37. The Last Chance
Chapter 37
The Last Chance
“Victor…”
I breathed his name like a prayer in the darkness, the memories of the chaos of the last few moments coming back to me. Gremio, not quite slain, had dragged his ruined carcass to the library door; our inattention afforded him time to cast his spell, and with nearly the last of his strength, in the uncanny swirling winds of the other world, he hurled at me what must have been some deadly surge of his art.
It never touched me. If it had, I would have been?—
My own deep, racking sob interrupted the thought; I threw down the dagger, disgusted by the very notion that I had once contrived to drive it through that bold heart, my hands clenching into Victor’s black cloak as I bowed my head and wept into his unmoving shoulder. I had to gather my strength, I knew; I had to find the power at least to turn him over—he lay now on his side, nearly face-down on the floor—even now when I dared not hope.
If not for Victor thrusting me aside, taking Gremio’s fatal elf-shot in my place, I would have been dead.
He saved me.
After the mysteries and the mistrust, in the midst of my own withheld secrets and my designs on his life, he had saved mine.
“Victor.” I breathed his name again as another sob shook me, and then I raised my head. My hands looked so small against him. And if all that were left for me now were to look again at that steel mask and what little I had ever known of his face, and touch his scarred hand again, and lay down beside him as his warmth faded to the anonymous chill of death—if that were all—then that would be enough.
I gripped his massive shoulder, and with my will and all of my strength I heaved him onto his back.
He grunted in pain, the sound halfway muffled by his mask, and I thought that my heart would burst from my chest to hear that voice again.
“Victor!” I gasped, my breath quickening and my heartbeat wild; my hand brushed a lock of damp black hair away from his face, ghostly smoke rising from the steel of his mask, and in my elation I scarcely noticed the ashen hue that tainted the dark olive of his skin. “You’re alive, Victor,” whispered, willing it, feverishly forcing my art to make it true. “You’re alive.”
“Not… for much longer.”
“But you can speak! You’re breathing.” In truth, so still was he before that I wondered if he had stopped, and only now begun again. “Don’t leave me, Victor. I’m sorry. Don’t leave me—you can’t. You can’t. There must be something—something I can do?—”
“I’m dying, Elizabeth. There is nothing,” he sighed heavily, an ember of that fire in his dark eyes still burning as he looked up to meet my gaze, “nothing you can do. Magical injury. It’s beyond your sorcery.”
“Anything—isn’t there anything? A spell, an herb—a sacrifice—a contract—anything, no matter how horrible, how impossible—in this world, or any other?—”
He chuckled weakly, bitterly, and the familiarity of that evil tone of his laughter almost broke my heart. “One thing, then. Impossible, as you said. If you could, in a mere minute’s time, run up those flights of stairs to Hargrave’s house, break into Karvonen’s laboratory undetected, successfully locate and steal his greatest prize—assuming it is still there at all—and return to me in one piece… If you could bring to me, in the breadth of a moment, the Talisman of Thoth…”
“It isn’t there anymore,” I breathed; new tears ran down my face, clear and clean with an impossible hope, washing the old tears of sorrow away as my shaking fingers fumbled with the thin chain hidden beneath my clothes. “It’s here.” I pulled the Talisman up out of its hiding place between my breasts and let it fall over the front of my black mourning dress and disheveled shawl, still hanging from my neck, Victor’s eyes wide with disbelief as its golden gleam caught the candlelight.
“Don’t tell me, sir, what I cannot do.”
“How did you—” He laughed again, desperate and triumphant, and in the dim light I thought that I saw a lone tear slip down from his eye. “No, there is no time?—”
“—Greycliff stole it from Karvonen, and I from Greycliff,” I said with all speed, “but I thought it would kill you—harm you to touch it?—”
“It may, if I do not die of my wounds before taking that chance.”
“Then tell me what to do, sir, and I’ll?—”
“Listen to me, Elizabeth,” he interrupted, breathing hard, his broad chest heaving beneath his torn black robes. “Understand what you offer. If this experiment succeeds—perhaps even if it fails—it will take all of you, and all of me, and it requires the destruction of the Talisman. You will be utterly exhausted, in body and in art, for days—weeks—if you are fortunate and strong. And the Talisman will be gone.”
“I don’t care.”
“Understand me now. It is probable that your Talisman of Thoth is the alchemical Lapis Philosophorum. Some desire it for the breaking of curses, others for eternal life. Eternal life. Unlock the secret of its use—yes, I know what to do; yes, I can tell you now, and reverse your initial abjuration of its power before Hargrave, with such time as I have left—and you, Elizabeth, will live forever. Destroy the Talisman, and you forfeit immortality itself.”
“ I don’t care! ”
“ Why? ”
“Because you gave your life for me! Because it’s only right, and just, that I should give my eternal life for you in turn.” I shook my head, weeping openly—because it was correct, and true, and because it was not at all what I meant or what I wanted to say. “Nothing you can say or do can dissuade me now, and if time is as short as you claim, do not waste any more in a futile attempt to change my mind! All I need to know now,” I looked him in the eye, dashing away my tears with my hand to meet the gravity of his gaze, “is how to destroy the Talisman.”
Another long, deep breath swelled Victor’s strong chest, and from the new-kindled fire in his eyes I knew, for the first time since Gremio had struck him down—perhaps for the first time since he arrived in the library to the sight of my drawn dagger—that he meant to live.
“ Ego sum ego solus! ” his deep voice rumbled as with a wince of pain he raised himself up onto one elbow, panting with the effort; the strength in his voice was nowhere near what once it had been, but his will burned yet. There was a sound of something shifting in the darkness—a change in the air—the lone candle flickered, and it occurred to me to wonder if he had opened some unseen door.
“Behind the third bookshelf, through the cavern mouth,” the effort and tension in his voice made it little more than a low, hurried growl, “is the rest of my library. You must go in as far as the shelf of skulls,” he bit back a groan, and I thought that whatever pained him was growing worse. “Take one. Take the black vial from the rack before them, and the bottle of oil with the death’s-head stopper, and come back to me.”
“How will I know which skull to take?”
“Choose the one that seems correct—let your senses guide you. Go! Go, now!”
I stood up from him, grabbed an extinguished candle and lighted it again in the sole remaining flame—and then, so much as I could run within the cluttered confines of the library, dodging the fallen leaves of paper on the floor, I ran: down the narrow, dusty aisle, through the dark gap in the wall where third bookshelf must have slid aside. I found myself in a small, natural vault, by its appearance as much a study and a laboratory as a place for books, but there was no time to look closely—no time to waste—the empty eyes of two dozen human skulls watched me from the wall at the limit of my candle’s wan light, and I could think only of my perilous adventure in the catacombs, though it seemed now a lifetime ago.
Indeed, one of them appealed to me somehow—I cannot say why; perhaps it was no more than the happenstance of it facing directly where I stood: one of the older-looking of his collection of skulls, greyer and more brittle of bone, with several teeth lost to time and the edge of one eye socket partly crumbled away. I stepped closer and took it carefully in hand, the glow of my candle revealing an old clockwork model of the orbiting planets in the darkness beyond, shelves of ancient scrolls amid a forest of stalactites; but I knew the need for haste, and with all speed I found the black vial and the oil bottle on a rack of glass containers and made my hurried return, keenly aware of the exposed Talisman swinging on its chain against my chest.
“This one, sir?” I knelt at Victor’s side and held the skull out to him, setting the vial and the bottle beside him on the floor.
“Wagner,” he chuckled grimly as he forced his dark eyes to focus on the skull’s empty sockets through the pale smoke that rose from his mask. “Of course it would be Wagner…”
“I’ll get another?—”
“No time. You made your choice. He was an old friend, and he will assist me now again. Elizabeth, stand.” Victor drew a labored breath, and I watched as his hands clenched—whether in pain or conviction, I did not know—his fingertips digging into the pile of the rug, and at his command I rose to my feet. “Think of me, Elizabeth. Create me as you knew me, with your senses and your Sight—summon me—will me to appear in my strength—and when you adjudge the moment to be right, wrap Wagner’s skull in your shawl, and smash it beside me on the floor.”
“Smash it, sir?”
“With all your power. Into pieces. Into dust.”
And when I had summoned him, created him, sensed the vestiges of his possessing shadow within me rise and fill me one last time—when I felt him—when I felt nearly that I was him, as I had dreamt, and the sound of his voice murmuring spells under his breath filled my mind as if it were my own—then I folded and knotted the skull into my shawl, hung onto the trailing corners of the fabric for the advantage of momentum, and with all my strength whipped it down into the floor at Victor’s side, where it burst apart with the grisly shatter of crushed bone.
“Good. Use the remains to cast a circle around me on the floor,” he paused with a groan, “counterclockwise, starting at my feet to the West. A drop of oil from the death’s-head bottle at each compass point. Hurry.”
I quickly unwrapped what was left of the broken skull and did as he asked me, encircling him in a ring of grey dust and shards of bone, and at the cardinal points I spoke the names of the winds with him, he in his language and I in my own, letting fall a single drop of oil to the West, South, East, North—but I felt nothing change in the air, in the earth, in him.
I could not allow myself to think that I had felt no change at all.
“Five drops from the black vial, Elizabeth, nearly equidistant around the circle, clockwise, from my head, a candle burning over each drop— L’uomo vitruviano —Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—do you understand?”
“Almost like the points of a pentagram, sir?”
His affirmative grunt became a pained growl as he lowered himself from his elbow onto his back again, staring up at the ceiling as he lay on the floor; I saw that his forehead was damp with sweat, his black brows lowered over his burning eyes, his expression fearsome and driven in his desperate defiance of death.
The liquid from the black vial was dark and dripped swiftly from the rim, and as I lighted and positioned the five candles the notion struck me that it was some concoction of his own blood.
“Step into the circle with me, Elizabeth. Anoint the Talisman with three drops of oil, three drops from the vial, and hold it against my chest.” His strong hands struggled to grasp at the gap in the fabric that covered his breast, and it pained me to see him so. “Against the skin.”
There was no time to think of how it made me feel to clutch the folds of his robes as I knelt down beside him once more; I felt a tear slip down my cheek, to have at last what I so deeply desired, and yet to have it like this—to feel all that was meant to be the beginning, and to know that it may well be the end. My hands unfastened his cloak and parted his black robes, and if I could not afford to linger, I could at least allow my fingers to glide gently over his warm skin, and I pushed back the dark fabric until his heaving chest lay bare beneath my touch. His body was the map of a hard-won life, slick with sweat, streaked with the blood of his new wounds, solid with muscle and crossed with old scars—he had been slashed, clawed, bitten, burned, stabbed and perhaps shot—and I wondered at all the horrors and wonders he had seen, all the battles he had fought, all the tales I despaired of ever hearing told.
I unclasped the Talisman’s chain and held it in my palm, anointing it with the oil, the crimson fluid from the vial, and my own hot tears that fell unbidden into my hand.
He still had his mask on, and without his clothes to partially obscure its shape I saw it now plainly. It was unmistakably in the fashion of the lower part of a knight’s helmet; an impressive piece of craftsmanship forged to fit the shape of his neck and face, finely etched with a motif of twisting vines, slotted for air, jointed for movement and flared where the throat met the shoulder, the weight of the steel borne by Victor’s heavy clavicle. It was bloodied on one side over the bone—the fight with Gremio must have driven the edge of the metal partway into the flesh—and white smoke still rose from the steel, thin and ghostly, like the spectral steam off a road after a night’s rain.
All I wanted was to get it off of him somehow, to know his face at last, to see him (if only for a moment) unmasked as a living man.
But the hour for such caprice had passed.
“Where, sir?”
“Against the ankh on my sternum.”
Amid his wild field of scars, by the unsteady candlelight I could scarcely make out the several purposeful marks on his body, a few shades darker than the skin—rough, faded tattoos of arcane signs—and finding the blurring lines of an ankh between the swell of his muscles, shadowed by the black hair of his chest, I closed my eyes—I drew a breath—and I pressed the Talisman of Thoth against his sternum.
I did not know whether to be ruined or relieved when there was no effect that I could tell. He seemed no better. He did not die from the touch of it.
The Talisman remained unbroken.
His eyes closed in a look of concentration, and I felt his breath halt, his heart quicken under my palm—but he shook his head with a frustrated grunt.
And then he covered my hand with his own, holding my touch against his skin.
“No,” his eyes opened again as he moved my captive hand slowly away from the center of his chest. “Not the sternum. Over my heart.”
But he was restless even then; no sooner had our hands touched the heart side of his chest than he tried to raise his head from the floor to watch while still lying on his back, the motion impeded by the smoking metal of his mask.
“Can’t see for this damned thing,” he grumbled. And then he drew a breath with a strange, firm resolve, and lay still. “Take it off of me, Elizabeth.” I felt his deep voice rumble in his chest as he spoke, against my fingers—against the Talisman—though it seemed too unsteady now, too shallow, like the poor rhythm of his breathing. “With your free hand. Take off my mask. Find the latch on the right side.”
With a breathless yes, sir I heard the throbbing of my own heart in my head as I reached with my left hand toward the side of his face, watching his eyes as he watched mine, as he gripped my right hand tighter in the warmth of his own.
I wondered if it were all over now—if the spell had failed, and he had resigned himself to his infernal doom—and were it so, and were it so that nothing mattered anymore, I wondered if in the reinless freedom of despair he meant to look upon me before dying.
And for me, at the end of it all, to see his face.
The touch of steel beneath my fingers was not so cold as it might have been, warmed by his heat; at the side of his armored throat, half-hidden by the damp waves of his silver-streaked black hair, I felt the gap of a seam in the metal—some manner of leather strap and lock—and I curled my fingernails in under its sides and pried until it gave way with a solid snap.
As I had in so many fantasies and fond, secret dreams, I unmasked Doctor D’Arco. The cruel steel mask released into my hand. I pulled it forward and off of him, more slowly than I had ever dreamt I would; as I moved it aside to set it down by his massive shoulder, my pulse quickened in anticipation, and I prepared to behold whatever countenance of man or monster it had hidden for so long?—
Then the steel mask slipped from my hand, falling the last inch onto the rug, and I heard myself softly gasp.
The sight of his face took my breath.
I stared down into the striking, alarmingly handsome face of a man of forty-some summers, rugged and masculine, his well-formed physiognomy singed by the passion of hellfire fury. No fiercer a man had ever I seen, his strong, decisive features too grim to be beautiful, too noble to be truly coarse; had I been told he was a half-demon lord of outlaws, riding down midnight travelers on the haunted, lonely roads—had I been told he was the exiled prince of some far, sweltering dominion, his heroic sword flashing sunfire and his black courser’s hooves beating in the dust, sparking at the strike of stone—I would not have disbelieved either tale.
I touched him then, watching the instinctive defiance in his dark eyes assuage as my trembling fingers traced the side of his face, trailing through the heavy black side-whiskers that grew from his temple to the angle of his proud jaw. My touch lingered, and his burning eyes closed beneath his thick dark brows, the brooding set of his mouth softening into something like a subtle smile.
I smiled back at him with such poor strength as I could summon, tasting the salt of my tears as they slid into my mouth.
“Your last chance, Elizabeth,” he breathed, the fleeting smile fading, “to turn back, and spare yourself the depletion of your strength. To keep the Talisman. To secure your immortality.”
“I don’t want it,” I whispered. “Not like this.”
“You are resolved, then, to destroy the Talisman of Thoth?”
“Yes. Tell me what to do, and it is done.”
“As a sacrifice in exchange for my sacrifice? Because it would be fair, and just, and right?”
“No, sir.”
I watched his dark eyes reopen, their fire returning as if with some last rally before death, and I wondered how much time was left.
“I lied to you, sir. I lied so you wouldn’t turn me away, and for the sake of time, and because the truth would be the death of us both. But now, here at the end, I don’t care any longer. The truth, sir, is that I don’t know anymore what is fair, or just, or right, but I know that I am going to break the Talisman of Thoth—give up my eternal life—because I don’t want an eternity without you.”
I could see only the darkness of his eyes in the throbbing candlelight, I could hear only the thundering of my heart—and then every thought, every sight was struck from my mind, my senses flooded with the unexpected softness of his warm lips as they crushed so desperately against my own.
Whether I had descended upon him or he had thrust himself up to meet me, whether I kissed him or he kissed me, I do not know, I did not care; with his scarred hand on my back he drew me down into his powerful arms and I sank into his kiss, our hands on the Talisman together over his heart, against my breasts, and my lips parting for him as he rolled his great shoulders back in a reflexive frisson at the sensation, and my hand still caressing the side of his face, harder now, as if to stay the moment from vanishing into a dream as my fingers curled through the rough black hair.
Every stroke of his tongue against my own, every inch his strong hand trailed up my spine sent another quavering flash of fire through my nerves. I thought fleetingly of my vow to him of celibacy, of my vow to myself of revenge, and I defied them, I defied all of Hell and earth for this feeling—this moment—as I kissed him deeper yet, gasping into his mouth as his hand slid up the nape of my neck, his insistent fingers pushing through my loosened hair bun, freeing my long tresses to spill in a sudden wave over us both. With his hand on the back of my head and a shift of his muscular body he pulled me closer still, letting me lie down on top of him, and with my weight supported by his impossible strength and his shadow closing in around me, I felt as if he unmoored me from the world.
Only when he had me so close was he content to let his first fervor fade into a deep, slow rhythm of his lips and tongue against mine as I felt myself falling, falling through his fathomless darkness: his kiss was comforting me as my strength began to fail, my free hand slackening from the side of his jaw to drift unconsciously down his neck; his kiss drove me deeper, the heavy heat of my swelling breasts pressing closer into his chest, into the backs of our hands, as something altered in the sensation of the world—and then our hands were flat against his skin, his hard fingers woven through mine and his heart pounding into my softening palm. I do not know why I thought that the Talisman was seeping apart, its liquid heat running through our fingers and down the valleys between the muscles of his heaving chest before vanishing into vapor; but I knew from the potent force in his pulse, the renewed grip of his hands, the heat of his skin that he was alive, that the Talisman was gone, that he was alive again.
With that surge of vitality his shadow engulfed and filled me; in my weakened state, the elation of our survival, the heady pleasure of our kiss, the thrill of his art rippling through my body in black waves became together too much to endure—too much to even desire to resist—he wrapped both arms around me as I felt the electric tingle of my muscles tightening in futile defense beneath my fevered skin, the eldritch shiver of sorcery creeping up my spine, the dark vertigo of his rising shadow spreading through my blood, lightening my head until I thought that I would swoon into the drowning depths of his art again—but it was his kiss that overcame me at last, melting my fainting resistance into release: I lasted for one more sensual caress of his tongue, and then with a long sigh into his lips I felt my body quiver, and I slipped into a strange, uncanny ecstasy in his arms.
I thought that our hands were in each other’s hair—I thought that he kept slowly kissing my parted, panting lips as my body pulsed in deep rhythm against him—and not until the last of my trembling softened into a warm languor did I feel him suck gently on my lower lip, breaking the kiss with that last, lingering touch. He carefully shifted under me, his hand guiding my head down to rest against the bare skin of his broad chest.
Idly I watched one of the candles of the circle burn out as my pulse and my breathing relaxed, the pale ring of Victor’s faerie fire dimming into its own ghostly black smoke. He held me fast—a little too tightly, too possessively perhaps—and I settled in closer against him, breathing in his shadow and the warm scent of his skin. His heart, strong and steady, was beating in my ear. His possessing hand between my shoulders stroked me through the black silk of my mourning dress in a slow, soothing rhythm.
I pressed my lips softly to his chest and touched his skin with the tip of my tongue. It was bitter with sweat and the metallic tinge of blood, and in that moment there was no taste more comforting in all the world.
It meant that all of this was real: that he defended me with his life—that we had survived—that the Talisman was destroyed—that we kissed—that I had fallen into quivering pleasure in his arms.
That he was holding me now, letting me sleep in the dark, fulfilling warmth of his protective embrace.
I closed my eyes, resting a tired hand on the iron muscles of his shoulder.
Despite all of our peril—despite whatever was to become of us—never in my life had I felt so content, so safe.