If you had just stayed at the palace … if we had talked further …”
“You could have worn me down with your clever arguments?”
“We could have talked more,” he said flatly. “I was … frustrated. I needed to cool down, to think through your refusal …”
I finally looked at him fully, my face set. “And?”
“And we would have come up with something else. Together. With Dwale, and Mieka. There would have been a middle way.” His eyes were intensely green. “I came here to find you, didn’t I? To help?”
Milady was speaking again, and I shushed him.
“There are powerful wards on this,” she said, examining the book. “It is as I suspected. She wouldn’t want anyone else to be able to wield the power.”
“Then what use is this to me?” said the Pontiff, exasperated. “After all the time and coin we have invested in it! I would never have accepted your offer of an alliance if I had known you would be unable to cast it. You assured me—”
“I did not promise,” said Milady. “And I am also not saying that I cannot release her. Just that it will be challenging.”
“Well, get on with it,” said the Pontiff. “Either you or your niece must extricate her as soon as possible so that we can release our controlled Plague. The hour is perfect. The throne is unstable, enemies—pardon the term, Ban Morin—are at the gates, and the time is ripe for a savior.”
“I am surprised your One-Eyed God approves of such trickery,” Ban Morin said sardonically.
The Pontiff gave a sour smile. “We do not worry Him with such matters. We bring Him believers, and His reputation grows. Soon it will grow beyond Virelith. He does not trouble Himself as to our methods.”
“And yet you wish the people to have faith in him.”
“I wish for people to have faith in the Temple,” he said sharply. “In our ability to protect them and guide them. They have been falling back into the old ways, and require a swift and decisive correction.”
The guard came running back into the room, panting. “Your Holiness, she is gone. She, and the other.”
“The other?” said Milady sharply. “Who is that? Could they have abetted her?”
“Gone? How?” said the Pontiff, not answering her.
“I found the doors unlocked.”
“That is impossible,” said the Pontiff. “The wards on those rooms are unbreakable.”
“By a regular mage, perhaps,” said Ban Morin drily.
“Impossible!” cried the Pontiff again. To the guard he said, “Go! Find them!”
Milady clapped her gloved hands together in sarcastic applause. “Excellent. So my niece has disappeared again, and we are no better off for it.”
“You had her in your hands,” Ban Morin hissed at the Pontiff. “How could you have let her slip through them so easily?”
The Pontiff drew himself up to his full height, or what passed for it. “You will speak to me with the respect due to my station.”
“I shall speak to you however I please.”
“Well, we do not have Netta,” said Milady, and I flinched at the sound of my own name. “But we do have the next best thing.”
She stepped up to the book again and opened it. She bit her full lower lip prettily as she ran her eyes down the page.
“Well, get on with it, then,” said the Pontiff sulkily. “We have wasted enough time as it is.”
With great ceremony, Milady stripped off her gloves and hovered her palms over the book’s surface.
“And if you can’t cast from it,” the Pontiff began, “then I suppose …”
“Hush,” she said without looking up. “I can feel her.”
The Pontiff spluttered a little, but fell silent.
“Sawl, the books,” she ordered.
Ban Morin went to the wagon and removed several volumes, one at a time. Milady flicked her eyes over them before nodding to one. “That.”
He opened the book to the first page, setting it beside Mother’s book on the stone.
Milady muttered under her breath as her eyes swept over it, then shook her golden hair back over her shoulders, and laid her hands flat on the pages.
She began to speak the words of the spell in her other volume in a clear, bell-like tone.
My eyes went to her fingernails. I could see nothing happening so far—she was too far away. When she had finished speaking, however, she stepped back a pace and winced as she removed four loose nails from her fingertips, easing them out from the root and letting them fall to the floor with a tink.
For a moment, nothing happened. Even the dust motes in the air seemed to hang suspended. Then, an arm burst from Mother’s spellbook, straight up, fingers spread. It was nothing but bone.
Ban Morin cursed, and I heard the jingling of the Pontiff’s chain of office as he stumbled back. Patrick said something under his breath, and Baldbeak clicked his beak almost inaudibly. My stomach lurched. I could see the skeletal hand fumbling about blindly, searching for something to grab onto.
It found it.
I saw Milady’s slim hand reach out and clasp it in her own.
“Margotte,” she said.
“What is that cursed thing?” spluttered Ban Morin.
“My sister,” said Milady over her shoulder, not a trace of a tremor in her voice. She turned back to the bony hand that gripped her own, and whispered, “Margotte. My sweet. Come back to us.”
The bone that protruded from the book was white and clean, gleaming so brightly that it almost looked wet.
“They did it,” whispered Patrick. His face was pale. “Is that really your mother?”
“I don’t know,” I breathed, staring at the bony hand.
Despite Milady’s initial triumph, they wrestled with the spells for what seemed like an hour, but was probably only twenty minutes or so.
Milady and Ban Morin took turns, riffling through the spellbooks.
Even with all their efforts, they did not progress much further—but the air of the tomb thrummed with power, bitter and pulsing.