22. Gremio
Chapter 22
Gremio
“Is it your will to run or to stand?”
Victor’s urgent voice ignited like a flash of flame in my head, consuming my senses in a sudden, blinding heat; I could not hear the hooves anymore on the lakeside path behind us, I could scarcely feel the quickening falls of our own steps—there was only the ghostly glow of the will o’ the wisp ahead of us, my heartbeat thundering in my ears, and the feeling that Victor striding beside me, clasping my hand in his iron grip, was burning with a black fire.
“I trust you, Victor,” was the most coherent thought I forced myself to will into his mind—a poor synopsis of all that I meant, all that I could not say.
“The carriage is ahead,” he replied as if all of Hell were at our heels, “but not as close as I would like; the damned demon behind us has broken a sworn oath, and there is no direction that does not lead to danger; now, is it your will to run or to stand? ”
“Then stand , sir!”
I must have said it aloud, shouted it into the night for the feeling of his fire burning inside my mind—he stopped abruptly, his great black cloak lashing through the fog as he turned back toward our pursuer with all the vital force of a gathering storm, his right hand brandishing the scorpion cane across us like a shield and his left arm seizing me by the shoulder and spine, pulling me into him and holding me fast.
“ Tramontana. ” With my black veil and my cheek against his hard chest I felt as much as I heard him intone the first of the old names of the four winds, as he had done before his cauldron in curing Greycliff. His deep voice rolled like thunder, resonating through his heavy muscle and bone as if to quake the very earth.
“ Levante. ” He moved suddenly—something with his right arm—and out of sheer instinct I pressed my left hand against his chest, fingers curling desperately into the starched white fabric of his shirt, as if I had the sorcery to spare him from some imagined attack. The power of his left arm trapped me closer in the heat of his solid body, his grip on my shoulder tightening; I looked up to see what I could of his face, and the scarf was gone—the scarf, and the top hat—and the bared steel of his mask flashed in the moonlight, his black hair flying free in the rising wind.
Moonlight. I raised my gaze to the sky, watching the veil of snowy clouds part before my eyes as if severed by the white sickle of the moon.
“ Mezzogiorno. ” The power of his voice shuddered through my hand and my body as the wind rose higher, swirling around us, drawing spray from the rippling waters of the lake, and as I dared to look ahead of us, down the path from whence we came, I saw the shining host of the procession that had followed us sober and part, clearing the way for whatever was coming up the trail. The dancers slowed, the garlanded couples stepped back and bowed; a few of the creepers by the edges crept away. The golden buck-fawn looked to me with an expression I did not understand, and vanished into the mist.
“ Ponente. ” The very air of the night seemed to crackle with his tension and his fury, electric and alive, and I felt as if he clenched in his right fist not only the cane but the reins of the world: as if it were only the forces of his hand and his heart that held him from being torn apart, quartered to the four winds, even as the invincible drive of his will drew that same power back to us, surging into us like a black tide.
“ Sii la mia acqua—sii la mia terra! ” I did not need to understand the words to know that he willed the primal powers of the world itself to his command—I felt it through me, desperate this time to keep my senses, holding onto him to fight back the sensation of swooning again.
“ Mia aria—mio fuoco! ”
No, I would not swoon again—I could not drown again in his art—not now, as the last of the hosting disprites stepped aside, and a white shadow stalked between them through the darkening fog.
“ Ego sum vis naturae… Ego sum ego solus! ”
The last of the spell was deeper, stronger yet than the rest, proclaimed into the night with unyielding conviction, with unmoored abandon—something flashed through my mind like a paroxysm of lightning; something seared up out of the ground itself, encircling us, as if Victor in his transcendent, demonic fury had set his very shadow aflame and wreathed us in its fire. He had traced no figures on the path, as he had done before, but by his strength and his wrath and his sheer will I could nearly See the magic circle that I felt in my marrow, surrounding us like a rim of moonlight smoldering in the earth, glowing faintly through its own rising trails of thin black smoke.
The ghost-white figure drew nearer, its steps in time with the sounds of the echoless hooves. I could not convince myself that it was after all in the shape of a man.
I should, I am sure, have been afraid.
But if this were fear, it only stoked every sensation within me higher, the sparking of my own sorcery against the vital rage of Victor’s art flaring through my nerves and my blood. I felt his magic merge with mine and rise through me, a fever surging into my head like a rush of madness and then streaming down molten through my skin, its quivering touch setting my senses alight. The scent of Victor’s heat intoxicated me—the fabric of his shirt, lightly damp for the exertion of his power and the sweat of my palm, was all that separated my lace-gloved hand from his skin—I became acutely aware of my breasts pressed against his hard body, rising and falling with the heaving breath of his chest, and I could not help but think somehow of awakening in his arms only a day ago, after together we lighted the candle on Friar Bacon’s skull?—
Together we lighted the candle . Blinking, widening my eyes, forcing my Sight through my black veil, I looked for the smoking moon-glow that I sensed ringed the earth around us.
The hoof-falls slowed; our pursuer was nearly to the border of the circle, but even then I did not know what I Saw before me—it was a rider on a tall, misshapen steed, or a man alone, or a rearing white mule with a sea-foam mane—the visions flickered before me, ghostly and unsettled, but the creature’s appearance was to me of no moment.
No moment at all.
I closed my eyes, focused, imagined and created my desire with all of my senses—and then, with our mingled art twining and trembling through me, with all the audacious presumption of my sorcery, I enforced my will upon the world.
The unearthly half-sheen of Victor’s circle erupted into a flare of sudden fire, violet-black like the mist of the will o’ the wisp; Victor gripped me closer in reckless, defiant triumph, holding me against him as I felt his broad chest swell in vindicated pride, while beyond the flash of spectral fire was a dull clatter of quickened, irregular hoof-beats on the path and the unearthly squealing bray of a spooked mount: the amorphous form of the creature that stalked us staggered back, struggled for footing, tripped over his own ankles and then clambered back to his feet.
Victor’s low, ominous chuckle emerged into outright laughter, grim and almost vitriolic, cooling his rage into smoldering embers. I braced myself against him—I felt my stamina begin to drain, watched my burst of dark fire fade into the black smoke—and he held me tighter still, supporting me between the iron force of his left arm and the hard muscle of his chest, sustaining me somehow with the strength of his body and the warm sense of his shadow surrounding me, his sorcery seeping in through my skin.
“It was worth it, sir,” I murmured against him, half in pride and half chagrin, my voice faint in my own ears.
I meant—I thought that I meant—my own rash judgment of the moment past, the reckless expenditure of too much of my art to ignite the circle into flame. But I wondered then, as I watched the creature before us paw the earth with an agitated hoof—as I listened to the echo of inhuman laughter from some pair of disprites on the path behind him—I wondered how Victor interpreted my words, and whether in his uncanny mind I spoke of all our excursion through the twilight and the night.
Or—if this were to be the end—if I spoke of all our adventures together, briefly and brightly though they burned.
“Yes,” he replied to me: a strong, steady whisper, hollowed by the half-echo of his cold steel mask. “Yes, it was.”
The ghost-white creature snorted, and I thought that I caught a faint, acrid whiff of brimstone. “Is this how you welcome an old friend, Vittorio?”
“An old friend,” I felt Victor’s deep voice rumble in his chest, “who has twice in recent memory lowered himself to an attempted ambush.”
“I don’t think,” the disprite replied, with a sound like a horse’s champing teeth, “that the infamous Vittorio D’Arco has much room to complain about the methods of a highwayman . She doesn’t know you very well,” a hand (why did I perceive at first a webbed claw?) reached out to point to me, “does she?”
“She knows me well enough. But she does not know you , who cannot be bothered, evidently, with the old traditions of your own dominion. Is it no longer the custom in the City of Tartarus to state one’s name and titles upon first apparition?”
“Fair enough,” the disprite mumbled, “fine enough. Gregory Emory,” though I could still not entirely discern his form, I knew that he bowed, “Slayer of Chaal, Conqueror of the Two Realms, Grand Duke of Tartarus.” He paused. “The custom, Vittorio, is for her to reciprocate.”
This was twice now that I had been spoken over, and in my strange state—half-exhausted from the exertion of my art, yet strengthened and energized by the touch of Victor’s sorcery—I had neither patience nor trepidation enough to hold back the swelling frustration. “If you mean to speak to me, Mr. Emory,” I said plainly, “I should like to request you do so. My titles may hold little significance to your people,” thinking of Victor’s admonition not to reveal my true name, I searched my mind quickly for a suitable pseudonym, “but I remain Charlotte Hartford, Novice Sorceress of the Order of Magisophists, Apprentice to Doctor Victor D’Arco.”
“ Novice Sorceress? He taught you well—I couldn’t speak for whether your name is true, but you know enough to lie about your title. Novice Sorceress,” he repeated with an amused disbelief, “and that trick of yours just now must be novice work, yes? And a novice hears me speak? Must I look like such a fool to you?”
“Settle your apparition, Gremio,” Victor grunted, irritable and impatient yet with no suggestion of true concern. “Pick a form—I do not care which—and she will decide for herself how you look.”
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, “your will is done, Vittorio.”
No sooner had the disprite spoken than his flickering, amorphous ghost seemed to slowly separate from the mist off the lake and congeal into flesh: there was in the sight an odd sense of heaviness and stagnancy, and I thought surely that I watched one of the folk of the air transmute his ether into animal bone. Moments later, something like a human man stood before us, wreathed in the thin black smoke rising from Victor’s circle. He was much shorter than Victor, and scarcely taller than I; where Victor was massive and dark, this figure was finer of bone and pale as the scythe-blade of the moon. His hair was a coltish mane of white, but with no apparent brittleness of age, nor could I guess his years from his face: it seemed to subtly age before my eyes as soon as I deemed it young, and grow young again once I assured myself that he was old. In his plain black robe (not unlike, I thought, what Victor usually wore beneath his cloak) he paced the perimeter of our circle, just beyond its boundary, and I could not say whether his walk was unsettling for its ungainliness or its grace—he had an equine, almost camel-like gait that made a poor match for the form of a man.
I felt Victor turn his head to look slowly over his broad shoulder as the pale man circled behind us—Gremio, or Gregory Emory, or whatever he should be called—and not for the last time I wondered what manner of sworn oath he and Victor had with one another, and what their history may have been, and who had the greater power over whom.
“Enough, Gremio. Stand before us, outside the circle. State your business.”
Grudgingly, he performed the former as commanded, watching us with unblinking silver eyes. As if he could not quite balance flat-footed in the manner of a man, he shifted his weight on his bare human feet further toward the toes than the heels. “A mere gentleman’s request, Vittorio? You have not constrained me.”
“Correct. We still have a contract—and, I remind you, your selective memory of that fact does not alter its breach clause.”
“Oh, now you trouble yourself with the breach clause, Vittorio— now ? And here I thought we had set such stiff formalities aside, as friends, given that you broke contract first?—”
“ Enough ,” Victor interrupted in a deep, commanding snarl. “I repeat,” he intoned with an ominous stillness after a brief silence between them, “state your business in seeking us here. In opening the door in the hollow hill. Pray don’t make me repeat myself again.”
The pale disprite allowed a crooked nod of appeasement, nervously licking his large horse-teeth.
He feared Victor, to judge by the look in his eyes as he glanced to me, unless this creature were so subtle as to seek my sympathy. Victor had some manner of command over him, that much was clear—and yet too clearly something was amiss, or Victor would not have been surprised by the door in the hewn stone of the hillside, nor seen it needful to cast a circle around us as our pursuer approached.
And yet, between the two of them, it was difficult not to suppose that Victor was the stronger in body, the more relentless of will, the more potent in art. Had I not known by feel which one of them was the infernal Duke of Tartarus, and which the mortal man of magic, I cannot say I would have guessed aright. I wondered then if our escape through the tunnel and the spell of his circle were for the sole purpose of my protection, and whether, had Victor met Gremio alone in the same London alley where once he met Absolon, he could not simply crush him into the same wet cobbles of the street, or unsheathe his iron dagger and tear him into ash and fog.
“To see your apprentice.” I could hear Gremio’s teeth lightly champ. “Measure her sorcery. Determine the location of the Talisman.”
“And?” Victor’s voice was gruff and abrupt. “Is that all?”
Gremio stretched his neck and then half-hunched forward, silver eyes whitening in the moonlight and the pale glow of the circle. “ And , if I do not get the Talisman, nor suitable intelligence as to its location, nor some—” he paused, gathering himself, as if his mind had outrun his own words—“some effort, Vittorio, on your part! Something in which I can believe. Failing that, I come to settle. To collect.”
“You and how many legions?”
Victor’s challenge was met by a coarse, braying laugh. “Still as cocksure as the Devil himself, aren’t you? I should know it better, for how long I’ve known you—but it is good to remember. At least that part of the long, sordid legend of Vittorio D’Arco is neither a trick nor a lie.”
“The Talisman is useless to you,” Victor stated, seeming vaguely irritated but otherwise entirely unperturbed, “and likely equally useless to me.”
“Yes, so you say, but that painting Count Martas stole from the gallery was useless to you , and yet you banished him for it with a century-long seal. What difference the Talisman of Thoth, stolen from my museum? A thing of beauty. I too am a man of taste. You must allow I have a certain aesthetic sensibility.”
“And prior to that, I seem to remember, stolen for your museum from a mortal pharaoh’s grand tomb.” I felt in Victor’s chest that he started to chuckle, then forced himself into sober gravity. “I imagine he may have had a certain aesthetic sensibility as well.”
“Details,” Gremio spat, then collected himself, as if suddenly struck by a possible addendum to his own rather insubstantial self-vindication. “I had an agreement with him, you know. A few favors granted to him during his life, and in return a few treasures for me after his death. Coincidentally, he died a bit suddenly?—”
“Coincidentally.”
“—Before he could fulfill his part of the contract. I am sure he meant to make good on his promise.”
“I am sure,” Victor repeated with a sardonic nod, clearly amused.
“Well, at least I am not the one questioning his good intentions. But be that as it may,” he stroked the ground with his bare foot, once more recalling a restless horse pawing the earth, “what of my Talisman, Vittorio? Surely, given that it disappeared again, more than a year ago now, and that time is of the essence,” I thought I felt the firm muscles of Victor’s chest slowly tighten as Gremio continued, “you must be hot on its trail, if you mean to secure it and return it to me before midnight on the Eve of May— Walpurgisnacht , as I remember you liked to call it in your German days. Of course, if you cannot or will not divulge so much as a hint of your…”
My attention failed; I did not hear the rest of his talk, so fixed was I on the dozen questions that flooded my mind—a dozen, and then a hundred more. All of this—all this thorny, entangling contract between the two of them was truly about my Talisman of Thoth? What was Victor to gain in the bargain; what could Gremio possibly have that Victor could not acquire by his own art, and that he desired with enough fervor to make dealing with so slippery a disprite worthwhile?
And if Gremio did not know where the Talisman was now, did he know where it was once? Did this creature know that before it disappeared more than a year ago , the Talisman had belonged to?—
I felt my breath stop, my body stiffen with a long shiver, my blood run cold.
It did not even cross my mind to wonder if I was stricken by some elf-shot of Gremio’s art—if the circle somehow had been broken—if this was why Victor, whose arm around me must have slowly slackened, now gripped me breathlessly tight in his dark heat.
All my consciousness was fixed on the blinding North Star of one single, burning thought: more than a year ago, before the Talisman disappeared again , it had belonged to my husband.
My husband, Simon Ronald Buckingham—Egyptologist, secret occultist, who apportioned to me a share in neither his work nor his heart—who went missing , as the authorities so demurely described the mystery of his murder before abandoning the case, at the same time that his parlor was violated with ash and fog and blood, his collection of artifacts ransacked and looted, all of them gone by the time I returned. All of them but one: the Talisman of Thoth, which he had given to me to wear on its chain around my neck, hidden beneath my dress and my underclothes, the afternoon before his death.
Did he know, or sense, the coming of his doom? Did it matter now? I sought revenge—not for him, but for myself, for the loss of all that I had known in life at the mercy of the dubious document of my husband’s will—and I sought a quarry for my vengeance, a name and a form upon which to focus the fire that now flared in me anew.
I had that name now. Two names, at least.
Gremio. Gregory Emory, Duke of Tartarus.
The demon who pursued Victor and me in the tunnel—who stood now before us—killed my husband in the futile search for a simple amulet from a forgotten tomb: in his strange, capricious lust for the Talisman of Thoth, Gremio had torn asunder the life that once I had known.
How, then, was I not to rage?
“It was you! ” I heard my voice howl into the fog of the moonlit night; I watched Gremio draw himself up suddenly and stumble backward on the balls of his bare feet, tossing his mane of white hair as his pale eyes rolled in equine terror, and for the flash of a moment, before he collected himself, I Saw him in an altered form—I thought that he had an elongated head, cloven hooves, great webbed fore-claws for hands?—
I cannot say what happened next; not when it seemed all to happen at once. In the sheer fury of instinct I lunged headlong toward Gremio, forcing myself futilely against the inexorable strength of Victor’s left arm. With my hands pulling in vain at his wrist, with the element of surprise on my side, and with all strength of my body, I could move Victor only an inch, perhaps two, before I lost my footing, kicked a foot out at the earth in my struggle for balance, and fell back exhausted against him—only to feel a wet, webbed hand wrap around my ankle, claws piercing through my stockings and into the flesh.
“El—Charlotte!” Victor bellowed, catching himself in time to switch to my false name even as the force of his voice echoed behind his steel mask; his right arm slammed across me under his left with a force to nearly knock the breath from my lungs as he pulled my back into his chest. “Pull your foot in—get in the circle!”
I heard Victor’s scorpion cane clatter onto the path as he gripped me in both of his arms; I looked down in time to see Gremio flick his tongue across a sly, horse-toothed smile as he gazed up from where he lay on his belly on the ground, a pool of black robes and snow-white hair. I thrashed in his grip, trying to swing my free foot at his wrist or his head, but almost leisurely his left hand caught me up, closing cold and clammy around my other leg just below the calf.
The circle , had Victor said? The moon-pale glow of it, the rising black smoke was gone—I could not See straight, surely, with the shock that surged through me as I struggled for my life—but nor could I feel any barrier, any fortified edifice of Victor’s power.
I saw the long scuff of my shoe from when I lost my balance, striking clean through the faint ring singed into the earth.
The circle was broken.
“Pull him with you! Get his hands across the boundary!”
Holding desperately onto Victor’s arms, I fought to pull my legs in, with or without Gremio attached—Victor tried to step back with me, but I heard myself cry out as hot pain shot through my legs—Gremio had scarcely moved forward—the notion flickered through my mind to wonder if Victor would be as skilled at repairing dislocated joints as he was at half-fixing Rothfield’s haunted eye—Rothfield, who until this very moment was the most recent apprentice to break Victor’s circle?—
But Victor had said—hadn’t he said?—that in their fight in the London alley, his focused fury had burnt Absolon’s hands?—
“ Tramontana ,” I heard Victor growl under his breath behind the mask; I felt the power of his voice through his chest vibrate against my spine as I tried again, futile but undaunted, to wrench my ankles away from Gremio’s cold, dank grip. “ Levante… ”
I glanced to Gremio, only to see, to my horror, that he began to mumble under his breath with the kind of conviction I knew meant the casting of a spell.
“North Wind,” I managed to whisper despite the strain of my struggle, forcing my cheek back against the heat of Victor’s hard chest and looking upward to the steel mask, watching for a sign, any sign, that he heard me and understood. “East Wind…”
I felt the weight of Victor’s gaze as he looked down to me, grunting in something like mingled surprise and triumph.
“ Mezzogiorno! ” he called with renewed strength, and “South Wind!” I echoed him, and the dry leaves of winter began to whirl around us, catching at the corners of Gremio’s black cloak and in his white mane.
“ Ponente! ”
“West Wind!”
“ Silenzio! ” Gremio snarled; immediately Victor crouched and thrust forward with me still fast in his arms, at once toward the disprite and to the right, creating enough slack in the space between my two captors to allow us to dodge aside—and scarcely in time: I felt Victor’s shadow wash over me even as the very air of the night quivered and then quieted.
I discovered quickly that the tension of it stuck in my throat, and that Gremio watched me with hungry, expectant eyes—and that we were closer to him than ever we were before.
I should test, I decided, whether I could speak at all?—
“Don’t speak,” Victor shot his words into my mind, interrupting my train of thought. “Even if you can speak, do not. Let him think it worked, and focus on the circle!”
“What if he gets all the way inside?” I willed my thoughts into Victor’s.
“ Don’t let him get all the way inside! ”
I looked up, beyond Gremio, beyond the ruined circle—the disprites of the lakeside were gathering, drawing in again, glowing in the night—but Gremio’s sneering chuckle drew my attention back, along with the terrible violation of his grip working its way further up my legs, under the hem of my dress, past my ankles and towards my calves.
“ Sii la mia acqua ,” Victor intoned, muscles flexing under the white fabric of his shirt, pulling me backward until I thought my very skeleton would come unbound. “ Sii la mia terra! ”
Don’t let him get all the way inside , Victor’s desperate command echoed in my head, and I wondered whether I could will myself somehow to reach his fallen cane, twist it in my hands and watch the tines of the dagger-hilt spring into place?—
And that is when I realized that I had, foolishly bold though it was, some small scrap of a plan.
I wrested my left hand from the tight tangle of our arms across my chest and reached behind me, feeling for his black cloak as it billowed in the rising wind.
“ Sii la mia ? — ”
He paused suddenly with a deep, instinctual flinch: I had reached beneath his cloak, my hand pressing against the muscle and heavy bone of the side of his ribs.
“I shall apologize later, professor, for my indiscretion,” I willed urgently into his mind, hasty and disjointed though the thought must have been, and he was more pragmatic than to let it distract him long.
“ Mia aria ,” he repeated; my hand slipped lower, over his belt, searching. “ Mio fuoco! ”
“ Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves ,” I recited hurriedly in my mind—this was Shakespeare, the sorcerer Prospero, The Tempest ; the same lines Victor had used to request the ignis fatuus from the faeries were lines I knew by heart—I saw the buck-fawn prance closer, the Woman in the Water trail her kelp-hair as she crept naked up to the path, the garlanded couples nod to one another and stride nearer, horned and stately or half-reptilian, the small dancers singing and circling their feet—“ and ye that tread the sands with printless foot ”—I reached lower, down the outer side of Victor’s muscular thigh, closing my left hand around the cold metal hilt that I sought as the buck-fawn looked to me, to Victor, and to Gremio, as if waiting to understand.
“Hold him, please,” I willed my words at the small spirit-elk, his ears flicking about the new spikes of his horns as the rushing wind of Victor’s circle returning picked up again. “Hold him fast! I will not harm you, only Gremio, and only to escape.”
“ Ego sum vis naturae ,” Victor began to roar into the swirling air of the night, and Gremio gathered his horse-legs like a crouched frog to spring forward into the center of the forming circle; his cold claws sank deeper into my flesh, warming my stockings with the flow of my blood, and I knew the moment had come: a half-second before he lunged I drew Victor’s long iron dagger from its hidden sheath with my left hand, stabbing it toward Gremio with a grey flash in the moonlight. He screamed—an unnerving, inhuman sound like a startled mule—and threw himself backward from the blade, losing his grip on my legs only to swiftly thrash and grope and catch me again by the feet. He landed in an awkward position, lying almost on his side on the ground with his long wrists and forearms across what once was the boundary of the circle, and that is when I realized that the Woman in the Water held him faster yet than he held me, pinning him to the earth as she began to climb slowly over his half-prone body, her long wet hair soaking into his splayed black robes.
“ Ego sum ego solus! ”
The very air seemed to warp and ripple with the explosive force of Victor’s sorcery; the wind whipped clockwise around us, drawing the ghostly glow of Victor’s circle across the ground, and when it stilled the faint black smoke rose anew. Something began to hiss, like the sound of water expiring in fire, and before even I looked to the hideous sight I knew that it was Gremio’s arms, frozen across the arc of the magic circle just below his wrists, held in place over the spectral moon-fire by the Woman in the Water and his own desperate refusal to let me go. His silver eyes grew wide with feral rage, his broad teeth champing in disbelief and frustrated fury as his wrists began to steam, to smoke, leaking a greasy, sulfurous fog to rise into the mist of ghosts that began to roll over him from behind.
Perhaps the savor of a looming victory made me cruel, but I knew what next to do, and I had no mercy in my heart for a monster who had none for me.
For the demon who had destroyed the only life that I knew.
I did not close my eyes this time as I let Victor’s sorcery swell through me in tandem with my own—and with all my senses, all the rising force of my art and my will, I recreated before my eyes the living memory of the circle erupting in my violet-black fire.
I had not walked through terror and wonder and dark of night to miss one moment of my revenge.
The surging flames throbbed twice into the cold winter air like a shearing double blast from a knife-rift in the earth—once for my own spell and once, I knew, for the spell Victor must have cast with me—and as I watched the grotesque contortions of Gremio’s face, too wracked by shock and vitriol and sheer disbelief to even utter a cry of pain, I felt a sudden slack in my strained legs and staggered back with Victor until we both found our balance again, the constricting grip of Victor’s arms around my body at last beginning to relax. I caught a glimpse of dark fog streaming from the blackened, ashy stumps of Gremio’s handless wrists as the Woman in the Water wrapped the crook of her dripping arm around his throat and began to drag him slowly toward the lake, the rest of the shining host surrounding and descending on him as he brayed madly, drowning under the teeming creatures of the twilight world, shifting through form after form in hopes of writhing himself free.
I knew I should run, but rapt by my own morbid curiosity I could not help but watch, wondering all the while why I still thought that I felt his claws in my skin—and when I looked down, to my revulsion I saw the white webbed hands, relieved of their arms and body but still clinging futilely to my ankles in a ghastly rigor mortis, darkness seething from their severed wrists as they began to gradually dissolve into black ash.
It was that sight, coupled with the tenuous unwinding of the nerves after the horrible thrill of the fight, that at last made my head lighten, my stomach turn, and as I leaned back more fully into Victor, my left hand losing strength in its grip on his iron dagger, I truly wondered if I might at last faint.
“It’s not over yet!” Victor’s voice in the back of my mind woke me from my wavering state; he took the dagger from my hand, growling in disgust as he used it to swiftly knock the smoldering hands off of me, then took his scorpion cane and his top hat off the ground. He bent to pick me up next, as if it were a matter of course, and though I cannot pretend that I did not find promise in the touch of his muscular arm behind my knees—a moment’s hesitation, I knew, and I would be swept up helplessly from the earth and into his power—it still caused me to tense, almost to resist: I wanted, even then, to prove myself resilient.
“I can walk,” I managed to whisper between panting breaths, and I felt him straighten, the hand that would have lifted my legs from the ground instead closing around my wrist—more slowly, if no less firmly, than it had weeks ago when first we escaped Gremio. “I can run,” I continued, picking up the hems of my dress with my other hand, “like we did before.”
With his cane he struck swiftly through the circle, and then run we did: through the black London fog and the constellations of drifting snowflakes, as if we ran through the very night sky itself, while above us the clouds seemed to breathe again, and sheathed in their veil the sickle-blade of the moon. We ran down the path, around the end of the lake with its wallowing stone beasts and along its far side, beyond the unlight of the will o’ the wisp where the blind blackness of the night became all—but then ahead I saw gaslights shining between the trees to the right of the trail, static and sedate, like drab man-made ignes fatui to lure the wanderers of the spirit realms into the tired trap of the ordinary world. I laughed silently at the thought: I should be entirely glad to see them, I thought to myself, and in no sense as wistful as I felt for the eerie beauty we left behind—but we were nearly there, no matter my mind.
I wondered only where there might be, precisely, and how close we were to the coach; and that is when I realized, in the unfamiliar words I heard Victor repeat under his breath as we ran, that I heard him mutter Absolon’s name.
Listening, I tried to make out more, but all that I heard—aside of the panting of our fogging breath, the falls of our feet, the quiet sounds of the nighttime city at our side—was a distant, neighing croak of defeated wrath somewhere over the water, followed by the heavy scrape and creak of stone over stone.
I thought that it sounded like the shutting door of a tomb.
“Absolon is ahead,” Victor said aloud, slowing down; whether because he heard the same and knew that we were further now from danger, or simply because the thinning trees to our right allowed a better view of the road that ran beside the park’s southern edge, I did not know.
A hansom cab passed by on the street, its driver nearly turning his horse aside as he caught sight of us and gawked for a better view.
“I suppose we should act more naturally, sir.” I looked up at Victor, trying to maintain a straight face despite the combination of my amusement and the growing pain from the bite of Gremio’s claws.
He grunted in acknowledgement, too distracted to share entirely in my attempt at humor.
We had not much longer to walk until the light of two of the street lamps along the road to our right dimmed and darkened, as if swiftly eclipsed by a shadow that had not been cast only a moment before.
“I say,” I heard an irritated man’s voice from the street, accompanied by the stutter and clatter of hooves and wheels coming to an uncomfortably abrupt stop, “was there always a coach ahead?”
“Terrible drivers around here,” came a second. “These tourists appear out of nowhere—country fellows used to hay-wagons, who take no heed of the rules of the road.”
“Drunk off his arse I shouldn’t doubt, with the time of night and the way he cut me off.”
“Well, pass him, when you can, if he means to sit there like a lump and block the way. It looks at least halfway like the getaway vehicle for some kind of reprobate I’d prefer not to meet after dark.”
Then Victor really chuckled, hand still around my wrist as he led me off the path and between the last trees. “They aren’t wrong,” he murmured as he helped me over the low fence, pulled his black scarf up over his metal mask, and climbed over the fence himself with a casual confidence that suggested it was far from his first time.
“And there, by our luck, the villains are,” one of the men from the carriage behind Victor’s spoke again, though neither we nor Absolon paid them any mind. “Go around, James, go around! I don’t like their look, creeping out of the park after nightfall.”
“Man and a widow, not badly dressed,” the driver said as their canopied phaeton passed us by; as Victor held open the door of his looming black carriage, I made my way up the stair and inside, albeit with some difficulty. “A bit disheveled though, from the look of it,” I heard the driver again. “As like to be robbers,” he continued—I sat down, allowing myself to relax a little into the familiar creak of the black leather upholstery, feeling the coach strain beneath the muscular weight of Victor’s body as he entered and seated himself beside me—“as to be a lovers’ tryst.”
Absolon shut the door behind us.
I wondered briefly if Victor had heard those last words, or cared to listen to the ordinary chatter of the mortal world after all that had come to pass, but I said nothing. In the close confines of the carriage I felt, so much as I saw, the deep rise and fall of his broad chest as he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Well, sir,” I whispered as by Absolon’s art the carriage lanterns flared to life outside the drapery of the windows, and the hooves of Victor’s great black horses began to ring hollow on the street, and the wheels began to turn, “you did say it would be an adventure.”